Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,249

whispered the questions flatly, as though they were rhetorical.

I answered anyway, my voice sharp-edged. “It’s my fault. I was a fool to expose you like that.”

She stared up at me, surprised. “That’s not what I meant.”

What other reason could there be? Whose fault but my own?

“I was there,” she continued. “Big deal. It didn’t bother the other two. Why did this James decide to kill me?” She sniffled again. “There’re people all over the place, why me?”

It was a fair question, an astute question. And there were more answers than one. She deserved a full explanation.

“I got a good look at his mind tonight. I’m not sure if there’s anything I could have done to avoid this, once he saw you. It is partially your fault.” My voice twisted and I hoped she could hear the black humor in it, the irony. “If you didn’t smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered. But when I defended you…” I remembered his incredulity, his indignation even, that I would stand in his way. The arrogance, the ire. “Well, that made it a lot worse. He’s not used to being thwarted, no matter how insignificant the object. He thinks of himself as a hunter and nothing else. His existence is consumed with tracking, and a challenge is all he asks of life. Suddenly we’ve presented him with a beautiful challenge—a large clan of strong fighters all bent on protecting the one vulnerable element. You wouldn’t believe how euphoric he is now. It’s his favorite game, and we’ve just made it his most exciting game ever.”

No matter how I analyzed it, there was no way around this. Once I’d taken her to the clearing, this was the only outcome. If I hadn’t opposed him, perhaps it wouldn’t have triggered his love of the game.

“But if I had stood by,” I muttered, mostly to myself, “he would have killed you right then.”

“I thought…,” she whispered, “I didn’t smell the same to the others.” She hesitated. “As I do to you.”

“You don’t.” What she was to me, simply physically, was something more intense than I’d ever seen in any other immortal’s mind. “But that doesn’t mean that you aren’t still a temptation to every one of them. If you had appealed to the tracker, or any of them, the same way you appeal to me, it would have meant a fight right there.”

Her body shuddered against mine.

It would have been easier, though, I realized now, if it had come to a fight. I felt certain the frightened redhead would have run, and I doubted that Laurent would have stood with the tracker when it was an obviously losing prospect. Even if they’d all joined in, they could never have survived. Especially with Jasper launching a surprise attack from the midst of his smokescreen while all eyes were riveted on Emmett. I’d seen enough of his memories to believe that Jasper could probably have handled all three. Not that Emmett would have let him.

And if we were a normal coven (though we could never be considered normal at our size), we probably would have attacked just for the insult.

But we weren’t normal, we were civilized. We tried to live to a higher standard. A gentler, more peaceable standard. Because of our father.

Because of Carlisle, tonight we had hesitated. We had chosen the more humane route, because that was our habit, our way of life.

Did that make us… weaker?

I flinched at the thought, but then immediately decided that our choice was still the right one, even if it did make us weak. I could feel that. It resonated deeply in my mind, my being… or my soul, if such a thing existed. Whatever it was that drove this corporeal form.

It didn’t matter now. Alice might give us some power over the future, but the past was as lost for us as it was for anyone else. We had not attacked, and now we had the more complicated version still ahead. The coming fight could not be avoided.

“I don’t think I have any choice but to kill him now,” I murmured. “Carlisle won’t like it.”

But he would understand, I was sure. We’d given this tracker the option to walk away. He wasn’t going to take us up on the offer. There was only kill or be killed now.

“How can you kill a vampire?” Bella’s voice was a whisper. I could still hear the sound of suppressed tears in it.

I should have anticipated the question.

She stared up at