Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,272

tone was testy now. She looked half-asleep and impatient to find the other half.

“Where is your mother?”

Her eyes flickered for a second, and then she exhaled. “In Florida. He tricked me, Edward. He watched our videos.”

Though she was nearly unconscious from trauma and morphine, it was clear she was deeply offended by this invasion of privacy. I smiled.

“Alice?” Bella struggled to open her eyes, and then quit, but her words were as urgent as she could make them in her condition. “Alice, the video—he knew you, Alice, he knew where you came from.… I smell gasoline?”

Emmett and Jasper were back from siphoning the accelerant we needed. The sirens still wailed in the distance, but from another direction now. They weren’t going to find us.

With a somber expression, Alice flitted across the ravaged floor to the media center by the door. She picked up the small handheld video recorder that was still running. She switched it off.

In the instant she decided to retrieve the camera, hundreds of future fragments flashed through her mind—images of this room, of Bella, of the tracker, of the blood. It was everything she would see when she played back the recording, too fast and disordered for either of us to absorb much. Her eyes flashed to mine.

We’ll deal with this later. We have a hundred things to do now to make sense of this nightmare.

I could tell she was purposely directing her thoughts away from the camera as she ran through the rather involved chores we now must accomplish, but I didn’t push. Later.

“It’s time to move her,” Carlisle said. The smell of the gasoline Emmett and Jasper were applying to the walls was becoming overwhelming.

“No,” Bella murmured. “I want to sleep.”

“You can sleep, sweetheart,” I crooned in her ear. “I’ll carry you.”

Her leg was wrapped tightly inside Alice’s floorboard splint, and Carlisle had found time to tape her ribs. Moving more carefully than I ever had before, I lifted her from the blood-soaked floor, trying to support every part of her.

“Sleep now, Bella,” I whispered.

27. CHORES

“DO WE HAVE TIME TO—” ALICE BEGAN.

“No,” Carlisle interrupted. “Bella needs blood immediately.”

Alice sighed. If we went to the hospital first, things got more complicated.

Carlisle sat beside me in the backseat of the Cayenne, fingers pressed lightly against Bella’s carotid artery, one hand supporting her head. Her splinted leg stretched out across Emmett’s thighs on the other side of me. He wasn’t breathing. He stared out the window, trying not to think about the blood drying all over Bella, Carlisle, and me. Trying not to think about what I had just done. The impossibility of it. The strength he knew he didn’t have.

Instead he mulled over his dissatisfaction with the fight. Because, honestly. He’d had the tracker. Totally contained, though the tracker fought and squirmed and thrashed to avoid Emmett’s crushing arms. There was no chance any of this struggle could have helped him, and Emmett was already breaking him when Jasper lunged into the blood-drenched room.

Jasper, mangled and ferocious, eyes sharp and empty at the same time, looking like some forgotten god or incarnation of war, projecting an aura of pure violence. And the tracker had stopped trying. In that fraction of a second when he saw Jasper (for the first time, but Emmett didn’t know that), he’d surrendered to his fate. No matter that his fate was sealed once Emmett had gotten his hands on him, this was what demoralized him.

It was driving Emmett crazy.

Someday soon I would have to describe to Emmett what he’d looked like in the clearing and why. I doubted anything else would soothe the sting.

Jasper was in the driver’s seat, his window cracked to the hot, dry outside air, though like Emmett, he wasn’t breathing. Alice sat beside him, directing everything—the turns, the lanes to travel in, the highest speed he could go without attracting unwanted attention. She had him at sixty-seven miles per hour now. I would have pushed that, but Alice was confident that she would get us to the hospital faster than I could. Dodging patrol cars would only slow us down and complicate everything.

Although Alice was monitoring every facet of this drive, her mind was in a dozen different places, finding ways through the necessary errands in front of her, working through the consequences of every choice available.

A few things she was sure of.

Now she pulled out her phone and called the airline—one she already knew would have the right flight—and booked one ticket for the two-forty to Seattle.