Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,273

It would be tight, but she could see Emmett on the plane.

She saw the day ahead as clearly as if it were happening, and I saw it all, too.

First, Jasper would drop Carlisle, Bella, and me at St. Joseph’s. There were closer hospitals, but Carlisle insisted. He knew a surgeon there who would vouch for him, and it was a nationally recognized level-one trauma center. His urgency, and Bella’s ashen complexion—though her heart continued steady and strong—made it difficult for me to do much besides silently panic and curse our circumspect speed.

“She’ll be fine,” Alice growled quietly at me when she saw I was about to complain again. She shoved a picture into my head of Bella sitting up in a hospital bed, smiling, though she was all over bruises.

I caught her slight deception, though. “And when exactly is this?”

A day or two, okay? Three tops. It’s fine. Relax.

My panic skyrocketed as I processed that. Three days?

Carlisle didn’t have to read thoughts to understand my expression.

“She just needs time, Edward,” Carlisle assured me. “Her body needs rest to recover, and so does her mind. She’s going to be okay.”

I tried to accept that, but felt myself spiraling again. I focused on Alice. Her methodical planning was better than my useless agitation.

The hospital, she saw, would be tricky. We were in a stolen car that was linked to another stolen car and a twenty-seven-car pileup on the 101. There were multiple cameras around the emergency entrance. If we could just stop to switch to a better vehicle, something close enough to the rental Alice would acquire later… It was only a matter of fifteen minutes or so, just a short detour and she knew exactly where to look—

I growled, and she sniffed once without looking at me.

It never gets less annoying, Emmett grumbled internally.

So no car exchange. Alice accepted this and moved on. We’d have to park out of range of the cameras, which would make us more conspicuous. Why not pull right under the metal overhang with our unconscious patient? Why carry her farther than necessary? At least there would be shade for Carlisle and me to run in, otherwise we would have to brave the cameras and Alice would have to find her way into whatever security stronghold was used to store the recordings. And she simply didn’t have time for that. She had to check into a hotel and create a scene of violent injury stat. Because it was supposed to have happened before we arrived at the hospital.

So that was obviously urgent. But first she needed blood.

The blood should be quick. When I burst through the emergency room doors looking like someone had thrown a bucket of crimson paint at me, and with a motionless body in my arms, it was going to cause something of a stir. Every able-bodied staff member within a hundred yards of the emergency entrance would be running to meet us within seconds. It would be simple enough for Alice to slide in behind Carlisle and walk purposefully past the front desk. No one would question her, she could see that. A pair of blue booties available in a box attached to the wall would cover the stains on her shoes, and then it was simply a matter of darting into the emergency wing’s blood storage room through a closing door.

“Em, give me your hoodie.”

Careful not to jostle Bella’s leg, Emmett yanked the sweatshirt over his head and tossed it to Alice. It was remarkably clean, especially compared to Carlisle’s and my clothes.

Emmett wanted to ask what she needed it for, but he didn’t dare to open his mouth and possibly taste or smell his surroundings.

Alice shrugged into the enormous sweatshirt. It pooled around her tiny body, and yet, somehow, there was an air of the avant-garde about it. Alice could pull off anything.

Alice saw herself in the blood bank again, filling the sweatshirt’s ample pockets.

“What’s Bella’s blood type?” she asked Carlisle.

“O positive,” Carlisle responded.

So some good had come from Bella’s accident with Tyler’s van. At least we knew this.

Alice was probably being overthorough. Would anyone bother to type the blood she would leave at the scene of the “accident”? Perhaps, if it looked too much like a crime scene.… No harm in her being meticulous, I supposed.

“Leave enough for Bella,” I cautioned.

She twisted in her seat so that I could see her roll her eyes, then turned back and kept planning.

Jasper and Emmett would be in the stolen car, engine running.