Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,29

so many other spectators’.

I winced when I caught the thoughts of Rosalie, Jasper, and Emmett, just arriving on the scene. There would be hell to pay for this tonight.

I wanted to iron out the indentation my shoulders had made in the tan car, but the girl was too close. I’d have to wait until she was distracted.

It was frustrating to wait—so many eyes on me—as the humans struggled with the van, trying to pull it away from us. I might have helped them, just to speed the process, but I was already in enough trouble and the girl had sharp eyes. Finally, they were able to shift it far enough away for the EMTs to get to us with their stretchers.

A familiar grizzled face appraised me.

“Hey, Edward,” Brett Warner said. He was also a registered nurse, and I knew him well from the hospital. It was a stroke of luck—the only luck today—that he was the first through to us. In his thoughts, he was noting that I looked alert and calm. “You okay, kid?”

“Perfect, Brett. Nothing touched me. But I’m afraid Bella here might have a concussion. She really hit her head when I yanked her out of the way.”

Brett turned his attention to the girl, who shot me a fierce look of betrayal. Oh, that was right. She was the quiet martyr—she’d prefer to suffer in silence.

She did not contradict my story immediately, though, and this made me feel easier.

The next EMT tried to insist that I allow myself to be treated, but it wasn’t too difficult to dissuade him. I promised I would have my father examine me, and he let it go. With most humans, speaking with cool assurance was all that was needed. Most humans, just not the girl, of course. Did she fit into any of the normal patterns?

As they put a neck brace on her—and her face flushed scarlet with embarrassment—I used the moment of distraction to quietly rearrange the shape of the dent in the tan car with the back of my foot. Only my siblings noticed what I was doing, and I heard Emmett’s mental promise to catch anything I missed.

Grateful for his help—and more grateful that Emmett, at least, had already forgiven my dangerous choice—I was more relaxed as I climbed into the front seat of the ambulance next to Brett.

The chief of police arrived before they had gotten Bella into the back of the ambulance.

Though Bella’s father’s thoughts were past words, the panic and concern emanating from the man’s mind drowned out just about every other thought in the vicinity. Wordless anxiety and guilt, a great swell of them, washed out of him as he saw his only daughter on the gurney.

When Alice had warned me that killing Charlie Swan’s daughter would kill him, too, she had not been exaggerating.

My head bowed with that guilt as I listened to his panicked voice.

“Bella!” he shouted.

“I’m completely fine, Char—Dad.” She sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Her assurance barely soothed his dread. He turned at once to the closest EMT and demanded more information.

It wasn’t until I heard him speaking, forming perfectly coherent sentences despite his panic, that I realized that his anxiety and concern were not wordless. I just… could not hear the exact words.

Hmm. Charlie Swan was not as silent as his daughter, but I could see where she got it from. Interesting.

I’d never spent much time around the town’s police chief. I’d always taken him for a man of slow thought—now I realized that I was the one who was slow. His thoughts were partially concealed, not absent. I could only make out the tenor, the tone of them.

I wanted to listen harder, to see if I could find in this new, lesser puzzle the key to the girl’s secrets. But Bella had been loaded into the back by then, and the ambulance was on its way.

It was hard to tear myself away from this possible solution to the mystery that had come to obsess me. But I had to think now—to look at what had been done today from every angle. I had to listen, to make sure that I had not put us all in so much danger that we would have to leave immediately. I had to concentrate.

There was nothing in the thoughts of the EMTs to worry me. As far as they could tell, there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with the girl. And Bella was sticking to the story I’d provided, for now.

The first priority,