I shuddered. “No.”

“Did you have a strong desire to attend class today? We’re only a couple of days from finals; they won’t be giving us anything new.”

“I think I can live without school for a day. What are we doing?”

“I want to talk to Jasper.”

Jasper, again. It was strange. In the Cullen family, Jasper was always a little on the fringe, part of things but never the center of them. It was my unspoken assumption that he was only there for Alice. I had the sense that he would follow Alice anywhere, but that this lifestyle was not his first choice. The fact that he was less committed to it than the others was probably why he had more difficulty keeping it up.

At any rate, I’d never seen Edward feel dependent on Jasper. I wondered again what he’d meant about Jasper’s expertise. I really didn’t know much about Jasper’s history, just that he had come from somewhere in the south before Alice found him. For some reason, Edward had always shied away from any questions about his newest brother. And I’d always been too intimidated by the tall, blond vampire who looked like a brooding movie star to ask him outright.

When we got to the house, we found Carlisle, Esme, and Jasper watching the news intently, though the sound was so low that it was unintelligible to me. Alice was perched on the bottom step of the grand staircase, her face in her hands and her expression discouraged. As we walked in, Emmett ambled through the kitchen door, seeming perfectly at ease. Nothing ever bothered Emmett.

“Hey, Edward. Ditching, Bella?” He grinned at me.

“We both are,” Edward reminded him.

Emmett laughed. “Yes, but it’s her first time through high school. She might miss something.”

Edward rolled his eyes, but otherwise ignored his favorite brother. He tossed the paper to Carlisle.

“Did you see that they’re considering a serial killer now?” he asked.

Carlisle sighed. “They’ve had two specialists debating that possibility on CNN all morning.”

“We can’t let this go on.”

“Let’s go now,” Emmett said with sudden enthusiasm. “I’m dead bored.”

A hiss echoed down the stairway from upstairs.

“She’s such a pessimist,” Emmett muttered to himself.

Edward agreed with Emmett. “We’ll have to go sometime.”

Rosalie appeared at the top of the stairs and descended slowly. Her face was smooth, expressionless.

Carlisle was shaking his head. “I’m concerned. We’ve never involved ourselves in this kind of thing before. It’s not our business. We aren’t the Volturi.”

“I don’t want the Volturi to have to come here,” Edward said. “It gives us so much less reaction time.”

“And all those innocent humans in Seattle,” Esme murmured. “It’s not right to let them die this way.”

“I know,” Carlisle sighed.

“Oh,” Edward said sharply, turning his head slightly to look at Jasper. “I didn’t think of that. I see. You’re right, that has to be it. Well, that changes everything.”

I wasn’t the only one who stared at him in confusion, but I might have been the only one who didn’t look slightly annoyed.

“I think you’d better explain to the others,” Edward said to Jasper. “What could be the purpose of this?” Edward started to pace, staring at the floor, lost in thought.

I hadn’t seen her get up, but Alice was there beside me. “What is he rambling about?” she asked Jasper. “What are you thinking?”

Jasper didn’t seem to enjoy the spotlight. He hesitated, reading every face in the circle — for everyone had moved in to hear what he would say — and then his eyes paused on my face.

“You’re confused,” he said to me, his deep voice very quiet.

There was no question in his assumption. Jasper knew what I was feeling, what everyone was feeling.

“We’re all confused,” Emmett grumbled.

“You can afford the time to be patient,” Jasper told him. “Bella should understand this, too. She’s one of us now.”

His words took me by surprise. As little as I’d had to do with Jasper, especially since my last birthday when he’d tried to kill me, I hadn’t realize that he thought of me that way.

“How much do you know about me, Bella?” Jasper asked.

Emmett sighed theatrically, and plopped down on the couch to wait with exaggerated impatience.

“Not much,” I admitted.

Jasper stared at Edward, who looked up to meet his gaze.

“No,” Edward answered his thought. “I’m sure you can understand why I haven’t told her that story. But I suppose she needs to hear it now.”

Jasper nodded thoughtfully, and then started to roll up the arm of his ivory sweater.

I watched, curious and confused, trying to figure out what he was doing. He held his wrist under the edge of the lampshade beside him, close to the light of the naked bulb, and traced his finger across a raised crescent mark on the pale skin.

It took me a minute to understand why the shape looked strangely familiar.

“Oh,” I breathed as realization hit. “Jasper, you have a scar exactly like mine.”

I held out my hand, the silvery crescent more prominent against my cream skin than against his alabaster.

Jasper smiled faintly. “I have a lot of scars like yours, Bella.”

Jasper’s face was unreadable as he pushed the sleeve of his thin sweater higher up his arm. At first my eyes could not make sense of the texture that was layered thickly across the skin. Curved half-moons crisscrossed in a feathery pattern that was only visible, white on white as it was, because the bright glow of the lamp beside him threw the slightly raised design into relief, with shallow shadows outlining the shapes. And then I grasped that the pattern was made of individual crescents like the one on his wrist . . . the one on my hand.

I looked back at my own small, solitary scar — and remembered how I’d received it. I stared at the shape of James’s teeth, embossed forever on my skin.

And then I gasped, staring up at him. “Jasper, what happened to you?”

===========================================================================

13. NEWBORN

“THE SAME THING THAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HAND,” Jasper answered in a quiet voice. “Repeated a thousand times.” He laughed a little ruefully and brushed at his arm. “Our venom is the only thing that leaves a scar.”

“Why?” I breathed in horror, feeling rude but unable to stop staring at his subtly ravaged skin.

“I didn’t have quite the same . . . upbringing as my adopted siblings here. My beginning was something else entirely.” His voice turned hard as he finished.

I gaped at him, appalled.

“Before I tell you my story,” Jasper said, “you must understand that there are places in our world, Bella, where the life span of the never-aging is measured in weeks, and not centuries.”

The others had heard this before. Carlisle and Emmett turned their attention to the TV again. Alice moved silently to sit at Esme’s feet. But Edward was just as absorbed as I was; I could feel his eyes on my face, reading every flicker of emotion.

“To really understand why, you have to look at the world from a different perspective. You have to imagine the way it looks to the powerful, the greedy . . . the perpetually thirsty.

“You see, there are places in this world that are more desirable to us than others. Places where we can be less restrained, and still avoid detection.

“Picture, for instance, a map of the western hemisphere. Picture on it every human life as a small red dot. The thicker the red, the more easily we — well, those who exist this way — can feed without attracting notice.”

I shuddered at the image in my head, at the word feed. But Jasper wasn’t worried about frightening me, not overprotective like Edward always was. He went on without a pause.

“Not that the covens in the South care much for what the humans notice or do not. It’s the Volturi that keep them in check. They are the only ones the southern covens fear. If not for the Volturi, the rest of us would be quickly exposed.”

I frowned at the way he pronounced the name — with respect, almost gratitude. The idea of the Volturi as the good guys in any sense was hard to accept.

“The North is, by comparison, very civilized. Mostly we are nomads here who enjoy the day as well as the night, who allow humans to interact with us unsuspectingly — anonymity is important to us all.

“It’s a different world in the South. The immortals there come out only at night. They spend the day plotting their next move, or anticipating their enemy’s. Because it has been war in the South, constant war for centuries, with never one moment of truce. The covens there barely note the existence of humans, except as soldiers notice a herd of cows by the wayside — food for the taking. They only hide from the notice of the herd because of the Volturi.”

“But what are they fighting for?” I asked.

Jasper smiled. “Remember the map with the red dots?”

He waited, so I nodded.

“They fight for control of the thickest red.

“You see, it occurred to someone once that, if he were the only vampire in, let’s say Mexico City, well then, he could feed every night, twice, three times, and no one would ever notice. He plotted ways to get rid of the competition.

“Others had the same idea. Some came up with more effective tactics than others.

“But the most effective tactic was invented by a fairly young vampire named Benito. The first anyone ever heard of him, he came down from somewhere north of Dallas and massacred the two small covens that shared the area near Houston. Two nights later, he took on the much stronger clan of allies that claimed Monterrey in northern Mexico. Again, he won.”

“How did he win?” I asked with wary curiosity.

“Benito had created an army of newborn vampires. He was the first one to think of it, and, in the beginning, he was unstoppable. Very young vampires are volatile, wild, and almost impossible to control. One newborn can be reasoned with, taught to restrain himself, but ten, fifteen together are a nightmare. They’ll turn on each other as easily as on the enemy you point them at. Benito had to keep making more as they fought amongst themselves, and as the covens he decimated took more than half his force down before they lost.

“You see, though newborns are dangerous, they are still possible to defeat if you know what you’re doing. They’re incredibly powerful physically, for the first year or so, and if they’re allowed to bring strength to bear they can crush an older vampire with ease. But they are slaves to their instincts, and thus predictable. Usually, they have no skill in fighting, only muscle and ferocity. And in this case, overwhelming numbers.”

“The vampires in southern Mexico realized what was coming for them, and they did the only thing they could think of to counteract Benito. They made armies of their own. . . .

“All hell broke loose — and I mean that more literally than you can possibly imagine. We immortals have our histories, too, and this particular war will never be forgotten. Of course, it was not a good time to be human in Mexico, either.”