Rachel had made no attempt to contact Victor for more than two weeks, so one night he risked a brief inspection of her house. He found her in the attic and had to call her down. She had poked holes in the roof, to spy on the town from cracks between the exterior asphalt shingles. At some point she had destroyed the flimsy retractable attic ladder and had replaced it with a reinforced stairway, cut into the ceiling of her old bedroom. He shrugged a pair of half-dead human boys off his shoulders and dropped them at her feet. She stared at him for three hundred forty-six milliseconds, with wild eyes, and then fell on both of them without a word.
She should have been watching the town for vampires. The thousand scarred warrior and the fortune teller, especially. She had cut the spy holes to take an inventory of the blood. Every day for the past two weeks, she had labored to talk herself out of pillaging the town and leaving no one alive.
Rachel took her mouth from the neck of a boy to inform Victor, "You waited too long."
"I came as soon as I was able."
"Too long," she insisted. "You told me to stay in the house, tidy it up. I did that. You promised you would bring someone."
"I've brought you two."
"Too long. I can feed myself. I almost did."
"No. You must not feed here."
"Why can't I? You did," she accused, glancing down at the pair of dying boys.
"No. I didn't. I carried these two from Oregon. You must not, Rachel. You'll be destroyed, if you try."
She bent her teeth to the neck of the closest dying boy. "You waited too long."
Later, after Victor showed her how to cake the bodies inside and out with lime and dispose them several hundred feet below the house, they whispered once more in the attic. She poked a hole in the roof to lift an asphalt shingle and called his attention to the outdoor outfitting shop at the end of the town. From the attic, they could readily identify the silhouette of the pinnacle of a totem pole, bearing at its apex the spread wings of a golden eagle.
"One of the wolves is there," she told him. "Yes, that's right," she added, in response to his shock. "A Quileute wolf. One of those unnatural creations you've been telling me about."
Victor harshly said, "Here? In the town? How do you know?"
"I listen. Not only to her voice. Also her heart. She has an unnaturally slow heart. And I watch her. She is easy to spot. As fast as we are. Faster. She runs to and from the coast each day. She also runs to Port Angeles most days"
"Why?"
"The community college. She takes courses there. She does her homework at the cash register."
Victor hissed, "They have spies! Right here in town!"
Rachel rolled her eyes and shook her head, with the deprecatory mutter, "You have spies here in town."
"Close that peek-hole. She could be watching and listening, right now."
"I don't think so. She's not looking for me. She's guarding the girl from Phoenix. The rock climber who lives in the apartment behind the store. She's also guarding the boy."
"Boy? What boy?"
"Charlie's kid. Edythe Cullen's boyfriend."
Victor growled low in his throat. "The human pet?"
"He's not a pet, you fool. They're lovers. I enjoy listening to them. I think they're sweet."
Victor took her hand firmly and attempted to pull her finger from the spyhole, to drop the asphalt shingle. She resisted his pull, with a modicum of effort, and he felt the vestigial adrenaline rush, the race of fear, in reaction to her effortlessly prodigious strength. She slowly turned her head and regarded him with a curious and sanguine calm, well aware that with a twist of her forearm, she could snap his hand off at the wrist. Victor slowly released his hold, finger by finger. She smirked at him without a word and flexed her forearm.
In a rush he upbraided her, with a tone of desperate petulance. "Don't ever forget that Edythe Cullen is the enemy."
"Your enemy, maybe." She let that hang, without qualifiers, and watched his gears turn. Before he could ask her what she'd meant by that, or utter something even more insipid, she said, "Before you run off to wherever you hide, we need to talk about something else."
"I understand. You're new to this life. You must feed more often."
"Not that. Though you waited too long. I won't wait in this house for that long ever again."
"You mustn't"—
"Enough. You need to scoot, don't you? The other thing. I think I understand your game, now. Why you had me checking sick files and absences. You're trying to catch them as they change, but before they get too far along. That will never work, Victor. The timing is too sensitive, and you don't know enough. We could fail another dozen times before we get it right. There's another one, an unnatural creation, who's fully changed, but he doesn't take it seriously and doesn't participate. His guard is down. He's a sitting duck."
"How do you know this?"
"He's a friend of the girl at the store. And a friend of the human boy. He's in Forks a lot, too. We could box him, attack him head on, and take him down. It would take two of us, one to hold, the other to bite and break. Together, we could do it."
"Who is he?"
"The son of the Quileute Chief. Jake Black."
"No, Rachel, no."
"The girl at the store ghosts him constantly. I could text you, next time I know he's coming into town."
"I said, no. The son of the Chief? He's the most powerful wolf man of all."
"Victor, he doesn't take orders from the leader. He doesn't even run. He still drives his car. He's oblivious."
"That is how he must remain. No. We stick with the plan. Listen to the town, wait for word on a sick one. No more talk of taking on their strongest. I have to go. I've been here too long."
Rachel glowered at him as he descended the improvised attic staircase. No wonder Victor had gone so long without allies, on the cusp of losing. No wonder he had created her, in a last desperate bid to contrive one sympathetic soul on earth. And he'd done it in craven fashion. Not even with a bite. He'd changed her like a coward, by sending her home with a tainted box cutter.
Now he did something that he hadn't tried since the apartment in Oil City, and then only under duress. He reached out and brushed fingers along her jawline. She stood still and stared at him, distracted by the curious sensation of his fingers. She had expected his touch to be cold. 'Of course,' she thought to herself, 'now I'm cold, too.' His touch became more assertive, a palm on her cheek, and now he moved closer.
She blinked and demanded, in a harsh rush, "What are you doing?"
"Looking at you, Rachel. Immortality becomes you."
"I'm a hideous wraith."
"No longer," he said. "Have you not looked at yourself?"
She had, but she did not reply. She stared at him, frozen on point.
He moved slowly and bent toward her face, with nose, cheeks, lips.
"Don't."
"Let yourself feel," he urged. "We are creatures of sensation, liebchen."
She instantaneously stood in a corner, across the room. His presumptive hands still hung in the air. "That was her name for you, Victor."
