Page 64 of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined (The Twilight Saga)

He grinned. “It’s hard to explain without sounding slightly schizo- phrenic.

. . . Time doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it does to you—or Jess, or anyone else.

” Jessamine grinned and tweaked his ear.

“So this won’t make sense to you. But for me, it’s like we’ve already been friends for a long time, Beau.

The first second you became a part of Edythe’s life, for me it was like we’d already spent hundreds of hours together.

We’ve laughed at Edythe’s overreactions together, we’ve annoyed Royal right out of the house together, we’ve stayed up all night talking with Carine together. . . .”

I stared and he shrugged. “It’s how I experience the world.”

“We’re friends?” I asked, my voice full of wonder.

“Best friends,” he told me. “Someday. It was nice of my favorite sister, don’t you think, to fall in love with my best friend? I guess I owe her one.”

“Huh,” was all I could think to say.

Archie laughed.

Jessamine rolled her eyes. “Thanks so much, Archie. I just got him calm.”

“No, I’m good,” I promised. Archie could be lying to make me feel better, but either way it worked. It wasn’t so bad if Archie wanted to help me, too. If he wasn’t just doing it for Edythe.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait for something to change.”

It was a very long day.

We stayed in the room. Archie called down to the front desk and asked them to suspend our housekeeping service. The curtains stayed shut, the TV on, though no one watched it. At regular intervals, food was delivered for me.

It was funny how I was suddenly comfortable with Archie.

It was like his vision of our friendship, spoken out loud, had made it real.

He sat in the chair next to the sofa where I sprawled, and answered all the questions I’d been too nervous to ask before.

Sometimes he’d answer them before I asked them.

It was a little weird, but I figured that was how everyone else felt around Edythe all the time.

“Yes,” he said, when I thought about asking him that. “It’s exactly the same. She tries hard not to be obnoxious about it.”

He told me about waking up.

“I only remembered one thing, but I’m not even sure it was a memory.

I thought I remembered someone saying my name—calling me Archie.

But maybe I was remembering something that hadn’t happened yet—seeing that someday someone would call me Archie.

” He smiled at my expression. “I know, it’s a circular dilemma, isn’t it? ”

“The hair?” He ran a hand over his scalp, unselfconscious.

The stubble was just long enough to see that his hair would have been dark brown, nearly black, like his eyebrows.

“It was a rather extreme look for 1920. A little too early for me to have been a skinhead, thank heavens. My best guess is disease or bad behavior.”

“Bad behavior?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I might have been in prison.”

“You couldn’t have been much older than me,” I protested.

He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I like to believe that if I was a criminal, I was both a mastermind and a prodigy.”

Jessamine—back at the desk and mostly silent—laughed with me.

“It wasn’t confusing the way it probably should have been,” Archie said when I asked him what his first visions were like.

“It seemed normal—I knew what I was seeing hadn’t happened.

I think maybe I’d seen things before I was changed.

Or maybe I just adapt quickly.” He smiled, already knowing the question I had waiting.

“It was Jess. She was the first thing I saw.” And then, “No, I didn’t actually meet her in person until much later. ”

Something about his tone made me wonder. “How long?”

“Twenty-eight years.”

“Twenty-eight . . . ? You had to wait twenty-eight years ? But couldn’t you . . . ?”

He nodded. “I could have found her earlier. I knew where she was. But she wasn’t ready for me yet. If I’d come too early, she would have killed me.”

I gasped and stared at her. She raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked back at Archie. He laughed.

“But Edythe said you were the only one who could hold your own against her—?”

Jessamine hissed—not like she was mad, like she was annoyed. I glanced at her again and she was rolling her eyes.

“We’ll never know,” Archie said. “If Jess was really trying to kill Edythe, rather than just playing . . . ? Well, Jess has a lot of experience. Seeing the future isn’t the only reason why I can keep up with Edythe—it’s also because it was Jess who taught me how to fight.

Lauren’s coven all had their eyes on Eleanor—she’s pretty spectacular, I grant you.

But if it had come to a fight, Eleanor wouldn’t have been their problem.

If they’d taken a closer look at my darling”—he blew her a kiss—“they would have forgotten all about the strong girl.”

I remembered the first time I’d seen Jessamine, in the cafeteria with her family. Beautiful, like the others, but with that edge. Even before I’d put it into words inside my own head, I’d sensed there was something about her that matched up with what Archie was telling me now.

I looked at Archie.

“You can ask her,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”

“He wants to know my story?” Jessamine guessed. She laughed once—it was a dark sound. “You’re not ready for that, Beau. Believe me.”

And though I was still curious, I did believe her.

“You said humans were harder . . . but you seem to see me pretty well,” I noted.

“I’m paying attention, and you’re right here,” Archie said. “Also, the two-second head starts are simpler than the weather. It’s the long term that won’t hold still. Even an hour complicates things.”

Archie kept me updated on what was happening with the others—which was mostly nothing.

Joss was good at running away. There were tricks, Archie told me.

Scents couldn’t be tracked through water, for example.

Joss seemed to know the tricks. A half dozen times the trail took them back toward Forks, only to race off in the other direction again.

Twice Archie called Carine to give her instructions.

Once it was something about the direction in which Joss had jumped off a cliff, the other time it was where they would find her scent on the other side of a river.

From the way he described it, he wasn’t seeing the hunter, he was seeing Edythe and Carine.

I guessed he would see his family the most clearly.

I wanted to ask for the phone, but I knew there wasn’t time for me to hear Edythe’s voice. They were hunting.

I also knew I was supposed to be rooting for Edythe and the others to succeed, but I could only feel relieved as the distance between her and Joss got larger, despite Archie’s help. If it meant I would be stuck here in this hotel room forever, I wouldn’t complain. Whatever kept her safe.

There was one question that I wanted to ask more than the others, but I hesitated. I think if Jessamine hadn’t been there, I might have done it sooner. I didn’t feel the same ease in her presence that I did now with Archie. Which was probably only because she wasn’t trying to make me feel that way.

When I was eating—dinner? Maybe, I couldn’t remember which meal I was on—I was thinking about different ways to ask. And then I caught a look on Archie’s face and I knew that he already knew what I was trying to ask, and unlike my dozens of other questions, he was choosing not to answer this one.

My eyes narrowed.

“Was this on Edythe’s lists of instructions?” I asked sourly.

I thought I heard a very faint sigh from Jessamine’s corner. It was probably annoying listening to half a conversation. But she should be used to that. I’d bet Edythe and Archie never had to speak out loud at all when they talked to each other.

“It was implied,” Archie answered.

I thought about their fight in the Jeep. Was this what it was about?

“I don’t suppose our future friendship is enough to shift your loyalties?”

He frowned. “Edythe is my sister.”

“Even if you disagree with her on this?”

We stared at each other for a minute.

“That’s what you saw,” I realized. I felt my eyes get bigger. “And then she got so upset. You already saw it, didn’t you?”

“It was only one future among many. I also saw you die,” he reminded me.

“But you saw it. It’s a possibility.”

He shrugged.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know, then? Even if there’s only the slightest chance?”

He stared at me, deliberating.

“You do,” he finally said. “You have the right to know.”

I waited.

“You don’t know fury like Edythe when she’s thwarted,” he warned me.

“It’s none of her business. This is between you and me. As your friend, I’m begging you.”

He paused, then made his choice. “I can tell you the mechanics of it, but I don’t remember it myself, and I’ve never done it or seen it done, so keep in mind that I can only tell you the theory.”

“How does someone become a vampire?”

“Oh, is that all?” Jessamine muttered behind me. I’d forgotten she was listening.

I waited.

“As predators,” Archie began, “we have a glut of weapons in our physical arsenal—much, much more than we need for hunting easy prey like humans. Strength, speed, acute senses, not to mention those of us like Edythe, Jessamine, and me who have extra senses as well. And then, like a carnivorous flower, we are physically attractive to our prey.”

I was seeing it all in my head again—how Edythe had illustrated the same concept for me in the meadow.

He smiled wide—his teeth glistened. “We have one more, fairly superfluous weapon. We’re also venomous.

The venom doesn’t kill—it’s merely incapacitating.

It works slowly, spreading through the bloodstream, so that, once bitten, our prey is in too much physical pain to escape us.

Mostly superfluous, as I said. If we’re that close, our prey doesn’t escape. Of course, unless we want it to.”