"Drop us here," Alice instructed. "You should tell Carlisle yourself."
I nodded, and the car squealed to a sudden stop. Emmett, Rosalie and Jasper got out in silence; they
would make Alice explain when I was gone. Alice touched my shoulder.
"You will do the right thing," she murmured. Not a vision this time-an order.
"She's Charlie Swan's only family. It would kill him, too."
"Yes," I said, agreeing only with the last part.
She slid out to join the others, her eyebrows pulling together in anxiety. They melted into woods, out of
sight before I could turn the car around.
I accelerated back toward town, and I knew the visions in Alice's head would be flashing from dark to
bright like a strobe light. As I sped back to Forks doing ninety, I wasn't sure where I was going. To say
goodbye to my father? Or to embrace the monster inside me? The road flew away beneath my tires.
2. Open Book
I leaned back against the soft snow bank, letting the dry powder reshape itself around my weight. My
skin had cooled to match the air around me, and the tiny pieces of ice felt like velvet under my skin.
The sky above me was clear, brilliant with stars, glowing blue in some places, yellow in others. The stars
created majestic, swirling shapes against the black universe-an awesome sight. Exquisitely beautiful. Or
rather, it should have been exquisite.
Would have been, if I'd been able to really see it.
It wasn't getting any better. Six days had passed, six days I'd hidden here in the empty Denali wilderness,
but I was no closer to freedom than I had been since the first moment that I'd caught her scent.
When I stared up at the jeweled sky, it was as if there were an obstruction between my eyes and their
beauty. The obstruction was a face, just an unremarkable human face, but I couldn't quite seem to
banish it from my mind.#p#分页标题#e#
I heard the approaching thoughts before I heard the footsteps that accompanied them. The sound of
movement was only a faint whisper against the powder.
I was not surprised that Tanya had followed me here. I knew she'd been mulling over this coming
conversation for the last few days, putting it off until she was sure of exactly what she wanted to say.
She sprang into sight about sixty yards away, leaping onto the tip of an outcropping of black rock and
balancing there on the balls of her bare feet.
Tanya's skin was silver in the starlight, and her long blond curls shone pale, almost pink with their
strawberry tint. Her amber eyes glinted as she spied me, half-buried in the snow, and her full lips
stretched slowly into a smile.
Exquisite. If I'd really been able to see her. I sighed.
She crouched down on the point of the stone, her fingertips touching the rock, her body coiled.
Cannonball, she thought.
She launched herself into the air; her shape became a dark, twisting shadow as she spun gracefully
between me and the stars. She curled herself into a ball just as she struck the piled snow bank beside
me.
A blizzard of snow flew up around me. The stars went black and I was buried deep in the feathery ice
crystals.
I sighed again, but didn't move to unearth myself. The blackness under the snow neither hurt nor
improved the view. I still saw the same face.
"Edward?"
Then snow was flying again as Tanya swiftly disinterred me. She brushed the powder from my unmoving
face, not quite meeting my eyes.
"Sorry," she murmured. "It was a joke."
"I know. It was funny."
Her mouth twisted down. "Irina and Kate said I should leave you alone. They think I'm annoying you."
"Not at all," I assured her. "On the contrary, I'm the one who's being rude-abominably rude. I'm very
sorry."
You're going home, aren't you? She thought.
"I haven't...entirely...decided that yet."
But you're not staying here. Her thought was wistful now, sad.
"No. It doesn't seem to be...helping."
She grimaced. "That's my fault, isn't it?"
"Of course not," I lied smoothly.
Don't be a gentleman.
I smiled.
I make you uncomfortable, she accused.
"No."
She raised one eyebrow, her expression so disbelieving that I had to laugh. One short laugh, followed by
another sigh.
"All right," I admitted. "A little bit."
She sighed, too, and put her chin in her hands. Her thoughts were chagrined.
"You're a thousand times lovelier than the stars, Tanya. Of course, you're already well aware of that.
Don't let my stubbornness undermine your confidence." I chuckled at the unlikeliness of that.
"I'm not used to rejection," she grumbled, her lower lip pushing out into an attractive pout.
"Certainly not," I agreed, trying with little success to block out her thoughts as she fleetingly sifted
through memories of her thousands of successful conquests. Mostly Tanya preferred human men-they