The Twilight Saga Collection part 2(315)

“Purely a mental defense.” Eleazar nodded to himself. “Limited, but strong.”

“Aro couldn’t hear her,” Edward interjected. “Though she was human when they met.”

Eleazar’s eyes widened.

“Jane tried to hurt me, but she couldn’t,” I said. “Edward thinks Demetri can’t find me, and that Alec can’t bother me, either. Is that good?”

Eleazar, still gaping, nodded. “Quite.”

“A shield!” Edward said, deep satisfaction saturating his tone. “I never thought of it that way. The only one I’ve ever met before was Renata, and what she did was so different.”

Eleazar had recovered slightly. “Yes, no talent ever manifests in precisely the same way, because no one ever thinks in exactly the same way.”

“Who’s Renata? What does she do?” I asked. Renesmee was interested, too, leaning away from Carmen so that she could see around Kate.

“Renata is Aro’s personal bodyguard,” Eleazar told me. “A very practical kind of shield, and a very strong one.”

I vaguely remembered a small crowd of vampires hovering close to Aro in his macabre tower, some male, some female. I couldn’t remember the women’s faces in the uncomfortable, terrifying memory. One must have been Renata.

“I wonder…,” Eleazar mused. “You see, Renata is a powerful shield against a physical attack. If someone approaches her—or Aro, as she is always close beside him in a hostile situation—they find themselves… diverted. There’s a force around her that repels, though it’s almost unnoticeable. You simply find yourself going a different direction than you planned, with a confused memory as to why you wanted to go that other way in the first place. She can project her shield several meters out from herself. She also protects Caius and Marcus, too, when they have a need, but Aro is her priority.

“What she does isn’t actually physical, though. Like the vast majority of our gifts, it takes place inside the mind. If she tried to keep you back, I wonder who would win?” He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of Aro’s or Jane’s gifts being thwarted.”

“Momma, you’re special,” Renesmee told me without any surprise, like she was commenting on the color of my clothes.

I felt disoriented. Didn’t I already know my gift? I had my super-self-control that had allowed me to skip right over the horrifying newborn year. Vampires only had one extra ability at most, right?

Or had Edward been correct in the beginning? Before Carlisle had suggested that my self-control could be something beyond the natural, Edward had thought my restraint was just a product of good preparation—focus and attitude, he’d declared.

Which one had been right? Was there more I could do? A name and a category for what I was?

“Can you project?” Kate asked interestedly.

“Project?” I asked.

“Push it out from yourself,” Kate explained. “Shield someone besides yourself.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. I didn’t know I should do that.”

“Oh, you might not be able to,” Kate said quickly. “Heavens knows I’ve been working on it for centuries and the best I can do is run a current over my skin.”

I stared at her, mystified.

“Kate’s got an offensive skill,” Edward said. “Sort of like Jane.”

I flinched away from Kate automatically, and she laughed.

“I’m not sadistic about it,” she assured me. “It’s just something that comes in handy during a fight.”

Kate’s words were sinking in, beginning to make connections in my mind. Shield someone besides yourself, she’d said. As if there were some way for me to include another person in my strange, quirky silent head.

I remembered Edward cringing on the ancient stones of the Volturi castle turret. Though this was a human memory, it was sharper, more painful than most of the others—like it had been branded into the tissues of my brain.

What if I could stop that from happening ever again? What if I could protect him? Protect Renesmee? What if there was even the faintest glimmer of a possibility that I could shield them, too?

“You have to teach me what to do!” I insisted, unthinkingly grabbing Kate’s arm. “You have to show me how!”

Kate winced at my grip. “Maybe—if you stop trying to crush my radius.”

“Oops! Sorry!”

“You’re shielding, all right,” Kate said. “That move should have about shocked your arm off. You didn’t feel anything just now?”

“That wasn’t really necessary, Kate. She didn’t mean any harm,” Edward muttered under his breath. Neither of us paid attention to him.