“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.”
“Carine,” I said quietly. The holes in the story Edythe had told me were filling themselves in. “So… if the venom is left to spread…?”
“It takes a few days for the transformation to be complete, depending on how much venom is in the bloodstream, how close the venom enters to the heart—Carine’s creator bit her on the hand on purpose to make it worse. As long as the heart keeps beating, the poison spreads, healing, changing the body as it moves through it. Eventually the heart stops, and the conversion is finished. But all that time, every minute of it, a victim would be wishing for death—screaming for it.”
I shuddered.
“It’s not pleasant, no.”
“Edythe said it was very hard to do… but that sounds simple enough.”
“We’re also like sharks in a way. Once we taste blood, or even smell it for that matter, it becomes very hard to keep from feeding. Impossible, even. So you see, to actually bite someone, to taste the blood, it would begin the frenzy. It’s difficult on both sides—the bloodlust on the one hand, the awful pain on the other.”
“It sounds like something you would remember,” I said.
“For everyone else, the pain of transformation is the sharpest memory they have of their human life. I don’t know why I’m different.”
Archie stared past me, motionless. I wondered what it would be like, not to know who you were. To look in the mirror and not recognize the person looking back.
It was hard for me to believe that Archie could have been a criminal, though; there was something intrinsically good about his face. Royal was the showy one, the one the girls at school stared at, but there was something better than perfection about Archie’s face. It was totally pure.
“There are positives to being different,” Archie said suddenly. “I don’t remember anyone I left behind. I got to skip that pain, too.” He looked at me, and his eyes narrowed a little bit. “Carine, Edythe, and Earnest all lost everyone who mattered to them before they left being human behind. So there was grief, but not regret. It was different for the others. The phys-ical pain is a quick thing, comparatively, Beau. There are slower ways to suffer.…”