I Never Meant to Start a War

Parties weren’t my scene. I didn’t know if this was because of my introverted personality or because my attitude wasn’t entirely the best company at a light celebration of freedom and frivolity. Graduation came much too fast.

Of course, I haven’t graduated yet—but it was official that all of my friends were no longer going to be there with me for the one remaining year of my high school career. Bella was leaving; well at least, she was destined to be turned, in which case banning her from humans. Jasper would no longer be able to sit with me at all hours of the day, which made him anxious. But he officially graduated from yet another high school in yet another town. And he would wait for me.

And yet, all I could think about was that I had missed Paul’s graduation.

I gripped Jasper’s hand nervously as I looked out into the great mass of human bodies all clustered into the Cullen’s vast living room area, bathed in the odd glare of the multicolored rave lights. Sometimes I would catch sight of Alice Cullen in her sequined shirt as the light caught her flittering throughout the heavy teenage crowd. Other times, every face I recognized totally disappeared into the mass.

Jasper was my only company, his pale skin reflecting mysteriously off of the overwhelming lights.

“I find this terrifying,” I finally turned to say to him, looking up to see his face. He smiled, but there was the same kind of tiring intelligence raging behind his golden eyes.

“Very exhausting,” he relented. “Personally, I find the emotional climate erratic and unpredictable. My otherwise antisocial behavior resents this.”

I smiled and he smiled back.

Before we had broken our gaze, Bella with Edward in tow broke through the crowd in front of us, Edward less than a step behind her. She sent me a tired smile but I could see the storm of fear raging behind her eyes.

I didn’t ask.

Edward smiled at us, but I read the same stress. “Enjoying the party?”

“No,” Jasper and I answered simultaneously. We grinned at each other.

“Really?” Bella shouldn’t sound so surprised; I knew she disliked parties almost as much as I did. I pretended not to notice and shrugged, gazing around as I had been doing for the past hour. Nothing had changed.

“Really,” I responded. “I find it hard to enjoy a gathering of teenage socialite debauchery, filled to the brim with everything that is immature and unethical. Where have the values of humanity gone?”

Jasper rolled his eyes at my rampage, but the events that ensued my next simple observation would send all things casual straight from my faulty mind. I glanced away—only for a moment—and caught sight of Alice standing at the fringe of the bodies, eyes lost to nowhere as she stared. My stomach twisted not because I knew that meant that she was having a vision, but because of the horror on her face that made the moment stop dead in its tracks. Edward had been distracted by the observation and looked toward her as well.

Their gazes met for only a moment.

And then everything morphed into motion.

“Jasper,” Edward said hurriedly, “we need to talk about something that Bella came up with today. Something about Seattle.”

The tension tying him together was an electrified wire, and I think we all felt the sting. Jasper nodded and let go of my hand with a worried glance to me before him and Edward disappeared. I hadn’t failed to notice that Alice and her sequins also could no longer be spotted.

“What are they talking about?” I demanded of Bella, hoping that she would have a better answer than I did since, apparently, she was involved. And she did.

“The activity in Seattle,” she began, but never really finished. “I think I know what’s going on. And I don’t think it’s just one vampire doing all of it. It has to be an army, and there has to be a reason why they picked Seattle.”

I went pale. “They stole your scent.”

“They’re after me,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. It could be the Volturi, it could be Victoria. Nothing seems logical anymore . . . Are you looking for them?” She eventually came to notice my panicked sweeping gaze over the crowd. There was not a vampire to be seen.

“No,” I murmured. “I think Alice just had a vision, just before they left. I don’t like the looks of this.”

Bella looked at me with a look that told me that she didn’t, either. She shot me a distressed look before she was moving back into the crowd, pushing softly past the sweaty teenage bodies in a silently terrified manner. I watched as she went, weighing my options.

And then I was diving into the crowd, too.

I couldn’t describe what I was feeling or thinking for a long moment because it was all a blur of activity, sound, lights, and breathing. [i[My breathing. It was loud in my ears, my heartbeat the bass backdrop to the sick symphony. I started to duck through to the stairs—they had to be upstairs, right? If they weren’t down?

I caught sight of a sequined glint as a voice echoed back to me like a whisper: “Hey Bella!”

I froze.

I turned to face the front door, and saw the one thing I wished I hadn’t—Jacob Black.

It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate his presence, because he hasn’t ever done anything against me, but the panic of just seeing him here came because of something I could not think. If I thought it, my world could come crashing down.

And Jacob Black didn’t know.

He could ruin everything.

I saw that he was flanked by Quil and Embry, two that Bella told me were his close friends, and I managed to blend deeper into the crowd. I couldn’t let them think about me.

There was still no Cullen in sight, and I was becoming very anxious.

I felt a gaze burning into my back over the molten lava I felt surging through my veins, and I spun around, my gaze going immediately to the source. And I felt sick.

The three werewolves had Bella cornered in the kitchen, and Jacob certainly didn’t look happy about something or another. My best friend caught my eye and sent me a desperate, pleading look—she needed help. And I wasn’t a bad enough friend that I could ignore her, as if I ever could, and I risked everything just to run into that kitchen.

“What is going on?” Jacob was demanding in a near-growl as I slipped into the room, the only one noticing me entering being the one that had called me there in the first place. I crossed my arms and felt a scowl cover my face that didn’t quite match with my deep blue dress. I gathered the right words to say.

My eloquence left me anyway.

I felt the hostility in my words as I managed over the music, “Calm down, Jacob.”

The werewolves spun around in shock, but my words didn’t bear the warning I had intended. Jacob’s hands began to shake, and his eyes narrowed as he noticed that it was me. I wondered what I looked like, but I didn’t even know, even if I had a feeling that I didn’t look friendly at all. And that didn’t help.

“You know, don’t you?” he asked, annoyed, as the other three looked on.

“If you’ll excuse us,” I said, cutting through them and grabbing Bella’s good wrist. “We need to talk to someone. You can let yourselves out.”

I can honestly say that I didn’t expect anything of his response, probably because I didn’t know how easy it would be to set him off. I wasn’t expecting him to grab both of my shoulders and slam me into the wall, growling. My back exploded and I gasped in shock, my shoulders aching against the unexpected force. I opened my mouth to say something, even though I couldn’t say what, but I was stopped short by an enraged bass snarl directly beside us, where Jasper now stood, his expression absolutely terrifying.

I had never seen his eyes so black.

Jacob, realizing what he had done, immediately dropped his arms, looking at me with wide guilty, apologizing eyes, but I didn’t look at him back. The second that his arms were off of me I was in Jasper’s, and he started to pull me away from the kitchen. I glanced over to see Edward and Alice standing there as well, Alice with her nose scrunched. But Edward was looking at me.

His expression couldn’t be explained in one word—surprise, disbelief, disgust, hatred, but then there was one more, shining throughout the whole of the feelings, something so much stronger than the other ones. That something told me that he felt betrayed.

And that was when I knew that he knew.

The moment was all a blur after that, because the moment of realization went by much too fast. Jasper was pulling me away, still snarling under his breath as his ice cold hands held me. He brought me to a room that had to be on the first floor, since I didn’t remember going up stairs, and it looked as though it could have been a den. There was a large bookcase of miscellaneous genres spread over one wall and an assortment of black leather couches strategically placed throughout, one of which being where Jasper was taking me now. Now that the door was closed, he didn’t hesitate to hide his rage.

“He’s lucky if I don’t rip him to pieces,” Jasper was snarling, running his hands over my arms and my back, as if checking for anything to be seriously hurt. He growled. “I can’t believe he would touch you like that. He’ll be so lucky if I don’t hunt him down and kill him like the dog he is!”

And, despite everything, I managed to smile.

“Shh,” I cooed, reaching up and touching his cheek softly. He looked down into my eyes the soulless black turned slowly to the darkest gold, and sighed, leaning toward me to hold me closer. I closed my eyes and relaxed into his arms, wondering how long we would now have left before Edward told him, and everything would go wrong. I tried not to think about that, not as he sighed again.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he whispered. “No one had any idea that those mutts were coming.”

“I know, Jazz, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. What he did is not okay.”

I knew that once Paul found out, he would attack Jacob just as Jasper wished he could be doing right now. But I didn’t speak a word of comeuppance, just sighed and hugged myself closer to him.

Eventually, everything calmed down, and the music of the party felt forever away.

“I love you,” Jasper whispered into the silence, and I whispered the same, feeling him smile at this moment of pure peace. I couldn’t tell him that everything was falling apart.

As the silence rang on, all I could think of was how I had betrayed him.