Our Infinite Sadness

Hide

The plan to hide Ben began flawlessly. Jasper urged Ben to duck as low as he could behind the seats, flat to the floor if possible. Ben wondered for a moment if they were taking over-caution to a fault, under the dark of night and behind deeply tinted glass, but then he recalled Edythe's lesson that vampires could see heat.

The Mercedes burst from green concealments onto the main road, and Alice already had the car fishtailing into its intended trajectory. They were the first to emerge, an attempt to pass themselves off as a decoy. Alice gunned the engine, and they sped back toward town. The ruse worked. They weren't followed.

"Stay down," Jasper warned.

Benjamin's bodyguards forbade him to sit up until Forks was long behind them.

They caught him checking his phone and confiscated it. Jasper ripped it right out of his hands, so fast that his fingers stung. Ben's hands were still outstretched, and he just stared at his empty fingers as though they were strangers.

Jasper assured him that he would get it back. After. Phones were easily traceable, Jasper explained, and besides, it was too easy in text messaging to inadvertently reveal some salient aspect of one's location.

"We want them to be guessing what continent you're on," Alice pitched in. "Until they're gone, it's radio silence."

"It doesn't matter," Ben whispered emptily. "I don't even have her number, because she destroyed her last burner phone. I was only hoping she'd call me."

Alice and Jasper exchanged shocked glances. It hadn't occurred to either of them that he could be waiting for Edythe to contact him so soon. They explained that Edythe simply couldn't risk any kind of contact. She was the one being followed. She could be overheard or observed. Edythe couldn't risk projecting the fact that she and Ben were physically segregated.

Ben stared out of the window and watched the night flash past, punctuated by occasional houselights that stretched like neon tubes as the car flew with ghostly silence over the flat, depthless landscape, trees and hills superimposed upon the horizon and sky like paper scrolls cranked across the view on perpetual reels. Every time the flying car passed a house, Ben imagined the occupants within and wondered how they would react if they had an inkling of their peril by virtue of his mere proximity. He imagined the Huntress Jillian shadowing their car and bolting through yards where children played, sprinting under open windows and living rooms whose occupants felt an inexplicable race of fear with her unseen passing. Alice insisted that Jillian and her accomplice, Victor, had taken the bait and were nowhere near. But they were hunting somewhere, and passing within leaping distance of window sills that opened into mundane rooms occupied by people who might die in the next instant with no warning.

Jillian had taken the bait. She was following the Humvee, on the supposition that Ben rode with Edythe and the strongest grouping, that they were spiriting him away to a safe location. That made Edythe a target, and Ben couldn't protect her.

He liked his plan less and less.

Worst of all had been Edythe at their parting. Her desolation had been heartbreaking to see, the rending corollary to her beseeching pleas on the flight home from the vale and rock wall, when she had begged Ben not to force them apart. When they had parted with that final kiss, the word intolerable came to the fore. She had looked rent in two.

He knew exactly how she felt, as Washington State flew past his window. He stared into the night, pretended to hold his phone, pretended that she might call him at any moment and give him the opportunity to tell her once again that he loved her, more than anyone or anything, more than himself, more than the world entire.