Solstice

INTERLUDE

'What about this for you, Bella?' Alice, her bell-like voice piercing, held up a silk blouse for my inspection. I shrugged. Since the other night, when I had gone against vampire lore by yawning, that utterly human thing to do that suggested a fatigue I shouldn't have been capable of, she'd been watching me. She wasn't overt about it – she managed to be more surreptitious than even Jasper, who'd drifted seemingly at random after me wherever I went in the big house – but she was watching, all the same. 'I thought this was supposed to be fun?' she said plaintively, and the clerk gave her a wide-eyed, apprehensive look. I supposed that it must have been quite an unusual occurrence for her: two deathly pale young women who looked like supermodels wandered off the street and seemed to subtly repel her from her own store.

'I'm sorry. I have a lot on my mind,' I told Alice and riffled through the racks of clothing. I held up a blouse and skirt that I actually liked, and my sister looked surprised.

'Wow, Bella: those are actually in good taste. There might be hope for you yet.' She grabbed the hangers from my hands before I had the opportunity to put them back and went to pay. Once upon a time I would've felt guilty at the amount these items cost – after all, it made us even less relatable than ever to spend $900 on a stupid skirt – but these days, money meant little to me. Relationships were everything. Of course, I was very lucky to be in a position where I no longer had to worry about money. 'Come on – there's a place I want to show you. Very exclusive,' she told me, grinning, as she put up a huge umbrella over both of us and drifted rapidly along the busy city streets. I noticed, idly, that while other people had to duck and dodge out of each other's way, we had a large section of sidewalk all to ourselves. No-one wanted to come too close to a vampire. In some ways, it made little sense that we were so offputting to humans: as our prey, shouldn't they be more attracted to us rather than repulsed by us? But I supposed, in some ways, we were like polar bears. I'd remembered going to a zoo in my human years where there was a jolly round snowy-white bear in an enclosure, and the way he'd sniffed the air when a little boy came close. People in the crowd around him had 'aaaahed' when he'd seemed to smile at them – when really, he'd seen them as mobile meat. Lunch. We only really needed to be close to people when we were planning on killing them – and then we could use our natural allure to draw them in. The rest of the time humans were a bizarre species, overcome by emotions and bodily functions, who seemed determined to destroy anything they got their hands on. 'This way,' Alice chimed, linking arms with me. She took me down a back alley, the kind of place I would expect to see people furtively buying drugs in, the grimy walls covered in graffiti: suddenly, she slid through a hole in the pavement. Closing the umbrella, I followed her.

To my astonishment, the ground at the bottom of the hole was thickly carpeted in red velvet. I pursued Alice along a long hallway and jerked in surprise when I rounded a corner. It was a bar, of sorts, and one filled exclusively with vampires. Behind a long, chrome bar stood an exceptionally beautiful young man with shoulder-length black hair caught back in a ponytail, who smiled at both of us. He had high cheekbones, a beautifully defined jaw, and a long, curling mouth. He was a lot more attractive than the average vampire. Nothing compared to Edward, of course. No-one and nothing could compare with Edward.

'Leopard, with a chaser,' said Alice to the bartender. He nodded, and turned to me.

'Animal or human?' he asked, and I gaped at him.

'She's only seven,' Alice told him, and he grinned. 'You can have whatever you want, here – even human blood from live feeders, but only centuries-old vampires use them; you have to perfect a certain level of self-control to be able to feed from a human without killing them. And it's very expensive.' She raised her glass as it was set in front of her and beamed. 'I told you it was going to be fun.'