In Another Life

Chapter 28: A Short Sad Life

Chapter 28

Every vampire in the clearing watched in silence, with obvious relief evident on their somber faces, as Alice turned Isabella away from Edward and the two dark figures vanished into the shadowed gloom of the canopied darkness. None of them could explain what had just happened, since Isabella seemed so suddenly and oddly compliant. Eliza watched the two of them walk slowly out of the clearing with a look of surprise on her face.

Even though no one had been killed, the sheer savagery of Isabella's outburst was somehow far more terrifying than the fight with the newborns minutes earlier. There was a sharp contrast between the primal ferocity of the melee against newborn army, and the violent uncontrolled rage that Isabella displayed towards Edward. The former looked and felt like explosions of short controlled bursts of rage, the latter was an unbridled yet tightly focused fury.

No one moved to help Edward pull himself out of his indent in the tree. So when he pushed himself out of the trunk, he stumbled slightly as his feet hit the ground. Then he straightened up, dusted himself off and snarled at no one in particular. "What the hell is her problem?" He growled, glaring at where Isabella and Alice had disappeared from view.

Without warning, Eliza spun around and without hesitation, pulled her leg back and kicked Edward solidly between the legs. He gasped loudly in surprise, which was followed by a small annoying squeak that sounded like Mickey mouse getting squashed by the Monty Python foot. Quickly sinking to his knees with a pathetic wheezing and whimpering sound.

"She's not the one with a problem. You're the one with a problem. You're a fucking moron." Eliza said with an icy calm voice before she turned around to walk back towards the clearing, leaving him lying on the ground hunched over in a semi-fetal position. "Asshole." She said over her shoulder as she walked away.

Eliza walked until the impulse to stomp Edward into the ground lessened. Then she stopped and glanced back towards where she knew her mother was. Trying to get a sense through their connection of the tenor of Isabella's emotional state. She couldn't understand how, or why Alice hadn't been turned into dust as just another obstacle in her mother's path.

Never before had Eliza seen anything or anyone come close to reaching through to her mother when she was in that state. On the handful of occasions when she had lost her temper to that extreme, it took all of Eliza's concentration focused through their connection to pull her back to reality. The only other exception was when Eliza found herself hurt or in trouble she couldn't handle on her own. So Alice's strange and immediate effect on Isabella was a mystery that Eliza was determined to solve."

Unfortunately Eliza would have to figure it out later, in her own time, in her own way. She wasn't using their connection to spy or see through her mother's eyes at the moment. They were always aware of one another's emotional state, Eliza was just focusing on it. Her primary concern was whether or not Alice's effect had just snapped her out of it temporarily or not. So she monitored her mother's emotions, a thoughtful expression on her face. Eliza was so focused on her Mother, that she was slightly startled when Jacob stepped up beside her.

"Is she going to be okay?" Jacob asked quietly. Once he'd settled into a comfortable position next to her, he glanced in the same direction Eliza was staring, concern wrinkling his eyes in just the right way to betray his true age.

Eliza nodded, her thoughts were still mostly focused on her mother and Alice. "She's calming down, she'll be fine in a few minutes." It wasn't exactly the truth, since her mother's emotional state was swinging erratically from her normal angry state, to seething hatred, to hurt. The only real truth was somehow Isabella had gotten her control back. She winced at that hard fact, her Mother was always angry or hurt. It was something Eliza had accepted long ago, but had never felt content with. Nothing could live in perpetual anger forever without eventually destroying itself. It had been a lifelong goal to and figure out some way to give her mother something besides that anger, but it was obviously still a work in progress with minimal results thus far.