Enchanted | Jasper Hale [Completed]

|54| Huilen

Chapter Fifty-Four:
Huilen

    Alice danced, coming from the south-west with William, Jasper and two others walking across the snow ridden field towards the cloaked vampires whose leader watch the the pixie-like woman intently as if she would disappear any moment now. Lucinda hadn't realised that she had that look pointed towards her fiance.

   Relief and violent joy surged through the Cullen's and witnesses. Jasper joined his coven, standing next to Lucinda and Nadine; his stance protective as Alice and William (flanked by the two olive skinned strangers) approached the coven.

    " I can't really be mad, can I?" Lucinda murmured to Jasper, her waves of relief flooding through him.

    "I suppose not."

    Alice leaped lightly over the edges of the dissipating almost invisible mist as Edward began to address Aro, "Alice has been searching for her own witnesses these last weeks," he said to theancient. "And she does not come back empty-handed. Alice, why don't you introducethe witnesses you've brought?"

     "The time for witnesses is past! Cast your vote, Aro!" Caius snarled, venomously. But Aro just held up his forefinger to silence his brother, clearly intrigued.

    Alice stepped forward lightly and introduced the strangers. "This is Huilen and her nephew, Nahuel."

    "Speak, Huilen," Aro commanded. "Give us the witness you were brought to bear."

  "I am Huilen," the woman announced in clear but strangely accented English. As shecontinued, it was apparent she had prepared herself to tell this story, that she hadpracticed. It flowed like a well-known nursery rhyme. "A century and a half ago, I livedwith my people. My sister came to me one day in secret and told me of the angel that found her in the woods,that visited her by night. I warned her. She was bewitched.  I caredfor her, hunted for her when her strength failed. She ate the animals raw, drinking theirblood. I needed no more confirmation of what she carried in her womb. But she loved the child inside her. She called him Nahuel, after the jungle cat, when he broke her bones—and loved him still.

    "The child ripped his way free of her, and she died quickly,begging all the while that I would care for her Nahuel. Her dying wish—and I agreed. He bit me, though, when I tried to lift him from her body. I crawled away into thejungle to die. I didn't get far—the pain was too much. But he found me; the newbornchild struggled through the underbrush to my side and waited for me. When the painended, he was curled against my side, sleeping.

    "I cared for him until he was able to hunt for himself. We hunted the villages around ourforest, staying to ourselves. We have never come so far from our home, but Nahuel wished to see the child here." 

    Every vampire gathered in that field stood in a peaceful silence, listening intently to Huilen's story about her shift to vamprism. Nadine had lowered her head, know the pain of losing a sibling just as the Denali coven did, seeing as Irina's body had finished burning.