The Shadow and The Seer (Jasper x Alice fanfic)

21. Reunions

   I'm so happy to get back to this fic! With all of the stuff going on in the world, it was really a great relief to get back to this.

Thank you so much reading!
😊

Chapter song: Vikingman by Rodrigo y Gabriela

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   Leah stared at the little cottage in the woods as she slinked on all fours as quietly as possible. A tired fog reigned supreme in her head. It'd been several days since she'd slept and only a day had passed since she'd sensed that Bella wasn't actually dead. The revelation still sent tremors down her spine.

   She'd just been about to phase back to human when the annoyance of her life suddenly went wolf. Where the hell are you? Sam whined.

   Fuck off. She sent the image of a middle finger to him to distract from her location and then phased. The she-wolf got dressed quickly with shaky hands and did her best to comb through her short, thick hair with her fingers. She wished that she'd had the forethought to bring a comb and deodorant, but the last couple of days had been far too unpredictable and hellish on her mind for that to be the case.

   What would she be like now that she was a vampire? Ever since Leah sensed that Bella had been bitten, she'd found that the sickly sweet scent and disgust that she'd held for vampires had long dissipated. She didn't think that she'd ever be skipping and holding hands with just any vampire, but she'd be able to more than tolerate her imprint. Bella.

   But that didn't mean that Leah didn't have her doubts.

   Oh please let her be a vegetarian like the Cullens. She prayed. No matter the draw that she felt, there was no place in her heart for a murderer. Jasper had told the she-wolf plainly that her imprint would have urges, and that terrified her.

   She didn't dare think about the Council or what her family would think about the situation. It was lucky that she had such a talent for hiding her thoughts or Sam would've already snitched. They all just thought that she was avoiding the male because of their past relationship.

   Leah leaned against a tree and took a giant breath to calm her heart. She would hear it and there was no way in hell that she was going to make her imprint nervous.

  Once she was fully in control of herself, she forced herself to walk almost robotically to the ornate, hand-painted door and knock. Within two seconds, the door opened to reveal a large, muscular chest, which was an odd view for Leah, who typically was as tall as any male.

   A whistle assaulted her eardrums. "Well damn, Jazz really wasn't lying that a mutt would be visiting." Emmett Cullen grinned down at her as though his mortal enemy was just what he needed to shake up his undead existence.

   Leah tensed, summoning all of her willpower not to snark back at the vampire who could stop her from seeing Bella. "Yeah, if it's not too much trouble." She refrained from spitting out the instinctive leech at the end of the sentence and did her damnedest to look relatively harmless. The imprint bond pulled at her in sadistic bouts of punishment at such close range and it caused her fists to clench. Hard enough that her fingernails caught into the skin.

   The big vampire stared at Leah's hands for a moment, grinned, and raised his eyebrows. "You best stop that unless you want diced up by Bell's claws. She's refusing to feed and has been giving us a helluva lot of trouble over the past couple days." He stepped his massive body out of the doorway and beckoned the she-wolf inside.

   The werewolf cautiously followed Emmett into the homey, airy cottage that actually didn't seem too dissimilar to her family's house at LaPush. If Sue Clearwater hit the lottery and decked the place out with only custom-made furniture and appliances. But it wasn't the decor that wrapped up Leah's attention as her imprint's frustrated voice rang down the hall.