91Chapter 5
First Gap | Alice
She moved.
Or rather, they moved. Bella and her mother.
Moved from nice Riverside that was surrounded by the sorts of mountains and forests perfect for what I was when I needed to retreat to Phoenix.
Phoenix.
There were no forests around Phoenix. Oh, there were more than enough mountains, but no true forests, not in the middle of a desert. There were trees, clusters of them, swathes, even, that the humans deemed "forests". My opinion was that if it wasn't good enough to hide a vampire, it wasn't a forest.
It frustrated me. Because just as I was settling and getting used to checking in on Bella every so often, this happened and disrupted everything.
It left me with two options: stay in Phoenix, living in some abandoned area and only moving around only after dark (which was usual enough for me, to an extent), or heading somewhere else for a bit and hopefully come up with some better solution.
I managed to do the first for little more than three months.
Long enough that I was able to leave something for Bella on Christmas —though I could only see her reaction in a vision, not in person— before I started having premonitions of the local vampires growing suspicious of my presence and investigating.
So I left to give them time to settle down.
Instead of going north, I decided to do something I'd never done before when in America. Namely, go south.
Mexico was interesting, staying to the western edge at least. But it was southern Central America that was the best.
Cities that were too disorganized to deal with people going missing. Forests with towering trees that created eternal shade. Lakes and rivers high in the mountains with sparkling-clear water.
I loved cities; they were my typical hunting grounds. I loved the constant motion, the way humans felt they couldn't stop running around, the constant changes in them. But this was the exact opposite, and the general serenity was almost soporific.
I'll admit that I lost track of time. It was easy to. I was aware of it passing, but I simply didn't keep track of it. I'd never had to before, and it was easy to fall back into the sort of less-aware state driven only by instinct and need, broken only a few times.
It was only by coincidence that I overheard the date in one of my visits to a city and realized it had been over six months since I'd left Arizona. That revelation caused the pull I felt towards Bella to return full-force, perhaps even magnified, and the sun had hardly set when I left San Benito.
It seemed like nothing had changed when I got back the next night. I already knew that Bella was safe, but seeing it in a vision and seeing it in person were two different things.
I relaxed, satisfied, and made my way back to the warehouse I had claimed as my own.
A/N: Next chapter will be out next week, as it's already written. I apologize for how short they are right now, but they will be getting longer the further into the story we get as Bella gradually grows and her interactions with Alice shift and change and become more meaningful.
