The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (5 page)

It was shockingly weird to touch another person after a whole life—because the last three months
were
my whole life—of avoiding any kind of contact. Like touching a sparking downed power line, only to find out that it felt
nice.

The smile on my face felt a little lopsided. “Count me in.”

“Excellent. Our own private club.”

“Very exclusive,” I agreed.

He still had my hand. Not shaking it, but not exactly holding it, either. “We need a secret handshake.”

“You can be in charge of that one.”

“So the super-secret best friends club is called to order, all present, secret handshake to be devised at
a later date,” he said. “First order of business: Riley. Clueless? Misinformed? Or lying?”

His eyes were on mine as he spoke, wide and sincere. There was no change as he said Riley’s name. In that instant, I was sure
there was nothing to the stories about Diego and Riley. Diego had just been around more than the others, nothing more. I could
trust him.

“Add this to the list,” I said. “Agenda. As in, what is his?”

“Bull’s-eye. That’s exactly what we’ve got to find out. But first, another experiment.”

“That word makes me nervous.”

“Trust is an essential part of the whole secret club gig.”

He stood up into the extra ceiling space he’d just carved out and started digging again. In a second, his feet were dangling
while he held himself up with one hand and excavated with the other.

“You better be digging for garlic,” I warned him, and backed up toward the tunnel that led to the sea.

“The stories aren’t real, Bree,” he called to me. He pulled himself higher into the hole he was making, and the dirt continued
to rain down. He was going to fill in his hidey-hole at this rate. Or flood it with light, which would make it even more useless.

I slid most of the way into the escape channel,
just my fingertips and eyes above the edge. The water only came up to my hips. It would take me just the smallest fraction
of a second to disappear into the darkness below. I could spend a day not breathing.

I’d never been a fan of fire. This might have been because of some buried childhood memory, or maybe it was more recent. Becoming
a vampire was enough fire to last me.

Diego had to be close to the surface. Once again, I struggled with the idea of losing my new and only friend.

“Please stop, Diego,” I whispered, knowing he would probably laugh, knowing he wouldn’t listen.

“Trust, Bree.”

I waited, unmoving.

“Almost…,” he muttered. “Okay.”

I tensed for the light, or the spark, or the explosion, but Diego dropped back down while it was still dark. In his hand he
had a longer root, a thick snaky thing that was almost as tall as me. He gave me an I-told-you-so kind of look.

“I’m not a completely reckless person,” he said. He gestured to the root with his free hand. “See—precautions.”

With that, he stabbed the root upward into his new hole. There was a final avalanche of pebbles and
sand as Diego dropped back onto his knees, getting out of the way. And then a beam of brilliant light—a ray about the thickness
of one of Diego’s arms—pierced the darkness of the cave. The light made a pillar from the ceiling to the floor, shimmering
as the drifting dirt sifted through it. I was icy-still, gripping the ledge, ready to drop.

Diego didn’t jerk away or cry out in pain. There was no smell of smoke. The cave was a hundred times lighter than it had been,
but it didn’t seem to affect him. So maybe his story about shade trees was true. I watched him carefully as he knelt beside
the pillar of sunlight, motionless, staring. He seemed fine, but there was a slight change to his skin. A kind of movement,
maybe from the settling dust, that reflected the gleam. It looked almost like he was glowing a little.

Maybe it wasn’t the dust, maybe it was the burning. Maybe it didn’t hurt, and he’d realize it too late….

Seconds passed as we stared at the daylight, motionless.

Then, in a move that seemed both absolutely expected and also completely unthinkable, he held out his hand, palm up, and stretched
his arm toward the beam.

I moved faster than I could think, which was
pretty dang fast. Faster than I’d ever moved before.

I tackled Diego into the back wall of the dirt-filled little cave before he could reach that one last inch to put his skin
in the light.

The room was filled with a sudden blaze, and I felt the warmth on my leg in the same instant that I realized there wasn’t
enough room for me to pin Diego to the wall without some part of myself touching the sunlight.

“Bree!” he gasped.

I twisted away from him automatically, rolling myself tight against the wall. It took less than a second, and the whole time
I was waiting for the pain to get me. For the flames to hit and then spread like the night I’d met
her
, only faster. The dazzling flash of light was gone. It was just the pillar of sun again.

I looked at Diego’s face—his eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open. He was totally still, a sure sign of alarm. I wanted
to look down at my leg, but I was afraid to see what was left. This wasn’t like Jen ripping my arm off, though that had hurt
more. I wasn’t going to be able to fix this.

Still no pain yet.

“Bree, did you see
that
?”

I shook my head once quickly. “How bad is it?”

“Bad?”

“My leg,” I said through my teeth. “Just tell me what’s left.”

“Your leg looks fine to me.”

I glanced down quickly, and sure enough, there was my foot and my calf, just like before. I wiggled my toes. Fine.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

I pulled myself off the ground, onto my knees. “Not yet.”

“Did you see what happened? The light?”

I shook my head.

“Watch this,” he said, kneeling in front of the beam of sunshine again. “And don’t shove me out of the way this time. You
already proved I’m right.” He put his hand out. It was almost as hard to watch this time, even if my leg felt normal.

The second his fingers entered the beam, the cave was filled with a million brilliant rainbow reflections. It was bright as
noon in a glass room—light everywhere. I flinched and then shuddered. There was sunlight
all over
me.

“Unreal,” Diego whispered. He put the rest of his hand into the beam, and the cave somehow got even brighter. He rolled his
hand over to look at the back, then turned it palm up again. The reflections danced like he was spinning a prism.

There was no smell of burning, and he clearly
wasn’t in pain. I looked closely at his hand, and it seemed like there were a zillion tiny mirrors in the surface, too small
to distinguish separately, all shining back the light with double the intensity of a regular mirror.

“Come here, Bree—you have to try this.”

I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, and I
was
curious, but I was also still reluctant as I slid to his side.

“No burn?”

“None. Light doesn’t burn us, it just… reflects off of us. I guess that’s kind of an understatement.”

Slow as a human, I reluctantly stretched my fingers into the light. Immediately, reflections blazed away from my skin, making
the room so bright that the day outside would look dark in comparison. They weren’t exactly reflections, though, because the
light was bent and colored, more like crystal. I stuck my whole hand in, and the room got brighter.

“Do you think Riley knows?” I whispered.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell us if he did? What would be the point? So we’re walking disco balls.” I shrugged.

Diego laughed. “I can see where the stories come from. Imagine if you saw this when you were human. Wouldn’t you think that
the guy over there just burst into flames?”

“If he didn’t hang around to chat. Maybe.”

“This is incredible,” Diego said. With one finger he traced a line across my glowing palm.

Then he jumped to his feet right under the sunbeam, and the room went crazy with light.

“C’mon, let’s get out of here.” He reached up and pulled himself toward the hole he’d cut to the surface.

You’d think I would have been over it, but I was still nervous to follow. Not wanting to seem like a total chicken, I stayed
close on his heels, but I was cringing inside the whole way. Riley had really made his point about burning in the sun; in
my mind it was linked to that horrific time of burning as I became a vampire, and I couldn’t escape the instinctive panic
that filled me every time I thought of it.

Then Diego was out of the hole, and I was next to him half a second later. We stood on a small patch of wild grass, only a
few feet from the trees that covered the island. Behind us, it was just a couple of yards to a low bluff, and then the water.
Everything around us blazed in the color and light shining off of us.

“Wow,” I muttered.

Diego grinned at me, his face beautiful with light, and suddenly, with a deep lurch in my stomach, I
realized that the whole BFF thing was way off the mark. For me, anyway. It was just that fast.

His grin softened a little bit into just the hint of a smile. His eyes were wide like mine. All awe and lights. He touched
my face, the way he’d touched my hand, as if he was trying to understand the shine.

“So pretty,” he said. He left his hand against my cheek.

I’m not sure how long we stood there, smiling like total idiots, blazing away like glass torches. The inlet was empty of boats,
which was probably good. No way even a mud-eyed human would have missed us. Not that they could have done anything to us,
but I wasn’t thirsty, and all the screaming would have ruined the mood.

Eventually a thick cloud drifted in front of the sun. Suddenly we were just us again, though still slightly luminous. Not
enough that anyone with eyes duller than a vampire’s would notice.

As soon as the shine was gone, my thoughts cleared up and I could think about what was coming next. But even though Diego
looked like his normal self again—not made of blazing light, anyway—I knew he would never look the same to me. That tingly
sensation in the pit of my stomach was still there. I had the feeling it might be there permanently.

“Do we tell Riley? Do we think he doesn’t know?” I asked.

Diego sighed and dropped his hand. “I don’t know. Let’s think about this while we track them.”

“We’re going to have to be careful, tracking them in the day. We’re kind of noticeable in the sunlight, you know.”

He grinned. “Let’s be ninjas.”

I nodded. “Super-secret ninja club sounds way cooler than the whole BFF thing.”

“Definitely better.”

It didn’t take us more than a few seconds to find the point from which the whole gang had left the island. That was the easy
part. Finding where they’d touched ground on the mainland was a whole other problem. We briefly discussed splitting up, then
vetoed that idea unanimously. Our logic was really sound—after all, if one of us found something, how would we tell the other?—but
mostly I just didn’t want to leave him, and I could see he felt the same. Both of us had been without any kind of good companionship
our whole lives, and it was just too sweet to waste a minute of it.

There were so many options as to where they could have gone. To the mainland of the peninsula, or to another island, or back
to the outskirts of Seattle, or north to Canada. Whenever we pulled
down or burned down one of our houses, Riley was always prepared—he always seemed to know exactly where to go next. He must
have planned ahead for that stuff, but he didn’t let any of us in on the plan.

They could have been anywhere.

Ducking in and out of the water to avoid boats and people really slowed us down. We spent all day with no luck, but neither
of us minded. We were having the most fun we’d ever had.

It was such a strange day. Instead of sitting miserably in the darkness trying to tune out the mayhem and swallow my disgust
at my hiding place, I was playing ninja with my new best friend, or maybe something more. We laughed a lot while we moved
through the patches of shade, throwing rocks at each other like they were Chinese stars.

Then the sun set, and suddenly I was stressed. Would Riley look for us? Would he assume we were fried? Did he know better?

We started moving faster. A lot faster. We’d already circled all the nearby islands, so now we concentrated on the mainland.
About an hour after sundown, I caught a familiar scent, and within seconds we were on their trail. Once we found the path
of the smell, it was as easy as following a herd of elephants through fresh snow.

We talked about what to do, more serious now as we ran.

“I don’t think we should tell Riley,” I said. “Let’s say we spent all day in your cave before we went looking for them.” As
I spoke, my paranoia started to grow. “Better yet, let’s tell them your cave was filled with water. We couldn’t even talk.”

“You think Riley’s a bad dude, don’t you?” he asked quietly after a minute. As he spoke, he took my hand.

“I don’t know. But I’d rather act like he was, just in case.” I hesitated, then said, “You don’t want to think he’s bad.”

“No,” Diego admitted. “He’s kind of my friend. I mean, not like you’re my friend.” He squeezed my fingers. “But more than
anyone else. I don’t want to think…” Diego didn’t finish his sentence.

I squeezed his fingers back. “Maybe he’s totally decent. Our being careful doesn’t change who he is.”

“True. Okay, the underwater cave story it is. At least at first… I could talk to him about the sun later. I’d rather do it
during the day, anyway, when I can prove what I’m claiming right away. And just in case he already knows, but there’s some
good reason why he told us something else, I should tell him when we’re alone. Grab him at dawn, when he’s coming back from
wherever it is he goes….”

I noticed a ton of
I
’s rather than
we
’s going on in Diego’s little speech, and it bothered me. But at the same time, I didn’t want much to do with educating Riley.
I didn’t have the same faith in him Diego did.