Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer [175]
Edward could see that, too.
“Don’t go, Victoria,” he murmured in that same hypnotic tone as before. “You’ll never get another chance like this.”
She showed her teeth and hissed at him, but she seemed unable to move farther away from me.
“You can always run later,” Edward purred. “Plenty of time for that. It’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s why James kept you around. Useful, if you like to play deadly games. A partner with an uncanny instinct for escaping. He shouldn’t have left you — he could have used your skills when we caught up to him in Phoenix.”
A snarl ripped from between her lips.
“That’s all you ever were to him, though. Silly to waste so much energy avenging someone who had less affection for you than a hunter for his mount. You were never more than a convenience to him. I would know.”
Edward’s lips pulled up on one side as he tapped his temple.
With a strangled screech, Victoria darted out of the trees again, feinting to the side. Edward responded, and the dance began again.
Just then, Riley’s fist caught Seth’s flank, and a low yelp coughed out of Seth’s throat. Seth backed away, his shoulders twitching as if he were trying to shake off the pain.
Please, I wanted to plead with Riley, but I couldn’t find the muscles to make my mouth open, to pull the air up from my lungs. Please, he’s just a child!
Why hadn’t Seth run away? Why didn’t he run now?
Riley was closing the distance between them again, driving Seth toward the cliff face beside me. Victoria was suddenly interested in her partner’s fate. I could see her, from the corner of her eyes, judge the distance between Riley and me. Seth snapped at Riley, forcing him back again, and Victoria hissed.
Seth wasn’t limping anymore. His circling took him within inches of Edward; his tail brushed Edward’s back, and Victoria’s eyes bulged.
“No, he won’t turn on me,” Edward said, answering the question in Victoria’s head. He used her distraction to slide closer. “You provided us with a common enemy. You allied us.”
She clenched her teeth, trying to keep her focus on Edward alone.
“Look more closely, Victoria,” he murmured, pulling at the threads of her concentration. “Is he really so much like the monster James tracked across Siberia?”
Her eyes popped wide open, and then began flickering wildly from Edward to Seth to me, around and around. “Not the same?” she snarled in her little girl’s soprano. “Impossible!”
“Nothing is impossible,” Edward murmured, voice velvet soft as he moved another inch closer to her. “Except what you want. You’ll never touch her.”
She shook her head, fast and jerky, fighting his diversions, and tried to duck around him, but he was in place to block her as soon as she’d thought of the plan. Her face contorted in frustration, and then she shifted lower into her crouch, a lioness again, and stalked deliberately forward.
Victoria was no inexperienced, instinct-driven newborn. She was lethal. Even I could tell the difference between her and Riley, and I knew that Seth wouldn’t have lasted so long if he’d been fighting this vampire.
Edward shifted, too, as they closed on each other, and it was lion versus lioness.
The dance increased in tempo.
It was like Alice and Jasper in the meadow, a blurred spiraling of movement, only this dance was not as perfectly choreographed. Sharp crunches and crackings reverberated off the cliff face whenever someone slipped in their formation. But they were moving too fast for me to see who was making the mistakes. . . .
Riley was distracted by the violent ballet, his eyes anxious for his partner. Seth struck, crunching off another small piece of the vampire. Riley bellowed and launched a massive backhanded blow that caught Seth full in his broad chest. Seth’s huge body soared ten feet and crashed into the rocky wall over my head with a force that seemed to shake the