Your Scream Is Burning Through My Veins

Jacob

It’s always easier to blame someone else. It’s always easier to think that maybe things didn’t have to be the way they were.

If only someone had detected the scent sooner...

If only we had run faster...

If only she hadn’t associated herself with him.

And yet it kills me to think that just an extra fifteen seconds could have made all the difference.

The last three days have easily been the worst days of my life. It made Mom dying feel like a walk in the park. Sure, the sense of loss was hard to take for all of us. Hell, Rach couldn’t even live at home anymore, but at least nobody had been left screaming for hours on end. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything scream like that before, not the way Bella was screaming. I wasn’t even aware that anyone could make that kind of noise, though Bella was no longer what most would call ‘anyone’.

It seemed almost fitting that I had to endure her screams, and as I sat watching her I knew I would have gladly taken her place. Bella didn’t deserve this, she had been through enough pain from their doing and yet, like a big cosmic joke, her fate seemed cruel to the very end.

I guess what they say is true. Life sucks and then you die.

Except that I couldn’t let her die. I couldn’t let the pack do that to her.

We had failed to protect her and that filthy goddamn leech had bitten her while we ran through the forest no more than two hundred meters away. She lay in the grass like a broken ragdoll, her throat torn out and bloody against the rest of her ivory skin, a scene straight out of a horror film.

After we had destroyed the vile leech that had bitten her, I somehow managed to get Bella to the bloodsuckers’ mansion. I remember picking her up and running for it, thinking that I didn’t have half a chance in hell. There was no way the pack wouldn’t stop me. Sam would order it. There was no way I would be able to run fast enough without phasing.

It was only when we crossed the boundary line did I even realize that we were alone. For some unknown reason they had let us go. Maybe they knew they that they would have had to take me out too. Whatever the reason, they didn’t follow and at that point I was past caring. On any other day, in any other circumstance I would have cursed the massive white house that emerged beneath the thick vegetation, but that day the whole world had been overturned and flipped backwards.

It was the easiest building in the world to break into with one whole side made of glass. I guess security wouldn’t have been an issue – more like home delivery – when you had seven bloodthirsty murderers living inside. Not that I was really complaining at that point.

Several seconds and one broken glass panel later, I managed to get us inside the living room despite every fibre in my body screaming at me to leave. The sickly sweet stench of leech was horrendous – a scent we had all been hardwired to hate above all other smells, passed on from generation to generation like everything else we knew.

Ignoring my watering eyes and burning nose, I managed to place Bella onto one of the big white sofas that stood in the living room. The screaming had stopped for the moment, replaced by soft whimpering and I noticed that she was no longer bleeding. Dark crimson blood still stained her neck, but underneath the skin was already healed.

I tried my best to comfort her as she whimpered and convulsed on the sofa, pretty sure that she couldn’t hear me. “It’s going to be okay,” I found myself saying, repeating it like a mantra.

It was like part of me was simply refusing to accept what had happened. I was helpless, watching my worst nightmare unfold before me, and it was perhaps this doubt, this crippling sense of denial that kept Bella alive. Because despite what Sam had said about the newly turned, I had to believe that she would still be the same, still be Bella.

I couldn’t lose her, and although it was selfish I knew that if I looked into her eyes I would see her again. But the pain showed no sign of stopping, and she continued to wither on the couch. And as the living room shadows grew longer in the waning afternoon light, the room remained filled with her screams and cries and I felt my resolve falter. Our natural hatred for their kind was so strong that a little part of me couldn’t help but feel that the pack had been right. The arms of death were preferable to what she would become. 

There had been a point when I thought that it was finally over. The screaming had stopped again though she remained panting heavily on the sofa. Her eyes had flickered open in an unseeing stare and I’d felt myself cringe away, because before anything else had changed, her eyes were already glowing red.

Then her screams started again.

For the next three days, every single whimper, every single scream made me question my decision and yet there was nothing I could do but watch helplessly as my Bella turned into a monster as I battled my own personal hell.

Each day she grew colder, her temperature dropping significantly every few hours as her skin grew deathly pale. Each day I observed her scent turn sweeter and sweeter each day, until at last it was almost sickly sweet, burning my nose.

Still her suffering didn’t end and I found myself wishing for some knowledge of a time limit. Was this normal? How much longer would she have to endure it? Was I being cruel by allowing her to suffer? But werewolf knowledge on bloodsuckers began and ended at how to kill them so there was nothing to do but wait.

Eventually I moved her into one of the ground floor bathrooms, afraid she would escape me in the large living room while I remained in my human form – the only way to escape the voices of the pack I had abandoned.  

Instead I found myself thinking about the Cullens and the other red head we had been chasing. Had Bella known the bloodsucker that bit her or the red head like she knew the Cullens? She had to have known about her boyfriend and his cold skinned family... You know, “Goodness honey, what cold hands you have…”

No, there was no way she couldn’t have known which was why it seemed beyond stupid that I had had to keep the werewolf secret from her these past few weeks. All this time I had cursed him for toying with her so recklessly and then disappearing when I had done no better. Despite the circumstances, now I could finally tell her the truth about all of us, and that thought made me feel a little better.

I wondered what she would say when I told her about the pack. I could almost hear her reproachful tone and her adorable pout as she told me off for abandoning her. But that was the old Bella, I couldn’t help but think as I watched the creature that used to be her grimace in agony.

Finally on the third day her heart started to slow.

It was subtle at first. Not something anyone would normally notice unless they’d been sitting there for the last three days listening to it.

As it slowed it got louder – the sound of her heart beating harder, pumping for all it was worth, fighting to stay alive. The only thing it didn’t know yet was that it would undoubtedly lose.