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Geneses by Miri






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All recognizable characters and settings in this story are the express intellectual property of Stephanie Meyer and her associated agents and publishers. No money is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.

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Geneses

 

Edward leaned forward, teeth bared at the advancing Volturi soldiers, topaz eyes gleaming with bloodlust and rage.

My beautiful Edward...one hundred years to the day since we married, and I still can't believe you're mine for eternity.

Eternity.

A century as a vampire, watching my mortal family die off one by one, has given me a better grasp of the concept of immortality - but not the perfect understanding of Marcus, Aro and Caius, whose lives are better measured in millennia than centuries. Now, they were determined to end ours, all of ours, before we had the chance to experience that incomprehensible longevity.

We had always known they would eventually come for us, that the Volturi were watching us, waiting for any excuse to rid themselves of the threat we posed to their leadership of the vampire world. Finally, they'd found what they were waiting for.

I was sure they were counting on every last one of us defending their quarry with our lives.

The snarls and growls from just behind me sent a new thrill of fear through me. If I still had a human heart, it would have skipped a beat. Instead, I wrapped my shield even more tightly around the five precious, warm bodies I was protecting. I had not wanted them here; I had wanted them all as far away from this as possible, but they had insisted we would be safer together. Edward had agreed with them, though it still caused me pain to remember the anguished look on his face as he had made his decision.

"Steady," Carlisle murmured from behind me, as though he had sensed the tightening of my defenses. "They must make the first move; do nothing to give them even the slightest provocation."

"We are stronger than the Volturi," Edward whispered. "Aro knows that. Only his blind devotion to what he wants gives him the nerve to lead this attack."

"Momma," Renesmee whispered so softly that even vampire ears would have had to strain to hear her. She reached a soft, warm hand out and gently touched my shoulder.

Jacob, his face blanched with worry, exhaustion and joy, held a tiny bundle in his lanky, muscular arms. Carlisle smiled with relief, turning to tell us that Renesmee had safely delivered a handsome baby boy - a baby none of us had ever considered possible.

"William," Renesmee whispered from her bed. "William Edward Black. We'll call him Billy."

I smiled, relaxing ever so slightly as I received Renesmee's vision of our second miracle, just over seventy-seven years ago. The first, of course, had been Renesmee herself, but Billy's birth had brought something to us we had never thought to hope for again - the joy of a healthy child, growing and thriving within our unconventional family. I turned a little and smiled at my first grandchild, tensed and ready in the form of a huge gray wolf, standing protectively between his father and mother.

Billy growled affectionately in precisely the same way his father was still want to do. He had largely inherited Jacob's traits and had made his first transformation at the startlingly early age of seven. Over six feet tall in human form, Billy had Jacob's jet-black hair, though his skin was somewhat paler than other Quileutes. Not quite the marble white of his mother, Billy was best described as olive-skinned, tanning easily and completely with the slightest exposure to the sun.

Edward hissed as the Volturi advanced, and I knew they were now within range for him to read their thoughts as clearly as he could read those of the family and friends standing protectively around us.

"What is it, Edward?" I asked, my smile dissolving as I refocused on the gray-cloaked soldiers, gliding in perfect formation across the rainy and deserted English moor. I bared my teeth reflexively as I caught sight of Jane, the diminutive blonde vampire between Aro and Marcus. Her ability to cause indescribable pain with only a slight exertion of her strong will made Jane one of our most formidable enemies. I knew if she managed to breach the shield I was projecting over my loved ones, the battle would be all but lost.

"Nothing new," Edward said, trying to reassure me though his face was as still and as hard as granite. "We already know what they want, and that hasn't changed. Aro has seen them, though, and his desire has grown. He wants to possess Renesmee's children, all three of them, to own them like a human would own a cat."

A muted cacophony of hisses and murmurs erupted through our group at his words. I tested my shield again, expanding it to well outside the group's borders and then bringing it in, bit by bit, to tightly cover each individual within.

I heard another low growl and felt a cool, wet nose touch my hand. Billy was his mother's son as well as his father's. At his touch, I was given another soothing memory, as though my children and grandchildren somehow sensed my need for comfort as I struggled against my panic.

"Nana! You can't find me!" Susan Isabella, the second of Renesmee's children and my only granddaughter, cried as she ran at lightning speed across a clearing in the woods north of Anchorage, Alaska.

Laughing, I sped after the small girl, three years old, but similar in size and features to a ten-year-old human child. From behind me, I heard a playful growl, and before I knew it, two wolves had jumped from their hiding places behind the trees and flattened me to the snow-covered ground.

Renesmee, my beautiful daughter, laughed as her husband and son bested me, and she stroked her round belly as she watched us cavort in one of the few places we felt safe from exposure to the human world. "Sue," she called, her lovely voice trilling into the forest, "Nana is out of the race! Come out, now; you know we came here to hunt."

Though I was too focused on the advancing Volturi to smile this time, I once again felt myself relax as I remembered the perfect days and nights we had spent in the mansion north of Anchorage and the miles and miles of uninhabited land surrounding it. Besides Forks, which would always feel like my real home, we loved our home in Alaska the most and had lived there on two occasions over the past century.

"Alice? What do you see?"

Esme's strained voice snapped me out of my reverie, and I turned, carefully keeping my shield intact, to look at my sister-in-law. Her face had gone blank with the look we had come to regard with a mixture of awe and terror.

Alice answered her mother in a monotone, unable to snap herself out of the visions she had been searching for ever since she had seen the Volturi coming for us. "They will take Susan and Samuel," she stated flatly.

"No!" Esme cried, more loudly than she normally would have. A shrill note in her voice testified to her increased fear of losing any of her adopted children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. She had experienced such loss in her human life and had yet again a mere fifty years before, on a day which none of us could think of without pain.

Edward's face contorted with that too-familiar grief, and when I saw him working his strong jaw, I knew he and Esme were experiencing the moment that had seemed to tear our family apart.

The front door opened with a crash, and I heard Jacob, Billy and Samuel startle out of deep slumbers at the noise in the usually quiet house in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest. Moving so quickly that the movement would have appeared instantaneous human eyes, Carlisle, Edward, Alice, Jasper and I ran into the foyer, knowing something must be seriously amiss.

It was Rosalie, but my sister-in-law was barely recognizable. Her once-perfect face was marred by a gaping hole where she had been bitten, and her designer clothes, carefully chosen for her by Alice, were tattered and hanging onto her body only by thin scraps of fabric, destroying any pretense at modesty and making all too plain the fact that the bite mark on her face was not her only injury.

"Rosalie!" Carlisle cried, striding forward and taking her easily into his arms. "What's happened? Where's Emmett?"

Rosalie opened her mouth, but no words came. Instead of an explanation, she wailed - a loud sound of utter grief and inexpressible sadness that filled all our hearts with terror.

"Emmett," Edward said, staggering backward as if from a blow, his face contorting in pain as he read his sister's tortured thoughts. "Killed…newborns…surprised them, five of them…three newborns killed, but Emmett…"

"No!" Esme screamed, her eyes sweeping from Rosalie, still wailing in Carlisle's arms, to Edward, leaning against the wall for support as he saw in Rosalie's mind what had happened.

Emmett, while he and Rosalie had been tracking a pack of newborns wreaking havoc on the villages near our home, had been surprised by a rogue group that had lain in wait for them. Rosalie had only been saved when the scent of human blood had wafted in on a breeze from a less dense part of the forest. By the time the newborns were gone, nothing had been left of her mate but a pile of shredded pieces already burning to ashes.

"Do not worry," a hard voice proclaimed from behind us, easily reading the pain on all of our faces, caused both by Alice's prediction and by our own tortured memories. "Do not you worry, my Nessie," she repeated, addressing my daughter individually. "They will not have the children. They will not."

Zafrina, with whom we had exchanged yearly visits for the last century and who had made a special pet of Renesmee, had brought her coven from the Amazon the moment she had received word that the inevitable confrontation between the Cullens and the Volturi was near. She had been our neighbor when we had received news of Emmett's death, and since we had left her homeland and traveled back to the United States, she had added two members to her own coven: Scyleia, a diminutive but powerfully-built vampire who was fiercer than most, and Djavan, a mild-mannered vampire with a smile that, I had heard, chilled the very marrow of his human prey. I had never been certain if I liked either of her new additions, but I was undoubtedly glad they were on our side.

"They will not take me alive," Susan spoke coldly, her musical voice sounding discordant with the weight of her distaste, "and while I am drawing breath, they will not have Samuel, either."

Susan, by some freak of genetics, had inherited almost solely vampire traits, and, it seemed, almost nothing from her father but his playful temperament. Though her heart beat like her mother's, its rate was slower than the average human's, and her skin was considerably cooler and harder. While Billy and their younger brother Samuel both were able to fit into human society almost seamlessly, Sue had the same challenges Edward and I had when trying to fit in - she had to avoid direct sunlight, hide her superhuman strength, and the smell of human blood caused her the same cravings as the rest of our family. She had more vampire traits than even Renesmee, and she preferred the society of other vampires to that of humans. Nearing her seventy-fifth birthday, she seemed also to have inherited her mother's immortality: she didn't look a day older than fourteen.

Nearly fifty yards from us - I thought, like I had during our first confrontation, that it would be such an easy leap for any one of us save Samuel - the Volturi stopped as one, though none of us could perceive any sort of command to do so. No one on either side spoke, though it was obvious that this time there would be no pretense at friendship. This battle would be fought, not averted, and only one family would survive. Would it be my family, I wondered as I again tested and strengthened my shield, or would the Volturi achieve the same victory they had achieved over their adversaries for millennia?

There could be no doubt the Volturi would be better prepared than they had been nearly a century before. They knew the powers we had among us, and they knew those powers would only have grown and been strengthened. They knew we had added to our ranks both by birth and by change, and I had no doubt they had done the same. Had they, I wondered, found someone who could see the future with the same clarity as Alice? Someone who could read minds at a greater distance than Edward? Had they found someone who could breach my shield against mental attack, or who could manipulate the elements like Benjamin?

"Filthy Redcoats," I heard Garrett mumble from a few yards away, and I couldn't suppress a grin. There was almost no color among the Volturi, their gray cloaks covering their heads, the black robes of Aro, Caius and Marcus standing in sharp relief, front and center.

"Hush," Kate ordered her mate. Since the first confrontation, Garrett and Kate hadn't left one another's side, and Garrett had (with some difficulty) adopted the "vegetarian" diet strictly kept by my family and by the Denali clan who were our closest friends.

"Shall I speak?" muttered Samuel to Jacob and Edward, and my eyes widened with alarm. It sounded like the three of them had come up with some sort of plan involving Samuel's unique ability, and given that I knew Aro wanted Samuel most of all, I did not want him calling attention to himself.

"No!" Renesmee and I whispered in unison. "Be quiet, Samuel!"

Though his gift was formidable, Samuel was the most fragile of any of us - the third and last of Renesmee's children, he was the closest to human with average features, no shape-shifting abilities, and an ability to be injured that frightened all of us. I wished he was safely away from this fight; I wished Jacob had taken him far into the wild, where the Volturi would never find them.

"We might need him, Bells," Jacob told me. "We might need his gift."

"We survived without it last time," I had argued, dismayed that my tall, frail-looking grandson wanted so badly to stand with us.

"I want to fight!" Samuel had insisted, though he had used his particular gift rather than his voice. Like his mother, Samuel was able to project his thoughts and his will onto others, but he did not require touch to do so. He could project images, like Zafrina and Renesmee, or words that seemed so loud inside of the mind that all other thought was clouded. He seemed to have inherited the best of all of his family's gifts, as far as mental defenses were concerned, but we were always very afraid for him, because Samuel did not seem to have what we considered the most important gift: immortality. He aged more slowly than a human, but at the age of seventy-two, he looked perhaps forty. The thought of losing him was the cloud over Renesmee's sunshine.

"No!" I had insisted, but I had lost the battle. With Edward and Jacob on his side, Renesmee and I were overruled.

I shivered. Why was it always my family targeted? Why did it have to be my children, my grandchildren who stood to lose the most?

A soft growl from the great russet wolf behind me reminded me that it wasn't just my family this time, but my best friend's family as well. Jacob was the last surviving member of the original Quileute pack since Quil had died a decade before. Owing to Renesmee's incredible rate of growth, we had left Forks when she had been only a year old. Other than brief visits with our human family while they had still survived, we had never returned. With the absence of the "cold ones," the necessity to transform had been lost, and the pack had resumed aging. Jacob, who had never left Renesmee's side for more than a day, still kept his sixteen-year-old body and the ability to transform at will.

"We will protect them, Jacob," I promised him under my breath. "I swear to you, we will protect them."

"We will protect them," Edward echoed, and the words spread through the group of nearly fifty vampires, all ready to fight for the future of our world.

"We will protect them," I whispered one final time as the last echoes of the phrase died and we turned our full attention to our enemies.

From across the field, Jane bared her teeth and I saw a fine mist begin to sweep towards us, faster and more solid than last time, as Alec attempted to neutralize our senses. I tightened my shield and snarled in response.

I could hear the vampires and wolves behind me shifting, readying themselves as I poured all of my concentration into my shield. Zafrina hissed sharply, and I knew she was readying herself to project utter darkness into the Volturi ranks.

The rain twisted and coalesced in the area between us and our attackers, and I could almost feel Benjamin's feral grin as he created a solid wall of water, obscuring us from view. As Alec's mist floated effortlessly through the swirling, wet obstruction, Edward took my hand. Our entire group glided forward as one, ready to protect our own… ready to end this, once and for all.

The battle had begun.

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