Death was supposed to be written in black—in terms of terror…of blood, and pain, and loss.  It was supposed to be darkness that faded to a deeper shade inside…obsidian in color with no light around it to reveal its transparent nature.  Death was the end of all things.  Described in a million words by thousands of authors in thousands of years of literature, all made obsolete by one inevitable finale.  It was supposed to be dark. 

My death was white.  At least it began that way.

No, it was something more glorious than white—something that couldn’t be written.  Something that put every book I’d ever read to shame in a faded heartbeat.  It was pure, and beautiful, and inviting, and it called to me from the corners of my own consciousness—from the air all around me in welcoming, familiar voices.

White…yes…to wash away the coppery taste of blood on my tongue and the memory of terrified golden eyes…of everything that I was about to lose.  A blinding white to take the pain—to snatch it from my throat and to stop my burning breath.  To leave me to wonder what had happened…

“What happened?” 

The voice was near crazy.  “Oh God, what did I do!?”

Jacob?  Had Jacob phased back?

I couldn’t breath.

It took me some time to realize why, though how long exactly, I couldn’t say.  Time didn’t seem to be flowing like it should be.  It was a moment, or perhaps several before I recognized the acute pressure on my chest.  It wasn’t pain, exactly—only something cold and heavy that prevented me from drawing a breath.  It was Edward.  It had to be.  I tried to turn to the side and free my arms—to push him off—but my upper body did not seem to comply. 

“Edward, you’re crushing me,” I tried to whimper, and had to add my voice to the list of things that were no longer functioning at the moment. 

A gush of something warm—hot even—flowed down over my shoulders then, covering my neck and pooling in the gap between my collar bones.  It formed tiny tributaries that seeped quickly toward the ground where it coagulated in an uncomfortably warm pool below me.  I shuddered, desiring more than anything to wash whatever it was off of me.  It felt like it should be sticky—warm liquids were always sticky—and the smell of it sent waves of vaguely familiar nausea rolling through me.  I tried again to draw a breath, but something was still on my chest.  The pressure had grown larger and it was starting to hurt.

“Edward!” It came out as a whisper…wet and weak.

“No.”  The voice came from farther away than I’d expected.  “Not now.  Not on their land!” 

A silhouette fell over me—a pale one with wide, furious eyes that was too beautiful, and moved too quickly to be anyone but Edward.  He had not fallen over me as I’d predicted. A strange relief washed through me.  It came with a sigh that I could not retrieve.  The weight that was not Edward wouldn’t let me inhale.  His hands were on my face in an instant, brushing hair from my eyes that was soaked in the same warm liquid that covered the rest of my torso.

“Not here, God damn it!” he moaned in a half-crazed tone that matched his expression perfectly.

His was the only voice; the only sound in the entire yard now.  The fighting had ended, and it had left a strange, ethereal peace as an aftermath.  Even the wind through the trees seemed to have ceased.  I wondered if anyone had been hurt badly…if Jacob had stopped himself in time after all; if Edward had come out unscathed.  The figure above me looked relatively undamaged, but I wanted to get a better look…to feel him whole and unharmed, just to be sure. 

If it weren’t for this weight…

“I can’t breath,” I repeated.  I couldn’t hear myself—didn’t know if Edward could hear me.  I tried to raise my hand to his face and a stab of pain shot up through my shoulder and into my chest.  A squeak of surprise escaped me, followed by a gush of liquid warmth.

There was an anguish on Edward’s face that surpassed any I’d seen there before as he took my arm and placed it gently on the ground again.  “You’ve been…injured, Bella.  Don’t try to move.”

And it hit me then…the distress in his eyes…the silence all around us.  It was because of me.  Jacob hadn’t stopped in time, but it hadn’t been Edward injured in the charge.  It was me that was hurt.  Only me.  Funny.  There wasn’t much pain…only a slow, cold sensation that was creeping up over me from the ground in spite of the rapidly forming pool below me.

“Bella? Is that my Bells?” 

From the corner of my eye I saw my father bound from the porch, leaping over the edge, ignoring the stairs all together and bolting toward me.  There was terror in his eyes.  Not yet pure terror—not what I saw threatening in the expressions of all of the vampires around me, but terror all the same.  Tainted, still, with disbelief.

 “What did you do to her?!”

He was running toward me, and so his accusation was not directed at anyone in particular, and he didn’t notice anything unusual when Jasper appeared out of nowhere, catching him in midstride and holding him there, yards away from me, though he whipped around and fixed him with a death glare.

“Get your hands off me, you God damn freak of nature,” Charlie growled.  It was intended to be threatening, but his voice cracked on the last word.  He turned frantic eyes toward me again, practically pleading with Jasper to do the same.   “That’s my little girl on the ground!  Look what you bastards did to her!”

But Jasper did not follow his eyes.  He did not turn to observe whatever sinister scene I must have been the center of, and he was unphased by Charlie’s insults and pointless struggles to break free.  Jasper’s attention had been directed toward a more immediate danger, and he pulled Charlie away from it now—back toward the porch with grave purpose…away from me, and away from the scent all around me.  Because I recognized the smell now—thick, coppery…rust.

Blood.

And from the feel and smell of it, more than I had ever seen spilled. Not Jacob’s.  Certainly not Edward’s.  It was my blood.  And that was all it took—recognition—to send me spiraling down into the depths of darkness.

It dripped like dye into a glass of water…something solid and liquid at the same time that danced, and changed, and writhed into a million Rorschach images as it penetrated my strange white oblivion, absorbing the light...overshadowing the promise of something greater beyond its ever-growing boundaries.  It was the shade of defiance…the color of burning, and it was wiping away death as it came. 

I should have cowered away from it.  I should have cried out and struggled to avoid it until its tendrils overtook me, but my hands reached out for it, longing to feel the beautiful black liquid between my fingers.  It flowed toward me like a tide, branching out and expanding until my hands pushed through and I was plunged into an entirely different world. 

And the world was on fire.

My hands had been the first part of me to touch the void, but the pain began, oddly, in my lips and my tongue.  It spread like flames over a doll doused in gasoline, and before I could even question the disappearance of the light, my entire body was engulfed. Pain, like I had never felt before in a lifetime of minor injuries, took root in my skin and began to bore into every pore of my body.  My arms reached back toward where I had come from in desperation, my hands searching for the way out of this new torment, and my fingers clawing at nothing.  The path behind me had turned black.

I screamed as my stomach seized and my lungs breathed in the pain, but here in this world, my scream did not sound.  I tried to curl into a fetal position, but I found myself detached from my body; my mind trapped in a vessel that I could no longer control.  I screeched, and thrashed, and flailed with every bit of strength that was left to me as the darkness ate its way into my brain, but my body stayed motionless…dead.

Somewhere, far away, my mind registered a place where I could pull away—a place where my body was still mine and I could shrink back from the darkness and scream.  Somewhere far away, I could react to the agony, but that place would do me no good in this dark hell.  I tried to go there anyway…if only in my mind.  If only to put a voice to my torture. 

“She’s moving.”

Heard from that same distant place, from a voice echoing concern that arrived to me even here; even over the roar and the rush of the fire that crawled behind my ears.

It took so much time.  This time the words were not spoken.  They were not heard.  It was almost as if I had felt them.  I thought she was gone.  HE thought she was gone.

“It’s working.” Spoken this time, with relief—but only a hint of it.  The voice was familiar, sweet—something from another place.  From before the darkness and even before the light—a place that I knew could burn away entirely in the furnace behind my cheeks now, spreading like a demonic blush.  The voice belonged to amber eyes, and impossible speed…to a crooked smile and cool, blessedly cold arms.  It was his voice—the voice of…

“Edward?”

Another thick stream of blood flowed down my shoulders.

“Don’t try to talk.”

He was leaning over me now in the same manner that I’d seen the EMT’s do before when I’d fractured my skull attempting to skateboard in Phoenix—stabilizing my neck and checking my vital signs.  His mannerisms were businesslike, but he could not hide the urgency with which he moved or the shadow that fell over his face when his eyes dropped to the place just below my jaw line, toward which everyone else’s attention seemed to already be focused.  There was pain there now—a sharp steady one that was growing less tolerable by the second.  I could only imagine how large and how deep the cut had to be to cause so much blood loss…and I couldn’t begin to imagine how Edward was able to control himself around such a morbid delicacy.

“Edward, the blood…”

“I know.  Just hold still, love.”  His eyes found mine, and held me there.  His hands closed around my shoulders in as supporting a gesture as he could provide without moving me.  That was the best thing he could have done then, because that was when the real pain kicked in.  What had been a strange, undecipherable burning sensation in my throat from the beginning, now combined with the weight on my chest and surged into a pulsing agony that took over my entire upper body and seemed to grow worse with each frighteningly fast beat of my heart.

I stifled a scream, and my body convulsed—my back arching suddenly and my heels digging deeply into the grass, finally calming into a series of uncontrollable tremors that caused the wound to spew more blood onto the already saturated ground.  Edward cried out beside me. 

“No! No…Bella, please…not this way!”  His face was resolute and tortured and beautiful all at once.  I tried to hold on to that image as my eyesight blurred. “Stay with me.  Open your eyes!  CARLISLE!”

But Carlisle was already there at his side, staring down at my wounded throat with a look of cold professional determination.  It was the face that I imagined he wore in the hospital when he was confronted, again and again, with the fragility of the human form, and I focused on it now as he began his examination.  I let it block out the sentinel of figures in the yard that were all slowly migrating toward my prostrate form, faces frozen in similar maws of helpless anguish.  Let it silence Charlie’s labored sobs and dull the throbbing in my lungs.

A series of racking coughs overwhelmed me then, and a fine spray of blood flew from my lips, spattering across Edward’s shirt and reaching as high as his chin.  I watched as his eyes widened in shock and turned jet black.  His lips parted, and his teeth drew closer to my ruined throat for just a second before a tortured sigh escaped him and he disappeared from my side.  I could no longer feel his arms around me, holding me there in consciousness, and I let out a scream.

A strangled, high pitch shriek that echoed in my own mind alone. 

It was meant to form words—to call out to the only one who was preventing my fall into complete darkness—but the pain twisted my efforts into primeval sounds instead.  There had been an indeterminable amount of time where it had slowed and centered around my throat and my chest.  Every breath of air that I’d taken had turned into a molten tide exploding from my lungs, rising into my throat and preventing my screams as it burned away even my concept of time.  Hours had begun to pass in seconds, and seconds in days.  It had become impossible to imagine how long I had been trapped inside this oblivion. 

I struggled and cried as the pain devoured my ribs and spread relentlessly into every vein and every neuron.  It pulsed from my skull to the tips of my toes in excruciating electrical currents.  My whole body seized and shuddered and twisted, but only in that strange world, far away—the place where the voices came from.  Here in Hell, I no longer had a body…only a searing semi-consciousness that was everywhere and everything—the only thing that I remembered, and the only thing that I could imagine ever feeling again.

And then I felt hands on me—smooth, icy hands that glided over unseen arms, offering a moment’s reprieve wherever they touched, like a winter breeze through the coals of a firestorm.

“I’m right beside you, Bella.  Can you hear me?”

It was his voice again, still tinged with worry.  I could feel the fear in his touch.  It pulsed from his skin in waves.

She’s not healing.  High, sweet, feminine.  Not his voice anymore.  Not a voice at all.

“She will,” came the response, annoyed and unwavering.  Please…please.

His hands fell away—there one moment and then gone again, leaving a trail of agonizing memory in their absence. 

It’s been too long. Felt and not heard again, through a shower of white hot needles.

“It’s only been two days.”

His tone was sharp, and the statement was accompanied by a series of strange flashes, woven into images by my overtaxed synapses.  I centered in on them and let them take me away from another burning wave.

There was a girl with long brown hair in the room with him; pale and unmoving on a bed of grey silk. Most of the images focused around her, and most were veiled in sheets of emotion that were so strong they blurred everything around them.  I watched her for a moment, swirling through half light in a long white dress…trudging stubbornly through the underbrush with a scowl of concentration carved into her face…sleeping…sleeping—so many hours passed away asleep in those strange, strong arms.  The images were washed in a bright white that smelled like the sun’s rays and felt like memory.  They faded too quickly—replaced by the flames of my reality and the ashes of his. 

The girl formed again in my mind.  Not dancing this time.  Not smiling or sleeping, but dead, sheathed in a grey cloud of mourning that hurt almost as much as the burning in my own skin.  Her body was clothed in plain white cotton, but there was something wrong with her appearance.  Her chest was frighteningly misshapen—collapsed on one side, right arm hanging at an odd angle.  Her throat was pale and raw, ripped open and displaying dry, torn vessels that would never have been in view if the girl were alive. I stared into half closed eyelids—into white, sightless eyes.  She was dead.  I could feel the loss radiating from the corner of the room and a cry of mourning for her formed in my lungs.     

A shock of pain ripped through me, causing me to cringe and writhe in my own dark world.  The dead girl in my visions writhed too.  Her lips curled into a snarl and the wound in her neck gaped, but her eyes remained half closed and gone.  I felt cold arms curl around me…saw them curl around her, and it hit me with a sudden frigid certainty. 

It was me. 

I was the girl in the room…the one who was dead and alive at the same time.  The one with her throat splayed and her eyes gone from this world…with a body cold and dead, but a heart and mind that still clung to life—to him. Because I knew that it was him who held me now, even though I could not yet remember who he was.  I knew that it was his mind that pulled me away from the torture, and his thoughts that kept me from falling back into a pool of fire.

Please, Bella.  Fight it.  Come out of it.  Come back to me.  Please.

It was a mantra.  It was a chorus repeated again and again until the words became the soundtrack to my tiny piece of hell.  I listened to the hum of the words in his head and I felt myself falling towards them—out of the dark and toward the girl in white...toward the pain of a broken mortal body and the wounds that had left me dead after all .  Still, I pushed toward it—struggled to die just as much I as had once struggled to live.

A struggle…that’s what everything had suddenly turned into.  A struggle to breath…to move…to understand the words of the pale figure hovering over me.

“…laceration in the throat.  Right jugular and carotid severed.  Left vessels appear intact.  Pressure here.” 

It was Carlisle, spoken in the urgent tones of someone who knew exactly how much time I had left with those injuries.  Edward had returned to my side, and he obeyed before the command had even left his father’s mouth.  I felt pressure on my neck and a pain that caused me to cry out.  All that came to my lips were a series of choked gushes.

“Trachea…” Carlisle continued his probing.  “Compromised.” 

Edward drew in a sharp, pained breath as his father moved down my mangled body.  “Can we intubate?”

Carlisle shook his head distractedly.  I followed his progress, struggling for breath that did not come as his hands glided over my ribs. There was no pain this time.  I wondered if there should have been. 

“Even if we had the supplies, intubation would be pointless.  The right lung is collapsed.”  More probing.  “Five…perhaps six ribs broken.  She has a flail chest.” I wondered quietly what that meant.  “Lower organs appear unharmed, but she’s going into shock.”

“What about the spinal column?” Edward’s tone was one of pleading rather than inquiry.  Carlisle avoided his eyes. 

“Damaged.”   

Father and son shared a moment in which much more than looks were exchanged, and the silence between them was broken only by my own suffocated struggle for breath.  Edward’s eyes blazed, and then dulled entirely—the hope blown out of them just as efficiently as a flame from a candle.  I watched as his entire body slumped miserably.

“You can’t save her.”

Carlisle shook his head.  “I can’t even be certain that the venom…”

His conjectures were interrupted by Charlie’s renewed cries and a miserable moan from my left.  I turned my head instinctively toward the sound and a pulse of pain raced down my neck.  It was ice cold this time.  I was so cold now.

The moan had come from Jacob.  He was standing, motionless and once again human, behind two somber wolves. Their fur seemed to gleam in the early morning light.  Jacob was almost as pale as the vampires.

“This is my fault,” he whispered.  “I couldn’t stop.”  His voice was small and unbelieving, filled with impending tears.  “She jumped in front of me. I was going too fast. I…I attacked her.”

“Attacked her?!”  Edward’s eyes became livid and half crazed as he directed all of his wrath toward Jacob.  The hand that was not stopping me from bleeding to death became a rigid claw.  “You’ve killed her, you bastard!”

He was shaking now with poorly controlled rage as he leaned unconsciously toward my devastated best friend.  I understood that the only thing keeping him from lunging at Jacob at this point was the hand on my throat that kept the last of my blood from spilling out into the weeds. That, and his desire to be beside me now as I died.  Jacob knew this too.  Still, he didn’t move.

Charlie did. He’d heard Edward’s final diagnosis, of course. 

“Nooo!”  he screamed.  “NO! She’s not going to die!”  I could tell from the tremble in his words that he had redoubled his efforts to escape Jasper’s grasp, but I could not see the struggle. Turning hurt too much…stole breath I did not have.  Jasper let Charlie go, and he sped to my side, pushing wolves as big as him out of the way as he came. 

“Doctor Cullen, please tell me she’s not going to die!”

“Charlie, her chest has been crushed and one of her lungs has stopped working.” He looked down ominously at my throat.  “It’s only a matter of minutes before the blood stops circulating to her brain completely.  I can’t repair the damage.  Not here.”

“Call the damn ambulance then!  Get her to a place where they can!” Tears streamed down his face now.  I’d never seen Charlie cry.

“We can do that.” Carlisle’s voice was calm and practiced, chipped to perfection by three centuries of recounting deaths to loved ones. “But she’ll be gone before the ambulance arrives.”

I had known this already, of course—if there had been any hope at all, Carlisle wouldn’t have been wasting his time explaining the inevitable to Charlie—but I watched as the tragedy crashed across my father’s face.  A desire to react, to comfort him, overwhelmed me, but I couldn’t move.  My whole body was so cold now, and my breath was coming in moist, shallow gasps that brought choking more often than the air I so desperately needed.  It occurred to me then how selfish I had been to plan to leave my father so soon.  My death…my very close death…would kill him just as surely as it would kill Edward. 

I saw that fact confirmed in Edward’s eyes too as he recognized the only option left to him now.  His January deadline had been blown to bits.  But as I stared, blood blurring the sight in one eye now, I saw Carlisle shake his head again and he spoke to his son in a whisper that was too fast and too low to be meant for anyone else but him. I tried to listen anyway. My hearing was surprisingly acute when there was hardly a pulse to beat in my ears. 

“…too slow…too far gone…”  The words were nothing more than a series of divined s’s and t’s in my ears.  “…must circulate…” And then the most damning ones, “…in Quileute territory.” 

Edward’s despair was almost palpable.  His father’s words were the confirmation of both his and my worst fears.  He couldn’t turn me in time.  Not here.  Not in Billy’s front yard with every last wolf looking on.  It would cause a massacre, but there was no way that I would make it past the trees as a mortal.   

Charlie was bent down beside Edward now, asking Carlisle to do something…anything besides just standing there watching me die, but there was nothing left to do.  I felt it coming—creeping up through my limbs just like frost over a winter window.  Too little blood to my brain.  Too little time for the venom to get to my heart before I died.  Even venom needed a pulse to circulate.

I gasped and struggled to grab onto Edward’s hand.  It was no longer cold to me.  Eternity had turned out to be not so long after all.  We were both staring a very real death in the face.

Yes, that was what it felt like now.  Not the bodiless, otherworldly fire from before.  Not an agony that jumped from hands to eyes to brain and made me want to tear away at my own organs, but a different kind altogether—much more material…the kind of pain that I knew would come to an end eventually.  It centered again around my chest—pooled there just like the blood that I almost remembered losing now. Realizing that I had somehow won back control of my arms, I tried to claw at my throat. At my stomach.  To pull the fire out of my lungs, but something else was there with me—cold in the extreme—to pin my arms at my side.

She’ll injure herself again. 

“Hold her down.” A voice rang through the red fog around me. “I need to administer more morphine.”

And you need to hunt.

“I’ll hunt with Bella in a few hours.”

Bella. That was her name.  That was my name.

You won’t be able to control a newborn if you are unable to control your own instinct.  The voice was admonishing.  Loud in my head, and growing louder as I listened.  Esme and I will stay with her.  Go with Jasper and Alice. They’ve been waiting for you.  Alice can alert you to any unforeseen changes in her condition.

“I’ll hunt with my wife,” the voice repeated, and the tone around his words was determined.  I saw it in a colored cloud around him, almost as dark as the pain around me.  “Emmett and Jasper will come with us when she’s ready.”

I saw the needle go into my pale skin before I felt it.  It was not the dull sting of a pinprick that I felt—something so small had been rendered entirely insignificant in my current situation—but a beautiful, numbing warmth that spread from the pinpoint outward, washing over my arms and legs and mind, but passing through the pain without touching it.  It threatened to drag me back out of this world and toward the moving, crawling darkness once again.  I held on tight.  Not to consciousness this time.  Not to life, but to an undeath that would bring me back to him. The drugs brought tears to my eyes.  I watched them fall through the mind of someone else.  They felt like liquid fire.

Cold hands drifted over me, and I saw in another strange series of images that the girl was healing. I was healing.  Her wounds—my wounds—were closing inhumanly quickly, scarring without stitches and bruising without blood, finally disappearing entirely.

The pain was something wholly different, however.  It did not go away.  It clung to every piece of me still, a burning, clawing creature alive inside me…a death come due that would not give up so easily.  The pain surged.  I seized, and my jaw snapped convulsively closed on my lower lip.  It was an act that should have torn a hole right through it.  Instead, my teeth felt as if they were grinding against stone.

She’s stronger now.  A different voice. Calm and confident   Loud in my head.  Hurting my mind as the emotional cloud around him darkened…almost hardened.  Her heart will stop soon.  

Oh, Edward!  She’s so beautiful!  Thoughts shouted at him from the doorway.  I flinched and tried to escape the flashes of images that were flung in the wake of the words.

His hand tightened around mine.

Do you think this will teach her to stay out of the middle of dog fights? Thought bitingly, but accompanied by a tarnished grey mist of what could only be concern.

There were others in the room now.  Other voices and other images flying at me from everywhere.

She’ll be impossible to control.  She was impossible to control when she was human.

They flowed around me in a tide of colored excitement and silver tinged anticipation, each voice louder than the next—each image more intrusive.  I moaned and tried to push them away as they came, but of course there was nothing there.  They were only inside my mind.

Her reactions are too severe.  I’m not sure the morphine is having any effect.

Flashes and feelings that circled the room, curling around my pale new body and striking like lightning from the clouds of pain that were still hovering close around me.  Voices that whispered from every direction—that mixed and swirled together, and amplified, pushing me downward again into a different darkness.  I tumbled through the floor, away from the room and into a clearing, dark and bitter cold—an entirely different time.  It was a sightless abyss where the voices only echoed in the distance…

Echoes in the distance. 

All of the voices around me had taken on that quality.  Even the strange one that was shouting now, pulling me away from my own pain.

It was Charlie.  He had left my side and was stumbling angrily toward Jacob.

“You killed her!” 

His fist flung back and then forward with his full force behind it. The impact should have sent the seventeen year old reeling, but Jacob stayed firmly planted where he was, staring back at Charlie in bewildered resignation, as if my father was doing nothing more than playfully ruffling his hair.  Charlie’s fist folded and crunched against Jacob’s jaw.  The impact was audible, but Charlie continued.  “She was your friend!  She accepted everything about you and look what you did!  Aw Bella…” 

He broke off into senseless syllables, though he continued to swing blindly.  Jacob made no effort to defend himself.  Instead, he stared down at the growing pool below me as if lost in concentration.  He detained my father only when it became obvious that Charlie would shatter both hands before his rage was spent.  His next words were barely heard over Charlie’s sobs.

“Turn her.”

His voice was gravelly—close to tears and hating every last letter of what was coming out of his mouth.

Edward’s eyes were gone from mine in an instant.  He stared up in shock and puzzlement at his one unphased rival as if he had not comprehended the words…or even the thought process behind them.

“Make her a leech, god dammit!”

A shock of liquid ice shot down my spine, and I tried to hide the shiver of pain that it brought with it as Edward’s eyes darted around the circle of gathered wolves.  It was a breach of the greatest kind—an annihilation that had threatened to bring bloodshed for decades.  The wolves knew this just as well as Edward.  They avoided his eyes and shifted uncomfortably as if they were about to consent to an execution.  Many of them glanced in horror toward their human pack member, but there was no open protest.  To deny this last option was to turn one of their own into a murderer. 

In the silence, all eyes fell to Sam.  His lip was curled into a resentful snarl and he emitted a low growl that made his true inclination more than obvious, but his attention had wandered to Charlie, who was now knelt beside me, grasping my hand like a lifeline and sobbing into a puddle of blood soaked grass.  I was the only thing that Charlie had left.  Sam couldn’t stand by and watch as I was taken away from him because of a simple slip-up on the part of one of his pack.  His head bent reluctantly into what desperate eyes would most undoubtedly construe as his agreement.

Edward’s eyes fell to me again and I watched the internal debate in them as my heart lurched unsteadily and then slowed.  My breath caught again and I choked.  I felt blood trickling down over my chin.  That was all that it took for the decision to appear on his face—if it had ever been a real decision at all.  Faced with the responsibility of taking my soul or the possibility of losing me forever, my soul was doomed to be lost.  He couldn’t watch me die. 

“Is there time?”  he asked Carlisle without looking up.

“I don’t know.  Her pulse is almost gone.  I’m not sure how much blood is even arriving to her brain at this point.  You can’t do it alone.”

“But you can help?” It was Charlie.  He had stopped crying and a spark of hope had appeared again in his crinkled eyes.

There was apprehension in Carlisle’s voice as he answered.  “I can’t save her, Charlie, she’s going to die.” 

“But you can…turn her.”  He repeated the words that had come from Jacob’s mouth as if they were foreign.  He had no idea what drastic measures they entailed.  “Do it!”

Carlisle had been listening to my pulse as he spoke.  The result must have been less than favorable.  He frowned toward Edward with a new urgency. “Her heart is failing.  Even both of us combined…”

“There’s three of us,” It was Emmett’s voice, and though I could not see him through the strange fog that was gathering in my periphery, I could hear the tremble of uncertainty that had crept into his words. Edward shook his head, but Rosalie interrupted him before he could respond.

“Dammit, Emmett!”  she hissed.  “With your will power, you’ll kill her for sure.  Back up.  I’ll do it.”  She looked just about as willing to do so as the wolves were to serve as witnesses, but her eyes were firm as she pushed her husband safely away from the growing puddle of blood. 

Alice made a move toward us as well, but Edward stopped her with a beseeching glance toward Charlie.  There was no option left of where I would be turned, but he would not do it in front of my father.  Alice nodded, a hint of relief in her expression, and grabbed Charlie’s shoulders gently, pulling him away from my side.  He went with her grudgingly.

“Charlie, you’ve seen what we can do?  My brothers, and sisters, and I?”  She was pulling him toward Billy and toward the house as she spoke.  “Charlie, look at me!  You saw the battle?”

None of the three vampires crouched around me moved as Charlie ripped his eyes from my torn form and nodded.  It occurred to me then that Edward had not only wanted to save Charlie the trauma of watching his daughter turned into a vampire.  He was seeking my father’s permission. My heart slowed and my world spun.  I focused on the pain in my lungs to hold me in consciousness. I wasn’t sure if there was time to deal with the formalities of consent.

“We don’t have time for this.” Rosalie insisted, echoing my own worries.  Her eyes were fixed on a place just above my right shoulder.  “Listen.”

And I could hear it now too…a rushing in my ears and the strange sound of a life fading, but not to black…not like fainting.  Everything was becoming brighter—more vivid, more defined.  The arrival of something much more permanent and beautiful that was almost like falling away. 

Into light.  Into darkness.  I fell so fast that I couldn’t tell which.  The world around me turned and spun…turned gray and then black.  It grew transparent, seemingly at battle with the voices and images from some other place that pushed at the boundaries, but the darkness held.  I fell for what seemed like forever, but did not land.  Instead, the ground spun around me—crept up below me and I was lying in the tall grass before I was even aware that grass existed here.

The pain had not gone, but it was muted.  It took away my breath for a moment as my mind spun again and I realized that the clearing I had fallen into was filled with blood.  I could smell it.  I could taste it in the air and I could see it flowing from the bodies—so many bodies—lying in my line of sight.  It was wolf’s blood, and human’s blood, spilled from friends and fathers. 

There was another pulse of agony from the world I had fallen out of.   I closed my eyes against the sight of so much death and embraced it.  The pain was real.  This sight was not. I was in one of Alice’s visions.  I knew that just as surely as I looked around and knew exactly what was fueling the pyre in the corner of the clearing.  The russet fur of a wolf, turned black with blood in the moonlight.  The delicate white fingers protruding from beneath the kindling, the ring on the left hand glinting through the flames that engulfed it.  It was Alice’s wedding ring.  Alice was burning.  Alice…

Alice.

Alice was talking.  Calling my father’s attention like he was a wandering toddler.

“Charlie? Can you see what we are? Can you see what we would do?”

“Can you save her?”  My father’s voice, as if from far away.  I concentrated on staying awake for my father.  The alternative—slipping away from the pain—was so much more inviting than I’d ever thought it would be.

“We can if we do it now, but she won’t be the same, Charlie?  Do you understand?”

He blinked, confused.  “Will she be alive?”

“She’ll be…like us.”

Another convulsion racked my body.  I felt myself begin to tremble; felt the claws of icy shock that dug into my shoulder and my chest, but I didn’t cry out this time.  There wasn’t breath enough for that.  I could only grab the pale hand offered me and wait for a suddenly uncertain end to come.

“Now!” Rosalie snapped, the urgency overshadowing her reluctance for a fraction of a second.  “I won’t do this if she’s further gone than I was.”

Edward’s entire form jerked in frustration, and I saw what I needed etched clearly into his expression.  He would not let that happen.  He could deal with his conscience later.  My soul had come in second place.  The decision that formed on his face seemed to convince my father as well.  He stared at Edward, pleading and intense with the morning sun lighting tear brimmed eyes.    

“Save her,” he said, his voice trembling.  “Any way you can.  She’s your wife now.  She’s my baby.  Please just…just do whatever you can.”

Anything in your power.

If Carlisle recognized the connection, he did not show it.  If Charlie noticed the diamonds that glistened in the beautiful faces all around him as the sun turned my in-laws into angels, he did not show it either. 

I choked again, one last racking cough, and the movement made my breath stop entirely.  It did not start again.  I struggled, for only a moment, to draw an impossible breath, and then gave up.  This was it—the point at which my fate ceased to be my own.  I gripped Edward’s hand as tight as I could, and watched the trees on the edge of my vision begin to spin...to fade.

I heard, as if from a distance, Alice leading Charlie away toward the porch.  I saw the wolves through a thickening curtain of grey, forming their circle around me—not shielding me from my fate now, but Charlie from what was about to happen to me.  None of them were watching as the three that were left by my side closed in. All lupine heads were turned away in disgust as Rosalie took the wrist of my left arm.  Carlisle bent to my neck—to the side that wasn’t torn open, but his eyes, and everything else around me, was overshadowed by Edward’s angelic face as he leaned into the strange light that seemed to be gathering in my mind.

“Hold on, Bella.  Don’t leave me now,” he whispered, and bent to kiss my lips.  I could no longer sense his mouth on mine, but I felt the kiss turned warm…become a sting, and then the world went white.

White like the snow that was falling over corpses in the clearing.  White like the skin of those who were burning away in the fire. 

This is it.  This is her death.   Professional.  Anticipating.

She’ll be awake in three minutes.  Bright with reassurance.

“Bella, can you hear me?”

It was a voice, not a thought, which broke through the night sky and jerked me away from the wintery apocalypse that I had fallen into—back into the world where my body was on fire.  Except, as I emerged again, I realized that there was no fire left in me.  There was no pain at all.  No need to force a cry through mangled lungs.  No need to even draw a breath.

My ears were full of a sad, unsteady rhythm, and I realized that it was my own heartbeat—louder now, and slower than I had ever heard it before.  As I listened, still motionless in a shroud of white cotton, my human heart stuttered, stumbled, and ceased to beat again.  There was no great trauma…no cardiac paddles for me.  Only a quiet death in the end, and the sound of my final heartbeat echoed in the memory of a roomful of witnesses.

The silence lengthened…intensified.

I wondered, in that frozen moment, if something had gone wrong.  I felt nothing different.  I felt nothing at all.  Perhaps I had died—really died—after all.  And then the clouds parted from my memory, and my consciousness expanded.

Exploded.

Everything rushed in at once—scents that seemed to linger on my tongue.  Sounds that came in colors, and a multitude of voices, painting a million pictures that I could see and feel even though my eyes were still closed tightly, and my arms remained pinned to my sides.

“Bella?”  Edward’s hands held mine firmly.  “Open your eyes.  Can you do that?”

His voice was still the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.  That, at least, had not changed.  His words were tinged with awe—with worry and desire.  They echoed in his mind and the minds of everyone around him, urging me to move…willing me to wake and to take my place among them all. 

And so, at last, I opened vampire eyes.