The first thing I saw with vampire eyes was only a blur of color—a swirl of darkest amber that seemed to dance in front of my face. It took only a moment to focus and to realize that the gold formed a beautiful barrier around wide, heavily dilated pupils. Eyes. Edward’s eyes fixed intently on my own. Reflecting my frighteningly pale complexion and a worry that I had seen there altogether too often lately.
Beautiful. The words were his. I heard them even though his lips had not moved. She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.
My lips formed a smile that I hoped was reassuring. My ears were still filled with the liquid rush of adrenaline. I did not trust myself to move just yet, certain that any movement at all would bring back the pain.
“Thank God,” he breathed. “Thank God.” The bouquet of his breath fell all around me. I could taste him in the air, just as mouthwatering as before, but multiplied a hundredfold and sweeter somehow. I took it in, inhaling unnecessarily now, and my senses seemed to erupt. Scents and sounds and sights filled the room. Filled my mind in an instant, so much like an explosion that I braced myself once again for the torment of the last few days. Instead, my mind accommodated instantly, expanding, adapting…calming the flame of my new senses as I tasted the night around me.
The background was more of a distraction than I had ever expected. I heard animals from the yard outside bedding down for the night in trees that whispered and groaned as loudly as if I were right there in the middle of them. Animal scents and decaying needles and leaves were craftily masked behind the sterile, more modern aromas of the Cullen home—cedar, fiberglass, potpourri, cleaning materials. I could have spent hours pondering the intricate ingredients in the bleach that coated the floor below me…if, in fact, what came to me at that moment had been solely olfactory.
But scents were accompanied by something much stronger, almost an aura that covered me like a blanket, multihued and undulating, emanating from all of the vampires around me. It seemed to radiate dark grey around Edward. Darker still around Jasper. The strange colors mimicked expressions and body language perfectly. I could feel it…nearly see it pour from everyone around me, flowing, mixing in tiny tendrils with the auras of the others…and curling into the liquid smoke that clung to me. It was bright and blinking and somehow unstable around me.
“How do you feel, Bella?” Alice’s voice was lower to me now, and her smile was obscured by a haze of white all around her, fast fading to grey. I realized with some trepidation that the smoke seemed to correspond with emotion—that the grey reflected the general unease emanating from most of the figures around me.
It was incredibly distracting—the black that was building around Jasper like a thundercloud was the most troubling. It felt like the same emotion around the others condensed. It was anger and fear and pain and…hunger. It was hunger, and it seemed too dangerously close to the darkness that had dragged me into the conversion in the first place. It danced and pulsed in the same manner, but did not advance, kept firmly in check by…what? Was Jasper holding all of that around him?
“Bella?” Edward’s voice was unsure. The insecurity reflected in the cloud around him as my eyes flashed back to him and I swayed to my feet. “What are you feeling?”
What wasn’t I feeling would have been a better question. The clouds of emotion were beginning to gather around me. I had never been claustrophobic before, but that was exactly what it felt like now—an overwhelming necessity to bolt straight out into the open night air…a suffocation that rendered me speechless.
Something in my expression must have given Edward the answer I was too besieged to voice at the moment. Something must have revealed how close I was to my first full-on vampire panic attack because it only took him a fraction of a second to grasp my shoulders so quickly and firmly that it surely would have crushed mortal shoulders. He turned my face to his.
“Look at me,” he commanded. His voice was calm and imperious, but the cloud around him was not. It was dark and cold and creeping toward my trembling hands. “Look!” he shouted, shaking me this time until my eyes fell on his again. “Try to force it all out of your mind. Concentrate on me. Only on my face.”
“But…but everyone…” I wanted to protest. To tell him what I was seeing—what I was hearing, but the sound of my own voice was so foreign and beautiful that the words tangled on my tongue. The blanket of tension around me began to close and build…darkening to nearly the color around Jasper. I recognized the panic coming like a parent recognizing their child’s tantrum before it erupts, and then Edward’s hands were on my face, cupping my chin and blocking my peripheral vision, forcing out everything else but him.
“Listen to my voice, now Bella. Try to let it calm your senses. You’re adjusting. It will pass. Focus on what I’m saying…”
And I did. I fixed my eyes determinedly on Edward and let his voice become the background all around me as I tried to appeal to the part of my mind that was still rational. I could handle all of it. I would not let it overwhelm me. I was a vampire now. This was part of the change. I knew what I was getting into, I told myself as tremors pushed through me and threatened to destabilize my newly immortal frame.
“What’s happening?” I asked him, the sound of my voice foreign and volatile. “Is the smoke part of the transformation? Will it go away?”
His brow furrowed. The cloud darkened around him and I felt tiny plumes of something that could only be confusion. “I’m not sure I know what you’re…”
“Smoke?” Jasper interrupted, alarmed. His voice was filled with the same tension that I felt—that I saw—in all of the room. “In colors?”
I nodded, and the cloud around Jasper became so dark that it should have obscured him entirely, but somehow did not. It crept toward me, fell all around me, lighter tinges darkening and joining the bombardment. Worry, excitement, apprehension, confusion, anticipation, dejection, and worst of all of these, a terrible, damning emptiness that I was suddenly sure was the bloodlust that Edward had described, lurking beneath the carefully conjected composure of every figure in the room.
“What colors?” Emmett.
An orange inquisitiveness joined slow black coils and continued advancing. I couldn’t take it…gave up trying to watch it come at me or to take it in, and instead willed it away from me with all of my new strength. To my intense surprise, it obeyed, flinging violently away and dispersing around the room like a miniature explosion. I turned away from Edward’s eyes just long enough to watch it hit everyone in a shockwave that I could measure in the changing expressions all around me. Expectant smiles were instantly obliterated. Mild expressions of concern were blasted into painful grimaces and stifled only with great effort.
“Careful, Jasper,” came the warning from Carlisle. Every muscle in his body was tense and his face was only barely composed. “She’s still discovering her own emotions. She’s not prepared for you yet.”
“I’m not doing it.” Jasper looked stunned. Tiny bolts of white surprise jolted through the black of his emotions. His head jerked in my direction. “She is.”
Surprise and alarm surged through the entire room and every being around me went into heightened alert.
“Her?” Alice. “What do you mean?”
“Your emotions are too much for her,” Jasper explained. “She pushed them away.” She’s got it, he continued, but there was something different in his voice this time. Something about his body language. She’s cursed.
“How do you know that?” I asked him, glancing at him in a half panic, and I didn’t need the cloud around him to read the anguish in his expression.
“Clouds,” he said, looking down. “Smoke. It’s how my mind rationalized the emotions of others as a newborn.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, though I was beginning to now. “What’s wrong with me?”
I scanned the room for clarification, watching muscles tense and eyes darken before me, but no answer was forthcoming. It came instead from the air all around me in several different voices.
She’s frightened. Esme, her eyes and aura full of concern.
She’s fantastic! Alice.
She’s an empath! Carlisle’s voice, full of surprise and revelation, and not meant for me, but for his omniscient first son. My eyes darted back to Edward.
“An empath?” I asked, then put voice to the words that only now clicked into place. “It’s Jasper’s talent, isn’t it? I’m cursed because I’ve got Jasper’s talent?”
My human mind would not have thought that Edward could go any paler than he already was. My human eyes would not have been able to see the color drain from an already bloodless face, but my vampire eyes registered the change easily—registered the expression of mournful shock that froze on his face as well.
Worse. His voice echoed, though his lips were a pale still line in an even paler face. So much worse than that.
“What’s worse?” I snapped, the taste of panic back on my tongue. My answer did not come from him…or not from him exactly. Edward seemed suddenly past the point of speech, but I heard his answer just the same, echoing his torment through my own unstable emotions like dolphins must hear sonar.
Cursed. She heard him. It was Edward, but his voice was wiped away too quickly by…
Both! Carlisle caught on quickly. She’s an empath and a telepath!
“Bella, can you hear us?” he asked. He indicated his family…my new family, with a slight nod in their direction.
“Of course I can hear you!” I answered. The frustration that seethed forward had a power that I wasn’t prepared for. I swatted it away like a cloud of flies and watched as it infested the expressions around the room. Jasper took it in. I felt…saw the wave of calm that he sent back in its place.
And can you hear me? Edward’s voice this time.
I was about to teach him exactly how scathing a reply was warranted by such a patronizing question when it suddenly…finally…occurred to me. Edward had not spoken. Only Carlisle had voiced his question, and even then, only for the benefit of the others around him. What I was hearing was not Edward’s voice. What I was seeing and feeling and sensing were not my own newly immortal thoughts and emotions, but those of the others around me. I was reading thoughts. I was seeing, experiencing, the emotions of others.
The retort stuck in my throat, and I was forced to nod, speechless.
“And…feel us?” Jasper’s voice nearly trembled with the anguish behind his question. I nodded again, shivering. Not trusting my own voice as the reality of the situation took hold. An empath and a telepath. Emotions and thoughts. Every thought and feeling from everyone within whatever border for senses existed for those kind of talents. I was doomed.
My answer prompted a reaction that I would not have been prepared for had I had thirty—maybe even three hundred—years of vampire experience. The room lit up in a fantastic array of opposing colors. A bright sparkling red that I recognized as jealousy emanating from the corner near the doorway…yellow-gold rays of excitement shooting at me like daggers from Alice and Emmett to my left, and the deep bright blue of Esme’s anxious pride pushing from the opposite side of the room, battling with the greys and blacks that barreled over me from Carlisle, Jasper, and Edward. I felt hope battling with agony…exhilaration with sorrow. All of it shot toward me, through me like so many burning needles and I wondered how such a blur of uncontrolled colors and pictures raging through one head could ever be organized into something that was considered civilized thought.
But that was not where it ended. Clouds of emotions mixed exhaustively with voices…thoughts…images flashing impossibly fast, flinging like knives at me from every direction. They were pictures of people, places, memories, scents. Everything all at once, like the screens of a thousand televisions broadcasting every signal imaginable directly into my head at full volume—an unbearable barrage on already overtaxed senses.
“Bella! That is so perfect!” Alice exclaimed, beaming. Her happiness riddled me like bullets. Her mind hurled a fusillade of future plans at me. “Of course you’d be a talented vampire. You weren’t exactly a normal human!”
“You could have been a bit more original though,” joked Emmett from behind me, clapping me on the back—a gesture that would have knocked me across the room just days earlier. “We’ve already seen those two.”
Rosalie chortled wickedly from the doorway, her mind a painful blur of violent memories from her own turning, but her dark humor had not reached the other side of the room, where a different cloud still hovered around the other three Cullen men. The colors around them remained intensely dismal.
“Both?” I stammered as disembodied voices began flying past me—around me—screaming straight into my mind.
She’ll never control it. Jasper was thinking. Not as a newborn. She’ll have to leave or she’ll kill them all.
Edward shook his head at Jasper. “I’ll teach her,” he said, never without his capacity to rationalize. “Show her how to block it.”
“I have…both…”
She can distract herself. It will only take a little more effort.
Distract myself. That was exactly what I had to do…find a way to tune everything out and concentrate on one brand new thing at a time, but that wasn’t easy with what seemed like a banquet hall of other increasingly alarmed emotions and voices sounding off in traitorous succession around me.
“It can be managed, Bella.” Carlisle was striding toward me, a physician’s curiosity drawn plainly into his face, and a confidence etched into his voice that did not reflect the truth of his own emotions. “It’s been managed before.” He was thinking about Edward, and about how difficult it was for him in the beginning. They had kept to uninhabited areas for years afterwards, and still…
“You don’t know that,” I managed. “Not for sure.”
“No,” he agreed with the control of a doctor with centuries of tragic diagnosis under his belt. “It’s not the same for anyone.”
His positive expression did not waiver, but his thoughts betrayed him as they turned crimson, sinuous and tantalizingly textured. My mind was filled with blood. The blood of dozens, maybe hundreds, flowing…gushing in arterial fountains from dark alleys where an even darker creature had given up the fight for his own humanity. Edward as a newborn. Edward unchained.
But it wasn’t Carlisle’s recollection of his first son losing control, or even the remembered scent of blood on Edward’s lips from his first human victims that finally overwhelmed me. It was another image…one of thousands that came free form and lit up my head like a beacon.
It was an image of me, seen from the eyes of someone else…I couldn’t tell who. Only it wasn’t the same image I had stared at with such despondency every day in the mirror up until today. It was as if I were watching someone only vaguely familiar. She was flawless, and so frighteningly pale…cold and deadly with dark crimson eyes. She fascinated me…terrified me. The girl looked vicious. Ready to pounce. I’d seen Edward like that before. I’d seen all of them like that…just before battle. Just before a kill. I cringed. The female vampire cringed in seven different minds from seven different angles. It was like being in some warped funhouse hall of mirrors. Blood red eyes reflected seven times over. Shock…almost fury reflected seven times over. She looked caged. Beautiful in all her new wild glory.
Beautiful, echoed a soothing voice, Edward’s words, though most of his thoughts were still black memories, and lost too fast in the sea of voices.
“Bella,” he reassured. “We will do this together.”
“Together…” I echoed, and it rang back at me through seven sets of ears.
“Together,” he repeated, but…
She’s not even that pretty. Rosalie sat uneasily in the corner, consoling herself. I glared over at her, surprised by the sting of such a surreptitious insult. She’s actually pretty creepy. There was a scar across Rosalie’s left cheek that marred her tenacious expression—a remnant of the battle. Her mind shot scathing memories of humans in all stages of decomposition…recollections of her own newborn education.
Those thoughts and everything else played inside my head. They twisted and danced. They faded to images and memories and back to words that stabbed behind my eyes. They filled the silence in between each flowing aura of emotion and blended together to bellow back at me in an excruciating cacophony of screams and flashes.
She’s going to ruin everything. Rosalie.
She’s going to be so amazingly high-maintenance! Alice.
She’s thirsty. She’s going to need to hunt. Carlisle.
She’s going to have such a difficult first few years. Esme.
Oh, she is going to be so much fun! Emmett.
They were too much. It was all too much. I needed to get away—far away from this rush of information. I needed to…
She’s going to run! Jasper.
My eyes must have given Jasper all of the confirmation that he needed. As they shifted toward the door, I saw at least ten different escape plans spring into his mind. I saw myself try to escape in at least ten different directions, and I saw Jasper detain me at every turn, but it did nothing to stop my need. I realized that I no longer really even had a choice. Now that the idea had been planted, running seemed like the right thing to do…the only plausible solution. Toward the trees. Toward the river. Toward the town, so full of beating hearts…
So many delicious heartbeats.
I twitched toward the door. Jasper moved with me, like a mirror. I growled without knowing I was growling. “Edward…” Jasper began as each of his defense strategies hardened in my head. His face was twisted with effort as he tried to pull the thirst away from me. “If you’ve got a plan to calm down an omniscient newborn, now would be a great time to begin.”
And then I was overtaken by warmth…security…something so sure and pure that all thoughts of running were washed from my mind in its wake.
You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
It was Edward, of course. He glided toward me with a grace and a speed that I realized I had never been able to fully appreciate with human eyes. His arms came around me, and a wave of tranquility washed over us. I felt a relief like I had never felt before…his relief. The joy of watching me standing in front of him after he had seen death inside me. The absolute certainty that he had stolen me back from that death. His own guilty excitement bled through; brought with it so many visions of the future he could now allow himself to imagine with me. They formed a barrier around me that was a strong as the one that Jasper had formed around himself, but the voices were still there on the air, pecking at me like so many crows.
Push them away.
“I can’t,” I said as the voices continued to carve away pieces of the barricade he’d created. And then he was showing me how. The wall disappeared. Became a river of memories…of logic and science; of history and religions and languages; of complex equations and simple designs in nature; of every detail of every moment that he’d spent in sleepless wonder creating the scaffolding that had become his own wall. They flowed around me, through me. I felt as if I were swimming in them. Carefully, he let them ebb away, and as they left me, I tried to fill the space left in their absence with my own accumulated thoughts. But there were no centuries yet to fill the broken places, and the thoughts of others floated in freely. Worse…the thirst of others.
“Oh God…” I moaned, and my voice sounded dangerous in my own ears. “Edward, I can’t!”
His hand came up to my face. Brushed across my cheek and he cupped my jaw in his hand and brought my lips to his. The kiss was gentle, but somehow more intimate…more passionate than I had ever shared with him. Our first kiss without caution between us.
“Find a place where you’re at peace,” he explained vocally, for the benefit of everyone in the room. “Make that place your refuge. Build your wall from there.”
I tried, reaching out for the first thought that came to my mind that was my own, and suddenly, I was no longer surrounded by a faltering river of my own poorly constructed distractions, but by the flowing blue green of the Spanish Mediterranean of our honeymoon. The voices warped and sputtered, and finally disappeared entirely as I sank thankfully into the tide. I closed my eyes.
Can you hear me? Came his voice out of the silence. I nodded and held on to him.
“I’m alright,” I reassured him, not feeling alright in the slightest. Relief flooded him nonetheless, and for a moment Edward’s thoughts broke through the surface of my new found cove of silence as he was overtaken by a memory of me, frail and pale with my throat torn open. I gasped, and he grabbed me once again, pulling me to him with crushing force.
“I thought he’d killed you,” he said. “I thought you’d gone beyond our help. There was so much…”
He stopped in mid sentence, but the thought had already formed. It formed in the memories of everyone in the room. The thirst came in from every direction. Jasper could do nothing to stop it this time. I tensed, only slightly, and moaned. Edward’s arms tightened around me.
“You need to hunt. Do you think that you would able to now?” He was looking at me with an awe that I had never seen before in his eyes.
I wanted to admit to him that I had been looking forward to hunting with him since he had first described it to me, but I was afraid of becoming entranced enough by my own strange voice to let the thoughts of others back in, and so I only nodded.
“We were all planning to go together, but I’m not sure that’s the best option at this point,” he said. “Perhaps it would be easier with less companions. Less thoughts and emotions to distract you.”
Anxiety came from everywhere around. I felt seven different versions of alert and saw seven different plans to stop me if I reacted wrong in the slightest. Jasper and Carlisle were busy strategizing. In their minds, I pictured the possibilities: I left on the hunt without them and escaped, only to claim my first human kill. I turned on Edward—overpowered him and headed toward town. I went with all of them. Their thoughts and emotions drove me crazy, and I bolted. A dozen…a hundred other visions passed through their collective minds—some plausible…most cringeworthy…all ending in the worst possible outcome.
“Stop it!” I hissed. My voice sounded strange in my own ears. My head was beginning to hurt again. Did vampires get headaches? “I’ll hunt with Edward and Alice. They can take me down together, right?” I felt a twinge of excitement that I had to ask. Was I actually contemplating the possibility of being stronger than two immortals? “If…any of those things…happens?”
“Of course,” Carlisle said, looking sheepish, as if he’d been caught plotting a coup, but there was doubt in all three expressions. They didn’t know for certain if only two vampires could take me down. “In any case, you won’t be far, and we will all be here waiting to make sure there is no trouble.”
“Perfect! Let’s hunt!” Alice intervened, moving gracefully to give me a quick, excited hug. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
I shrugged as reassuringly as I felt capable of and thought of the back-up squad waiting on the porch at the Cullen home. They may not get to me in time, but they would get to me. It was as prepared as I could be for such circumstances. Alice hugged me again and disappeared into the hallway.
“Are you absolutely certain you’re able to do this?” Edward asked, squeezing my hand. I rolled my eyes at him and relished in his momentary frustration.
“Are you?”
“Touche, Mrs. Cullen,” he mused, and motioned excitedly toward the door as if he had been waiting for this moment to arrive, and not dreading it from my very first mention of being turned. I let my own uncertainty reveal itself for only an instant, took one last whiff of the air and the thoughts around me, and then I followed Alice into the hallway. The thoughts and emotions of those staying behind followed me closer out of the door than Edward did.
