THROUGH THE DOOR.
It shattered around me, flying off the wall in pieces.
The roar that exploded from my core was entirely instinctual. The tracker’s head jerked up, and then he dove for the crimson shape on the floor below him. I saw one pale hand stretched out in futile self-defense.
The obstacle of the door had not slowed my momentum. I flew into the tracker mid-lunge, throwing him away from his target, smashing him into the floor with enough force to crater the wooden planks.
I rolled, pulling him over me, and then kicked him to the center of the room. Where Emmett was waiting.
For the entire quarter of a second that I was grappling with the tracker, I was barely aware of him as a living creature. He was just an object in my way. I knew that at some point in the near future, I would be jealous of Emmett and Jasper. I would wish for the chance to claw and slash and sever. But that was all meaningless now. I spun.
As I had known she would be, Bella was crumpled against the wall, framed by splintered mirrors. Everything was red.
All the terror and pain I’d been subduing since I’d first heard Alice’s dread in the airport crashed into me in an unstoppable tidal wave.
Her eyes were closed. Her pale hand had fallen limp beside her. Her heartbeat was weak, faltering.
I didn’t decide to move, I was just there beside her, kneeling in her blood. Fire burned through my chest and my head, but I couldn’t separate out the different kinds of pain. I was afraid to touch her. She was broken in so many places. I could make it worse.
I heard my own voice, rambling the same words over and over again. Her name. No. Please. Again and again like a record skipping. But I wasn’t in control of the sound.
I heard myself screaming Carlisle’s name, but he was already there, kneeling in the blood on her other side.
The words pouring from my mouth weren’t words anymore, just mangled, heaving sounds. Sobs.
Carlisle’s hands traced from her scalp to her ankle and then back again so quickly, they blurred. He pressed both hands to her head, seeking ruptures. He pushed two fingers tight against a spot three inches behind her right ear. I couldn’t see what he was doing; her hair was saturated with crimson.
A weak cry broke through her lips. Her face spasmed with pain.
“Bella!” I begged.
Carlisle’s calm voice was the antithesis to my raw screaming. “She’s lost some blood, but the head wound isn’t deep. Watch out for her leg, it’s broken.”
A howl of pure rage ripped through the room, and for a second I thought Emmett and Jasper were in trouble. I touched their minds—they were already gathering up the broken pieces—and realized that the sound had come from me.
“Some ribs, too, I think,” Carlisle added, still preternaturally calm.
His thoughts were practical, impassive. He knew I would be listening. But he was also encouraged by his examination. We were in time. The damage was not critical.
I caught the ifs in his assessment, though. If he could get the bleeding under control. If a rib didn’t puncture her lung. If the internal damage was no more than it seemed. If, if, if. His years of trying to keep human bodies alive gave him a plethora of insights into things that could go wrong.
Her blood had soaked through my jeans. It covered my arms. I was painted in it.
Bella moaned in pain.
“Bella, you’re going to be fine.” My words were pleading, begging. “Can you hear me, Bella? I love you.”
Another moan, but no—she was trying to speak.
“Edward,” she gasped.
“Yes, I’m here.”
She whispered, “It hurts.”
“I know, Bella, I know.”
The jealousy surfaced then, like a fist punching through the center of my chest. I wanted so badly to break the tracker, to rip him into long, slow strips. So much pain and so much blood and I’d never be able to make him answer for it. It wasn’t enough that he was dying, that he would burn. It would never be enough.
“Can’t you do anything?” I snarled at Carlisle.
“My bag, please,” he called coolly to Alice.
Alice made a tiny choking sound.
I couldn’t force my eyes away from Bella’s bruised, blood-spattered face. Under the gore, her skin was paler than I’d ever seen it. Her eyelids didn’t so much as flutter.
But I reached out to Alice’s mind and saw the complication.
I’d yet to truly register the lake of blood I was kneeling in. I knew, somewhere inside, my body was probably reacting to it. But wherever that reaction was, it was so deep below the pain that it hadn’t surfaced yet.
Alice loved Bella, but she was not physically prepared for this. She hesitated, teeth clenched, trying to swallow back the venom.
Emmett and Jasper, too, were struggling. They’d pulled the shattered pieces of the tracker—and I could only vehemently hope that those pieces were still somehow able to process pain—out of the room. Emmett was watching Jasper closely for a break. Emmett himself was in admirable control. His concern for Bella was deeper than his usual carefree frame of mind allowed for.
“Hold your breath, Alice,” Carlisle said. “It will help.”
She nodded and stopped breathing as she darted forward and then back, leaving Carlisle’s satchel next to his leg. She’d moved so carefully that she didn’t even get blood on her shoes. She retreated to the destroyed emergency exit, gasping for fresh air.
Through the open door drifted the faint sounds of sirens, looking for the car that had raced so recklessly through the city streets. I doubted they would find the stolen car parked in the shade on a quiet side street, but I didn’t really care if they did.
“She’s here.” I babbled the words. “She knew where to find you.”
Bella whimpered. “My hand hurts.”
I was surprised by her specificity. There was so much damage.
“I know, Bella. Carlisle will give you something. It will stop.”
Carlisle was suturing the tears in her scalp so quickly his movements were blurring again. No bleed could escape his eyes. He was able to repair the larger vessels with tiny stitches that another surgeon would not be able to duplicate under perfect conditions even with mechanical assistance. I wished he would take a break and get some painkillers into her system, but I could hear under his controlled calm that there was more damage to her head than he liked. She’d lost so much blood.…
With a sudden jolt, Bella twitched half upright. Carlisle caught her head in his left hand to steady it in his iron grip. Her eyes flew open—the whites bloodred with broken vessels—and she shrieked with more strength than I would have guessed she had left.
“My hand is burning!”
“Bella?” I cried. Idiotically, for an instant I could think only of the fire raging though my own body. Was I hurting her?
Her eyes fluttered, blinded by blood and blood-soaked hair.
“The fire!” she screamed, her back arching despite a groaning in her ribs. “Someone stop the fire!”
The sound of her agony stupefied me. I knew that I understood the truth of what she was saying, but panic scrambled all the meanings in my head. It felt like someone else was forcing my head to turn away from her face, forcing my eyes to focus on the crimson-stippled hand she was thrusting away from herself, the fingers seizing, twisting to the torture.
A short, shallow slice was torn through the skin across the heel of her hand. It was nothing to her other injuries. Already the blood was slowing.…
I knew what I was seeing, but I couldn’t form the right words.
All I could gasp out was, “Carlisle! Her hand!”
He glanced up unwillingly from his work, his fingers pausing for the first time. And then the shock hit him, too.
His voice was hollow. “He bit her.”
There were the words: He bit her. The tracker had bitten Bella. The fire was venom.
In slow motion, I saw it replay in my memory. I ripped through the door. The tracker lunged. Bella’s hand shot out in front of her. I slammed into him, forcing him away. But his teeth were exposed, his neck extended.… I’d been a millisecond too slow.
Carlisle’s hands were still motionless. Fix her, I wanted to scream at him, but I knew, as he did, that his efforts were worthless now. Everything broken inside her would knit together on its own. Every shattered bone, every gash, every tiny leaking tear beneath her skin, all would be whole soon.
Her heart would stop and never beat again.
Bella screamed and writhed in misery.
Edward.
Alice had returned, finding some new resolve that let her crouch beside Carlisle now, red seeping into her shoes. Lightly, she brushed the hair from Bella’s blood-spotted eyes.
You can’t let it happen this way. She was thinking of Carlisle.
Carlisle was also remembering. The teeth marks on his own palm, and the long, protracted suffering of his change.
Then he thought of me.
A phantom burn raced along my hand, my arm. I remembered, too.
“Edward, you have to do it,” Alice insisted.
I could make this easier, faster for Bella. She didn’t have to suffer as long as I had.
She would still suffer. The pain would be unimaginable. The fire would torture her for days. Just… not as many days.
And at the end of it—
“No!” I howled, but I knew my protest was useless.
Alice’s vision was so strong now it seemed inevitable. Like history, not future. Bella, stone white, her eyes glowing a hundred times brighter than the slaughter scene surrounding us now.
My own memory intruded, shoving another image into juxtaposition with Alice’s vision: Rosalie. Resentful, regretful. Always mourning what she’d lost. Never resigned to what had been done to her. She’d had no choice, and she’d never forgiven us.
Could I bear to have Bella stare at me with the same regrets for the next thousand years?
Yes! the most selfish part of me insisted. Better that than to have her disappear now, to slip away from me.
But was it better? If she could grasp every ramification and every loss, would she choose this way?
Did I even fully understand the cost? Was I aware of everything I’d traded in exchange for my immortality? Had the tracker just met the same black wall of nothingness that I was destined for someday? Or would there be eternal flames for the both of us?
“Alice,” Bella groaned, her eyes sliding closed. Was she recognizing Alice’s return, or was she just giving up on my help? I was doing nothing but falling apart.
Bella started screaming again, a long unbroken wail of agony.
Edward! Alice shouted at me. Her impatience with my hesitation was reaching a frenzy, but she didn’t trust herself enough to act.
Alice saw that I was drowning. She saw my futures spinning out into a thousand different kinds of despair. On the outer edges, she even saw me doing the one unimaginable thing I hadn’t yet consciously considered. The thing I was sure I was too weak for. Until I saw it in her mind, I didn’t realize that version even existed inside my head.
Now I could see it.
Killing Bella.
Was it the right thing? To stop her pain? To give her, in her total and perfect innocence, a chance at a different destiny than the inevitable one I knew I was facing? A different kind of afterlife than the cold, bloodthirsty one she was burning toward now?
The pain was too much, and I couldn’t trust my thoughts, spinning out of control because Bella was screaming.
I turned my eyes and mind to Carlisle, hoping for some assurance, some absolution, but I met something entirely different.
In his mind, a coiled desert viper, sand-colored scales sliding across each other with a dry, rasping sound.
The image was so unexpected that I froze again with shock.
“There may be a chance,” Carlisle said.
There was just a glimmer of hope in his head. He saw what Bella’s suffering was doing to me now; he, too, feared what forcing her into this life would do to both her and me in the future. And yet, the sliver of hope…
“What?” I begged him. What was the chance?
Carlisle started stitching her scalp again. He had enough faith in this idea that he thought it might be necessary to finish repairing her wounds.
“See if you can suck the venom back out,” he said, calm again. “The wound is fairly clean.”
Every muscle in my body locked down.
“Will that work?” Alice demanded. She looked ahead to answer her own question. Nothing was clear. No decision had been made. My decision was not made.
Carlisle didn’t look up from his work. “I don’t know. But we have to hurry.”
I knew how the venom would spread. She’d felt the first burn just a moment ago. It would climb slowly up her wrist, into her arm. Then faster and faster.
There was no time for this.
But! I wanted to scream. But I’m a vampire!
I would taste the blood and I would frenzy. Especially her blood. Only the burning she was feeling now was stronger than the flames in my throat, my chest. If I gave in even a tiny bit to that need…
“Carlisle, I…” My voice faltered in shame. Did he even realize what he was suggesting? “I don’t know if I can do that.”
Carlisle’s fingers moved the suture needle so quickly it was all but invisible. He’d moved to the back of her head, on the left now. There were so many wounds.
His voice was even but heavy. “It’s your decision, Edward, either way.”
Life or death or half life, my decision. But was life even in my power? I’d never been that strong.
“I can’t help you,” he apologized. “I have to get this bleeding stopped here if you’re going to be taking blood from her hand.”
Bella thrashed as a new wave of pain rocked her, jerking her twisted leg.
“Edward!” she screamed.
Her blood-filled eyes snapped open, and this time they focused sharply, boring into my own. Imploring, beseeching.
“Alice!” Carlisle snapped. “Get me something to brace her leg!”
Alice darted out of my peripheral vision, and I could hear her ripping boards up from the floor and snapping them into usable sizes.
“Edward!” Carlisle’s voice had lost its control. Pain bled through. Pain for me, pain for Bella. “You must do it now, or it will be too late.”
Bella’s eyes begged, desperate for relief.
Bella was burning, and I was exactly the wrong person to save her. Absolutely and literally the worst person in the entire universe for this task.
But I was the only one here to do it.
You have to do this, I ordered myself. There is no other way. You cannot fail.
I grasped her twisting hand, smoothing her clenched fingers and holding them still. I stopped breathing and bent to press my mouth to her hand.
The skin on the edges of the wound was already cooler than the rest of her hand. Changing. Hardening.
I sealed my lips around the small gash, closed my eyes, and then began.
It was only a trickle of blood—the venom had already begun healing the wound. Just a few drops to start with. Barely enough to wet my tongue.
It hit me like an explosion. A bomb detonating inside my body and mind. The first time I’d caught Bella’s scent, I thought I’d be undone. That was a paper cut. This was a decapitation. My brain was severed from my body.
But it wasn’t pain. Bella’s blood was the opposite of pain. It erased every burn I’d ever suffered. And it was so much more than just the absence of pain. It was satisfaction, it was bliss. I felt suffused with a strange kind of joy—a joy of the body alone. I was healed and alive, every nerve ending thrumming with contentment.
As I pulled from the wound, it reversed the effects of the venom. The blood started to flow steadily, coating my tongue, my throat. The sharp, icy taste of the venom was a weak counterpoint. It did nothing to interfere with the power of her blood.
Rapture. Elation.
My body knew well that there was more to be had, close at hand. More, my body hummed, more.
But my body couldn’t move. I’d forced it motionless and I kept it so. I could hardly think to know why, but I refused to release my hold.
I had to think. I had to stop feeling and think.
There was something outside the bliss.
Pain, there was pain that the pleasure couldn’t reach. Pain that was both outside and inside my mind.
The pain was high-pitched and dissonant. It swelled into a crescendo.
Bella was screaming.
I reached out mentally for something to hold on to, and found a life ring waiting.
Yes, Edward. You can do this. See? You are going to save her.
Alice showed me a thousand glimpses of the future. Bella smiling, Bella laughing, Bella reaching for my hand, Bella holding her arms open for me, Bella staring into my eyes with fascination, Bella walking next to me at school, Bella sitting beside me in her truck, Bella sleeping in my arms, Bella pressing her hand against my cheek, Bella holding my face and pressing her lips carefully against mine. A thousand different scenes with Bella, healthy and whole, alive and happy, and with me.
The bliss, the physical joy, dimmed.
The taste of venom was strong. It was still too soon.
I will show you when, Alice promised.
But I felt myself careening past the place where I could stop. I was losing myself. I was going to kill her, my body thrilling with joy the entire time.
Bella’s screaming quieted, loosening my connection to the pain I needed to feel. She whimpered a few times, and then sighed.
I was going to kill her.
“Edward?” she whispered.
“He’s right here, Bella,” Alice soothed.
Right here killing you.
I was barely aware of anything else. Sound faded, the light seemed dim behind my lids, there was nothing else really, just the blood. Even Alice’s thoughts, nearly screaming at me, felt muted and far away.
It’s time, Alice told me. Now, Edward.
Through my near-total absorption, I could taste that. The icy sting was gone. A new chemical flavor took its place, however, and some piece of me realized that Carlisle had been working fast.
But Alice could see I was lost. I could hear her wondering frantically if she could pull me off Bella, or if that fight would just injure Bella more.
“Stay, Edward,” Bella sighed, peaceful now. “Stay with me.…”
Her quiet voice slid into my head, somehow stronger than Alice’s panic, louder than all the chaos inside and around me. The sound of her confidence was a key turning; it seemed to reconnect my brain to my body. It made me whole again.
And I simply let her hand fall away from my lips. I raised my head and looked at her face. Still spattered with blood, still ashy, eyes closed, but calm now. Her pain was eased.
“I will,” I promised her through bloodstained lips.
Her mouth twitched into a frail smile.
“Is it all out?” Carlisle asked. He worried he’d been too quick with the painkiller, that it might be covering the venom burn.
But Alice had seen it would be fine.
“Her blood tastes clean.” The sound of my voice was rough, grating. “I can taste the morphine.”
“Bella?” Carlisle asked in a low, clear voice.
“Mmmmm?” was her response.
“Is the fire gone?”
“Yes,” she breathed, a little clearer now. “Thank you, Edward.”
“I love you.”
She sighed, eyes still closed. “I know.”
The chuckle that bubbled up from my chest surprised me. I had her blood on my tongue. It was probably tinting the edges of my irises red even now. It was drying into my clothes and dyeing my skin. But she could still make me laugh.
“Bella?” Carlisle asked again.
“What?” Her tone was testy now. She looked half-asleep and impatient to find the other half.
“Where is your mother?”
Her eyes flickered for a second, and then she exhaled. “In Florida. He tricked me, Edward. He watched our videos.”
Though she was nearly unconscious from trauma and morphine, it was clear she was deeply offended by this invasion of privacy. I smiled.
“Alice?” Bella struggled to open her eyes, and then quit, but her words were as urgent as she could make them in her condition. “Alice, the video—he knew you, Alice, he knew where you came from.… I smell gasoline?”
Emmett and Jasper were back from siphoning the accelerant we needed. The sirens still wailed in the distance, but from another direction now. They weren’t going to find us.
With a somber expression, Alice flitted across the ravaged floor to the media center by the door. She picked up the small handheld video recorder that was still running. She switched it off.
In the instant she decided to retrieve the camera, hundreds of future fragments flashed through her mind—images of this room, of Bella, of the tracker, of the blood. It was everything she would see when she played back the recording, too fast and disordered for either of us to absorb much. Her eyes flashed to mine.
We’ll deal with this later. We have a hundred things to do now to make sense of this nightmare.
I could tell she was purposely directing her thoughts away from the camera as she ran through the rather involved chores we now must accomplish, but I didn’t push. Later.
“It’s time to move her,” Carlisle said. The smell of the gasoline Emmett and Jasper were applying to the walls was becoming overwhelming.
“No,” Bella murmured. “I want to sleep.”
“You can sleep, sweetheart,” I crooned in her ear. “I’ll carry you.”
Her leg was wrapped tightly inside Alice’s floorboard splint, and Carlisle had found time to tape her ribs. Moving more carefully than I ever had before, I lifted her from the blood-soaked floor, trying to support every part of her.
“Sleep now, Bella,” I whispered.