"I must make the deciding vote, it seems," Aro mused.
Suddenly, Edward stiffened at my side. "Yes!" he hissed.
I risked a glance at him.
His face glowed with an expression of amusement that I didn't understand - it was the expression an angel of destruction might wear while the world burned if the angel of destruction found the world burning really, really funny. Beautiful and creepy.
He turned to face Carlisle. "Carlisle!" he chided gleefully, "You totally got us!"
What.
"STUPID NEWBORN!" yelled a bunch of people including Carlisle, Esme, Rosalie, Emmett, the Denalis, most of the Volturi, and the barely audible voices of Alice, Jasper, and some people I didn't know from somewhere in the forest to the southwest. Expressions of relief and understanding dawned on the faces of everyone else.
"Alice?" I said, completely confused, "What's... what's going on?"
"Stupid Newborn is a vampire tradition. It's sort of similar to your April Fool's Day," explained Edward. "When a human is turned into a vampire it's traditional for their vampire friends to play pranks on the newborn and his or her mate. The pranks tend to be really elaborate and awesome since we're so much more intelligent than humans and we only get to play them once per newborn." He turned back to Carlisle. "But I can't believe you managed to hide the fact that male vampires can impregnate female humans from me for so many years!"
"It's not like having biological children with humans is particularly common," said Carlisle. "Hybrids are slower, weaker, and generally inferior to full vampires so most of us avoid making them. I honestly never thought to mention them to you, since you were so morally opposed to premarital sex anyway. I did suggest to Rosalie that she might want Emmett to have one as a stepchild for her; she wasn't interested but suggested we let you make one accidentally for Stupid Newborn if you ever found a mate and ended up marrying and sleeping with her while she was still human."
"And I did!" smiled Edward, putting his arm around me affectionately.
Alice danced into the clearing. She was followed by Jasper, two female vampires I didn't know, and a young man. The young man was not quite as fast as the others, with dark brown skin and eyes the color of warm teak. I stared at him.
"This is Huilen and her nephew Nahuel," introduced Alice. "We thought you might not believe us when we told you that hybrids are actually pretty well-known unless we showed you another one! Also we weren't sure we could avoid thinking about the pranks in front of Edward."
I regained my ability to speak, which I had temporarily lost due to confusion and shock. "Caius killed Irina because of your stupid prank!"
Edward smiled at me condescendingly like I was a particularly ignorant child. "Oh, Bella. Didn't you know that to permanently kill a vampire you have to tear it to pieces, burn the pieces, and scatter the ashes?"
Irina's ashes were still together in a relatively neat pile. One of the Volturi produced a bag of blood and poured it all over the pile which coalesced into Irina, whole and alive and perfectly fine.
"STUPID NEWBORN!" she yelled triumphantly.
"Oh, neat, I've never seen that done before!" exclaimed Edward. He turned to Carlisle again. "Was anything else a prank?"
The Cullens looked at Jacob.
"You didn't imprint on the baby!" laughed Edward, sounding even more relieved than he had been that the Volturi didn't really want to kill us.
"He didn't?" I looked at Jacob. He had a smug "yeah, I was in on this too" expression on his inane wolfy face.
"STUPID NEWBORN!" yelled everyone again. This was getting annoying.
"Of course he didn't! She was just a baby. Jacob's not a pedophile like Quil, I wouldn't allow him near Renesmee if he was," Rosalie told me.
"He did originally think he'd imprinted on her, since he had the strange feeling that she was the centre of the universe and the only thing holding him to the ground, but that turned out to be a simple partial seizure," explained Carlisle.
"It was lucky it happened, too," said Esme. "He was planning to kill Renesmee for killing you. The seizure stopped him until Edward got your heart beating again."
"What else... Bella's really not a shield?" said Edward excitedly, looking from Eleazar to me.
"No, she's not," agreed Eleazar.
"I... I'm not? But... But... I can feel it! I can feel my shield!" I blathered defensively. My shield made me special. I liked being special.
"STUPID NEWBORN!" they chorused.
"You can feel my illusion," Zafrina informed me smugly. "We pretended I could only cause visual ones to make it less likely that you would guess what was going on."
"I actually thought you really were a shield, when I first met you," admitted Edward. "I didn't seem to be able to read your mind properly. After I got to know you better I soon realised there just wasn't much there to read, but I kept pretending you were immune to my telepathy as a prank."
"And then Carlisle called the Volturi and had them act like you really were a shield when we met them in Italy, as a prank on Edward!" finished Alice proudly, "...and also on you I guess."
Jane smirked at me, and I fell to the ground in terrible pain as she proved the truth of their words.
Everyone laughed.
"Any other pranks?" asked Edward.
"Nope, I think that's all of the ones we played on you! Now let's feed!" Emmett pulled a huge cloth off of a big cage full of humans which I somehow hadn't noticed until now.
I stared at the cage.
"You're vegetarians! You only kill animals! Murder is wrong!" I objected self-righteously at the Cullens.
"STUPID NEWBORN!"
"But... that... can't have been a prank! I've hunted with you! We hunt animals! And you have yellow eyes!"
"We do sometimes hunt animals, Bella, but that's just because bears and mountain lions are more fun to fight than humans. We can't survive on animal blood alone for more than a year or so. And our yellow eyes are no more an indication of diet than human eye color, they're caused by a mutation that is passed on through our venom when one of us turns someone," explained Carlisle patiently.
"So you're... You're not vegetarians? You kill people?" I started to back away in horror. "I have to kill people?"
"Bella, Bella, it's OK!" Edward told me, holding out his hands appeasingly. "Nobody's going to kill anyone you care about. And look! You can have Lauren!" He pulled a human out of the cage and thrust her at me. Lauren. Lauren from school, who was always so snobby and hostile and prettier than me even after she got an ugly short haircut when she fell for a modelling scam. That bitch.
That delicious bitch.