When Love Was New Contest (2011)

Title of Entry: Lost and Found

Your pen name: bubbalicious_91

I had awoken to this life a mere 2 weeks ago with no memories of who I was, where I was and what had happened to me. I still didn't have many answers but I had found out my own name within minutes of opening my eyes.

I still remember that day clearly, every breath, every move, every mouthful I took from the humans' necks.

So many colors… I thought to myself with amazement as I watched the collage of colors the dust particles were making and they twisted and moved gracefully along with the air current that was passing through an open window.

"Bella?" a women's voice called through the front door as it squeaked open slowly. "Bella, baby, we're home!"

I tensed for a fraction of a second before moving faster then I could register and finding myself up and out of what appeared to be a kitchen and pressed against the staircase wall less than a second later. I watched silently from around the corner as the woman threw her purse and keys onto the table before turning around and calling out to her companion.

"Phil, honey, do you need any help?"

The man, who seemed to struggle a bit getting through the door with three large bags, told her not to worry and asked where this Bella was.

"I don't know, I've called her but she isn't answering." The woman turned from the man, leaving him to struggle as he heaved the bags into a sitting room, and started to retreat into the kitchen where I had laid moments ago, mumbling something about 'Bella' being asleep. Once she passed me I breathed in deeply, thankful that I hadn't been caught in the couple's home.

Something… delicious tickled my nose. A deep, robust, mouthwatering scent invaded my senses and I seemed to lose all control. My eyes rolled back into my head as I stepped silently from my hiding place, my ears intent on the sound of the woman's heartbeat, her every step, the way I could see her blood pulsing through the thin, almost translucent skin on her wrist as she reached for the light switch. I slipped into a low crouch, scrunching my leg muscles in preparation to lunge, my hands instinctively curling into claws, ready to dispatch her at a moment's notice.

The kitchen light flicked on and the woman froze for barely a second before letting out an ear-piercing scream at the sight of the gore-splattered kitchen. She stumbled back and I pounced, latching onto her back and wrenching her head to one side, my teeth piercing her jugular within the same second.

My eyes closed in ecstasy as the crimson liquid flooded my mouth, ran down my throat and gave me the greatest pleasure, whilst giving me relief from an ache in my throat I had failed to notice until now.

The woman in my arms struggled for a few seconds before she strained her neck around to see me, whispering one single word before her heart stop beating and I dropped her to the floor.

"Bella…"

"RENEE! RENEE, WHAT'S WRONG?" Phil darted into the kitchen, sliding on the bloodstained tiled. He fell to the ground at the sight of his partner's dead body on the floor, her head twisted at an abnormal angle and her eyes blank but wide open from the shock she had received moments before. He started to crawl over to her, sobbing and crying her name, not seeming to notice me until I growled and had him pinned to the wall. I bared my teeth at him whilst he struggled.

"BELLA? Bella, what did you do?"

Bella again? Why did they keep calling me Bella? Was I the girl they had been looking for? The girl the woman had supposed was asleep upon their return?

I couldn't worry too much about those questions - they would have to be answered later. Right now I couldn't focus on anything but the pulsing jugular of the man before me. He still struggled and questioned me as I moved my head toward him, running my nose up his throat so I could take in the full aroma of his intoxicating blood. He smelled slightly different to the woman I just drank but blood was blood to me and I needed it more than he did.

He yelled and grappled with my hands when he felt my teeth pierce his neck. His struggles grew weaker after a few long pulls and his attempts for freedom grew more pathetic as the seconds passed. He started to whimper and beg me but strangely enough he wasn't begging for his life like I assumed he would. He begged for answers.

"Why, Bella?" he whimpered as his heart beat its final beats. "Your mother…?" His heart went silent, his blood stopped pulsing and I froze.

Mother? What mother?

I dropped the man from my grasp and slowly turned toward the woman whose body was drained of color and was growing cold.

Did he mean…? No! He couldn't have; I would have known if she were my mother. Wouldn't I?

No, I wouldn't know. I couldn't remember a thing before I opened my eyes. I had no memory of her, of this man, of this house. I knew nothing. Blindly, I stumbled into the sitting room and looked around desperate to find something familiar. Nothing. Nothing in this room seemed familiar - not the bright red leather couch, not the gold trophies that adorned the bookshelves, nor even the many photos that sat alongside those trophies. I slowly and carefully took in the photos and all the faces in them. There were many of the short haired brunette women that now lay on the kitchen floor with the very same man that lay dead next to her. But in a few photos there was another shorter, younger girl with them.

She had long brown hair and hazel eyes that smiled sadly back at me. I carefully picked up the frame and searched the room for a mirror of some sort.

Was this Bella? Was I the girl they called for? The girl that stood wrapped in the arms of - who appeared to be - her mother? My mother?

I found a mirror in the entry way where the door still stood open and looked at my reflection. I gasped at the sight of blood that almost covered me from head to toe, dripping off my chin and onto the blue blouse I was wearing. Despite my horror at the sight, I also had to fight back the beast inside me that was desperate for me to lick my lips clean before moving onto find more; more blood, more death.

I placed the frame on the table just under the mirror and attempted to clean my face with the bottom of my shirt. It got most of the blood off but much of it was still smeared.

Figuring that was the best I could do for now, I picked the photo frame back up and looked at the teenage girl in it before looking back at my reflection. Though there were obvious differences between the girl in the picture and myself there was no mistaking that we were the same person. We had the same long brown hair, the same set lips, same almost delicate looking frame and the same shaped eyes, though the colors were different. What was once a rich chocolate brown was now scarlet.

I dare say that I might have searched the house for more details about myself and about the people I had just killed - to check that they were in fact my parents - but I hadn't had the time as the sound of approaching sirens reached my ears. Instinctively I'd known that sirens meant people and I hadn't wanted to want to make them my next victims, so I fled.

I ran for days without slowing down; I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I just knew that I had to run and keep running. It was obvious that I couldn't be around people anymore since I clearly wasn't like them, wasn't human, and would only endanger them or flat out kill them, so I ran past towns and cities, crossed border after border, avoiding any and all human life with the hopes of preserving it, though there was many an occasion where I found it almost impossible to resist as I grew weaker and I started to slow, before eventually collapsing where I now lay, half buried in pure white snow that had been falling constantly for the last 6 hours.

I watched the snow fall peacefully, taking in the individual patterns of each snowflake as it drifted down from the heavens, trying to ignore the thirst that was burning my throat from the inside out, when the resounding silence was broken by the sound of extremely light, extremely quick footsteps approaching.

When they came closer and I could hear the low murmur of voices, I growled as loud as I could manage. They stopped in response. They only stopped for a second before they began walking toward me again. I continued to growl, willing my weak body to be able to run away but it wouldn't. All I could do was lay there as three pale figures entered the clearing and searched the snow for me.

They were all eerily beautiful and still but something about them told me that they were ok. That didn't mean I stopped growling though.

The blonde male, who stood in front of the other two men, saw me first and was quickly beside me despite the deep snarl that came from my chest at his approach.

"Emmett, go find something for her to drink." He directed back over his shoulder, the dark curly-haired male nodded and ran off somewhere to find food.

I shook my head weakly, I knew what he wanted me to drink and I didn't want it. I refused to kill another person.

"It's ok, everything's going to be fine. Edward?"

I looked at the bronze haired boy who now approached us but refused to look at me, his eyes instead scanning the tree line.

"She's silent." His smooth velvety voice rang out through the clearing and into my soul. He was beautiful, but so were the other men with him. He… he was different though. He was perfect. He was lean but muscular and moved with a grace that could only be rivaled by lions. His hair was the most curious shade of bronze I had ever seen and it stuck up this way and that, tousled by the wind. I gasped at the sound of his voice when he called for the other man to hurry.

My gasp seemed to have drawn his attention and he finally met my eyes. They were gold, a beautiful butterscotch that seemed to melt as he looked back at my surely, disgusting, red eyes. The world fell away in that moment; nothing existed except him as he approached, just as entranced as I was.

When he was beside me, he knelt and ran his fingers through my matted hair. Lamely, my hand searched for his as the other man stopped his examination of me and sat back to watch our interaction. The bronze boy's hand found mine and intertwined our fingers before looking at the blonde man crouched across from him.

They appeared to be having a silent conversation that I couldn't follow until the blonde man spoke again.

"Ok Edward," he sighed, his eyes flicking down to my limp form for a moment before looking back at my angel. "We'll talk about this later. Right now, we need to get some blood into her."

I started to shake my head again, dislodging Edward's hand from my hair, and tried to sit up.

"Shh, it's ok," Edward whispered to me, running his thumb over my knuckles and a hand over my arm to calm me. "It's not human blood, it's animal blood. We don't drink from humans, it's ok."

I relaxed a bit under his touch and the sound of his voice, trying to absorb this information. I knew I was a vampire - that was kind of obvious from the whole bloodlust thing - but I had no idea that I had another source that would sustain me. I looked back into Edward's eyes and then into the blonde man's - who was still looking at me curiously - noting that his eyes were the same color as Edward's.

Edward followed my gaze and seemed to understand my inquiry.

"Yes, ours are gold because of our diet. Yours could turn gold if you kept drinking from animals on a regular basis, instead of the red they are normally. Though your eyes are as a black as coal at the moment. When did you last feed?"

I frowned. Black? What is he talking about?

"What… black?" I rasped out. The smile Edward gave me in answer was completely disarming and completely crooked. I wanted to see it again and again and wanted to be the one to put it there, given the chance.

"When your eyes turn black it means you're thirsty. You didn't know this?" the blonde man asked incredulously.

I shook my head in response and Edward's smile disappeared, staring intently at me in confusion.

"How old are you…?" He trailed off, not knowing my name.

"Bella," I ground out again as the flames became almost intolerable when I breathed.

"Bella…" he mumbled under his breath, seeming to test it out with a small smile tugging at his beautiful lips. "How old are you, Bella? How long since you woke up to this life?"

I closed my eyes as his hands resumed their exploration of my hair before gasping my answer.

"2 weeks."

I was met with shocked silence and upon opening my eyes I was met with two disbelieving gazes.

Edward opened his mouth to answer but was cut off by the third figure I had seen leave, as he re-entered the clearing with a rather large moose in tow. I breathed in again out of habit and was assaulted with the smell of the animal's blood. It smelt similar to a human but completely different at the same time, but the smell didn't matter - I was too starved to care and my senses went into overload as I started to whimper and struggle to sit up.

Edward moved behind me and placed his arms under mine before pulling my body up so that my back was against his chest, with his arms folded around my waist to keep us upright. The large man that held the moose handed it over to the blonde who was crouching beside me and then ripped the moose's throat open with his fingers and quickly placing the wound to my lips, holding it there for me.

I latched on greedily and had the moose drained in seconds. The big man gaped at me in astonishment before removing it and throwing it aside.

"Emmett, can you go find another one? Bella is a newborn," the blonde man said as he lifted my head by a finger he had hooked under my chin and looked into my eyes.

"Sure, Carlisle. Be back soon, Bella." The man called Emmett was gone a second later.

I tried to sit up a little straighter but Edward tightened his hold on me making it impossible to move, so I let him pull me closer and rested my head on his shoulder.

I felt so safe in his arms, in his presence, and that was something I hadn't yet felt since I woke into this world of confusion, chaos and blood. Yet here I sat in the arms of what must surely be an angel with a drained moose laying only feet away and I had never felt so peaceful, so calm and so in control of myself.

I faintly heard the blonde man, Carlisle, ask me who created me but I shook my head in response. I had no idea what he meant by 'created' but I knew that there was no one there when I woke, and there was no one there to stop me from killing the people that were apparently my parents, and there was certainly no one to guide me until they came and I saw Edward.

Edward was my sun now, my guiding light, and I would go where he went for the rest of eternity if he gave me the chance to prove my worth to him. I knew that he was my soul mate and in this terrifying and horrid world there was no way that I was going to let go of him. Thankfully he didn't appear to be inclined to let go of me anytime soon as he pulled me closer and let his head lay on my shoulder, seeming to ignore the curious but happy gaze Carlisle was sporting.

After a few minutes Emmett came back with another dead animal. After I drained that, Emmett and Carlisle picked one carcass up each and danced into the forest to do God knows what with them, whilst Edward shifted his position behind me to pick me up bridal style and we headed off into the woods at a leisurely pace.

I wrapped my hands around his neck to secure myself to him though I knew he wouldn't drop me and breathed him in. He smelled divine, like honey and cinnamon with something else I couldn't quiet put my finger on.

"Where are we going?" I said lazily into his neck.

"We're going home, Bella." His answer sounded so simple but confounded me at the same time because I didn't have a home. I didn't belong anywhere but right where I was at this moment - in his arms. I didn't even know if he was going to allow me to stay here with him.

I felt him chuckle and looked up to find him smiling crookedly down at me.

"You are coming home with me to meet my family. I can't let you go now that I've found you, Bella." He ducked his head and buried his nose in my hair; breathing deeply before muttering two words that sent shivers up my spine and secured my place in his arms, in his life, forever.

"My Bella."

Author Note: Hi All! This story was originally written for the 2011 When Love Was New contest, it has been active on my account over on Stars Library since 2011 but it had not been posted here so just thought I'd repost since it's one of my fav pieces of fanfic that I've written. Bye!