They didn't listen, was all that I had been thinking as Jacob ran with me through the snowy forest over a half decade ago. The Volturi had been so bent on killing me that even with Alice's proof, they had not changed their mind. I remembered Alice kicking Aro in the jaw and sending him flying through the air as my mother told Jacob to run away with me. The last thing I heard of the battle was Carlisle shouting "Let her go!" when the Volturi captured Alice.

I had clung to Jake's shaggy fur as hard as I could as he ran and we were being pursued by one of the guard, a dark skinned thin man with red eyes and wearing the black cloak of the Volturi. We had been running for a few minutes with the vampire hot on our heels and the sounds of battle too far off to hear when a wolf howl split the air and the russet wolf below me started to whine and slow down.

The vampire took advantage of Jacob's distraction to catch up with us. I called Jacob's name over and over again, begging him to come back to me. "Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob!"

The light above me dimmed and I looked above me to see the vampire flying through the air, fangs bared. "Watch out!" I screamed, and Jacob came back to reality in that instant. He turned his head around and met the vampire head on before tumbling in the snow as I held on. Within seconds, Jacob and I were free and I looked back to see the vampire and his severed head land about three feet apart in the snow.

Jacob never stopped running with me until we were out of the country and deep in the Canadian Wilderness. Finally he stopped in the middle of a clearing that held a run down and abandoned cabin. It was evident that no one had been there in years. We had had no indication that it was there. We just found it.

Jacob phased back to a human behind a tree after I handed him one of the few changes of clothes that my mom had given me before the battle. He looked tortured when he came out from behind the tree in a pair of jeans and a long sleeve shirt. "What happened?" I asked him frantically.

He scooped me into a cradle hold and held me close. "They're all gone, Renesmee." He sobbed.

"All of them?" I asked in frightened disbelief.

"Jasper, Carlisle, Seth, Leah, Alice, Rosalie, Emmett, Esme, Sam, all of them."

I almost didn't want to ask him if my parents were ok, debating whether I wanted to stay ignorant and hope, or know the truth, whatever the outcome had been. The urge to know won out. "Are mom and dad ok, Jacob?" I asked shakily with teary eyes.

"I'm sorry Renesmee, but they're gone." I started to sob heavily into his shirt. He sat down on the snow and I cried into his shoulder as he sobbed silently, but I felt his tears drop on my back. I cried so much that I soon fell asleep in his arms, still crying.

I awoke who knows how much later in a small bed with a tattered, moth-eaten blanket and heard Jacob sobbing in the corner of the cabin with his knees pulled to his chest. I crawled out of the creaky bed and walked over to him and sat beside him, laying my head on his shoulder and crying.

The only thing that I now had of my parents was the locket mother had given me the night of the battle. I opened it to see the image of my parents, when life for us was still happy, and read the French words on the other half that mother had translated to mean, "More than my own life."

I still wore that locket to this day. I was now full grown and Jacob and I were settled in a cozy two bedroom cottage in the forests of Montana.

Jacob took me away from that cabin the next morning and we bought a used car with the money my mother sent with us. I had thought it strange when Jacob had called me "Vanessa Wolfe" and that he was my uncle while he was talking to the salesman, but I assumed it was something that my parents had talked about with Jacob, to keep me safe and under the radar of the remaining Volturi.

Jacob told me that some of the Volturi had survived, and fled after the massacre in that lonely snow covered field. Thankfully, Jane, Alec, Aro, and Caius were dead, same as Demitri and Felix. I found it sad that Marcus died. He didn't seem nearly as bad as the other two, he just seemed bored with life.

Countless other members of the guard were killed, but as far as Jacob knew, before the last wolf fell, a boy of only twelve, there had been about half a dozen of the Volturi still alive and someone new was calling the shots.

I looked at the picture of my parents again and felt tears welling, so I closed the locket and let it fall back against my neck before my tears destroyed the cheerful image beyond repair. I looked up to see that a sunset was framed in the window as it overlooked the peaceful lake and forest that Jacob and I now called home.

The words written in the locket flashed through my head again.

Plus de ma propre vie.

Yes mother, you had loved me more than your own life. To save me, you gave it up willingly, you and just about everyone else I loved.

Sometimes I felt so guilty for their deaths that I sunk into a bit of a depression, but then Jake would remind me that they did it because they loved me, and that would make me feel better. He was all that I had now, and I had vowed to him long ago that I would never lose him. I also would never leave him, not willingly at least.

I watched him now through the window as he chopped wood on a wide old stump in the front yard. Everything looked so perfect that I was almost able to forget what caused me to be here, but it often lingered at the back of my mind.

More things came to mind after I ceased lamenting the dismal fate of my family. What if the Volturi found me? I knew not if the mate of the vampire that Jake had killed when we fled was dead or alive. I hoped to heaven that she was dead, since the mate bond between Vampires was just as strong as the bond between imprints. If someone killed me, Jake would not rest until I was avenged. If the mate was one of the half dozen who had escaped, she would want me or Jacob dead as retribution for the death of her mate. For all I knew she was the one who had been giving orders after the deaths of the others.

That thought scared me more than if she were just one of the ones who had fled. If she were the new "Aro", she would surely have found a tracker to replace Demitri by now, and would have him looking all over the world for me. Maybe I was just paranoid, but to be safe Jake and I hadn't left our vast property in over a year.

I bought everything that we needed online and tried to make as much as I could. It was a good thing that I could sew.

Jake and I hunted regularly in the forest on our thirty acre property. It had been pricey, since it was a lake property, but Jake paid cash for it a few weeks after we left the cabin. My mother had sent us far more money than I had thought, and we ended up having well over half a million. If I used it wisely it would keep us for the rest of our lives, or, at least for the first century or two. Sometimes I forgot that we don't age.

Jake phased every time we hunted, which was usually once or twice a week, but I could tell he felt overwhelmingly alone in his now empty head. His pack, and Sam's, had been completely obliterated off the face of the earth. We also knew that no new boys had phased, which also meant that no vampires had entered Forks since the battle.

I finished drying a plate and put it in the original china cabinet of our Victorian cottage. It sometimes reminded me of the cottage I lived in when my parents were still alive and well, but there was nothing modern about our place. It had four rooms, two of which were bedrooms, and one other was a bathroom, with fading wallpaper plastering the walls on every side, and covering the windows were fading pale calico curtains, probably original too.

The house had furniture in it when we moved in; the previous owner had been an aging woman who was moving south to live out the rest of her days and let us have it, no questions asked. There was minimal paperwork too. I wondered if our place was still in her name.

The cottage that we called home had an aging refrigerator from when they were just coming out, bulbous and pastel yellow, in the the kitchen. The stove to cook on was wood burning, which was why Jake was chopping wood right now. The kitchen also sported engraved, white cabinets, and matched the wood-and-glass china cabinet. The kitchen sink had a single basin, instead of the double like in modern houses, with a simple copper faucet.

As far as storing food went, our house, thankfully, happened to have a root cellar that was currently filled with human food that I had grown and Jake had hunted in preparation for winter when game grew scarce. We learned that the hard way when we first moved here. We had had some pretty lean times back then. Even though I could subsist on blood and both of us could survive on raw meat, we still had to store food for the winter like squirrels.

Our room had an old double bed painted white, the head and foot-board of wood carved into graceful curves. We had a dresser that served us well, but the closet was shockingly small, at least by Alice's standards. It was fine for us. A mirror rested on the white dresser that looked exactly like something right out of Alice-in-Wonderland, which contrasted sharply with the bookcase that looked like it had been cut ready made from the forest rather than built.

The second bedroom was obviously meant to be a child's room, given the size of the bed. That was where I had slept until recently. There was nothing much to be said about the bathroom. The claw-footed tub was cool though.

The dining room had a rustic table and chairs that seated four. The chairs had backs of wooden dowels bent into a sharp up-side-down U and straight, vertical dowels that the filled the space of the U, so you had something to lean on.

Everything was the pale on pale color scheme that I had been used to at the house in Forks. Everything, that is, except for the living room. Its maple wood floor that spread throughout our house, so that wasn't much of a shock, but the room held the hunting-cabin-esqe fireplace. It even had a rack of antlers perched on the chimney. The living room also had two arm chairs of a pale faded floral, and one end table between them.

The rustic book case hugging the wall was stocked with books, most of them we had bought online when I was still growing up so I could continue to learn. I loved to learn, and read especially. Jacob read to me until I could read myself, (which was about a week), and then I almost never put a book down, and I was a fantastic speed reader. With the self educating I had, even though I'm technically only seven, I would have had my high school diploma by now.

Just because I was born seven years ago did not mean that I only had seven-year-old maturity. I was as mature as I looked. Since for my entire childhood I only had Jacob, I had grown up fast.

I continued to wash the dishes and was drying one when I heard a crash behind me and I turned in that same second. A pile of porcelain shards littered the wood floor, and then I realized that I had apparently, and involuntarily, thrown the plate that I had been drying against the wall.

That was weird, very weird.

Jacob ran inside the house when he heard the crash. "What happened Nessie?" he asked, concerned.

"I'm not entirely sure." I answered blankly. I held my hand to his face and showed him exactly what had happened.

"Hm." was all that he answered.