Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight. Twilight is owned by Stephenie Meyer.
Author's Note: Thanks to Grassy Leaves and miss-chief managed!
After what seemed like eons of being consumed by flames, the fire was extinguishing; I felt my heart beat one last time, and then go silent. I hesitated to open my eyes, afraid to see what I had become. During the burning, a voice spoke to me softly and gently, and told me that I was becoming a vampire. I almost had to laugh through the pain. A vampire!? I figured I must have been hearing things. How could I be a vampire? They didn't exist!
I tried to remember what had happened that brought me to where I was now.
A piercing alarm bell sounded in our small house, small because it was only for my mother, father, and me. All of my grandparents had died, and both my parents had no brothers or sisters, so I had no aunts or uncles or cousins. I was very close with both my parents and it worried me to be unsure of their fates. My mother was carried in to a hospital on a stretcher, her face scarred and red from the burns. Through her labored breathing she explained to the doctors and firemen that our house had caught fire after a nearby tree had been struck by lightning. The doctors, in hushed whispers said that my father had already perished from burns and smoke inhalation. All this I heard from my own hospital bed. Apparently I had third-degree burns all over my body, and my prospects were not good. A doctor had told a nurse that I wasn't expected to make it through the night. The doctors gave me medicine to dull the pain, and it did, but it did not make me unconscious, so I could still hear everything around me. When I heard a doctor telling the nurses to send my mother to the morgue, I decided that it was time for me to die as well. What other purpose did I have on this earth now that my entire family was gone? My lungs were already heavy with the smoke I had inhaled, and it seemed easy to succumb to death. I wished that I would have been able to stay alive to work towards the dreams I had, but burned and maimed, even if I had survived, I would never have been able to accomplish anything. I had wanted to be a veterinarian, because I loved animals. My parents were zoologists who studied the behaviors of North American wildlife, so I naturally cared for animals. They were able to take the place of the cousins and siblings I never had. Back in the hospital, I wondered what had happened to my dog; hopefully the firemen had gotten him out.
I was ready to die, but then, just as my eyelids were about to close, I felt sharp pains at my ankles, wrists, and a prick of a needle near my heart. I was whisked away by an angel to a soft bed in a white room. Then the flames began.
In the present, I took a breath, and I could sense that my whole body had changed, that the action was different than it had been before. I finally decided to open my eyes, if only because I was now so curious about what had become of me that it overtook my fear of a new unfamiliar world.