The Beginning of It All
It came upon her very suddenly.
She usually sensed it coming. Ha ha, she involuntarily thought weakly, I made a funny. She often knew when a vision was approaching. She sometimes pulled them toward her, whether to predict the next storm or determine the location of the nearest hunting game. Rarely was Alice Cullen ever caught off guard about anything, and even more so when it concerned her frequent visions. But this time was different.
It wasn't the first time. It had happened before. Thrice before. The baseball game back in forks. Twice in the hotel in Phoenix. All three concerning the same life, the same person...
The same threat.
Perhaps that was the reason this time. Perhaps the reason this one had seemed to sneak up on her was the same as the others. Because the same concern was the object of the vision. Because the same person was in danger.
Because Bella Swan's life once again hung in the balance of a choice.
As the foresight took hold of Alice, she stopped moving, stopped thinking, stopped breathing – not that she needed to anyway. All other functions were forgotten as she took in the moving pictures flashing in her mind, and she was powerless to stop the horror from revealing itself to her.
Bella stood upon the edge of a cliff. Where? Her long, dark hair swirled around her face in the cold wind. The sky around her boded rain. She's still in Forks, then. Her blue jeans and long sleeve sweater seemed out of place despite the lack of warmth in the weather. She seemed designed for warmer temperatures even though her features were pale and drawn; More so than I remember; is she sick? She was alone, but she seemed to be listening to something that apparently only she could hear. The open sea lay out before her. Her too loud, too slow truck was parked haphazardly a few yards behind her, forgotten as she stared into the thrashing water more than a hundred feet below her. No, Bella… She took a half-step toward the edge, an unconscious smile spreading across her face as she spread her arms and closed her eyes. No, Bella, NO! Bella Swan leapt from the rocky cliff she had stood upon, and her lithe form fluttered slightly as she fell freely through damp air and sea spray.BELLA! A scream, not of fear, but of thrill, escaped the girl's lips until she hit the ocean beneath her. Then there was only silence. She remained under the crashing waves. She didn't come back up.
Alice could still hear the scream resounding in her ears. In the seconds that it took for the vision to clear, for her eyes to register the reality of the living room around her, the Alaskan landscape just outside the windows, the quiet of the surrounding country; in the few short moments that demanded for Alice to remain in one spot, she digested the full meaning of her vision.
Bella had jumped off of a cliff. Bella had leapt to her death. Bella had more than likely died upon impact with the violent waves beneath her, or otherwise drowned. Bella must be dead. Bella had died. Not only that, but she had done it voluntarily.
Dear Lord, Bella had committed suicide.
Had Alice been able to, she would have cried. Had she needed to breath, she would have passed out from not inhaling for such a length of time. Had she been human, she might've collapsed from the sheer emotion the revelation was causing to erupt within her.
And as Alice recovered the ability to move, she registered the fact that she could still hear the screaming. It wasn't the same scream from the vision; shriller, less awed and more terrified, bloodcurdling.
Then, and only then did she realize that the scream was her own.
Sixteen-hundred feet away, while lying by the lake, Rosalie Cullen easily heard the sound of her sister screaming.
Sixteen minutes later, while lying in a depression, Edward Cullen easily ignored the sound of his cell phone ringing.
And it was only sixteen seconds after Bella jumped that Jacob Black dove in after her.
And that was the beginning of it all. The ushering in of the new moon.