PREFACE
I'd had more than my fair share of near-death experiences; it wasn't something you ever really got used to. It seemed oddly inevitable, though, facing death again like I really was marked for disaster.
I'd escaped time and time again, but it kept coming back for me. Still, this time was so different from the others.
You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers the monsters, the enemies.
When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?
A/N When Bella dreams about the little boy, I have it switching from a boy to a girl and back.
That way Bella dreams of EJ and Renesmee not just EJ.
Edward whispered, Twins. So Bella d been wrong. It wasn t just one baby it was two babies. No big surprise there. What hadn t she been wrong about?
I didn t look away from her red-spotted eyes, but I felt her hands lift weakly. Let me , she croaked in a broken whisper. Give them to me.
I guess I should have known that he would always give her what she wanted, no matter how stupid her request might be. But I didn t dream he would listen to her now. So I didn t think to stop him. Something warm touched my arm. That right there should have caught my attention. Nothing felt warm to me. But I couldn t look away from Bella s face. She blinked and then stared, finally seeing something.
She moaned out a strange, weak croon. Renes mee. E...J So beautiful. And then she gasped gasped in pain.
By the time I looked, it was too late. Edward had snatched the warm, bloody things out of her limp arms. My eyes flickered across her skin.
It was red with blood the blood that had flowed from her mouth, the blood smeared all over the creatures, and fresh blood welling out of a tiny double-crescent bite mark just over her left breast. No, Edward murmured, like he was teaching the monsters manners. I didn t look at him or them. I watched only Bella as her eyes rolled back into her head. With a last dull ga-lump, her heart faltered and went silent. She missed maybe half of one beat, and then my hands were on her chest, doing compressions.
I counted in my head, trying to keep the rhythm steady One, Two, Three, Four. Breaking away for a second, I blew another lungful of air into her. I couldn t see anymore. My eyes were wet and blurry. But I was hyperaware of the sounds in the room, the unwilling glug-glug of her heart under my demanding hands, the pounding of my own heart, and two others. Two fluttering beats that where too fast, too light. I couldn t place them I forced more air down Bella s throat.
What are you waiting for? I choked out breathlessly, pumping her heart again. One, Two, Three, Four.
Take the babies, Edward said urgently. Throw them out the window. One, Two, Three, Four. Give them to me, a low voice chimed from the doorway. Edward and I snarled at the same time. One. Two. Three. Four. I ve got it under control, Rosalie promised. Give me the babies, Edward. I ll take care of them until Bella . . . I breathed for Bella again while the exchange took place. The fluttering thumpathumpa-thumpas faded away with distance.
Move your hands, Jacob. I looked up from Bella s white eyes, still pumping her heart for her. Edward had a syringe in his hand all silver, like it was made from steel. What s that?
His stone hand knocked mine out of the way. There was a tiny crunch as his blow broke my little finger. In the same second, he shoved the needle straight into her heart. My venom, he answered as he pushed the plunger down.
I heard the jolt in her heart, like he d shocked her with paddles.
Keep it moving, he ordered. His voice was ice, was dead. Fierce and unthinking like he was a machine.
I ignored the healing ache in my finger and started pumping her heart again. It was harder, as if her blood was congealing there thicker and slower. While I pushed the now-viscous blood through her arteries,
I watched what he was doing. It was like he was kissing her, brushing his lips at her throat, at her wrists, into the crease at the inside of her arm. But I could hear the lush tearing of her skin as his teeth bit through, again and again, forcing venom into her system at as many points as possible.
I saw his pale tongue sweep along the bleeding gashes, but before this could make me either sick or angry, I realized what he was doing. Where his tongue washed the venom over her skin, it sealed shut holding the poison and the blood inside her body.
I blew more air into her mouth, but there was nothing there just the lifeless rise of her chest in response. I kept pumping her heart, counting, while he worked manically over her, trying to put her back together all the king s horses and all the king s men But there was nothing there, just me, just him.
Working over a corpse because that s all that was left of the girl we both loved this broken, bled-out, mangled corpse. We couldn t put Bella together again. I knew it was too late. I knew she was dead. I knew it for sure because the pull was gone. I didn t feel any reason to be here beside her. She wasn t here anymore.
So this body had no more draw for me. The senseless need to be near her had vanished.
Or maybe moved was the better word. It seemed like I felt the pull from the opposite direction now.
From down the stairs, out the door. The longing to get away from here and never, ever come back Go, then, he snapped, and he hit my hands out of the way again, taking my place this time. Three fingers broken, it felt like. I straightened them numbly, not minding the throb of pain.
He pushed her dead heart faster than I had. She s not dead, he growled. She s going to be fine. I wasn t sure he was talking to me anymore. Turning away, leaving him with his dead, I walked slowly to the door so slowly. I couldn t make my feet move faster. This was it, then the ocean of pain the other shore so far away across the boiling water that I couldn t imagine it, much less see it.
I felt empty again, now that I d lost my purpose. Saving Bella had been my fight for so long now. And she wouldn t be saved.
She d willingly sacrificed herself to be torn apart by that monster s young, and so the fight was lost. It was all over.
I shuddered at the sound coming from behind me as I plodded down the stairs the sound of a dead heart being forced to thud.
I wanted to somehow pour bleach inside my head and let it fry my brain. To burn away the images left from Bella s final minutes. I d take the brain damage if I could get rid of that the screaming, the bleeding, the unbearable crunching and snapping as the newborn monsters tore there through her from the inside out. . .
I wanted to sprint away, to take the stairs ten at a time and race out the door, but my feet were heavy as iron and my body was more tired than it had ever been before. I shuffled down the stairs like a crippled old man.
I rested at the bottom step, gathering my strength to get out the door. Rosalie was on the clean end of the white sofa, her back to me a crib in front of her. She was cooing and murmuring to the blanket-wrapped things in the crib. She must have heard me pause, but she ignored me, caught up in her moment of stolen motherhood.
Maybe she would be happy now. Rosalie had what she wanted, and Bella would never come to take the creatures from her. I wondered if that s what the poisonous blonde had been hoping for all along. She held two dark things in her hands, and there where two greedy sucking sounds coming from the tiny murderers in the crib the scent of blood in the air, human blood. Rosalie was feeding them. Of course they would want blood. What else would you feed the kind of monsters that would brutally mutilate there own mother?
They might as well have been drinking Bella s blood. Maybe they where. My strength came back to me as I listened to the sound of the little executioners feeding. Strength and hate and heat red heat washing through my head, burning but erasing nothing.
The images in my head were fuel, building up the inferno but refusing to be consumed. I felt the tremors rock me from head to toe, and I did not try to stop them. Rosalie was totally absorbed in the creatures, paying no attention to me at all. She wouldn t be quick enough to stop me, distracted as she was.
Sam had been right the things where aberrations there existence went against nature black, soulless demons. Something that had no right to be something that had to be destroyed. It seemed like the pull had not been leading to the door after all. I could feel it now, encouraging me, tugging me forward.
Pushing me to finish this, to cleanse the world of this abomination Rosalie would try to kill me when the creatures were dead, and I would fight back. I wasn t sure if I would have time to finish her before the others came to help. Maybe, maybe not. I didn t much care either way
I didn t care if the wolves, either set, avenged me or called the Cullens justice fair. None of that mattered. All I cared about was my own justice. My revenge. The things that had killed Bella would not live another minute longer.
If Bella d survived, she would have hated me for this. She would have wanted to kill me personally. But I didn t care. She didn t care what she had done to me letting herself be slaughtered like an animal. Why should I take her feelings into account?
And then there was Edward. He must be too busy now too far gone in his insane denial, trying to reanimate a corpse to listen to my plans. So I wouldn t get the chance to keep my promise to him, unless and it was not a wager I d put money on I managed to win the fight against Rosalie, Jasper, and Alice, three on one.
But even if I did win, I didn t think I had it in me to kill Edward because I didn t have enough compassion for that. Why should I let him get away from what he d done? Wouldn t it be more fair more satisfying to let him live with nothing, nothing at all?
It made me almost smile, as filled with hate as I was, to imagine it. No Bella. No killer spawn and also missing as many members of his family as I was able to take down.
Of course, he could probably put those back together, since I wouldn t be around to burn them. Unlike Bella, who would never be whole again.
I wondered if the creatures could be put back together. I doubted it. they where part Bella, too so they must have Inherited some of her vulnerability. I could hear that in the tiny, thrumming beats of there hearts their hearts where beating. Hers wasn t. Only a second had passed as I made these easy decisions
The trembling was getting tighter and faster. I coiled myself, preparing to spring at the blond vampire and rip the murderous things from the crib with my teeth.
Rosalie cooed at the creatures again, setting the empty metal bottle-things aside and lifting one of creatures into the air to nuzzle her face against its cheek.
Perfect. The new position was perfect for my strike. I leaned forward and felt the heat begin to change me while the pull toward the killers grew
it was stronger than I d ever felt it before, so strong it reminded me of an Alpha s command, like it would crush me if I didn t obey. This time I wanted to obey.
The murderer stared past Rosalie s shoulder at me, its gaze more focused than any newborn creature s gaze should be.
Warm brown eyes, the color of milk chocolate the exact same color that Bella s had been.
My shaking jerked to a stop; heat flooded through me, stronger than before, but it was a new kind of heat not a burning. It was a glowing. Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in
swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self disconnected from me in that second snip, snip, snip and floated up into space.
I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was. Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing to the very center of the universe.
I could see that now how the universe swirled around this one point. I d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.
The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood.
It was the baby girl in the blond vampire s arms that held me here now Renesmee.
From upstairs, there was a new sound. The only sound that could touch me in this endless instant. A frantic pounding, a racing beat A changing heart.