I expected my skin and my blood
to ripen, not be ripped from my bones;
like fallen fruit, I am peeled, tasted,
discarded. My seeds open
and have no future.
-Wendy Rose
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He heard his name being called—screamed —and it was close enough to be his own voice, too close to what he'd been looking for.
His monstrous paws darted into the clearing, and halted.
Her eyes met his and he saw it in her expression before he saw how that fiend, its smell stinging and vile, had its teeth locked on her, just around the soft bone at the point of her shoulder. Her blood was spilled all over her clothes, and in one sharp flicker of a millisecond, Jacob was reminded of the fear of another day: the clouds churning angrily through the skies, water spilling from their sopping hair, the discoloring beach, and the way her shirt, wet, clung lovingly to the bones of her shoulders as he beat the death out of her lungs, again and again, praying for her eyes to meet his.
The thought burned like a bat to the head and Jacob's head was filled with fury; the rest were coming from the side, but he didn't wait. He charged forward and ripped it away from her, teeth gnashing and claws cracking, a thunderous roar chilling even the four others who came into the gap and saw the two fierce figures disappear through the trees, one already seeming victorious in the weight and speed of violent loathing.
They took her to Jacob's house.
Soon enough Bella's best friend came running into his yard and there was Leah on the little porch with a cigarette, which she dropped in a fumble, and her eyes widened almost fearfully as if she'd heard a banging sound when she saw Jacob's face.
He bolted through the front door and he heard her screaming before he hurried with a sickened look into the next room to see all the tall boys surrounding the girl, every one wearing an expression of near-nauseated unease.
She seemed incapable of opening her eyes or even reacting to anything but the pain; he'd never asked her about it and he had no idea it was supposed to hurt this bad. Her face winced in whimpers between the almost-constant screams of what was surely the worst burning she'd ever been in; Jacob could have never imagined her like this, her nerves so completely crushed...
"Bells," he choked. The others moved quickly to let him through, and he was down on his knees, reaching for her hand...
As if it scalded him to touch her, his hand flicked quickly away: her hand was already shockingly cool.
Jacob's mind felt around in desperation, until he remembered. Her scar...
"Wait, wait, wait, wait," Jacob yelled shakily, "It just happened, maybe we can do something—She told me before she'd gotten bitten, and he just sucked the venom out..."
He had her lifted up against him, but there were several exclamations at his blundering madness and somebody was already grabbing him strongly at the shoulders and pulling him back.
"Are you crazy, you'd die before it did any good—"
Embry tightly held him back until Sam, tightly reasoning, said to Jacob, "It's too late. Can't you see she's bitten all over? Both her legs..."
For a moment Jacob looked at her, biting his lip until the tears started running hot down his face.
As Billy Black came slowly forward out of the corner, Jacob seemed to notice for the first time that his father was in the room. He just grimaced and moaned, "Dad..."
Billy's face was so vacant, it looked like he was only tiredly heading over to look out the window for a while before heading to bed; and he did stop next to the couch and glance out the window as if there wasn't a girl twisting around in excruciating pain, her heels recoiling sharply into the couch like she was trying to bury herself into its torn spaces.
But his hand seemed to act on its own accord, and his fingers twisted through a tangled mess of her hair that was hanging off over the armrest, lingering for one moment, and then letting it escape from him like air.
He had to be thinking, Not Charlie's girl. But to everyone who saw the tall tensing boy get up, cringing into the far wall like he couldn't stand to watch anymore, this was the end of Jacob's girl, the silencing of a favorite sound, loss of hearing, loss of sight.
After a long moment it was Paul, his eyes watching Bella's agony with pity and disgust, who said, "We ought to kill her."
Jacob didn't flinch; the rest were frozen in anticipation of what he would say.
Paul reasoned, but seemed almost afraid of speaking. "It's our job, isn't it? Newborns are the most dangerous. Either way. She can't be here when she's..."
A few pairs of eyes looked to Sam, whose face looked deeply troubled, but the most measuring of the whole group.
After a moment of consideration, he just said, "Jacob..."
From where he stood with his body buried against the wall, still not daring to look over at Bella, Jacob closed his eyes, his breath heaving for a long moment. For a minute all that was heard was Bella's helplessly dwindling whimpers, and Jacob seemed to speak just to shut that out when it simply became too much. His eyes were as decisive as they could manage as his gaze turned over to Sam, but they all knew there was really only one choice.
"Take her to them."
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.
.
When Sam, alone, appeared at the Cullen house carrying Bella's writhing, ripening body out of his Toyota and up to their porch, the reactions were speechless. There was no confusion as to what was happening to her.
Edward Cullen, his composure shaken, looked at his sister. "Why didn't you...?"
Alice was the least able to quite grasp the tragedy but nonetheless looked unquestionably unsettled, and said nothing. But Rosalie, her expression pained, sinister, and more fierce than any of the wolves had ever seen, glanced acidly at Sam, and grated, "Because of them."
"We had a rogue in the forest," Sam explained. "Only some thirty minutes after we first caught scent of it...Well, Bella just happened to be in the clearing. If no one had found her at that very moment..."
By now the entire family, examining Bella's cringing form with shock, shared the same look of amazement. There was a foreboding feeling, like a burning odor in the air; everyone understood quite numbly that this was tragic and terrible, but the very reason why was lingering somewhere, snickering wickedly from Bella's chilling wails.
"The one that attacked Bella..." Sam's voice was now tightening, quavering, "He wasn't alone. That's why we got thrown off looking for the first scent we caught...The other, we found closer to the border of the forest. She..."
"No—!" Edward now heard it in Sam's carefully controlled thoughts, and his face contorted in misery as he practically fell against the white banister on the porch. The rest waited fearfully for Sam to finish.
Sam had lost his composure at Edward's outburst, but the rest were waiting fearfully for him to finish. He pressed his knuckle to his mouth, then forcibly brought it back down. "Her dad came looking for her. She killed him. Charlie Swan's dead."
Emmett cursed. Alice buried her face into Jasper's chest.
With a tense, guarded look, Carlisle came forward and took Bella into his arms, carrying her quickly into the house. Esme watched her with heavy silence.
Sam then answered the question smoldering in Edward's eyes. "Jacob destroyed the one that got Bella. Tonight we will burn the remains of both of them close to the border."
That was all for Edward, who turned out of his tense stance to go after Carlisle, after Bella.
The rest—his sisters, brothers, and Esme—exchanged looks of desolate expectation, and then turned away from the last they'd ever see of Sam Uley, and went into the house, shutting the door behind them.
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There is an at times romantic but also disastrous human tendency to assign destiny to coincidence. For someone immortal, someone who will see the chance occurrences of not just one but many lifetimes, this tendency is only flirted with in occasional fancy. After many occasions of just barely possible circumstance, a person granted with eternal life, after a time, could casually monitor and perhaps even calculate the probability or frequency of that one-in-a-million, that chance meeting of two long parted, or a certain beautiful type of snow.
But Bella's circumstance was somehow unavoidably eerie, strangely astonishing to every single one of the Cullens. Bella would come upon her new existence, and recoil, falling victim to the mortal assumption that she had been sentenced, punished.
It was because of this profound shred of her past nature that Bella sought no peace with her new one. It was because of this she could not fully change.
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Bella opened her eyes and knew it was the last time she'd ever wake up; it was a strange thing, like what it would be like to fitfully fall asleep, to furiously lie still.
The first thing her eyes focused on was the reflection of herself in the great glass window at the back of the Cullen house. Her mouth fell slightly open and quivered like she was afraid of that perfection in the mirror, calling itself her self. Someone was running a comforting hand over her head; in the reflection, she saw Rosalie with the deepest look of defeat and grief. The strangeness of that affection was horrible, and Bella had to stand up and get a better look. She immediately felt the speed of her reborn body, the lightness of her awesome strength as she moved to stand and glance over into the window. She gasped slightly, and then her breath drew more deeply at the astonishment of that empty action, the air pushing bothersomely into her inconsequential lungs.
She gaped at herself in the glass, never imagining she would be this beautiful; closer to the door of the bedroom, Alice gave a tentative look.
And then Bella realized, and realized. As surely as her feet were on the floor, this was not a dream, and this was an after to the before: A door slamming, twigs flitting by her angry body in the dimness of the woods, and a creature.
"Charlie..."
Edward's hand had closed firmly around her wrist before she could make it to the door, a sad first of being able to touch her so strongly. She felt his voice at her ear, sounding more tortured than he'd ever sounded before, with her hearing ripped raw and anew.
As it was whispered, the newness of Bella's skin became heavier, still and cold: she felt as if she had been freezing solid for a hundred years, now anciently sharp, fossilized. Instantly, one hand felt for another wrist. Without looking down, she could feel that her bracelet was gone.
She felt she would surely tumble as she limped—but then glided like a ghost—back over to the window. Her alarmingly white hand came up to cover her face, stopping stuck in paralyzed disbelief over her mouth.
They could see that her eyes, looking like translucent hard candies, held more than the sadness for Charlie and her mother's grief. Where human eyes would seem in a daydream, hers seemed fixed and searching, farther away than any of them could see. She would begin to always do this, to look outside of the windows to the impossible depth, the swallowing trees.
That evening being the first night she would have to occupy herself instead of having her vividly telling dreams, she sat in the window and listened. From the haze of afar she heard the agonized pitches of not just one but several wolves howling; her arms jolted with the reminder, her fingers tensing as if she was still in pain, still transforming. Edward had been watching her, anxiously helpless, and his expression became pleading as she reacted just the same as ever to the pain of someone who was more than miles—some life—away now.
In a gasping moan, she whispered, "I can't..."
But there was no can or cannot; nothing to be done or not done or undone or redone. There was only existence and an always tasting far less sweet than she'd expected; it now seemed less like living, less like being, when coupled with the impossibility of doing anything else.