Disclaimer: Twilight Saga doesn't belong to me, but this version of VampWard is all mine. ;)
A/N: All your reviews for the prologue have made me smile like crazy. I would like to thank every one of you, who has reviewed, favorited, put on alert or simply... read RoALS. You guys make it worth my time to put my crazy thoughts in writing. Thank you.
Ready for the next chapter? Read on!
Chapter-2: Winds of Change
EPOV
A few weeks after Alice's "intangible" vision, I was standing on the front porch of our house with my two brothers, planning to make a baseball match out of the upcoming storm Alice had just predicted.
"Who's gonna be the referee if we all play?" Jasper asked with a frown on his face.
"You will," I replied, plucking the baseball cap off of his head and putting it on. I turned to look at Emmett and asked with a raised eyebrow, "I look better wearing it, don't I?"
Jasper tried to reach for the cap exclaiming loudly, "Hey! That's mine. Allie bought that for me."
"Then she'll get you another one," I said, holding the cap away from him. "You should thank me for giving Alice a chance to go to shopping."
He grumbled in response, obvious cursing the day humans decided to invent shopping malls.
Emmett snatched the cap from my hand and jammed it on his head. "I'm the good looking brother, remember? So you two should play fair. If there's a shortage of referees, we can always leave baseball and go and hunt down a few grizzlies."
"There isn't a shortage of referees," Esme's voice answered from the house as her footsteps approached us. "I'm the referee. I'm always the referee. Now, why don't you boys give Jasper his cap back?"
I smirked at Emmett, receiving one of his dimpled-grins in return. "Who said it's Jasper's?" Emmett asked innocently.
"Yeah," I butted in. "It doesn't have his name written on it."
"Actually it does," Alice's voice answered from behind us.
"What the …?" Emmett took off the cap, and sure enough, there was the asshole's name written on the inner seam of the cap … in Alice's handwriting.
"You would betray your brothers like that?" I asked her feigning a hurtful expression on my face. "Oh, little sister, how you wound me!"
She just rolled her eyes at me and snatched the cap from Emmett's hands. Putting it on top of Jasper's dirty blond hair, she grinned at us.
Jasper laid a kiss on her lips and smiled impishly at me. "That's the benefit of having a psychic wife."
I resisted an urge to stick my tongue out at him like a two year old kid and settled on sending him a grimace instead.
"I can always go and buy caps for you guys as well." The grin in Alice's voice made me reconsider whether I wanted a cap or not. Judging by her tone, the cap she intended on getting us could very well be clown hats.
~*~*~*RoALS*~*~*~
Jasper smacked the ball hard enough to make a sound like a thunderclap for the fourth time, making Emmett hi-five him, and I laughed at the two of them.
No matter how much I resented Carlisle's choice of meal, I could never resent him for this family life he had created for all of us. Aside from the part where they thought I was to be handled with a little bit of tact, I enjoyed being a part of this family.
I wouldn't change my brothers even a little bit; or Alice for that matter. Rosalie was a little debatable, but if she toned down the bitchy attitude a little bit, I think even she would be tolerable.
Alice was just taking her place to pitch when suddenly she stopped. Her eyes went glassy and she took in a deep breath. She was back to her usual self in a few short moments. No one other than Jasper and I even noticed her change in stance.
Jasper looked at her closely, possibly trying to check whether she was okay.
She nodded at him in reassurance.
And then she turned to face me. She didn't let me hear her thoughts like I hoped she would—like she did whenever a vision bothered her.
No, this time, she smiled sweetly at me, and then looking up at the windy sky, she sighed.
The wind is changing, brother. Her thought didn't reassure me—not even a little bit. Instead, it made me feel restless.
What change is the wind gonna bring with it?
BPOV
I sat there, holding my head between my hands for how long I had no idea. I kept my gaze fixed on the papers lying on the table before me, fearing that they might disappear if I moved my eyes.
"Yo, Bee-girl!"
I looked up from my seat at the sound of my best friend's voice. "What are ya doing here, girlfriend?"
Her attempt at trash-talking made me smile. "Hey, Ang."
Angela Webber, the daughter of the preacher who ran this home, plopped her ass down next to me and looked closely at me. "Bee? What's wrong? Where are ya?"
"I'm right here, Ang." As an after-thought, I added, "For now."
She splayed her hand in front of me, letting me see the mark proudly on display on her wrist.
"Another tatt? Really?" I asked her. "You turned 18 just three months ago! And already you have what? Four tattoos?"
"Five to be exact," she replied with a wink, motioning at her pants …. very close to her crotch.
I held my hands up in surrender. "I don't even wanna know about number-whatever!"
She bumped her shoulder with me and grinned. "That's what you do when you become all legit, Bee-girl. Get a tatt, fuck Ben Cheney, drink at least half your weight … you know, all the crazy shit? You don't sit alone looking like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders."
"First, you're not legally allowed to drink until you become 21," I said to her. "And secondly, Ben Cheney? Really? I thought he was too much of a geek for you."
Her smile broadened. "Well, you know what they say—it's usually the quiet ones."
"O—kay," I said cutting her off before she could start sharing about her sexcapades with sweet, innocent Ben Cheney. "In any case, I just turned 18."
"Yes, you did," she said with a nod before pulling out a large envelope from behind her. "And you're also officially a high school graduate."
"Shut up!" I exclaimed, almost tearing the package from her hands. Opening the envelope I found the papers I had been hoping to get for about a week now—my GED test results.
I shuffled through the papers and then let out a sigh of relief before launching myself at my friend. "Oh, Angie, I passed!" I told her, pulling her into a hug.
She hugged me back, but said in a grouchy manner, "As if there was ever a doubt of that!"
When we settled back on the couch, Angela raised an eyebrow at me. "So who was the stiff I saw leaving the room a while back?"
I shrugged. "A lawyer."
"For real?" She looked at me in surprise. "Damn! Girlfriend, I never thought I'd see the day when you'd join the rebellion," she said, wiping off an imaginary teardrop. "What did ya do?"
"I turned 18."
"Meaning?" she asked, looking confused.
I took a deep breath and decided to spill it all out. I had to confide in someone, and Angela was the only one I trusted with my life.
"That guy who came here? His name is Jenks. He's a lawyer … he's my parents lawyer."
"Your birth parents?" she asked in a whisper, her fake trash-talking style— which she was trying to perfect just to annoy the hell out of her father—falling away. "Do they want to meet you? After all these years?"
I shook my head, feeling the regret from an hour ago return in full force. "No. They're dead, Ang."
"Shit! Bee, I'm sorry."
Her apologetic tone made me give her a small smile. "I didn't even know the people. I'm not sure how to mourn the loss of someone I never had."
She wrapped an arm around my shoulders, offering me her support as she said, "You never knew them, but that doesn't mean they didn't love you, Bee. I bet they'd be proud as hell of you if they saw you now."
I looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "Then why do you always give your dad such a hard time? He loves you too."
She smiled, her eyes twinkling with mischief. "I know he does, but that doesn't mean I have to live like a nun. I do what I feel like. He needs to learn to not to hover."
A sigh bubbled up my throat. "At least you know he loves you. All I know is that they died when I was barely a year old and someone dropped me on the front step of your house."
She gave my shoulder a squeeze. "Hey, you're loved. I love you like my own sister, Bee, and my dad loves you too … sometimes even more than me."
I laughed at her remark and nodded. "You guys are the only family I've known, Ang."
"So what now?"
Her question sounded so simple but felt like it was loaded with enough ammunition to blow up my head. I reached out to grab the papers from the table and held them up to her.
"Jenks had instructions to come find me on my 18th birthday. He just disclosed my parents' last will and testament to me."
Angela frowned from beside me. "How did he know where to find you?"
I bit my lip, not yet believing his explanation myself. "He said he searched for Isabella Swan all over the country until he found me."
"But there must be more than one Isabella Swan in the continental U.S.!"
I nodded. "Yeah, but he showed me my mother's photo and unless he was really good with photoshop or whatever the hell they use to brush up pics now-a-days, I think I'm the one he's been looking for."
"Why?"
I handed her the photo Jenks had gotten me—the only photo I had of my real birth parents—their wedding picture.
A man in a charcoal grey tuxedo was holding a woman wearing a simple wedding gown to his chest and looking down at her with what I could only call pure adoration.
His face didn't look much like mine to be honest. He was good looking, I supposed, and with a mustache. However, his brown eyes looked hauntingly familiar because they were just like mine.
The woman in the picture, however, was a different story altogether. She looked like an older version of me—an older, happier and very much in love with the man version of me.
"You look like your mom."
Angela's words made me smile.
I nodded and continued on with the story. "Anyway, Jenks said they left me a sizeable bank account and a house in a place called Forks."
"Never heard of it," she said.
I took a deep breath, knowing she's gonna kick my ass for this. "It's in the west coast, Ang. A town outside of Seattle, Washington."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, and I'm leaving for there in two days."
Just as I suspected, my answer made her look at me like I had lost the screws holding my skull together. "Bee, are you out of your mind, girl? You can't go there."
"That's my home, Ang," I tried to reason with her.
She just shook her head and said, "No deal, Bee. You don't know the place and you don't know the peeps. Like hell I'm gonna let you go."
"I need answers …"
She held up a hand to silence me. "And you'll get them. Dad will find someone to look into your parents. Besides, you don't have the money to buy a plane ticket to Washington," she said with a satisfied smile, as if that lack of money was going to stop me.
"I already have my ticket," I told her calmly.
"What?"
I held up the piece of paper I had been looking at when she walking in and tried to smile. "Jenks was kind enough to buy a ticket for me with some of the money my parents left me. I'm going home in two days … to the place I was born in."
She sighed, suddenly looking defeated. "You won't stay even if dad asked you to, would you?"
"No. Ang, I love you and your dad. You've been my family since I can remember," I said slowly. "But these are my parents … the people who gave birth to me. I owe it to myself to see the place where I was supposed to grow up in. Please try to understand."
She finally gave me a curt nod. "Fine, you go, but always remember you have family here as well, okay?"
I nodded, hugging her once more. "I know that, Ang. I'm gonna miss you like crazy."
~*~*~*RoALS*~*~*~
I gripped the straps of my backpack tighter, and turned around to look at the place I grew up in for one last time.
The building sat like a dark shadow against the bright Arizona sun.
It is said that in order to see the light, you must step into the dark first, and that was what I was doing.
I was leaving the known life here in sunny Arizona to pursue a life in the gloomy Washington town of Forks.
A change was coming, and I hoped it was going to be a good one.
Turning back to look ahead, I got into the cab waiting for me.
I'm going home.
A/N: So how was the first peek into Bella's mind?
This fic is gonna be mostly in Edward's POV. The boy has so many things to figure out, don't you agree?
Share your thoughts with me and leave a review, please?
The song rec for this chapter is Wind of Change by Scorpions.
If you haven't voted for The Perfect Light today, go and vote! The poll closes on the 31st!
twifanfictionrecs category / top-ten-fics / top-ten-completed-fics-dec-2014 / (Remove the spaces before hitting enter) :)
Fic Rec: A Life Unplanned by savannavansmutsmut
Summary: Bella was doing fine raising her son on her own. That is, until her mother convinced her that her son should have a sibling. Not wanting her kids to have different fathers and look like a slut, she tracks down Man-Whore, Edward Cullen, and father of her son, unbeknownst to him. It's been a few years and Edward has changed a lot, or has he...
This fic already owns me. I have high hopes for this jerkward. Check it out and leave my friend, savannavansmutsmut some love. :)
Until next time.
Take care.
Ann
