CHAPTER IV

Fire slides down the back of Bella's throat like molten glass. In her mind's eyes she sees the delicate tissues there stripping away, curling like birch bark. She snaps her eyes open and nearly chokes with horror. The air is fuzzy. Had her vision been impaired somehow? Suddenly she realizes that she's merely seeing the dust motes in the air, millions of them riding a shaft of sunlight sliding in between the curtains. Before she can refocus her eyes, the name is on her lips.

"Edward?"

She can only breathe the word because the mere thought of making her vocal chords vibrate makes her want to scream in agony.

But Edward is not there, and Bella's eyes land on two women she doesn't recognize. One is slender with blunt white-blonde hair and a hopeful expression, the other has dark hair and feline-shaped eyes. Emmett watches her warily, his eyes serious, assessing. He is making an effort to block both the women from view. Bella wonders what he's protecting them from.

Then, there's Jasper.

"He's not here, Bella. He wishes he could be, and he will be soon." His eyes are intense but wary, and slightly unfocused. "We need to take you hunting now. It will help the burn." She knows he's right but she can't quite seem to make sense of her surroundings, her . . . existence. She considers the tiny dust motes for a moment. Instead of being dirty, they seem beautiful, and the light bounces from them like gold dust. She doesn't recognize her body at all, and even the expansion of her chest as she breathes feels oddly mechanical. Pointless. A phrase comes to mind, though she can't place it—ghost in the machine.

They're down the hall before she even realizes she's moving. Jasper is in front of her, or beside her or behind her, and his hovering makes her angry—so angry she wants to turn and rip his fucking head off. But as suddenly as the urge rises, it's gone, leaving a dull empty feeling in its place.

"I'll come too." It's the blonde speaking. She's pulling coats and boots from a closet near the front door, but Jasper waves her off.

"No need for those. Let's just get her out," he says tensely.

Bella doesn't like him speaking of her as if she's not even there, but the feeling is rough like an emery board, not blade-sharp, and she doesn't react. The door swings wide, revealing the shimmering afternoon sunshine. For one moment, she glances down at the skin of her arm, it's even more beautiful than the dust in the bedroom; she wants to strip it off and leave it in a lifeless pile on the threshold.

She makes a feral sound and sprints toward the cover of the woods. From behind her come footfalls, and voices.

"Don't want to miss this." She can hear the grin in Emmett's voice, but Jasper is not amused.

"Pay attention."

A million smells assault her, sliding over her face like cobwebs as she plows recklessly through them. Bella remembers a recurring theme from her human dreams. In the dream she takes one step and bounds down the block, but she's moving in slow motion, and her pursuer looms closer as she slowly sails past the houses on Yucca Drive. Now, she whips past the enormous pines and nothing can catch her. Something niggles at her to try to remember the feeling of dreaming and sleep, but the impulse is overwhelmed by the burn of her throat and the sudden wet smell coming from. . . there!

Through a break in a stand of gnarled trees Bella sees the brown-yellow eyes, the staring, frozen panic of the wolverine. There is a brief snarl--from the animal or from her own body, she doesn't know—and suddenly her nose is full of bristly fur, and she presses her mouth to the rich liquid pulse of life as it pours from the beast's body. It does not taste good, and she gags on the blood, and it sprays from her nostrils, but she's swallowing as fast as she can, desperate for relief. The effectiveness of the blood is like cold water run over a burn. It sweeps away the outer layer of sensation, yet leaves a deeper, threatening pain beneath, ready to bloom again once the water stops.

"Easy, Bella. You're—" Emmett is at her shoulder, too close. Does he want to take the wolverine from her? Bella reacts before she can think. Her arm shoots back and meets him squarely in the head. He gives a startled yelp and tumbles back, head over heals, and again, before hitting a tree fifteen yards away.

The wolverine is empty now, and Bella's up, sprinting away from the carcass to hunt again. She takes another animal, and another. She runs wildly, taking no stock of where she is. She wants to get lost and for Edward to find her. She no longer keeps track of what she has killed.

Finally she stops, kneeling over the body of a female moose. It's not quite drained yet, but Bella has reached her limit. She flops to her backside, belly aching and taut, and looks up to see a small moose calf shuffling nervously in the distance, staring at the thing that has killed its mother--and, in so doing, has taken his own life as well.

Something like a sob breaks between Bella's ribs, and then the woman with blonde hair is crouched beside her. Bella doesn't know this woman, doesn't really want her there now, and when she abandons herself to the woman's embrace she wishes it were Edward's. But she's in no position to be choosy now.

* * * * *

"Do you plan on typing all night?"

Bella looked away from the screen and blinked. It was two in the morning. She's been typing non-stop for nearly three days. Her only pause, apart from another hunting trip, came when she broke the first keyboard—it was too flimsy under her new fingers—and Kate and Emmett went into town to buy another one. Or, three actually, and a good thing because she had broken another since. This one seemed to be holding up, though. That or, she was finally growing accustomed to some of her new strength.

Bella was writing about her relationship with Rene, both the mothering and the being-mothered, and she had 54 pages so far, so maybe she'd done enough for now. (She had written over 300 pages about Edward and the Cullens before she even began on Rene, and she was ashamed.) Bella saved the document (Renee Higginbotham Swan Dwyer) and closed it.

"I suppose I ought to take a break. Be sociable."

She clenched her teeth and looked up at him where stood in the doorway. A pang shot through her at how beautiful he was, and she wanted fervently to see Edward, to know him with these eyes, but she smothered the thought. She was staring at the scars that laced Jasper's neck and throat. He was just as lethal as he was beautiful, and the new Bella wasn't any less intimidated by Jasper than the old one had been before she could see the scars. He must have felt that from her because he sat on the floor and crossed his legs.

"For whatever it's worth now, Bella, I'm so sorry for what I did to you."

She replies quickly. "It's what I wanted." It surprises her, how the voice coming from her charred-feeling throat, sounds soothing and cool, like the way autumn nights in Phoenix sometimes felt after a 105 degree day. She seizes the memory and claims it, wanting to capture the way things felt before vampire sensations.

"Even so," Jasper said, "it's early yet. Sometimes receiving our deep desires is less satisfying than the desire itself."

It was a clumsy way to say it, and Jasper looked uncomfortable. She didn't know if it was because he had trouble finding the words or if he just didn't like being around her.

From the first, Bella had wanted Jasper to like her; and even more, since she knew him as the husband of her dearest friend, she yearned for his approval as she had Esme's and Carlisle's. There had always been an unnerving distance between them, one of Jasper's making. As much as Bella wanted to believe it was for her safety's sake, she had been frightened it was something more.

"Whatever happens, I'm going to make the best of it," she said, more brightly than she actually felt.

"Good. That's a good attitude." She hadn't fooled him of course, but he didn't push.

Jasper rose and the two of them walked into the living room where Kate and Tanya were playing World of Warcraft on two enormous flat-screens. Irina looked up from the beanbag chair where she was crocheting . . . something. She looked happy to see Bella and the bag rustled as she extracted herself. She approached Bella slowly, holding the object toward her like an offering.

"It's a light sweater, more like a bolero," she explained. "I thought the color would suit you." It was a deep, nameless blue, unlike any she was familiar with, and Bella wondered what color she would have called it before.

"It's amazing," Bella said, stroking the net of silky fibers. "Thank you."

"I'm glad to do it," Irina said fervently.

Emmett strode into the room just then, with his arms raised in triumph. He held a mud-smeared dry-walling trowel in one hand, and he was bellowing. Every head snapped to look at him in bewilderment as he made a raucous, growling noise like a broken garbage disposal.

Kate laughed and hurled a knick-knack from the computer desk at him. Emmett snagged it before it could do any damage.

"I'm throat singing," he said in response to Bella's quizzical look.

"He thinks he's throat singing," said Kate.

"You can see why Rosalie threatened to divorce him the last time he took it up," added Tanya.

Emmett's grin slipped but was back in place almost instantly.

"Well, that's why I have to practice when she's not around. Good to see you again, girlie," he said, with a wink to Bella. "How's the great American novel coming?"

"Great," she said dryly, and looked pointedly at the mud smears on his shirt. "I'm sorry about the wall," she said, again.

"Seriously, don't worry about it. It just gave me a chance to be all manly."

"Don't say that around Esme. She could out-drywall you any day," Jasper said.

Bella had begun to understand why vampire homes had the enormous glass wall. There never seemed to be enough space. Being in a confined space made her nuts; her one attempt at a shower had to be abandoned after only a couple of minutes, and she finished rinsing her hair in the out-door spigot.

Carmen and Eleazar's room had a large picture window, but it hadn't been enough when the claustrophobia set in. As she sat typing, she wondered if she might just run through a wall, and no sooner had the thought struck her than she found herself in the hallway, covered in drywall dust. Fortunately she hadn't taken out a load-bearing stud, and Kate reassured her that Carmen really had been wanting to repaint the bedroom walls for quite a while. Bella chose to believe it.

Afterward, Tanya reluctantly gave up her room, one with a glass wall, for Bella to type in.

They were all gathering at the dining table for a game of Apples to Apples, ("Glad you could condescend to join us," Tanya told Bella with a sharp smile), when Emmett's cell phone buzzed.

Cards scattered to the floor as he checked the screen, and he was out the back door in a flash. They had only finished one hand when he returned.

"I'm going to have to take a rain check," Emmett said, a smile on his face.

"Where's she at?' Jasper asked,

"Chile."

Tanya made a sound of approval. "Nice."

Emmett nodded and shifted from foot to for a moment, ill-at-ease despite the smile, and finally asked Jasper if he'd come get some stuff together with him. Bella watched nervously as the two glided down the stairs into the basement.

"Turn your card over," directed Kate, and she did.

"Delicious," the card read, and the table chuckled. Even Bella forced a laugh. Kate, Irina, and Tanya played Pina Coladas, Jane Eyre, and Mel Gibson respectively, and Bella chose "Jane Eyre."

"I'll be right back," she said, deciding not to care what Tanya thought, and slunk down the stairs as quietly as she could.

Rosalie must have told Emmett something, and whatever it was he would pass to Jasper. She wasn't sure what Jasper might pass on to her.

Bella had Googled her name the first night after she had "awakened," after the horrible first-hunting trip.

At the time, there were few articles on The Forks Forum, and they said very little, mostly mostly sympathetic, carefully constructed stories to let residents know, "this is one of our own." The writer, Ray Igles, sounded like he might have cared about her, or her father. More so than the Seattle Times where the headline read:

Daughter of Forks Police Chief Goes Missing: Boyfriend's family questioned

Her stomach went hollow as she read the heart-breaking quotes from her father. Even Rene sounded oddly non-hysterical, just mute and flat between the quotation marks. When she could no longer bear to think of her parents, she let her mind drift to Edward, and what it might mean if Edward and the Cullens were questioned too closely. What if the police wanted to administer polygraphs?

She hovered with her ear to the door where Jasper and Emmett were speaking in such hushed rapid voices that, even now, she had to strain to understand what they were saying.

"Damned wolves are causing problems."

Jasper said something she couldn't make out, and then Emmett spoke again.

"She didn't elaborate, just said the Quileutes are pushing things pretty hard. I don't think they're in physical danger. Not yet."

"I still wish I knew better what the hell was going on."

Whether she had made too much noise in her descent or some sixth sense that alerted them to her, she didn't know, but the door creaked open and Bella actually stumbled forward. Unlike before though, she managed to catch herself before she could fall and looked up directly into Jasper's leonine eyes. She froze there for a moment, startled by his unreadable expression.

Emmett slipped past him and put a heavy arm around her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "They know how to take care of themselves."

"I can't help it," she gasped. "I don't want them to be in trouble. I feel like I've brought this on them." She pressed a hand to her mouth to block off a threatening sob.

"If anyone has done that, it's me," said Jasper.

And even as she stood there, comforted against Emmett's bulk, Bella felt overwhelmed by her loneliness and fear and self-recrimination. Then she wondered if the emotions were solely her own.