7. NIGHTMARE
I spent a silent dinner with my father, who seemed to know that there was something bothering me, but he didn't ask about it. Tyler and Angela had both tried to call me after everyone went home, but I didn't want to talk yet. After eating, I went to my bedroom and listened to music for a while. All I really wanted was to distract myself from the chaos of the afternoon, but things worked out better. In the end, I fell asleep.
I was in the green fairy-glow of the forest, at the edge of First Beach. I could hear the ocean. I felt a hand on mine and, looking to the left, I saw the dark eyes and chestnut skin of Jacob Black. He was walking, and I realized I was walking too. We were heading away from the shore, though, and into the dark tangle of the forest.
He looked frightened of whatever we were walking away from, but I was frightened by the shadowy trees, and I did not want to follow him into the bush.
"Run, Bella!" He urged.
Other voices whispered out to me, from unseen mouths in the forest. "Bella," they said. "Run, Bella." "Run." "You have to run."
"Why?" I asked, unable to stop my feet from moving into the darkness.
"It's him," the whispers said. "Him." "It's because of him."
"Run from him, Bella!" Jacob said, though I could no longer see him.
"Run away from him." The whispers agreed as I crashed around the trees, trying to find where Jacob had gone.
The voices stopped suddenly. Terrified, I tore around, trying to find someone to help me.
Edward stepped out of the darkness of the trees. The mud from his fight earlier was still on his face, but now it mixed with dark blood that dripped thickly from his mouth and chin, staining the front of his shirt. His two brothers were behind him, blood smeared on their hands and arms. Each of them had one hand on Edward's shoulder. They both had looks of calm superiority on their faces.
Edward looked different. He had that same wild, black-eyed look of panic that he'd had the first time we met. He was straining against their hands, trying to get to me. He grimaced with the effort of trying to free himself, and I saw that his teeth were pointed and sharp. Blood welled between them, turning his mouth grotesque.
"Bella!" He said, his teeth grinding.
I tried to step backward, but tripped and fell.
"Run." Edward ground out. Blood bubbled on his lips. He took a shuddering breath and snarled, "RUN!"
"We'll never be like you." Emmett and Jasper said together, and they released their hands. Edward surged toward me as if in flight.
As his teeth tore into my neck, I woke up.
I stared at my ceiling. For a moment, I didn't know where I was. As I tried to catch my breath, I remembered that I'd moved to Forks. The fear was still real in my mind, and my eyes darted around the room, trying to confirm that I was safe. Behind the fear, though, I felt sadness. I felt despair. I didn't know why.
Music was still playing in my headphones, and my ears were sore from the way they'd pressed against my head while I was asleep. The light was on and I was fully clothed. The clock read 5:24 AM.
Hands and arms still heavy from sleep, I fumbled out of my clothes and crawled back under the sheets, trying to drift off once more. It was no use; my subconscious had dredged up the very images I'd refused to face before. Jacob's story and the incident with Emmett and Jasper had rung true to me on a base level, confirming some belief that I couldn't quite place. There was something about Edward Cullen that was extraordinary – I'd seen that much at the accident – but it hadn't fully sunk in until hearing Jacob's story. Emmett and Jasper's aggressive behavior only increased my suspicions.
I tried to be quiet as I gave up on sleep. I put on a pair of shabby sweats and made my bed. I hardly ever did that, but it helped me clear my mind as I tried to decide how to deal with the far-fetched ideas I now held about Edward Cullen. When I ran out of things to do, I decided the best course of action was to do some research. Unfortunately, my father's idea of technology was a ten-year-old PC with dial-up internet connection. It was slow and riddled with irritating glitches, but at least it worked.
As I waited for it to boot up, I looked at my phone. Mike and Jessica had both tried to call me later on in the evening, meaning four separate people had wondered if I was upset about the beach. I couldn't just ignore that. I typed up a text message and sent it to all of them.
i didn't feel like talking last night. don't worry, i'm fine.
i just don't want to talk about what happened. thanks
though, i appreciate you guys calling. love, bella.
After it sent, the computer had finished starting up, so I began my research.
Jacob had told me that the 'cold ones', including Edward, were vampires. But vampires were such a staple in human culture and belief that I knew I'd be flooded with fiction and novelty sites if I searched for that. I sighed. How could I expect to find anything factual when most people believed monsters to be a fantasy?
I finally decided that if I were going to find anything useful, it would be from the original stories about vampires. They were the ones that purported to be truth, after all. I searched for 'vampire mythology'.
I found an encyclopedia-like website that claimed to have every vampire myth known. There was a vast list of the names given by different cultures, all with their own incarnation of the creature. Somewhere in all this there had to be something that matched what I'd seen.
I read carefully through the descriptions, looking for something familiar. Most seemed to be constructs made to excuse unfaithful husbands or explain the deaths of infants. Many stories were based around unhappy spirits of the improperly buried dead. There was hardly anything that resembled what I'd seen in movies, and most of the stories didn't even focus around the drinking of blood. And the Quileute story, the one that Jacob had told me, wasn't listed at all.
Only a handful of the myths matched even one factor from what I'd seen from the Cullens, and there was another problem on top of that. The website had backed up the idea that vampires couldn't come out in the daylight; that sunlight would kill or burn them. This obviously didn't apply to Edward Cullen. Though Forks was hardly a tropical resort, the sun did shine on it. I assumed that sunlight strong enough to grow such incredible plants would be enough to kill a vampire.
Frustrated with my lack of results and feeling stupid for entertaining the idea of vampires at all, I decided I had to get out of the house. I changed into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, pulling on my boots and raincoat, and went downstairs. The police cruiser was gone from the drive, and I remembered suddenly that my father had planned to go fishing today.
I stepped out of the house without any clear idea of where I was going. There was nowhere I wanted to be that didn't involve a three-day drive. Still, the cool, fresh air on my face did a lot for my mood. It was overcast but not yet raining. I walked past my truck and headed toward the woods beyond our yard. Normally, my poor sense of direction would have prevented me from wandering into a forest by myself. But every summer growing up, my dad had taken me hiking through these woods. I was confident that I knew them.
There was a narrow, snaking trail through the trees. I listened to the mud sucking at my boots and the jays crying as I passed. I tried to recall the names of the trees around me, but was only able to identify the Sitka spruces and the hemlocks. My dad knew them all, but I had never had much aptitude for plants.
As my frustration began to dissolve, my pace slowed. I could hear drops of water patter against the leaves of the canopy, but I wasn't sure if it was raining or simply the drip of dew, or even water left from yesterday's shower. Feeling less tense, I took a few steps off the trail and sat down on a fallen tree to think. The forest was an ethereal haze of green so like what I saw in my dream that the images came rushing back to me. I closed my eyes and listened to the twittering of birds, to the beginning buzz of insects. The sound of water dripping was occasionally punctured by the sound of a branch falling or a tree rustling with the wind.
I tried to compile a list in my head of what I knew. I knew that Edward was different, that his whole family was special. He'd protected me from the van, and when he'd been in the brutal fight with his brother, they had both walked away with nothing damaged but their pride. Jacob had told me they were vampires.
But was that really possible? Jacob hadn't been trying to convince me, he'd been telling me a scary story that he didn't believe himself. The fact that the Cullens weren't allowed on the reservation didn't mean much – it could be because of any number of reasons – and the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that all the members of the Quileute community would know why. If the elders didn't think the kids needed to know, they wouldn't have told them. The kids may have made up their own story about why, and rumor could have brought that story to Jacob.
As for the legends… well, Jacob also said that his people could turn into wolves, which was the basis for their hatred of the vampire. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Jacob's ancestors were werewolves, so why had I taken the vampire part so seriously?
I tried to talk myself out of the silly idea, but the fact remained: I'd believed the Cullens were vampires because of what I'd already seen, what I'd seen with my own two eyes. Superhuman strength and beauty, unusually pale skin, eyes that shifted color. Was it such a stretch to believe that Jacob's criteria could also apply? Did they also drink blood? Could they be immortal?
If they really were the same people Jacob's great-grandfather knew, they must be immortal. But there was no way to know if that was true, no one could really confirm it. The current elders would only have been small children when the treaty was created. Children remember things differently; real events become colored by imagination. I clearly remembered once being attacked by a fire ant the length of my arm, but in retrospect it was obviously my mind exaggerating things. How could I know for certain that the childhood memories of the Quileute elders weren't equally vulnerable to fantasy?
But as I tried to convince myself that it was all impossible, other things began to register, small things I hadn't quite processed. They never seemed to eat, they moved with shocking grace regardless of build, they had incredibly sharp reflexes, and I couldn't forget the display of speed when the boys had fought. There was the way Edward sometimes spoke with an unusual cadence that would be more appropriate to a turn-of-the-century novel than a twenty-first-century classroom. There was his odd insistence that he could 'read people'. He'd skipped class the day we did blood-typing. He and his family had twice confirmed that they were forbidden from First Beach.
And what about what he'd said at lunch? 'What if I'm the bad guy?'
Regardless of whether he was a vampire or not, whether he was a hero or a villain, Edward wasn't… human. He was something more. I tried the hypothetical out. If – if – he was a vampire, what would I do? Only two options seemed practical.
The first was obvious: to take his advice, to be smart and avoid him. To cancel our plans, to ignore him. To pretend there was a wall between us when classes forced us to be together. To tell him to leave me alone – forever.
The other option was to risk it. To continue to speak to him, to try and spend time with him, to get to know who he really was. I supposed it wasn't really a practical option in the hypothetical scenario, but something about it felt right to me. We hadn't known each other long, and only recently had he even considered the possibility of being friendly with me. But I couldn't deny that my reaction to the nightmare hadn't just been terror at being attacked by Edward. There had been that other feeling, too, that sadness. Sadness caused by the regret on his face, by the fear he openly showed at the idea of hurting me. Sadness caused by his clear feelings of betrayal toward his brothers.
In the face of my apparently instinctual attraction to Edward Cullen, it was difficult for me to even entertain the idea of abandoning him. That idea scared me more than anything, and I rose to go home. The winding trail seemed to last forever as I tried avoiding the thoughts of Edward. Finally my father's house came into my line of vision, safe and clear, outside of the dripping green maze. I'd just begun to cross my father's lawn when the heavens opened and rain came pouring down.
...
I woke to sunshine. It usually took me awhile to pull myself out of bed in the morning, but this time I was on my feet before I was even fully coherent. I pressed my hands against the cold glass of the window, looking up at the blue sky and the few fleecy white clouds that were drifting lazily in the sun. I opened the window and inhaled the dry, warm air. It was hardly windy at all, and what little breeze there was smelled of flowers and grass. It was the first truly sunny day that I'd seen since I'd moved to Forks, and I couldn't stop the cheerfulness from surging through me at the sight of it. I was so delighted with the change in weather that I was almost able to forget about Edward Cullen and the incident at the beach.
I was one of the first people to school, and I could tell that I wasn't the only person who was uplifted by the weather. Everyone was in t-shirts, and some people even had shorts on despite that it wasn't much more than sixty degrees.
"Bella my darling, Bella my love!" A familiar voice called out as I reached the grassy lawn of the school grounds. I turned to see Mike jogging toward me, wearing khaki shorts and sunglasses. He caught a strand of my hair that was fluttering in the breeze and gave it a playful tug. "I never noticed your hair had red in it."
"Only in the sun," I admitted, feeling embarrassed.
"Well, it suits you marvelously," he said, drawing the word out and tucking the strand of hair behind my ear.
"Don't ham it up too much," I warned him gently, swatting his hand away. "Jessica's feelings might get hurt."
"She'll never find out, secret love of mine." Mike continued, pulling his sunglasses off with a grin.
"Michael Newton." I said firmly.
He held his hands up innocently. "No need to pull out the full name, Isabella Swan! I surrender!"
As we met up with Jessica, Angela and Eric, I found my thoughts drifting back to Edward. It was hard to avoid because Mike and Eric were talking about the trip to the beach, so I made an effort to distract myself with Angela and Jessica's conversation. Though I had dreaded having to listen to people gossip about the incident at La Push, I was shocked to find that no one brought it up. At least, not with me. Most of the kids from the trip had been visibly shaken up by the violence they had witnessed, but now everyone seemed content to pretend it hadn't happened.
Angela and Jessica were planning a trip to Port Angeles to shop for dresses, which didn't interest me all that much. I wasn't going to the dance anyway, and I had never been much for shopping. In the end, though, I agreed to Jessica's invitation to go with her to help the two of them find the perfect dresses for their dates. It would be nice to get out of town with some girlfriends, and I was interested in seeing what Port Angeles had to offer.
When lunchtime rolled around, I found my nerves buzzing. With the new thoughts I had on the Cullens, I was eager to see them. But I also felt anxious at facing Edward after what had happened, and confronting him with what I thought. If I was wrong, how could I explain having thought he was a vampire? He would probably take it as an insult to his character, wouldn't he?
As was my routine, I looked immediately toward the Cullen family's table. My stomach dropped when I saw that it was empty. I glanced around the cafeteria, looking for them, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Although I'd been nervous about seeing Edward again, I was shocked at how disappointed I felt when he wasn't in school. It should have occurred to me that he might not be there, anyway. He had been humiliated by his brothers – if it had happened to me, I would have seriously considered running off to join the circus – and there were obviously some family problems that needed working out. It surprised me that they were all absent, of course, but I should have considered the possibility. Even accepting that they were probably gone because of the incident, I was disheartened by it.
When I got home, I tried to shake myself out of the mood. I grabbed Sense and Sensibility, which we were supposed to read in a few weeks for school, and headed into the yard to soak up some sunshine. I sat beneath the large shade tree in the yard and cracked the book open. It was only when I got to the third chapter that I remembered that the hero of the story was named 'Edward'. I dropped the book to my side and sighed, closing my eyes in the warm air.
It was arrogant to think he'd come to school just for me. I thought, but pushed it away.
I would not think about Edward.
I focused on the heat against my skin, the gentle breeze that caught in my hair and tickled me. I tried to feel every inch of my skin that the sun touched, mottled through the leaves against my cheekbones, my lips, my arms, and my neck. The way my shirt soaked up the warmth…
When I woke up from a disjointed dream about Tyler growing wings and flying away without his crutches, the sun was setting and clouds were beginning to draw in again. I blinked groggily and realized that the police cruiser was in the driveway already. I rubbed my eyes, my skin slightly tender as I touched it. Who knew you could get sunburned in Forks? At least my recurring dreams had stopped, and the nightmare from the day before chased off with the image of Tyler flying.
I walked into the house, surprised to smell hot food. My stomach rumbled as I gave my dad a sheepish look. "I guess I dropped the ball on dinner, huh?" I said.
"Don't worry about it, Bells. I'm the parent, it's not your duty to make sure I get fed. I managed to feed myself for seventeen years before you got here!" He smiled at me, still in his uniform. "You got some sun today, didn't you? I saw that you fell asleep in the yard so I ordered us some Chinese food. I wasn't sure what you wanted, though… I got you sesame beef, I hope that's okay?"
"That's great, Dad. Thanks." I said. I knew he was right – most children were fed by their parents, not the other way around – but I'd gotten used to taking some of the family responsibilities on my own shoulders. My mother was wonderful, but disorganized and forgetful. I'd learned early on that if I did what I could to help her out, life was better for us both.
Somewhere along the way I'd started to feel like it was my obligation to be the caretaker. It was nice to remember that Dad could take care of me, too, and more than that… that he wanted to. It made it easier to ask him for permission to go with Angela and Jessica to Port Angeles, and made me feel less guilty that he'd be on his own for dinner tomorrow night. He seemed so happy that I was making more plans with local kids that I began to forget my disappointment at Edward Cullen's absence from school. I was sure I'd see him again eventually.
