A.N

We are now reaching the ends of Bella's threads of sanity. Her accounts of this time are erratic and fleeting and full to the brim with pain-wrenching angst! Just the way I like her :)

So please, read and review. I don't mean to moan again guys, but I got THREE reviews last chapter. Is my writing really that terrible?

Anyway, enjoy. :)

After weeks of managing to keep track of Victoria's chaotic hunting, Jasper and I were finally at a loss.

Though all of Victoria's woodland kills were in running water and her city executions could never have been traced to any immortal suspicions, we had always managed to stay a few feet behind her, either confronting her or just missing her by hours. But now, as we relentlessly searched the crowded streets and abandoned back-alleys of Brazil, there was - infuriatingly - no sign of her.

Brazil was hot. And therefore the sun beat down on the land in waves of light, securing us inside abandoned houses and forgotten attics until night dawned and we were free to hunt amongst the humans once again…

The street lamps that lined our newest hunting ground were a clinical bright white that threw both mine and Jasper's skin into a shocking contrast to the flushing humans around us, their hair beaded with drops of cold sweat as the temperature started it's nightly sudden decrease. The humans that were walking alongside us as we searched the main center of Buenos Arias sped up whenever they were in danger of their paces aligning with ours. Flurried thoughts of families' faces flashed in their minds as they saw the two of us, before a sense of guilt surrounded them at being terrified of two such young people.

Birds moved in shocked droves and flurried movements up into the boundless spaces of the sky as we appeared, stalking down the streets of Brazil, cool and composed, as though we belonged. It could almost seem possible, for the briefest moment while the smoke and hazy warmth of the night beat around us, that we could belong here, save for our unbearably white skin. With this marker, one that showed that we were more than human, we were wolves in a flock of sheep.

Painstakingly obvious.

The traffic was heavier than I'd expected it to be this late at night, apparently a few of the humans had decided that this Friday would be their night out. I wondered how many would see their beds again with Victoria on the loose.

The passing cars taunted me as they drove by. Were I human it would have been so close, so damned easy. Just one small step out from behind a parked car before...oblivion. Like an outright protest against the world - Take that!

"Walk me home tonight please?" A small woman asked her date in Portuguese, wrapping her coat around herself tightly. The streets aren't safe at night.

"Of course," He told her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, leading her away from the flashing lights of the restaurant that declared the 'Dish of the Day' to be vegetable soup.

I took a deep breath, sampling the cold night air, then headed down a alley-way with Jasper at my heels. I leapt effortlessly to the top of one of the two buildings that lined the dank back street then sprang across to the closest building.

Crossing the rooftops to the east, I tried to bury my traitorous thoughts that kept breaking free of the locks I had haphazardly placed around my mind in a foolhardy attempt to bar and stray thoughts.

The scent I had thought I'd recognised was gone by morning when we bid our hasty retreat into the nearest hotel of the many that lined the Brazilian streets.

The sun stared at us mockingly from the window as we sat, waited and counted the hours until dusk.

Every day now started the same. The sun rose, and Edward's taunting voice whispered to me every morning as the sky changed from royal blue, to burgundy, to orange and finally the familiar white sunlight that barricaded me behind closed doors and walls, no four ever the same. Then, as the sun slipped beyond the far-off horizon, we set out to resume the hunt.

He would keep throwing memories of the previous year towards me, so that they ricocheted through my mind. I tried to shake him away, but he forever persisted, memory after stunningly real memory repeating themselves as though on a reel in the unseen vantage point of my visual mind.

Walking through the present, living in the past.

My original promise to stay away had been shortened already to a year, but even that had been discarded as I fought to make my absence even a month longer.

We'd moved south of Brasília, following following every border-line and tracing every square foot for any trace of her. The widely stretching city shown no hint of her and we had found no new leads pointing us in any direction. So Jasper had suggested that she may be in the smaller, more inaccessible of Brazilian villages.

No-one can hear the village's screams... His darkly military mind focusing on worst case scenario as we passed unnoticed through the midnight hush of tiny villages.

Edward whispered to me as the sun came up. "Why are you here?" He questioned innocently, nodding towards the rocky Brazilian terrain. Give in He begged.

I looked up at the noon-high sky from my position under the trees.

Another year.

My resolution was absolute.

Every detail of the days passed before my unseeing eyes, slipping through into my subconscious. The nightly chasing on a non-existent trail. The days of Jasper staring at his phone, willing his wife to call with any type of news. The second hand ticking around the generic plastic face of every clock in every hotel, each tick slower than the last tock.

Days ran together, one hour melding into the next, night blending into day. I was numbly aware of the world, but I was in the passenger seat of my own body, someone else working the gears and levers while I watched idly as the world slipped on by.

I remembered a time when I knew sunlight, and dappled water and laughter in annoyingly bright school corridors — and I knew that the savage wilderness hidden within me was other, was wrong, shameful and inhuman and uncivilized, sick and diseased, rotten and disgusting and putrefying.

Now I embraced the darker side of nature.

Since the dawn of time, animals have feasted off one another's flesh. Driven by the most basic survival instincts, hungry creatures hunt with great skill. Vampires are the world's greatest hunters with their keen sense of smell and insatiable thirst for blood, they are unstoppable. The hunt is almost a game to these hunters. A game they always win.

The moon rose as I blinked the days collection of dust out of my eyes.

I was a hunter. Forever. Now it was time to act like one.

That was nearly a month ago.

In the days since I hunted in areas that grew ever bigger by the day, Jasper permanently at my side. We lurked in bigger cities now, looking into every occasional violent end of human life that was broadcast callously across the human's usually trivial and irritatingly silent news in technicolour. But with each and every human victim, there lay a very human, but no less evil, killer thrown safely behind the cold and unforgiving cell bars.

Dead end followed dead end. We continued on, I never bothering to feed, despite Jasper's repeated warning. I found myself slipping, driven into the grasp of the haze I had only so recently escaped, the obscurity of a unrepentant memory embedded in my mind and heartstrings, acting without my consent. A world of natural instinct awakened within me, somewhere between reality, hunting and longing. And with each day ending in failure, my sanity fell out of my grip a little more.

Insanity is defined as 'Exhibiting unsoundness or disorder of mind; not sane; delirious; distracted; erratic;'

Step forward, Isabella Cullen.

Is it just a simple fact of life that every single thing I ever do fails to a point so monumentally pathetic? That the vicious harpy of fate that laughs and laughs at my boundless stupidity and arrogance, my unquenchable thirst and the bottomless, boundless void that filled me, chose my life to truly screw up!?

The void stared at me. And I stared into the void. Boundless. No echo.

The failure of this sham of a hunt – for that's all it was, a sham - was finally complete. Fate had stopped playing with my strings, choosing to cut loose my cords and let me fall until she decided to intervene once more.

Victoria wasn't in Brazil. I was beginning to think she'd never even set foot on the continent. Never even entered the airport.

She should have been easy to find. So simple. I'd followed every street, trailed every scent that was even remotely like hers, inspected the minds meticulously searching for the wicked she-devil. But nary a sight of the red-head had arisen, and the memories strengthened.

In the weeks that had followed, I had only been able to commit myself and Jasper to searching for an hour, maybe two, a night. But now we had trodden across every last inch of Brazil, our labour fruitless.

Now it was over, our failure accepted. As Jasper headed back to the hotel, I took a walk through the local cemetery, through endless streets of markers and tombs, all that was left of what had once been people with lives, memories and laughter. The flowers scattered around the various graves were drowning and wilting under the onslaught of rain.

The storm to end all storms raged. Thunder sounded in the distance as flashing light crossed the sky. Torrents of rain poured in buckets to the muddy ground, and the sound of it echoed through the air. There was another strike of lightning. A dog barked nearby, but it did so more from terror than anything else. Wind wailed and threw buckets of rain at the stained windows of the church, causing the glass to rattle. The thunder continued to roll over the sky, the flashes of lightening following at even intervals.

I sat against a grave-stone whose name had long ago been worn off, the effects of rain and time leaving it blank. I sat, empty-eyed with water pounding down on my skull and shoulders, watching the full moon above my head seem to pulse and rage at me like a coming storm, like all of nature had realised my short-comings.

Now, as I huddled in the dust and grime, taking my place amongst the other corpses and ignoring the babble of the few minds in the church, I wondered if I had now essentially killed him. He was so warm, so soft, and so beautiful...And should Victoria ever choose to seek her revenge he would fall under her attack like a grain of sand under a tsunami.

I ached to feel his head resting on my own again, to feel his smooth skin against my hair. To be healed, to have him…It wouldn't be long now.

Just one more day. Could I give him one more day? Another hour? I wrapped my arms around myself, head hanging as I stared unseeingly at the ground.

Mechanically I exited the cemetery. I didn't even realize that I'd left the worn down tarmac of the well-trodden path until I reached the edge of the cliff. I pulled up short, faced with a huge expanse of water.

The waves are rough below, smashing into the rocks of the cliff, tearing themselves to pieces along the length of the jutland. Only a fool could stare down and not feel fer. And only someone far beyond ordinary foolishness would even think for a moment of leaping into that roaring, forbidding abyss...

For a brief second, the urge to throw myself over was strong. To die as a human would, so beautifully, so perfectly, dashed against the rocks until I'm nothing then swept away into the company of fishes and other creatures of the deep.

But I knew my limits. Death was nothing I could reach with the ease of throwing oneself off of a cliff. It was much more difficult than that.

Hours went by. Slow, tedious, anxious hours, that seemed to crawl. Sometimes I wondered if Jasper meant to leave me here forever. It was an odd thought — I'd read over and over again about men who'd gone crazy when they were isolated in complete darkness during World War II.

I wondered, how long it could take for a vampire to go crazy. Hours of waiting in the darkness...could they have any effect on me.

Just the thought of seeing Edward again had sapped most of my controlled thoughts. I knew I couldn't even entertain the idea of seeing him ever again if I wanted to make it another day, let alone a year, away.

I dug my fingers into the ground, self-disgust churning through my veins.

I have to stay away. I must.

"Bella?" I turned, seeing the rain-drenched Jasper appear from the trees. I knew I could look no better after sitting out in the downpour for hours.

"What do you want, Jazz?" I asked, wanting to be alone with my unending failings.

"You had Alice worried, you know," He chuckled, sprawling next to me and kicking his feet over the edge of the cliff. "What the hell did you think about doing?" Under the joking exterior, genuine worry raced alongside his thoughts.

"Nothing," I lied, leaning back on my palms.

"Liar," He whispered before letting it go. "She's asking...well she's hoping...that maybe you could come home. If just for a few weeks," His hands entwined with a drenched daisy, spinning it round until the petals fell like white rain. "They all miss us. Esme especially is worried and would love to see us...you...just for the day."

"But Victoria..."

"Is long gone. Look, it won't be a waste of your time. Check in with Alice, get her to really look ahead and find where she'll be," The false excuses fell tepid on Jasper's tongue as his true intentions failed to remain hidden. "Mom is really suffering, missing you." He said softly.

I sighed, tapping slightly on the edge of the cliff-face. Esme had been so sad when I'd left — if I came then left again... it would be too cruel to put her through that again.

But maybe if I spoke to her, called her? "I know. But seeing me would only make things worse for her."

"You know that she doesn't care about that. She wants to see her children, all of her children?"

I couldn't argue the fact that seeing Esme wasn't appealing. It was also extremely selfish.

"They miss you." Jasper spoke softly, as though talking to a very small child.

My stomach sank to my knees. "I miss them too, Jazz. But you should go, at least."

"You know that it's not truly me she wants to see. You're her first daughter, she loves you the most – as much as she denies it."

"They shouldn't want to be around me. I don't even want to be around me."

"And who's fault is that?" He snapped before sighing loudly. "I'm sorry,"

I didn't answer.

He wasn't making his usual sense to me, keeping his thoughts flitting and erratic, hiding his thoughts and saying half of what he means to say with his amber eyes alone.

I turned away, reflecting silently.

We both have monsters that well up inside us, shine through our eyes, change our vision, our hearing, our voices, our touch and smell, our very lives; monsters who haunt our lives, whisper in our ears, hide in the back of our minds and threaten to get out. He knows what it is to be cursed, to be owned by a monster, to be chained to an endless destiny of rushing night and death. The only difference between the two of us is that he managed to live with his. I couldn't handle mine at all.

Jasper'd killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of vampires; he'd make it quick and relatively painless, I was sure. But could I ever ask him? Could I ever burden my brother with my execution?

I was pretty sure the answer was no, but who knows?

"Bella?" I looked at him. That's where our eye contact comes in—I'll never tell him, but my respect for him has become limitless, almost fearful awe after he told me his brutal history. And yes, I want to hate him for stopping my destroying myself—on more than one occasion now. "Bella, please?"

God, how I wanted to hate him at that moment! How badly I wanted to howl my misery and feel biting wind on me, drown in the cold surface of the moon and roam free from everything, all at that instant. But the small human part of me that still remained, stayed attached that small particle of humanness. The one that is always overridden with horrendous guilt. Jasper kept pulling me back from the edge with his damn humanity

I longed for it. I wanted to hurt myself. Hurt for all that my existence has taken from others. Then I wanted to run, then I wanted to die, fall into deep waters and never feel again. I want to drift into blackness until I fall into my Angel's arms. I want to stay there for all eternity, holding onto him so that I never lose him again, so that he can never leave me behind and alone. Ever.

I must have looked terrifying as the smallest dash of uncontrolled fear made it's way into Jasper's eyes. I blinked and it was gone.

"Please, Bella?" He asked again, so quiet this time that it was beyond what any human could ever hope to here. "Think of Esme."

Esme? No, think of my sanity.

I closed my eyes and, full of regret, stood again.

"When do we leave?"

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