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Chapter Ten – Alice's POV

Emmett and Rosalie finally came home. After the first month they were gone we started to worry that something had happened like they had been taken by the Volturi, but Edward kept assuring us that they were just moving around the country, Emmett somehow convinced Rosalie not to reveal herself in the sunlight, and she had insisted that they keep moving, not staying in any one town more than a couple of weeks. She said she had to wander for long enough that she missed having a stable home.

Carlisle is still keeping an eye on Renesmee and her condition, being one of the only known human/vampire hybrids meant that everything about her was measured and recorded for future reference. He had to prove to the Volturi that she wasn't just an immortal child, he had to show that she wasn't a violation, and they accepted his research.

What Carlisle should really get an award for is the miracle growing inside me. It's been three months since the procedure, but I'm almost due already. My pregnancy took longer than Bella's because the cells had to start from scratch building a baby, but I guess because we're vampires it is still much faster than a human.

I've been drinking human blood so regularly to keep my baby supplied with energy that my eyes have turned fully red again. I hate that. Every time I look in the mirror I feel like the monster I have spent so long trying not to be.

Because we're different from the wanderers and the scavengers that prey on hikers and loners out in the wilderness. We're civilized, we have a family, and we can live in a single place long enough to make friends. Not permanent ties, of course, we have to move on every five or ten years so people don't notice that we never age, but that's okay. That's plenty of time to get to know people, even fall in love.

Since ordinary medical methods wouldn't work for tracking my baby, Jasper has been helping by reaching out with his mind and trying to feel if there was anything wrong. In fact, he was the reason that we were able to tell the procedure worked in the first place.

About a month in, Jasper was lying with his head in my lap and his eyes closed and we were just enjoying each other's company, when all of a sudden he looked at me and said that my emotions felt different. I asked him what he meant and he got this strange look on his face that melted into excitement as he said it felt like there were two sets of emotions coming from me.

I started crying, I was so happy, and Jasper picked me up and spun me around. The whole house had a celebration that night because of my baby. Jasper says the emotions and mind sound feminine. I can't wait to meet my little girl.

I thought about all of this as I walked up to Carlisle's study. He has been having Jasper monitor the baby carefully so that he could predict when she was going to arrive. Ever since Rosalie got back, she and Esme have been putting up decorations in the spare room so that our daughter has a bedroom all furnished with frilly little pink things.

Renesmee, who is almost the size of an 8 year old by now, is excited to have a sort-of sister who she can play with. We all have told her that she has to be careful around the baby, because it will be new to the world, and won't be able to just tell us it's needs like she could.

"Come in Alice." Carlisle says just as I raise my hand to knock on the door. He must have heard my footsteps. I turned the knob and pushed the oak port out of my way as I step into the room. The baby shifts inside me as I sit down in one of the chairs across from Carlisle's desk.

"How are you feeling?" He asks me in a friendly way, hiding the paper he's writing on so that it doesn't just seem like he's interrogating me.

"I'm tired," I reply honestly, "but on the bright side, I'm back to beating Edward at chess."

"Your foresight returned? When did that happen?"

"It's been getting better over the course of the last month. I think it's because I'm not depressed anymore, because I know I'm going to have this baby."

"Yes," he says as he looks down at the paper and misses my facial expression changing, "any day now it would seem—Alice?" He says concerned when he looks up again

"Carlisle, I…" and my sentence ends in a grimace of pain. It feels like I'm being cut open with the werewolf claw again, which Carlisle told me I would have to be for the baby to be born.

"I guess any day is today. Come on, let's get you to the downstairs shower, I'll have Edward get Jasper and meet us there." Carlisle helped me limp down the stairs, and Esme and Bella were instantly on hand to help me the rest of the way to the bathroom floor while Carlisle got his supplies.

"Ripping…" I mumble as another wave of pain explodes from my abdomen

"I know, sweetie, I know. It hurts." Bella says reassuringly as she grips my hand. My red gaze meets her amber one, the animal blood hadn't quite flushed the newborn roses out of her eyes. She is the only woman in the house that knows what it feels like to have a vampire child trying to tear its way out of you, and having to have a C-section before it can. At least I don't have to go through the conversion right after it, though.

Carlisle scrubbed up as thoroughly as possible, and then worked expediently to cleanly open me up at free the baby. The tearing of my skin went almost unnoticed this time and soon the sound of crying reached my ears.

Through the fog of the pain, I reached out to hold her

"Just a second, love, Carlisle has to make sure she's okay… she is okay, right Carlisle?" Jasper and I both looked to Carlisle whose face was set in hard lines of concentration as he listened to the newborn's chest and then he handed her to me and I instantly cradled her against me. She was cold, well, she felt fine to me, but she wasn't the human temperature Renesmee had been when she was born.

She was very pink, and her eyes were clenched tightly shut, but she had Jasper's lips and nose, my small, almost pointed ears, and a tuft of black hair sticking up from the top of her head. Her tiny fists were curled into balls that she held up over her face as she sucked in breaths of air to cry. Her skin was puckered and wrinkled, but she was my daughter, and that made her the most beautiful baby in the world.

"Grace," I said as I looked down at her, smiling wider than I can ever remember smiling before, "because if it weren't for grace, she wouldn't be here." I said and planted a kiss on her forehead. Slowly Grace stopped crying, but continued to shake her fists. Then I noticed something strange.

"Carlisle… she isn't breathing." I started to panic

"I'm not surprised, she doesn't have a heartbeat either. She's pink because of all the blood you drank while you were pregnant, I suspect that she'll metabolize that like we metabolize the blood we consume. I think we should keep her on a mixed diet, mostly human with part animal blood, slowly increasing the amount of animal blood as she gets older so that she doesn't get so used to the human that she won't want to feed from animals, but so that she has enough human blood to grow up properly."

"Perfect," I acknowledged, only catching half of what Carlisle said, I was too busy staring into the face of a miracle. By all the laws that vampires knew, Grace shouldn't be lying here in my arms, shaking her tiny fists in the air, just like Renesmee shouldn't be running around outside playing with her father.

And yet, both these little girls are here and real, born into eternity without having to pay the painful price that we all did. Renesmee was a hybrid, but Grace was fully a vampire. She was born without a heartbeat or a need for air, learning how to hunt and how to use her powers would be as natural for her as a human baby learning how to walk. She would never know the limitations of a weak human body.

I sat there and cradled her, Jasper sat next to me with his arm around my shoulders, looking down at Grace with as much wonder and love as I was. This was our perfect moment, and Grace was the center of our world.

The End