Note: I do not own or have rights to Twilight or its characters!!!

So don't get all impressed with the fact that I'm posting yet another chapter, the third in three days. No, I'm not on some mad writing bender; I'm just catching you guys up on material I already had. I only needed to finish the second section of this for posting. This chapter was a bit more time consuming to write however, because of the technical aspects of it. I spent a lot of time trying to recall things I learned in chemistry and my biology course work. I hope it's convincing enough.

Enjoy!!

Blue

PS: You've reached the end of my pre-written and saved stuff from here on out I have to work again.

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Chapter 10

Weird Science

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

A week had passed since William's foiled attack on the house. After his escape, Zafrina and her sisters tracked him to the cliffs near Billy's house. His trail ended there, he'd thrown himself from the jagged rocks into the tumultuous sea. I was certain that we hadn't heard the last of him. His escape route afforded him the luxury of cropping up again anywhere and without warning. This fact left me feeling very uneasy.

On a happier note, Esme had recovered from her injuries completely. Within three days she was hunting on her own again and puttering around the house as well as in her garden. It did wonders for my long dead heart to watch her hunting again that first night as she took down a large bull elk. The image of her laying in the middle of our living room, mangled like the accident victims I had so often seen in my ER, was sure to haunt me for eternity.

Unfortunately, Sarah's guilty heart wasn't as easily mended as detached vampire limbs. Or best efforts notwithstanding, she still felt somehow responsible for her mother getting hurt on account of the fact the William was her brother. This feeling persisted in spite of my constant assurances that she could never be held accountable for the actions of another.

I have always been a consummate preacher and teacher of personal accountability and it pained me greatly that my daughter persisted in her self-flagellation. Yet there seemed to be little I could do to convince her that she wasn't to blame. At my request, Edward monitored her thoughts with extreme vigilance, the only thing that was remotely encouraging to me was the fact that, according to him, her negative internal dialogue had toned down somewhat over the course of the week, but the viscous thoughts still cropped up with a regular vengeance.

Poor Jasper was having the worst time of it; I could easily read the conflict and turmoil of emotion on his face. The burden of helping me with Sarah while keeping the rest of the family on an even emotional keel was wearing on him. Alice told me that the two of them might need to take a little brake soon. With the threat of William still very real, she assured me that they wouldn't go far. I offered them the use of the cabin Esme and I owned north of the boarder in Canada. It was our private retreat and Alice had been hesitant at first, but eventually she and Jasper accepted.

Given the lingering dark cloud of William, security around my home now mimicked that surrounding the First Family. The entire tribe was involved in protecting us . . . even the reservation's part time sheriff and his three deputies were now on call for us. For all the good it would do, a squad car was parked outside my home at all times. I would have found the whole affair highly amusing if it weren't downright frightening.

A week had also passed since I'd started running tests on Sarah's blood and the water samples from Peru. I found my progress with those just as irritating as William's invasion of my sanctum sanctorum. Even now I sat at my desk staring at the third set of results of the mass spectrometry analysis of the Water. Why I'd run the test three time I didn't know, perhaps I'd hoped the first two runs were flawed.

The water had a high mineral content, as I had expected, but the tests also reviled something highly unusual. There was a peek on the mass spec read out that didn't correspond to any known compound or element. The substance was completely unknown. If I were a human scientist I would be looking forward to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for my ground breaking discovery. Not being one to indulge in pomposity, I simply called my find Element X, at least until I could come up with something more fitting.

Also to my fascination, when I looked at the water under my microscope, I found it teaming with a very unusual sort of life form. It wasn't a bacterium nor was it a virus, but rather it was some sort of here to for unseen microscopic animal. I found this odd because the water was more acidic than was preferred by most organisms. I was even further astonished when I tried to isolate these creatures and grow them in a Petri dish. The little colony died almost immediately. I tried this several times, always with the same result, even when I adjusted the ph of the dish to match that of the water from which they came the experiment still ended in failure.

In frustration I put down the Mass Spec report and turned my focus to the results of Sarah's blood tests. My colleague, Dr. Raven, had graciously agreed to help me with Sarah's case, running the tests in the hospital's lab which, in spite of my great interest in research, was still more extensive than my home lab. He had faxed the results over along with a simple cover letter apologizing for the delay, sighting the fact that he too had run the labs multiple times and instructing me to do a wet mount of Sarah's blood. He insisted I would find it very intriguing.

I went to my lab's small fridge and retrieved one of the test tubes containing Sarah's blood. After preparing the slide, I slipped it under the objective lens of my microscope and peered through the eyepiece. I was astounded by what I saw; the same organism I found in the Water also swam happily in the smear of my daughter's blood on the slide.

My first reaction was to pronounce the organism a parasite, but I held off on this for a moment. For reasons I couldn't explain, I felt suddenly compelled to perform the same analysis on Sarah's blood that I had on the Water. Wonder of wonders, I found high levels of Element X in my daughter's blood. Now inescapably intrigued, I decided to run one more test . . . on a sample of Sarah's venom that I'd collected before her ill-fated trip. Once again I found Element X, but in an even higher concentrations than I'd encountered in either the Water or Sarah's blood.

Now I was truly baffled. While I could understand how Sarah might have gotten Element X as well as the parasite into her system in Peru, I couldn't fathom how the element had found its way into her pre-trip venom samples. Out of curiosity, I preformed the analysis on my own venom, a fresh sample that I collected then and there. Element X stared back at me, laughing haughtily at my ignorance.

I slumped into the chair at my desk feeling utterly defeated. 'You should be ecstatic, giddy with the new knowledge you've gained,' my inner voice mocked, 'it's not every day that you discover a new element or a previously unknown life form in one fell swoop.' But I was far from happy. The conundrum that was my daughter's condition had just deepened by a hundred fold. I had a thousand new questions, but only the barest of hints for answers.

Dejected, I decided to reach out to the one person I had come to rely on as a sounding board over the centuries. He had always proved to be a thoughtful listener, both to my personal problems as well as my scientific ones. In spite of the fact that he didn't always understand the science behind my research projects, he did comprehend their overall importance of them. Ordinarily we communicated by handwritten letter, but he had recently decided to boldly step into the 21st century by acquiring a cell phone. No doubt we would still write each other, but the phone made staying connected much easier . . . and faster.

I scrolled through the index on my phone and dialed the appropriate number, then I waiter for the answer on the other end.

"Yes, good evening." Aro answered a bit stiffly; he had only had his new iphone for about three weeks. "Who is calling please?"

"Hello old friend," I replied, confident he would recognize my voice.

"Ah ha, Carlisle, it is so good to hear you." Aro purred with delight. "But do not get the notion that phone calls will replace our letters. It is a dying art, letter writing, we will not let it become a dead art."

"Of course not," I assured him, at the sound of his voice my frown had become a smile and my previous anxiety seemed to ease somewhat.

"So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call," he asked, "or were you simple testing the number I gave you just to see if I was telling you the truth about my plunge into the modern world?"

"I would never presume test you," I began. "I called because I have a dilemma that I would appreciate your council on. However, before I share my burden with you, I must insist you not share this with Caius. It involves Sarah and she doesn't trust your brother as far as she can spit."

"She is not the only one to mistrust Caius." Aro informed me dryly. "I do not fully trust him myself. I tell you a closely guarded truth; for centuries I have been blamed for murdering Marcus' mate, but it was not me . . . it was Caius. His wife was jealous of the friendship that existed between Sulpicia and Didyme, they were like sisters. So Athenodora went to her husband and complained, filling his ears with every conceivable manor of lies. Soon after this, Didyme was destroyed by an unknown assassin."

Aro's confession was quite a shock; I had never heard this story before. Though I never truly believed that my long time friend had killed Marcus' mate, I had accepted the prevailing opinion and hoped that everyone was wrong. I was glad my faith was well placed. With a deep breath a launched in to my narrative, explaining what happened to Sarah in Peru as well as filling him on my test results.

"I am very sorry for young Sarah and for your family." Aro sighed. "What can I do to help?"

"Have you ever heard of anything like this before," I asked, trying not to sound desperate. At over three thousand years of age, Aro might be the only one among us old enough to possess the wisdom I sought. "Your library contains ancient works from many cultures, even Ptolemy's fabled Royal Library of Alexandria; do you recall reading anything that might be helpful?"

The line was silent for several seconds then I heard Aro let out a breath. "I have not read even a full third of the volumes in my vast library, but of the ones I have read . . . I've come across nothing that would be of assistance to you. However, I will begin my research in earnest as soon as I get off the phone. If I find anything I will scan the document and email it to you. In the mean time please tell Sarah how much my wife and I care about her and that we will be working very hard to help figure this out."

When I ended my call with Aro, I felt much better. Following his unsuccessful attempt to destroy my family after Nessie's birth, my relationship with the leader of our world went sour . . . actually rancid would be more accurate. But while the 'Cullen Crises', as it was known throughout the Vampire Nation, was the low point in our friendship, the day my wife and daughters stormed into the Volturi palace to rescue me was it's turning point. As we worked together to build a new nation, we also reconciled our differences and now Aro and I shared an even closer bond than we ever had before.

*****

"I have a . . . thing inside me!" I exclaimed in disbelief. This revelation only added insult to injury considering the overall level of chaos in my life at the moment. "You're telling me I have a thing . . . inside me!" I repeated at an even more elevated volume.

"Sarah, please calm down." Papa insisted in his most soothing voice. "There's no need for hysterics, the organism has been inside you since you ingested the Water, and you haven't come to any harm. Now I doubt very seriously . . ."

"No harm!" I shouted. When I felt Benjamin tighten his grip on my hand and heard him gently clear his throat I realized that perhaps I should lower my voice . . . at least a little. "With all due respect Papa, how can you say that I've come to no harm. I'm human again, against my wishes. I very nearly lost my sanity and now I have to be on medicine that robs me of my gifts. And to top it all off, in a year this . . . thing is going to kill me."

I heard my father sigh loudly before he responded, "I can see your point, of course, perhaps what I should have said was; you're in no immediate danger."

"It's a parasite then," Ben inquired in the soft yet serious voice that he usually reserved for his legal clients. "Is there some way to destroy it, some medicine you could give her to rid her of it."

"I tried several well know anti-parasitic drugs on samples in the lab," Papa confessed. "None of them were effective. The organisms seem to thrive on Element X, removal of the element from their environment causes instantaneous collapse of the parasitic colony."

"Then filter this strange element out of her blood." Mama suggested in her usual bright effervescent manor. "You know, like the dialysis you do every week on Billy."

My father's frustrated chuckle filled my ears followed moments later by the tell tale sound of him giving my mom a quick chastened kiss. "What the lot of you fails to realize is that, for your benefit, I have vastly oversimplified the science behind this discovery.

"To surmise thing concisely; Element X is present, in extremely high concentrations, in our venom and tissue and, because Sarah was once a vampire, it is present in her blood and tissue as well. How it got there and what precisely its function is, are still mysteries to me. I do know that this parasite thrives on the element and that it is the organism's bio-waste that is responsible for reversing Sarah's transformation as well as maintaining her life."

"Symbiosis," Edward whispered faintly. "But according to Zafrina, dead animals and such were cast into the pool and brought back to life. By your account Element X is unique to us."

"To us and to the water in the pool," my father corrected gently. "The element is easily absorbed by organic tissue, even dead organic tissue it would seem . . . where it tends to concentrate. It is especially fond of bonding to the heme group, found in blood. As the element concentrates in the test subjects tissues, the organism is drawn to these more favorable conditions, thus excreting their bio-waist which intern reanimates the host. The whole process is really quite fascinating."

"Maybe for you," I squeaked, "but not for me, organisms 1, host 0. The score card isn't too encouraging."

I heard Papa cross the room and come to kneel before me. His cold yet gentle hand cupped my face and his thumb brushed my cheek affectionately. "I'm sorry if I made my explanation sound terribly clinical, it wasn't my intention. Trust me Kitten, I haven't lost sight of the reason for my inquiry. You are the very real and present cause for my pursuits and I keep that fact firmly centered in the focus of my mind each and every time I enter the lab.

"I know I made the promise to you earlier, but it is worthy of my constant repetition . . . I will do everything within my power to make you whole again, Sarah."