It was late – or early – when I finally returned to the house. Since it was overcast as usual, the night sky was pitch black, no light from the moon or stars able to permeate the ever-present cloud cover.
I could see artificial lights glowing from certain rooms, where my family members were situated going about their various night time activities. Still not in the mood to face them, I scrambled up the outside wall to slip in the window of my – our – bedroom.
Bella was fast asleep in the large gold bed, curled into a ball on 'her' side of the mattress. Squeezed over to the edge that way, she looked even smaller and the bed looked even larger than usual.
I climbed on top of the bedcovers beside her and gently lifted her head into my lap, careful not to wake her. Just as gently, I reached down to brush her hair back from her face. As always when she slept quietly, not speaking in her sleep, she looked so peaceful, so serene.
Not for the first time, I wished I could slide into sleep and enjoy a few hours of unconsciousness myself, free from my tormenting thoughts.
I hear you in there, Edward. I'm listening, so don't try anything. Rosalie's mental voice came from the room she shared with Emmett, a few doors down the hall.
I hissed, annoyed not only with her continued interference, but also with the fact that she assumed for a moment I hadn't already known her ears had perked up when she heard me climb the wall and through the window. She, of all people, did not have a mind that was particularly difficult to read.
"Yes, Rosalie, I know that," I muttered, just loudly enough for her to hear me. "Whatever would Bella do without you to protect her from me?"
It's not her who needs protecting from you, Edward. It's…
"Oh, enough, already," I snarled in a low voice. "I know exactly where your interests lie. Spare me."
I cursed under my breath when Bella stirred in my arms, even more annoyed with Rosalie now that her meddling had caused me to disturb my wife from the sleep so clearly needed.
"Edward?" she murmured, her voice still thick with her deep slumber.
"Yes, love, it's just me. It's okay. Go back to sleep," I said softly, stroking her warm cheek with my cold fingers.
She shifted in my lap so she could look up at me, forcing herself to blink awake. "Where have you been? When did you get back?"
"Just a few minutes ago. I was in the forest, running. Hunting." The one high point in my evening had been when I'd come across a particularly large male mountain lion stalking a doe with her fawn near a small stream. Unfortunately for him, he had been the recipient of my deflected wrath.
"Oh."
"I'm sorry I woke you. You should go back to sleep."
Ignoring that, she struggled to pull herself a little more upright so she could lean against my chest. She had more trouble with the movement than usual because of her fatigue and her displaced center of gravity. Automatically, it seemed, one of her hands fluttered down to rub her new center of gravity.
God help me, her belly looked even more swollen now than when I had left a few hours ago.
She appeared to have seen something in my expression and sighed. "Edward. I wish you wouldn't be this way. I understand it, but…" Her voice trailed off sadly as she continued to rub her stomach.
"But what?" I asked irritably. "You think I should be okay with you risking your life in this manner? I should be happy about it perhaps?"
Now she frowned. I wasn't usually short with her like that.
"Well, no…I just wish you wouldn't see it that way. I mean, all I need to do is hang on long enough for him to be born and…"
"You make it sound so easy," I huffed, interrupting. Her apparent nonchalance with all of this was really starting to wear on me.
"You don't think I can do this?"
"I don't think any human can do this."
"You don't know that," she stated flatly, her chin jutting out in the way it always did when she was being stubborn. "I mean, I'm not an idiot, Edward. I know it won't be easy, and I know there's risk. Not only have you and Carlisle made that abundantly clear, I'm the one who has ballooned into a whale in a matter of weeks. I'm the one who can't stop eating or sleeping, and who keeps getting booted in the gut."
I straightened up, alarmed. "Has something else happened?"
"No, no…" She waved a hand dismissively. "Nothing has changed from before. I'm only trying to point out that you shouldn't think I don't know what I'm into, here. It's just that I happen to think the risk is worth it. For our baby, Edward."
"That's just it, Bella," I sighed. "We don't even know what kind of creature this is going to be…"
Now she scowled and smacked at my shoulder. "Edward Cullen, you will not call your child a 'creature', do you hear me? It's a baby, just a baby, and he's going to be beautiful. Just like you."
Just like me. That was exactly what I was afraid of.
I suppressed a shudder.
"Anyway, Edward," she continued. "I am confident I can do this. I only need to hang on long enough for him to be born, and then however bad it is, you can step in and change me. I mean, I can't possibly be worse off then than Esme was after jumping off a cliff, or Emmett after that bear got him, can I?"
God only knew. "You have too much faith in me as usual, Bella. You're too optimistic about what I can do."
"And you have too little faith, Edward." She rested her cheek on my shoulder and twined the fingers of her right hand with my left. "You'd think after all we've been through and how far we've come, you'd have a little more."
That shut me up.
We were silent for a few moments as I chewed that over. I was starting to think she had fallen back asleep until she spoke. "Actually, Edward, we have a more immediate issue to deal with."
What now? I wasn't sure how much more I could take.
She must have felt me tense under her. "Relax, it's nothing terrible. It's just Charlie. And Renee. They're expecting us back from our honeymoon any day now. Obviously they can't see me like this. What are we going to do about them?"
Hmm. A good point. Renee could be handled with a phone call, but Charlie would want to see his daughter eventually. We couldn't just pretend to stay on the island indefinitely, or to have left for New Hampshire without saying goodbye.
Sooner or later he'd come to the house asking questions.
"I don't know, Bella. I'll have to think about that. I'll discuss it with Carlisle, and Alice. If Carlisle doesn't have any ideas, maybe Alice will have seen something. And if not, she relates well to Charlie. She may have an idea herself."
"Okay. But we have to come up with something soon." She reached a hand up to cover her mouth as she yawned.
"You need to go back to sleep, love." Even in the darkness I could see how tired she looked. She didn't argue when I moved her gently so she was laying back down, but wrapped an arm around me and put her head back in my lap.
"Stay with me?" she murmured sleepily, nestling herself into a comfortable position.
"Of course. Always," I told her, and started to hum her lullaby.
She was asleep before I got through the third bar.
***
Things went downhill quickly after that.
Carlisle continued to examine Bella every day, and every day her abdomen grew noticeably larger. By his calculations, her pregnancy was progressing approximately eight or nine times faster than a normal human pregnancy. He had no explanation as to why.
This accelerated rate of development might have been a particular point of concern if it hadn't been overshadowed by the other problems.
Not only was Bella constantly exhausted, sleeping anywhere from 12 to 18 or more hours per day, she was still constantly hungry. Half the time she was awake, she was eating, but all of the nutrition appeared to be absorbed by the crea…fetus she was carrying. Her hair quickly became limp, her skin paler than usual, her face drawn and shadowed as though she were on some radical starvation diet…or had just escaped from a prison camp. While her midsection distended and swelled, the rest of her seemed to get smaller and smaller as the fetus took everything and left her nothing.
And then there was the kicking.
As the fetus grew, it became more and more active, and kicked her fragile human body from the inside more and more often.
Bella being Bella, she tried to keep me from worrying by saying nothing when this occurred, trying simply to let it pass without acknowledging it. Every once in a while, though, she couldn't help but at least flinch, and when she happened to slip and allow me a glimpse of her stomach under her clothing…
The sight was appalling. Her swollen abdomen was grotesque with the pattern of bruises against her fair skin, each deeper and more purple-black than the last.
I felt like I was coming apart at the seams.
My soft, delicate, human wife was disintegrating before my eyes, the life force being sucked out of her by the thing she carried, the thing she still sang to and spoke to as lovingly as if it weren't eating her alive.
And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
I tried talking to her, I tried reasoning with her…I tried pleading with her, my body wracked with sobs as I begged her not to do this to herself, not to risk taking herself away from me when she'd promised me forever.
Her heart broke to see me that way, I could see it in her eyes. She did her best to comfort me and reassure me, but she remained steadfast.
She could do this. She would do this. It was not open to negotiation.
I continued to try and think of a way to make her see reason, to make her do what I wanted. I tried to think of ways to grab her and force the thing out of her body in some way that wouldn't end up with her hating me forever. God help me, I even thought about doing it even if she did hate me forever – because at least that way she would still be alive.
I might have tried, but as my desperation grew and my sanity stretched thinner and thinner, Rosalie stayed closer and closer, seldom leaving Bella's side for more than a half hour at a time. She encouraged Bella, assuring her that she could do it, she was strong enough… And then when she did venture away, she left Emmett or Esme in her place, both of whom were apologetic for siding against me but firm in siding with the choice Bella had made.
But the worst of all of it was that I knew the entire situation, every untenable, horrifying moment of it, was my own fault.
The fates had mocked me once again, delivering my soul mate to me after more than a hundred long years only to stand by while I caused her destruction. This had happened because I hadn't been strong enough to stay away from her, I hadn't been strong enough to refuse her when she had asked me to do something I had known all along could only end in disaster.
I was slowly burning at the stake under a fire of my own creation.
My desperation reached a new low the day Jacob Black decided to visit.
Bella had been throwing up periodically for the past two days and all of that morning, depriving her body of even the scant traces of nutrition she had remaining to her after eating, after the crea…fetus took what it needed. She insisted that it wasn't a sign of yet a new form of ruination, that it was simply that something hadn't agreed with her stomach…but the vomiting took even more out of her, made her look even more pale and drawn than before. It was shocking that she could still actually look worse than she already had.
We all smelled him just as we heard the sound of his motorbike snaking up the driveway. I had taken to tuning my family's thoughts out to a dull background roar, unable to tolerate their worry, the visions in their minds of my tortured face and Bella's tortured body. I hadn't been paying attention, so I hadn't picked up on his thoughts before the scent and sound were already upon us.
Rosalie was the first to wrinkle her nose in disgust. "Oh, goody. Wet, rancid dog."
The family was all gathered in the front room, Bella reclined on the white sofa and Rosalie and I standing to either side of her. Carlisle wanted her confined to bed rest, but she refused to listen to that advice also, insisting instead on at least joining the family in the common rooms of the house during the day.
Bella glanced at Rosalie curiously. "Dog? One of the wolves?"
"What the hell do they want?" Emmett grumbled.
I cast my mind out and found Jacob's thoughts easily. I almost had to chuckle at the irony; he had assumed that Bella had already been turned, and was coming to fight me, to kill me if he could.
Little did he know that I already wished I was dead. If Bella weren't still alive, however tenuous her hold on life now seemed to be, I would have begged him for it.
"It's Jacob," I told her softly.
"Just what we need," Rosalie muttered in irritation. "Bella, let me go out and be done with him once and for all, please?"
"Rose…" Bella simply shook her head, too exhausted to offer more of a complaint than that.
Carlisle sighed from his chair near the window, where he had been scouring his latest acquisition, yet another medical textbook on high-risk pregnancies.
Like the author of that could ever have foreseen anything like this.
"I'll speak to him," Carlisle said, and got up to go to the door. He opened it before there was a knock.
"Hello, Jacob," we could hear him say calmly. "How are you?"
Jacob was surprised at Carlisle's demeanour. He had expected a confrontation right off the bat. He had hoped for one, and he had hoped it would come from me. He was unable to muster the same kind of hatred for Carlisle that bubbled near the surface for me.
"I heard Bella made it back alive," Jacob replied.
"Er, Jacob, it's not really the best time. Could we do this later?"
"Carlisle will get rid of him for us, Bella," Rosalie murmured softly, patting Bella's shoulder. "We won't let him in."
"Why not?" Bella asked, her voice rough from the morning spent vomiting. "Are we keeping secrets from Jacob, too? What's the point?"
She was frustrated by the lies we had had to tell Charlie and Renee, that she had picked up a rare disease during the trip to South America and had to be quarantined. We had convinced her not even to speak to them on the telephone herself, lest she let something slip that would reveal the story to be the untruth that it was. She knew it was necessary, but hated it nonetheless.
She raised her voice the best she could. "Come in, please, Jacob," she called.
Carlisle briefly considered closing the door in Jacob's face, but Jacob stepped around him and into the house. He knew Carlisle would not be the one to lift a finger against him.
Esme, Emmett, Jasper and Alice all drifted toward the couch, automatically moving to where they could best protect Bella – and me.
Jacob scanned the faces collected before him quickly, assessing the threat, but was distracted immediately by something else: not Bella – me.
He was shocked by the torment so clearly written on my face, so thoroughly rooted in every muscle, every cell of my body.
I didn't turn my face to look back at him, but instead reflexively, automatically, tuned his thoughts out. It made it even worse to see myself reflected in the minds of others, and to know that no matter how I looked, it was a pale shadow of what I actually felt.
There was a moment of silence in the room that was interrupted only when Bella's heart rate jumped and a strangled gasp caught in her throat. Rosalie heard it at the same time I did, and knew to grab the white plastic basin from the floor and get it under Bella's chin just as she threw up once again.
That had to be the fifth time in the last two hours. I felt my knees give way, and I fell to the floor in front of the sofa. Rosalie lifted a hand in warning as though she thought I had been about to pounce on Bella.
"Sorry about that," Bella murmured quietly. I assumed the comment was directed at Jacob. That she would apologize for the state she was in caused my own stomach to clench violently, and I could not suppress a moan. I leaned forward until my forehead was against Bella's knees, and she placed a clammy hand against my cheek to comfort me.
In a flash, Rosalie had sprung forward, suddenly launching herself between Jacob Black and the sofa. A warning hiss escaped her lips. She didn't want him coming any closer to what she protected.
"Rose, don't," Bella whispered. "It's fine."
Reluctantly, without lifting her glare from Jacob's face, Rosalie edged back to the sofa and crouched near Bella's head at the end opposite from where I was slumped. She was ready to spring at the blink of an eye.
Jacob stepped closer and leaned across the sofa to look at Bella more closely, ignoring Rosalie with ease. "Bella, what's wrong?" he asked, his voice also a whisper. He took one of her hands in his. "Are you all right?"
Since the answer was obvious, she didn't provide a response. Instead, she simply said, "I'm so glad you came to see me today, Jacob."
While I knew she didn't believe this would be the end of her, the way she said it sounded as though she was nevertheless suggesting she was glad he had made it…in time. I couldn't help another moan, my face buried in the blanket that covered her.
Jacob ignored me, too. "What is it, Bella?" he asked, deeply concerned.
"Help me up, Rose?" Bella said after another brief moment of silence.
I'll kill him if he makes this worse, so help me God I will rip him limb from limb and eat the pieces…Rosalie's thoughts were so sharp, so tinged with fury and violence I couldn't block them out.
"Please, Rose."
Numb, I was unable to find the will to move, but I was dully aware that Rosalie was now leaning over, trying to hoist Bella up by the shoulders.
To his credit, Jacob seemed alarmed at the movement from one so obviously unwell. "No…Don't get up…" he murmured softly.
"I'm answering your question," Bella snapped, and struggled to her feet. With her knees no longer under me, I simply fell into the sofa cushions.
I knew Jacob was staring at Bella – he couldn't help but be staring. The change was too obvious, too grotesque. His shock amplified his thoughts, made them impossible to shut out completely, but they were a confused jumble. What the…so sick…looks terrible…horrible… can't be…CAN'T be…it's only been a month…not possible…cradling…loves it? Killing her…clearly…monstrous…feeding on her…monster…
I always knew he would kill her.
My head snapped up at that.
I was seized with fury. As though this had been deliberate, as though I somehow wanted this to happen…For as much as I hated him, hated what he had tried to do when he'd made his shameless attempt to steal Bella away from me, never for a moment had I doubted his affection for her, that he would never purposely harm her.
That he didn't grant me even that much credit was beyond tolerance.
I was on my feet instantly. "Outside, Jacob," I snarled. The idea of releasing on him the fury I had pent up against myself had sudden appeal. I could kill myself later in another way, I didn't need him for that.
He got up just as quickly, utterly unafraid. "Let's do this."
I was aware that Emmett and Jasper had stepped up behind me, but was startled when Bella fell forward and grabbed my arm, gasping. "No."
Of course not. I couldn't do anything to make her feel even worse. I couldn't hurt her even more. She loved him. She…
Suddenly, an idea hit me.
It was a horrible idea, one that made my stomach heave. It filled me to the core with disgust and loathing…but I was desperate. She wouldn't let me save her in any other way.
Maybe this…
Swallowing back the revulsion at my own thought, I turned to Bella and gently stroked her cheek. "I just need to talk to him, Bella," I told her softly. "Don't strain yourself. Please rest. We'll both be back in just a few minutes."
She looked at me for a long moment, trying to find the truth in my face. I assumed she found it to her satisfaction when she nodded and let Rosalie guide her back to the sofa. When she was situated, she gave Jacob a firm stare. "Behave," she told him. "And then come back."
He didn't answer. Unlike me, he wasn't inclined to indulge her every request.
Maybe he was the wiser of the two of us in that regard.
I led the way out the front door, down the driveway. Jacob followed, his thoughts on strategy, how easy it had been to separate me from the protection offered by my family, how quickly he'd have to move if he wanted to take me by surprise.
He didn't realize it wasn't possible to take me by surprise, not when I was paying attention as I was now.
"I'm not ready for you to kill me yet, Jacob Black," I muttered as I walked. "You'll have to have a little patience."
"Patience isn't my specialty," he growled in a low voice.
Of course not. Adolescent werewolves were unable to govern themselves. That was the problem with them.
I ignored him and kept walking, trying to get far enough away that none of my family would hear us. It didn't escape me that this was a dangerous thing to do, given how furious he was at what he had seen and how badly he had wanted to kill me for so long.
But he was also curious.
When I figured we had gone far enough, I stopped and whirled on my heel to face him.
For a moment, he was stunned by what he saw in my face. My reflection was as clear in his mind as if I were looking in a mirror—eyes black but glazed over, surrounded by deep purple circles, mouth tight, agonized…
He knew immediately what it meant. "It's killing her, right? She's dying." He wasn't as pained yet by the notion as I was. The full import of what he had seen was still dawning on him. He had yet to feel the full weight of his words.
And he also had the comfort of knowing that it wasn't his fault.
All of my fury blew out of me like a puff of air from a deflating balloon.
My knees gave out once again and I fell to the ground. "My fault," I whispered. He knew it. I knew it.
I went on to answer his original question. "Yes. Yes, it's killing her."
"So why hasn't Carlisle done anything?" he growled. "He's a doctor, right? Get it out of her."
Like we hadn't thought of that already.
I sighed. "She won't let us."
Of course not. Of course she'll volunteer to die for the monster spawn. How typically Bella.
Jacob saw that quickly, that it was so her to sacrifice herself for someone she loved.
I hadn't seen it until we got to the Sea/Tac airport and she had thrown herself into Rosalie's arms. I had assumed she'd see reason, the need to end the pregnancy as soon as possible.
But Bella didn't act reasonably. I, of all people, should have known that from the fact that she hadn't run screaming from me the moment she had met me.
"You know her so well," I whispered, still on the ground, in the dirt. "How quickly you see….I didn't see. Not in time. She wouldn't talk to me on the way home, not really. I thought she was frightened—that would be natural. I thought she was angry with me for putting her through this, for endangering her life. Again, I never imagined what she was really thinking, what she was resolving. Not until my family met us at the airport and she ran right into Rosalie's arms. Rosalie's! And then I heard what Rosalie was thinking. I didn't understand until I heard that. Yet you understand after one second…" I let my voice trail off with a groan at my own stupidity.
"Just back up a second. She won't let you." His voice was sarcastic as he repeated what I had said earlier. "Did you ever notice that she's exactly as strong as a normal hundred-and-ten-pound human girl? How stupid are you vamps? Hold her down and knock her out with drugs."
He made it sound so easy, like there would be no repercussions from doing something like that to her against her will.
It made me wonder if he really knew her that well after all.
But that was neither here nor there. "I wanted to," I told him quietly. "Carlisle would have…"
But you're all just too noble for that, right? he thought, still sarcastic.
"No. Not noble. Her bodyguard complicated things."
Jacob considered that for a moment, putting it together with what he had seen of Rosalie's behaviour in the house. Why would she bother? I know she doesn't like Bella, but does she really want her dead that badly?
"Maybe," I replied as though he had asked the question aloud. "Rosalie doesn't look at it quite that way."
"So take the blonde out first." He shrugged, again as if it were really that easy. "Your kind can be put back together, right? Turn her into a jigsaw and take care of Bella."
"Emmett and Esme are backing her up. Emmett would never let us…and Carlisle won't help me with Esme against it…." I trailed off, leaving out the rest, that no one in the family wanted to do that to Bella against her will. There was no point in debating the morals of the situation with him right now, when he was so inclined to see it in black and white, death or life.
"You should have left Bella with me."
Again, like it would be so easy. Like it was entirely my choice.
I was starting to wonder if he knew her at all.
But there was still no point in debating any of that with him. It wouldn't help me convince him of my idea…the last idea I had to save her. So I just told him what he wanted to hear: "Yes."
His mind was filled with blame, all for me. I was willing to accept it, but for some reason, I still needed him to know I hadn't deliberately hurt her. "We didn't know," I offered quietly. "I never dreamed. There's never been anything like Bella and I before. How could we know that a human was able to conceive a child with one of us—"
"When the human should get ripped to shreds in the process?" he asked bluntly.
He knew the strength of my kind well enough. "Yes. They're out there, the sadistic ones, the incubus, the succubus. They exist. But the seduction is merely a prelude to the feast. No one survives." Once more my mind was filled with the images I'd seen for myself of the human lovers taken by Tanya and her sisters before they'd become 'vegetarian' like us.
"I didn't realize they had a special name for what you are," he sneered.
I looked up at him wearily. He could lambaste me with his invective as much as he wanted. It wasn't anything I hadn't already thought of myself.
"Even you, Jacob Black, cannot hate me as much as I hate myself."
Wrong, he thought, but didn't say it aloud.
It was time to explain my idea.
"Killing me now doesn't save her," I said quietly.
"So what does?"
"Jacob," I began, steeling myself for the astonishing, impossible words I was going to have to say, "you have to do something for me."
"The hell I do, parasite!" he snapped.
"For her?"
I heard his teeth snap together in frustration. "I did everything I could to keep her away from you. Every single thing. It's too late."
"You know her, Jacob. You connect to her on a level that I don't even understand." I dragged the words out of me by force, using what little remained of my strength of will. I wanted to vomit on them. They were like poison on my tongue.
But I had to be convincing.
"You are part of her, and she is part of you," I continued, each syllable wrenching my gut violently. "She won't listen to me, because she thinks I'm underestimating her. She thinks she's strong enough for this." I swallowed hard. "She might listen to you."
"Why would she?"
I forced myself to my feet, needing to look him in the eye to be able to convince him of what he needed to do. It was asking so much, asking him to put himself before her once again and risk rejection. I had little doubt that it wouldn't end in rejection for him, but I had to try.
I think he's actually going crazy. Can vampires lose their minds? he thought, and I saw from his mind's eye that I indeed looked rather manic.
"Maybe. I don't know. It feels like it." I shook my head, trying to calm down. This definitely wouldn't work if he thought it was borne of insanity.
It undoubtedly was borne of insanity, but such was the situation we were in.
"I have to try to hide this in front of her, because stress makes her more ill," I explained. "She can't keep anything down as it is. I have to be composed; I can't make it harder. But that doesn't matter now. She has to listen to you!"
"I can't tell her anything you haven't. What do you want me to do?" he demanded. "Tell her she's stupid? She probably already knows that. Tell her she's going to die? I bet she knows that, too."
I swallowed hard once again. "You can offer her what she wants."
Jacob frowned, confused.
Now that I had started down this path, I pushed myself forward, spilling the words quickly. "I don't care about anything but keeping her alive. If it's a child she wants, she can have it. She can have half a dozen babies. Anything she wants." I paused just long enough to summon the will to shove down every part of me that recoiled against this plan. "She can have puppies, if that's what it takes."
Jacob's mouth fell open in shock as he quickly tried to process what I had just suggested.
I pressed ahead. "But not this way! Not this thing that's sucking the life from her while I stand there helpless! Watching her sicken and waste away. Seeing it hurting her." I gasped with the force of what I was saying, what I had seen the past two weeks. It had been like being chained to a wall in the darkest of dungeons, being forced to watch while my beloved was slowly tortured to death, inch by inch, erased before my very eyes.
"You have to make her see reason, Jacob," I pleaded. "She won't listen to me anymore. Rosalie's always there, feeding her insanity—encouraging her. Protecting her. No, protecting it. Bella's life means nothing to her."
Jacob made a strangled noise deep in his throat. What is he saying? That Bella should, what? Have a baby? With me? What? How? Is he giving her up? Does he think she won't mind being shared?
Yes, it was as crazy as it sounded in his mind. But I had to try. There was nothing else I could think of to be done.
"Whichever," I said softly. "Whatever keeps her alive."
"That's the craziest thing you've said yet," he muttered.
"She loves you." It galled me beyond reason to say the words, but they were true in their way. And I needed him to believe it.
"Not enough."
"She's ready to die to have a child. Maybe she'd accept something less extreme."
"Don't you know her at all?" he asked.
Oh, don't underestimate me, Jacob Black, I thought. I knew my wife. I knew how much she loved me, too, whether I deserved it or not. I knew it was the longest of long shots. But what other possible choice did I have?
Her death was simply not an option.
I wasn't going to admit how stacked the odds were against him, though. I needed him confident in her affection for him, or he wouldn't even try.
We had to try.
"I know, I know," I said. "It's going to take a lot of convincing. That's why I need you. You know how she thinks. Make her see sense."
I thought I had seen the worst already in Jacob's mind, long ago. I had seen many of his fantasies involving my wife, all the worse than the fantasies of someone like Mike Newton, because at least Jacob had had a chance.
They were nothing compared to what he thought of now. The images were sharp slaps to the face, kicks to the solar plexus…Bella in his arms, Bella sighing his name the way she had sighed mine so many times on the island…
Worst of all, Bella pregnant but rounded in a more natural way…full, healthy, glowing…bursting with happiness and anticipation at the thought of having his child.
It almost took me to my knees again, but I fought against it. Hard.
"Make Bella see sense?" he was saying, through the haze of horror and revulsion that was threatening to knock me over. "What universe do you live in?"
Once again, I swallowed to avoid gagging. "At least try."
He was conflicted, considering it but knowing somehow that it was useless. Useless but so tempting…he was having a hard time resisting the chance, being given the opportunity with my…blessing, such as it was. "Where is this psycho crap coming from?" he asked as he thought it over. "Are you making this up as you go?"
"I've been thinking of nothing but ways to save her since I realized what she was planning to do. What she would die to do," I answered honestly, then prepared to delve into the lie. I had to make it seem like I had carefully considered this for many days, concluded that it had a decent chance of success, or I knew he wouldn't try. "But I didn't know how to contact you. I knew you wouldn't listen if I called. I would have come to find you soon, if you hadn't come today. But it's hard to leave her, even for a few minutes." Back to the truth now. "Her condition…it changes so fast. The thing is…growing. Swiftly. I can't be away from her now."
"What is it?"
"None of us have any idea. But it is stronger than she is. Already."
A vision of a bloody demon breaking through her body in a burst of flesh and bone filled his mind.
It was horrific, but no worse than what I had already imagined, long ago.
"Help me stop it," I whispered. "Help me stop this from happening."
"How?" he demanded. "By offering my stud services? You're really sick. She'll never listen to this."
"Try. There's nothing to lose now." That was it, in a nutshell. "How will it hurt?"
It will hurt me, he thought. Haven't I been through enough?
You haven't even begun feeling pain over Bella, Jacob Black, I thought darkly. Try being in my shoes for five minutes. Five seconds. "A little pain to save her?" I asked instead. "Is it such a high cost?" If I had been in his position, I knew there was no way I would hesitate to help her, no matter what it did to me.
Look at what I was already doing, having this conversation at all. Did he think this was easy for me?
"But it won't work," he protested.
"Maybe not. Maybe it will confuse her, though. Maybe she'll falter in her resolve. One moment of doubt is all I need."
"And then you pull the rug out from under the offer? 'Just kidding, Bella?"
"If she wants a child, that's what she gets," I said simply. "I won't rescind."
Ridiculous…she'll never go for it. She'll punch me and break her hand again instead. He's messing with me, messing with my head.
I should just kill him now.
I sighed. He was back to that again already. "Not now," I said in a low voice. "Not yet. Right or wrong, it would destroy her, and you know it. No need to be hasty. If she won't listen to you, you'll get your chance. The moment Bella's heart stops beating, I will be begging for you to kill me."
"You won't have to beg long."
Thank God for that. I couldn't help an ironic smile from creeping into one corner of my mouth. "I'm very much counting on that."
He hesitated again, for only a brief instant. The idea had far too much appeal for him. "Then we have a deal."
I nodded and extended a hand to shake his. Reluctantly, he took it and shook once.
"We have a deal," I agreed.
