Edward's POV

School had just let out and all the students were rushing to the parking lot so that they could be the first to leave. It took my family a few minutes to get outside, so we were caught in the middle of the parade of slow moving cars. I put in a CD and Alice, Jasper and I were all "jamming out" to the tunes, like normal teenagers would, when all of a sudden Alice gasped. I saw what she was seeing and turned to lock eyes with her.

"Go!" she urged me. I didn't need telling twice, not once I felt the familiar tug of Bella's gift, the tug that was so urgent that you didn't have any choice but to go. Rosalie obviously felt the same thing, because at the same time we both pulled out of the line of cars and into the opposite lane – the one for the cars going the other direction. We sped down the street, sending cars off the road as they swerved to avoid a head-on collision with us.

"Police," Jasper warned me as we pulled out into a busy street at over 60 mph.

"I know," I told him, having already caught their thoughts. "They won't catch us,"

"What's happening?" Jasper asked. He could feel our panic, and he could feel Bella's gift pulling us home, but he didn't know why.

"That club set our house on fire with Bella, Esme, and Victoria locked inside!" Alice squeaked. "We have to get there to save them!"

"The fire won't kill them, will it?" Jasper asked worriedly.

"I don't think so," I answered as the police lights and sirens went on behind us. I didn't mind – it just gave us a clear path as all the cars ahead of us pulled over. Rosalie and Emmett were close behind us, pulling up beside us as we raced home. The police didn't stand a chance against Rosalie's modified engines, especially when we took corners at insane speeds with our great reflexes.

We lost the police quickly, and Rosalie pulled back behind us as we had to narrow down and take up only one lane again.

I'm not sure how long it took, but the entire time while I was driving, I kept chanting in my head, "Let them be safe. Not Bella. Not Esme. Let them be safe."

Finally, after what seemed like the longest drive of my life, we pulled in the driveway. We left the cars close to the road and ran the rest of the way – it was faster than trying to take the twisty driveway in cars.

The black smoke was pouring out of the house, the flames eating every inch of it, and I foolishly ran up to the door. Emmett pulled me back.

"We can't go in there!" he yelled over the flames.

"Why not?!" I demanded, struggling to get free from his grasp.

"Can we walk through fires?" he asked.

"I'm going to find out!" I told him as I ripped out of his arms and dashed into the house.

"Bella!" I screamed.

"Edward!" I heard her yell. "EDWARD!!!!"

" Carlisle!" I heard Esme yell, and I heard Carlisle come in behind me.

"Where are they?" he asked urgently.

"This way, I think!" I told him, still yelling. The fire was deafening, and it was hard to even think over and above the noise and heat. I listened for Esme and Victoria's minds, and found the door to the room they were in blocked by heavy steel bars that were bolted to the wall. Carlisle and I tried to rip them off the wall, but they wouldn't budge.

"We can't get through!" I called.

"I'm here!" Emmett announced. Together, the three of us were able to pull the bars off. We all listened to Bella and Esme shrieking and Victoria yelling at them to pull it together, and that just made us pull harder.

Finally, we were able to open the door, and the flames inside the room grew bigger as they received more oxygen. Carlisle ran into the room, and pushed Esme out the door first. Victoria was next, and Bella was last. All three seemed weak, so Victoria made it to the door with Emmett's help, and Carlisle helped Esme out. I was helping Bella out when suddenly someone grabbed me from behind.

"No!" Bella screamed. She tried to punch the vampire, but the vampire who attacked was gone before Bella's fist even made it halfway towards their nose.

"Get us out of here!" Bella commanded.

"No!" I yelled back, "I'm going to find them and rip them to pieces!"

"Not now!" Bella begged. "Not in the house while it's on fire. Do it later!"

"Emmett!" I yelled. Emmett appeared again, and I handed Bella off. "Take her outside. I'm going to go find the vampire who just attacked us!"

"I'm coming back in to help!" he shouted back, and took Bella.

"NO!" Bella screamed. I gave her a quick kiss and then took off towards the middle of the house, after the other vampire.

Bella's POV

"NO!!!" I screamed. "NO! NO! NO!!!!"

"Calm down," Emmett instructed me.

"NO!" I repeated. "EDWARD! EDWARD!!!!!" I tried using my gift to call him to me, but he didn't come.

"Emmett, put me down!" I commanded. Emmett didn't listen until we were outside.

"Are you okay?" a fireman asked. He grabbed me out of Emmett's arms, wrapped me in a blanket, and let another try to steer Emmett away from the house.

"I have to go back in!" Emmett protested.

"No, you don't. The house is going to fall anytime now," the fireman said. "No one is going in."

"My son is in there!" Esme sobbed. "We have to get him out!"

"It's my brother!" Emmett argued. "I'm going in to help him."

"We'll send one of our men in to find him," the fireman said. "Is he on the first level?"

"I don't know!" I said hysterically. "He went further in, and I don't know where he went!"

"Why would he do that?" a fireman asked.

"He saw someone else in there," I said. "Let Emmett go back in."

"He'll die," they argued, "He doesn't have a suit, and he's not trained. We'll have to go in ourselves."

Two men started towards the house to go in, but a huge crack was heard, and then the house started to fall. I bolted out of the fireman's grasp and started to run towards the house, only to get intercepted by Carlisle.

"You can't go in," he told me in a fierce whisper. "The humans will wonder."

" Victoria can confuse them," I hissed back, jerking out of his arms. I ran, blanket and all, into the house. Emmett came and grabbed me, pulling me back out just as the whole thing came crashing down.

We barely made it out in time.

"Edward!" I screamed. "EDWARD!!!!"

There was no answer. Esme sobbed into Carlisle's chest, Alice sobbed into Jasper's, Rosalie stood staring at the house, too shocked to move. Emmett was holding me back, and Victoria sat on the ground next to the firemen, staring at the flaming pile that was once the house as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"Calm down," the firemen ordered me. "We'll comb the ruins and see if we can find your brother."

"No," I sobbed, knowing that they wouldn't find anything but ashes. They sprayed the house, dousing the fire, but it was too late. The house was just a pile of ashes, and Edward wasn't coming back. Edward was gone. I had just lost my husband, my life, my everything.

"No," I sobbed. I sank to my knees, and Emmett let me go. I sat on the ground, rocking back and forth, repeating, "No," over and over and over again.

Time passed. The firemen talked with Carlisle, then the police who came, and the paramedics. They tried to check us over, but Carlisle refused, saying that he would do it himself at the hospital once we were done here. Alice produced three sets of clothing for Victoria, Esme and I out of the back of the Volvo, saying something about how she was going to use them in P.E. at school, but we needed clothes. She practically had to do it all for me because I was too shocked to do anything on my own. After that I don't know what happened. I was too busy staring at the pile of ash, wondering what had gone wrong, and how I could get Edward back. I knew he was nothing but a pile of ashes anymore, buried somewhere within the ashes of what used to be the house. If he hadn't come out by now, then he was dead.

Dead. My Edward, never to smile or laugh or tease me again. Never again could he laugh at my silly fears, or tell me everything would be alright. Never again could he fight with our siblings or tell me exactly what someone was thinking. Never again…

Sometime during the evening, after all the emergency vehicles had left, and all the chaos had died down, I heard Carlisle talking to me, but I paid him no attention, choosing instead to continue to stare at what used to be the house. I think he tried to get my attention for several minutes before finally giving up.

I felt two strong arms pick me up, and I knew it was Emmett. I was too tired and weak to struggle. I had been calling Edward to me with all my strength for the past few hours, but he never came, and I was exhausted. I curled into a sobbing ball and allowed Emmett to carry me to the car.

Alice's POV

We checked into a local hotel, our stay courtesy of the local fire department. We had two different rooms, but we all went into one and sat around, silently waiting for someone to say something. Bella just kept repeating, "No," in a broken voice and sobbing into Emmett's chest, but we didn't count her. We were waiting for someone to say something more official.

"I'm sorry," Victoria finally whispered in a broken voice. She broke down and started sobbing, and I reached over to comfort her.

She jerked away from my hand. "Don't touch me," she hissed. "I don't deserve your comfort."

" Victoria," I protested, but she hissed again.

"Don't touch me."

"We need to figure out where we're going to live," Carlisle announced emotionlessly, cutting off our exchange.

"We just lost our brother, and you are already talking about finding a place to live?" Rosalie asked incredulously. "We're all on the verge of breaking down, and all you can talk about is finding a new house?!"

"Rosalie," Carlisle growled warningly. "Don't go there. "I'm just as upset, if not more so, than you are. I just know that life moves on, and they won't pay for us to stay here forever. We need to figure out what we're doing."

"Give us some time to mourn," Rosalie snapped. "We aren't ready to talk about moving yet. We just lost a brother, and we don't want to have to deal with stupid things like where we're going to live!"

"Rosalie!" Carlisle barked, "Calm down and lower your voice!"

"No!" Rosalie snapped. She stood up, grabbed the key to the other room, and stormed out.

"Do you all feel the same way?" Carlisle asked.

"Yes," Jasper answered for everyone. "We just need some time to mourn and accept that we'll never see Edward again. Come talk to us again later."

"Very well," Carlisle assented. He pulled Esme to him and wrapped his arms around her. Jasper did the same to me, and Emmett went to go find Rosalie. Bella still lay sobbing in a ball on the couch, and Victoria was next to her, still looking shocked.

"WHY?!" Bella finally burst out. "Why did he go?"

"He wanted to protect us," Carlisle told her softly. "He thought he would be okay."

"We had an eternity together," Bella whispered. "We had an eternity to live, and now he's gone."

"You have to keep living," I warned her. "Edward would want you to continue living."

"It's not like it matters," she said emotionlessly. "That club is going to kill us all anyway, one by one. I might still be last, but I don't care. I don't want to live for an eternity without Edward."

"Don't say that," Victoria said harshly. "Never think like that. You wanted to be changed, so deal with it. Deal with the consequences of your actions. Sure, lover boy is gone, but that doesn't mean that you need to stop living."

"I wanted an eternity to live with Edward," Bella told her. "But Edward is gone now, and I don't want to keep living if I can't spend my eternity of repeating stupid high school and then going back to college and always moving and never getting to know anyone except my family with him."

"I wanted to spend eternity with James," Victoria snapped.

"It's all because you made that stupid club mad," Bella blamed her, sitting up so she could argue better. "It's all your fault!"

"Do you think I wanted to live after your family killed my husband?" Victoria questioned. "Do you think I was happy that my husband was killed so that a single human girl could live? You can say we're even now. We both lost our husbands for the other's stupidity. You're just being selfish!"

"I wasn't stupid!" Bella exclaimed. "I was spending a day with the man I loved and you guys showed up!"

"I was spending a day with my husband, and we hoped to join a baseball game! How was I to know that James would decide to hunt you?"

"You helped him!" Bella screeched. "You helped him hunt me, and then you hunted me later. We aren't even!"

"You're the stupid one who decided to ask me to join this family!" Victoria yelled. "You're the one who made the stupid decision!!!!"

Bella fell silent and looked sad. I knew that she was regretting that decision.

"Maybe you should just leave," she finally suggested quietly.

"That won't stop the others from killing all of you," Victoria told her. "It wouldn't do any good."

"They might leave us alone," Bella said.

"They won't," I told her sadly. "They are after all of us now."

"Perhaps you should both calm down and quit yelling," Jasper suggested.

"There are other people in this hotel," Carlisle said. "We should stop pointing fingers at each other and just accept the fact that we need to work together to prevent anyone else from dying."

"I'm leaving," Bella said. She tried to stand up, but was too weak and fell almost immediately. No one caught her, and she stayed on the floor.

"No, you're not," I told her. "You're staying here. We're all working together, and we're not letting you out of our sight for even one minute. You don't get to try to kill yourself."

"I don't want to be here," Bella sobbed. "I don't want to be alive."

"You're already dead, hun," Victoria told her. "Don't worry about being alive."

"I'll take you to the other room," I told her. I stood up from Jasper's embrace and helped her off the floor. We left and I helped her to the room that Emmett and Rosalie were in. I knocked on the door, and Emmett answered.

"We need to separate Bella and Victoria," I told him.

"We heard," he said. "Bring her in."

A/N: You all hate me now, yes? Oh well. You should have known it was coming. You did read the preface, after all.

Until the next chapter,
Addie