You'll finally get to know what is wrong with Mary. GASP!
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One minute I was racing for the finish line and the next I was out like a light. This was the second time that I had woken up to find myself in my purple childhood bedroom at the Cullens' and not known how I had gotten there or how long I had been unconscious.
This time, though, I was alone in the room that I should have remembered a mere two days ago...or, at least, I think it had only been two days. Honestly, I had no idea how much time had passed since my fainting spell on Monday during track practice.
I could hear various family members throughout the house so I was comforted in my solitude for the time being. At least I wasn't all alone like I had assumed moments before when I woke up in this strange room again. My parents, from what I could tell, were at the top of the stairs just outside my door.
"Jake, I'm worried about her." My mother's voice from the other side of the thick wooden door. "What if Carlisle is wrong? What if that's not what's wrong with our little girl?"
"I trust Carlisle with my life." My father responded automatically, always ready to support this family like no other werewolf would with vampires. "We should trust him with Mary's, as well."
"I'm not saying that I don't trust my grandfather, Jake. You know that's not what I meant." Nessie sounded tense.
"Shh, baby, you know that that's not what I meant either. I know that you're just scared about what he said is wrong with Mary." Jacob, always the diplomat, especially where his imprint was concerned.
"I just don't see how we could have been so blind. Our little girl...oh, Jake, what are we going to do?" My mother sounded like she had a lump in her throat.
"We're going to love her exactly like we did before. Nothing has really changed." Jacob said and I smiled slightly. Whatever it was that they knew that I didn't, at least my father was still willing to treat my sickness as if it were nothing.
"Who are we kidding, Jake? Everything has changed." She sounded like she was about to cry. Oh, god. What was wrong with me that was upsetting my mom so much? I think I wanted to stay in the dark as long as possible.
"Mary is alive and that is all that we should be concerned with right now." My father said, always the one grounded to reality.
"But her future..." My mother quietly muttered.
"At least she'll still have one. We have to look on the bright side of things, Ness, or we'll never be able to get through this." For the first time in this conversation, my father sounded pessimistic.
More footsteps, though they were so faint that if I hadn't had grown accustomed to hearing them throughout my lifetime I wouldn't have heard them at all. I assumed it was the rest of my family. And I was proven correct when I heard their voices.
"I think she's up, guys. Let's not debate this any longer. Carlisle's explanation is the best one that we have right now." Grandpa Edward said, his voice a mix of happiness and chagrin.
"Edward is right." Esme sounded sad, as well. "Until it is proven one way or another, let's try to stay positive."
"I really wish that I could just see what the final outcome of the test is so we wouldn't have to worry about it any longer." Alice sounded like she was pouting. Which, knowing my aunt, she probably was. She loved me like the little sister she never had (other than my mother, of course), but I knew it was difficult on her whenever she didn't know what was going on in my future. Her visions were circumstantial with normal humans and full vampires, but since I was partial of both like my mother (with a little bit of my father's werewolf DNA mixed in) poor Alice had massive headaches whenever she attempted to search my future.
"It's not your fault, Alice." Uncle Jasper tried to console his wife. "We'll find out soon enough."
"I know." Alice sighed. "I just wish that I could help get rid of some of this fear."
"Momma?" I called out, hoping that my family would just come talk to me instead of keeping me out of the loop in the hallway any longer. It wasn't that they didn't already know that I was up. "Daddy?"
All at once, they were in 'my' bedroom: my parents sat on the edge of the bed, my aunts and uncles stood near the tiny wooden dresser and closet on the other side of the room, and Grandma Esme stood near the door waiting for her own mate. My family, forever in their pairs, stared down at me with worry in their eyes.
"So, how long was I out this time?" I joked, but it wasn't received as well as I thought it would.
"Three days." Nessie whispered, really looking like she was about to cry.
"Again?" I asked. "But, I wasn't under Alec's spell..." I couldn't wrap my head around this. The only reason that (or so we thought) I had been knocked out so long after the fight with the Volturi was because of Alec's sensory compulsion.
"It wasn't Alec that kept you unconscious." Emmett said in his 'spooky' voice that never worked on me even when I was a little kid. Somehow, it seemed to give me chills today, though.
"I don't understand." I said, rubbing my arm to get rid of the goosebumps and looking at my parents for all of the answers.
"When Leah and Sammy killed Alec, anyone that had been under his mind control was released from it...except you." Jacob said slowly. "Mary, it's your body that has been knocking you out."
"My body?" A lump formed in my throat.
"We can't be sure until Carlisle confirms it, but we think that your body is forcing you unconscious because you're Changing, Mary." Jacob explained further.
"I've been changing every day of my life. I don't understand why it's so dramatic now." I reasoned. "I'm not like mom."
I knew that my mother wouldn't get offended, and when I looked at her face, I was correct. There was no bitterness or resentment at my comment, only what appeared to be pity.
"You're right." Nessie said, trying to force a smile on her face for me. The longer her speech got, the less real it seemed. "I grew quickly, much too quickly, throughout my childhood. I stopped growing when I was seven and near sexual maturity. You've grown sparatically like any normal human would. Even when you started phasing when you were seven, you still continued to age at a human pace minus the short outbursts whenever you would stay phased for more than a day or two."
"Ah-hmmm." Carlisle cleared his throat since no one had even noticed that he entered the room.
"What's the verdict, Doc? Have her blood results come in?" Jacob asked, standing up to look my great-grandfather in the eye.
"Would you mind if I spoke with Mary alone?" Carlisle asked. "Edward can relay the results of the test to you all downstairs. But I think it is imperative that I confirm my conclusion with Mary by herself."
My family begrudgingly cleared out the room, my parents each giving me a hug before leaving. I could tell by the look in Grandpa Edward's eyes and from the way that Aunt Alice avoided my eye contact that the test results were just as they expected.
"What's the farthest thing back that you can remember, sweetie?" Carlisle asked and I raised an eyebrow. "The first clear memory that you remember having."
"Um...I was playing with Daddy in the yard of the Cullen home in Portland." I smiled at the memory. "It had just rained and we were playing my favorite game, something about being a cowgirl or something like that. He was in wolf form and I was riding on his back when I looked down at a puddle and saw my eyes. I screamed and jumped off of him. It took me a minute...okay, it was longer than that...to realize what had happened. That was the first time that I had phased. Any memory before that is kind of hazy."
"And how old were you?" Carlisle asked, checking over his notes in his hand.
"Seven." I said, rolling my eyes. "You should know, you were there, too. We were all still living together at that point. I'm pretty sure that you and Daddy were the ones who figured out what had happened."
"That's what I thought." Carlisle gave me a weak smile. "I was just making sure that that was as far back as you could clearly remember."
"Granddad, what's wrong with me? I can handle it. I just need to know." I asked. Better to know and be devastated than to stay in the dark any longer and come up with any more ridiculous scenarios of what could be the problem.
"Mary, we ran dozens of tests while you were passed out. Many of them were blood tests." Carlisle spoke slowly in his voice that I had only heard him use on his patients at the hospital. It was both soothing and scary. "On the first day, your blood test turned up like it normally does, with a mere trace or two of venom. The second day, I grew concerned. Though you were not phased, vampire venom was slowly depositing into your system. Today when I got the results back, your blood count was nearly one percent venom."
"That doesn't seem like a lot." I stated, though at the same time I was terrified.
"Mary, you're Changing much slower than your mother did, but you're changing into more of a vampire nonetheless." Carlisle admitted. "I'm so sorry, sweetie."
"That's why it has been three day periods." I suspected. "Because when a human undergoes a Transformation, they whither in pain for three whole days just like Grandma Bella did."
"Were you in any pain?" Carlisle asked, pulling out his notepad again. "Even the smallest bit of pain needs to be recorded, Mary. It's very important that you don't lie to me like Bella tried to do to spare my feelings."
"None. I didn't feel anything. I just felt like I was asleep but without having a dream." I said and at least my granddad looked relieved about that. "I just don't understand why it is happening now. Why not when I was seven like mom did?"
"I don't think that it was the year that was so special towards your mother's permanent change." Carlisle hypothesized. "Renesmee was fully mature when she stopped aging. You are just beginning to mature into an adult. Because of how special and unique you are, we have no idea when you will be done with this process or even how you will be when it is over."
"You don't think that I'll be fully vampire, do you?" I asked.
"Sweetie, we have no idea what you will end up as." Carlisle said in his soothing doctor voice, though this time it seemed to be less comforting. I felt like I had a death sentence looming over my head.
"But I will end up as something, right?" I knew my voice was full of panic, but I couldn't contain my fear any longer. I could see why my mother was so upset. What if I didn't have a future? What if this Transformation killed me?
"We don't know that either." Carlisle continued slowly. "You are one of a kind. Alice would have come across someone like you when she was searching for a half-vampire hybrid when your mother was born. You are the only Shapeshifter/half-vampire child in existence."
"What about my children? How will this effect them? They'll be even more one of a kind than I was." I knew what he was going to say before he even said it.
"Mary, we don't think that you'll be able to have children once too much venom gets in your system. We don't know for sure, since you are the first of your kind, but from what your mother went through, we can guess." Carlisle hypothesized again. "Your mother had fifty percent human blood and fifty percent vampire venom in her when she got pregnant with you. Once she stopped aging, she had more venom than blood which was why you were born premature."
And, suddenly, a dream that I didn't even know I had was being taken away from me. It wasn't that I had never thought about it before, but children just didn't seem like a big deal to me until now. If imprinting was all about creating a stronger bloodline of wolves, then what the hell did I imprint on Sammy for? I couldn't give him what he would eventually want and that killed me. I felt the tears on my cheeks before I even realized that I had started crying. Granddad handed me a tissue from the nightstand and I blew into it.
"Let me guess, you have no idea when that will be: when I'll have too much venom in my system to conceive." I guessed.
"It just depends on how often your body tries to knock you out." Carlisle concluded reasonably. "It seems you only have venom in your system when you are phased or when you are unconscious because of this Change. After the Volturi fight when you were out for three days, it appeared as if you were the same. Looking back on my notes from those three days, however, I realized that you had accumulated half of a percent of vampire venom in your system. We are all hoping that you are Changing at half a percent and that your body isn't doubling the amount of venom in your system each time you are knocked out. It would be better for you if you slowly edged into this and weren't shocked with it like your mother was."
"And if I change with the half a percent each time it happens and if the pattern stays to once a week like it seems to be happening?" I asked, trying to do the math in my head.
"You'll have four years until you're fully a vampire." Or dead, I could tell that he wanted to add.
"And if it doubles each time and continues once a week?" I asked, knowing that my odds were even worse.
"Two and a half months." He said and I felt dizzy. The whole room was spinning. I possibly only had two and a half months to live? Or, at the very least, live the way that I have been living. No one would treat me the same at school if they knew that I was a full vampire. If I even ended up like that. I could stop at any point and be done, like my mother did. No matter what happened, I was never going to be the same again.
"Is there anything that we can do to slow it down?" I asked, feeling my chest clench up in panic.
"The only thing that we know for sure to do is to monitor you." Carlisle admitted glumly. "You're just too unknown for us to try anything risky. We don't know if having you phase will slow down the process or speed it up. The best we can do is just wait and keep you safe and calm in the meantime."
The Volturi were right. I had no business being born. I was too much of a threat to everyone around me. Who knew what would happen if I phased now? Would it kick-start my Transformation even more? Would it kill me? Would I kill someone that I loved? It was too much to think about. I only prayed that I had longer than two and a half months to figure this all out.