A/N: Hola everyone! I'm SO sorry for the year-long delay. Things have been extremely hectic and busy this past year, so this story was put on the back burner for a while. But I hope that for those of you who are still reading this enjoy this chapter! :) Thank you all so much for the support that this story has and still receives; this story wouldn't be at all possible without it. And so, this one is for you guys. Enjoy!

"One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood."

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

It's Hayley's Turn

"Get out of here, Jake."

"I'm not leaving her, Sam."

Two voices arguing slowly brought me out of my sleep. Part of me wanted to yell at them for waking me up, another part of me wanted to find out what they were arguing about, and the final part of me wanted to try to ignore them and continue sleeping. The third part won.

I was almost back to sleep when the first voice spoke again. "Jacob," he growled.

"Let him stay, Sam. What if that was me?"

After the woman spoke, everything was silent and I internally breathed a sigh of relief because that meant I could sleep again. However, before I could try to go back to sleep, memories started flooding into my brain, and I tried to make sense of all of them. Before I could fully understand what they all meant, a dull aching pain came from my arm, and I groaned. I knew I wouldn't be able to fall back asleep, so instead I opened my eyes and looked around.

"Huh?" I mumbled as I felt a comforting warmth on my hand. Looking down, I noticed that Jacob was holding my hand. I quickly took it out of his and sat up. "What happened?"

"Your idiot of a boyfriend decided to take you out on a disastrous motorcycle ride," Embry growled. Subconsciously I noticed that Jacob growled back at him, but I had other problems to worry about. I had just noticed the cast on my arm, and it worried me. If I got a cast, that meant that they saw the burns. If they saw the burns, they probably would have tried to clean it off, and if they tried to clean the burns off with water, they would have seen my tail.

I tried to control my breathing, but nothing worked. I looked up at the people around me and asked, "What doctor did I go to to get this? Did they find out that I'm a mermaid?"

"No, I took you to Dr. Cullen," Jacob said.

"WHAT?" I yelled. How could Jacob be so stupid? I never had a good relationship with the Cullens, and they've been asking about what I was, and so Jacob just decides to take me there? "Why would you do that? Does he know? Did he find out? Was everyone-"

"Hale, calm down! Everything's fine. He did find out, but none of the others did, and he said he wouldn't tell anyone. It turns out he knew mermaids existed, but he just didn't know that you were one."

"And what about Edward?" I yelled. "He's going to read Dr. Cullen's mind at some point and he could very well figure it out through that!"

Jacob was silent for a few seconds before speaking again. "He's been keeping the secret for centuries. I'm sure that he can keep your secret from Edward, too."

"I hope so," I said, a warning in my voice. If Jacob was the reason that the whole Cullen family found out that I was a mermaid, I was going to be freaking pissed off.

I looked at the contemplative expression on his face, and I internally groaned. He had something on his mind, and I wasn't sure if I'd be happy knowing what it was. "What else happened?" I asked, glaring at him.

"What are you talking about?"

"You obviously have something on your mind. What is it?"

"It's just something we found when the leech put the cast on your arm." Shit. I was hoping that it wasn't that. I could feel my face getting red, and I started bouncing my leg up and down to try to get rid of my nervous energy. "What happened to your arm, Hale? Why was it burned?"

"What do you mean it was burned?" Sam demanded. I cringed at the fierce tone in his voice.

I looked down and started picking at the ends of my sleeve. "You guys really don't want to know about that." Maybe I could get them off the topic and we could forget about this whole mess.

"Are you kidding? Of course we want to know," Sam replied. Of course. I should have known that Sam wouldn't have dropped it.

I continued looking down at my shirt as I took a deep breath. "A girl that we knew in Australia turned into a mermaid when I was there. We tried to talk to her about everything but she got so pissed at us that she started to fight us. She was able to channel her powers a lot quicker than we expected, so she was able to heat the water around my arm during the fight, and it burned me."

I looked up when I felt the couch I was on start vibrating. Jacob was intensely shaking, and his eyes were filled with rage. I shrunk back into the couch slightly. I had never seen him this mad before, and it scared me. He was shaking so badly that I didn't know if he would be able to control it and calm back down, and fear gripped at my heart.

"Jacob, calm down," Sam ordered.

Almost as soon as Sam finished speaking, Jacob was flying out the back door. He phased as soon as he stepped outside and ran into the woods. I watched his brown form until it disappeared completely, and I turned my pounding head around towards Sam. He was staring at the woods, a dazed look on his face.

"Sam?" I asked quietly, my voice shaking slightly. "Are you okay?"

"That was an order. He just disobeyed a direct Alpha order," he said, slowly moving his head in my direction.

"What does that mean?" I asked. I didn't think that any of the wolves could disobey an alpha command.

"It means Jacob is embracing his role as the Alpha of this pack."

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," he said. He sat down in the chair and rested his forehead in his hands. "I don't know what will happen to the pack. He declined the offer to become Alpha before, so I don't know how that will affect things. Before he phased, I was saving his space as Alpha, but when he declined the offer to become Alpha, I was officially made the Alpha. If he embraces his role now, I'm not sure what will happen. I'll have to talk to Old Quil and Billy about this."

I knew my brother was going to take care of it, but I was still worried about what would happen to the dynamics of the pack if Jacob took his place as Alpha. Would he take over my brother's role, and would that lead to tension between them? Or would there be two packs? And if there were two packs, would there be disputes about territory or would they be able to work together harmoniously? I knew that the whole pack loved each other like brothers, so I assumed that it would be the latter, but a part of me was worried that I was wrong and there was an unwritten rule about wolf pack territories not overlapping.

Sam went upstairs for a little bit, and I stayed downstairs with Em and Embry to keep them company. I grabbed the plates on the table and put them in the sink as Em started sweeping the floor. I put the cleaned and dried dishes away, and then I ran upstairs to my room to grab what I needed. Once I was back downstairs, I took a deep breath and turned to face Embry.

"Embry?"

"What's up, Hale?"

"Do you think you could bring me to the store? I have to pick up a few things."

"Sure." He grabbed his keys and motioned me towards the front door. I waved bye to Em and followed him out the door and into his car. Once I was buckled into the passenger seat, he started the car and drove down the road. When we got closer to First Beach, I asked him if he could pull over.

"Why?" he asked, confusion clearly written on his face. "I thought you had to go to the store?" He paused before adding in a rushed voice, "You're not going swimming are you? Sam and Jake would kill both of us if I let you go swimming today after everything that's happened."

I let out a light chuckle. "No, I'm not going swimming. I just need to talk to you about something and I didn't think you'd want to do it in front of everyone."

"Are you okay?" he asked quickly, glancing over at me in concern. "You look kind of pale."

I nodded my head, trying to calm down my erratic heartbeat. "I'm fine," I lied. Truthfully, I was terrified. I had no idea how Embry was going to react to what I was going to tell him, and I was worried that I was wrong about my decision to tell him.

He stared at me and looked like he was about to say something, but he held his tongue. Instead, he pulled into the parking lot for First Beach and stopped the car.

"What's up, Hale?" he asked, maneuvering his body so that he was facing me. My tongue got caught in my throat as I tried to find a way to express what I was thinking. I knew that it would be a big deal to him whether or not he truly wanted to find out, so I didn't want to say it off-handedly.

"Hale?" he asked after a bit, worry clearly written on his face. "You're scaring me. What's wrong?"

I rested my head in my hands as I took a deep breath. "When I was in Australia, I came across something I thought you might want to read."

"Okay..." he trailed off. "What is it?"

I grimaced slightly as I felt the letter's weight in my pocket. I took the folded letter out and stared at it in my hand. "Can you promise to keep an open mind while reading it?"

"Of course. I'm sure it's not as bad as you think."

He carefully took the letter out of my hand and unfolded it. I could see his eyes moving back and forth as he read the letter from his mom, and my heart clenched together as his face continued to be unreadable. There were no body cues to figure out what he was thinking, and that worried me.

All of a sudden, Embry ripped open the car door and ran onto the beach, throwing the letter behind him. Before I could call out his name, he took off his clothes and phased into his wolf. He paced continuously around the beach and growled at seemingly nothing. Slowly, I climbed out of the car and walked towards him.

"Em?" I asked, scared about what the letter had done to him. "You okay?"

Nothing. There was no indication that he even heard me. I took a few steps closer to him and cautiously extended my arm.

"Em?" He growled and stalked away. My hand slowly went down to its side. "I can understand if you want to be alone, but can you please go into the woods? I don't want anyone finding you here and freaking out and calling animal patrol or something and then you guys getting close to being found out and-"

He turned around and partially lunged at me. I stumbled backwards to try to get out of his way, but he stopped before he even got to me. My heart thudded in my chest, and I tried to take calming breathes to calm its erratic pace.

My heart started to slow down, and I fell back into the sand. This was such a mess. Maybe I never should have told him about it. He just seemed so mad now. The Embry I knew never got that mad. At least not at the people he called his pack.

I stiffened when I felt the familiar brush of fur on my leg. I slowly lifted my head and saw Embry there, laying his head on my lap, looking up through tear-filled eyes. Cautiously, I moved my hand to rest on his nose. He closed his eyes once my hand made contact and he nuzzled into my lap a little more.

"I'm sorry if you never wanted to know. I thought you did, but I guess I was wrong, completely wrong. If I knew you were going to be this upset about it, I wouldn't have told you."

He looked up at me through the top of his eyes before quickly shaking his head. He suddenly got up and ran off to the woods, grabbing his clothes along the way. Within minutes, he was back sitting beside me.

"I'm glad you told me," he said after a while, his voice quiet. "And I'm sorry for freaking out. It's just not something that I was expecting. And then I started actually thinking about what that meant."

I glanced over at him, confused.

"We're only a few months apart, Hale. And you're parents didn't divorce until after you were born."

Everything clicked in my head and my shoulders sagged. "He... he..."

"He's a scumbag," he growled, shaking slightly again. "I can't believe that piece of filth ended up being our father. That bastard." He grabbed a rock and chucked it out to the sea.

We were silent for a while. I was trying to wrap my mind around everything until I came to one final conclusion. "I guess we were kind of lucky he was a bastard though."

Embry looked at me incredulously. "How could we ever be lucky we got a douche as our father?"

I looked up at him with a slight smirk on my face. "If he wasn't, I wouldn't have had an awesome brother like you."

His grin became so wide that it made me smile. He quickly stood up and grabbed me in his arms before running down to the ocean.

"Let me down! Em! Let me down!" I yelled, laughter escaping my lips as he continued to run down to the water.

"Are you sure that I'm that great of a brother?" he asked, a joking glint in his eye.

"You would be if you let me go!"

He suddenly dropped me to the ground and I landed on my butt. "You're unbelievable," I said, looking up at his smiling face.

"Come on," he said, lending out a hand to help me up. "Let's get you back before everyone starts to get worried."

I grabbed his hand and he pulled me up to my feet. We walked back to the car and he started the drive back.

"Wait, did you need anything from the store?

"Nah. That was only an excuse to get you away from the house."

"Clever girl."

I whipped my head over at him, staring wide-eye. "You did not just quote Jurassic Park."

He looked at me. "Oh, but I did. It's one of the best movies out there."

"You said it, bro."

He pulled up to my house, and I saw Jake on the porch. We stepped outside, and I nodded at Jake before turning to Embry.

"You alright?" I asked. I wanted to make sure he was okay with everything before I headed inside.

He looked down at me with a slight smile. "I'm great. Thanks, Hale. Thanks so much."

I hugged him tightly before whispering in his ear, "I'm so glad you're my brother." After, I let go and waved bye before heading inside and up to my room.

By the time I reached my room and looked out the window, I saw that Embry had already headed out. What I didn't expect to see though was Jake walking the way that I'm sure Embry had went.

I quickly took out my phone and shot Embry a quick text.

I think Jake's coming your way, and he looks murderous.