Title: The Lost Soul
Rating: T
Full Summary: The Volturi have fallen. And so has Bella Swan. Left wandering through a world that is slowly falling apart, Edward wonders whether her sacrifice has been worth it. Lonely and grieving, he meets up with old friends who do their best to reassure him that Bella did the right thing. But is life really worth living without your Mate?

Disclaimer: Twilight and its characters are all property of Stephenie Meyer. No profit is being made from this piece of work. No copyright infringement is intended.

PART 3: THE LOST SOUL

36. Mourning

The bright orange of the flames spread from one house to the other. From so high up on the mountain, the figures were nothing but shadows blurring into one another. It was impossible to distinguish between human and Vampire.

It had been like this non-stop for a week, ever since the Volturi had been wiped out by…

I turned away from the sight below me, unable to bear looking at the mess Bella had caused. It wasn't meant to be like this. She had wanted to bring peace. I sat on a rock with my back to the chaos, looking straight ahead at the peaceful trees in front of me. It was like I was sitting right in the middle of the calm and the chaos.

I'd known Bella was up to something; of course I had. She…was my Mate – there was nothing she could fully hide from me. But I had kept quiet. I had done the stupid thing of not asking her anything about it and had simply hoped that she had known what she was doing. I remembered how she had always wanted to do things on her own; confronting the Angels, joining the Lycanthropes. A pain ripped through me at that last thought and drove my fist into the nearest tree in anger. I should have known she would be putting herself in danger again.

But that was Bella; always looking out for others. I wouldn't have changed her for the world, even if it meant being able to have her here with me now. It hurt to admit it, but it was the truth.

Both Demetri and I had felt the explosion before we heard it. It travelled from the floor up into my body, making my insides quake as though in fear. Demetri gave a cry of horror and tried to run for it. He got a few feet ahead of me before the ceiling came crashing down, along with the palace that was situated on top.

I had let everything crush me. Never in my long years of being a Vampire had I ever been so frozen in place. All I could think about was how nothing could have survived that blast, not Felix or the Volturi or Bella. She was gone. That thought crushed me more than any centuries-old building could have ever done. For a while I sat there, as still as a statue hoping I would hear the sounds of Bella scrambling through the debris, trying to get out. I heard nothing to my right though and the only sound to my left was of Demetri clawing his way out. Why had he survived and not Bella?

Of course I knew the answer to that; Bella must have been the one with the bomb. It explained so much; her trying to join the Volturi, the feeling that she was hiding something from me. In the end, not being able to breathe became too uncomfortable to bear and, with a silent apology to my dear love, I left her behind and spent the next couple of hours climbing out of the mountain of debris. I passed old furniture, now crumbling to dust, the odd skull from the palace that had survived, all the while thinking of how Bella had done what she did.

She had to have swallowed it. If it had been on her person, we all would have detected the metallic smell and I would have found it the night before when we…I grabbed a pendulum from an old clock and crushed it between my fingers. Of course, there were other possibilities too – I'd heard of the ways humans smuggled drugs when they were desperate for money – but I didn't think Bella was the kind of person to do that kind of thing.

So where had she gotten the bomb? I knew that answer before the question had even formed in my head. Irina. This all had to have been Irina's plan. Bella would never have come up with it. As smart as she had been, she wasn't up to Qualified standards.

When I had emerged from the rubble, it was to greet the many humans that had gathered round in horror, staring at the great abyss that had once housed their leaders.

"Is that…Was that…" one asked. It was a little girl with hair and eyes so brown it hurt to look at her.

All it took was one person. "The Volturi have fallen!" And then the whole world fell apart.

I caught up with Demetri a few hours later. He was fleeing the city. I killed him before he had a chance to escape. If my Bella couldn't enjoy the freedom she had given so much to gain then a traitor such as him definitely wouldn't.

Now I began my journey down the mountain, my intentions clear in my mind.

Since the fall of the Volturi, Vampires discovered they were free to feed from whomever they liked. This led to chaos. Humans began using fire to ward of Vampires leading to many homes and buildings being destroyed. Fire was only a short-term solution. The long-term of it were the bombs which were still going – now stronger than before.

I walked down the streets, glad the sun had set so as not to reveal my identity to the humans. My eye colour worked to an advantage. A burly man went running down the street screaming at the top of his lungs. In each hand he carried a flaming torch – what looked like stair railings set on fire. He stopped short when he saw me, peered at my face through narrow eyes.

"Pardon me, sir," he said in Italian, thrusting one of the torches at me. "I almost mistakened you for one of them. Protect yourself, sir. We're in for a rough time ahead."

I took one of the torches from him so as not to appear suspicious – something I had a feeling I would be doing a lot of from now on – and looked at the burning flame. Was this the future that Bella had wanted? I threw the torch aside, not caring where it landed. I didn't care about anything anymore except finding a well-armed human. Chaos was everywhere; everyone's thoughts were so jumbled together that it was hard to read anyone.

Breathing in the air around me, I allowed my mouth to water at the smell of human blood which was pumping hot and fast around everybody's adrenaline-fuelled bodies. Opening my eyes, I saw my target. It was a family of four; parents and two children. They were crowded in an alley, the father frantically pushing his family further into the darkness out of harm's way. He, too, carried two torches both burning hotly.

He noticed me when I was but three steps away.

"Get back you monster!" he yelled. I could have killed him easily had that been my intention. Instead I let him swipe at me, let the flames burn my skin for a fraction of a second. Would this do the job? Would burning be enough to kill me or did I have to be dismembered? From what I'd seen, those of us that had been burned hadn't died straight away. They'd simply grown weak and, left vulnerable, had been blown up by grenades.

So letting that man attack me was just step one but hopefully step two would come quickly. As though reassuring me, I heard a grenade blast just a few blocks away. Taking my hesitation as his only chance to act, the man leapt forward. His torch was seconds from igniting me but before he could I was pulled out of the way with such speed and strength that it could only have been by a Vampire.

I didn't know this Vampire – this young man with burning red eyes and thick brown hair – but that didn't seem to matter to him.

"Be careful," he warned me, having no idea I had been on a suicide mission. "Don't misjudge their strength. We've become too complacent over the centuries." And then he was gone, leaving me stood there with sudden second thoughts.

What if there was an afterlife and, having managed to succeed in destroying myself, I'd met up with Bella only to have her scream at me for giving up. I couldn't help but smile a little. I could just picture her face framed by that deep brown hair of hers. Her eyebrows would be pulled heavy over her eyes, her jaw jutted out and her glare would have been piercing. She wouldn't want me to take my own life; she'd want me to be stronger than that.

Silently thanking the Vampire who had saved me, I turned and ran for the mountains.

"So, what do I do now, Bella?" I asked the sky above me. "Do I just keep wandering until I find someone who wants to kill me? Is that it? Is that all I have now?" No wind rustled as a sign she had heard me. Was there even an afterlife for us? We started out as human so if there was one for humans then there had to be one for us – unless religion was just a farce humans invented to try and scare us away.

I sighed and slid down to the floor where I lay, looking up at the stars above me. I wanted to believe there was something. I wanted reassurance that I would see her again, hold her again, listen to her grumble about some injustice or other – because even if a perfect heaven did exist she would find fault with it.

"What do I do now?" I repeated in a whisper, closing my eyes.

And then it came to me all at once. Alice! Jasper! Carlisle! Esme! Emmett! Rosalie! My friends! Now that the Volturi had gone I could meet up with them again! It would just be like the old days, we'd play baseball in the clearing by the woods in Forks, we'd challenge each other as to who could win the most games of chess – and I would swear I wasn't cheating by reading their minds. How could I not think of them when I had been considering ending my life? How could I do that to them when they had done so much for me?

Nevertheless my heart still sank. I didn't want to go back to the old days. I wanted to still be living in the new days with Bella. It would be weird going back to only finding peace when I was alone. It had been nice not being able to read somebody's mind for once. And of course, Bella herself. My Mate. Gone forever.

Clenching my fists, I jumped to my feet. I needed to stop moping. If she was here now she would have buried me alive for all the sulking I had done. Hadn't I told her that we needed to forget the past and look towards the future? The future was so uncertain now that it was hard to envision what life would be like in the next few years but I couldn't keep going over the past and mourning her. She was gone, she wasn't coming back but at least – for a tiny proportion of my life – I had had her and held her and loved her.

Surely it was better to have loved and lost her than not found her at all and spent my life feeling out of place even though I was surrounded by friends and…Tanya.

I wasn't ready to let go of Bella just yet though so I decided to head back to England, the only place in the world where – for a brief amount of time – seemed to belong us and only us.