"What? How -" Edward began, and then he shook his head. "What can you tell me?"

I bit my lip. I hated not being able to tell him things. Hating that in and of itself, when it was in my power to tell all, was dangerous. So I hated Aro, instead. Once he was out of the picture I wouldn't need to.

I almost wished that Edward would just demand an explanation of me, making it so hard to keep the assorted secrets that I could judge it not worth the trouble. Or that he'd stumble across something, as Charlie had. But if I truly wished that I might as well spill all the beans - and that wasn't the best thing to do. I already had a little itch of worry in the back of my mind about the danger Charlie had walked into, although the wolves would look out for him if they could. Better not to add a similar one about Edward.

"I had an idea," I said, which was true. "Caesarean section - early in the pregnancy. Gianna probably couldn't expect to live through a whole month, but she could likely manage three weeks or so, especially if we turned her right after. And Nahuel was a really healthy baby when he was born. He had nobody taking care of him for three days and he was fine. A preemie half-vampire would probably be no more vulnerable than, say, a full-term or slightly early human baby, and would catch up quickly, as fast as they grow."

"That sounds sensible," said Edward, lighting up.

"One thing that has me worried is all those bruises, though," I said, as it occurred to me that they could in this sense be my business. "I'm guessing Maggie hasn't broken any bones or anything, since Gianna wasn't taped up that I could see, but having a lot of extra healing to do while trying to carry a half-vampire is... I don't know how it'd interact, but it couldn't be in a good way."

"I haven't been keeping up to date on that," Edward said. "But some of the bruises did look new, so if Maggie's getting more careful, it's not happening very fast. It's something we'd need to discuss with Gianna at least, and Maggie too, most likely."

"She'll probably need human blood to drink during the pregnancy," I said. "Nahuel can live on whatever if he decides to, but fetuses don't have that kind of volition..." I went on walking him through all the steps, including the possibility that the shell would only be vulnerable to vampire teeth and that it could grow attached to the uterus. I didn't pull in any evidence that I could only have gotten from Sue, although some of the mental leaps were a little tenuous and I had to frame everything with uncertainty. It wasn't obvious if Edward connected the dots (the blinking neon dots labeled "connect me!"), but he didn't mention it if he did.

Night fell, and Gianna was presumably asleep, so we put off bringing the subject up with her until the next morning.


Maggie proved very displeased by the idea.

"Let me get this straight," she said indignantly, after we failed to get Gianna alone and explained to both of them at once instead. "Bella said something dumb to Aro under pressure, which means Gianna's in danger if she doesn't have Bella's kid. Nowhere in this does it say that the kid has to be Edward's too. Not if that's going to hurt my Gianna."

"Maggie," said Gianna, "they think I'll be safe - and it means I'll turn sooner, too..."

Maggie softened at once when Gianna spoke, turning to the Italian woman and carefully taking one of her hands. "Baby, I want that over with soon too, but you might not make it that far!" she said. "Nobody has before! This is an experiment they want to try. You're not a guinea pig, baby."

"I said I would help," Gianna murmured.

"You didn't know when you said so that they'd ask you this! Enough people die having normal babies - my own mother did."

"I'm sorry to hear that, but that was more than a hundred and fifty years ago," I said. "Carlisle, Edward, and Rosalie are all doctors. We can have all the advance notice we could possibly need. Every advantage that Nahuel's mother didn't have - or yours, for that matter. If things take a turn for the worse before the three-week mark we can do the C-section earlier than planned."

"I'm getting Ilario, he'll back me up," said Maggie fiercely, patting Gianna's cheek once and then rushing out of the house to look for him.

"I take it they're getting along, then?" Edward asked mildly.

"He'll leave me alone with her as of last week," Gianna said.

"And that hasn't changed since you're... kind of black and blue?" I asked. "It's not really my business, I'm sure if there were something seriously wrong it would have been noticed and addressed before now by Ilario if nobody else - although if I'm wrong please tell me. But if you're getting hurt often it would probably make a pregnancy, any pregnancy, riskier."

"Actually," Gianna said, "Ilario was the first one to give me a bruise. He was upset about something Maggie said. I don't remember exactly what it was, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me away from her. She didn't try to play tug of war or anything. He just squeezed too hard. And then she fussed over me so much that he decided she's no more likely to hurt me than he is. So he thought it would be hypocritical of him to keep spending time around me himself without letting Maggie do it. She's always more upset than I am when I get hurt, anyway."

"Still, there are a lot..." I mused.

Gianna shrugged, looking down and blushing again. "She gets carried away, but she stops whatever she's doing right away when I say "ow". The first time it happened she offered to quit touching me at all so she wouldn't get carried away anymore, but... I said she didn't have to do that." She squirmed slightly.

"Right, um," I said, having wandered into territory that was even less my business. If Gianna was covering up something serious, Edward would know about it and tell me, and he was silent. "She's obviously very concerned with your safety, so that might wind up being what happens anyway for a few weeks - or months if we have to go the human baby route."

"I could mention that to her," Gianna said lightly.

"Might help," I allowed.

I heard Maggie and Ilario's footfalls as they approached us. A few seconds later, they were there, Maggie promptly sitting back next to Gianna and carefully putting an arm over her shoulders while Ilario stood.

"Let me get this straight," Ilario said, and there ensued a conversation very similar to the one we'd had with Maggie, minus the part where Gianna was addressed as "baby" and the part where someone's mother had died in childbirth.

"I understand you're both worried about me," Gianna said when this segment of the exchange wound down, "but isn't it my decision?"

Maggie bit her lip. "Baby, you don't know what it'd do to me if you died. I don't think even I know what it'd do to me, and I already can't stand to think of it. I know it's up to you, but it affects more than just you."

Gianna patted Maggie's knee. "But I think it sounds survivable. Also, it gives more of an explanation for why I'm going to be turned. The Cullens have a history of turning dying people - but not people who've just given birth to a human baby once and are fine."

"Aren't I sufficient explanation?" protested Maggie. "Bella wasn't dying, she was just Edward's."

I said, "That'd be sufficient explanation if you had run into her all by herself a year or two ago before she met the Volturi. Now, they think she belongs to me, so I need a credible reason to turn her. If simply thinking that people ought to be vampires instead of humans when they're willing were a reason the Volturi would accept, I could have just said that in Volterra."

"You should've let me fight you for her," Maggie said. "That would be credible."

"I don't think it would have helped the situation at all if Aro found that I'd put her up as stakes on a fight," I said dryly, "since you challenged me on my home turf while you were alone and I had my whole coven present, and clearly didn't have to wager her - or lose."

"Oh," said Maggie, hanging her head.

"Maggie," I said. "I have every confidence that Gianna will be okay as long as we do a C-section at or before the three week mark, then turn her."

The Irish vampire looked up at me. "You really do believe that," she murmured.

I debated whether to tell her that I was immune to her power. I decided that she'd find out sooner or later, or at least suspect it - and it'd be a show of good faith. "I actually think I'm immune to your power," I told her sheepishly. She frowned. "Edward, you tell her," I said.

"I think Bella's right," he said confidently. Maggie scrutinized his face - I wasn't sure if this was habit, an actual way to focus her witchcraft, or just for effect.

Maggie looked over at Gianna. "You're sure you want to do it this way, Gianna?" she asked softly.

Gianna nodded, then glanced at her brother, who looked uncomfortable but didn't speak.

Maggie looked at Edward and me, fixing us with fierce glares. "If she dies," she said in a flat, cold voice very unlike her usual demeanor. She didn't finish the sentence, letting the threat trail off into thought.

"If you tried, no matter how justified you were, you'd die too," Edward said softly.

"If she dies," Maggie said, "then I wouldn't care if I did."


Permission secured, it was time to deal with the the complicated technical stuff. I wasn't deeply involved in this part. I had no relevant expertise and my biological contribution was already in a freezer. It was mostly Edward, Rosalie, and Carlisle, ordering assorted equipment which trickled into the house in boxes over the next few days and then beginning work.

Meanwhile, Maggie redoubled her efforts to leave Gianna undamaged, and the bruises slowly faded. The attempt wasn't without its mistakes, but Gianna could have picked up the same level of injury by bumping into things all by herself, and was disinclined to adopt a hands-off policy with Maggie. I didn't want to risk re-igniting Maggie's opposition to the plan by requiring more of a sacrifice from her.

Edward kept me in the loop on the general shape of the process. Rosalie had taken far more eggs from me than were normally removed in a harvesting procedure, since I'd had no expectation of needing them in their original state. As a result, they had some leeway with the raw materials, and were creating several embryos, most of which would go right back in the freezer to be used later in case we found a second surrogate and wanted a second child. This also meant that we had an opportunity to pick the gender we preferred.

"Well," I said when presented with this, "if there's a bunch to choose from, why stop at gender? Let's get Alice and have her look them over, and tell us about them in detail."

So we found Alice, who pranced into the room, closed her eyes to concentrate, and promptly said, "Ow!"

"What's wrong?" asked Jasper, who'd followed close at her heels. Edward, who didn't need to ask, groaned.

"They take after you, Bella," laughed Alice weakly.

"You can't see them?" I asked. "That doesn't make sense. You could see me perfectly when I was human; they shouldn't have inherited that immunity if they inherited any of it at all."

"Not a thing," Alice said. "I can't even tell which are the girls and which are the boys. I'm sorry, I wish I could help."

"Can you see around them?" asked Edward. "If we decide on one can you look ahead a few months and see us...?"

Alice tried, but then winced. "Nothing that depends on them, either. Oh, boy, this is going to be fun."

I sucked in a nervous breath. "I guess we're flying blind, then - or rather, with what we can find from the genes alone. That's gender and what else?"

"Carlisle's already looked at one of them, but while he's fairly confident that that one was a female, she had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes - which means anything known about human genes could be completely off-base," Edward said.

"Humans have twenty-three, right?" I asked, and he nodded. "Has Carlisle ever taken a vampire cell apart and looked at it?"

"We've got twenty-five pairs," Edward said. "So it makes a bizarre kind of sense. Anyway, Carlisle could guess what the other genes on the embryos' chromosomes might mean, but it would be just that - guesswork."

"I guess it's still more choice than most parents get," I sighed. Alice and Jasper left the room, the former rubbing her temple. Jasper threw a suspicious look at me over his shoulder. We'd avoided crossing paths very much since I'd added his witchcraft to those I blocked. There hadn't been another dramatic confrontation, but when we did pass each other in a hallway or have reason to exchange information, he was definitely less friendly and more willing to assume that I was acting in bad faith.

Edward frowned at his departing brother but didn't comment on that subject. "Indeed," he said instead, turning back to me and taking my hands in his. "So, my love - son or daughter?"

"Do you have a preference?" I asked, and he shook his head. "I suppose the evidence we have available suggests that a girl will probably not be venomous," I said. "That seems like a plus." I supposed I could have covered for my existing bite mark by having a son and plausibly being bitten once thereby, but I wasn't confident I could manage the concealment for that long anyway. Emmett would be suspicious if I suddenly lost interest in sparring, and that would inevitably push my sleeve up my arm unless I made obvious and equally peculiar efforts to prevent it. I really needed to figure out how to explain it. Ran into an immortal child in Sweden while not with Edward? But then what would I have done with it after receiving the bite? Found some baby brother of Nahuel's in Finland someplace, whose mother swore me to secrecy? That could work. Got into a fight with a vampire midget?

"True," he said, fortunately and maddeningly oblivious to my thought process as always. "So, a daughter, then?"

I nodded slowly. Everything was coming together very fast, and while it was still necessary and I still liked the idea, it was also intimidating. Picking a gender was much more emotionally real to me than being vaguely aware that strange pieces of medical equipment were being carried into the house. "I guess we should start thinking about names," I said, "since we won't have as long as human parents to think of them."

We left the room where the embryos that included our future daughter rested, walking together out of the house and into the yard. "I don't know anything about your opinions of baby names," Edward said.

"Likewise," I replied. "I feel like we should - one way or another - name her after somebody. I'm a little concerned that as the only half-vampire in a large coven of vampires she'll be... disconnected, somehow. A meaningful name might help her feel grounded. I'm making this up completely, of course; my parents picked my name out of a baby book because it sounded pretty and I haven't felt particularly un-grounded."

"It's still a place to start," Edward said. "I was named after my father. I don't remember a lot about him, but I have his name, which is something."

"I didn't know that," I said. "Okay, what was your mother's name?"

"Elizabeth," supplied Edward. "Actually, I think Isabella is a variant on the name Elizabeth, too, but the source I heard that from might not be reliable."

"So maybe another Elizabeth variation," I said. "Especially if that turns out to be right." I ran through the other names we might want to incorporate into our daughter's. "You know," I said, "it really seems like there should be a way to portmanteau "Renée" and "Esme". The vowels are so similar. But there's just no way to put them together in a way that sounds like a name and not a Pokémon."

Edward laughed. "I think it would mean a lot to Rosalie if her name were wedged in there somewhere. A middle name would do," he suggested.

"I think it'd also make sense to honor Gianna. She's helping us out in a really major way. "Annarose" for a middle name?"

"That's perfect."

We went to our cottage, and I pulled out my laptop and looked up names derived from "Elizabeth" on the Internet. There were a lot, including, as Edward had said, "Isabella". I pruned out those that were just different spellings of the base name or my own version, and the obvious nicknames like "Liz" that our daughter could plausibly choose to go by no matter what variant we landed on.

"Look," I said, smirking. "Buffy is a nickname for Elizabeth."

"I think we should rule that one out," Edward said seriously. "It could prompt the wrong sorts of guesses if people notice anything different about her."

I nodded, deleted it from the list of possibilities, and then started removing other names for increasingly minor reasons, mostly aesthetic. I removed "Libby" and its near cousins, which I sort of liked, at Edward's direction; he'd known someone who went by that name and had found her an unpleasant person. After a while, we had a short list: "Babette", "Bettina" and a few similar names, "Elspeth", "Ilsa", "Lisel" and other spellings thereof, and "Lilibeth".

"I'm tempted by Lisel," I said, "but I think I like Elspeth better. It's uncommon without being unpronounceable, nor so novel that it risks sounding much more out of place after a hundred years than it does now."

"Elspeth Annarose it is," said Edward.


Carlisle picked out a female embryo for us, and Rosalie did the honors of actually implanting it. The others were frozen. We were warned ahead of time that the rates of pregnancy for in vitro techniques were low, but the following day Gianna was absolutely certain that the first try had taken, and she made herself a large plate of eggs for breakfast. Puking began shortly afterwards.

Maggie insisted that Gianna shouldn't have to cook for herself in her condition, bought a large stack of cookbooks so she could make Gianna's food herself, and burned a few omelettes trying to get them right. At that point Ilario took over, rolling his eyes at Maggie as he expertly poached a new batch of eggs; he actually knew how to cook, having done some of it in his human days, and kept his sister supplied with whatever she wanted for her solid food while she ineffectively protested that she wasn't that impaired.

There was plenty of human blood in the fridge that Carlisle had purhcased, too, which Gianna drank out of opaque cups with lids so she didn't have to think about it too hard. Carlisle, who was taking a lot of time off work and pretending that he was looking after a sick Esme to excuse it, fetched her these beverages and did the dishes. Maggie, Ilario, Jasper, and myself left the house for safety reasons while the scent of blood was in the air, and everyone else at least gave a wide berth.

I e-mailed Charlie and told him the whole story; Rachel got the truth too. I told Renée that I was pregnant (as of early July, moreover); I planned to take an inordinate number of baby pictures and dole them out to her at a rate that would make Elspeth appear to age normally.

After I'd reminded the wolves of my existence with this e-mail, Leah sent a conversational sort of note, sounding me out for ongoing correspondence. She was an irregular pen pal and had poor spelling, but I wrote her anyway, telling her what had my attention in a newsy sort of way and making polite inquiries about her. I was informed that Sue's turning, adjustment period, and assumption of her share of the duties of infant care had gone without significant hiccup. Cody was growing as fast as expected and was already talking in complete sentences (his first words had been "Seth, can I have a wolf ride?", which request Seth had obliged). Relations between halves of the pack were cordial, but sadly distant.

Gianna did not lack for attention during the ensuing weeks. Maggie fussed over her, obsessed; she rearranged her hair several times a day for lack of much else helpful to do, and sang constantly. Ilario mostly stood in the corner of Gianna's room, looking stoic, when he wasn't cooking something. Edward and I, plus Rosalie, were mostly interested for the Elspeth's sake rather than in Gianna herself, who didn't lack for caretakers anyway. This still had us hovering around the bed where she spent most of her time resting, trying to make sure she had everything she needed.

The one problem it turned out we were least prepared to handle was Gianna's fluctuating temperature. It had never occurred to me to read anything into it when Sue instructed her children to hug her; now I wondered if she'd been using them as sources of warmth. When Gianna felt too warm - which did happen, although less often - Maggie could snuggle up to her and that worked fine. When she was cold, though, turning up the heater or giving her blankets worked too slowly for comfort. Electric blankets were purchased, but Gianna seemed to find them vaguely unsatisfying. Eventually we settled for keeping the house warmer all the time, and Maggie's cuddling efforts were called on more frequently.

All told, Gianna held up better under Elspeth than Sue had under Cody. Probably, this was because twenty-three was a more convenient age at which to be violently pregnant than forty-two. In spite of that favorable comparison, and Gianna's better care, Elspeth started doing damage a couple of weeks in. Several ribs were casualties, and Gianna went on painkillers - taping them up, I learned, was not actually a treatment for them, which made me feel better about Sue's neglected fractures. Gianna did not lose consciousness except when properly sleeping.

Without giving this comparison away, though, I could only do so much to soothe Maggie and Ilario, though. Both were in states of constant worry by the end of the first week and wanted Elspeth's birthday to be as early as possible. They were agreed that far, but could not so readily come to an agreement on who was to turn her, each preferring to do that task themselves.

Gianna was prevailed upon to settle their argument - which consisted mostly of Maggie gesturing wildly and ranting (half in Gaelic) while Ilario regarded her impassively and occasionally uttered a monosyllabic denial. It was an odd role for Gianna to have fallen into, since she hated confrontation and would obviously have rathered it if Maggie and Ilario invariably agreed on everything. Still, she ultimately came up with a compromise they both accepted - Ilario would administer the venom, but it would be Maggie's.

We planned to deliver Elspeth on October twenty-first, if nothing required us to operate earlier. It was exactly three weeks after the implantation date, when I knew and everyone else suspected that this would be safe enough for Gianna and Elspeth both. I suggested the tooth-ripping-out plan so no one had to risk tasting Gianna's blood, and volunteered a canine of my own which Edward could use to open the shell. He was leery of trying to do delicate surgery while distracted by my discomfort, though, and Rosalie readily offered to loan a tooth in my place. My role would instead be to lift Elspeth out.

On October thirteenth, Edward remarked that my birthday had been a month prior, and I hadn't mentioned anything about it. He asked if I was just not counting birthdays anymore. I'd been in La Push on the thirteenth of September - but in all the excitement even Charlie had forgotten the significance of the day, and he (and my permanently scatterbrained mother) had both sent me belated e-mails of well wishes. I'd noted the date when it had passed, but not seen fit to announce it to anyone. "What's the point of counting them?" I said. "So I'm chronologically eighteen now - but I'm going to be physically seventeen for all time, and I'll use mostly forged documents to demonstrate my legal status anyway, and I no longer find birthday cake appetizing."

"That was my guess," he said. "No presents, either?"

"You can get me presents if you want, but there's no need to use my birthday as an excuse," I replied. I smiled. "Or as a restriction."

"So acknowledged," he laughed. "I've been thinking we'll need to celebrate birthdays and half-birthdays for Elspeth, while she's growing still - it still won't be as many as most people get, over the course of a childhood, but..."

I nodded. Elspeth had become the primary topic of conversation between Edward and I; soon we would be parents. If everything went according to plan.

In the next room over, Gianna failed to keep her juice down.