Darkness.

Darkness, and then death in the snow.

But this time the snow was different. It wasn't the colorless grey of the vision I had seen just before waking into vampire life. This time, it was lit up, blinking, and wavering, and all different colors. Christmas lights. 'Twas the season to be jolly in La Push, but around me, the scene was anything but celebratory. The cheerful porch decorations of a typical Christmas had been torn from doorways and decks and strewn over yards in a chaos of garland and broken yard ornaments. Windows that had once framed glowing evergreens and stockings hung by fireplaces were now shattered and rough with bloodied shards. Christmas lights ripped from gutters and bushes continued to blink, no longer illuminating a winter wonderland, but rather the corpses of LaPush's lupine inhabitants in red and green and eerie LED blue. Some of the wolves had been caught in almost comical poses with expressions of surprise frozen on their human faces as death had overtaken them before they could phase. Others lay in full wolf form, tongues lolling and fangs bared, blood turning the snow dark around them.

Beside them, between them, beneath them…even in the air around them were the vampires, burned to ash and blowing in the holiday breeze or trapped in piles of cinders that only other vampires would recognize later as something more significant than an abandoned campfire. The smell of death was everywhere…in every form, but worst on the wind. It crept into my pores and stopped my breath. Dust covered my tears as I searched further and my gaze fell upon a pocket of LaPush's human residents, all gathered in the shelter of a nearby tool shed as if they had banded together there to make their final stand. The torn and twisted angles in which they had died left little doubt to which side had won that particular battle.

There were human residents everywhere, scattered among the wolves and the bonfires in pieces or resting in pools of blood with wide unbelieving eyes that stared away into nothing. I recognized only a few. Most were too mangled to identify, and everywhere, there was the dust in the wind.

I heard voices then. Soft, shocked, coming from behind the houses where the silent blues and reds of police cruisers had already taken up residence. They were rational voices, offering up explanations for the incipient violence with almost childlike desperation. Strange gas explosion? Animal attack? Anything would do as they crept through the bodies of their neighbors and friends, trying not to step on the pieces.

But there was nothing about this that could be explained away with human rationality. There were no burning buildings…no knife wounds, or claw marks, or bite marks. Only ash and the torn and bloodied remnants of the wolves, the vampires, and anyone in the town with any knowledge either party's existence. This was the work of the Volturi. They had burnt all traces of their own kind, but left the wolves where they lay, phased and unphased, to explain away the human casualties to any survivors.

As I watched, an officer approached one of his own fallen, lying face down in a dark police jacket, half in and half out of the biggest bonfire. In a daze, he tugged at one lifeless arm, pulling the corpse from the fire and turning him over. The blinking lights reflected a face that had been burnt away entirely, and a blackened badge…a number…half a name:

…LIE SWAN.

My father.

Dead on a pyre.

My father with his face burnt away.

The cry that had been threatening for some time was finally ripped from my throat and I gulped air to stop the pain. It tasted like ashes. I fell to my knees alongside Charlie's remains, sobbing and choking. My hands pressed into the ash at the edge of the fire, and I felt something small and hard beneath my fingers. Still trying to gain my breath, I clawed at the object, grasping at it like a lifeline, and brought it up to stare at it. My blood chilled as I realized I was holding a tiny gold cross. The intricate details had melted away, but I could still recognize it for what it was—Jasper's cross. The cross that he had carried from the mission where he had spent his first decades as a vampire. It had hung around his neck for over a century. Even Alice could not get him to remove it. My hands shook, and I was suddenly desperate to wipe off the ash that covered them. The ash that was my father and my brother in law and…

A sudden blink caught my eye. It was the tiniest echo of blue Christmas light reflected in the white-hot embers near the outskirts of the fire, but it seemed to call to me. I bent in, still sobbing, and plucked the peculiar item from the fire. It burned my fingers as I held it, but I had suddenly lost all sense of hot or cold as I stared at the ring, silver and fragile in my hand. Edward's wedding ring. Edward's promise of eternity, blackened and charred. Edward's ashes covering my face.

I screamed. And in that scream, my whole world melted away.

"Bella! Stop! Please! Wake up!"

Someone was shrieking Charlie's name. Someone was calling out for Edward. Someone was crying blood tears. I could taste them.

"You're alright, Bella! Please stop screaming!"

What is happening to her?! Not spoken. Sensed. Felt.

It's the turning. She must be hallucinating.

Thoughts. I was hearing thoughts again. I opened my eyes and found myself laid out on the floor of the Cullen family room with seven shadows looming over me, all firing their concerns directly into my mind at once. I sat up with a motion that caused all seven to lurch backward.

Seven. I counted seven. Edward and Jasper were both there, untouched. But Charlie…

"Where is he?" I asked. "Where is Charlie?"

Edward stepped forward again, confused. He bent down to cup my face in his hands. "Charlie's fine, Bella," he repeated. "Are you?"

"No, I…" I began, but then stuttered, looking around the room at everyone, unharmed, and the scene I had just witnessed began to take on a dreamlike, Wizard of Oz kind of sensation.

You were there, and you were there…

"Yes," I managed. "I'm…I'm fine."

"Did she…did she just faint?" Rosalie's voice was ringing with cruel surprise. "Do we…faint?"

"Leave it to Bella to be the only vampire to find a way to pass out and injure herself," Emmett snorted jovially.

"I'm not injured," I corrected, annoyance replacing some of the surplus grief left by the vision.

Carlisle approached, his doctoring instinct in full swing. His hand slipped to my forehead to check for a temperature that I no longer had, and to check the dilation of pupils that no longer dilated with the light.

"Perhaps you haven't fed enough," he mused. "Do you feel hungry?"

I rolled my eyes. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to be permanently hungry for a while now," I reminded him.

The muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched, but he remained in full examination mode. More questions followed. Had I felt pain when I lost consciousness? Did I feel pain now? Was I dizzy? His thoughts were full of genuine concern, so I tolerated it with as much geniality as I could muster, fully aware that Edward was beside me hanging on Carlisle's every word, and any inspection now would save me hours of anxious investigation when he got me alone. I finally put an end to it when Carlisle asked me if I thought that I would be able to stand up. With an exasperated sigh, I leapt up as hard and as fast as I could and ended up perched lithely on one of the ceiling beams staring down at him with purpose.

"Ok, you're alright," he acceded. "But fainting for a vampire is not something normal. I've never seen one do it before. You mentioned the scent of Jacob's blood just before you lost consciousness. Do you believe that could have been a factor?"

"I've heard her discuss human blood in that way before," Edward mused, pride well-hidden, but present on his face as I jumped down gracefully to take a place by his side. "Rust and Salt. She described it in those exact words."

I imagined the scent that had been so prevalent on the day that they had been blood-typing in my old biology class…recalled the taste of it on my human tongue from one of my multiple accidents, and instead of the temptation that I'd been warned about for so long, my stomach churned violently and nearly upturned itself. I gagged and threw green shaded waves of nausea away from me as hard as I could. It washed over everyone in the room, and I watched as seven vampires dealt with sudden morning sickness.

"Agh! Stop!" Alice whined, holding her hands in front of her stomach in a defensive position. "You really do have Jasper's talent, don't you?"

"You still want to call it a talent?" Jasper rasped as he bent over, hands on his knees. "I haven't thrown up in over a century. I'm not sure I'd think of it as talent to start again now."

Carlisle frowned. "You'll most likely still be attached to some of your more human traits for quite a while," he explained. "I've never seen an aversion to blood in life transfer to a vampire, but I can't rule out the possibility by any means.

The memory of Jacob's scent washed over me once more and I pushed another involuntary wave of sickness around the room.

"Jeez, Bella, stop it!" It was Emmett's turn to chastise me. "We all chip in to make you a vampire, and look what we get. An anti-vampire who can't stand blood and can make us all sick!"

"She took down the deer without a problem," Edward replied defensively. "She's not repelled by all blood."

"Just wolf blood," Jasper said.

"And maybe human blood too," I corrected hopefully, struggling to avoid another trigger to my gag reflex.

"Let's not be in too much of a hurry to test out that theory," Edward said, his attention suddenly more on Alice than the happenings around me. She was silent and pale in the background. She had apparently thrown off the nausea and, if my newfound powers of thought reading were correct, was now entirely absorbed in the Chicago Cubs line-up for the last century. My mind, still fighting to forget what I had seen as I was regaining consciousness, focused on her as the others' thoughts threatened to flood in around me again. She had seen the destruction of LaPush too. That much was clear to me, and she was trying to direct my attention and that of her mind-reading brother, elsewhere knowing full well that I despised baseball and Edward despised the Cubs. I decided to end the subterfuge quickly.

"What did I see?" I asked her plainly, pushing away all the other thoughts around me as much as I was able and focusing in on number 38: Dick Barrett, pitcher, 1943...

"What do you mean?" Alice asked guiltily as Barrett was replaced by a thin, smiling player with deep set eyes and the unfortunate name of Hi Bithorn.

"Don't bother hiding it. No one believes you're a Cubs fan. I saw everything just before I opened my eyes. Was it a vision? Like…your visions?"

Edward, suddenly visibly upset, looked from me to Alice and back again. His aura went black and his own thoughts raced.

"When did you see it?" he asked harshly.

"I told you, just before I woke up. I didn't just see it. I could smell, and feel…like I was there in the middle of everything."

"Shit." Alice's aura went black beside Edward and I drew a startled breath. In all the time that I'd known her, Alice had never even come close to swearing! "That's it. She got them! She got my visions!"

"Like you were there?" Edward hissed. "Are you absolutely sure?"

I nodded and felt the pain wash over him. He'd watched Alice's mind for decades as she had experienced her visions. He could see them and interpret them, but had never experienced them like he knew that she did. Only someone with her particular talent could do that.

"Everyone was dead," I said, looking around the room. "All of you. Your ring was in a fire," I gestured toward Edward. "And your cross too." Toward Jasper now. His fingers instinctively rose to touch the place where the tiny figure hung beneath his shirt.

"How is she doing it?" It was Esme. There was no malice or frustration in her voice. Only concern, and an unceasing faith in her husband, toward which she directed her question. "How does she have all of their talents?"

"I don't know," Carlisle admitted, his confusion flowing in tendrils around me that brought back the memory of the ashes in mine and Alice's vision. "Perhaps it was the circumstances of her transformation. We all gave her our venom. Perhaps she inherited something from each of us."

"I didn't," Jasper whispered ruefully. Of course he hadn't. He wouldn't have been able to control himself with the thirst of seven others in his mind. "I didn't give her any venom. She couldn't have gotten my talents from me directly."

"Please," Edward insisted. His voice was hopeful. "We still don't know if she even had a vision. She was in an incredibly vulnerable state. We know for certain she's inherited mine and Jasper's, but perhaps she was just experiencing Alice's thoughts and emotions as the vision was occurring to Alice."

Hopeful, yes, but he knew otherwise…and so did Alice. I smiled sympathetically at them both and squeezed Edward's hand.

"Well that's easy to find out." Rosalie said. I recognized the doubt in her expression. "If she's got Alice's visions, then she should be able to look into any of our futures and see something, right?"

"Right." Alice replied for me.

"So…look into my future," she instructed. "What do you see?"

I balked and stepped back. "I don't have the first clue how to look into a future, Rosalie. And if I did…"

"Think of her walking out." Alice. Soft. None of the usual vigor in her voice at all.

"What?"

"You know what she'll do next if you refuse. She'll laugh at you and walk out. Think of her doing it."

I laughed, but no one else did. Even Edward seemed to be pushing me to try. He took my hand, but his eyes were egging me forward.

"Fine," I sighed, defeated, and imagined Rosalie's haughty little walk out the door.

Before I knew it, I was no longer in the living room. I blinked and I was in a room of the house that I'd never seen before. It was beautiful. Just like Edward's room, one of the walls was made entirely of glass, giving way to the blues and greens of deep forest that surrounded the Cullen home. It was dominated by a king-sized bed, and on that bed…

I gasped, realizing too late that I was standing just a few feet away from my new sister and her 7 times husband naked, breathless, and so embroiled in carnal acts that my newly cold skin felt hot just listening. Instinctively I tried to turn away, my breath catching in my throat as Emmett moved with impressive speed to switch positions, and found that I was suddenly in the living room again, surrounded by curious faces, and a thankfully fully clothed Rosalie. She glared expectantly.

"Well?"

Mortified, my eyes flicked to Edward, who chuckled in spite of the obvious confirmation.

"I knew I would miss that blush," he said. "I just didn't realize how soon its absence would be noted."

Rosalie looked puzzled for only a moment, and then her eyes widened in bemusement.

"No!" She turned toward Emmett incredulously. "No! You didn't even know if Bella would be out of the transformation! How could you still want to do that?"

Emmett shrugged, not one shred of guilt on his face to mar his only slightly perverted grin. "What do you want me to say?" he replied. "All this drama has made you incredibly sexy!"

That seemed to settle things for Rosalie. She rolled her eyes and turned back to me, her thoughts now filled with flashes of desire as she accepted her prophesied destiny with remarkable ease.

"OK," she said, slipping past Carlisle without meeting his eyes and settling for a more subtle position near the door and a change of subject. "She's got Alice's visions. Now what?"

Alice's lips thinned, and I was suddenly bombarded by decades of memories of convulsions, seizures and painful episodes that pulled a fragile human Alice bit by bit away from reality. I watched as James tried to use them to his advantage, then other unknown vampires who tried to do the same, and finally there was Jasper, who sat patiently, soothing and listening and talking through them until they no longer overwhelmed her. And as I watched through Alice's memory, I saw Edward take Jasper's place, and Alice's face transform into my own, and I realized that Alice was not thinking, as Jasper and Edward had been, of passing on a curse. Instead, she was sharing a record of the work that she had put in to mastering it, along with the hope that I would be able to do the same.

"Now the work begins," she said with an amicable shrug.

Now she learns to control it all, or you lose her. Jasper's thoughts were directed at Edward.

Now we leave. Edward was thinking. Buy an island and stay away from anything with thoughts or emotions.

"An island?" I responded, indignant. "Edward, are you crazy? I'm not leaving now? Did you not pay attention to what we saw? You're all dead!"

The lack of reaction around me should have been all I needed to clue me in to the fact that I was repeating old news already. Still it took way too much time for me to realize that they had known about this for much longer than any of them were letting on. Pieces of other visions that Alice had experienced before my turning flew at me too quickly to piece together logically, but the message was simple. Our fates, as well as those of Jacob's pack, were already well known.

"You knew?!" I hissed accusingly at Edward, but of course he knew, and of course it had been his decision to keep it from me. "We had an agreement! You made a promise! How could you not tell me this!"

Edward took a step backward as I advanced on him in anger, but his face remained passively amused.

"Bella, Alice's visions of this incident began before our agreement," he explained. "They hadn't occurred in such a long space of time that I didn't think to share them with you." I tried to search his mind for any sign of falsehood and found none. Still, I allowed myself one moment of triumph in knowing that secrets between us were now a thing of the past, whether he liked it or not.

"Fine, I moped, turning back to Alice. "The last vision you had about this…before the one today…was it right before I woke up from the transformation?"

Alice looked at me and nodded. "You had it too?"

"Yes," I replied.

"What did you see in that one?"

I could have read her own memories of the vision right out of her head if I had needed to, but I didn't. It was still frozen just as vividly in my own mind.

"The meadow was full of dead wolves," I said. "There was a bonfire on the edge of it. You were in it." A chill spread around the room. I wasn't sure if it was me that sent it, but Jasper absorbed it.

"Yeah," Alice mumbled dejectedly. "That's the one."

"But it's changed now." I pressed on. "This one wasn't in the meadow anymore. It was in LaPush." I struggled to remember the details of my newest talent, and instead, was faced with my own vision in the memory of the three closest vampires.

"I've been watching it change since before the wedding," Alice confessed out loud for the benefit of the others. "when I first started seeing it, it was the meadow in late fall, and the slaughter was limited to the wolves and our family."

"Limited?" Emmet snorted. "Just our whole family? Is that all?" But he took Rosalie's hand in his, and I saw the tendrils of tension curl up each of their wrists as she smiled up at him. They had both heard this part before.

"And the wolves," Alice corrected. "Every one. I counted." She paused, frowning, and I watched her thoughts form like a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together on its own. "It has to be the Volturi, but I've been watching their decisions since they gave of your deadline, and I can't see any sign of them becoming involved." Her mouth had tensed into a doll's frown. "This latest change has caused some concern. They aren't even bothering to attack away from society now, or hide their carnage. They kill everyone in LaPush with any connection to us…any wolves, any vampires that stand with them…any humans who could possible become a wolf later."

Silence, and in that silence, the thoughts of everyone around me turned to bloodshed. I saw Rosalie cry out in Emmett's imagination, and Emmett's half hidden flinch as his own mind brought in Caius to cut her down. I smelled blood baking into the Christmas lights that dangled from Billy's house…a wheel chair overturned and empty. It was Jasper that saved me from the barrage of thoughts this time.

"Alice didn't see everyone dead," he elaborated. "She's seen more."

"What?" I asked. My thoughts were taken to my own vision of Charlie's jacket covered in ash. I saw hesitance cloud the room around me. "What?" I persisted, certain that I didn't want to know what else her visions might have brought to light. The newfound direct express into everyone's head was merciless, though, and whether Alice wanted them to or not, the images came unbound and uncensored, complete with narration from Jasper.

"She sees herself in chains," he admitted, his own aura black around him. "And you too."

And I saw them then. The chains. Large oversized manacles from another era plucked straight from Edward's memory as his teeth ground together and he tried to hide his own anger. Chains too easily broken by a newborn vampire. I didn't understand why either Alice or I would follow in such a manner, bound and docile.

"Just us?" I asked. "Not Edward? Not you, Jasper? Both of you also have talents that Aro wants. He'd take you too, if he could."

If he could…

Edward's hand slipped into mine as the answer slid into place. "Do you think I would stand for you to be marched away in chains if I were still alive to fight them? Would Jasper watch Alice treated that way without fighting if he were able to fight them?"

One look into both boys' eyes was all I needed to know their fates and ours. I understood now. We were docile because we were defeated. The men we loved in the pyre behind us, and nothing left to fight for before us. I pushed Edward's hand away in a sudden violent denial.

"Why?" I asked angrily. "Why in La Push now and not away from the public eye? What changed?"

But I didn't need to ask it. It was written in the thoughts of everyone there, a damning blame hanging in the air, just waiting for me to catch on.

You did. You became a vampire.

Shocked, I looked toward Edward once again. "But they couldn't know that," I said. "You weren't going to change me for months. How could they know that I'm a vampire already?"

It was Carlisle who stepped forward, a bit shamefully, to answer. "I'm afraid that Tanya and Irina are in quite frequent contact with them. Caius in particular."

"Tanya and Irina were gone by the time that I…"

"Died." Edward, jaw clenched. "And you're right, but…"

It was amazing to watch the workings of Edward's mind, like a delicate clockwork of his own thought and images infinitely dancing around the ticking and tocking of the thoughts of everyone around him. He no longer needed to push them away to concentrate. Instead, he took them in and organized them into part of his own reality almost instantaneously. In this particular case, his father's thoughts and his own worked together harmonically to bring about his own shocking deduction.

I did! He concluded, and then finished it out loud. "We did!"

Confusion glowed a strange salmon color in the auras of everyone. "I'm afraid I don't understand," admitted Carlisle.

But I saw it now, coming together inside his head before the explanation was forthcoming.

"At the wedding reception, when Tanya was going to attack Jacob, we stopped her by pledging to fight with the wolves." His voice lowered in frustration as he continued. "In her eyes, we chose Bella and her wolves over our own family."

"My wolves?!" I nearly shouted, "They aren't…" but Edward put out his hand to stop my argument.

"Tanya is incapable of seeing wolves as anything more than packs of savage half-breeds following any leader that steps forward. I saw this in her thoughts, of course, but I never anticipated her arrival at such an erroneous conclusion about Jacob's companions."

Alice shook her head. "No." she said. "Tanya is family. She knows that if she goes to the Volturi with a story like that, she'll cause them to pursue us. She wouldn't start down a road that would lead to our destruction because of some unproven idea."

Edward sighed. "Tanya lost everything to wolves. She spent her first, most impressionable years as a vampire, as well as a good part of the medieval age hunting down wolf packs under Caius's tutelage. They've seen the bloodshed brought about by wolves who were led by a vampire before. If you had been able to see the massacre that remains in her memory from the destruction of such a pack, you'd have no doubt of her convictions."

The silence in the room would have been tangible, had it not been pierced by sharp blades of betrayal that were only now twisting their way into the backs of each sullen figure present.

"Now" Edward continued grimly. "Consider a pack controlled so well by a leader that they are capable of controlling their strongest instincts at her mere gesture."

I rolled my eyes, but Edward's were very serious as he stared me down. "A leader whose pack has already killed several vampires to keep her safe."

She's not wrong. Rosalie's thoughts cut through. Bella's got at least a couple of the dogs wrapped around her little undead finger.

Edward's eyes darted to her. "Consider the fact that any vampire deaths were committed with the full consent and assistance of our own vampire family."

Rosalie considered this, and swallowed hard. Edward continued, unperturbed. "And that this leader, influencer of wolves and vampires alike, has already made plans for her own immortality." At this, Edward turned toward me again, and I saw a certain unchecked pride that shined past the anger and worry in his beautiful golden eyes. "She's become a member of our family, loved and protected by us with all of our strangely desirable talents. Now how do you imagine that Caius and the other members of the Volturi will react when they are faced with the possibility of a wolf and vampire army, already with a history of defiance, fighting together to protect each other from harm?"

There was no movement. No response. I didn't need one to sense the apocalyptic tone that the night had taken.

"Then it's my fault," I breathed dejectedly, and was surprised by the strength of denial in the thoughts around me. Even Rosalie rejected my statement without pause.

"Don't you dare!" exclaimed Alice, her arm wrapping around me in such a sisterly gesture that it would have brought tears to my eyes, had I been able to shed them. "You did everything the Volturi asked you to do! You followed all their rules, and we can't blame you for hanging around those smelly mongrels too much. We owe them your life a few times over after all…and Edward's."

Carlilse nodded. "The Volturi don't need something as improbable as a wolf and vampire army to bring their version of justice to this place," Carlisle admitted. "I'm afraid they've been looking for an excuse to regulate us since they discovered our family."

"They have it now," Edward replied sullenly. "I was unaware that I would be the one to give it to them, but they have it nonetheless."

Esme stepped toward her first child with concern and love written in the cloud of emotion around her. Her thoughts were only for him as she slipped a motherly arm around his shoulders.

"Edward, you need to stop…" But that was as far as she got, as the front door suddenly erupted in a fury of pounding. I jumped, startled and tried to push through an uncontrollable cloud of vampire deliberations to find the thoughts of whoever was at the door. It proved impossible, and yet I discovered that I didn't need to hear his thoughts to recognize our gentleman caller. His scent came to me on the air, floating in dangerous tendrils that made me want to sprint straight towards the door in hunger, and simultaneously to push away from it in fits of nausea.

Jacob. He'd been down below waiting for news, of course. He'd heard everything.

Again, just like in the woods, my body reacted first, and I was turned toward the entryway before my mind could even gain a foothold. Edward, Emmet, and Jasper reacted just as instinctively, putting themselves in my path, and giving me time to realize what was happening.

"Oh no," Emmett said as the pounding on the door grew louder. "The last thing we need right now is for you to faint and change the whole future again."

I rolled my eyes as a guilty smile appeared on both Jasper and Alice's face. I noticed that the tension had gone down though. Or at least faded to a lesser shade of grey around the room.

"Damn it!" Jacob's voice resonated on the other side of the door. "You leeches knew I was out here the whole time! You can't pretend that I didn't just hear what I heard! We deserve to know what the hell is going on just as much as you do!"

My head drooped in frustration as I realized that I hadn't known Jacob was there. My own musings and the thoughts of everyone around me had kept me so distracted that I hadn't even thought to inquire about my best friend, who I had come within seconds of killing not twenty minutes before. The shame of it should have tainted my cheeks.

Edward, still in a position to stop my advance should it prove necessary, seemed to be in silent conversation with Carlisle. I realized that Carlisle, Jasper, and Edward had all known exactly what Jacob was hearing from his front porch guard. They had silently decided that it was his pack and his people dying in the night in Alice's…our vision. The knowledge was his terrible right as much as ours. Edward took one last look at the line of security in between me and the door and nodded at Esme to let Jacob in.

My first thought was one of guilt as Jacob stormed through the door and I noticed the deep blue and purple bruises extending from the base of his neck and around the muscle of his left shoulder. Dislocated. I picked the images of Carlisle resetting it out of at least three minds. I had done that. I stood behind my iron line and tried to convey as much remorse as I could in an expression. Flustered, Jacob came to a complete stop when his eyes met mine, and his thoughts shot straight through my immortal body guards.

She doesn't even look human! He thought, and the pain in that statement hit me just as hard as it did him, but was accompanied by a flurry of notions that cushioned the blow…at least on my end. I must have hit my head harder than I thought. She's even more beautiful as a leech.

This internal revelation was accompanied by a series of images that could only be straight from the mind of someone who had never had an intimate moment with a member of the opposite sex, and yet had spent entirely too much time playing out detailed sexual fantasies of…well…me. I grimaced as a vision of me topless and disproportionately big busted with a sickening come-hither expression drifted straight into my head. Edward cringed alongside me.

"That's my wife you're envisaging, dog," he admonished, and then added with only the smallest hint of dark amusement, "And she can see every last thing you're imagining now too. Careful, or I might trip and let her get a second chance at that neck of yours."

As if Edward's joke had reminded me, I realized that the anger and disgust of being Jacob's weird fantasy had also triggered my thirst. I groaned in sudden pain as Jacob's blood suddenly called to me from his side of the room and I fought to keep my own sanity in check. Jasper grabbed both of my arms and braced himself, a sympathetic smile on his narrow lips.

"Careful," he whispered calmly, sending a dose of his own talent with his words. "He's not worth the guilt you'd feel if you slipped up."

Jacob jolted, his thoughts instantly pulled away from sex as he observed my struggle. I saw myself become a monster in his eyes, and my scent turn to the sickeningly sweet odor of half rotted meat. I nauseated him. That thought alone should have caused me pain, but went mostly unnoticed as I struggled to maintain my position in Jasper's grasp. I stopped my breath, and looked at him gratefully.

Jacob managed to tear his eyes away from me. "I'm telling Sam everything," he admitted. "They need to know what you're about to bring here."

"What we're about to bring here?" Rosalie hissed. "Was it us who tried to attack our guests at a wedding? Was it us who decided to break a centuries old treaty and go full wolf on our friends? You've brought this on just as much as us!"

"Who broke the treaty?!" Jacob was turning a dangerous shade of red…just about the exact shade of the cloud of emotion around him. "I seem to recall a random half naked vampire swimming up out of the ocean right onto our land."

"She didn't even know where she was! She just followed the stench and…"

"That's enough," Carlisle intervened, giving Rosalie a look that had come from centuries of fathering an eternal teenager. "We'll get nowhere arguing fault. Of course we'd expect you to relay this information to your pack. Every one of them deserves to know." He turned, acknowledging Jacob. "And every one of them deserves an opportunity to fight alongside us to prevent that fate from happening."

Fight? Had it come to that already? I looked around the room in shock and understood that it had. All the vampires in the room trusted Alice's visions implicitly, and all of their thoughts had slipped quickly into doom mode once it was confirmed that not only Alice, but I myself had seen events to come. Minds were scouring all options, but it was clear that Alice's previous visions had eliminated the idea of negotiation. Now, the only viable solutions that presented themselves were different versions of an all out war with the Volturi.

"We'll fight to save our pack and our families if it comes to that," Jacob agreed. "I'll let Sam decide if it's come to that." He turned toward Alice grimly. "I thought you couldn't see us in your visions. That our lives are too unpredictable."

Alice couldn't quite meet his eyes. "I can't," she confirmed. "At least I can't if any of you are…alive."

Jacob flinched. "So we all die? Every one of us?"

Alice nodded. "And your town."

It hung in the air like the death sentence that it was.

"I need to talk to Sam," Jacob sighed. "I'll try to arrange a meeting with you as soon as I can."

He glanced toward me again. "I'm so sorry I did this to you, Bella."

"Don't be." I smiled. "This was the plan anyway."

I had nearly recovered my full composure, but my eyes, red and desperate still, caused a shiver to run up his spine. He was seeing an army of those eyes marching toward his town. His own eyes showed the exhaustion of three days without sleep.

"I'll let Billy know about….you," he said bitterly.

"Will you tell him what I am now?" I asked.

"He's Charlie's best friend, Bella. He already knows what you are." And with one last penitent glance, he slipped out of the front door and into the night.