AN: This is sort of a transitional chapter. Hope you're all still enjoying the story and staying safe!

CHAPTER NINETEEN: PREPARATIONS

…

I'd been trying not to think too much about the other things that I would be.

Wild. Bloodthirsty. Maybe I would not be able to stop myself from killing people.

… People… who'd had families and friends and futures.

People who'd had lives.

Bella, Eclipse, Chapter 15

…

The next month passed in more or less the same fashion. I would leave my room when the sun rose and be taught etiquette by Aro in the same, cramped room full of broken furniture. Then, after a couple of hours, Aro would lead me to the other small room, with only a little writing desk inside, where Marcus would teach me history. Then, after a couple of hours of that, Caius would come fetch me, and I would spend the remainder of the daylight hours sparring in the enormous room padded with thick, red plastic. After Caius' training, Renata would test my shield. Then Heidi would teach me Italian. And when all of that was finished, I was free to spend the rest of the night as I wished, until the sun rose, and the process would begin anew.

It wasn't a horrible routine, as far as routines went. It was predictable. And yet also quite interesting. There was always something new for me to learn.

Aro taught me everyone's preferred method of address. Which was helpful in not pissing other people off. He also taught me some simple hand gestures I could use to silently communicate. Everything from how to order around the guard members beneath me in the hierarchy, to how to express assent to orders given to me by those who ranked above. And after I'd mastered those, Aro started having me practice marching formations in the turret room—since it was the largest room in the castle besides the sparring room—with the rest of the guards.

Those were the hardest.

In theory, the formations were rather simple. We simply would move together in whatever shape Aro had scrawled on a piece of parchment, keeping the most valuable members wearing the darkest cloaks in the middle, and the more expendable members wearing lighter cloaks on the outside. Then we would simply follow whatever cues Aro gave us to contract, or fan out, or switch directions as we marched around the room.

Like every other bit of etiquette, he'd taught me, I memorized all the marching cues instantly. But I had a hard time slowing down my movements to the unhurried, almost human pace that the guard used during many of their marches. So, when we weren't running combat drills—our faster marches—I kept bumping into other vampires, and kept tripping on the edges of their cloaks. Which annoyed everyone greatly.

In fact, it got so bad that Aro had to pull me aside one day and coach me about my movements.

"Try to imagine the action taking longer in your mind," he advised one morning, before we started our marches. "And do not simply think 'I want to go slower' either. Because to your new senses, what seems 'slow' is not in fact slow enough," he explained. "Instead, try to picture the exact amount of time you want it to take. Say to yourself, 'I want this footstep to take a full second'. Then count it in your head."

I looked at Aro quizzically. "One-one-thousand?"

Aro shook his head. "I am afraid that little trick will no longer work either."

I pouted. He was right. The chronometric only worked for humans because of how slow their brains were. As a vampire, I was going to need a new one.

"How long is a second anyway?" I asked.

I felt like I had a rough idea. But I hadn't actually seen a clock with seconds on it since my transformation, so I couldn't be sure.

Alice, prepared for everything, whipped a stopwatch out of her pocket and tossed it to Aro. It whistled through the air, sailing across the room in a quick, graceful arc. Then he caught it, set the timer for one second, and held it out in his palm so I could watch.

There were four bright red numbers after the second—milliseconds I guessed. But they counted down from a thousand a lot slower than I thought they should. The time ticked by painfully slowly. And when it was over, I sucked in a startled breath.

That long?

I looked up at Aro, dumbfounded. I'd been off with my calculations before. I'd known that my brain was faster now, so I'd tried to compensate accordingly. But I'd thought a second was half that long, at least. A full second—an actual, honest-to-god-second—was an eternity. I could list every president of the United States forwards and backwards during that time.

No wonder I'd been so unsuccessful at slowing down my movements before.

I set the timer a few more times, burning that length of time into my memory. Then, when we started up our marching drills for the day, finally, I started to get better at matching the pace of the other guards. I had to step on a lot of toes in the process. And I fell on my face more than once. But I was getting better.

…

One day, we took a break from the etiquette and the formations. We met in the conference room, in front of the huge map of the world spanning the right wall.

The map was probably twenty feet high, and three times as wide. Big enough that even the smaller cities could be written in at a legible size. And it was an impressive work of cartography. The terrain stood out, bumpy and color-coded according to climate. And every body of water was accounted for, down to the tiniest creek.

Somewhat distracting from the beauty of it, however, was the fact that the map was littered with thousands of tiny red push pins. They were situated in odd, randomly scattered clusters of two or three, with the occasional larger patch here and there. There were twenty-nine red push pins in the middle of Italy, centered tightly around the word VOLTERRA. Three or four patches of about fifteen clustered around the border between Texas and Mexico. Ten in Cairo, Egypt. Nine in Bejing, China. Eight in Dehli, India. A few clumps of five or six across northern Russia. And one cluster of four in Sydney, Australia.

I counted one-thousand one-hundred and sixteen in total—a calculation that only took half a second. But upon closer examination, I realized not all of the pins were red. I spotted two tiny clusters of gold pins sticking out of Forks Washington, and Denali Alaska.

"Are those… the Cullens?" I asked, pointing to the cluster of six gold pins crammed together on the Olympic peninsula.

Aro nodded. And as the implications of this confirmation sunk in my mouth gaped in wonder.

"So, this map has every vampire in the world on it?"

Aro nodded again. And my astonishment only increased. "Every one I am aware of, anyway," he stipulated, before I could get too excited. "There may be a handful more I have not met personally—no more than ten or so, I am guessing. New vampires don't always announce themselves, even if that is the polite thing to do. Especially if they are created as part of illegal, newborn armies. But it is, of course, impossible to hide from us forever."

I nodded myself, a fast, jerky bob. I couldn't imagine, with how often his guards combed over the earth, that any vampire could escape his scrutiny for very long.

Then, after pondering something else for a sixteenth of a second, I pointed to the other golden cluster in Alaska. The cluster I now knew represented the Denali clan.

"Do you really think they could be responsible for what Alice is seeing?" I asked nervously.

I didn't really like the idea. As unhealthy as I knew vegetarianism to be, and as impossible as it was without Carlisle's mind-altering help, I didn't want to believe they would deliberately seek to sabotage us. Even if we had hurt them in the past, they couldn't still hate the Volturi that badly, could they?

Luckily, Aro seemed to agree. He softly shook his head, before pointing to the cluster of gold pins in Alaska.

"Although they resist their natural instincts, and they miss their former coven leader, I do not believe them to be the authors of the chaos that Alice predicts. Nor, for that matter, do I suspect the Cullens are involved," he added, hovering his finger down to point at the cluster of gold pins in Washington. "They may be misguided, but I do believe their hearts are sincere. They would never do anything which would jeopardize the lives of so many humans."

I nodded again, relieved. If Aro believed they were innocent, then they probably were. He after all, having read all of their innermost thoughts up to a certain point, would have a better idea than anyone what their personalities and tendencies towards violence were.

But then, that left the question open. The question that had been gnawing at me ever since I'd seen Marcus' suspicious expression in the conference room on my induction day. Who was going to create the newborn army in Alice's visions?

I scrutinized the map again, focusing on the red push pins closest to Seattle. There were more than I expected. The single one hovering between Forks and La Push I suspected was Victoria. But there were three more clustered around Spokane. And two down in Portland.

"Who are they?" I asked, pointing to the two unfamiliar clusters.

"Nomads," Aro responded.

I blinked at him, confused. "But if they're nomads… how do you know where they are? I thought Marcus said they don't stay in the same place for very long?"

"Marcus is correct," Aro acknowledged, reaching up to tap the two clusters of pins in question. "Therefore, these locations are not absolute. But I am fairly confident they are close. We keep track of the rough location of nomads through a number of different methods. Crime statistics. Past patterns of movement. Information from our informants."

I was impressed with how thorough the Volturi were about this. Paying attention to every little detail. But I balked at the last one.

"Informants?"

"Did you notice how I let Hippolytus and Octavia keep our insignia?" Aro asked, gesturing to the silvery, V-shaped necklace bearing the Volturi coat of arms resting over his unbeating heart.

I nodded. Then looked at Aro, confusion etching my hard features. "Yes, but why?"

"They may be unwilling to stay and fight, which forfeits their right to the cloak and the honor of being counted among the guard. But they can still be of use to us in their respective homes," Aro explained. "They can monitor the movements of vampires around them, and send us that information. So, we can perform our duty as the world's police, more effectively."

I blinked rapidly in surprise. "All old Volturi members become spies? Not just Alice?"

I thought her going off on her own and coming back was a fluke. And I'd thought it was odd that Aro didn't seem all that upset by it, when he clearly hadn't ordered it. But now I was starting to find out that might be the norm. That vampires might join and leave and rejoin the Volturi all the time.

Aro's face split into an unnervingly wide grin. "Most do report back to us in some fashion or another, yes," he confirmed. "And some even elect to return to the guard after a season. Or alternate between being here in Volterra, and away in some other part of the world. Only twelve members of the guard have stayed with us permanently. The rest come and go."

So, I was right. It was normal for people to leave.

But I was more surprised by the other implication of Aro's statement. I hadn't expected him to be that magnanimous.

"You let them back in every time old members come back?" I sputtered in shock.

Aro laughed a little at the idea, and gently shook his head. "Not every time," he corrected. "Sometimes we have too many members—for logistics' sake, I try never to exceed forty. Or the role they used to fulfill has been taken by another. For example, we had a different tracker before Demetri, who would not be allowed to return to the guard if he ever tried, simply because his presence would be redundant, and we can only afford to feed so many."

I swallowed. So that's what Aro had meant by logistics. The logistics of murdering so many humans on a regular basis without the general populace becoming aware of it.

I shook myself vigorously before the ghastly images could start to fill my head. Then asked another question to distract myself.

"How many are there out there? Former members of the Volturi, I mean?"

Aro tapped his chin in thought. It only took him a quarter of a second to do all the calculations. "Well, a good number of them are no longer with us. However, assuming you are only interested in the number of our former members who are still alive, that would put the number at about a hundred forty-eight."

I gasped. "One hundred and forty-eight?" I did the math quickly in my head. "That's more than ten percent of all the vampires in the world!"

Aro beamed, proud of himself. "Indeed, it is. However, we need as many allies as possible if we are going to maintain enough power to enforce order, would you not agree?"

"I guess…" I admitted weakly. He did have a point. Even if the words maintain power still made me and my egalitarian upbringing uneasy.

Then, an even less pleasant thought crossed my mind. "But Alice thinks it's one of those hundred and forty-eight, or one of their friends, doesn't she?" I asked. "That's why she's having you make a list?"

Aro frowned and nodded gravely. "It would make the most sense, given our enemy's apparently intimate knowledge of how to exploit the limitations of Alice's power, that they, or someone they know would have worked with us in the past," he reluctantly conceded. "But I think we can narrow it down a bit more than that. That is why dear Alice is having me and my brothers make the list," he stressed. "Because it is hardly practical to go after so many suspects. Perhaps, when we have whittled the list down, we can begin the interrogations."

I nodded quickly. That made sense.

"How close are you?" I probed, deadly curious.

Aro gave the matter some thought, before replying. "By April 19th, I think the list should be finished."

"What's so special about April 19th?" I asked.

Aro smiled wickedly. And my heart sank in my chest. That was never a good sign.

"It is the date of our next meal."

…

Aro and I went back to running marching drills with the guard the next day. And the next. Until April 19th arrived. It had become the new routine with him—practicing formations, now that we'd exhausted everything to do with Volturi coven etiquette. But not everyone's routine had changed.

Marcus' routine stayed more or less the same during that entire first month. He taught me more about the Volturi's history. Including when every core guard member was acquired. And every notable confrontation they'd had since their inception.

It was a lot of information. And though my memory was perfect now, I was glad that Aro had deigned to write it all down. I found myself consulting one of his journals often during Marcus' lesson, pouring over the dates.

2500 BC – Amun, Kebi, and others formed the Egyptian Coven

1400BC – 1200BC – The Volturi family was formed.

1150BC – Aro romanced Sulpicia as a human, and had her changed into his mate.

1100BC – Chelsea a.k.a. Charmion became the first member of the Volturi guard. Marcus and Didyme began travelling the world together, only occasionally returning to Volterra.

1100 – 1000BC – Corin and several other vampires joined the Volturi guard.

1000 BC – Vladimir, Stefan, and others formed a coven in current Romania.

500 AD – The Volturi laid siege on the Romanians. The Voturi began enforcing their laws.

600 AD – The Volturi laid siege on the Egyptian coven.

800 AD – Alec and Jane joined the Volturi guard.

1000 AD – Demetri joined the Volturi guard, hunted down the survivors from the previous wars. Two from each were left alive to spread the word. The Volturi gained undisputed, world-power.

1000 AD – 1300 AD – Immortal children plagued the world.

1260 AD – Renata joined the Volturi guard.

1550 AD – Heidi joined the Volturi guard.

1600 AD – Felix and Santiago joined the Volturi guard.

1700 – 1720 AD – Carlisle stayed with the Volturi.

1700 AD – Marcus and Didyme had a son, Tristan.

1720 AD – Eleazar joined the Volturi with his mate, Carmen. He found ten humans with potential for powers around the globe and brought them to be changed. Six died in Carlisle's experiment. Afton, Yvonne, Vera and Heinrich lived. Heinrich was dismissed for being a hinderance. Yvonne left for personal reasons a year later. Vera and Afton remained until the present day. Carlisle, unable to trusted not to bring about undue harm to himself, and potentially others, was dismissed from the coven.

1730AD – Aro and Sulpicia had a daughter, Valentina.

1756 AD – Caius and Athenodora had a son, Theodore.

1770 – 1810 AD – Newborn armies plagued the southern United States. Intervention became necessary.

1820 AD – Didyme and her son Tristan perished in a tragic accident. Marcus stopped travelling.

1906 AD – Valentina left the Volturi.

1920 AD – Alice joined the Volturi. She worked on and off, leaving every couple of years to explore the world, but always came back.

1948 AD – Alice left the Volturi, all believed for good this time.

1956 AD – Titania and Lucretia were born.

1960 AD – Theodore left the Volturi.

2006 AD – Alice returned to the Volturi.

Marcus went over every event listed in Aro's timeline in vivid detail. And he talked slowly, in a tired, apathetic voice, which dragged things out a bit longer than necessary. But his lessons were never boring, despite his monotone. And he was always open to answering questions. Even if he evidently did not appreciate being side-tracked.

Or the questions were painful ones.

I asked him one day, after debating about the wisdom of such a thing within myself for weeks, to explain how Didyme and Tristan had died. And that was a tale I would never forget.

"Aro was experimenting with faster ways to kill criminals," Marcus began in the same, weary old voice as usual. "I thought the whole venture was unnecessary from the start—Jane and Alec together could incapacitate anyone long enough for us to rip them apart and burn the pieces. But it was the Industrial Revolution, and Aro was eager, like the rest of the world, to invent."

"Had I known how horribly wrong this experiment of his was going to go, I would have stopped him, of course," Marcus went on. "But we had no way of knowing. Alice would not become immortal for another century. And all of Aro's other experiments during the technological boom had been successful."

I raised an eyebrow. "Other experiments?"

Marcus nodded slowly, and gestured to the strange stretchy fighting uniform I was wearing in preparation for Caius' lesson after this. After my black jeans and one of my boots had been destroyed, Alice had insisted I get my own set of combat clothing. And that I change into it as soon as my morning lessons began, and didn't change out of it until my training for the day was over.

"Aro was interested in material science—in creating materials that would better withstand our speed and strength in combat," Marcus explained. "The clothing we used to wear beneath our cloaks into battle had always worn down quickly. And while money was no object when it came to replacing them, it was tedious to have to order more to be tailored so frequently. Especially before the advent of mass production."

I nodded quickly. That made sense.

"His experiments with clothing, as you can see, were a great success," Marcus said. "That uniform should, barring exceptional circumstances, stand up to decades of wear."

I gasped. "Decades?"

"Provided you do not cut through it with your teeth," Marcus stipulated. "Or another immortal's teeth."

"That's so… long," I marveled. Especially since I'd seen the kind of damage the Volturi could do during the sparring sessions first hand. And I couldn't imagine actual battle was any kinder. "What is it made of?"

Marcus shrugged. "I am not certain exactly of all of the materials. It is, as I understand it, a rather complicated blend of fibers. Mostly new synthetics I could not tell you much about. I am not an expert in all this—" he waved an irritable hand, "—newfangled technology."

I bit back a laugh. So, Marcus, at the very least, had one thing in common with other old people I knew. It was strange to think of him like a senior citizen when his face didn't look a day past nineteen. But it was the truth.

Another one of many truths I would have to get used to.

"You could ask Aro sometime, if you are curious," Marcus went on. "He is the one who oversees everything our private contractors produce."

He said this with the same, bored monotone as always, like he wasn't saying anything momentous. But I didn't miss it.

"You have private contractors?" I blurted out, stunned.

I'd suspected as much before. But it was another thing to hear Marcus confirm it.

"There is… a company in Italy that specializes in weapons-grade materials for the Italian military," Marcus explained. "We pay a small, underground branch of theirs a large sum of money every month to discreetly produce everything we need. From those combat clothes, to Titania and Lucretia's toys, to the soap Alice and Aro formulated together, and many, many other things."

So, they were the ones who made all that stuff. A secret branch of an Italian military weapons provider.

"I believe Aro has been working with them for the past century on making metal sturdy enough to withstand our prodigious strength," Marcus added, in case I was interested. "He's hoping to replace the old grates in the sewer entrances with something a lot more likely to keep our enemies out. As well as perhaps make cages or chains that could restrain our kind. I have not seen the results myself. But I have heard that the prototypes are performing quite nicely."

I gaped in shock. Metal that could resist vampires?

The idea seemed patently ridiculous at first blush. I'd seen Edward crush the side of a van almost effortlessly. And he wasn't even half as strong as the Volturi were.

But as I thought it through, I guessed it wasn't completely outside the realm of physical possibility. Metals could be mixed into stronger alloys. New materials were being made every day to fit the needs of an increasingly complex, modern society. And vampire skin, tough as it was, still had to follow the laws of physics. So, it was only a matter of time, really, before a team of smart material scientists were able to make something that would fit Aro's specifications.

"How much do you pay them?" I asked.

I wasn't sure what the Volturi's net worth was. I suspected, from their age, and Alice's involvement in the last century, that it was probably somewhere in the billions, thanks to their money gathering interest in the bank, and Alice's stock market maneuverings. Enough to make the Forbes 500 for sure, if vampires had been allowed to be listed.

But with their finances being deliberately obfuscated, it was hard to tell just how rich they were. Did they have enough money to equal the GDP of a small country? A large country?

The distinction wasn't really that important most of the time. But I couldn't help but wonder now just how much could the Volturi afford to pay these military contractors. I knew military-grade equipment didn't come cheap. The United States government consistently sunk more than half of its enormous federal budget into defense spending every year. In fact, they'd been paying so much for war stuff lately, while waging their "War on Terror" that they'd racked up trillions of dollars in debt.

Could the Volturi afford that?

But to my absolute consternation, Marcus simply shrugged again. "Aro and his secretaries handle all the finances. I simply know it is a very large amount that we wire-transfer to them each month."

Wire-transfer? What, like electronically?

"Is that legal?" I asked.

Couldn't wire-transfers be tracked?

Marcus looked askance at me. "Is anything we do legal by human standards?"

I clammed up, feeling embarrassed. "I guess not," I murmured quietly, shaking my head. "But how do you keep that connection a secret if the money is all transferred digitally?"

I didn't know all the specifics. But I'd watched enough CSI to know that bank accounts could be watched. If you wanted to keep things off the books, cash was the way to go.

Of course, for that same reason, large sums of cash were suspicious. So, money-laundering was a thing most organizations operating outside the rules of human laws had to contend with at some point.

Marcus shrugged for a third time. "Again, I am the wrong person to ask. But I do know we disguise most of our outgoing money as charitable donations or expensive fine art purchases. So, it is likely the contractors we work with are able to simply claim they have a generous, anonymous benefactor or patron, if anyone begins to ask to many questions."

I blinked, dumbfounded. Really, it was that easy?

"We do make a lot of genuine contributions to various charities, and we are also true patrons of the arts, science, medicine, music, and so forth," Marcus felt the need to add. "We pose to the humans as a family that comes from old money. So, the Italian government does not look too closely when we make a large purchase, or make an odd charitable donation or two to a charity they have never heard of."

Marcus paused for a second to let that sink in. Then, when I nodded, he added, "Especially, if we say…" he made a noncommittal gesture "…transfer some of that money to the government."

I nodded again a bit more briskly. Bribes. I guess that made sense.

Though it reeked of corruption. And I tried not to let that make me uncomfortable.

"Anyway, you were saying… about Didyme?" I asked, hoping to get back on topic. We'd gotten off on another tangent again. Which seemed to be a bad habit I had when I was talking to Marcus.

Marcus' face hardened. "Yes. Well, Aro started working with this military weapons company in the late seventeen-hundreds. And in eighteen-twenty, after many successful inventions, they were helping him devise a method to kill our kind faster."

I pursed my lips together. This already wasn't sounding good.

"The initial design was something like a modern flame-thrower," Marcus went on. "It never got as sophisticated as the ones humans developed later. But that was the general idea."

I narrowed my eyes. "I thought Alice said flamethrowers weren't very effective?"

I wasn't sure what her exact words had been. But I seemed to recall, somewhere in the haze of my human memories, her either saying or implying something about flamethrowers not being very effective weapons against vampires.

"Not in human hands," Marcus clarified.

Things clicked in my head a sixteenth of a second later. "Oh. He meant this to be a thing used in vampire-to-vampire combat?"

Marcus nodded. Then frowned deeper than usual. "He never got that far. He made a lab for himself in the catacombs and was tinkering with the formula for Greek fire—a weapon used on ancient Greek ships," he added when I blinked in confusion. "—trying to adapt it for land-based combat. But he never got past the prototyping phase."

My head bobbed vigorously. I didn't know exactly what this "Greek Fire" stuff was all about. Maybe once I could trust myself around a computer again, I would Google it. But I wanted to let Marcus know I was following well enough for him to continue.

Marcus went on. "One night, Aro had to leave the lab to interrogate a suspected criminal. He only left the prototype unattended for a couple of hours," he told me, the devastation slowly creeping into his voice. "And he had no reason to suspect anything would happen. No one had ever visited the catacombs before without a clear reason."

Marcus swallowed, and forced himself to continue, though it was clearly taking its toll on him. "I was in the library, just across the hall, reading a book. I didn't hear Didyme and Tristan go into Aro's lab. But perhaps I simply wasn't paying attention. I thought they were in the courtyard of the city. The sky was dark enough for them to move freely in the streets. And, even though Aro thought it was unwise, for our secrecy's sake, she did like to mingle occasionally with the townspeople."

A tiny, fleeting smile decorated Marcus' face as he reminisced about Didyme and her idiosyncrasies. It was like a sliver of sunlight had slipped through the cracks of his perpetual gloom. But it only lasted for a twenty-fourth of a second before it was suddenly replaced with the deadest, darkest expression of all.

Marcus swallowed again. And I stiffened where I stood.

Here it came.

"To this day none of us are sure what happened. But when I finished my book, Didyme and Tristan were nowhere to be found. I checked every room in the fortress. Every street in the town. And I asked everyone I came across if they had seen anything—but of course they had not."

I started slowly chewing on the corner of my lip. It didn't take a genius to see where this was going.

"When Aro returned to the catacombs to tinker with his prototype," Marcus continued, his voice wavering. "I went with him, thinking they might have gone to see the device together. But when we pulled open the door…

Marcus swallowed a third time. And I winced.

"…there were thick, black, scorch marks all over the stone walls and floor. And two…"

Marcus choked, his voice cracking and giving out with emotion. The words were too painful. But he forced himself to try and say them anyway.

"…two g-glittering piles of…"

I held up a hand to stop him before he could hurt himself. I already knew what he was going to say—two glittering piles of ash. And he looked like he was going to break down sobbing. His scarlet red eyes—no longer the freshly fed vivid crimson, but not quite a thirsty burgundy either—were fogging over with thick clouds of venom. And his breath was coming out in sharp, halting gasps.

"I'm so sorry," I breathed. "That must have been horrible."

Marcus nodded sharply in agreement, his lips trembling. Then, quite unexpectedly, he flung his arms around me in a desperate hug. And began to tearlessly weep.

I held him as best I could—at six feet, he was taller than me. And patted his back affectionately. I felt awkward, hugging him. We barely knew each other. And he was supposed to be a person who held authority over me. Not someone who was barely holding it together, and relying on me to support him.

But as I tried my best to comfort him in my arms, while he shook with great, heaving sobs, I realized, even if he was an ancient powerful vampire, underneath all that, he was still just a man. A man bereft from the loss of his wife and child. A man who, I realized with a jolt, could still remember with crystal clarity what his wife and son's ashes looked like, even though the accident had occurred nearly two hundred years ago.

I gulped, and rubbed little circles against his long, lean back.

No wonder he looked so lifeless all the time.

We stayed on safer topics after that. But I did believe, after sharing his story, that Marcus and I had crossed an invisible barrier. That he regarded me less as some generic subordinate he had to train because Aro wanted him to, and more as an individual person he got the privilege of sharing the Volturi's history with.

His lifeless voice and generally bored demeanor didn't change. So, maybe I was imagining it. But every now and then, I thought I saw, for no longer than a sixty-fourth of a second, Marcus give me a tiny smile, before Caius collected me for my physical training.

…

Caius' routine wasn't as stable as Marcus', nor as erratic as Aro's. On my second day in the sparring room, I had my own fighting uniform. And Caius finally started teaching me some moves.

We started with the very basics—how to stand during a fight, how to throw a punch, how to kick without being knocked off balance, etc. We worked our way up from there, tackling a few new moves every day, while making sure I hadn't forgotten the ones I'd learned during our previous sessions.

His was probably the hardest training I received from the three brothers. My super-vampire-brain made memorizing historical names, dates, and the Volturi's secret cues a piece of cake. And I was getting better at slowing my pace during the marching drills once I knew how long a second really was. But I had absolutely no background in fighting—or anything athletic for that matter. And it showed.

I knew in theory how to do everything Caius taught. I memorized his instructions permanently as soon as they left his lips. But in practice, I didn't always succeed. My lack of coordination from my human life had carried over. And it frustrated Caius to no end.

"Isabella, for the last time, what did I say about letting your opponent get their arms around you?" He snapped one day, after I'd received a rather decisive defeat from Felix.

"Not to do it?" I mumbled, suffusing with embarrassment.

Caius put his hands on his hips and glowered down at me. I was still flat on my back on the plastic mats from when Felix had tackled me to the floor and forced me to surrender.

"And what did you do?" he hissed.

I sighed. "Let Felix get his arms around me."

Caius pinched the bridge of his nose, like my incompetence was giving him a headache. Which of course it wasn't. Vampire's didn't get headaches. But still.

"Can you, or can you not follow instructions?" he asked, exasperated.

"I'm sorry, I'm trying!" They were pathetic excuses, I knew. But they were the truth. "It's just… I'm so new to this. And sometimes my body doesn't want to follow my commands!"

I growled in frustration—the ferocious sound making a few nearby guard members stiffen. Then, as if to demonstrate how sloppy my control really was, I raised my arms above my head and wiggled them like boneless noodles.

Caius narrowed his eyes. "Then make it follow," he snapped.

Then suddenly, he sighed and his voice lost a little of its biting edge. "You have true potential, Isabella. You defeated Jane, which is hardly something to scoff at," he unexpectedly praised.

I guessed he really was still impressed by that.

"But unless you can master the use of your strengths, your weaknesses will be your downfall."

I sat up on the mats and hung my head. "You're right." Then I tilted my head back up and looked Caius dead in the eyes, with an expression of determination. "I'll keep trying."

Caius nodded. "Good."

…

Renata's lessons were a lot easier than Caius' lessons. At least at first—when she was only having me move my shield away from my mind. But they got a bit more difficult as time went on.

After it was clear that I could move my shield back to and away from my own head, easily, we'd tried to relocate it to another person's mind—to protect their head instead of mine. And that, I was frustrated to realize, was a lot harder.

My shield was naturally averse to touching anyone's brain that wasn't mine. It kept bouncing away, like I was trying to force the wrong ends of magnets together. And whoever I was trying to force the shield into—no matter who they were—said, whenever I managed to get my shield to stick to their mind for more than a second, that it was uncomfortably ticklish. That it made their brain feel smothered and itchy.

But eventually I was able to get the hang of it. Able to make the shimmering red veil of silk I pictured in my head slip comfortably around someone else's brain, and hold it snuggly, protectively, in it's grasp. Able to make it not feel wrong and itchy. Able to hold it there for at least thirty minutes.

And strangest of all, able to feel that person's mind when it was under my shield. Every person I tried my powers on, I could see when my shield closed around their mind. Well, not exactly. It wasn't something I did with my eyes, for I could still sense it when they were closed. It was more like I had a sixth sense that I could register things with—a sense that made any mind under my shield appear as a hot point of light.

It was fascinating to explore this new sense. I learned this sense was strangely unimpacted by distance. I could sense any vampires under my shield just as clearly from across the room as I could standing right next to them. And I also learned each vampire had a unique cadence or flavor to their mind—an essence, Demetri had called it. Which was what he must use to track them.

Though, while I played with my powers, under Renata's patient guidance, I realized there were several big problems. The first was, if I was protecting someone else, I was wide open. Which I couldn't imagine would be very helpful on the battlefield. After all, how long could it take for the enemy to realize what was going on and attack me? And once they did, how long would it take to kill me?

I knew that was part of why Caius was training me to fight—so I would survive longer out there. But if I didn't even have the advantage of my mental shield, how long could I last? It was really my only trump card. And if Alice's words were anything to go by, I assumed our enemy had some mental gifts on their side that I would need to thwart. Gifts that could be used against me when I was guarding someone else.

I wasn't sure how Alice thought I was going to protect everyone in the upcoming battle. Or really how that was supposed to stop the calamity that was going to befall us all if I didn't succeed. But I was hoping that she had some kind of plan besides forcing me to play a very complicated version of whack-a-mole. And that once she'd narrowed down our list of suspects, she would share it with me.

I figured she must have some reason for not telling me yet. That her omission was deliberate rather than accidental. But I wasn't sure what that reason was.

Maybe she thinks I am not ready yet?

Whatever the case was, I trusted Alice's judgement.

But I hated being in the dark.

…

Italian lessons with Heidi were probably the easiest of all. I memorized the entire English-to-Italian dictionary in the first week. Pronunciation took a bit longer to perfect, since my mouth wasn't physically used to making those shapes. But in only two weeks I sounded just as fluent as everyone else, and we were able to switch our weekly progress-report meetings over to Italian without worrying about leaving me in the dust.

There were a lot of Italian-specific terms the Volturi had for things. Not just la tua cantante but hundreds of other phrases they'd coined over the centuries that just didn't quite translate into English. So, things ran a lot smoother when the Volturi were allowed to speak their Lingua Franca.

In informal settings, or one-on-one meetings, sometimes English was still used. Neither Aro, Marcus or Caius seemed to mind using it during our lessons. And, of course, Alice would use it when we were alone. But many of the members of the guard were simply more comfortable speaking Italian.

After mastering Italian though, I was curious to see if I could pick up more languages. Heidi knew forty-seven and was working on several more herself—her job as the Volturi's fisher required her to know as many as possible. So, I asked her what she recommended I learn next, and if she would be willing to help me. At least, until I had enough understanding of how languages worked to teach myself.

Heidi agreed, to my delight. Then she decided that, after Italian—the language I would use most often with the Volturi—and English—the language of international communication—I should learn Mandarin Chinese—the most commonly spoken language in the world. Her logic was sound. So, we got right into it, learning thousands of new characters in our first session, and spending the next few having me practice reading them aloud.

But during one of our lessons, I noticed something strange. While I recited new words from an English to Mandarin dictionary, and Heidi corrected my pronunciation, she lounged across a long, wooden bench. Her head was propped up on her elbow. And she poured over some printed documents.

I leaned forward, curious. Then started to read the documents in her hands. Which was easy, despite their distance, and the fact that they were upside-down from this angle.

But when I read what Heidi was looking at, I drew back in horror and shock. Heidi was pouring over a list of people. And next to each name, age, country of origin and short biography, she had written a little number in red ink. A number I came to realize was the number of people that might realistically care if they went missing. A number which was a big, fat zero for all too many.

It didn't take long for me to put the pieces together. Heidi was compiling her own list. A list of people to try and lure into the fortress on April 19th, so the Volturi could host their monthly meal.

I suddenly felt sick. And the lines of Chinese characters in front of me suddenly looked like gibberish again. I couldn't focus on them, when I kept picturing all those people filing into the turret room, unaware of the ghastly fate that awaited them.

I could just see their innocent smiling faces, blinking and taking candid pictures, thinking they were on some sort of exotic vacation. And I could picture perfectly their happiness slowly melting into horror as the doors were locked behind them, and the monsters around them began to converge. Began to select their victims and start the feast.

I had to set down the thick book in my lap and focus on not hyperventilating. Heidi didn't comment. Her face—sour under her luscious waves of mahogany hair—already told me that she knew, or at least had gathered the gist of my thoughts. She let me sit there, frozen in stupefied terror for the rest of our lesson.

And then, when I came by the next night, she simply was gone. She'd left a note on the door informing me she'd left, and our Mandarin lessons would, unfortunately have to stop while she fetched our food.

At first, I hadn't known what to do with those hours. But when I informed Aro the next morning, he decided to fill the time slot with more training. It gave him a chance to take a break from making the list—which was almost done.

And it also gave Alice a chance to share what she had seen with as many other members of the coven as she could. She used Titania and Lucretia to spread the news, the same way Aro had shared information with me before.

When it was my turn, I wasn't sure how to feel. In theory, I understood that it was good for us all to be on the same page. But most of the guard shuffled away after their turns, with eyes wide, and bodies quaking in fear. So, I wasn't sure if I wanted to see. Maybe it would be better for me to be in the dark?

Of course, I didn't really have a choice. Alice beckoned me forward with a small, white finger. And, since she ranked above me, I couldn't really say no to that cue.

So, reluctantly, I stepped forward, with as much grace as I could muster. I couldn't quite glide in my cloak the way the other Volturi could yet. The best I could manage was an awkward slink.

Then I mentally pushed aside the barrier that normally blocked my mind—a gesture that was now as easy as breathing. And let Lucretia put her tiny hand in mine, completing the chain from Alice, to Titania, to Lucretia, to me.

The memory Alice showed me wasn't long. I guessed she didn't feel the need to share every possible outcome with me, the way she had with Aro and Caius. But as soon as the scene leaped into focus, I felt abruptly very grateful that she was only giving me a glimpse.

Blasted, burning skyscrapers rose around me in every direction. Some of them were tilted at odd angles, their very foundations disrupted. Several had fallen over, breaking up the asphalt beneath them and littering the ground with heavy debris. And the few that remained upright pierced the violent orange sunset like great, black daggers.

Helicopters wheeled overhead. Their blades spun and engines roared loudly above as they swept over the city. Bright searchlights shone from bulbs affixed to their fronts, scanning for survivors.

And as they passed, fire rained down from the sky. It showered the crumbled streets, demolished cars, and broken sidewalks in sparks and flames. And some very nearly landed on us.

Whoever's memory this was coughed and ducked behind a smoldering storefront as one of these cruel, metal machines hovered past. Thick plumes of smoke filled the sky and a strange, holographic dust which looked like the powder of crushed diamonds clogged the air. The desolate city was totally silent except for the whirring of approaching helicopter blades, and the faint crackling of flames.

We waited, with bated breath as the helicopter whirled closer. Their blinding searchlights narrowly missed us as we hid amid the burning rubble. And when the awful sound of its chopping blades had finally faded to a dull hum, we broke out of our hiding place.

We ran through the rubble desperately. Suddenly, screams pierced the air all around us. And we added our own cries to the cacophony of terror, as we went.

I recognized the voice that felt like it was coming out of my lips. Alice's voice.

So, these were her memories. Or rather, her visions of the future.

But Alice wasn't screaming in pain like the others around her. Instead she was calling out a name—Jasper's name—over and over.

They'd been separated in the chaos, I realized. And she was desperate for some affirmation, no matter how minute, that he was still alive.

She vaulted gracefully over a large pile of cracked concrete and broken glass, and kept moving, her eyes switching frantically across the disastrous landscape as she ran. There were bodies trapped underneath the rubble here and there—only an errant arm or leg visible under the enormous piles of debris.

Most of them were bleeding—a clear sign that they weren't who she was looking for. But a few limbs were the pale, bloodless type she sought. And of these few, some of the appendages twitched, still living. But others were eerily still.

She didn't pause to examine the bodies or try and wrench the wriggling ones free of their rocky prisons. There was no time for that. So, she kept moving, her eyes flickering quickly from one to the next. Searching. Praying. Hoping.

Alice recognized them all—a startling realization. I had not imagined that, even with her superior memory, she would be able to name every immortal body we encountered without seeing their faces. And as Alice searched, she felt an appalling combination of dread and relief as she noticed that his body was not among the dead and dying she had happened across so far.

She paused at the end of the decimated street and cried his name again, as loud as she dared with the helicopters still circling overhead.

But like always, there was no response.

The smoke rising in thick, dark columns around us burned her nose and throat. And the diamond dust floating through the air stung her eyes. But she still couldn't cry. That human capability was lost to her forever.

She mouthed his name forlornly now. Then, to my alarm, she shook an angry fist at the orange sky and cursed me directly.

"None of this was supposed to happen, Bella!" she screamed. "No one was supposed to die! We only changed you to prevent this very outcome! If Jasper is dead because of you…"

Lucretia's tiny hand released mine suddenly, cutting off the memory in its tracks. And when I got my bearings again, back in my usual body, I exhaled in shock. And felt even more resolve to help. In whatever way I could.

I absolutely could not let that future come true.

…

After my lessons were over, I always went to my room. But the longer my training dragged on, the more I began to believe that those few hours of reprieve were, in fact, the opposite.

I didn't get physically tired any more. I didn't have to sleep. So, all I could do was sit on the bed and stare at the ceiling. And being left alone with my own thoughts, I quickly found, was not a good thing.

My memory was perfect now. And I found, when I left my mind to wander, that it reveled in the most disgusting of things.

Like the way my first victim's terrified, flailing hands had slapped powerlessly against my rock-hard grip during my first feed. The way their scalding flesh had slickened with fearful sweat. How the pitch of their gasping, desperate howls had grown higher as my teeth sank into their flimsy neck. And how eerily limp their corpse had suddenly become in my frigid arms once I'd drank enough of their blood.

And although such things horrified my gentle heart, the savage creature newly born inside of me was thrilled. Perhaps even aroused by these vicious thoughts.

I tried not to sink into despair whenever my unhelpful brain decided to take me down a thirsty memory lane. Tried not to let the horrible images fill me with guilt. I knew it wasn't really avoidable. Even Carlisle had felt these same cruel, violent feelings from time to time. But I still hated myself for feeling that way. Even when I knew that it wasn't really my fault.

It wasn't like I could just be okay with it all of a sudden.

To avoid the grisly images, I tried reminiscing about my human life. Although my memories of it were hazy, murky, and many included the "vegetarian" coven, they were a relatively safe place to be. There I only had to struggle with petty things. Like whether I would make an utter fool of myself at prom. Or whether my fastly-flourishing friendship with Jacob was a betrayal of Edward.

Nothing like wondering how on earth I would cope when the time came for my next meal. I shuddered, just considering the prospect. That was a whole new level of horrible.

Sometimes, I even went so far as to try and trick myself into thinking I was still human. After all, humans didn't have to worry about any of the awful things that plagued me now. But it was hard to forget that I was a vampire with all the constant reminders.

If Alice hadn't been around to help me, I knew I would have shredded my clothes trying to take them off. The few times she'd let me try had been disastrous—I'd ripped everything to ribbons.

And even with her help, I couldn't avoid destroying things. On the rare occasion I decided to use my free time to explore the castle, I accidentally crushed every door knob I touched with my powerful fingers. And I finally understood why the desk in Aro's etiquette training room was broken in half. I'd been responsible for more broken furniture than I could count.

In fact, it was so bad that Aro had put a blanket ban on the library. I wasn't to go through its doors until he gained evidence that I wouldn't make anything I touched disintegrate in my hands. An order I hadn't felt the slightest inclination to protest.

He was right. I was a menace.

But really, it was the minor things that made it impossible to maintain the delusion that I was still mortal. Like when I caught my flawless, red-eyed reflection in the mirror. Or when I realized one afternoon that I hadn't blinked in days. Or when I tried, out of habit, to go to sleep, only to discover that I neither possessed the desire, nor capacity. Or when I touched something that was once freezing cold, but now felt much warmer.

These little things added up. Cementing into my brain my new identity. My identity as a monster.

One particularly egregious incident was when I tripped all the way down a spiral staircase leading into the catacombs and escaped completely unscathed. That had been a doozy. I wasn't any more coordinated as an immortal, it seemed. The flawless grace everyone else possessed must be the result of hundreds of years of practice.

But I'd been confused when my tumble down some stone steps didn't give me a concussion. And while a part of me was grateful to be spared the pain. I felt a strange longing for the sensation anyway. The pain, at least, would have meant I was still human.

Through it all, though she was very busy making preparations of her own, Alice was very helpful. She not only helped me change my clothes, but also offered emotional support whenever my stupid, newborn brain decided it wanted to think about my first victim again.

She explained to me one night, while I was going through a particularly bad rehash—a flash of violent cruel memories I couldn't stop—that what I was experiencing was very normal. That I'd been through something I still considered traumatic. And until I could accept it completely, I would be plagued by these vivid, waking nightmares.

I didn't understand how that was supposed to help. Why my new brain and body thought it was a good idea to make me relive the horror every night.

Why yes, that's exactly what I need when I'm trying to radically alter my moral framework.

Not.

And it certainly didn't help that my emotions had gotten more intense. That everything I found a little uncomfortable as a human was absolutely unbearable as a vampire.

Had it been possible, I would have wept every night. But my eyes wouldn't produce proper tears anymore—the venom that had replaced them would only sting inside my eyes. So instead, I just released choked, dry sobs into Alice's shoulder, as we sat together on the bed, and she patted my back consolingly.

It was a pathetic routine. One I was glad no one besides Alice got to see. I couldn't imagine the rest of the Volturi would be impressed with the way I shook, and sometimes even clawed at my own skin in self-loathing, having to be restrained by Alice before I could tear anything off.

Immortality was supposed to be awesome… And yet during those first few weeks, I spent most of my free time holed up in my room, trying to fool myself into believing it hadn't happened.

…

One night, Alice broke our sad routine to briefly sneak back into Forks. She did it both to retrieve some of my things, and to give some suitable excuse to Charlie for my indefinite absence. She wouldn't tell me what she'd told him just yet. Only that he still believed I was alive and would continue to contact me. And when she returned, Alice filled the lush carpet of my new room with boxes of my old stuff.

Which was both wonderfully considerate of her. And paradoxically painful.

Everything Alice had brought back, from the silly old photo album I'd put together before Edward had left, to my favorite CDs, and my much-beloved laptop, was comfortingly familiar. But everything was also still faintly covered in my human scent. Which I was disturbed to find extremely mouthwatering, despite its weakness.

Aro had said before that the blood that most appealed to us was that which was similar to our human blood. But it was jarring to thirst for my former self just the same.

There was also the fact that I didn't really trust myself to handle any of my old possessions for very long, given my excellent track record with destroying things. And so, without opening my computer or my phone, I had no idea if Charlie had tried to contact me yet.

Instead, I mostly just stared at the last remnants of my human life, sitting untouched in travel-scuffed cardboard boxes next to my four-poster bed. And fought back unshedable-vampire-tears as I remembered everything I had left behind.

I had sacrificed so much. Renee, and Charlie I would probably never see ever again, and I hadn't even been able to give them a proper goodbye. My human friends too—Angela, Jessica, Mike… I wondered what Charlie would tell them about why I suddenly disappeared. What would they think of me for abandoning them so suddenly? Would they miss me at all?

And Jacob—I guess technically as a member of the "supernatural community" as the Volturi called it, he could be in the know without being given the ultimatum to be changed or die. But knowing that my recent dietary choices would likely destroy everything positive we had once shared, I probably had to give him and the whole Quileute wolf-pack up too.

I had to be careful not to bite my lip too hard in frustration—I could saw through my entire lower lip now if I wasn't careful. But I would miss them: Seth, Leah, Quil, Embry, Paul…. Even Sam, if only because his was a familiar face that I associated with Jacob. With being human. With feeling sane.

As I counted my losses that night, I built up an abundance of venom in my eyes—creating a thick, filmy white veil over my vision that never went away. At least, not until the sun rose. And I had to face the others.

…

In the days leading up to April 19th I tried to take some solace in the knowledge that most vampires typically adjusted to their new morals in a handful of months. There were a few outliers of course. And others that were hard to place because of extenuating circumstances. Like the newborns involved in Carlisle's experiments, who had spent their first months being forced to drink animal blood. Or Aro's daughters, who had never been raised to think killing human beings was wrong.

But the general timetable still stood. So, if I was a typical vampire, I should only have at most another few months of this.

But that wasn't as comforting of a thought as it should have been. When had I ever been a typical anything?

How could I know I wouldn't become one of those vampires who spent too long hating themselves for eating people, and as a result had a hard time ever letting go of those feelings?

I knew already that I wasn't going to be one of those who let go of those destructive emotions faster than average and embraced their inner animal. And it was a small comfort that I would likely, end up nothing like Caius or Jane as a result.

But the other end of the spectrum was just as dangerous.

I didn't dare let my feelings show when I participated in activities with the rest of the guard. I had an inkling that the more sadistic members of the Volturi would roll their eyes. Which would only make me more furious.

But as I sat alone in my rooms each night leading up to the monthly meal, I still worried. About Charlie, and the rest of those I'd abandoned back home, and how they were coping with my absence. About how I was going to live up to Alice's lofty expectations. About Aro's suspicions, and Marcus' strange behavior on my first day—things that added up in my mind to mean the Volturi leaders suspected a traitor among either their current or former members.

But most of all, I worried about my future.

I'd killed one man. But I wasn't sure how well I was going to handle killing a second. And as I stared into still vividly crimson eyes in the mirror on the morning of April 19th', I felt a current of fear race down my spine.

I wasn't ready for this. I wasn't adjusted to being a killer yet.

I wasn't ready to kill again.