For the 17th time since takeoff, Bella wondered exactly at what point she had gone completely insane. For surely there was no other explanation for her behavior in the last 12 hours than the undeniable fact she had gone completely off the rails. She belonged in a padded room in a straightjacket.
Not for the first or last time, Bella reviewed the train of events that had led to her getting on this plane.
Charlie had yelled at her at breakfast. Well, more gruffly tried to lay down the law like a total awkward dad and ended up pleading with her to just go along with what he told her to do. Only what he had suggested was that she move to Florida and live with Renee again. When she'd asked why, he'd sort of imploded, said something about her 'moping' and basically said that he hoped a change in scenery might help her to recover from… the breakup.
Even now, in her madness, her mind shied away from that pain, the source of the crater where her heart should be. But she could think about that morning. When Charlie made it clear that for all her effort, all her most concentrated focus on carrying on for Charlie's sake, she had failed. That she wasn't fooling anyone. Bella Swan, as a person, had died that night when he had told her he didn't want her and left her in the woods. And apparently her living corpse going through the motions freaked Charlie the fuck out, to the point he'd give her up back to Renee in the desperate hope that she'd get better.
Bella supposed that had been the trigger to this whole thing, the tilt to the domino that started this chain of events. That she'd wasted that last 4 months of this… not life. Existence was a better word. Realizing that all that energy and drive, as much as she could muster in her broken condition, had been for nought.
And realizing that, on some level, had led to this cockamamie scheme.
She'd said empty words about making a date with friends to convince Charlie she wasn't actually a heartbroken zombie and could indeed have a life after him. She'd driven off to school as if she had any real intention of attending class. She'd even made it all the way to the parking lot and waited until she was sure Charlie had left for the station. Then she'd driven back to the house, gotten her passport, and driven to Seattle with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her obvious youth and the fact it had been a school day had gotten her odd looks, but both her driver's license and passport insisted she was 18 and not a minor. So the bank clerk, while looking uncomfortable, had zeroed out her checking account and given her the sum of her college fund in cold hard cash. Then she'd driven to SeaTac, and purchased a last minute flight to Rome with cash.
In a twisted, demented, Bella-like way, she supposed her plan made perfect sense. Her human life was over. Had ended the moment he left her, taking everything. "It'll be as if I never existed." As if. She'd been altered irrevocably by her love for him. Nothing could change her back to the Bella she'd been before she'd weaseled her way into his world. And apparently, as Charlie's plea had made so clear, she couldn't even give a convincing act to the rest of her loved ones that she was fine, would recover eventually, 'move on' from her first and probably last breakup.
So, accepting that there was no point in continuing the charade, there were only two real options: suicide, or a second chance at life, as something decidedly not human. And Bella knew herself well enough to know she'd utterly fail at any attempt to end her life. Nevermind that she almost got herself killed on a daily basis just walking down the sidewalk, she was just so clumsy and pathetic that everything from stabbing her heart to jumping off a cliff was doomed to leave her alive. Potentially with life-altering injuries and medical conditions, but she'd definitely find some way to live even if she ran into traffic or chased a handful of valium with bleach.
Plus, let's be honest, she was a coward. And she did not relish the idea of hurting herself, or pain on any level. Physical pain seemed a paltry thing compared to her constant emotional agony since he'd broken her with his words. But still, not something she was eager to inflict on herself, even if there was a slim chance it would bring an end to her torment.
So, suicide was out. Which left only becoming a vampire, since human life was no longer a viable, or even remotely desirable, option. And she only knew of 3 covens. One was actively hiding from her, and she had no idea where any of the Cullens could possibly be in the wide world. There were the 'cousins' in Alaska, Bella even wanted to say they lived near Denali (some little detail he or one of his family had mentioned in passing and she'd absorbed). But as vegetarians, they were suspect. Would they turn her just because she asked? And she couldn't rule out that he could have warned them of her existence and left instructions to deny her. Because he wanted her to have a 'clean break' from his world, utterly forgetting or denying the fact that it was her world too. Had been from the moment he hadn't decided to kill her that first Biology class.
So, the only real option was the Volturi. And they were in Italy. Hence Bella's sudden trans-Atlantic flight.
Bella reflected that, on some level, this could be a cry for help. A desperate, last ditch try at getting his attention back on her. Her decisions, while split-second, were solid and done. Alice, even if she weren't actively looking at Bella's future anymore, could have had a vision of all this. And surely she would tell her family, and at least one of them would feel a sliver of concern for their old companion, Edward's human girlfriend he'd humored for a few months, and come to stop her. Maybe he would even come, be at the airport in Rome when she landed, if only to scream at her for her idiocy and foolishness in intending to approach vampire royalty and basically say "Kill me or turn me, dealer's choice."
The point, if this whole enterprise even had a point, was that Bella was done. Done with a human life without him in it. So, she was going to find the Volturi. And then they'd either kill her for knowing the secret, or for the simple fact one of them was hungry and she apparently smelled better than the average human, or maybe, just maybe, bite her and leave the venom to do its work.
One way or another, Bella knew deep in her gut, she wasn't leaving Italy as a human. By some viewpoints, she'd never leave it alive at all. She was flying to the end of her human life, one way or another.
It was surprising, how much peace that brought her. No matter what, this would all be over soon. The liberation from her pain, no matter the precise method, soothed the ache in her chest to a level where she almost felt normal. She was even tempted to sleep, but waking up screaming from her usual nightmare might get her put in handcuffs by the air marshall or something. She ordered a Coke instead for the caffeine.
She landed in Rome and got off the plane. Nobody was there to greet her, of course, but she still felt disappointed. Guess Alice didn't care after all. Well, maybe that was unfair. This had been rather last minute, a whim of Bella's she intended to see through to the end. And for all vampires' speed, they couldn't outrun planes. For once, maybe Bella was ahead of the Cullens, outpacing their last-ditch effort to save her from vampirism. Or maybe she was reading too far into this.
It was only as she was standing in a busy airport terminal, surrounded by people speaking not-English, that Bella came to the blinding flash of the obvious that she didn't know where the Volturi lived, other than somewhere in Italy. And while smaller than the USA, she didn't have time to go into every Italian city and town shouting "Come out Dracula!" at the top of her lungs hoping one of the vampires would notice and/or take her seriously. Luckily, this was 2006, and there was a space age invention called the Internet now. Bella found an internet cafe in the airport, rented half an hour, and literally just googled 'Volturi, Italy, Aro, Caius, Marcus'. Hell, for all she knew, the Volturi had monitoring programs for searches with those exact keywords and this search alone would bring them to her.
The top result was Volterra, a small Tuscan town dating back to the Etruscan era, reachable by bus from Florence or 'Firenze' as the locals called it. Supposedly, Saint Marcus was famous for casting vampires out of the city hundreds of years ago. Well, that was good enough for Bella.
It was an hour wait for the next bus to Florence, and then 3 and a half hours actually on the bus to the city. Bella wondered if maybe she should take the chance to play tourist. While she'd always more imagined England, the land of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen and Shakespeare, when it came to foreign vacations, Italy had been on her list. The Duomo, the chance to see Michelangelo's David, how could she pass that up? Except she could, because that wasn't why she was here. She was on a mission, why waste time?
She got off at the bus station in Florence and, through a very helpful German tourist, managed to read the Italian bus schedule and get a ticket to Volterra. That was another 2 and a half hours. Bella was seriously starting to flag, she hadn't slept in… how long at this point? She couldn't even remember. But she was so close, and her screaming seriously could get the Italian cops called on her. So she kept chugging caffeinated drinks, lucky that Italy was the land of espresso. She got to Volterra at close to sunset local time.
Bella hadn't really planned out what she was going to do to draw the Volturi's attention. She'd been riding one impulse after another since her talk with Charlie and realizing how futile her attempt to live a life without him truly was. So, why break character?
Bella found Saint Marcus Square, the center of the town it seemed, with a beautiful fountain and clocktower that Bella couldn't fully appreciate in the light of the streetlamps. She sat down on the edge of the fountain, took a deep breath, and shouted in full voice "Aro! Caius! Marcus! Volturi! I want to talk!"
Now, Bella had no hard confirmation that this was even the right location of the most powerful coven in the vampire world. And maybe she'd forgotten just how quick and supernaturally strong the senses of vampires were since they'd vanished from her life. But whatever she expected from her yelling in the town square like some loony, it certainly hadn't been an instant response.
Appearing like that film trick where they stop recording and bring in an actor to make it look like they'd just 'popped' in, a figure in a dark grey cape and a cowl pulled over his head appeared directly in front of Bella. His features were inhumanly pale, inhumanly perfect, and his eyes were a muted red verging on black. "Who are you and how do you know those names?"
Bella took a second to just drink in this stranger's features. Here, at least, was proof. Was validation. She had not hallucinated all her time with him and his family. Vampires were real, and one was right in front of her. Her heart, which she thought withered to a black husk in her chest if not entirely absent, pounded. Only it wasn't fear. No, it was exhilaration. For the first time since that night, she felt truly alive.
She'd already had a dubious opinion of her own sanity, but this clinched it. She had officially cracked. No sane human would be so happy to meet a carnivorous vampire to the point she wanted to wrap him in a hug for proving she wasn't delusional.
The vampire was staring at her, and Bella belatedly realized he was waiting for an answer. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. "My name is Bella. I… I dated a vampire. He told me about the Volturi. I want to meet them."
The vampire just kept staring, though now he was tilting his head in a bird-like motion. "You want to meet the kings?" He asked, as if to clarify that was actually what she meant when she uttered the last few sentences.
"If they're willing. I realize it's rude to expect them to drop everything for some random human girl. If there's a waiting room… wherever your home base is, I'd be happy to wait there while they clear their schedules," Bella offered. She was nothing if not conscientious.
The vampire unexpectedly burst into laughter. "Oh, this is too rich! We'll be talking about this shit storm for days!" Once the laughter was out of his system, he pulled out a cell phone. The juxtaposition of a modern cell phone, one of the latest models by Bella's estimation, in the hands of this immortal creature in a getup out of a Renaissance horror film, made Bella want to giggle. She was surprised she was capable of so light an emotion. Seems vampires, rather ironically, brought her to life. Even a first meeting with a stranger from the species was enough to make Bella feel more human than she had since the week of her birthday.
The vampire spoke too fast and low for her human ears to catch, he listened to the response, and flipped the phone closed. "You're coming with me," he said, as if her opinion was irrelevant to this course of action. And then, for the first time in months, she found herself manhandled into a bridal carry and moving so fast the world blurred.
Bella had learned from experience with him that it was best to just close her eyes when she was being moved at vampire speed. And really, if she couldn't see the world moving so fast and feel the wind whipping her hair, she'd hardly know she was moving. Vampires were so graceful and fluid in their movements that it just wasn't fair on any level.
When she felt them come to a stop, she opened her eyes.
Despite everything, the patently insane actions of the last day and a half and her usual impressive intellect, somehow she hadn't expected an actual throne room for the vampire royals.
It was indoors, lit by torchlight. There were windows set high in the walls, but even at high noon they'd only let in thin slivers of sunlight, no doubt artfully planned and designed to enhance the effect of the whole room. There were marble columns that they just don't make anymore supporting the ceiling. And 3 chairs that could not be mistaken for anything but thrones took pride of place in front of Bella.
The room was filled with vampires, their skin tones varying based on their ethnicity when human but all paler than albinos, looking like living marble statues. Most wore dark gray cloaks like the man who'd found her and brought her there. But the men seated on the thrones wore pure black cloaks.
Bella stared. She recognized them, on some level. She'd seen the painting in Carlisle's study, and the artist had done his best to capture the vampires' features with the hopelessly inadequate medium of oils and pigments on canvas. But seeing them in the flesh was another matter.
The one in the central throne and the one to his right were dark of hair, the one on the left a milky blonde. And they were somehow exactly the same and yet completely different from every other vampire in the room. They had the marble white skin of Caucasians made vampires, the dark circles under the red eyes, the flawless beauty that made photoshopped models seem plain. And yet, there was a… dryness to their skin, somehow more like granite. It was somehow papery, as if there were millions of minute cracks in the skin that her weak human eyes just couldn't see. If a normal vampire looked like a statue brought to life, then the Volturi kings seemed to have somehow been eroded by time and the elements. No less beautiful, but somehow more… fragile.
Bella could only wonder what could cause such a phenomenon. Was this the vampiric version of old age? Given enough centuries or even millennia (she had no idea how old the Volturi actually were, he hadn't given an exact figure), would the Cullens look like this?
Her escort and courier set her none too gently on her feet. She almost fell flat on her face. For some reason, the thought almost had her laughing so hard she'd fall down. Little Bella Swan, the nobody friendless freak from a nowhere town in the Pacific Northwest, face to face with the rulers of the dominant lifeform on the planet. And their first impression of her was that she tripped on her own feet before she'd said a word.
"Welcome, Bella, to Volturi Castle!" said the Volturi king in the central throne, looking at her with avid curiosity and addressing her as if she were a dear friend he hadn't met in a long time and was most anxious to reconnect.
Even in the room where there was a very real chance of her ending up food or just another corpse to clean up (did they bring in maids to get the bloodstains out of the marble flooring?), Bella was still a socially awkward klutz. "Um, thanks," Bella said with a blush. "Your home is… wow," she managed.
"Yes, I spent years working out just the perfect design for this room! Very awe-inspiring, isn't it?" The vampire chuckled, sounding rather proud of himself at her obvious speechlessness at the effect.
"Would it make a whit of difference to the outcome of this if I got on my knees and started kowtowing? 'Cause that seems like what you were going for." Bella never claimed to have much of a filter.
The vampire blinked, before bursting into loud laughter. "Feel free to start prostrating, but I never really intended to set myself up as a god. I left that to Amun and his coven."
Bella's lack of a social life and 4.0 GPA combined to make her pick up on the name. "Amun? As in Amun-Ra? Wait, was the whole ancient Egyptian pantheon really vampires?!"
"Got it in one! Yes, Amun was one of the major players when Marcus, Caius, and I set out to take control of the world from the shadows. Had to all but neuter him, killed more than half his coven before he agreed to bend the knee and stay out of the way," the ancient vampire said casually, as if deicide was an everyday occurrence. And maybe for him, it was.
"That makes you Aro, right?" Bella spoke up.
"Yes. And I'm quite curious as to how you ended up in our city blurting out our names for all and sundry to hear," Aro said. His tone wasn't judging, per se, but something in it made Bella feel like a misbehaving toddler.
"I didn't know how else to get your attention. I wasn't even sure I had the right place," Bella admitted.
"So many delightful questions you present, dear Bella. I can't wait to see the answers for myself." Aro stood, and it was at vampire speed so to her eyes it was like he was sitting one millisecond and upright the next. She half expected his joints to creak like a rusty hinge in a haunted house or his papery skin to tear from the movement. But no, he was as inhumanly poised and economic in his movements as any of the Cullens. He walked up to her at human speed for whatever reason. She supposed that when you had eternity, there was no need to rush.
Aro took her hand, without even the courtesy of asking her permission. But then, vampires were superior to humans in almost every way, and this was one of the triumvirate that ruled all vampires. A mere mortal like her had no right to contest the shadow king of the planet to his right to touch her, for whatever reason he deemed it necessary. His skin was as cold as she expected, as she barely allowed herself to remember from her time with him and his family. But it felt brittle instead of smooth. Whatever mysterious process had worked its way on his and the other kings' skin had robbed him of typical vampire smoothness.
Aro's face did a curious transition from eager anticipation to confusion to delighted amusement. "How… interesting. I see nothing. Nothing at all!"
The vampires around the room broke out in murmurs too quiet and fast for Bella to make out, but the tone of the noise was pure shock.
"I'm sorry, was something supposed to happen?" Bella asked, afraid she'd done something wrong.
"Ah, where are my manners? And you're but a human, you wouldn't know. But you see, Bella, certain immortals are gifted with… I suppose the best term in English would be 'psychic abilities'. I have tactile telepathy. Whenever I touch someone's skin, I can read every thought that ever passed through their mind, from birth to the present moment. Not once, in over 3000 years since I left humanity behind, have I been stymied or blocked. And yet, when I touch you, my power is blocked or rendered null. I don't believe you to be some unthinking vegetable, so I can only conclude you have some natural talent at blocking the gifts of immortals," Aro explained, still holding her hand as if he hoped her mental silence would end if he just tried hard enough.
"Not all of them," Bella said without thinking.
The room turned into a statuary.
"Ah, yes, I had rather forgotten what Afton told us for a moment. You have met an immortal before?" Aro asked. The fact he had to honestly ask instead of just knowing from his power seemed to at once annoy and humor him.
"A whole coven, actually," Bella said, blushing. Even with vampires, whom she'd felt more comfortable with than other humans from the start, she hated attention and the spotlight. "You know one of them actually, the leader. Carlisle Cullen. He lived with you for a few decades."
"Ah, dear Carlisle! What a curious soul! Hopelessly mad, but what delightful company! I was sad to see him go. And now I hear he's made a whole family! Do tell, dear Bella, do tell!" Aro said, looking delighted as a little boy at storytime.
Bella wondered what it said about the world that this guy was one of the people in charge of the whole thing from behind the scenes. But she acquiesced to his playful demand. "Well, I suppose I'll go chronologically. He turned… Edward," and Bella hated how just saying his name almost made her collapse in paroxysms of pain, "in 1918 when he was dying of Spanish Influenza. Then he met his mate, Esme. After that was Rosalie, and then Emmett. Jasper and Alice found them later. They all follow his diet, by the way. All 7 of them feed on animals only. I mean, they slip up every now and then, but for the most part they try to be 'vegetarians' as they call it."
"Fascinating, absolutely fascinating! And here I thought dear Carlisle was doomed to starve or lose what little sanity he retained due to his insistence to resist his natural prey!" Aro chuckled. "Isn't this amazing, brothers?"
"The madman has formed a cult. I find this troubling, not amazing, Aro," the blonde, Caius, hissed. "And based on the girl's comments, some of them are gifted. We should do well to check in on 'dear Carlisle' once this business is concluded."
The other king, Marcus, said nothing. Bella would almost say he looked bored, and his facial features certainly were. But something about his red eyes were focused so intently on her that she wondered if laser vision was his gift.
"Now, that's rather ungenerous of you, Caius. Carlisle failed to convince any immortals in Europe to follow his lifestyle choice, so he simply made his own! Perfectly understandable, hardly a reason to worry. Though I do think a check in might be warranted. But we're interrupting dear Bella! Dear, you mentioned your talent protects you from some gifts but not others. Can I assume that some of Carlisle's progeny are gifted?" Aro said, returning focus to Bella. Her hand was utterly numb from his arctic touch, but she had just enough self-preservation left in her bruised psyche not to try and take it back.
"Um, well, Jasper is an empath. He can sense and manipulate the emotions of everyone in his range, but I don't know how far that actually is or how potent it is. Alice is precognitive, she gets visions of the future. But it's subjective. She sees the course people are on while they're on it. If they change their minds or an outside force acts on them, the visions change. And… Edward is a telepath, like you. He hears from a distance, but only stream of consciousness. Alice could see me and Jasper could affect me, but he never heard a peep out of my head," Bella informed Aro. She vaguely felt like she was betraying the Cullens by giving the Volturi all their secrets. But she'd made her bed, and she'd lie in it. For all eternity, one way or the other.
"Truly? Such a unique set of powers! And I don't doubt the others are special in their own way. Describe the other 3," Aro ordered with all the casual authority of a royal to a peasant.
Bella wet her lips. "Rosalie is the most beautiful creature I've ever laid eyes on. Even among vampires, she's exceptional. Emmett looks like he can bench press a mountain as a warm up, he's made of muscle. And Esme is… so very kind. Everything you'd expect of a woman who could nail Carlisle down, and he probably qualifies for canonization or something. She made sure I felt like part of the family from the start."
"Ah, yes, that rather brings us to the crux of this whole gathering. They revealed the secret to you? And left you human?" Aro asked.
Bella had the uncomfortable realization that she may or may not be able to doom the Cullen family with her next words. "Not exactly. I don't think they technically broke your laws. I realized from my own observations and the help of some tribal legends of the local Native Americans that they weren't human. They didn't reveal the secret to me, I sort of read myself in. I let them know I knew they were vampires and they kinda just confirmed it."
"How curious," Aro mused. "Much less common in recent years, a human realizing and accepting that our kind exists without one of us deliberately confronting them with the truth. I've invested so much time into the ruse, the misinformation. I handfed Stoker the material for Dracula, you see. Deliberately planted the seeds to grow into the caricature of what you think of when you hear the word 'vampire'. Most humans aren't comfortable admitting they're not the rulers of the world as they like to believe."
"I never really… fit in with other humans. The months I could pretend I was part of Carlisle's family were the happiest of my life, even as this fragile little human they had to go to such lengths not to kill by accident. Maybe I was born wrong or something, but I don't feel scared when I'm with your kind. I fell… at home," Bella found herself saying. She'd normally never say something so private, but knowing that she was never going to leave this place, whether animate or otherwise, brought a deep sense of peace to her. So she found it easier to admit those intimate thoughts. And maybe part of her felt guilty or something that her weird mental silence had blocked the seemingly omniscient Aro.
"Extraordinary. But, Bella, do clarify something for me. What role did you serve in Carlisle's family? Were you, pardon if this insults you, their pet or something?" Aro asked, genuinely trying to work out why a coven of vampires would invite a human into their fold.
Bella closed her eyes, but that didn't stop the tears. Her voice was steady though, even if it trembled with the pain of her complete and utter devastation at his hands. "Edward… let me love him for a little while. Then there was an incident at my birthday party. I got a paper cut, Jasper lunged at me, Edward threw me into a pile of glass plates trying to protect me. And I guess he just got tired of having to look after me. He left, said he didn't want me anymore. The family left with him, so I guess they never really cared about me either."
"Ah, how tragic!" Aro said, sounding as if he would be moved to tears by her plight if he physically could cry. "To fly so near the sun, only to plunge back into the cruel, dull ocean of the human world. You remind me of Icarus, Bella, truly. Only, I'm still a bit confused. What exactly did you hope to accomplish by coming here and announcing yourself as you did?"
Bella opened her eyes, and something in them seemed to disturb Aro to the point he let go of her hand. "I tried to live without him, without them, to pretend I could function on Earth after having a taste of Heaven. But I can't. My father is ready to institutionalize me, we had a little fight and I realized… I'm done. One way or another, I'm ready for this human life to end. So I'm here to, well, basically beg on my knees for you to either snap my neck and drain me dry or consider letting me join your… guard, or whatever you call it."
When vampires were surprised, they went still. It was like the astonishment made them forget to pretend to be human and they turned into little more than life-size crystal figurines. The whole room was as silent and still as the grave.
Aro finally chuckled. "I see. Do you have any great preference which option we settle on?"
Bella shrugged. "Not really. I'm scared of what comes next, if anything. I think most rational beings are. But life is too hard, death must be easier. Though the part of me that remembers the fire of the venom coursing through me is utterly terrified, truly gibbering in the back of my brain at the thought of feeling that throughout my entire body for a full 72 hours. So I'm leaving it up to you."
"Venom was introduced to your system?! And yet you remain human? How is that even possible?!" Aro gaped. If she had her wits about, Bella might feel accomplished that she'd made a Volturi king's jaw drop from something she said. As it was, she just felt awkward.
Bella rolled up the sleeve of the thin sweater she was wearing, revealing the bite scar. "3 nomads crossed paths with the Cullens. James, their leader, was a tracker. Edward said the hunt was his obsession. He picked me as a target. He managed to lure me away and got very close to killing me, biting me in one last act of spite before the Cullens killed him. Edward sucked the venom out, like with a rattlesnake."
"How remarkable. Less than a century old, but able to control himself to that degree," Aro mused. "I'm now very curious to get my hands on this Edward myself."
Bella winced. "I get you kind of rule the world and everything, but you realize how creepy and wrong that sounded, right?"
"You dare!" Hissed a short woman standing behind Aro like a shadow.
"The audacity!" Caius gaped.
Aro, for his part, seemed more amused than anything. "Fair is fair, everyone. Taken in the wrong context, I did sound rather like an old pervert eager to corrupt the young virginal boy, didn't I? I can admit fault in myself. If not me, then who?"
There was silence and stillness again as the Volturi processed that one of their leaders was going to brush off a mere human admonishing him. Bella apparently hadn't lost her ability to stun vampires with her sheer force of awkwardness and lack of any real self-preservation instinct.
"If James met an untimely end, then what became of the other two? For really, they should have reported your presence with the Cullens to us immediately," Aro said.
Bella simply could not bring herself to care for bringing Laurent and Victoria into the crosshairs of the Volturi's sights. "Laurent is a coward, he didn't want to go up against a bigger, gifted coven and Carlisle let him scurry off to their 'cousins', another vegetarian coven in Alaska. For all I know, he's still there. Victoria, as far as I know, is in the wind, heartbroken at the loss of her mate. I'm not sure a being like James was capable of true reciprocal love, but then what do I know? Even sadistic serial killers must have at least one redeeming quality, right?"
"Oh my, a coven that shares Carlisle's appetites? Not even of his own creation? Will wonders never cease?" Aro giggled like a schoolboy. "Why, I'm so curious to meet them. I might even go to the trouble of going to them rather than demanding they come here. I'm not sure I've even left the castle this century yet. I'm due for some fresh air, as it were."
Bella cleared her throat, drawing the attention back to her as if it had ever left. "So, yeah. Basically, please kill me, with the token request that you at least have the decency to make it quick and painless, or induct me into the ranks. Gifts get stronger once you're turned, right? If I can keep out you and Edward as a human, imagine what I could do as a vampire."
"Oh, believe me I am. Only, if you're merely a mental mute, able to block out all gifts based on telepathy, that's rather limited, your immunity to my own gift notwithstanding. But perhaps an experiment? I do so love the scientific method! Let us see if you're immune to all our powers," Aro decided. He turned to the two shortest in the room. Now that Bella focused on them, Bella wasn't sure if they more resembled angels or demons. They were heartbreakingly beautiful, turned in that messy grey area just before you truly start to mature into an adult but too old to really call a child anymore. They were almost identical, but the slightly shorter one had just a little too much cherubic softness to her cheek to be anything but female. But her brother was a treasure to look at in his own right. And unless Bella was now hallucinating or all her instincts had gone off-kilter, the rest of the vampires seemed to regard them with deference, a reverence built on fear and respect almost as strong as that directed at the kings.
"Jane, you go first," Aro encouraged the girl, sounding like a father asking a beloved daughter to do a trick for a friend.
Jane, the girl, got a smile that had no place on a child's face. It was more sadistic than James had ever been by far. "This may hurt just a little," she said in a polite soprano before her eyes focused on Bella.
Bella braced herself for… what, she wasn't exactly sure. But any gift belonging to that demon with an angel's face must inflict a lot of damage. Only nothing happened. "Um, when will it start?" she asked.
Jane looked at her incredulously. "Pain!" she snarled, her eyes narrowing in almost manic focus. And yet, Bella continued to feel nothing. Well, apart from ready to fall asleep standing up. And distractingly hungry, now that she thought about it. When was the last time she actually remembered to eat something? She had a bad feeling it was an alarmingly long time ago.
Aro burst into delighted laughter. "Remarkable! Why, I do believe she's as immune to your gift as she is to mine, Jane! Alec, dear boy, why not you try?"
Jane stomped her foot and glared at Bella as if she'd embarrassed her for not doing whatever she was supposed to do when Jane glared at her like that. Bella shrugged apologetically, which just seemed to confuse Jane. Bella noticed that a light mist was spreading from her twin brother's hands, like a heat shimmer on a hot day. It moved slowly across the floor until it reached Bella. It moved to encompass her, and yet Bella didn't feel a thing. "Um, think it's another dud," she said, noticing that most of the vampires were outright staring at her like they couldn't decide if she was fascinating or terrifying. Whatever Jane and Alec were capable of, it was enough to have vampires their clear physical superiors cowering in fright.
"Enough, Alec, I think it's clear she's immune to you as well," Aro chuckled, looking like this was the most interesting thing to happen in the last decade. And for all Bella knew, it was. "Need I even ask, Demetri?"
A tall, thin vampire with Slavic features tilted his head. "Nothing. Worse than when Afton's trying extra hard. There's nothing there for me to latch onto."
"She confounds us all!" Aro said in sheer joy at Bella's apparent potential. "Chelsea? Renata? Why, I'm half-tempted to have someone fetch Corin from the tower, but I suspect that will merely confirm what we all know."
One vampire woman moved her hands like a puppeteer working strings in Bella's direction. She shook her head in bemusement. "How strange, I can't touch her at all. I can't feel her connections in the slightest."
Aro blurred back, until he was standing next to the woman who'd hissed at Bella's chastisement of Aro's words. "Dear Bella, please try to approach me," Aro asked pleasantly, though everyone in the room knew her choice was no factor in the outcome.
Bella walked up to Aro, succeeding in tripping into his arms. "Sorry," she blushed as she clutched to his arms as he supported most of her weight. "I'm extremely clumsy. If the venom doesn't fix that, I'm demanding a refund. And um, mind telling me what gifts I'm apparently blocking without conscious control?"
"Ah, yes, sorry. It's just, we're all so familiar with each other and so infamous in our world that it honestly didn't occur to me that you wouldn't know what everyone could do," Aro said, sounding profoundly apologetic for his lapse. "Jane and Alec are arguably the most deadly pair of weapons in the Volturi's arsenal. She can inflict pain surpassing even the venom on someone just by looking at them, and he can reduce a crowd to a state of total sensory deprivation. Demetri is, to our knowledge, the best tracker on the planet. Once he meets you, catches the 'tenor' of your thoughts, he can find you anywhere in the world, no matter how far apart he is from you, down to the inch if necessary. Chelsea is really the glue holding us all together and what pries our enemies apart sometimes before the battle even begins. She can create or destroy bonds of loyalty, though she can only encourage or exacerbate existing bonds. She can't create life-long subservience from a stranger nor break a bond of true love. Renata is a shield, as I suspect you are, though her's is more physical. If she projects a field, a normal person simply cannot cross it. They could launch themselves directly at her with the force of a bullet and still manage to miss. Which is why I employ her as my personal bodyguard."
"Who's Corin? And any other gifts you want me to cut my puny human teeth on before you decide whether to give me vampire fangs?" Bella asked Aro, finding her own two feet and stopping her use of a king of the planet as a support.
"Corin is… purely an indulgence, if I'm being honest with myself. Her gift is the ability to make someone feel a euphoric high. The drawback is that it creates a dependency, much like an opium addict desperate for their next dose. She often stays in the tower with my and Caius' wives, Sulpicia and Athenodora. They were so terribly bored before Corin came along, cooped up for their own safety and all," Aro said.
Bella's inner feminist raged against the idea that Aro and Caius literally kept their wives locked in a tower, doped up on a psychic drug dealer to while away the centuries under lock and key. But, a stark and pragmatic part of her pointed out, Aro was by his own admission over 3000 years old. And kind of one of the most powerful guys there ever was or ever would be. His views on women might be archaic, but Bella was in no position to critique them. Not if she wanted to keep her head, at any rate.
"As for other gifts, well, the only other one that comes to mind is my brother Marcus," Aro said, turning to the other dark-haired king. Throughout the test of powers on Bella, his expression hadn't changed. If you were merely to look at his face, you might think he was watching paint dry from the level of interest he was showing in the world around him. But those dark red eyes had not moved an inch off Bella since she'd entered the room. "His power is just as revealing as mine, in its own way. He can see the relationships between people, the tapestry of connections woven between every sapient being in the world. What do you see when you look at her, dear brother?"
Marcus opened his mouth and said, in a voice as dry as the Sahara and soft as the whisper of a breeze on a dry day, "I see potential."
Aro blinked, as if he honestly hadn't expected Marcus to actually answer. "Whatever do you mean?" Aro asked the other vampire.
Marcus merely offered his hand. Aro took it with a sure familiarity. They were still for a second that somehow stretched. Then Aro fucking beamed like he'd just gotten the best news of his life. "Oh! Oh yes! I see what you mean, Marcus! Such brimming potential!"
"What do you mean?" Bella asked, confused what Marcus could possibly see in her that was in any way interesting.
"You, dear Bella, have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, and even more to offer to us in turn if we nurture you along the proper path," Aro explained with the indulgent grin of a teacher giving his favorite lesson to a cherished student. "You have literally only two real connections binding you to the human world. Your mother, who in many ways is more the child of your relationship than the parent, who no longer needs you now that she has her new husband. And your father, who has already begun to lose hope he'll ever get you back, and you have already abandoned in your heart by coming here. I'm uncertain as to the exact circumstances of how you arrived in our city, but I'm sure it won't take too much effort on our part to help you utterly disappear, just another missing teen never to be seen or found again."
"And your relationships with our kind… my, that's a sight to see. If only we could share it with you so you could appreciate it yourself. Have no doubt, you were loved by the Cullens. Carlisle and Esme regarded you as a daughter, Alice and Emmett to this day see you as a sister. Jasper is wary for your own sake and Rosalie, to be blunt, is more concerned with your humanity as a concept than you as a person. And Edward… my, what a tangled mess," Aro sighed, as he relayed what Marcus' gift revealed to him to the whole room.
Bella was sure her arrhythmia was audible to the whole room, but she couldn't bring herself to care. "Can… can you tell me if he ever really loved me?" she begged, knowing she sounded like every sad, pathetic teenager dumped by her high school sweetheart ever, but she needed to know.
"'Love' is too healthy a word for the relationship you had with Edward," Aro said, blunt as an anvil dropped on her skull. "Granted, I can't see into your past nor have I read his mind personally, but what Marcus sees between you two is… frankly, it disturbs me, dear Bella."
Bella looked down. "Did he care for me at all, or was he just playing a sick game with my heart for months, stringing me along just so he could drop me like yesterday's garbage once I stopped entertaining him?" These were her darkest suspicions, the doubts that clawed at her sanity in the aftermath of her nightmares, when she was vulnerable and allowed herself to dwell on what they'd had.
"No, no, nothing quite so callous as that. Don't misinterpret my words, he certainly has a great deal of affection for you. Still does, in fact. He might even genuinely believe it's love. But it's not. Marcus and I know what real love looks like, and it is not what you two share, Bella," Aro explained to her, patient as if he could spend days spelling out every minute detail if it would help her understand.
"What do you see, exactly, between me and Edward?" Bella asked, forcing herself to say his name without flinching.
"I see a storybook romance, the beauty who found something worthwhile in the hideous beast. He saved your life, and you feel indebted to him for your continued survival. Perhaps, in your worst moments, you believe you owe every positive experience since that first rescue to his intervention and he is somehow responsible for all that is good in your life. You are besotted with him, find him fascinating, either willingly blind to his faults or far too forgiving of them. He could likely murder a man in front of you and you would find some excuse to explain away why it was necessary, how it didn't really make him 'evil' or 'bad' as you perceive the terms. There's the natural association with physical pleasure, given he's your first real relationship, and part of you seems to think you can't experience what he bestowed on you with anyone else ever again. You're in love with the idea of love, and you have deluded yourself into thinking the codependent trainwreck that was your relationship with Edward is your own version of the great love stories of the human world. That is what Marcus sees in your half of your relationship with Edward," Aro spelled out as casually as if he were discussing the weather, and not the deepest, darkest facets of Bella's emotions.
Bella usually blushed when she was mortified, but she distinctly felt herself turn pale. She even heard a ringing in her ears. "You… you can't read my mind. But Marcus can see all that, just from his gift of seeing relationships?" Bella asked, staring at Marcus in… well, she couldn't decide if it was awe or horror. Maybe a bit of both. He couldn't look inside her head, her head was private, but he was able to dissect her heart based entirely on whatever his gift presented to him when it surveyed the strings binding her heart to others'.
She heard herself ask, as if from a great distance, "What does he see in Edward's half of our relationship?"
"Frankly, he's seen weaker obsessions between pathological stalkers and their targets. Correct me if I'm wrong, but does your blood appeal to Edward more so than the other Cullens?" Aro asked, as if he already knew the answer.
Bella gulped. "He once told me I was his own personal brand of heroin. It took everything he had not to lunge at me when he first smelled me my first day of school when I moved to Forks."
"We have a name for the phenomenon, 'la tua cantante' which translates as 'singers'. Your blood 'sings' to him. For your typical vampire, you would be nothing more than an orgasmic meal he would savor the memory of for all eternity. But to a vegetarian like Edward, you are a demon summoned from his personal hell, a constant test of his willpower against his every natural instinct. No greater torment, but also no greater triumph. Edward cares for you as a person in a shallow, polite way, but his primary reason for investing so much time and energy in you was always down to what you represented: a chance to prove his strength. To stroke his ego. Look at him, the vampire who could resist his singer to the point he could hold her hand or kiss her on the lips with no danger to her! If he ever slipped and failed, then it would be no true loss, of course it was inevitable, you were his singer after all. But every day you survived in his presence was confirmation that he was good, that he was righteous, that he was better than us other vampires who are slaves to our evil, base instincts." Aro wasn't even being sarcastic, that was genuinely what Marcus saw from Edward's side of their bond.
And what's worse, a deep, dark part of Bella could believe that was all it ever was. A test. A trophy. She was to be the squishy human he could parade on his arm, show off to his parents and siblings and rub in their noses the fact that while they struggled with the diet, Edward had such complete control as to resist the greatest temptation a vampire could ever face.
"Having never met him in person, and not being able to see your memories of him, I'm merely speculating from this point. But would you agree that Edward has a rather dim view of immortals, vampirism in general?" Aro posed to Bella.
Bella found the words just tumbling out. It was as if this revelation, this clinical analysis of the relationship that had consumed her life to the point its loss had made her truly suicidal and ready to die, had unlocked some secret vault where part of her had always known the truth and just waited for her to find the key for herself. "He thinks you're all monsters. He puts Carlisle on a pedestal, he's the opposite of a fallen angel in his mind, the demon who earned a trip to heaven for good behavior. He indulged in the 'normal' diet for a few years, and he's never forgiven himself for that egregious lapse, that betrayal of all the perfect Carlisle, the second father who saved him from wasting away at the hands of plague, stood for. If he could press a button and reduce every vampire on Earth to ash, with the exception of Carlisle but not himself, he'd do it in a blink. His self-loathing, his martyr complex… goddammit, he's the immortal brooding teenager, forever trapped in an existential crisis he can never escape because for some reason he relishes in thinking the worst of himself."
Bella started giggling. It wasn't from humor, nothing about this whole thing was remotely funny. Her emotions, let loose from her tiredness and vulnerability in being once again the pitiful human in the presence of the earthbound gods that were vampires and this stunning moment of clarity, just needed a release. "Jesus H. Christ! Why did I ever chain myself to that ticking time bomb of neuroses?! Why did I convince myself he hung the stars in the sky and could walk on water? He used me as an emotional security blanket, proof he didn't have to be a monster if he just tried hard enough, and when things got tough he bolted! And why, why in the name of all that is good and pure do I still want to die just to escape the pain of him leaving me?!" She was practically screaming at the end.
"Control yourself. We are not here to listen to your childish wailing at the unfairness of life and love," Caius scoffed.
"Odd," Aro said, tilting his head and watching Bella as she panted and tried to breathe through her angry tears. "Granted, we just met, but I was expecting some more denial. Most humans don't like to face uncomfortable truths they've learned to ignore when someone shoves them in their face."
"You have no reason to lie to me," Bella gasped, honestly starting to feel lightheaded as her desperate flight here started to catch up with her. "Why go to any effort at all to make up some deception? To toy with the little human's emotions? If you were that petty, you wouldn't have risen this far or lasted this long. Marcus sees what he sees, and you gave it to me straight. To refuse to accept it is to pretend the world is not what it is, and I always pride myself on accepting what is over what I want it to be."
Marcus was still staring at her. Somehow, his intense gaze grounded her. Who was she to fall apart in front of these titans, these demigods as far above her as she was above an ant? She got her breathing under control and wiped her eyes. "So… what now?" Bella asked.
"Traditionally, when it comes to a decision which will affect the coven as a whole, my brothers and I put it to a vote. So, Marcus, Caius, shall we end Bella's misery tonight… or give her the gift of immortality?" Aro posed to the other two still sitting in their thrones.
"You never know where and when the next Jane or Alec will pop up. An extra layer of defense for ourselves and the guard will be useful indeed. I vote she is turned," Caius said, sounding utterly pragmatic. He probably saw nothing in Bella but yet another tool to hone and refine into an instrument to help solidify the Volturi's rule. Bella couldn't find it in herself to resent him for that. She should feel privileged to be considered useful by such a powerful man, shouldn't she? And wow, she'd really gone off the deep end to be thinking shit like that.
Aro grinned fondly down at Bella. "You will make for a very intriguing immortal. I'm absolutely positive, dear Bella. You have my vote for joining us."
"I vote she joins. But with a caveat: not tonight," Marcus said, in that voice like the sighing of a ghost you could so easily miss but found yourself listening that extra bit closer to make sure you caught it.
"Wait? Whyever should we?" Caius demanded.
Aro, however, was still holding Marcus' hand. "Oh, yes, I hadn't considered that. But Marcus has a point, dear Caius. Just look at her, she's skin and bones. She's wasted away without Edward in her life, broken beyond easy repair by his betrayal and abandonment of their 'love'. To turn her now would be to make her immortal, but a mere shadow of what she could have been. Why pluck the fruit before it is fully ripe? What difference does it make if she spends a few months on a steady diet and exercise regime to reach the peak of health? We are immortals, surely you can see the validity in some delayed gratification?"
Bella tilted her head. "So, um, wait. Back up a bit. It's a unanimous vote for me to be turned… but I have to get better first? You want me as strong as possible, so I have to reach my best fitness as a human before I'm turned?"
"Bella, dear girl, I'll be frank. If I saw you on the street, I'd assume you suffered from an eating disorder. Your clothes can't be a year old, and yet they hang off you. You've lost a lot of weight very quickly. We shall endeavor to restore you to where you were before that whole unpleasantness with Edward leaving you, and then surpass that to the limits of what your human body can reach. Only then will you be the best immortal, the best member of guard you could possibly be!" Aro told her. It was like he was already planning a training montage for her in the gym while the theme from Rocky played.
Bella frowned. "So, what… I'm going to live here? As a human? What about, you know, food and stuff?"
"This may surprise you, but we do employ human staff for the castle. Can you imagine me doing my own laundry? Oh, don't get me wrong, no one but me is allowed to wash my prized tapestries, but for the menial tasks we're content to rely on a small, trusted cadre of humans who value their pay and lives enough to keep their eyes down and mouths shut about who exactly they work for. You will not want for meals or hot water or any of the comforts of home you thought lost to you," Aro grinned at her.
As if on cue, Bella's stomach growled. She groaned in mortification. "Right. Well, in that case, can I get a hot shower, a soft bed, and a bowl of warm soup? Not necessarily in that order. I'm about this close to collapsing in a dead faint. I've been pretty much running on self-thanatos and gumption since the fight with Charlie at breakfast… two days ago? The time difference is really throwing me off."
"Felix," Aro snapped, like a master summoning a trained dog. A man even bigger than Emmett stood to attention. "Congratulations, my friend, you are now dear Bella's babysitter. You are to ensure none of the guard or visiting guests attempt any liberties with her, and most likely to protect her from her own two feet at times."
"As you will, Master," Felix bowed, but Bella didn't think he tried to hide his irritation. Then again, a man who for all she knew was older than the country they were standing in being forced to look after a girl just barely considered an adult was a bit demeaning. She opened her mouth, maybe to make a off-color joke that she'd not shove crayons up her nose as she remembered some kids she had to babysit had done. But apparently her engine chose that moment to run out of fuel, the accelerant of caffeine and adrenaline insufficient to coax out any more internal combustions. She fell towards the ground.
The last thing she saw was Marcus' bored yet intense gaze.