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To anyone stumbling across this story for the first time and wondering what in the world is going on, this story is not a stand-alone. This is a sequel to my previous story, Twilight Through the Looking Glass, a chapter by chapter re-imagining of Twilight in which everything is as close to the original as I could make it, except that it is in reverse. Here in my Looking Glass Universe, Edward is human, and Bella and Charlie are vampires. If you'd like to give this story a try, I would strongly encourage you to go back and read (or reread) that first story because although this story will also be very similar to Meyer's original, there are some very important changes that had to be made in order for everything to work the way I wanted it to in my universe, and without understanding those changes, you're going to have a lot of questions.

Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight, New Moon, or anything else of interest, really, except maybe a drawer full of some very crazy socks. Twilight, New Moon, and all characters, settings, etc. portrayed therein belong to Stephenie Meyer. Likewise, I do not own Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. They belong to . . . well, they became public domain a long time ago, so I guess technically no one owns them. The point is that none of this is mine, and I'm not saying any of it is, so please, no one sue me.

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New Moon Reflected

"These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume."

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI

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"Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
[Always] moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes."

from the untitled acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass,
and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

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PREFACE

I wasn't going to make it in time.

I was sure I'd dreamed this dream before, this nightmare where I was running out of time, where I couldn't run fast enough, only this time I could feel my ankle screaming as I ran along the cobblestones, pushing and shoving my way through the crowd where the people were too densely packed for me to get through.

That pain was how I knew this nightmare was real.

Alice had said we might all die today. Maybe if the unforgiving sun hadn't been so vicious now, seconds away from the height of noon, she might have been able to save us all, but she was trapped in the shadows. It was up to me. And I couldn't run fast enough.

Death was lurking everywhere. It was watching from the darkened windows above, hiding in unseen crevices, and waiting to pounce, and some dark, desperate part of me was almost glad of it, glad that if I failed I would likely die, because if I failed today, I could not live in a world where she did not exist.

Up above, the merciless sun shone down from its highest point, and the clock began to toll the hour.

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1. BIRTHDAY
(PARTY)

The sun was shining down brightly from a cloudless blue sky. That was my first indication that this had to be a dream. My second was that I had no idea where I was or how I had gotten here.

I turned in a circle, searching for something, anything that looked familiar, but there was nothing I could recognize. I was in a garden—that much I could see—a garden surrounded by high hedge walls. There were flowers everywhere, blossoms of every shape and color, all bursting forth in full bloom. An ornate fountain at least ten feet across gurgled and bubbled against a backdrop of birdsong. There were beautiful wrought iron benches and marble statues of cherubs spaced here and there along the path, yet nothing was familiar. Nothing triggered my memory until I heard her bell-like laughter. Her voice called out to me.

"Edward!"

I turned in a circle again, panicked this time, as I searched for the source of that beautiful voice.

The voice belonged to Bella, my girlfriend, although calling her simply 'my girlfriend' never felt quite right. She was so much more than that. She was the angel of my dreams. The light in every dark day. But Bella had a secret; Bella wasn't just an ordinary teenage girl—she was a vampire. That was why she and her family lived here in the rainy little town of Forks, Washington, and while sunshine didn't affect Bella the way cheesy horror flicks seemed to expect it to, it was impossible to see her in sunlight and not realize that Bella was not human. I took one last uneasy glance around the garden, growing more nervous when my search came up empty. Where was she?

"Bella?" I called back. "Where are you?" She wasn't within the high green walls, which meant she had to be outside, but was there someone out there who might see her in the sunlight, who might realize that she was something . . . other? I jogged toward the gap in the hedges—the entrance to the garden, I had assumed—but found only another high green hedge beyond, creating a passageway outside the entrance that ran in both directions.

"Come find me!" she called back. Her voice had come from the left. I followed it down the verdant corridor and around a corner, then took another turn to the right when that passage ended. The green walls continued on either side, forcing me to follow their twisted journey until I came to another break. I realized then that I was in a maze, a labyrinth like the ones sometimes placed on the grounds of stately old manor houses to amuse and befuddle visitors. I studied the pathway as it continued on ahead, but there was another opening in the hedge, another passage leading off to the right. Which way had she gone?

"Bella?" I called again. Up ahead, where the hedges bent around a corner, I saw a flash of Bella's elbow, the sunlight reflecting off her skin as if she were covered in diamonds. I followed.

"Where are you going, Bella?" I heard the music of her laughter as I turned the corner, and up in the distance I saw her standing, waiting for me, a beautiful smile teasing her lips. For one heartbeat I took in the sunlight sparkling on her skin, the red highlights it pulled out in her mahogany hair, and then she disappeared through another opening in the hedges.

What was this strange game Bella was playing? Was she leading me toward the exit, or were we going farther into the twisted hedgerows?

"We don't have forever, Edward," I heard her call. The amusement was gone from her voice now. She was starting to sound impatient.

I turned another corner to find myself at one final juncture. The hedge walls had ended, and before me stood two iron gates, each identical to the other, but there was no indication of which way Bella had gone.

"Bella?" I called one last time, "where are you?"

"You have to choose, Edward," I heard her say, but she didn't seem to be behind either door. Her sad, soft voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, or maybe it was just inside my head. "You have to decide."

. . . . .

I awoke with a start only seconds before the clock radio on my nightstand came to life. An over-enthusiastic DJ cheerfully announced a sale at Fred's Furniture Emporium as I rubbed my eyes and stumbled out of bed toward the bathroom. Outside my bedroom window, the sky was gray and overcast. It was going to be a beautiful day.

After a quick shower, I dressed and headed downstairs for breakfast. A bowl of cereal, some toast, and a few words to my mother, who was halfway through a series of night shifts at the hospital, and I was out the door and on my way.

In retrospect, the dream wasn't difficult to interpret. I had a decision coming, a decision that would easily be the biggest I would ever make, and that was an understatement. Bella was the love of my life, but just how long that life would last or what form it would take was still undecided.

I was eighteen years old. My birthday had passed in June, a happy celebration with Bella and her family, who had gone a bit overboard because none of them had had a real birthday since the 1930s. I was aging every day, getting older every minute, but Bella was not, and regardless of today's date, Bella was frozen in time, forever stuck at seventeen. She hadn't aged in over seventy years.

We had avoided the subject this past summer—for the most part, at least. It had been the happiest—and the rainiest—summer of my life, and it had been easy to forget about growing older and making important decisions. Who wanted to think about the uncertainties of tomorrow when today was so perfect? But it was always there, in the back of my mind, the knowledge that I would have to decide, and today was a reminder that the day was creeping closer and closer.

The decision at hand was my mortality. Being in love with Bella, there were two possibilities. I could live out my life—my short, human life—and then die, parting us forever and leaving her behind alone, or I could find some way to join her in her forever, give up my mortality, and become what she was.

The first option was the easier of the two—just do nothing, and let nature take its course. I could grow old and die an old man while Bella stayed forever young. It was the one that Bella preferred, but it wasn't the one that pulled at me as I lay in bed at night, wide awake. Somehow, the first option felt too much like settling.

The second option was the harder of the two. While I only knew the basics of becoming a vampire—and it really didn't sound pleasant—it was hard not to think of the wonderful summer that had just gone by and realize that I could spend every day of eternity that way. All I had to do was give up everything else—my human life, my family, my humanity—because once it was done, there would be no going back.

Bella was adamantly opposed to the second option. For reasons I couldn't clearly understand, she thought of herself as a monster, even though she and her family had decided not to live as their kind usually did and opted to live on animal blood, instead of the blood of humans. For Bella, the first option was the only option she could bear to imagine, and so I found myself caught between the two, never able to decide in which direction my future would lie.

It was the two doors at the end of the labyrinth in my dream, and I didn't know which one to choose.

As I pulled into a spot in the parking lot of Forks High School, it didn't take long for my eyes to settle on a red '53 Chevy truck in perfect condition—or, more specifically, on the beautiful girl standing beside it. Bella was waiting for me, a book tucked against her chest. Her cousin, Alice, was waiting at her side.

Bella and Alice weren't cousins, of course. That was only a cover story. Supposedly Bella and her father had moved here last January to live with the rest of her family—her uncle, Dr. Carlisle Cullen, his wife, Esme, and their four adopted teenagers, three of whom had graduated last year. In reality, they were all vampires, vampires passing as humans in a world that knew nothing of their existence. Knowing what I knew now, it was easy to recognize the signs. The paleness of their skin, the purple bruise-like shadows beneath their gold-tinted eyes, and their nearly impossible beauty marked them for what they were.

I climbed out of my car, swinging my backpack onto my shoulders as I made my way toward her. I was slower than most people, granted. The broken right leg I had suffered earlier in the spring had healed, but the multiple breaks to my left ankle that had occurred years before would never heal perfectly. Bella didn't care about my imperfect ankle, though. The smile on her face was blinding.

Some poet, somewhere, would probably compare that smile to the sun, but they would be wrong. Her smile wasn't the sun; it was more like the moon, shining full and bright on a clear night, so luminous that it could cast shadows in the dark, even at midnight. And the stars in her eyes outshone every star in the heavens. Reaching her side, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against me.

Bella was firm and strong, more like an indestructible statue than a person. She could have stopped a speeding car without getting a single perfect hair out of place, so my weak, gentle tug wasn't enough to move her, but, as always, she gave, leaning toward me with such a perfectly fluid motion that any observer would have thought I'd pulled her into my arms. I reached up to curl a lock of her hair around my finger and gazed down into her beautiful eyes. I loved her hair. So silky and smooth, it was the only thing about her that felt soft.

"Happy birthday," I whispered as I pressed my lips against her forehead. Bella sighed and averted her caramel eyes toward the pavement.

When we had first met, I had found it difficult to "read" Bella. Her gestures, her facial expressions, even the look in her eyes had been hard to interpret. I'd gotten better at it over the summer, and that was how I had finally figured out that Bella hated to be the center of attention. At first, I had thought it was merely the result of her being what she was—a vampire pretending to be human in a world that couldn't know the truth. She and her family avoided unnecessary attention whenever possible. It was always dangerous to have someone look at her for just a little too long, to risk someone noticing something, anything that wasn't quite right about her or her family. There was always the chance, however small, that someone would discover their secret, as I had, but this was different. Over our long, perfect summer, I had realized that Bella was . . . well . . . shy, although I couldn't decide now whether the sigh that escaped from between her lips was from embarrassment, resignation, or a combination of the two. Sometimes I still found it difficult to understand just what she was thinking.

"It doesn't really count, you know," she said quietly, her eyes still averted. I found myself wondering if, back when she had still been human, she'd had a tendency to blush. I smiled a little at the thought.

"You were born on September the thirteenth. Today is September the thirteenth."

Bella frowned and glanced back up from the pavement.

"Yes, but I'm not getting any older."

"Your driver's license says you're eighteen today."

"I'm ninety five, Edward," she reminded me.

"But you don't drive like any ninety five year old lady I know," I teased.

It was one of the tendencies of a vampire, I'd learned. With their heightened senses and reflexes, they liked to drive fast—way faster, usually, than the posted speed limit.

"My parents wanted me to tell you, 'Happy Birthday,' too."

"Both of them?" Bella asked, looking skeptical. She and my mother were quite fond of each other, but my father, on the other hand, had somewhat mixed feelings about Bella. He still blamed her for my 'rebellious streak' the previous spring, when he had decided, without a word to me or my mother, that I would spend the summer working an internship at his law firm and then move to Phoenix to live with him my senior year. I had refused—something I'd rarely had the courage to do before—and he had blamed my new girlfriend. Of course, his disapproval of Bella had softened somewhat after he'd done some digging into her family and discovered their net worth. It had earned her a bit of acceptance, if not his full forgiveness.

"Even my father." I shrugged. It had been a short e-mail. Knowing him, he'd probably programmed it into his calendar months ago.

"Everything still on for tonight?" I asked Alice, who had been watching our exchange with a bemused expression.

"All ready to go," she announced, nearly bouncing on her toes. Alice was the most exuberant of Bella's cousins and the first member of her family to accept me at the beginning of our unusual relationship. Most of Bella's family had gotten used to me by now, although there were a couple of holdouts.

"I don't know why you're doing this," Bella muttered. "I'm not really getting any older."

"One good party deserves another," I answered, smiling over at Alice, my co-conspirator. She smiled back. "You've never had a party for your eighteenth birthday, have you?"

"That's because I've never turned eighteen, Edward." Bella answered.

"You had a party for me."

"That was different. You really were turning eighteen."

It was my turn to sigh. I reached out to take Bella's hand, as cold and as hard as marble, and started to walk toward the scattering of buildings that made up Forks High School.

"Don't you have to work tonight?" she asked.

Since the beginning of the summer, I had worked three days a week for my friend Mike's parents at Newton's Olympic Outfitters.

"No, I switched shifts with Mrs. Newton. She said to tell you 'Happy Birthday,' by the way."

"Great." Bella sounded less than enthusiastic.

"So, when should we be there?" I asked Alice. She frowned at Bella, her eyes slightly out of focus as she looked at something no one else could see. It was an expression that I'd come to know, one she used when she was looking into the future—an ability that was uniquely hers.

"Well, I was going to say after school, but I can see that Bella has other plans, and that you won't be able to say 'no.' How about seven?"

It was frustrating when she did that. What was she talking about?

"Okay, seven sounds good."

"Great! I'll see you at lunch." Alice smiled, then skipped off toward her first class. I turned back to Bella.

"So, what are these other plans?" I asked.

"I just thought we could watch a movie," she answered casually.

"A movie?"

"Romeo and Juliet," she explained. "I brought it with me." She patted her bag.

"You're just trying to avoid the party, aren't you?" I asked, grinning down at her. It was obviously the case, but Bella just glanced up at me though her lashes.

"Please?" she asked. "It is my birthday, after all."

I sighed. She knew I couldn't refuse her anything.

"Okay." She smiled up at me, and I couldn't help but smile back. Alice had been right. How could I ever say 'no' to her?

"Come on, we're going to be late." She gave my hand a careful squeeze, pulling me gently toward our next class.

It was autumn of our senior year, and Bella and I had been together for six months. There had been a time, early in the spring, when our romance had been the talk of this little school, but we were old news now. No one even glanced at us as we walked from class to class. And we walked together, most of the time. Somehow, and I still didn't know how, Bella had managed to arrange our schedules so that we had almost every class together.

We ate lunch together as well, huddled with Alice at one end of a lunch table, while my human friends—Mike, Angela, Ben, Jessica, Eric, Conner, and Tyler—sat at the other. I was the only one of the three of us that ate, of course, but Bella and Alice were good at pretending to eat, so no one ever noticed that tiny detail. On sunny days, when Bella and Alice skipped school, I slid down the table to sit with the others, though Lauren Mallory, who also sat with them, usually glared at me for most of the lunch period. She'd had a crush on me earlier in the year, but my rejection of her invitation to a school dance had stung her pride, and I was still not forgiven. Knowing Lauren, I probably never would be.

Afternoon classes passed quickly as Bella and I walked hand in hand from one building to another, and when school ended, she followed me to the parking lot. As we passed Bella's truck, Alice rolled down the driver's side window. "See you at seven!" she called before backing out and heading toward the parking lot exit.

I opened the door of my silver Volvo for Bella, then slowly made my way around to the driver's side.

"So, Romeo and Juliet, huh?" I asked when we had finally made it through the line and pulled out onto the road.

"Yes, the 1968 version. I have to agree with Mr. Berty. It is the best."

"Which version is that?" My mother and Bella shared a love of the classics. I figured I'd seen bits and pieces of a lot of Romeo and Juliet adaptations over the years.

"Franco Zeffirelli. Leonard Whiting. Olivia Hussey. Even a little bit of Laurence Olivier."

I still had no idea which one that was.

"Just how many times have you seen it?" I asked, stopping at a stop sign.

"A few," she answered evasively. "But you haven't seen it, have you?" I shook my head. I didn't know if I had or not.

"What is it about Romeo and Juliet, anyway?" I wondered aloud as I accelerated through the empty intersection.

"It's the ultimate love story, isn't it?"

"I guess, but it's pretty depressing. Everyone dies."

Bella frowned. "But they fell in love, even with the odds stacked against them. They fumbled their way through it and made a lot of mistakes, but in the end, even death couldn't keep them apart. It's so tragic and so beautiful." I wasn't quite sure I entirely agreed with her assessment. She shot a speculative glance across the car in my direction. "Surely you can identify with a pair of star-crossed lovers from two different worlds fighting against all odds to be together?"

"Are you saying we're Romeo and Juliet?" I considered this as I made the last turn toward my house. "Well, maybe there are some parallels," I conceded after a moment, "but I don't know how I feel about being compared to Romeo."

"You don't like being the hero of a love story?"

"It's not that. It's just that Romeo is . . . problematic."

"Problematic?" Bella asked as I parked in the brick driveway in front of my house.

"Well, to start with, at the beginning he's in love with Rosaline. That's why he went to the party in the first place, to see her. Then he sees Juliet, and it's like Rosaline never existed. It's not a very good advertisement for the constancy of his affections, is it? How do we know he wouldn't have met someone else the very next week, fallen in love with her, and forgotten all about poor Juliet?"

"But what if the whole purpose behind him loving Rosaline was so that we would know there might have been someone else in a world where he'd never met Juliet? Maybe it just serves to show that what was between them was so much more powerful than anything else that could ever have existed."

"Well, then he probably shouldn't have killed Tybalt and gotten himself exiled to Mantua . . ."

The glare Bella gave me out of the corner of her eye as we made our way up the front walk made it clear that I was ruining this for her.

"Okay, okay, but still, just when you think they have a chance, it all goes wrong at the end. Just when you think they might make it, it all goes sideways because of one lost message."

"Maybe," Bella mused, "Juliet shouldn't have trusted her fate to other people, no matter how well-meaning. Maybe she should have just ignored Friar Laurence and his potion, packed her suitcase, and gone to Romeo in Mantua." I chuckled and dropped a quick kiss on her cheek.

"And that," I said as I unlocked the front door, "is why Juliet's got nothing on you."

My mother had already left for work, but there was a small box wrapped in pale blue paper and a note in the kitchen telling Bella to have a "Happy Birthday!" Bella left the present on the table, insisting that she'd open it later.

I put in the movie, handing the remote to Bella as we settled in on the living room sofa. She fast forwarded through the opening credits, not resisting as I pulled her back against me. Maybe she wasn't quite as warm or as soft as a human girl would have been, but she still fit perfectly into my arms. Frowning thoughtfully, Bella reached over to pull an old afghan off the back of the couch and tucked it between us, trying to create a warmer barrier between my human body and her cold, hard skin.

We were mostly silent as the movie played. I couldn't stop myself from whispering some of Romeo's lines to Juliet into Bella's ear—the famous ones that I knew, at least. She was unusually quiet as the movie ended. I wondered if she would have been crying if she'd been able to. I pulled her closer against me. Bella sighed.

"It still gets me, every time," she whispered, "maybe more so now. Juliet waking up, finding Romeo dead. I understand that feeling. And all the little things along the way that had to go wrong in just the perfect way so that it ended so tragically."

I dropped a kiss onto the shell of her ear. "What do you mean," I asked her, "when you say you understand that feeling?"

"Nothing," Bella murmured as she pulled herself away and rose to eject the movie.

"Bella?" Sitting up, I watched as she slid the movie back into its case and returned it to her bag. She frowned at me for a moment, then sat down on the sofa again.

"I didn't know what we would find when we got to you in Phoenix," she said in a quiet voice. "I didn't know if you'd be alive, or if I'd be too late, and you'd be gone." She hesitated for a beat. "It was something I had to think about."

For a moment, it all came back to me—the abandoned restaurant filled with decay and broken childhood fantasies. My father tied to a chair in the shadows—my father who was not my father. The sound of James's voice, his amused chuckle as I realized that he had tricked me. But James hadn't known that Bella and her family would know where I would be, that Alice had seen me there in that room. They had found me, had ended James and Véronique, but it had been close. I still had the souvenir of that encounter on my right arm—a crescent shaped scar that always felt cold to the touch—to prove just how close it had been.

"What did you have to think about?" I asked, holding back a shudder at the memory of James's sadistic smile.

"What I would do if we were too late," she answered, her voice still low, "if you had died."

I stared at her, trying to fill in the words that she wasn't saying. Understanding dawned, and with it, the blood turned to ice in my veins.

"It's not so easy to accomplish on your own," she continued gently. "Carlisle tried, you remember, but he wasn't successful. I would have needed . . . help."

I shuddered, breaking her away from her thoughts, and she turned to see the horrified expression on my face. It made me feel sick, the thought of what Bella might have tried to do if Phoenix had turned out differently. And then came another thought—one just as chilling. If I chose option number one, if I lived the long, happy life that Bella wanted me to live, dying an old man asleep in my bed, what would Bella do then?

"Don't say that, Bella. Please don't say that. Don't even think it."

Bella reached up to lay her hand against my cheek.

"I don't have to. You're here, and you're safe, and I am grateful every moment for that." She smiled and sighed softly. "And I will suffer through one hundred birthday parties if you stay that way. "

"Promise me," I whispered, trying not to think about what might have been. "Promise me that if something ever happens to me, you aren't going to do anything rash."

"I promise," she said. Then she stood and pulled me up from the sofa. "You need to eat if we're going to be there by seven."

I ate a dinner of leftover pizza while staring across the table at Bella. Her melancholy mood was gone, and I was trying to remind myself that everything was okay. Bella was safe, I was safe, and there were no murderous vampires waiting to change either of those facts. Tonight was about Bella, about giving her a human experience she had never had, and I shouldn't darken it by focusing on horrible things that hadn't happened.

I drove north through Forks in the growing darkness, Bella beside me in the passenger's seat. My mother's present, still wrapped, sat in her lap.

"How did you get my family to agree to this party, anyway?" Bella asked. "Birthdays are usually more of an inside joke for us, rather than something to celebrate. I'm not really getting any older."

"That's exactly why we're celebrating," I explained, glancing across the front seat at her. She frowned, her perfect eyebrows lowering slightly.

"That makes no sense."

"You say that you and your family sometimes miss being human, that you'd go back to being human if you could."

Bella nodded.

"Only you can't. That's why we did prom . . . and now this. I'm trying to give you all of the human experiences you couldn't have."

Bella watched me carefully from her side of the car. The light was fading rapidly, but I could see that her eyes had gone soft.

"Now I can't be mad at you for doing this," she said gently.

"All part of the plan." I smiled over at her.

"Did you buy me a present?" she asked a few moments later as we turned down the nearly obscured driveway that led to Bella's and her family's homes. Even though I'd been coming here for months now, it was still difficult to find the turnoff in the growing darkness.

"I did," I said. "Alice has it at the house." We were going to the big white house in the woods where Bella's aunt, uncle, and cousins lived. Bella and her father didn't technically live there—they had another house, a gorgeous log chalet that looked out over the Sol Duc River—but most of their time was spent with the rest of the family and not in their own home. Bella frowned.

"I told you that you shouldn't spend any money."

"I didn't. Well, not much, anyway. You'll like it. Alice promised."

I pulled to a stop and parked by the steps that led up to the wrap-around porch. Every light seemed to be on, shining out into the front yard and brightening the shadows that gathered beneath the six towering cedars. A row of Japanese lanterns hung along the porch, and bowls of pink roses decorated the steps up to the front doors.

Bella's family was waiting just inside. A chorus of "Happy birthday!" greeted us as we stepped into the room. I had wondered just how far Alice would go with the decorations, and I realized now that I should have known. Alice never did anything halfway.

There were more roses here than I had seen outside; crystal bowls filled with them seemed to be everywhere. Pink candles were tucked into every crevice, and beside the grand piano, on a table draped with a white cloth, sat a stack of glass plates and an absurdly large pink birthday cake—a cake made even more ridiculous by the fact that I was the only person here who could eat it. I glanced in Alice's direction and shook my head in amazement. She simply smiled.

In front of us, closest to the door, stood Bella's aunt and uncle. Esme reached out to hug us both, while Carlisle chucked Bella under the chin affectionately. He reached over to pat me on the back. "This is very thoughtful of you, Edward," he said softly.

"Not too weird, then?" I asked.

"No, not at all," he assured me.

I was, perhaps, more comfortable around Bella's uncle than I was around most of the other members of her family. Carlisle's gentle manner, perfected by years of working with sick humans in hospitals, was flawless, but it was the past summer that had brought us closer. I was a teenage boy in a cast, and although my mother was a nurse well-accustomed to helping people in just such situations, no teenager wants his mother to help him in the shower. Carlisle had been a lifesaver, appearing to help whenever he hadn't been on shift at the hospital, and Bella and Alice had often tagged along, keeping my mother amused downstairs.

Next in line was Bella's father, the chief of police in our quiet little town. Chief Swan was still 'Chief Swan' to me—I had never been invited to call him by his first name, though the rest of Bella's family had long since done so. He was never hostile, just guarded and cautious, not quite ready to trust me with his adopted daughter's heart.

"Happy birthday, Bells," he whispered as he swept Bella into a hug.

If I had to be honest, this was all Chief Swan's idea, or at least he was the inspiration for it. He, alone, was a link to Bella's human life. Although already a vampire, he had been a lodger at the boarding house that Bella and her mother had run in a sleepy little town in Pennsylvania on the eve of the Great Depression. He had saved her after a fire had destroyed the boarding house, rushing her to Carlisle before she died, and asking him to save her in the only way that she could still be saved. He said it was because he had hated to see her working so hard at the boarding house, always baking and scrubbing and washing when she should have been out living a life. He had saved her, he once told me, because it had seemed a shame to let her die when she'd never really had a chance to live. That was why I was doing this now, trying to give Bella a glimmer of the life she'd never been able to have.

As I followed Bella past her father, he reached out and patted me on the shoulder.

"Edward," he acknowledged.

"Sir," I responded respectfully. Bella's father was usually a man of few words. It was one of the longest conversations we'd had in weeks.

Farther down the line were hugs from Alice and Jasper, though Jasper kept his distance from me. It wasn't personal, I knew. Jasper liked me—he was just newer to the Cullens' 'vegetarian' lifestyle than the others, and sometimes it was much more difficult for him. He kept his distance out of caution.

At the end of the line was an unexpected surprise. I turned just in time to see Bella's imposing cousin, Emmett, lift her up off her feet in a massive bear hug before he set her back down and pushed her down the line toward Rosalie.

"Hey, Edward." Emmett clapped me on the back. It was a gentle pat, at least for him. If he had been using more than just a minuscule fraction of his strength, that pat probably would have sent me flying across the room and through a wall.

"What are you doing back?" I asked, surprised to see him. "Weren't you and Rosalie in Africa?" The cover story, of course, was that they were attending Dartmouth, but I knew better. Emmett had told me all about their plans in the early part of the summer, before they'd left, as he'd helped me in the shower on one of the days when Carlisle had been unable to get away from the hospital.

"And miss the chance to tease Bella?" He laughed. "No way I'd pass that up."

From her place at the end of the line, Rosalie nodded toward me, but the look in her eyes was less than inviting. Rosalie was easily one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, but she was not very fond of me, and I didn't want to push my luck. I nodded back politely and excused myself to follow Alice toward the cake.

What came next was a subdued but happy celebration. There were presents, of course, although the Cullens didn't usually celebrate birthdays. It was, as Bella had said, hard to be excited about a day that didn't really mean much anymore. There were various books and trinkets, and even a carved African figurine from Emmett and Rosalie. (Emmett claimed that he had considered buying her another car but had decided against it since she hardly ever used the last one he'd bought her.) From Bella's father there was a round golden locket engraved with a swirling pattern of ivy, and as he fastened it behind her neck, I heard him awkwardly explain that Esme had helped him to pick it out. When Bella stood up on her tip-toes to kiss him on the cheek, he ducked his head sheepishly.

My mother's gift came next. She had framed two of the pictures she'd taken of us the night of prom in a hinged double frame. The photo on the right was the formal one; we were both facing the camera, Bella standing in front of me with my arms wrapped around her from behind. The picture on the left, however, was more of a candid shot. It was one of Bella's—and my mother's—favorites. Bella had been trying to smile at the camera, but my attention had been firmly fixed on the beauty at my side. I had said something to tease her, desperate to see those beautiful golden eyes, and she had turned her face up to mine just as my mother had snapped the picture. Bella smiled softly now as she ran her fingertip over the image of me staring down at her in wonder.

She'd saved mine for last, which mostly just put the pressure on. I wasn't lying. I hadn't spent much, but Bella seemed pleased with the CD I'd recorded of myself playing the piano. Her eyes went soft when she realized I had included her lullaby.

"Thank you," she whispered, wrapping her arms around me and kissing me gently.

When Bella had finished opening her presents, Alice insisted that I have a piece of cake. After all, she reasoned, why let it all go to waste? I decided not to point out that most of it would still go to waste because I couldn't possibly eat the entire thing and dutifully accepted a corner piece covered in pink icing. I was standing beside the cake table, watching Bella with her family, when Emmett wandered over to the opposite side of the piano and leaned across the glossy surface toward me.

"You know, Edward, you may want to pretend that she's getting older, but she's not," he said quietly. I was in the middle of chewing a bite of cake, so I couldn't respond. "And honestly, it doesn't matter whether she's seventeen or eighteen," he continued with mock solemnity, but then I saw a spark of amusement as his eyes lit up. He leaned even farther over the piano and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. "The legal age of consent in Washington State is only sixteen."

I snorted, clamping my mouth shut as I fought not to spit a mouthful of bright pink icing onto one of Esme's beautiful white carpets, and in so doing, I discovered the hard way that my lip, caught halfway into a grin at Emmett's ridiculous remark, was trapped between my teeth. I sucked in a breath and swallowed quickly, reaching up with my finger to dab at my wounded lip. It came away with a tiny drop of blood.

And that was when everything fell apart.

I was still staring down at my finger, barely registering what had just happened, when Bella let out a cry and threw herself toward me. She was already facing the rest of the room when she came to a stop, her urgent leap knocking me off my feet and back against the table. There was a horrible crashing noise as the table collapsed beneath me. Cake and presents and decorations were thrown to the floor, along with the stack of plates. Something sharp stabbed into my arm as I landed, but my eyes weren't focused behind me. They were looking up, glued to the place on the other side of the room where Jasper was growling, snarling in frustration as he tried to fight his way toward me. Something was holding him back, some invisible force that kept him from coming any closer.

Bella took a step forward, trying to shield me from the rest of the room. Angry growls rose in her throat, a threat to anyone who tried to come any closer.

Jasper's snarls were wild, feral as he clawed against the invisible hands that held him in place.

My eyes shifted toward Bella's father. He stood by the kitchen door, his gaze fixed on Jasper. I glanced down at my arm, at the stabbing sensation that had clarified into a line of pain that was running down toward my wrist. Blood was oozing out of a gash that had opened in my arm, and several pieces of glass, some darkened with blood, lay on the wooden floor.

Pulling my eyes away, I looked back up to a room frozen into perfect stillness. No one moved, save Jasper, who continued to struggle against Chief Swan's invisible grip. I could hear his frustrated snarls and Bella's low, warning growl, and as I looked around the room, I could suddenly see how many eyes were focused on me, on the blood dripping out of my arm and onto Esme's blood-stained floor.

And I could see the insatiable hunger in each and every one of them.