I don't own any characters. They belong to Stephenie Meyer.
It was now New Year's Eve and I couldn't be more excited. 1943 will start in just 24 hours, maybe this will be the year that Mary and I will reunite again, wouldn't this be the greatest present? However, I had to put my thoughts about the future and my sister aside, as Kate was about to put her gift to use on Jasper. We have been training for the past hour, and still, there was no progress. I could feel my shield inside me now, but when it came to expanding it, the stupid thing didn't want to come out. Eleazar thought that it might be because neither I nor my loved ones were in danger, so I wasn't motivated enough, thus the plan to use my brother as a practice bag emerged. I was highly against anyone hurting Jazz, but he seemed eager to help me.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked again.
"I am the only family member that you have right now, so it's my duty." He replied.
"Okay, give me a few seconds to concentrate, and do it when you see me nod." I was now talking to Kate.
I visualized my shield again, tried to imagine it as a solid bubble wrapped around my head. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked at Jasper. My brother's hand was mere inches away from the blond vampire. In a few seconds, he would be in pain, so I concentrated and started dragging my bubble away from me. I nodded my head when I saw it reaching Jasper. Kate pressed her fingers to Jasper's arm and I heard a scream coming out of his mouth. My shield instantly snapped back to me.
"Are you alright?" I came closer to Jasper and helped him get back on his feet.
"Yes, I am great." He said with a fake smile. "Just didn't expect it to hurt this much."
"You are not concentrated, Bella," Kate said. "Let's try it again."
And so, we tried, again and again until I couldn't stand seeing my brother hurt anymore. My shield was getting further away from me now but still wouldn't hold on to Jasper.
"That's enough for today," I spoke. "He needs some rest."
"We're vampires, we don't need rest. He is probably fine, and you are the one who needs rest." Kate started. "Bella, a princess of her own little world, is tired, and so she can't concentrate on anything except herself. Maybe that's why your shield is staying just on you, selfishness and laziness." I was getting angrier with every word that left her mouth, how could she talk about me like that? She has no idea what I had been through! And then she touched Jasper again. I saw my bubble extend just enough to cover him from the attack. I wasn't concentrating on it this time, I just let it fly out, and it worked. Everyone stopped moving in that second, all stares were turned to Jasper now. He was still standing right next to me, Kate's hand still on him, but there was no screaming, the whole clearing was quiet.
"You did it!" Tanya came running.
"I think so." I looked at her confused.
"I knew you just needed a little more motivation." Kate was now smiling. "Sorry for what I said earlier, I honestly was trying to make you mad in hopes the instinct to protect someone you love would kick in."
"That's alright. I understand."
Jasper was looking at me with a mix of surprise and pride. I couldn't help but smile at him. After all these hours, I was finally able to produce my shield onto somebody else. Kate definitely had the right idea, me concentrating too hard on dragging it away from myself was the problem. All I had to do was let it go, no pushing or pulling.
"Let's try again!" I exclaimed.
"Does anyone else want to volunteer?" Jasper looked around.
"Alright, maybe later." I laughed.
"How about we go for a hunt, and return to training after. We have some board games, so we can play those at night in the living room. We can also start the fire, Jasper mentioned you always liked fireplaces." Carmen mentioned.
"Like a family game night? I would love that." Tanya said.
"Sure, sounds good. I'm voting against poker though, with Jasper knowing what everyone else is feeling, that wouldn't be fair." I giggled.
"It's not like I can help it." He smiled at me.
"Ready for a hunt then?" Irina asked.
Everyone nodded and we ran towards the forest. Eleazar motioned Jasper to follow him to the West, Irina and Kate both ran to the South and East accordingly, so I decided to follow Tanya to the North. We stopped half an hour later. My new friend's footsteps were so light that I couldn't help but think if it takes special training to run on the snow without making any noise.
"Alright, so this is my usual spot. It's secluded enough that people don't come here and perfect for hunting grizzlies during the spring. Right now, they are all in hibernation, but there is plenty of food in this area anyways. My advice? Try finding a carnivore, they taste more like humans than herbivores because their diet is mostly raw meat." She explained. "There are plenty of wolves, lynxes, and foxes too."
"Okay, so how do I avoid getting blood on myself?"
"Attack your prey from the back. Pin them to the ground in the way that their paws are locked, you'll avoid rips in your clothes that way. Another thing to remember is that once you bite them, keep your mouth on the wound until you drink all of it, otherwise, you'll be covered with splashes."
"Alright, that doesn't sound so hard."
"Oh, and one more thing, Bella." Tanya continued. "Don't treat them like you would human. This time it's an animal versus animal, you can have a little more fun with it."
"I think I got it. I shall see you here in an hour or so."
I took off running again, a few miles in I heard heartbeats, a herd of deer was making its way towards me. I jumped on one of the trees nearby and started waiting for them to come closer. When I finally saw them, the only thing left for me to do was drop my body weight on one of them. I chose the biggest one and jumped from the tree right on its back. The animal squeaked because of the impact, and all the others started running away. I recited Tanya's instructions in my head again and sank my teeth into its neck. My venom spread and the deer was paralyzed now. After I was done with it, I looked at my shirt and noticed just a few drops of blood. That was definitely better than the last time I hunted. I gave myself a round of applause for a job well done and ran back to the meeting place.
Tanya was already sitting on a large stone next to where we were supposed to meet.
"Done already?" she smiled when she noticed me.
"I wasn't very hungry." I shook my shoulders. "Look, barely got anything on me."
"I can see that. Practice makes perfect, so just give it a few months and you will stop seeing even that."
"Thank you for your help," I said honestly.
"You are welcome. We don't always have to be mean to one another, also I'm quite fond of you already, Bella. I feel like we'll be very close in the future."
"Thank you, Tanya. I really hope you are right. Now let's get back to training."
When we arrived back, I saw that Jasper's shirt had a lot more blood drips than mine, and so I congratulated myself again. The training was easier this time, Jasper got hurt twice out of our ten tries. It was still a work in progress, but even Irina was giving me huge rounds of compliments. She remembered Kate working on her gift, and mentioned that it took her centuries to finally get it to what it was now. I was ecstatic. I later tried it on both Kate and Jasper, to see if I can hide both of them from Eleazar's gift of seeing abilities. It was successful; however, it took most of the time that we had left before 10 pm.
All of us went inside the house after that. While Eleazar was bringing the wood for the fireplace inside, Carmen and Irina went to grab their selection of board games from the basement. I couldn't recall any of them, they were probably invented after 1905. A word game by the name of "Scrabble" was Kate's and Carmen's favorite one. Tanya didn't look so happy about it though.
"We always play this one, isn't there anything else?" she cried.
"You don't know about Bella's or Jasper's ability in this game, maybe you won't be the loser this time," Irina mentioned.
"I still hate it, alright?" Tanya replied.
We started playing the game. It was rather calm and interesting, I managed to get a few bigger words into a much dislike of my new rose blond friend.
"There is no way that this is the actual word!" she exclaimed an hour later. "What in the world is Dewskich?"
"It's a hit," Jasper explained.
"Use it in a sentence," Tanya demanded.
"When I was young, my mom used to tell me she would give me a dewskich for constantly misbehaving at school." Jasper chuckled. "Aren't you supposed to be older than me? I would assume you'll be more knowledgeable."
"I have never heard anybody use it!" she exclaimed. "Do you people know of such a word?"
We all nodded our heads, that small action made her absolutely furious, so she spilled the rest of her letters back in the bag, and sat down with crossed arms. None of us were able to stop our laughter, which resulted in Tanya not speaking to anyone for the rest of the game. Irina won with just a few points over Carmen, I took third place with pride.
"I saw a few dictionaries in Eleazar's room, maybe you should borrow them." Jasper teased. Tanya glared at him and everybody laughed again.
These couple of days were wonderful. The warmth and simplicity of everyone in this room was everything I needed to gather up hope and make myself believe that eventually, everything will turn out just like it is supposed to. I will find Mary, all three of us will join Tanya and her family, I will go back to school, maybe even college if my blood lust becomes more tolerable.
"Look at the time, Bella," Jasper whispered. It was 12:01 on the clock, I chose the right time to think about my wish then. "Happy New Year, sister."
"Happy New Year, brother." I smiled.
We stayed with Tanya's family for the next two weeks. We trained for most of the days and hunted during the nights. When none of us felt hungry, we spent nights playing games, no more scrabble though, or just listening to stories about everyone's past. Tanya even told us stories of Carlisle's family, showed us pictures of all of them. I instantly felt like I would love Esme, Carlisle's wife, which had the same smile as Carmen. Very kind, protective, and motherly smile. I, before changing, have always thought that I'd have a baby in the future, maybe even two; those were the things expected of me. Get married, have kids, support your husband. I sometimes still regretted that I would never be able to have children; however, I constantly kept reminding myself that there was no point in dwelling over something that would never be possible. We were frozen in time, no changing that, there is no cure to immortality.
I could have easily gotten used to the routine that we had for the past two weeks. Tanya insisted that we need to stay for the old New Year as well. Having lived in Serbia for a couple of decades, she insisted it was necessary to celebrate that holiday too, in my opinion, she was simply trying to find a way for Jasper and me to stay at least a little bit longer, so I went along with it. We had to promise that we'll visit every three years to celebrate New Year. She also made me memorize their postal code and home number, so I could mail or call them whenever we needed help or just wanted to talk. With a promise that I will do just that, we left Alaska and headed South East.
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