19. Morte

"No, damn it! Next week is not acceptable! I need a flight today." After the human woman on the other end of the line made yet another excuse, I growled through my teeth, "They can't all be booked solid."

"I do have a three-fifteen leaving from here to Mexico City tomorr-"

"Tomorrow isn't good enough!"

"Well, I'm sorry, but that's the only - "

"Have you checked all the connecting flights? Other airlines? Transatlantic? Something with a few hours lay over?"

How was it so difficult to understand? What I was asking for was hardly complicated. I needed to travel from Rio to Seattle as fast as possible. Changing planes and layovers were to be expected with that distance.

"What do you mean, 'you can't'?"

"This is a busy time of year for travel and we're overbooked already. Company policy states that I'm not supposed to book for an alternate airline unless you pay in full, in advance, and - "

"Look! I don't care about any of that. I'll buy every seat on the damned plane if necessary."

Humans were so frustrating sometimes! It was all I could do not to scream at the woman who seemed to be deliberately making things as complicated as possible. No one could actually be so obtuse; it must have been deliberate.

"No, no, no. I told you already. Two! Two adults, n-no children."

I didn't care what it took; the next time we stayed here, Rosalie and Jasper were going to set it up so that we had internet access. This wouldn't even be a problem at all if I could have just booked the tickets for myself! It had taken me all of fifteen minutes to set up the flight down here. I'd already spent nearly an hour on the phone - precious time in which my Bella's fragile condition was surely growing steadily worse - and still I had no tickets to show for my efforts.

"Yes, we have our passports! Have you heard a word I've said?"

The woman stammered an apology, thinly disguised as justification for her obstinacy.

Trying to rein in my fury, I did my best to sound reasonable. "No, no. Don't apologize. Just get me and my wife on a plane today."

As I fought with the irritating human, I packed our clothes. Bella pressed herself against a wall, watching me with an anxious expression on her face, but she stayed out of the way while I zipped around the bedroom, snagging the clothes we had tossed about. Glancing at her, I realized she couldn't exactly board a plane dressed only in the frilly lingerie she'd worn to bed that night. I found clean clothes for her to wear and tossed them onto the bed before continuing to pack.

"...and there would be a changeover in Atlanta, Georgia, but that's the only stop. Will that work?"

Exasperated, but relieved that she'd found something, I sighed, "Yes."

"It's gonna be close, though. You'd have um... maybe half an hour to get to the next terminal."

"No, that's fine. We'll make it."

"So that's like, sixteen hours in travel time, if your flight's not delayed."

"That's perfect; better than I'd expected, actually. We'll make it work. Now," I took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to keep my temper in check. "I need you to arrange transportation for us from the Westside Docks to the airport."

"We don't have a shuttle service that goes to the docks. Those only go between the hotels and the airports. I'm sure you can understand that most of our guests - "

I scrubbed at my face. Had there ever been a less helpful human? "I don't care! Call a taxi, a limo, or a God damn horse-drawn carriage if need be. Whatever works. Just find me something!"

Finally everything was arranged and the trunks were packed. Except for some chunks I'd removed from the headboard, a few missing pillows, and the addition of some holes in the wall, the bedroom looked just as it had when we'd arrived. I looked around for Bella, but after dropping off her lingerie for me to pack, she had left the room and hadn't returned. I hadn't heard her getting sick again. The few glimpses I'd allowed myself of her face had told me she was upset. Of course, that was to be expected. She'd told me that she didn't want children, and now I'd gotten her pregnant with one that would kill her. She'd said she wanted to remain human, but now, depending on what Carlisle was able to do for her, that might not be possible.

I followed the sound of her heart into the kitchen, where she stood with her back to me and her hands pressed to her stomach. "Bella?"

She turned to face me, and I saw there were tears still streaming down her face.

"Bella!" I was at her side in an instant, gently pressing my palms against her cheeks. Her eyes were wide with worry and fear when they met mine. "Are you in pain?"

"No, no - "

Relieved that at least she wasn't hurting, I pulled her against me. Her warmth was soothing and calming after the hour I'd just spent arguing. I only hoped she could be as soothed by my touch as I was by hers, though I didn't see how that was possible when I was the one who had done this to her. "Don't be afraid. We'll be home in sixteen hours. You'll be fine. Carlisle will be ready when we get there. We'll take care of this, and you'll be fine, you'll be fine."

"Take care of this? What do you mean?"

Surely she understood? I looked into her eyes and saw the confusion in them. Didn't she know I'd never let anything harm her? "We're going to get that thing out before it can hurt any part of you. Don't be scared. I won't let it hurt you."

...didn't ask you to make them something, Kaure.

...can't bring someone food without needing to be asked?

...all he said was eggs.

...and we got those, too.

...risk ruining everything, Kaure!

...you the one who said we couldn't let our fear control us?

...yes, but -

...have to see. Can't stand the thought of that little girl killed to feed that monster!

...and if he hurts you?

...risk I'm willing to take.

"Dammit! I forgot Gustavo was due today. I'll get rid of him and be right back." I strode toward the front door in a fury. I didn't have time for this! I needed to get our trunks and my Bella onto our boat and I couldn't exactly do that with them watching. Before they could even knock, I threw the door open, scowling at their surprised expressions.

"Now is not a good time," I snapped. "Come back tomorrow." I started to close the door, but Kaure put her hand on it. Staring at her in shock, I held back the growl that wanted to rip from me. How dare she?!

"Wait, please. I - I have brought you a gift. You just got married..."

Trying to be polite, I swallowed my anger. "Thank you, Kaure, but that's really not necessary. Now, if you'll excuse me - "

"Your young wife... Has she been to Brazil before?"

Pressing my lips together, I shook my head.

"She might like - that is - I've prepared a traditional dish for you both. It's served at our wedding celebrations."

"That's very kind of you," I said through my teeth, "but Bella isn't feeling well at the moment."

"A-a-all the more reason to give it to you, then," she whispered. Her eyes showed her terror as I glared at her, furious. Hadn't I said no already? Her entire body seemed to be trembling as she inched a step forward. "She would surely be grateful to have a meal ready for when she is... feeling better."

Deciding it would take less time to allow her into the house and send her on her way than it would to stand there and continue to argue with her, I grunted and stopped blocking the doorway.

She edged by me, mentally pleading with me not to kill her once her back was turned. Glaring at Gustavo, I shut the door in his face, not wanting yet another human in the house to delay our departure.

Making sure not to touch the woman, I passed her in the hall and returned to where Bella still stood with tears and an expression of dread on her face. Pressing my lips against Bella's ear, despite the fact that I knew Kaure wouldn't be able to understand me, I whispered, "She's insisting on leaving the food she brought - she made us dinner. It's an excuse - she wants to make sure I haven't killed you, yet."

The words were bitter in my mouth. I had always known I would kill her. It was our destiny: hers to die, mine to kill. Every time I thought I had fought it off, God or Fate stepped in and pushed another potentially fatal obstacle into Bella's path.

The human woman crept into the kitchen and took a long look at the girl in my arms.

...still alive! He wasn't lying... girl looks unwell...

"I hope your wife feels better soon," she muttered, placing the foul-smelling dish on the kitchen counter.

"Thank you for your concern. Now leave!"

Kaure turned away at the same moment as Bella blanched and a familiar grimace crossed her face. I gathered her hair again as she leaned over the sink, coughing up what little food lay on her stomach. I rubbed my hands over her sweating face, hating the look of pain there.

"Bella, Bella, I'm so sorry," I murmured. "It'll be over soon, I promise. You'll feel better soon." I hated feeling useless, watching Bella get sick from the thing I had planted within her.

Though I found all human food to smell unpleasant, the strong odor of the food Kaure had brought was surely not helping Bella's stomach. I moved faster than a human would have been capable of doing and shoved the dish in the refrigerator, not caring that Kaure was there to see. I was grateful just to have some way to try to help Bella. Once the food was gone, her stomach seemed to calm, and I wiped the sweat from her face while she rinsed her mouth.

When she straightened, I pulled her into my arms. Bella leaned against me, resting her head against my shoulder, but rather than wrap her arms around me, she pressed her hands against her stomach. I guessed it still felt upset to her and brushed my hand down the back of her head, stroking her long, silky hair.

Kaure made a garbled noise as she stretched out her hand toward us. The woman was staring at Bella's hands with an image in her mind of Bella and I locked in a lovers' embrace. Abruptly, the woman's thoughts were no longer tentative or frightened, but full of fury. She imagined me in a pyre while she and her husband sped Bella away from the island in their boat.

Gasping, I thrust Bella behind me. There was no way I was going to allow this insignificant human to take her from me!

"What have you done?" Kaure screeched. "Is it not enough that you prey on the innocent, that you have dragged my family into your evil doings for decades, but now you have doomed this child with your foul, demonic lusts?"

Recognizing the change in her words from the Portuguese she'd been using to one of the native languages of the Brazilian tribes, I tried to deny her accusation. "No! I meant her no harm. I told you: she's my wife. I love her."

She blinked, surprised that I'd spoken in her tongue. After a moment's hesitation, she narrowed her eyes at me and asked, "Your wife? You meant it truly when you called her that before? You intended to keep her?"

Slowly, I nodded at the image of a Bella who was as pale and hard as the rest of my family.

A look of horror crossed her face and she made the sign of the cross over her chest as she stepped away from me.

I reached for her, intending to grasp her arm in supplication, but seeing me doing so only frightened her further. Instead of touching the woman, incapable of speech, I laid a hand on Bella's tear-stained cheek.

"Stupid boy!" Kaure spat. "What did you think was going to happen? Surely you know how babies are made."

"Of course," I whispered. "But I shouldn't have been capable."

She stared at me, not answering, but clearly not believing my ignorance.

"Please," I begged. "I love her. Help me. Help her! You aren't surprised - you must have known this was possible. Please, tell me what you know!"

Her eyes darted between us, noting Bella's definite lack of fear. Timidly, she took a step toward Bella and made a shape with her hands, pantomiming her own stomach swelling with child.

Bella jumped, apparently recognizing that Kaure had known of the possibility even though we hadn't.

The tiny human woman took a few steps toward us, studying me intently. In her mind was a memory of her tribe gathered around a fire as the elders told stories and legends which the younger members only half-believed. After seeing my family's unchanging state over the decades we'd known them, Kaure had come to believe every legend her people had ever told. Until I had brought Bella to the island, she hadn't been exactly sure of what to label us though, as we had fit none of them.

Shrewdly, she began to question me. "Where is your hat?"

"Pardon me?"

"Boto wear hats. I have never seen you in one."

Astonished, I saw her picture me wearing a hat to cover a hole in the top of my head. The image morphed into one of a river dolphin carrying Bella through the water. Almost amused, I shook my head. "I am no shape-shifter."

"You are no human!" she accused.

"No," I admitted. It would have been pointless to lie.

"Libishomen are well known for killing young women too."

Glad that I was able to answer her truthfully - aside from Maria and Victoria, who didn't really count - I shook my head again. "I have never killed a woman, of any age."

"And this girl here?"

"I'll save her," I insisted.

She gestured angrily toward Bella. "Her? Or the child?"

"Her."

Kaure's eyes widened. "And what of the child she carries?"

"What of it?"

"Do you not want it?"

"Want it?" I repeated in shock.

A look of surprise crossed her face. "You do not want your own young? Is that not why you took a wife?"

I hesitated, picturing again an image of a miniature Bella on our beach. How I would have loved to give her a child! "And if I did? What would become of her?"

Slowly, the woman shook her head.

Stubbornly, I said, "Then I'll remove it. Nothing else matters to me; only her. Bella will be fine."

...what he chooses to call himself matters not. His lies matter not. The end result is the same...

"What end result? What do you mean?"

The woman paused, recognizing that I had answered words she had not spoken aloud. She already knew I wasn't human though, and this new demonstration didn't seem to surprise her all that much. Slowly, she edged toward my wife and laid a hand over where Bella's were still folded. She looked Bella in the eye and clearly spoke one word in Portuguese. "Death."

In her mind was an image of a woman who had been impregnated by a demon. I watched in horror as she envisioned the thing clawing its way free of the human who nourished it, only to see it die moments later in a fire that billowed with purple smoke.

As Kaure turned and trudged away from us, her voice seemed to hang in the room like a curse. It felt as if by speaking the word, she had made it inevitable. I wanted to go to her, to shake her and demand that she tell me something else. I wanted to throw myself at the tiny woman's feet and beg her to remember some other legend, one that didn't end in Bella dying. I wanted to deny the truth that it had been Bella's fate all along.

Instead of chasing the woman, I stood immobile. Neither Bella nor I moved until the boat that had brought the humans took them out of the range where I could hear their thoughts. I might have remained unmoving until long after we had missed our flight if Bella hadn't started to walk away from me. I reached for her, barely daring to touch her shoulder.

"Where are you going?"

"To brush my teeth again."

"Don't worry about what she said," I insisted, stubbornly rejecting the woman's beliefs. "It's nothing but legends, old lies for the sake of entertainment."

"I didn't understand anything," she muttered to my relief.

Remembering that I had packed everything already, I said, "I packed your toothbrush. I'll get it for you."

"Are we leaving soon?" Bella asked as I strode down the hallway to where the luggage was waiting.

"As soon as you're done."

While she brushed her teeth, I was thinking furiously. My immobility from before transformed itself into restless movement, and I paced behind Bella, waiting for her to be done so that I could repack the items she'd needed.

The legends Kaure had envisioned had all ended in the girls' deaths, but there was more than one difference here. The monsters in the legends had intended to kill their victims. I intended for Bella to live.

The other difference, the one that would mean Bella would survive, was Carlisle. Carlisle would fix everything.

Those women Kaure had imagined or remembered had not had a vampire doctor to save them from their demon lover's spawn. Carlisle would take it out and we would destroy it. And while Bella was sedated, I could start her transformation process. If we kept her sedated, maybe she wouldn't even feel anything at all. I doubted she would want to remain human after it was gone. Her whole reason for changing her mind had been to make love to me. Well, that was certainly no longer an option! Not while she was human.

No, Carlisle would fix my mistake, I would change Bella, and my human wife would be my newborn vampire mate within a week. Then all I would have to worry about was keeping her from killing or from regretting ever asking me to change her.

I spotted Bella watching me, her toothbrush and toothpaste held in one shapely hand. Wordlessly, I took them from her and tucked them into the bag. I knew she was still watching me, but I couldn't bear to meet her eyes.

"I'll get the bags into the boat."

"Edward - "

My name on her lips was the sweetest sound I'd heard all day, and I turned to her, meeting her eyes at last. "Yes?"

"Could you... pack some of the food? You know, in case I get hungry again?"

She looked so scared! I felt bad for being so self-absorbed. I'd been thinking of my own fears and how the thing would affect her physically, and had not comforted her as I should have been doing. "Of course. Don't worry about anything. We'll get to Carlisle in just a few hours, really. This will all be over soon."

She merely nodded.

I grabbed the trunks and headed for the kitchen, shoving the pretzels she'd been eating earlier that morning into one, along with some of her favorite pastries and granola bars. I filled a bottle with ice water, shoving it, too, into the trunks before I sped toward the boats to secure the luggage. When I got back to the house, I darted from room to room, switching the lights off. Bella was waiting for me in the kitchen with my phone in her hands, her eyes wide and frightened. She held the phone out to me, and I tucked it into a pocket before scooping her into my arms. Before she had taken half a dozen breaths, I was stepping into the boat.

Although I wanted to get us to the airport quickly, we had time, and it wasn't necessary for me to push the boat too fast. The sea wasn't smooth, and I didn't want to jostle her, but despite my careful piloting, the boat lurched over the waves and Bella got sick again on the way. Enormously pleased to see a limo waiting at the end of the docks, I helped her into the backseat and pretended to grunt under the weight of the luggage as I lifted them into the trunk of the vehicle.

The woman at the ticket counter was far more helpful than the travel agent had been. Perhaps it was due to the fact that once I caught her eyes with mine, she couldn't look away until I had made her agree to switch us to the seats closest to the lavatories. It was a ten hour flight, and I couldn't expect Bella not to get sick again. I wondered if she would think it was still unfair of me to use my vampire charms in such a way. She kept her hand pressed against her stomach, nibbling on a granola while we waited for take-off.

I wanted to pull her onto my lap as I had done on our flight to Rio, but she stayed curled up in her seat with an anxious crease between her brows. Her heart kept stumbling, but she seemed to accept my reassurances without question. Perhaps that should have been my first clue. Despite her usual curiosity, Bella was not pestering me for information on what I may have heard - which, until I'd spoken with Kaure was nothing. She didn't wonder where we would land, or how long our layover would be. She didn't ask about Carlisle, or what would happen when we arrived. And she didn't meet my eyes, no matter how many times I tried to catch hers.

The airport in Atlanta was a large hub, and our connecting flight was on the other side of the terminal from where our first plane landed. Even healthy, I doubted that Bella would be capable of running such a distance fast enough to keep up with me - no matter how slow I kept my pace - and arranged for a wheelchair to be made ready so that I could push her through the crowds. When Bella caught the gist of my conversation with the stewardess about it, she shook her head and let out a sharp huff.

"I can walk, you know. I'm pregnant; not an invalid."

Even now, she didn't want to be taken care of. I laughed and said, "Of course you can walk, but can you run?"

She opened her mouth, and I was sure she was going to assure me that, yes, she could run.

Shaking my head, I insisted, "Fast enough to keep up with me?"

"You don't fight fair."

"I have never claimed to." Trying to lighten the mood and relieve her fears, I teased, "If you'd prefer, I could carry you instead. Though we might attract more attention that way."

Her mouth closed and twisted into an unhappy line.

"Love, you're not well. Please, let me take care of you. In sickness and in health, remember?" I held her eyes, pleading with mine that she not be difficult.

She relented with a sigh. "How are you still able to do that?"

I grinned, pleased that I could always affect her.

"You know, things will be different when I'm - I mean, after." She lowered her voice, apparently remembering that we could be overheard.

Sadly, I nodded. "I know."

Having to jog through the Atlanta terminal at a human speed had been agonizing, but we made the connecting flight with a few minutes to spare. Once we were airborne, Bella got sick yet again, and I caught the anxious thoughts of our fellow travelers. I motioned the stewardess over to where I stood outside of the bathroom door.

"Is your girlfriend alright?"

The sound of Bella's retching was clear enough even for the human woman to pick up, and I saw her grimace and swallow hard. Although annoyed at her assumption, I placed a sheepish, but worried smile on my face. Acting human was something I had a lot of practice with, and this human could help me if I played my part right. I locked my eyes onto the woman's and saw blood swirl up to stain her cheeks.

"My wife will be fine. She's just in a... delicate condition. You understand?"

"Oh. I see. Congratulations." The woman giggled and had the nerve to start picturing herself with me. ...awful young to be a father... maybe this'll make him run? ...be his rebound...

It took all of my concentration not to growl at her. I needed the woman's help, and seeing myself as the object of a sexual fantasy was nothing new. Replacing my fake smile with a look of real worry, I shook my head. "It isn't going well. There is a complication that requires a specialist whom we are meeting in Seattle."

"I'm so sorry." She took a step closer to me, actually reaching out to lay a hand on my arm.

Before she could touch me, I moved back, narrowed my eyes, and leaned against the locked door with my arms crossed.

She paused, recognizing my anger, and decided that it was probably for the best that I was not interested in her, despite the fact that I would not release her eyes. "Is there any way I can help?"

I nodded gratefully. "If you could see to it that we are the first off the plane, that would be an enormous help. Besides, judging by the looks on the other passengers' faces, I don't think they'd appreciate being thrown-up on."

"No, I wouldn't think so. I'll see what I can do."

At that moment, I heard Bella disengage the lock and stood upright again so that she could open the door. I helped her back to our seats, but she seemed not to want me to touch her, shifting her arm out of my loose grip before reaching for the back of her seat. I'd been around ill humans before, and knew that feeling bad often led to feeling grumpy. Aside from the long plane ride, she must have been tired of getting sick. She looked miserable, but didn't seem to want me to comfort her. I guessed she was angry with me. I was the one who had gotten her pregnant, so I was rightly to blame for her current discomfort.

I hoped that she would perk back up once we were home. Carlisle could give her something to settle her stomach. I was sure that would help. And knowing that he was actively working on removing the source of her misery should help her to feel better too. I just wished she would let me hold her; that would have made me feel better.

As soon as we got close enough to see the Seattle airport's landing strip lights from the windows, I cast my mind toward the ground, seeking the reassuring thoughts which I knew would be waiting for me. After a nearly a century as companions, Carlisle was easy to find among the hundreds of others that surrounded him in and around the airport. Through his eyes, I could see the rest of my family as they stood around the gate, waiting outside of the security checkpoint for use to arrive. Everyone had unhappy looks on their faces.

Even Rosalie was chewing her lip and frowning, and I felt a swelling of love for my sister. To have wanted a child for so long, but be unable to have one had been hard for her. Now Bella was pregnant with a child she could not have. Well, if Bella ever did express any regret that a life with me had ended that possibility, I was sure Rose would be able to comfort her - if she could get over her inevitable, self-righteous I-told-you-so.

Alice was concentrating, but on what, I couldn't be sure. Perhaps she was trying not to see? She certainly wasn't watching me and Bella. Her mind reminded me of when she was trying to see Victoria's plans. Since the vindictive vampire had not had any plans, there had been nothing concrete for my psychic sister to see, other than vague flashes. Her visions now seemed similarly absent and vague. A flash of a store. Blurry moments of my family's anxious faces. I waited, expecting the image I'd seen so often of Bella as a newborn. Now that that future was days away, surely she would be able to see more than the still-shot I had grown used to.

But there was nothing. How odd.

Carlisle's focused thoughts were reviewing his medical knowledge. Though my father had assisted with a birth or two in the days before modern medicine, obstetrics was not an area of practice with which he had often dealt. Besides, the thing I had planted in Bella would not be allowed to remain there long enough to be born. As a doctor in the emergency rooms, he had more often been a part of treating patients who were undergoing miscarriages. He was thinking that removing the thing that threatened my wife would be more like removing the remains of those failed pregnancies.

...or would it? ...have no way of knowing how firmly it is attached until I can examine her... Human miscarriages and abortions may not parallel removing a vampire fetus... always some exchange of blood between mother and baby... how is she still even human? May have to perform a hysterectomy to get it all... His eyes darted to the board displaying expected arrival times, then back to Esme's face.

...not that it would bother Bella as she claims that she never wanted children. Once she is changed, the option would no longer exist regardless, so it would matter not. Wish I knew exactly when it was conceived. ...give me a better idea of what to expect. Wish I could observe the growth for a day or two! Determining the rate of growth for a vampire-human child could tell me so much! Wish they would land already.

How much of it is vampire? A normal abortion requires a certain amount of cutting. Will I even be able to cut it? Will the skin be impervious like ours? Will it only be capable of destruction with fire? If that's the case, a complete hysterectomy is the most likely way to get rid of the thing.

Wonder if I should have obtained more supplies. If nothing else, I can always have - no, Edward will not likely wish to leave her - the others, then. I can have Jasper or Emmett retrieve what I'm missing, if anything.

I saw him flashing through his inventory of supplies: scalpels; scissors; clamps; specula; retractors; needles for sewing and for injections; IV lines, pumps, and tubing; a pharmacy of sedatives, painkillers, various chemicals the human body required for survival, bags of glucose, and pre-filled syringes of whatever medicines Carlisle had thought potentially necessary; sterile cloths, drapes, and gauze; bottles of iodine; and - I was shocked to see - a refrigerator full of units of blood.

There was human blood.

In my house.

Lots of it.

I swallowed a flood of venom and fought off the shiver of desire I felt at seeing it. If she was undergoing what would be a dangerous surgery, then she might lose a lot of blood. I grimaced at the memory of the last time she'd had a transfusion. The foreign blood had tainted her smell for days. That didn't matter. Saving Bella was what was important, and if the blood being stored in the refrigerator could do it, then I would put up with the smell of the foreign blood. It wouldn't matter for long. I would be changing her as soon as the thing was removed. We only needed to make sure any blood lost was replaced so that her heart kept beating. She had to live in order for the change to occur. Biting a corpse would do nothing.

Or maybe it would. My mind was abruptly filled with a horrible image. Bella - reanimated - but not as a vampire, or any sentient creature. I saw her body stumbling about with none of that which made her her existing any longer. My Bella, turned into a zombie, instead of a vampire. Well, and why not? Vampires existed, as did werewolves and shape-shifters. Who was to say that all of the myths and legends weren't based on some kind of fact?

No! That would mean Kaure's legends had merit, and I could not abide that possibility. No, Carlisle would keep Bella alive, remove the thing that threatened her, and I would change her while she was sedated. When she woke, she would be the Bella I had fallen in love with, the Bella who loved me, my mate, my wife, my love, my life, my Bella.

Thrusting my runaway imagination away from the path it kept trying to follow, I concentrated on my father's mind again. I saw Carlisle picturing himself wheeling a portable X-ray machine out of the hospital. Although it wasn't good medical practice to X-ray a developing fetus, this one wouldn't survive, so there was no conflict.

From his thoughts, Carlisle seemed to have brought half the hospital into our house in preparation for Bella's arrival. I wondered if he had done so with the hospital's knowledge. He'd already taken so much that spring for Jacob's recovery. If he had stolen what he needed, I wondered if he had done so from his own hospital or if he had spread the thefts out among several in the area.

Seeing him go over his supplies and the procedures he might need to perform was calming to my tightly wound nerves. I would be better calmed by Bella's love, though, and I watched her for several minutes. Her eyes were closed and her knees pulled up to her chin. She was grimacing, and I thought she might be fighting the urge to get sick again.

"Bella?"

She didn't respond to me.

"Love? Are you feeling alright?"

Her frown deepened. Carefully, barely touching her skin, I placed a hand on her arm where it was clasped around her legs. As if my touch triggered it, she launched herself from the seat and back into the lavatory once more. The passenger seated across the aisle from us glanced in the direction of the lavatory, and grimaced in disgust at the sounds she was making.

...going to complain to the airlines! Shouldn't allow sick people on the plane. What if it's contagious?! Oh, God, I'm feeling nauseous now... That boy she's with looks awful sick too...

He glanced my way, saw me scowling at him, paled, and broke into a sweat.

...oh, I'm gonna be sick, too... can I get the stewardess to move me away from them when there's no empty seats?!

Rolling my eyes in annoyance, I realized he was mistaking the tremors and queasy sensation in his bowels which his instinctive fear of me generated with an actual illness.

"She's not sick," I hissed. "My wife is pregnant."

"What?" he muttered defensively. "I didn't say anything." ...oh thank God, oh, thankGodthankGodthankGod... not gonna die from some horrid disease... swear the kid looks like he might kill me though...

I continued to glare at him until he averted his eyes, almost enjoying the stench of fear that was pouring off of him.

"Edward?" Bella whispered from behind the locked door.

In one swift motion, I left my seat. "I'm here."

"Could you get me my toothbrush?"

Grateful to have something useful to do, I grabbed our carry-on bag and found the travel-sized brush and paste in the pocket where she'd stashed it after her last use. The stewardess was eyeing me as I listened to Bella cleaning her mouth.

...beginning our descent soon... can't be in the aisles... or the bathroom... get sick again on the way down? I do not want to have to deal with that! Maybe she should just stay in there...

Trying to ignore the unpleasant thoughts of the humans around me, I waited while Bella rinsed her mouth until the sign on the door's lock changed from the red that indicated it was occupied to green and available.

She was pale again when she exited the closet-sized room, and her mouth was firmed into a line. I must not have been able to keep the worry from my face, because she insisted, "I'm fine."

The anger in her voice was surely directed at me. Trying to reassure her that she would be safe soon, I murmured, "We're going to be landing very soon."

She jerked her chin in a stiff nod and brushed past me back to her seat just as the light that indicated we needed to buckle our seat-belts came on. Bella's heart seemed to race the closer we got to the ground, and I smelled fear in her normal sweet scent as we taxied to a stop. True to her word, the stewardess motioned us off the plane ahead of everyone else. I caught a mixture of thoughts from the other passengers. Some of them were annoyed at being made to wait - it was quite ridiculous; I was ushering Bella into the tunnel that connected the plane to the airport before more than a minute had passed - but most were relieved to have me and Bella away from them.

Finally making it through the checkpoints, I couldn't believe the relief I felt at seeing my family waiting for us. I remembered the last time Bella and I had gotten off of a plane in Seattle to find my family waiting for us. Just returned from Italy, from seven months of misery that had nearly ended in both mine and Bella's deaths, I had been scared that Bella no longer wanted me. That plane ride, we had held each other, both convinced that the other had moved on. This flight, Bella and I were married, and she was pregnant with my demon child, yet we had barely touched. Why was our relationship always so backward? I shook my head, amazed at the difference such a few months could make.

As I met Carlisle's eyes, I felt a smile tugging at my lips. My father was here; he would fix everything.