Chapter 23

"Where is my baby? I want to see my baby girl!" Renée shouted when she entered the ward.

She looked around but didn't see anybody. It was 6.30 in the morning.

She knelt in front of Benjamin, who had followed her with Holly.

"Wait here, baby, wait with Holly. Mommy goes first to see how Bella is, then you can come to see her, okay?"

Benjamin was holding his nanny's hand tightly, his bottom lip trembling. A single tear dropped on his cheek. He had been adamant about coming with her and had refused to stay home.

Renée cupped his cheeks and brushed the tear away with her thumb. "Bella is going to be okay, baby boy. But mommy wants to see her first. I'll come to get you soon, okay."

Benjamin nodded, and Holly lifted him into her arms. They went to sit on the chair, Holly wrapping her arms around Ben. He held his well-worn plush toy elephant tightly against his chest and squeezed his other hand shut, probably keeping his precious lego figure or two inside.

Renée is dreading to go in. But in she must go. She entered the room and gasped. She covered her mouth to conceal the sob, and her eyes watered. Bella was lying on the bed looking pale, almost like she was dead. So many tubes and drips were attached to her. A heart monitor was beeping, saying that her heart was working as it should. If there was something she knew about was how a heart sounded when it wasn't working correctly.

She was used to seeing her child like this, it was only a couple of months since Benjamin had his last extensive heart surgery, but it never got any easier; to see your child in a hospital bed. And Ben, by the age of nine, had been in hospital more than an average person would be in a lifetime.

"Oh, my baby," Renée whispered and walked to the bed, and it was then she noticed Paul sitting next to the bed. She had clearly woken him up.

"Oh Paul, what has happened to her?" she asked, but her eyes were on her daughter. She touched her cheek lightly. It was cold, so cold. She took her hand and saw that her arms were covered in bruises.

Paul got up and cleared his throat. "Her kidnapper attacked her. Some of her bones are broken, and she had surgery and a blood transfusion. The doctor will explain it to you better. She can breathe on her own, but she is in a coma. We are waiting for her to wake up any second now."

"Did he...?"

"No, we got to her in time for that not to happen."

"Thank God for that."

"Yes," Paul said quietly, rubbing his face.

"Where is he?" Renée asked.

Paul looked confused for a second like he didn't know what to say. "We took care of him," he said, looking her straight in the eyes. His stare was unreadable and so intense Renée had to look away.

Renée thought to ask what he meant by that, but she didn't care, not now. All she wanted was to get her baby girl back to be the beautiful, lively young woman she was. Not this pale, lifeless body that lay on the hospital bed.

"Ben is at the hall waiting to come and see Bella. There was nothing I could do to get him to stay home. He's been very anxious all this time."

Ben hadn't told her much about what had happened. Renée had thought about calling the police, but she had decided to talk with Paul first. Calling the police would have caused extra stress for Ben, and it was the last thing he needed right now.

"That's great. Bella might react to him. He should come in and talk to her," Paul said.

Paul took a chair from the corner of the room and placed it close to Bella's bed for Renée to sit down.

"I'll get Ben," Renée said and opened the door. Ben bolted from Holly's lap as soon as he saw his mother. He ran inside the room and stopped to look at his sister.

Then he saw Paul.

"Pall! You saved her!" he shouted and ran to Paul. Paul lifted him to his lap, and Ben hugged him tightly, snuggling into his big chest. Paul wrapped his arms around him. "Hi, buddy. I did promise you to bring her back, didn't I."

"Yes," Ben nodded and hugged Paul again.

Renée felt tears in her eyes. Ben looked so tiny, tinier than usually against Paul's big form. Paul had always been so good with Ben, like a big brother. Paul had never seen the extra chromosome in him as many others did. He was such an amazing young man. Renée was so happy Paul and Bella were together. Mark had been a nice enough boy, but he had never cared for Bella the same way Paul did. And he hadn't known how to be around Ben.

Ben and Paul were whispering something, and then Ben laughed. It was such a joyous sound that it somewhat broke the gloomy feel in the room.

The doctor came in. He was a young-looking very pale man.

"Mrs. Swan?" the doctor asked, "I'm doctor Cullen."

"Yes, but please, call me Renée. How is my daughter."

"Hey buddy, should we get some ice cream from the café?" Paul asked Ben and got up from his seat.

"Yay! I want pear tasting ice cream," Ben shouted and took Paul's hand.

Renée mouthed thank you to Paul. He gave her a tight smile and a nod. He looked exhausted.

After the door closed, Renée turned to look at the doctor. His eyes had a very odd golden color.

"How is my daughter?" Renée repeated.

"She is stable, and she will be okay once she wakes up from the coma. She had gone through terrible trauma, and it might take some time for her to recover emotionally. It will take a few weeks to two months to heal physically. She had some swelling in her abdomen due to internal bleeding caused by a broken rib. So, the first thing we had to do was emergency surgery to stop the bleeding. It went well, and the injury caused no permanent damage. But we needed to perform a blood transfusion to replace the lost blood."

"Oh, my poor baby," Renée sobbed and sat down on her chair. The doctor moved to the other side of the bed.

"Yes, that is a lot to go through. She has a bone fracture in her left leg; hence the plaster and wrist broke again, and she has a few broken ribs. She bruises easily, so she looks pretty beaten up now, but it's not because the man beat her, but because he held her tightly and kept from moving."

Renée gasped; that sounded so terrible. Like she was...

"No, she wasn't raped."

Renée sighed in relief even though Paul had already told her as much.

"And the strangulation marks on her neck?" Renée asked. Renée was able only just to keep herself together; this was all too awful. "Did the monster strangle my baby?"

"Well, actually, no. Before Bella was kidnapped, there was an incident involving one of the young women living on the reservation. My daughter Rosalie found her, and she gave her CPR to get her to breathe again."

"Oh my God. What on earth is going on in her life? Another woman strangled her?"

"You have to talk about that with her when she's well enough for that. But she is safe now. No one is going to hurt her anymore."

"Thank you, doctor. How long do you think it will take her to wake up from the coma?"

"There is no way of telling. We would like to think that it will be soon. But all we can do is wait. She is in good care here. I will personally make sure she is very well taken care of."

Renée thanked the doctor again. She moved her chair closer to Bella and took her hand.

"Oh, Bella. What is it that you haven't told me? All this violence. Why?"

Renée looked at her pale and bruised face for a long time. Her skin looked almost translucent.

"Oh, Charlie, how I wished you were here." In moments like this, when Renée sat by a hospital bed occupied by her child, she missed him the most. His solid strength, silent but comforting presence. The shared parenthood, coping together with the fear and the sorrow.

"How is she?" Renée heard Patrick's voice behind her. Ah, she had already forgotten that she had called him. Yes, Charlie wasn't here, but Patrick was. Thank God for Patrick.

She got up from her chair and rushed into Patrick's arms. And she cried.

"Is she going to be, okay?" Patrick asked after a while.

Renée nodded and wiped her tears. Patrick gave her a tissue, and she blew her nose. "She has had surgery and blood transfusion, and her leg and wrist are broken and some ribs. But she will be alright. The doctor said she will heal."

Patrick knew better not to ask what had happened. The time to talk about that came later.

Ben rushed into the room, his face covered in the sticky substance of melted ice cream.

"Any change?" Paul followed him and went straight to Bella. "Sorry, we came back quite fast. I just can't be away too long if she wakes up."

Renée and Patrick shared a look. Yes, these two were meant to be together.

"No change. But the doctor is hopeful she'll come out of it soon," Renée told him.

Benjamin walked to Paul, and he lifted him into his arms and helped Ben lean over Bella to kiss her on her forehead without laying over her. Ben shouted happily when he was flying over Bella.

Renée's heart swelled to look at them and how much they both loved Bella.

"I brought this to protect you Bell-Bell," Ben said.

Renée looked at what he put on the bedside table. It was a small grey lego wolf. Renée smiled. Ben had been obsessed with the wolves for some time now.

Paul chuckled and shook his head.

Sam was exhausted when he pulled into the driveway leading to his house. He'd been driving almost non-stop for seven hours and ran five before that.

All he wanted to do was crash into his bed, pull Emilly under his arms, and sleep for the next two days.

But as soon as he stopped the car, a loud group emerged from his house. And fuck, there were all the imprints too. Damn, Paul was right; it's annoying as hell to have them all around all the fucking time. Especially now, he wished them miles away.

"Sam! Where the fuck have you been?" Jacob shouted.

"What has happened?" Jared asked. "We all felt some strange shift late last night, and we have been unable to concentrate on anything since then. If we phase simultaneously, we bite each other's heads off." Sam looked at Jared and saw his left eye swollen closed, and cheek bruised.

Sam had hoped to postpone this until he had had a night of proper sleep, and Paul would be present. But he could tell that the guys wouldn't settle anything else than the truth, and maybe it was better to let it out, everything at once. They did deserve to know. And who knew how long it would take before Paul returned to the Res.

"You have new alpha now. I'm no longer it." Sam said, feeling the great relief that had settled in him in the past few hours. He'd been freaked out at first when the shift had happened but after the long run and drive back; he was fucking ecstatic. Not being the alpha was the best fucking thing that could have happened to him. He didn't want it. Never had.

"What?!" they all shouted. "If not you, who then?" Jacob asked.

"Paul."

"Paul? What? How?"

Sam sighed.

"Okay, guys, listen carefully because I say this only once, and then I'm off to bed. Do not interrupt, or I won't tell you shit. Okay?" Sam said and looked at each one of them in the eyes.

Everybody nodded and shut their mouths.

"You continue your normal patrols until we can all sit down and talk about what has happened and it all means. So, after I'm finished, one of you goes out there and does what you are supposed to do: keep the Res safe. Understood?!"

Everybody nodded again.

"We don't know how the power shift happened or why. We haven't even talked about it between the two of us. We were up in the mountains close to the Alaska border where Edward Cullen had taken Bella. Paul and I were there with the doctor and four other family members. The fucker was on his way to rape her when we got there."

"What the fuck!" some shouted.

Sam lifted his hand, and they went silent.

"He didn't manage to do it, and Paul killed Edward. He fucking shredded him into tiny pieces in less than a minute. I've never seen anything like that before. He almost decapitated one of the leeches who had come to save Bella with us. When he phased back, the power shifted. We don't know why, but it did."

"Are you now beta?" Jared asked.

Sam just shrugged. "We'll come to all that later, as I said. Edward had bitten Bella, and she was starting to go through the change, but the doc sucked the venom out and saved her from becoming a cold one."

Everybody gasped at this. Yes, it was a fucking miracle.

"She is now in the hospital in Forks. The last time I heard from Paul, she was just out of the surgery and put on blood transfusion. She should be okay, physically at least. That shit messes you up, though, and we can only hope she will heal emotionally."

Sam felt the exhaustion getting almost unbearable. But there was one more thing.

"The imprint between Paul and Rachel is broken. She's not his imprint anymore."

Everybody started to talk and shout simultaneously, and Kim began to cry. Why the fuck would she cry over such a thing? Bella almost dying wasn't enough, but a broken imprint bond was. That was insane.

"STOP!" he shouted, but his voice lacked the alpha timber. Everybody closed their traps anyway. Thank fuck.

"As I said, we'll come back to this after Paul is back in the Res. This next bit will probably shock you, but I'm not going to stay here to talk to you about it. We'll talk about it later. The reason, at least we think it is the reason, Rachel Black is no longer an imprint is because she tried to kill Bella by strangling her, and if the leeches hadn't found her in Forks in time, she would be dead now, and Rachel would be a murderer."

No one said a word. They were too stunned to say anything.

It was his cue to leave.

"I'm going to sleep now. Do not dare interrupt my sleep unless there is a matter of life and death." And with that, he left, grabbed clearly shocked Emily's hand, took her inside, closed the door, and left the shouting group behind him.

Harry Clearwater was trying to think of the best way to tell young-Lahote what he had found out. He was driving towards the reservation he'd left two weeks ago to look for long-forgotten and presumably dead Quileute lore-keeper and medicine man Kal-lape. His abode was between the rivers of Quinault and Hoh, deep in the Olympic national park.

Kal-lape is the last living shapeshifter of the pack that lived more than a hundred years ago. So yes, he'd been utterly crazy even to consider Kal-lape to be still alive, but then he was a former shapeshifter, and they were known to be able to live long.

As there was no stone left unturned in reservation in his quest to find the missing journal, he had to widen his area of research. He had also been feeling restless lately and had needed to do something; he had needed an adventure. So why not look for a man who was probably 150 years old. It was as good a reason to leave the reservation as any other he could come up with.

However, he did regret not telling Sue; he knew how much she and the kids would worry, but Harry needed to leave the reservation, and if he had told them about his plans, Sue would have prevented him from leaving.

No one knew about Kal-lape, or at least no one had ever mentioned him to Harry. He is mentioned in the archives, though. And it was from the archives Harry had found out where this lore-keeper and medicine man used to live. So, Harry had left the reservation without telling anybody with a Uber (yes, he wasn't as senile fool as everybody thought he was) and gone to Port Angeles, where he had rented a car. And now, two weeks later, he was driving back.

Taking the risk of getting lost in the wilderness had been all worth it. Harry had gotten his adventure, and now he knew what was wrong with the present-day pack and how to help young-Lahote and his sweetheart. These things were very closely linked.

He was so angry that two of his fellow elders had manipulated and interfered with the dynamics of the pack. The truth was that young-Lahote was the true alpha of the pack. He wouldn't probably be happy about it, but it was his destiny.

Jacob Black was the born alpha, but as it had been the case in some packs back in time, it was also with this one: one wolf in the pack was more dominant and more eligible to lead than the lineage alpha, and that wolf was the true alpha of the pack. Paul Lahote was the rightful alpha.

This was why things started to go off rapidly after Paul had imprinted, which confused Paul's wolf. Instead of claiming his mate and becoming the alpha, he was pushed into submission and his true nature hidden from him.

Old Quil and Billy Black had probably realized Paul's true nature when Sam had come to ask the elders about Paul's wolf's need to bite Bella. Harry hadn't been present at that meeting; he hardly ever went. But Sue had, and she had told him about it. Harry had realized it was something significant right away, especially when the others had brushed the urge to bite under the carpet implying Paul was more aggressive than the others. And claiming how him being intimate with anybody else than his imprint, nonexistent at the time, made the deprived wolf go crazy. Sam had been a fool believing everything Old Quil and Billy Black had told him.

If only Paul had trusted his instincts. But that was beside the point; it was unforgettable that the elders had withheld vital information from the pack when they should have been there supporting them.

Billy obviously wanted his son Jacob, future chief to the tribe, the born alpha eventually to become one, and Old Quil, the scum bag racist, didn't want the mighty spirit warriors to have an alpha with a pale face mate.

Old Quil also had some grudge against Paul's father, Jeremy Lahote, who had been a drunken child abuser and a womanizer. If Harry remembered right, Jeremy Lahote had had an affair while still married with a young woman Old Quil had at one point hoped to marry. The woman had fled the reservation and was never seen again. But one could hardly blame the son for the sins of his father. If anything, Old Quil should be proud of the man young-Lahote, one of their spirit warriors, had become despite his childhood.

Because of these pitiful reasons, the whole pack was sent into confusion and brink of getting destroyed. Because the pack wasn't led by its true leader, the members had been confused and in constant disagreement.

Harry couldn't wait to let the bastards know what kind of destruction their actions had caused and hoped to see some remorse in them.

With these thoughts, the drive back to the reservation went fast, and soon he was parking his rental car in front of his house. It was late Sunday night, so Sue should be home, and yes, there she was.

"Harry!" Sue ran outside. "Where have you been? Are you alright? Do you understand how worried we all have been? We thought you were dead!" Sue shouted, tears running down her face.

Harry opened his arms and let his wife run to him and cry against his chest. He had missed her too. Another good reason to go away for a while; it helps you to see what is essential in your life.

"Where have you been?" his wife asked again.

"I had to go and look for a resolution. Everything was falling apart without any specific reason, and I had to find a way to stop it before it was too late. And I wanted to help young-Lahote and Bella. His imprint just wasn't right."

"Did you manage to find anything?" Sue asked, sniffing.

"Yes. I found the way young-Lahote can break the imprint. But it won't be easy. Rachel Black has to be willing to visit the medicine man I visited, take drugs and follow him to the spiritual walk with young-Lahote," Harry told his wife what Kal-lape had told him about the way to break the imprint.

"Young-Lahote has an essential role in all that has been going on, and I need to see him first. I need to see him now; there is no time to waste. And then I'll talk to Sam and Billy and Old Quil. You should be there as well."

"Paul is in the hospital in Forks."

"Why he's there?"

"He's there with Bella. She's been in a coma almost for two weeks now."

AN:

And so the story continues. Motives revealed. What do you think?

Thank you all for your comments, favs, and follows. One of the comments gave me an idea to include more Renée in the story. It was nice to write a bit from her point of view. Was it nice to read?