A feeling like a white hot iron was thrust at a young girl's forehead. Safina fell to the ground, her limbs rendered useless. She felt the blood rushing from the wound in her forehead, watching the scene in front of her unfold. Jasper appeared in her sight, an unknown pale body attached to his back. The brunette clinging to him clawed at his neck, chunks of pale marble falling to the ground. In a split second, Jasper's head fell to the ground, rolling next to Safina, who let a piercing scream into the air.
Sweat drenched the white pillow Safina's head lay on. When she finally woke from the never ending nightmare, the teenager was quick to leave her bed, not wanting any sort of reminder of the previous events. Inhaling deeply, Safina knocked on her brother's door, hoping he was awake or sleeping lightly enough to hear her.
Answering with a slight frustration, Gabriel sighed at the sight of his teary eyed sister, opening the door for her to enter.
"You're lucky I was working on my essay otherwise you might have had to sleep in the hall," he smiled at her as she laid down on his bed.
Gabriel was used to letting his younger sister into his room late at night, her constant nightmares leaving her unable to sleep alone. He understood, while his night terrors had decreased drastically, they also reduced him to sobbing and the inability to sleep.
"Don't snore too loud, you might wake the neighbors," Gabe laughed as a pillow grazed his head. Before the hour had passed, Safina had fallen asleep peacefully.
Yelling startled the amber teen awake. She ran downstairs to see what was happening, not expecting to see her brother seething with anger, yelling at their father with pure malice.
"If you cared half as much as you say you do, you would have invited us down here more than once every fourteen years!" Elliot remained calm in the face of his son's painful words.
"Son, it wasn't safe for you two to come down here, especially you," Safina couldn't understand why her father wasn't yelling back. She wondered why he hadn't snapped, grounding her brother for being disrespectful like their mother would have, not that she ever had to. Until that point, Safina had never seen Gabriel yell at anyone, with the exception of the boy who pulled his sister's hair in the fourth grade.
Silence filled the air, tension quick to follow at the confusing words Elliot was spouting. Gabriel rolled his eyes, the answer clearly not good enough for him. He began stomping off to his room, when Safina stopped him, worried he would hole himself up like he had done when their mother passed.
"Wait!" The family quickly looked to the girl though she remained focused on her brother, "Wanna go to the beach?" He looked at her, then back to his room and nodded. The siblings walked to their rooms to get dressed, preparing for the cold of the outdoors.
The green forest surrounded Gabriel and Safina as they journeyed through, Safina listening for the crashing of waves. Eventually, she found the clearing of trees signaling the entrance to La Push beach. When they stepped onto the sand of the beach, Safina immediately hear a familiar, twinkling voice and looked up to see Renesmee waving her and Gabriel over.
The first thing Gabriel noticed was the amount of shirtless guys throwing around a football.
"You play?" Gabe looked to see Jacob holding out the ball to him.
"Yeah, actually I got into Harvard, I'm gonna try out for the team," he received surprised looks from everyone save his sister, who sported a proud look for her brother.
As a black car pulled into the parking lot of the beach, Safina ran to Jasper, throwing her arms around his neck as he smiled at her. In the moment, Safina didn't even notice her brother shaking with newly formed anger, heat literally radiating off of his body. When she did, her immediate reaction was to run to him but was stopped halfway by Renesmee holding her back.
"Stay back!" Jacob's voice boomed as Safina turned back to her brother only to see him there for a second, but a wolf the next. The wolf growled, slashing its large paw in the air as Jacob held his hands up, seemingly trying to calm him. Turning back to the bronze-skinned girl, he said, "Safina, call your dad." Following his demand, a large russet wolf also took his place, running after her brother - who she hadn't even noticed ran off.
It only took five minutes for Elliot to show up at the beach where Safina sat in the sand, dumbfounded at the experience she just had. When her brother stepped out of the woods, an excessively large towel was draped around his body. Elliot handed him a stack of clothes as Jacob led him a house on the reservation.
Safina noticed her father's nod to Jasper, who courteously nodded back. His expression slightly changed as he noticed that the vampire's arm had found its way around his daughter's waist.
"I'm sure you would like to know what happened," Elliot's voice called out to his children, leading them to nod furiously. "Well I don't know how much your mother told you so I'll start from the beginning. Your mother's mom and mine were best friends. They both happened to fall in love with Quileute men, whose legends told of shifting into wolves to protect the world from the Cold Ones." Safina noticed her father's eyes shift to Jasper and Nessie.
"According to the legends the men of the Quileute tribe shift into wolves at the nearby existence of vampires. I shifted at 16 and, as our parents predicted, your mother and I began to date. We had Gabe at 18 and 'Fina at 20. You also may not know that Cherie is part Makah, and so is Sam's wife, Emily," he gestured towards a tall russet-skinned man whose arm was wrapped around the waist of another tan woman who had three claw-like marks adorning the left side of her face.
Elliot took a deep breath and continued, "When we met, my world shifted: I had imprinted. Your mother understood and took you two as far as she could so you could live normal lives without shifters or Cold Ones. We knew with the Cullens in Forks, you were definitely gonna shift. I hoped for a better life for you."
"Can I still go to Harvard?" Gabriel's worried expression dampened with sadness as his father didn't answer.
"The pack has certain responsibilities. It's the exact reason I kept you away," Elliot didn't look his son in the eyes as his authoritative voice spoke. He soon looked at Safina, worry replaced with a hint of anger, "When were you gonna tell me about your boyfriend?"