Onset
Sam watched from the far end of the street in horror as the leech jumped out the second story window of Chief Swan's house. It took every ounce of self control he had to not follow after her and force an explanation for her intrusion but he knew he didn't have time for that. Jared was standing watch outside Paul's house and, from the sound of what was going on inside, it was nearly time. He was dying to know what the blonde bloodsucker was doing in Bella's house but he also knew he had a tribal obligation to be there for Paul the first time he phased. No one had been there for him when it was his time and he would never allow any of his brothers to go through the same thing.
He growled in frustration as he turned away from the house and began his run back towards La Push. Through the consciousness he shared with Jared when they were both in their wolf forms he could hear Paul moaning and tossing in his bed, his breathing frantic and heavy. Sam picked up his pace, he was running at top speed now.
They didn't have much time, it could be any minute now.
You need to get him out of there in case his family walks in. We need to get him into the woods, he'll be safest there.
As soon as Sam thought the command, Jared quickly phased back into his human form, as they had planned, and went to try and get Paul out of the house. He and Jared had been watching him for awhile now, determining that he would probably be the next, and last, member to join the pack. There have always been three, the elders told them.
As he ran, now alone in his consciousness, he shifted his thoughts to the Swan girl. Something was off with her, to be sure. He was also pretty sure that, whatever it was, the vampires were involved. He had thought as much initially, the way his skin crawled when she shook his hand and how she seemed so curious about the family. His fears were confirmed by what he just witnessed. He had heard the girl get in the shower which meant she was alive. For the moment, it would have to be enough but he felt torn leaving before he could make sure she hadn't been harmed.
In the end, his surveillance trip had yielded him little new information. Because of what was going on with Paul, he didn't have the time to look for more clues yet. Hopefully, it wouldn't be too long before Paul was useful, then between the three of them they should be able to figure this thing out.
As he approached the house where Paul lived with his family he looked up to the window that he knew belonged to his friend. The light was off but Sam was sure they had not left the house yet. He would be able to smell them if they had already ran off into the woods. He listened. They were coming down the stairs.
Sam didn't move from his place along the tree line that led into the forest that surrounded the reservation, he knew that Jared would be able to see him waiting there. As he watched them walk towards him, Sam could hear Jared trying to reassure Paul that everything was going to be ok. He still had no idea what was coming.
Paul stopped cold about a hundred feet from the forest line. He saw the giant wolf standing in the trees staring back at him. He looked frantically to Jared, who had started backing away from him slowly.
"What the hell is going on, man?"
"It's going to be okay, Paul, we're here to look after you." Jared was moving to position himself between Paul and his house, in case he tried to run back.
Paul was shaking in anger, his hands curled into fists at his side. He kept looking back and forth between his friend and the wolf in the forest. "We? What the hell is that supposed to…"
He never finished his thought. The rest of the sentence came out as nothing more than an angry growl.
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Bella was standing in the woods, it was dark. She knew she should be running from something but she didn't know what. "Bella we have to go, hurry," someone said, she recognized the voice as Mike Newton's. She looked to him in time to watch him run off ahead of her.
She didn't like feeling left behind but she wasn't alone for long. Jacob Black was now standing beside her. "It's going to be okay, Bella, I'll protect you." He said to her, but he was looking at something else, staring forward intently as he stepped in front of her and crouched down as if preparing to pounce on something. She instantly felt scared for him and then her eyes found what he was looking at in the dark.
Edward Cullen, his pale skin practically glowing in the darkness of the woods. His eyes were black tonight, dangerous, and he was walking towards them. He extended his hand and she knew the offer was meant for her. She looked back to Jacob but he was no longer there. In his place was the largest wolf she had ever seen, growling, also dangerous.
Edward stopped and smiled ruefully. He had two teeth now that were longer than the rest in his mouth. "It's too late for you to save her. She's already mine."
As he began to move forward again, she could feel the wolf bristle in anger at what he just heard. She felt an urge to step in between them; she wanted to reassure them both that everything would be okay. There was no need for this. Then the wolf moved. He lunged forward, teeth bared, aiming for the neck.
Bella shuttered at her memory of the dream that woke her so early this morning.
As she stepped out of the hot shower, Bella was trying to convince herself that the best way to come to terms with it was to keep repeating it to herself, matter-of-factly, over and over again.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
She got dressed.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
She checked herself in the mirror.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
She made herself breakfast.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
She went upstairs to her computer and clicked it on.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
She pulled up her a browser with her favorite search engine, typed in one word and took a deep breath.
"Let's see if Edward Cullen is a vampire," she said as she clicked the search button.
Bella spent most of the morning "researching" vampires. Most of the websites she was directed to were not very helpful, a blogger who claims to track vampires, a site dedicated to rating the hotness of vampires in different movies, an Anne Rice fan site. There was, however, some seemingly useful information. There was a paper some college professor wrote that talked about the evolution of the vampire myth through history. It was interesting but told her little more than the history of how humans told vampire stories, not about vampires themselves.
One site, , was a whole vampire encyclopedia that broke down trait by trait different kinds and characteristics of vampires. That was really useful, even though Bella typically knew better than to trust information from a website that underwent unrestricted public editing.
She very consciously tried to keep her thoughts rational as she started to compare the information she was reading with the information she got from Jacob and that she had observed herself. There were definitely some things that matched.
Pale skin. Almost every description of vampires she read started with pale skin and Edward was pale, paler than her. It was one of the traits his whole family shared.
Speed. He obviously had to be fast, how else could he have gotten across the parking lot so fast that morning he saved her life?
Indestructible. She still vividly remembered the Edward shaped dent in Tyler's van.
Cold. Jacob had referred to the vampires as 'cold ones' when he was telling her his scary stories at the beach yesterday. Bella remembered the cold touch of his fingers as they trailed across her face. At the time she assumed it was the cold air that chilled them.
Immortal. If the Quileute stories were true, then this one would fit, too. Jacob said that Dr. Cullen had negotiated a treaty with his great-grandfather, a treaty that Jacob himself broke yesterday by talking to her.
She paused to think a moment about Jacob. He obviously did not believe a word of what he was telling her and she had pretended the same. He didn't know that she was taking him very seriously. She felt bad about using him as she did, worse about the way she tricked him it. It hurt because she actually did really like Jacob. He was the first person she met in Forks who seemed to get her; the first person it was easy and completely effortless to make conversation with. She hoped he wouldn't get in trouble for talking to her yesterday.
The thought brought her back to the task at hand. Her mind refused to be distracted any longer.
There was one problem that every vampire myth seemed to contradict. Vampires cannot come out during the day, but Edward and his family were at school nearly every day. Dr. Cullen was at the hospital in the morning when she first met him. Bella felt very conflicted on this point. On the one hand, she knew it was possible that myths were just stories and therefore sometimes got things wrong. But she also couldn't deny that there was a part of her that clung to this discrepancy tightly as a hope that her theory was wrong.
There were lots of reasons she wanted to prove herself wrong, but one more than any other. It was the last trait that all vampires seemed to share. The thing that made a vampire a vampire, something Jacob had also mentioned, something that always made her uneasy.
Blood.
As soon as the word entered her head she felt her heart start to race. Every hair on her body stood on end. She stood up immediately, knocking her desk chair over behind her, and pushed the power button on the computer. That was enough research for the day. The reality of what she had been trying to make her mind process came crashing down on her and she knew that, discrepancies or not, she could not deny it.
Edward Cullen was a vampire.
She couldn't sit still, her hands were shaking and she suddenly felt claustrophobic in her room. She ran downstairs and grabbed her coat, knowing only that she needed to get out of that house.
She wasn't thinking about what she was doing, only about the blood. Images of the beautiful boy with bronze hair kept flashing in her head. She didn't like to think of him as dangerous but in her head he looked it to her now. And yet he always still looked like an angel. An angel covered in blood. Every image was stained red.
She let her mind wander back to her dream. There had to be something she was missing. Even then, in the moment before the wolf moved, she felt anxious but never scared. She recognized the danger in his eyes but part of her knew that he was not a danger to her. He had never hurt her, never made her feel unsafe.
In fact, she would not be alive right now were it not for Edward Cullen. He saved her life that day. He kept her alive. Surely, he had to be different from the monsters she had just read about. And his father was a doctor, he healed people. He had healed her. She trembled for a moment at the thought of Dr. Cullen leaning in, hunger replacing the usual kindness in his eyes, towards an open wound on one of his patients before she quickly shut the image out of her mind.
No, he was good, they both were. She couldn't rationalize it but she just knew that it had to be true. Good vampires. Surely there were some. She had read about them this morning. They were scarce, but there definitely were stories about good vampires. Even Jacob had said that the Cullens were not supposed to be a threat to humans. That's why his great-grandfather had agreed to make peace with them. They were good vampires. Definitely good. The thought allowed her to calm back down and pay attention to where she was.
Bella realized she was on the road. She must have gotten in the truck and started driving in her attempt to get away from the house and her computer but she had no recollection of it. She was on the highway. She wasn't familiar enough with the road to know how far she had gone but she figured she had to be close to La Push. She pulled over and turned the engine off as she tried to get control of her breathing.
Edward Cullen is a vampire.
The phrase held more weight and meaning in her head than it had all morning. For the first time all day, she allowed herself to think forward. He is a vampire, so what did that mean for her?
She saw three options before her. The first was to run away or, at least, cut off all contact with him. She could start treating him like he had treated her, cold and distant. She could tell him they couldn't be friends like he kept telling her they shouldn't be.
She smiled to herself, his odd behavior suddenly becoming clearer. It was more evidence of his protecting her. It's still better if we're not friends, but I'm tired of trying to stay away from you, Bella. She suddenly understood not only what that meant but also how that felt. She knew that, if she was right, they shouldn't be friends, but she also knew that option one was not actually an option at all. She was too invested in him, she couldn't just ignore him and keep her distance. If she was honest with herself, she knew that she craved his company too much. It didn't really change what she felt for him.
She laughed at herself. The fact that he was a vampire didn't really change how she felt about him. What was wrong with her?
The second option was to just pretend like she didn't know. Maybe she could just act like she was still clueless until she knew for sure she was right. But that wouldn't work either. She knew that she craved answers almost as much as she craved his company.
That left option three: confrontation. After all, he had promised her answers and, given what she thought she knew now, she could never resist the opportunity to get them. She imagined meeting him for the first time since her revelation. She believed that he would answer her honestly, it was hard to doubt the sincerity in his eyes that night at the theater.
The theater. She was suddenly aware again of the pain in her shoulder. Jacob's scary stories had driven thoughts of her ailment out of her head. She was so focused on what she had learned about Edward that she had completely forgotten about it. The pain in the center was still as intense as ever but the dull tingling that spread out from it was hardly noticeable, except that it still seemed to be spreading further.
Edward knew what was wrong with her shoulder, that was something he had promised to explain to her. Her imagination started to sort through the possibilities, possibilities she wouldn't have considered before today. Her thoughts weren't coherent. It was as if her consciousness didn't want anything to do with this question. Yet she kept going back to the idea of a bug bite.
She drew in a sharp breath. Bugs aren't the only creatures known for biting human beings. Vampires bite, too.
Bella sat there in cold numbness. She wasn't ready to accept that possibility. It contradicted the good vampire theory that she was clinging to with all that was left of her sanity. She pushed it out of her head. Edward would tell her what happened and it would explain everything. There had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation. The sickening feeling in her stomach told her that she was probably fooling herself, but her mind had accepted enough for one day, it wasn't ready to deal with this. Not yet.
She reached her hand down towards the key that was still sitting in the ignition. She didn't get the chance to turn it, though, before she felt the truck shake beneath her. Panicked, she looked into the rear view mirror.
In it, she saw a giant wolf with dark grey hair staring back at her, growling.
The poor girl was frozen with her hand on the key as the wolf jumped up on the roof, then the hood of her car. He turned slowly to look at her and Bella would have sworn that there was recognition in its eyes. They stared at each other for several seconds before the other one showed up.
The second wolf, bigger than the first came out of the woods from the right and lunged at the one perched on the hood of the truck. Bella could clearly see its teeth sink into the neck of the one staring at her as both tumbled off the vehicle and into the road. The injured wolf got up quickly and ran into the forest, the second following it closely behind.
That was when she noticed the third. It was standing directly in front of the truck looking right at her. She couldn't move, her eyes locked with those staring back at her. As quickly as it had appeared, though, the wolf left following the other two into the woods.
Enough, she thought.
She immediately turned the key, starting the engine on her truck. She made an illegal u-turn on the highway and started racing back towards Forks. This was too much. She needed answers and she needed them now. She grabbed her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the number she had saved to it just the day before.
She waited as the phone rang once, twice. She heard the line click over.
"Good morning, Bella" a velvety voice greeted her.
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Author's Note: So if we're being honest I'm not super thrilled with my work on this chapter, but for now it's the best I could do at the moment. Maybe I'll go back and make changes later. As always, please let me know what you think.