Carlisle was in my doorway, yelling, "Bella!" At the top of his lungs. Esme and Jasper were close behind, and although Edward's teeth were still on me and I felt a throbbing pain, a sense of tranquility came over me.

Enraged, Emmett suddenly barreled through the doorway, nearly knocking Jasper and Esme aside, and threw his arms around Edward's waist.

Edward let out an animal-like shout, and suddenly they were rolling around on the floor, grunting.

Esme raced to my side. "Bella!" She cried, looking at my wound. I was already slipping. I could feel the blood slowly drying up, but I could also feel the intense pain, the feeling that my veins were on fire. It was slowly spreading, too; down my lungs. They contracted, and I forgot how to breathe.

I was surprised that Jasper hadn't thrown himself on me and wasn't sucking me dry. I was surprised that Esme wasn't, really. I didn't know they had so much self-control. Either way, there was no more fresh blood coming out of me at the moment.

When the pain reached my heart, I let out an ear-splitting scream, before I could stop myself. I tried to clap a hand over my mouth, but it was like my hands weren't working. I looked up, my vision swirling like soup, and Esme looked like if she could cry, she would.

Edward and Emmett had stopped scuffling. It was later explained to me that Edward seemed to snap out of his strange mood when he heard my scream; a second later he was at my side, staring down at me, and mumbling things like, "I'm so sorry. Bella. Where does it hurt? I'm sorry, love. I can't believe…." He sounded incredulous, dreading. And then he took my hand in his, and I instantly felt a little better.

But not so much better. The pain was still like hell. It was spreading slowly, so slowly that I writhed in anguish every time it moved along. I was aware that I was shaking, moving in my painful state, trying to get it to stop; just anything, just to make it stop.

When I opened my eyes again, Edward was gone, and Emmett was in his place. I felt my world crash down around me, and it felt like the intense pain I was feeling had suddenly doubled, or tripled.

Jasper returned with a wet cloth, which he pressed to my forehead. It helped a little, but I needed that wet cloth everywhere; currently my stomach, which hurt the most.

It was going to be a long, long three days.

I slipped in and out of consciousness, aware of the burning sensation more and more every time I opened my eyes. It was like every time I awoke, the feeling worsened. I had expected that maybe by day two or three I would be used to the pain; but it hurt more than ever with each increasing hour.

I think that it's physically impossible to live through that. If I weren't morphing into a vampire, I would've definitely died. I'm pretty sure that humans can't tolerate that amount of pain without kicking the bucket. But somehow someone up there felt like bestowing hell on Earth to me, and that was exactly what I got.

Being a vampire definitely couldn't be worse than this.

Hour after hour, I felt the pain shoot through me. The weirdest impression, by far, was when I could actually feel things changing; like my fingers, or my stomach, or my face, or my legs. I wished I were prettier, just so that maybe it wouldn't hurt so much to rearrange me into perfection.

I could feel the muscles growing on me, too. My arms felt stronger, and my legs, too; and then they were sore like crazy, even as the ache continued to bust through me.

Different faces appeared at different times; Carlisle, Jasper, even Rosalie. Esme was a twenty-four-hour fixation, although she did leave once to go hunting, as I understood it. I think Alice made an appearance once, too, when Carlisle had left for a second. It was probably the only time the whole time that I was left alone, and even then, it might have been my imagination. Either way, Alice—or my dream Alice—held my hand and spoke words of comfort to me, and then looked sad a lot and kissed me on the forehead and said something else that I couldn't hear. I had a strange sense of what her words were, but at the time I forced them away because the throbbing in my whole body was too distracting and I didn't really want to think about what she had just said. And then she squeezed my hand again, and left, just as Carlisle came in the door.

I wasn't really sure if I wanted Alice to be real or not. It was a hard decision, especially after what she had said.

I didn't keep track of time, but I think somewhere around day two, I felt my mind begin to change, too. I can't say exactly what, but it was like it deepened and expanded. My hearing seemed to get better, and I could see farther away.

But mostly those three days were boring. The hurting never went away, and it intensified with every day, but all I did was lie there in my misery, for seventy-two hours.

When it finally ended, my whole body was aching. I felt like heaven had come, though, when those spouts of pain came to an end, and I had my body back. Esme was there, and she was smiling wide when I stopped fidgeting and opened my eyes to her.

"Look in the mirror," she whispered to me.

I got up—slowly, hesitantly, feeling for differences—and walked in my soreness towards the closet. There was a full-length mirror there, and I positioned myself in front of it, and then, slowly, opened my eyes.