III. Blue Flame
A lot has changed since she was seventeen and unscathed, laughing at the things he said then in a way that made him feel ten times bigger than he knew he was and asking him to tell her scary stories. He keeps remembering her face that day now, thinking. How much did she already know?
Sam was able to tell Emily everything. More like he couldn't not tell her. He wonders, if he could just see Bella, if he was to imprint on her, if that bond would be strong enough to break the restraint of Sam's order. . .
Walking down the beach by himself, he shakes his head a little as if to jerk that thought out of his head. It may take a miracle to free her from the hold that's on her too, the claim that repulsive leech still has on her, but it won't make him feel better to imagine such an easy solution. That's when he sees the driftwood he and Bella were sitting on that day, where they always sit now, and in a surge of anger and frustration he imagines it burning up in a brilliant blue fire. She already knows everything. The memory of when he told her all of that is as clear to him as if it happened yesterday. Maybe not so much to her, he thinks feeling a faint sting.
Who is he kidding? He knows who his enemies are now - who they're supposed to be. She may not want to know the truth anyway. She may not be able to accept it that easily. Some bonds between people cannot endure anything like true love's kiss breaking a spell in a fairy tale or something. And between the ties she still has to the vampires and her ties to his world, he knows which bond is the strongest and more powerful.
But he keeps thinking of that memory, the instantaneous feeling that they could understand each other, the neat and orderly snapping together of two attracted magnets. Nothing magical about it, yet somehow still so strong. And he keeps thinking of how there are, after all, many varying kinds of bonds between people, a vast spectrum of different colors of feelings, different kinds of fire.