IX.
The flames receded in waves, a tenebrous tide that alternated between agony and anaesthetized dullness.
Touch returned to Bella's leaden limbs, disclosing her prone position upon a narrow bed with sweat-sullied sheets. A susurrus of voices reached her ears soon after, words spilling in a language that she did not comprehend, distorted into dreariness by stonework. In the periphery, she could detect mournful music, an arching, lonely lullaby plucked from a cello's tautened strings, while something much like laughter lingered in the foreground.
The revelation of her scent was subtle; a whisper of freesia coiled in the air and she nearly gagged upon the cloying, vernal sweetness. Immediately, her foreign mind questioned every purring endearment that had escaped immortal lips in her presence, praising the delights that were her skin and blood.
Thirst.
A blistering, bone-edged inferno ignited within her throat, searing skin away and leaving her gasping. Nothing, neither thought nor restraint, could elude the vicious heat, turning a girl into a growling, gasping beast whose humanity went no deeper than flesh. In a desperate haze, she rose onto unsteady toes and circled the room.
Vanity halted her footfalls in front of a slender dressing mirror, catching meagre candlelight beside a spindly chair. The creature gazing at her from the glass was merely lovely, and Bella felt cold fingernails bury themselves within the soundless cavity of her ribs. Certainly, her features were a paean to Grecian symmetry, rendered in perfect arches and deceptive softness but there was something absent, marking this moment of triumph with restless, chafing uncertainty. The unfamiliar pallor and grace of her rounded limbs evoked a moment of near-vertigo, and Bella clutched the frail birch of the chair with clawing hands.
Her nakedness, the raw, revolting silk of an immortal body, frightened her. She did not dare look at her high, arching breasts, the darkness pooling between slim thighs.
In a frantic, breathless gesture, Bella lifted a dress from a low table precisely draped with clothes. It was not a cloak, and the hue of the weave was so fair, so close to colourlessness that not even the lowliest of guards, the ungifted and newborn, wore it.
Her position, it seemed, was neither attained nor assured.
"Bella." A polite voice entered the room, impersonal and unconcerned. This was Felix, she decided, detecting the fire-edged scent of the burly guard. Somehow, she had thought him boisterous, Emmett's bounding doppelganger amongst the Italians, but he seemed remote now, heavy as the tolling of remote bells.
"When can I feed?" she demanded, immediately shocked by the command in her voice, the cadences of authority that thirst had wrought, terrible and ever-expanding.
"Aro wishes to see you," he announced, distant and deadly.
Although her thoughts wove themselves into a crimson maelstrom, a rushing, maddening demand to disobey and destroy, Bella pulled on her moonlit garments, her silver-clasped boots, and let her hair fall free. Such a small thing seemed an act of rebellion, and grave-gray fear outmatched the desire to drink.
Perhaps, it could be called a victory that Felix guarded her now, not wrenlike Renata.
[-]
The Volturi had gathered; the ellipse of the throne-room was edged with immortals, their cloaks a gradient of steel and night. The younger guards, innocent in their silvery garb, whispered and wondered as Bella passed, but granite stillness reined absolute when the ranks blackened. The disciplined survivors of a thousand battles were not charmed by a girl, and doubt trickled over Bella's skin, whimsical and maddening as mercury when she passed through the forest of stone faces.
If she presented no enigmas to young Alec or burly Felix, then—thoughts about Aro turned jagged, too cutting to hold between shredded fingers.
Upon the dais, a quartet of familiar faces watched her, wary and waiting. Marcus' gaze wandered in the middle distance while Caius' customary smirk marked his opinion that she had been measured, judged and found wanting. Behind him, catlike Athenodora smiled, pretty and amused. Bella did not dare to look at Aro; the memories were too fresh, raw and seeping crimson at the edges, and she knew that her features were treacherous.
Sulpicia's absence tore her insides to ribbons. A handful of days ago, she would have rejoiced in the same circumstances, considering herself victor over Aro's mate, but she could see that the Volturi were creatures of gesture and propriety. Snubbing one's wife before an audience would not be done, prevented by decorum if not compassion.
Aro rose from his throne, majestic in the ebony regalia of a reign that lasted three thousand years. His arms were open, an emblem of welcome marred by the distance threaded between them, drawn into knots and nooses.
"Well, well," he said, his voice sparkling like sunlit winter. "You are indeed a lovely immortal, my dear Bella. Would you not say so, brothers?"
Although the words were benevolence itself, some shade of an insult pervaded the sentiment behind them, a ghostly, chanting reminder that exquisiteness was insufficient beside its formidable elder sibling, power.
Caius and Marcus held their peace, but she supposed they were better left alone, for neither man obscured meaning behind lilting speech.
"My friends, it delights me to introduce Isabella. Please, be kind to her. Before she made our acquaintance, she considered herself a Cullen," Aro said to his guard, and fluting laughter wove its way through the lower ranks.
Carlisle, it seemed, left an impression.
"Now, my sweet," Volterra's lord said, intimate and intricate once more, "you must be thirsty, and I do not wish to be a poor host."
As though his words were an invocation, Sulpicia untangled herself from a puddle of darkness in one of the porticos.
A small boy curved at her side, his hand carefully curled in the cool grip of his corpse-pale guardian. The child was not afraid, his heartbeat steady, and Bella immediately remembered the age of make-believe, when a lady of spun silk and summer could only be a princess, though her crimson eyes spoke of slaughter. A falling, wheeling moment passed before she realized that the earth-haired child was nothing more than blood caught beneath fragile skin as soon as he had entered the palazzo with his long-dead parents.
"No—no, I can't," Bella began, a cogent protest dying upon her lips as the blaze in her throat encompassed her mind.
"Bella mia, if you are to be like us, you must feed properly. We do not have enough animals here to sustain your descent into the Cullens' habits. Besides," Aro said, with a graceful arabesque of his fingers, "I prefer it when my guards refrain from acting like aberrations to their very natures."
Sulpicia scooped the boy into her arms, and he clung to her as any child would. It took her a moment to pry his chubby hands from hair, and then his warm weight was pressed against Bella's chest, trusting and curious.
"Go on, my dear," Aro encouraged, as though he knew that the madness of unsatisfied bloodlust had already stolen her heart from her.
Bella intended to make it a gentle death, unpredicted and soundless. The black-mawed monster behind her eyes had other ideas.
[-]
"Brava, Isabella," Aro chirped, examining the rivulets of crimson painting her front. "Tell me, how are you feeling?"
No words left her throat, for there was no describing the greatest delight she had savoured in her short years and the most abhorrent crime she could perpetrate, tangled into a few ghastly moments.
"Ah, no matter, my dear. Moments of magnitude are beyond even immortal description. We are, of course, very proud," he continued, though no-one displayed even a shade of the sentiment in question.
"Renata," Aro said gently, calling the heart-shaped creature away from her position in the penumbra of his throne. She slipped forward, delicate as a child masquerading in priests' cowling robes. "I ask you to travel to America with Demetri. Find the Cullens, wherever they might be, and let them know that their beloved Isabella is safe and well. Show them, little one, what a glorious creature she has become."
Renata's china mouth bowed into her ordinary, paper-doll smile; her fine fingers were looped with Demetri's in a moment.
Bella bit back a scream, tearing her lips and leaving smarting, sickle scars. Edward would see her actions writ large in Renata's guileless mind and the Cullens would never take her back. Esme would never speak to her, sweet Esme who had lost a little boy, and Carlisle who had saved a thousand lives in his few centuries of practise—
"Bella, come along with me. You as well, darling Jane. We have a gift to test," Aro sang, and the mahogany-haired girl's mourning was cut short. Once more, her worth was in question, and she could scarcely stand.
Author's Note: I apologize for the appalling lack of updates, and I assure you that my excuses are mundane as can be. My thanks goes out to those people who nudged me to write more. It produced results :)
A Happy New Year to all of you!