Bella
A round stone table stood in the middle of a clearing in the dark forest, its top smoothed by years of weathering. A burning candle, an ornate old knife, a blank parchment and a long feather quill lay atop the table. I approached the table slowly, my eyes fixed on the candle. It seemed to cast strange shadows all over, even though there were so few and such small objects in sight. Truth be told, there seemed more shadows than actual material things about the table. I kept proceeding still, step by step towards the table that seemed to draw me irresistibly. All of a sudden a violent gust of wind blew through the clearing and the candle was snuffed out. An unknown dread threatened to suffocate me and I felt a scream building up inside me. The wind had stopped as suddenly as it had started. It was dark all around.
I realized dimly that someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes. The flight attendant was asking me to put on my seat belt. The plane was about to land.
I yawned and checked the time on my watch. Charlie had timed it according to GMT. It said 18:12 hours. I calculated in my mind and realized that Charlie would still be at work. I glanced outside the window for my first sight of London and caught my breath. There was just one word for it – overwhelming. That's what all that centuries old, perfectly laid out sprawling mass looked like from up above – overwhelming. This was where I was going to spend the next few weeks, this and some of the English countryside. Charlie said that his family, our family had property in some district in the north-east of England, I wasn't paying attention when he was telling me the name - some 'shire'. Apparently Charlie's grandfather Reginald Swan and his brother Walter had come to blows with their country squire father for some reason and had migrated to the US with his son (my grandpa Bob) and daughter Ethel right before the Wall Street Crash, while his bother relocated to London with his children. I would have imagined that my great granddad must have been in for a nasty surprise mere months after settling in a new country but funnily enough, by the end of 1939, i.e., before the Second World War had started in Europe, he was running a moderately successful woodworks emporium in Washington, which my grandfather started helping out his old man with after he returned from having served in the war. And that was where he first met grandma Marie. They married soon after and my dad Charlie was born. Reginald passed away a while later. They sold the business and moved far west to the opposite side of the country to the quiet, small town of Forks. I would never understand why. Then my dad grew up, joined the police, married my mum Rene; then I was born, my mum left town with me, somewhere in the middle Charlie became Chief Swan and before I knew I was moving in with him so that Rene could travel around with Phil. And here I am now, travelling across an ocean to a whole different country to vacation with people I barely remember meeting. How did this happen to me?
Between coming to live in Forks with Charlie and catching the plane to London, however, a LOT has happened. More things have happened to me than I had to experience all throughout the rest of my life put together. Finding the love of my life. And discovering the little fact that he and his family were not, well, technically human. That's how this had happened to me.
I don't know which happened first – falling in love with Edward or finding out that he was a vampire. I don't think it matters. I loved him. I still do. Only, a lot has happened since the day I fell in love with him, since the day he left me to save me from himself to the day I had to go stop him from getting himself killed by the Volturi, the vampire royalty, because he thought that I had killed myself and couldn't bear to live without me. As romantic and passionate as that sounds, it scared me more than anything else, more than James, Laurent and Victoria trying to kill me or even the Volturi giving me an ultimatum. I was scared at the thought of Edward killing himself. Living without him was bad enough but living in a world where he did not exist? The less said the better.
And then Jacob confessed his love for me. My best friend, my personal sunshine, Jake was a shape-shifting wolf. And he knew I was in love with Edward and he knew just how much. So when Edward came back, he spilled my stupid extreme-sports phase to Charlie and got me grounded. I still couldn't be angry at him. He was my best friend. He reached me where no one else could. He brought me back to life when I had quite given up. I owed him. So even when I knew that I would never love anyone as much as I loved Edward, not even Jake, I knew I loved Jake enough to feel guilty over refusing him. To make things worse, vampires and wolves were mortal enemies and in Edward and Jacob's world, they could not co-exist peacefully. Which would hurt more – losing the love of my life all over again, or never having to see my best friend ever again? What kind of a sick question of choice was that?
Maybe that's why when Charlie tried suggesting not-so-subtly that I take a vacation far away with different people for the umpteenth time, I finally agreed. I don't know if I was only kidding myself. I was afraid that I might change my mind, feel too weak to be able to stay away from Edward, so I decided to leave the following morning itself. Edward had almost killed Jake that night right after Jake kissed me and I fractured my fist by trying to punch him. My hand was still in a cast. The incident mounted my stress. It put a lot of things in perspective too. So I decided it was time to run. No matter that I was travelling to a whole different country. No matter that I was going to live with a whole bunch of people I knew so little about.
I have three cousins, two of whom I vaguely remember from a wedding I attended with Charlie when I was five. Harvey was a shy, quiet kid with serious grey eyes and shortly cropped brown and gold hair, who has a year older than me. He helped me up on my feet when Eugene had pushed me in the mud and then wandered off without a word before I could even say thank you. It had puzzled my five-year old brain but I hadn't given it a second thought. The said Eugene (who was my age) was the one I remembered more clearly because of, needless to say, the well-timed push that had sent me face-down into the mud and destroyed my new pastel pink pinafore frock. He etched his stick thin frame, evilly twinkling blue eyes, and crazy, brown, unevenly chopped hair in my mind more strongly by repeating the deed more times than I could count all throughout the wedding. It was mainly because of him that I was relieved when the event ended and I had to go home.
Harvey is from New York. His mom Jodie was Ethel's daughter, and is Charlie's first cousin. She runs a beauty salon and spa and often sent me exotic fruity smelling shampoos that actually smelled and tasted good enough to eat. We don't really visit each other much, though. Last time I saw Harvey, his voice had just started breaking. That was also the day I first got my period. Needless to say, it was awkward as hell.
My other two cousins where from outside the continent of North America. They were, as Charlie liked to call them, from "the other side of the family." They were Walter Swan's side of the family, the ones who had moved to London while Reginald and his family moved to the US. Walter had two sons and a daughter. His eldest son George had died in the war, while his younger son Rupert was reported missing and assumed dead. His daughter Wilhelmina survived the air raids and married the young heir Sir John Etherege and had a daughter Catherine and a son Clarence. Catherine married a Frenchman and moved to Singapore while Clarence joined the British Embassy and moved all over the world. Apparently they had both come to Forks for Charlie and Rene's wedding along with Jodie. That was the last time the whole family had come together.
Eugene is Catherine's son and three years older than me, which made him 21. Despite having first-hand experience of Eugene's shenanigans, it still felt really weird that he was a topic no one ever broached. Charlie had given me the idea that he was different.
As little as I know about Harvey and Eugene, the one person I have never seen is Carol. She is Clarence's daughter and a year younger than me. I have never met her, nor do I even know what she looks like. I got the impression that relations between Clarence Etherege and Charlie were strenuous at least.
I sighed mentally wondering how I had remembered all those names and places but for some unfathomable reason, Charlie insisted that I know and keep in mind and had been telling me over and over all throughout my grounding period.
The plane had stopped on the runway and my fellow passengers where unbuckling their seat belts while a pleasant female voice with a strong British accent was announcing a welcome message. I took a deep breath and prepared to get off. I had to see this through, for both my sake and Charlie's sake.