EPOV
Bella laughed. I twirled her around in my arms, lifting her waist to nearly my shoulders. The sun brought out a reddish tint to her wavy brown hair, making sequoia quickly become my favorite color.
"Bella, come on!" I yelled cheerfully, setting her down and pulling her by the hand up a grassy hill. The time was perfect—the sun was just setting, casting a wide array of pastels across the skies.
We collapsed on the very crest of the hill, leaning against each other in laziness. This moment was perfect.
"Bella…" I whispered. She leaned her head against my shoulder.
"Yes?" Came her sweet angel's voice.
"Bella." I turned my head and gently pushed her chin to look at me. "I think I lo…"
I hesitated and my breath caught in my throat. Bella's eyes were too deep: like they were looking into my soul. It mesmerized me to the point of incoherency. What do you do when you love someone so much you can't even say it?
A shot rang in the air, and suddenly I was outside Bella's kitchen, my mind unconsciously playing the worst hour of my life.
But this time, it wasn't just the murderer that came out; he was dragging Bella behind him before the burly man I had been fighting picked her up and swung my Bella over his shoulder.
"BELLA!!!" I screamed, but nothing was heard. I tried to lift me hand, but it felt dead. Everything melted away into black, and then a knife came out of the darkness and practically carved my ribcage like a dead cow right in front of me. And I couldn't do anything about it. At the same time, daggers appeared and stabbed at my shoulder. I began to thrash with pain.
CPOV
"God damn it, Noelle!" I shrieked, completely out of character for me. "Get the bloody power back! He's gaining consciousness!"
Edward was beginning to tremble, twitching his body from his head to his toes. I watched in horror as his hand went to his chest, probably expecting to feel skin, but instead plunged below his ribcage and touched the thin skin around the end of his bare stomach. I could see the bottoms of his left lung quickening its pace and expanding and contracting faster.
"Hert, get me some painkiller!" I shouted at one of the nurses. He quickly bustled away to the counter, clutching a flashlight, and began running his hands through one of the drawers.
"Found it!" The nurse called. He tossed the cased needle to me, and I quickly injected Edward's IV with it.
"Carlisle, the circuit breaker's locked!" Noelle said from the doorway.
"Damn it!" I muttered. Then in a louder voice, "We need to get him under again! Somebody please tell me you have a back-up generator at this hospital!"
"We do." Another doctor said. He walked over to me. "It's in the west wing of the hospital, at the end of the main hallway, big door that says 'Electrical Maintenance', access code is 57482. Once you get in, just flip the switch to 'On' and get back here as fast as you can."
I nodded quickly and rushed out of the operation room and to the lobby. Though I was reluctant to leave Edward right in the middle of his operation (even disregarding the fact that he was becoming conscious with his chest completely cut open), but this was the only way to get him under again.
In the lobby, there were at least a dozen people, including the receptionist, completely freaking out. My sprinting past them did no good.
"Somebody! Somebody help!" I heard Jasper's voice and my chest constricted. As if things couldn't get any worse, Isabella was probably dying, too.
"Jasper, what's happened?" I yelled as I neared Isabella's room, which was on the way to the generator. The door was locked. "Jasper, open this door!"
"I'm not opening this door until the girl wakes up." A low voice said. I panicked.
"Jasper, who is that?" I asked, worried. I began pounding on the door when he didn't answer. A girl began crying, and there was a crash and the sound of breaking glass. "Jasper, was that—"
"Bella!" He screamed. I heard the other man laugh. "You murderer!"
I gasped. The man killed Isabella? I was torn between helping Jasper and helping Edward. Both could die.
JPOV
"You murderer!" I screamed at the deathly familiar man, picking Bella up off the floor and comforting her. Tears were still flowing down her face, but the shock of getting hit off her bed with a beaker, which now lay in pieces on the covers of her bed, kept her from moving. She never failed to amaze me with how into things she was when still in her coma.
The man kept on laughing. I recognized his mocking laugh from the day Alice died. He murdered my Alice. My sweet, innocent Alice. A fury ignited my inside like a fuse.
"I remember you!" He cackled. "How's the knee doing? Still up and running, I see. I'm so disappointed. I thought a bullet to the leg would do much more damage than that!"
My nostrils flared and I gently put Bella down on Edward's empty bed, which she instantly relaxed on, for some reason, without taking my narrowed eyes off Alice's murderer. For a second, my eyes flicked to a piece of sharp, broken glass glinting in the dim light coming from a street light outside the window.
"Don't even think about it." The man growled, taking a gun out of his pocket and pointing it at me. He chuckled darkly. "Should I just end your misery right now?"
Yes… yes… yes… Alice's part of me chanted. But that stopped when I involuntarily looked at Bella. No… no… no… I was torn. Do I want my love or my sister?
"I think I shall."
The man didn't give me any time to think. My eyes snapped back up to his right as he pulled the trigger.
EPOV
Someone had given me a strip of material—leather, I think—to bit on. They were also holding my flailing arms and legs down.
"Somebody get his heart rate down!"
That's right. I was going to bleed to death if the pain didn't kill me first. With as much calm as I could muster through the searing pain in my torso, I began taking deep breaths, no matter how much like gasps them seemed. My hands clenched around the bed railings so tightly I thought I heard my knuckles cracking.
"Martin, he just broke the railing."
"WHAT?!"
The statement was almost enough to make me freeze. Key word: almost
"Somebody please get Carlisle in here!" But at that moment, a door slammed open and someone's gulping breaths entered my ears, twice as quick as mine. "Carlisle! Where have you been?! Look at what just ha—"
"Martin—I—don't—care—about—the—bed!" Carlisle panted. "Someone—got— Jasper—and—Isabella!"
My eyes snapped open. Almost like an enraged animal, they took in my surroundings in a split second before I shot a bewildered look at Carlisle. He looked almost as surprised as when Bella started laughing in her coma.
"Who?" I asked quickly, almost like it was just a clicking of my tongue, like it was an insect. "Where?"
"Edward, your chest is cut open showing your ribs, lungs, and stomach." Carlisle all but calmly explained as several of the nurses ran out the door, one of them wielding a scalpel. If this wasn't unbelievably scaring, I would have actually laughed. "Anything that happened to you would damage your organs."
"Carlisle, I can't just sit here and wait for whoever it is to kill my Bella!" I raised my bloody hands to my eyes, which began getting watery. Carlisle wasn't saying anything, and I didn't think it was his silent consent to let me go.
"Edward," He started slowly, "I think 'your' Bella is dead."
BPOV
I heard a gunshot and my eyes snapped open. For the first time in… God knows how long, I could actually see clearly. Nothing was in haze—and that wasn't very appealing at the moment.
"Jasper!" I screamed and sobbing simultaneously. A shadow across the room, a man, as I soon realized (though he—it—was a poor excuse for one), chuckled as if he had merely tapped a house of cards just to see what happens. He appeared not to have heard me.
"Huh, I guess he's not the one after all." He shrugged, but I froze. His voice was familiar—it was the same one that had been haunting my dreams ever since he killed Alice. "Guess that means the girl…"
The murderer spun over to where I sat half-off a bed, smirking victoriously. However, his smirk disappeared as his eyes focused and his bushy, disgustingly greasy brows furrowed. I was silent as a rock, and just about as immobile as one, too. My legs twitched, urging me to go to Jasper, who lied in a pile of his own blood and had a bloody hole right between his scary open eyes. It took all I had to not rush out and sob as loud as I could.
"Where…?" Alice and Jasper's murderer asked himself, confused. I cocked my head at him. Did he not see the girl standing right in front of him? I didn't feel like testing my theory.
We both flinched when somebody kicked the door down in a flurry of woodchips and glass shards. The broken door hit the floor by the man, nearly banging on his ankle.
"Mr. Swan?"
My lip trembled as I bit it hard to keep quiet. There was a chance that the man, who was quickly becoming distracted by the person breaking the door down, hadn't seen me yet—and he had a gun. After seeing and knowing what the murderer did, being seen by him was the last thing I wanted.
"Don't move!" The murderer shouted, pointed the gun away from my place and over to the doorway. "I mean it! I haven't gotten what I want yet, and I'm not leaving until I do!"
"Sir, put the gun down." A man dressed as a doctor slowly came out of the dust and attempted, in apparent vain, to calm the murderer. "This can be handled peacefully."
"Yeah, tell that to Mr. Swan."
The doctor's eyes trailed around the room, passing over me as if I weren't even there, and onto Jasper's corpse. I shuddered. My brother's corpse.
I couldn't contain my anger any longer without consequence. A fury overtook me, spreading from the depths of my mind to the tips of my fingers and toes, possessing all but my most innocent of thoughts. But, why not take advantage that your would-be murderer couldn't see you?
I slid off the bed, confident though cautious—my invisibility-type state couldn't last forever. Careful to avoid looking at Jasper's body, (though I still felt the sticky liquid of his blood clutching to the soles of my bare feet) I swept down to the floor and grabbed the first sharp object I could find. A six-inch long piece of glass, jagged like a lightning bolt.
"Y-you killed—" I distantly heard the doctor stutter in a whisper.
"Mr. Swan. I am quite aware." The murderer laughed mercilessly again, only fueling my already fury to unbearable. I had to kill something—namely him. "And I'm also quite aware that here I am, pointing a gun at you, a pitiful human whose going to be begging for mercy within the minute."
"I will never—" The doctor started, but was cut off by his own scream. He scrambled out of the room as fast as his long, lanky legs could take him, but not quick enough as to not hear the gurgle of blood rising in the murderer's throat, and see the maniac glint of a jagged point of glass shiny through the murderer's Adam's apple.
EPOV
"Edward, no!" Carlisle stubbornly said again as he pushed me gently back onto the cot by my bloody shoulders. "I can't do this with all your squirming around!"
He was referring to stitching my chest up as best he could by the light of a flashlight, held by a patient convulsing in pain as he got said stitches. What? I couldn't help the fact that I could still feel every nerve screaming in protest as the sliver of metal slid through my skin. At least they were just finishing up the surgery when I resurfaced again; in other words, at least my ribs were internally braced, as was my leg, and my shoulder bone was replaced. Otherwise, thrashing around would have been all the more painful.
But, no matter how necessary stitching up my chest was, it still made me hiss in pain and annoyance at the fact that I couldn't go to Bella. Annoyance that the last time I saw her alive as someone in a coma gets, she was tossing and turning, tearing and crying, muttering my name. I did not want the next time to be her in a pool of blood, or the sight of her mangled corpse, limbs twisted at all the wrong angles and eyes conveying pure and unadulterated terror. I'd never be able to forgive myself, nor would Jasper.
"There." Carlisle finally said, tying off the thin, but durable and strong, transparent string and cutting it off the reel. "But please, try not to over-exert yourself. They could break at any moment." He added as I hopped off the cot and headed towards the door. Carlisle had gotten me some clothes, since I was no longer incoherent and found being on a mission in a hospital gown very embarrassing, but my chest was still bare.
I sighed in the doorway, looking down at my stitches. I waited for a few seconds, just enough time for them to melt into my skin and merge together to form a long, faint pink scar that I knew would be most likely indiscernible within the day.
"Not a problem." I said confidently, though my voice was shaky with the aftermath of the pain and shock, as the last stitch melted away, and I began my brisk walk/run to Bella's room.
It quickened when: a) I heard a scream and b) when a ridiculously terrified doctor came running past me—
Away from Bella.
A/N: I assure you this is going to be an all human story... Just not normal. I swear, I can't write any story without there being magic in it. I just can't. I'm truly sorry if you all hate me for it, and if I get enough reviews saying I should just keep it AH with no magic whatsoever, I will happily rewrite the chapter. I have a plot both ways.
No worries,
Kylie M.