Author's Note: The opening extract of this Prologue (Italicized) is taken verbatim from New Moon.
Prologue
Cold Hell
"No! Bella, no!"
My ears were flooded with freezing water, but his voice was clearer than ever. I ignored his words and concentrated on the sound of his voice. Why would I fight when I was so happy where I was? Even as my lungs burned for more air and my legs cramped in the icy cold, I was content. I'd forgotten what real happiness felt like.
Happiness. It made the whole dying thing pretty bearable.
The current won at that moment, shoving me abruptly against something hard, a rock invisible in the gloom. It hit me solidly across the chest, slamming into me like an iron bar, and the breath whooshed out of my lungs, escaping in a thick cloud of bubbles. Water flooded down my throat, choking and burning. The iron bar seemed to be dragging me, pulling me away from Edward, deeper into the dark, to the ocean floor.
Goodbye, I love you, was my last thought.
I woke in a darkness that was almost as total as the pain. Coughing so violently it felt like my ribs were breaking, I automatically turned on my side to try and help myself breathe a little easier, only to find that I'd put my weight on an arm that definitely was broken. Not having the breath to scream as the pain shot up and down my right arm, I choked out an almost silent cry as I rolled onto my back once more.
The coughing began to subside a little, my breath returning in short bursts. The pain didn't subside at all; it got worse, as I slowly became aware of the rest of it.
I didn't think I'd actually broken any ribs, but I was sure they were badly bruised, even by my standards. My head pounded with an all-over ache that should have dulled the rest of the pain a little, but didn't. My back felt like it was in pretty much the same shape as the front. Only my left arm and my legs didn't seem to be hurt, although with the numbness in my legs I couldn't be sure about them. I could feel them; they were definitely there, and I didn't seem to have actually crippled myself, but it seemed they'd decided to stage a protest against their owner's abuse of the body they were attached to by turning to jelly.
Before I had much time to consider the pain, it was joined by something new. Confusion. I couldn't see anything at all. There wasn't a single spec of light where I was. The floor was metal, rusting badly if the texture was any giveaway. Reaching around with my good hand, I found a wall directly behind me. Again, the same corroded metal feeling.
I managed to push my body up into a seated position and propped myself up against the wall. After one feeble attempt to try and stand, I decided to give me legs a little while to wake up. I focused on trying to move my feet a little, to keep myself distracted.
It occurred to me after a moment that I should have been terrified. Alone in the dark, in serious pain… an image of the hapless, shrieking victims in the zombie movie I'd seen with Jessica flashed in front of me for an instant, but I dismissed it out of hand. I was too confused to be afraid, too frustrated to scream.
I thought about what had happened. The cliff. The overwhelming exhilaration as I flew towards the water. The millions of needles of ice prickling all over my body as I crashed into the surf. Even that had been a good feeling.
Then I remembered the current. Thrown against the rocks; that must have been how I'd broken my arm. Choking; darkness; a strange flame in the water; the burning in my chest and throat as the water forced its way into my lungs. Struggling to find the surface again.
And Edward. His voice had been so close, frantically pleading with me to fight. To escape the tempest and make it out alive.
But I hadn't. His voice, so terrified, desperate to spur me to action, had stripped me of my will. I couldn't leave because it meant leaving him behind.
I'd drowned. I was dead.
But then… where was I? Hell? That didn't seem to fit. I didn't think I'd done anything that could possibly warrant being sent to Hell, unless giving up the fight against the tide somehow counted as a suicide, but that seemed pretty unfair. Anyone who thought I should be condemned because I didn't have the strength to fight against that kind of power – not just the current, but against the effect his voice had had on me – would have to be playing out of a badly flawed rulebook.
It also occurred to me that if there was one thing a lot of people could agree on when it came to the afterlife, it was that Hell is hot. The only physical sensation competing with pain at that moment was a biting, awful cold, which set my teeth chattering loudly the moment I acknowledged it.
It was the thought of heat that brought me back to that disjointed image from my memory of the water. The briefest of flickering sights, so out of place that I almost dismissed it as my imagination; a flame in the water, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye.
I tried to cast aside the picture, to file it under 'Hallucinations', along with the voice I'd spent so long desperately chasing. But it wouldn't go away. Something I couldn't place nagged at me, telling me I hadn't imagined anything. The flame was important. But why?
The answer to that question was announced by a screeching old metal scraping against more metal. I caught my first glimpse of the room as a heavy steel door was shoved inward. The light that poured in wasn't bright, but considering where I was it was enough to make me throw up my left arm to shield my eyes at first.
The room was completely desolate, and I assumed about the same size as a prison cell. There was no furniture, and nothing on the once-cream-coloured-now-mostly-red-brown walls. The only thing in the room besides me was a dusty old light bulb hanging overhead, which whoever had opened the door hadn't bothered to switch on. I couldn't help but be a little thankful I didn't have to deal with that glare. My head hurt enough as it was.
The instant I began to lower my arm, the terror took root. The first thing I saw was a wild tangle of bright, fiery red hair. The shudder that hit me then had nothing to do with the cold as I realized what the flame in the water had been. Anyone but a vampire would have been no more than a shadow standing in the doorway, but ghostly pale skin made her feral features all too clear. Eyes as red as rubies shone on her luminous face. She'd fed recently.
The last time I'd seen Victoria, she'd been wearing simple hiking gear, minus the shoes, and she'd been intimidating enough then. Somehow, seeing her in designer jeans and stilettos, still adopting the same catlike stance, made her seem even wilder than usual.
Her face was totally impassive as she prowled gracefully across the room. Dropping to the floor directly in front of me, she didn't meet my eyes, but instead reached forward with blurring speed to grab my broken arm. I tried to pull away from her, but then I remembered I was backed up against the wall. Victoria held my arm firmly, but not roughly in one hand. The long, painted nails of her other hand traced gentle lines up and down my wrist.
Abruptly, I found myself lost in a scene from a day in another life. A day spent in the sun. The day I'd well and truly crossed into a world full of magic. I remembered my heart threatening to pound its way right out of chest as I traced lines up and down Edward's arm, while he lay on his back in the meadow; his shirt hanging open; his perfect mouth curled in a faraway, wondrously happy smile. That day, the cause of the tremendous force of my heartbeat was entirely different than it was now.
Victoria's voice brought me out my reverie, back to the freezing cold and horrible pain. "So fragile," she mused. Her voice was that of a small child in a church choir; too sweet and musical for one so wild. "Is that why he left you? Too afraid to make you strong, for fear you might see him for how weak he is and walk away, but then even more afraid of that inevitable day when, without even meaning to, he'd break you?"
Her bringing up Edward made my own fear that much worse. Where was he? Why couldn't I hear him? He always came when I was afraid, when I was in danger. Why wasn't he here now?
I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question. He wasn't here because his being here could make no difference. In Port Angeles, he ordered me to run back to Jessica, away from the threat the men I'd seen represented. Every time I sat on my motorcycle, he came to remind me of my promise, to warn me about how foolish I was being. In the meadow, he'd tried to help me talk my way out of becoming Laurent's next meal.
On the cliff, his warnings had been harsher than ever, more urgent. And in the water, his pleading agony, trying to force me to survive even against my will.
Victoria's babyish voice seemed a little further away as the truth of my situation crashed down on my head, bringing with it the horrible, unavoidable truth.
"And it really was inevitable," she said idly, still gently stroking my arm. "You're all far too easy to break. I did this just getting a hold of you to pull you away."
He came to save me, to guide me away from danger, to try – however futilely – to bring me back to where I would be safe again.
Now I was alone. He wouldn't come to comfort me, to watch me die. And he couldn't come to save me because this time, there was no way to save me. No hope.
"Of course, you're guard dog wasn't much more difficult to break," Victoria told me. Her eyes darted up to meet mine for the first time, and her previously blank expression turned into an icy, malicious grin. "He was so focused on you, he never even realized I was there."
She laughed lightly at my anguished, wordless sobs as her words got through to me. Jacob had been in the water. He'd had no way of knowing Victoria was so close. He was too busy trying to save me from my own stupidity. Had I gotten him killed, too?
It was starting again. I gasped and shook with agony as the hole in my chest viciously expanded, carving relentlessly through a shattered, ruined heart. Now there were two very distinct caverns in the hole within me. I could almost see them; the new one, no less potent for being perhaps the tiniest bit smaller, sent scorching tendrils of flame careering through my whole body, competing for space with the dull, empty cold emanating from the other.
I would have doubled over with the pain if Victoria hadn't released my arm only to pull my head back by my hair, forcing me to meet her eyes. It hardly made a difference. The tears had begun, worse than ever, stinging my eyes and cheeks, blinding me. "Destroying men seems to be something of a talent for you," she said, giggling delightedly at my distress. Her other hand moved to my right leg, which suddenly sprang to life along with the left. I tried to pull away, but she held me fast, no longer being quite as gentle as she had before. She gripped my ankle tightly enough that I could already envision a dark purple bruise in the exact shape of her seeming delicate little hand.
"I'll be doing the men of the world quite the favour by taking you out of it," Victoria announced. "Of course, they're going to have to be patient," she added, her sweet little voice taking on a sudden menace which matched perfectly with this monstrous feline creature who held me. "We have some time, you and I; and I have no intention of wasting it."
The echo of Laurent's words came back to me once more. If you knew what she had planned for you...
The scream left my throat even before she'd snapped my ankle.