"Not everyone can be Jacob."

"What a pity," Leah said. Her voice was once again in that haunted monotone; her head tilted slightly to one side as her ribcage undulated beneath it, lowering towards the ground, muscles coiling. "What a shame the alpha we got stuck with was so weak he attacked his own imprint when she didn't do what he wanted."

"You're out of line, Leah," Sam's deep voice held a menace as keen as a blade. I had to look closer to see that his hands were clenched in fists, desperately clinging to his humanity. Jacob's arm pushed Emily and I behind him, and I held her tiny body in my arms as our heads whipped back and forth between the former lovers in front of us.

"You were out of line," Leah replied, "when you cut my cousin's face off so she'd say yes." The words were a whip, cracking sharply across the room. "You were out of line when you let the council kiss your ass, when you didn't step down once Jake phased."

"Leah—" I could clearly see Sam beginning to shake, and I felt tears running down my face. This can't be it, I thought. Not after everything—this can't be the way we go. Not in my father's kitchen, not by our own hands.

"You're out of line now, Sam, letting us all wait here to die at their convenience. Letting the pack think we're safe." Leah's fingertips were splayed wide on the floor, her body curled like a sprinter's—except for her face. Her beautiful, murderous face, tears running freely down her cheeks, eyes open and staring and black.

"The bloodsuckers poisoned your mind, Leah," Sam whispered. He was crying too.

"They were too late for that, Sam." Leah inhaled. "I was poisoned years ago," she whispered, and then she leapt. The speed and force of the blow knocked them both through the open back door, and I heard the snarls erupt just as I realized Jake was right behind them.

"No!" I screamed, running, blind. Emily and I held hands like small children, stumbling through the back door and halting where we stood on the threshold. The sight before us was like something I would have dreamed, something only seen in the lurid dark of my nightmares.

The silver wolf was fast, and vicious. Heavy tracks of dirt gashed through the yard as she leapt and dove; Leah was fighting to kill, to die—Sam, his tail low, let her throw him and then lashed out as if he couldn't help it. He whimpered as she snagged his forepaw in her mouth and a sickening crunch echoed across the yard; he spun, growling, and ripped fiercely at her head, shredding her ear. Blood flew through the air. Jacob phased just as Emily wailed, a keening, haunted sound, unbearably human over the animal grunts and rumbles.

She pulled her hand away and ran at the flashing black and silver huddle in the ground, the red wolf snarling, enormous, but facing away from her.

I screamed. I screamed as though my whole body were surrendering—as if the sound were the only thing left in me, as if it could cleave the shivering bloody mess back in to two separate, thinking beings, and as it echoed across the yard they fell, heavy and silent as tombstones, to the earth.

The red wolf stood over them. Emily fell on their bodies, one hand on each, weeping. None of us moved for what felt like an eternity; the shadows of the trees slid silently across the ground before the two stood, Emily between them, and began to walk in to the woods. The red wolf turned and looked at me.

Jacob's fur was long, much longer than Sam's; his size was easily double that of Leah, and still much larger than the black wolf's. His body looked more like a bear's, except for the long legs, clearly made for running, and the broad glistening deadliness in his mouth. Both of his ears faced backwards, tracking the other wolves with keen hearing, but his eyes stayed on me, searching.

I didn't know what to do. Should I follow them? Was I welcome? I wasn't a tribe member, or even a pack member, really; I wasn't an imprint, and Jake and I had only been together for….best not to think of it. It felt so much deeper, like so much more…but still. Leah's words stung, although at the time they weren't directed at me. This is a pack issue.

The Jacob wolf took a step towards me. I realized how risky it was, what he was doing; the sun was closer to setting and we were out in the open. Before I realized what I was doing I ran to him, my hands lost in the rich fur. A grinding, purring sound from the enormous ribcage startled me back, but I pressed my face against him again.

"I don't know if I should come with you," I whispered. "I don't know if I belong there." My hands dug in to his pelt, fingers laced in the softness. Something strange began to happen—a shimmering snap of the air like a blast of hot wind—and then my fingers were entangled in the beautiful black hair of a kneeling Jacob Black. He stood and held me against him.

"You belong where ever I am, Bells," he whispered. I nodded, took his hand, and turned to face the woods.

The words hit me before we reached the clearing where they stood—the clearing where, years before, I'd watched a different group of legends face off; in retrospect, that meeting had been easier to deal with. The good and the bad were clearly distinct from one another, as simple as light and dark. There had been no tears. What I saw before me now was a family being wrenched violently apart.

"Traitor!" Quil screamed, livid. Hot, angry tears gathered in his eyes before a quick hand brushed them away, as if they, too, were condemned by his words. "I knew it, Leah—didn't I say it in the diner? Didn't I?" He stormed, pacing, the dense rage around him spreading and swirling everywhere. Embry's face watched the ground, still and heavy as a thundercloud behind him. The little boys, including the almost-men Colin and Brady, shivered together in a group not far off with Jared and Paul like brooding bookends at either side, grumbling and shifting restlessly. Seth slumped on the ground, a small ways away from the raging Quil, but nearer to a broken Sam.

The former alpha was collapsed in the dirt, one hand clutching the other to his chest. He didn't look up, and his shoulders were gently shaking. I had never seen any of the wolves look so vulnerable--least of all the one who'd been first to shoulder the burden of their destiny--with the exception of my desperate, pleading Jacob. The image was unfamiliar, out of place anywhere but in a nightmare.

In front of them all, as if on a tiny stage, was Leah. She held her ribs, looking like she was trying to keep her body from pouring outside of itself, and the top bandage holding her together was Emily. Leah's cousin glared furiously out at the savage, wounded men, and it was she who replied to Quil's raving.

"She's a traitor? A traitor for thinking? For wondering why all of this happened, for questioning Sam's decisions?" Emily's voice was tiny in comparison to the booming echoes of the others, but her words had a powerful effect. Sam never looked up, and never stilled; his grief echoed in low tones across the ground. Emily continued. "Do you—do you, Paul, or you Quil—really think you would have behaved differently, if any of you were able to actually think?"

"We think," Jared barked. Paul snarled, but I saw his hands trembling and the shine of wetness on his cheeks. None of them wanted to accuse Leah, all of them loved her. It was wretched to see the agony plain in all of them.

"She attacked him," Quil wailed. "She attacked the goddamn alpha—your husband, Emily!" The giant men sounded like children, a chorus of pain erupting at his words. "She was trying to kill him—"

"—She was trying to die." Embry silenced everyone else. "Leah is smarter than the rest of us." He looked around at them. "She's the fastest, sure, but who cares—she's the most clever, the most insightful, strategic, the smartest, however you want to say it…You didn't want to win that fight, did you Leah?" He took a step forward, one tiny step, and Quil crumpled to the ground beside him. "You didn't want to kill Sam, you wanted to make him or Jacob kill you." One more step. "Or us. You didn't want to win."