A/N: Thank you everyone for reviewing. It is much appreciated and I hope you'll continue enjoying this fic. I decided to change one of the POV characters from Edward to Leah because I think that the story needs more female awesomeness. Besides, she offers a radically different perspective from both Bella and (soon to arrive) Irina, and I thought that would be interesting. The fate of the demon-spawn will soon be revealed; I ask you to graciously bear with me a little longer.

Chapter 3

1 Bella allowed Jacob and Jasper to return her to the Cullen house. She was just glad that everyone else – she knew that there were others; she'd heard them – had gone out of sight. By the time Jacob was leading her up the stairs to the second story, she was glad of Jasper's magical I-don't-give-a-damn mojo. Thoughts of what she'd done kept circling around in her head, over and over, as clear and sharp as if she were still there, still ripping those four innocent campers to pieces, over and over and over until forever. Was this a vampire thing? Non-fading memories? No dimming of once-suffered pain? Was she going to recall this awfulness, this horror, with perfect clarity until the day she ceased to exist?

Well, she did remember every single second of her transformation, so there was some merit to the theory.

Jacob led her upstairs gently, in silence. For a second, she feared she was going to end up in the little room of horrors again, with the metal table and the corner and the broken mirror, but he took her past it and into a big, luxurious bathroom. Looking at the white tiles, the gigantic bathtub, the marble sink, she realised that she'd been in here a number of times before, when…when…what was it again? Something to do with why she'd been dying, why Edward had been compelled to change her. She'd taken baths in here. Someone had helped her.

"Sit here," Jacob said, taking her by the shoulders and guiding her to the toilet.

Obediently, she sat down, wondering when the last time had been that she'd needed one of these contraptions. Odd, wasn't it? She couldn't quite recall. "What happens now?" Focussing solely on him, she was blissfully able to not look down at herself again. Concentrating on his familiar, pleasant, but not at all appetising heartbeat, she managed to tune out all other noises. Unfortunately, what she just couldn't stop perceiving was the stench of coagulated, dead, human blood – to a point, at least. She was still aware of it, as she was aware of all smells within the range of her nostrils.

"Someone's gonna come in here and run you a bath," he said, briefly motioning at the tub, not quite looking her in the eye. "A girl, so don't worry. Not planning to perv on you, or anything."

Briefly, a fragment of a memory flared up: hills, a snowstorm, cold, angry voices, warm hands, a kiss…anguish. As soon as it surfaced, however, it was gone again, and she didn't try to bring it back. Right now, she had bigger problems on her hands. "Girl? What girl?"

Strangely, the question made his entire back tense up. There was a hard line to his mouth, and his pupils narrowed. "Friend of yours," he said, using a snide tone that sounded slightly familiar, but that he hadn't yet used with her – not since she'd died, at least. Maybe never. Then, it looked as if he was chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Alice. You'll remember. Just try not to flip when she bounces in here, chirping, looking weird to you."

"Okay," Bella returned dully, at a loss. The name Alice was familiar to her, and it had positive connotations, just as she'd expect from a friend, but Jacob's demeanour? It was quite unintelligible.

"Okay," he echoed, scratching his neck. "Hey, Bells, can I ask you something…personal?"

She only nodded jerkily, blinking, willing herself to keep her eyes trained on his face and nothing else. Maybe, if she strained herself really hard, she'd be able to separate his scent from all the other smells assaulting her nostrils. It had worked really well with the human blood, after all, earlier.

He crossed his arms before his chest and looked at her squarely, a little frown creasing his forehead. "What do you see when you look at a vampire? Coz you freaked out pretty badly when you saw Wardo for the first time since your…your change."

Unable to help the images of that small disaster flashing in high definition before her strange mind's ever-watchful eye, she felt compelled to shut her eyes and stare at the inside of her eyelids instead of her friend. "I see something that isn't human," she said, her voice even and toneless and metallic. It was the same tone of voice she always spoke in, now, and it couldn't even start to convey her emotions, if that's what they could be called. It felt like being locked inside a fortress, somehow. "I see a monster."

"Huh," he said, and chuckled. "Fitting, somehow." That made her re-open her eyes and blink at him in obvious confusion, and he cleared his throat, pressing his knuckles to his lips. "Whatever. Listen, Bells, you stay put, now. I'm gonna go fetch Miss Twee."

"I thought her name was Alice."

His face got flushed. He pressed his lips together, raised his eyebrows, and uttered a strange little cough. "Yeah, it is. Just, uh…stay here. Won't take a minute – literally."

Without waiting for a reply, he turned around on his heels and stomped out of the room. She could trail the sound of his heavy steps up until the point where he got halfway down the stairs. Then, it got mixed up in the sea of background noise, and trying to single him out was too difficult, too painful. There was, by this point, after getting this far with her training, little doubt in her mind that she'd learn that skill in time – not now, though.

About ten seconds later, there was a light knock on the bathroom door. Bella's head jerked to the side, and she saw someone standing in the doorframe: a small, lithe, exceptionally skinny vampire female, whose dark, short, ant-leg hair looked artificially tousled. She wore a short and sleeveless green dress, exposing much of her repulsive, grainy, sickly skin. Bella flinched at the sight and closed her eyes. Apparently, she wasn't very skilled at controlling herself in any way. Dang it.

"Sorry," she said through clenched teeth, took a useless breath, and made herself look at the woman – Alice, apparently – again. "I don't mean to offend."

"It's all right, I know you can't help it," Alice said, smiling. Her voice was even hollower and more tinny than Bella's, and her smell was clearly discernible: very sweet, like huffing honey in high concentration. It was almost a little nauseating. "Yet. In time, you'll learn not to look at something and see everything. You'll look at the surfaces, see what matters."

Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around? "Like the Rubik's cube," Bella said, trying to return Alice's smile. There was a sense of recognition in her when she looked at Alice: she knew this person. Judging by her emotional response, she supposed that Jacob had been right about her and Alice being friends. "Jacob taught me that."

"Did he?" Alice's voice got slightly more high-pitched. Clearly anticipating Bella's question – there was probably something on her face signalling confusion – she waved off. "Want I mean is this: you'll learn to filter out what you don't want to see, in time."

Bella studied her face, her greyish, pinkish, grainy face, looked into those yellow eyes, and frowned. "Did someone tell me that this would happen? You know, before. That it would all be so incredibly hard?"

For a few seconds, Alice just looked down at her with an unreadable expression on her face. Then, she smiled again. "You'll get used to it in time. Stop worrying about it. Now, let's get this show on the road. I'll even ignore what you did to the poor dress, even though it hurts to see such a crime against fashion. I mean, seriously, Bella, what were you thinking?" After theatrically planting her hands on her narrow hips and sighing loudly, she hopped to the huge bathtub and turned on the faucet. The sound of water splashing into the big, hollow, marble basin roared so loudly, Bella had to resist the urge to give in to focussing on all noises at once with all her mind, eyes shut firmly and hands clenched into fists. Alice said something, but it got drowned out in everything.

Bella willed herself to snap out of it; it took a while. When she finally managed to open her eyes again and see what she wanted, hear what she tried, the tub was half-full. "I'm sorry. You said something earlier?"

"Don't be frustrated if you relapse into sensory chaos, Bella; it takes a good long while until you can cope with it all," Alice said, scurried over on the tip of her toes to a cupboard, retrieved two bottles with pink and blue viscous fluids in them, respectively, poured healthy helpings out of each bottle into the steaming water, and put the bottles back again. When she reached into the water with both hands and mixed it up, this caused bubbles to rise; sweet, flowery fragrance pervaded the air. It was pretty pungent, but pleasant to Bella's nose. "All done," Alice said, motioning at the water. "Please, get out of these sad tatters and into the bath, because you are in sore need of it. You look terrible."

It wasn't easy, but Bella managed to not look down at herself as she rose to her feet in a slow, deliberate move, pulled the depressing remnants of her dress over her head, and dropped it on the tiles. Gingerly, she stepped into the steaming water. It was very hot, she knew that it must be, but it felt nice to the touch – silky, soothing. For a split second, she considered sighing to convey being pleased, but decided against it. It would be pointless, and Alice probably did not require this human kind of reassurance.

Bella submerged, relished the feeling of it, ran her fingers through her hair, stayed down for a while. Like this, under water, her body felt lighter and softer and warmer. No, it wasn't remotely human, but it helped, somehow. It took the edge off. When she re-emerged, she blinked all remaining droplets away and smiled at Alice, who was watching her intently, unmoving. "This is good."

"Isn't it? I've loved taking baths from the start, too…as far as I can recall, anyway. You probably don't remember me telling you this, but all my memories from before my change and right after it are gone, up until a point where I was actually quite in control of my vampire body."

"There's a lot from before that I don't remember, either," Bella said. Her worst memories flashed before her mind's eye again: the horror of the transformation, the frustration of being blind and deaf and useless…

…the campers, ripped apart and drained dry.

Bella wished she could shudder, that she could will her body into reflecting what was going on in her mind. Didn't she owe it to those poor people, those human beings who had died a truly awful death, to feel physically bad for them? Instead, here she was, relaxing in a bath. "I remembered my dad, though – earlier. When I was talking to Jacob. Charlie. That's his name. I asked Jacob about him, but Jacob wouldn't answer."

Alice sat down on the edge of the tub, all the while not taking her eyes off Bella's. "Charlie's fine. Don't worry about him. You should worry about yourself right now. Everything else will have to wait."

It was good to hear that her father was all right, even though she would have liked some details. Alice was right, though: at the moment, worrying about everything at once would only end in disaster.

Leaning her head back and looking up at the white ceiling, glad to not be forced to look at the yellow eyes of her fellow vampire (not to mention those disgusting capillaries) for a moment, she focussed on the scents rising out of the tub: water, perfumed oil, fragranced foam, the overpowering sweetness of her own body. Hadn't that been something she had liked, back when she'd still been alive? This smell? It wasn't terrible now, either, just…she didn't know how to put it. Strong? Concentrated? Something like that.

"When I killed those four people," Bella said, before she could think about whether sharing this was appropriate or not, "I felt so good. Tearing them up, drinking them, destroying them" – She nibbled her stupid lower lip that still felt utterly foreign – "it felt good, Alice. Ecstatic. Orgasmic. I loved it." She locked eyes with Alice again, trying and failing to gauge the latter's emotional state by scrutinising her expression. "I felt like God. That's how I know that I'm nothing more than a monster. Jacob should've killed me. Why didn't he kill me? I remember that he is something that hates things like me."

"A werewolf," Alice said, both her voice and expression terse. Then, she ran her skinny fingers through her spiky hair and shook her head. "He doesn't hate you, Bella, so please stop saying that he should kill you. No-one is going to kill you. You are not a monster. You made a mistake. It happens."

"A mistake," Bella echoed tonelessly. All the muscles in her face tightened as she struggled for a pained look. These facial expressions really weren't a picnic. "A mistake that ended four lives – horribly."

Alice rolled her eyes and waved off. "It's not as if you meant to do-"

"I did. I smelled the blood, concentrated on it, followed it with the intent to kill. I did mean to."

"Details. We won't let it happen again. You are not a monster and that's that, okay?"

"Okay," Bella said, sounding as unconvinced as she felt. If there was one thing she was not prepared to do, it was rationalising how barbaric her actions this morning had been. It was pretty obvious, however, that she was not going to get far with Alice on this topic right now. "Alice, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure, sweetie. Fire away."

Again, Bella chewed on her lower lip. "Right before I was bitten, I…I remember that something was going on, that there was something that needed to be saved, that…" She shook her head, shrugged, rubbed at her eyes. "It's all so blurred. I can't remember."

For a while, it looked as if Alice wasn't going to answer at all, whilst she just stared down at Bella, unblinking and still as a statue. Finally, her expression softened, and she said, "Edward will be mad at me for telling you this, but he'll have to deal with it. You had a baby, Bella. You were pregnant. Giving birth is what killed you, what forced him to change you."

"But…" There were flashes of severely fragmented memories. She shut her eyes. There was…she was there, weak and in pain, carrying a heavy load. A blonde woman – Rose, her name had been Rose – had hovered over her, protecting her. Pain, weakness, helplessness, but also happiness, calm, serenity – purpose. There had been so much meaning attached to doing what she had been doing, carrying this load, muddling through, suffering for the sake of another, an innocent. "Wait. I remember. Nudger. I called it that." Her eyes flew open. The ensuing sensation of vertigo had her slip in the tub, go under, and bump the back of her head. Scrambling, she hoisted herself up, spluttered water, and stared at Alice, wide-eyed. "Renesmee. Her name is Renesmee."

Alice's alien face lit up in a cheery smile. "That's right, you remember! Well done!" She voiced a screechy little laugh.

Thinking and moving at nearly the same time, Bella got to her feet, fuelled by purpose. "My baby. My daughter. I want to see my daughter."

2 "This is the last straw, Jacob! What the hell are you doing, mollycoddling this thing, this monster?" Leah Clearwater yelled, not caring that the leeches could hear her, not caring that both Jacob and her lickspittle little brother were glaring at her as if willing her to burst into flames. Leah, however, didn't care right back at them. "Are you brain-damaged? This is insane!"

They were standing outside, in the huge front yard of Castle New Money (at least Jacob agreed with her about the general tackiness of Chateau Cullen, even if Seth thought it was the bees' knees), right by the line of trees marking the edge of the lawn and the start of the forest. Heavy, grey clouds had started covering up the sky about an hour ago, and now, it was drizzling.

"Calm down, Leah, sheesh," Seth piped up, waving his hands at her as if he were trying to dazzle her into submission, or something equally doomed to failure. Seeing him sucking up to the vamps like this, their natural enemies, the reason the Quileute werewolves existed in the first place, was all kinds of heart-breaking. "You're making a spectacle of yourself."

"Oh, so the inconvenient little female is making a spectacle of herself? Well, we mustn't have that!" She brushed some of her chin-length, sleek dark hair behind her ears, tugged down on her short-sleeved, pretty beat-up cotton shirt, and crossed her arms, jutting out her chin. The air was chilly, but she didn't care. Not only was she always warm, anyway, but her temperature seemed to rise every time she had an argument with someone – which was all the time, these days.

"That's not what I-"

"She knows," Jacob cut in, all bossy like he effing owned the place, and glowered at Leah. It was probably meant to be menacing, the way he flexed his biceps and towered over her.

She, however, remained unimpressed. "Don't tell him what I know or don't know. The only thing I do know right now is that with your stupid, stupid decisions, you have doomed us all to die."

"Leah…" Seth whined, scratching his neck, rolling his eyes.

God, was he due for a bitch-slap, or what? When had her beloved baby brother turned into this spineless whine-bag? Leah made a face. "Leah, what, Seth? We might not be part of Sam's happy little band, anymore, but the treaty still stands. Turning Bella into a leech should have been enough to start a war." Again, she focussed on Jacob and his death-glare. "They gave you some leeway due to the demon-spawn situation-"

"Hey, watch your tongue!" Jacob took one step forward, but she did not budge.

"- but they will not forgive Bella's little spree-killing, I can guarantee you that." A bitter, humourless laugh escaped her lips. It wasn't half as snide as she'd intended it to come out, though. "They will descend on this place and smite our puny asses, and they'll be right to do it, too."

"Stop being such a drama-queen," Seth said, rolling his eyes again, since that was his go-to response to everything she did these days, it seemed. "It's embarrassing."

There were no words that would ever be able to properly express her annoyance – not anymore. This all was worse than mere exasperation, or than her feelings being hurt by her erstwhile friends and relatives (not to forget her ex-fiancé, of course) dumping on her all the time, mocking her and dismissing her. No, this right here was so much worse. She wasn't just the unwanted source of general reality-enemas anymore. It seemed to her that in all this madness, she was the only voice of reason left to knock some sense into everyone's mushy brains. If that wasn't a frightening notion, then she didn't know what else ever could be.

After she'd left her original pack, Sam Uley's pack, she'd been exhilarated, since she didn't share in the big pack's collective telepathy anymore. That meant that she was no longer forced to listen to Sam gushing over the girl he'd left her for from one day to the other, because he'd imprinted on said girl – Emily, Leah's cousin and best friend. Imprinting, that creepy, disturbing bullshit that basically erased a wolf's personality and turned him into a one-track-minded (often child-grooming) stalker. The imprintee? She'd either cave, eventually, or else. That was the way of their screwed-up genes, count your blessings, guys, at least you get to make perfect little wolf babies. Hurray! It would be funny if it weren't so goddamn scary.

When Leah had left Sam's pack to form a new one with Jacob and Seth, with Jacob as their glorious leader by divine right, she'd just been so relieved. No more sharing thoughts with Sam and everyone else – well, everyone except Seth and Jacob, that was. They were still forced to listen to each other when in wolf form, of course. Seth, however, was her baby brother, and Jacob…Jacob was hurt over being rejected by the girl he'd crushed on, so there was that to bond over. Being away from the larger pack, from Sam, was experiencing true freedom, William-Wallace-style without all that nasty belly-slicing. It meant no more having to listen to the others' opinion of her, no more being the designated killjoy, the only woman to have the gall to turn into a shape-shifting freak. Great, right? Yeah, not so much – not anymore.

Turned out that her intrepid pack-leader was, just like her brother, a little leech apologist. The fact that he wanted to ride off into the sunset with Bella cater-to-my-every-whim-damn-it Swan was well-known to everyone who'd ever met him and was in on the whole supernatural-shit-is-real deal. Yeah, Jake was hung-up on that tepid, shallow, sociopathic, self-entitled twit, but he'd still been relatively reasonable about it in the past – relatively. But since that hell-spawn had been birthed? Good gravy. There was no stopping him. He compensated for his guilt over all that nonsense by nursing Bella into being able to move her useless butt from A to B, as if the stupid bint deserved that after throwing her life away like it was worth nothing.

Now, changing packs didn't seem like such a brilliant idea anymore, what with the threat of imminent death-by-wolf and all that. Still, it was the choice between a rock and a hard place, and Leah knew this. Quileute lycanthropy wasn't fair or democratic: genetics and tribe traditions determined who got to be the Alpha, and everyone else had to fall in line, or else. Or else.

She took a deep breath to soothe her frayed nerves, but almost punched the big red cedar to her left when she smelled the sickly-sweet stench of vampires mixed in with the fresh, green, deep, lovely scents of the forest. Damn it, she was never going to be able to clear her nostrils of that stuff ever again! "Seth," she said, as calmly as she was able to, "I am not being a drama queen. Why don't you get your head out of Edward Cullen's rectum and think for once, okay?"

"Don't be so vulgar," Jacob said, still glowering, still carrying himself as if he meant to physically intimidate her. Maybe he didn't even consciously realise that he was doing this; who knew.

"Only if you stop getting hung up on pointless bullshit and listen to me," she returned coolly. "We are in deep trouble, boys, and you are refusing to face it. Now, Sam's been tolerating all of this" – she briefly motioned at the tacky white monstrosity the leeches lovingly called a home with a curt jerk of her chin – "because of your unfortunate circumstances, because of our previous positive experiences with these vamps, and because for all his posturing, he's not a warmonger." Talking about Sam like this, she felt reminded of how he used to look when he smiled at her, how it used to feel when he'd hold her, how happy she'd…damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it, this was so flipping stupid. "But you promised him that we had Bella under control. Sweet Jesus, were you wrong."

Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes for a few seconds, and sighed heavily. He then shrugged and locked eyes with her again. "What do you want me to do, Leah? Huh? You expect me to help kill her? Kill any of them? You know I can't do that. You know that I can't."

"I expect you to do your damn job and protect humans from these undead cannibals, yeah," she said, anticipating protest from Seth and briefly glaring at him. All he did was roll his eyes. She wished he weren't this young and green and blinded by the glitz, but if wishes were horses and all that jazz. "Four people died because we were dumbasses, and yeah, this one's on me, too. If Seth and I hadn't taken off to see our mom, we would've been watching the perimeter. We would have-"

"Been no match for a frightened and thirsty new-born," Jacob cut in, and shrugged again when she shot him a poisonous look. "What? It's the truth, and you know it. Two wolves can't defeat one of them when they're like this. I'm glad you weren't here. I don't want your blood on my hands."

The drizzle turned into bona-fide rain, and she raised her face to the sky. The droplets of cold water felt like heaven on her hot skin. At length, she looked at her Alpha again, hands on her hips. "So what do you plan to do, oh wise and sage leader?"

"Talk to Sam," Jacob said dully, as if it sounded as stupid to him as it did to her. "We're meeting up with the Cullens as soon as Bella's out of the bath, talk strategy. Then, I'm calling Sam. I'll ask him to meet me halfway between here and the Reservation. We'll talk it out. Stop panicking."

"Yeah, Leah, relax," Seth said, reached out, and patted her shoulder once. Leah allowed this stoically. "It'll be fine."

"I wish I had your confidence in the possibility of fairy-tale endings," she said, shaking her head, looking down at her sneakers-clad feet. They'd seen better days, sure, but they were the most comfortable shoes she'd ever owned, and she'd wear them until the day they fell apart. "But I don't. I have a horrible feeling about this. My guess is, there will be war."

"Well," Jacob said, turned around, and started heading back to the house, "that's the reason I'm the Alpha and you're not. I won't let it come to that."

"And I wish it were up to you," she called after him, unimpressed by his theatrics, and faced her brother again. "It's not, Seth. I know you don't want to hear this, but we need to prepare for the worst. If things keep going the way they're going, our Alpha's gonna make us fight our own people to defend our natural enemies."

"Nothing's gonna happen, so stop being such a girl about it," Seth said, and jogged off to catch up to Jacob.

Leah watched them leave in silence, her lips pressed tightly together, her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands. The thing was, she could kind of see where Jacob was coming from, what with all the personal stakes he had invested in these…these people, and Seth? Seth was just a naïve little kid, a boy who believed that the entire world was his playground, that life was just a huge, exciting adventure. The boys didn't understand that she did sympathise, telepathy or no. They heard her angry surface thoughts, listened to her angry words, and couldn't read between the lines. That was her fault, in part, and she knew that.

The thing was, it didn't even matter if they knew that she sympathised, or even the fact that she did feel a little sorry for Jacob, that she did so not want to be in his shoes. None of that mattered, because her sympathy and Jacob's predicament and Seth's naiveté, they changed nothing about the fact that a centuries-old treaty had been violated and four human beings had paid the price with their lives. Sam was not going to stand for it – none of the other wolves would. The Cullens and Jacob's little pack were living in a dream-world, in a rose-coloured bubble where everything turned out fine if they all just wished upon the same star hard enough. The problem was, this kind of calm before the storm never lasted. She was pretty sure that reality was bound to catch up with the lot of them very soon, and when it did, it would end in bloodshed.