Edward drove me to school the following morning but had to make himself scarce before we entered the building because someone nearby was bleeding a little too much. I threaded my way toward the front doors, relieved that for once my clumsiness wasn't the source of Edward's pain. I felt like I had a huge neon sign pasted to my forehead: Extra! Extra! High School Senior Bella Swan Knocked Up! I was sure people would know just by looking at me—never mind that I hadn't guessed it even with a tiny person swimming very feelable laps around my uterus.

But I also felt a curious inner peace, knowing what I had decided. There was no way this would end with sunshine and rainbows, but if all went very very well, it might end with a little boy who was half me and half Edward and all the way alive, doing whatever mysterious things little boys did. Walking slowly through the parking lot to the front doors I was so engrossed in my thoughts, which were equal parts fantasy and fear, that I didn't notice the stranger until she was right in my path.

"Bella?" said a timid voice in front of me. I jumped and looked up to see a girl I didn't recognize. She appeared to be a bit younger than me, smaller, frailer somehow. There was a cagey, hunted look in her eyes, a shivery caution that wafted perceptibly around her. Her hand was clenched around a white Kleenex with a spot of rust just visible. "Bella Swan?" she said again, louder.

I nodded slowly. She smiled in relief. "Do I, um...know you?" I asked.

"No," she said. "My name's Bree. My friend asked me to give you this." She handed me a sealed envelope, which I accepted cautiously.

"Does your friend have a name?" I said.

"Everyone has a name," said Bree. "Go ahead and read it."

I ripped open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of college-ruled paper bearing a short note written in pencil. The penmanship was scraggly and awkward, as if the hand that held the pen were unused to forming letters; the page was littered with misspellings that my eyes picked out before my brain had processed the words. But the script itself was old-fashioned, the letters curved and curling around each other. My eyes skipped to the end and saw the one word that was written with confidence, a signature that must have been practiced often enough over the years to adopt a natural flourish:

The letter was from Victoria.

I looked up at Bree, expecting her to have suddenly transformed into a blood-eyed vampire woman with ginger hair. I suddenly saw glimpses of red out of the corners of my eyes and became paranoid that I was surrounded by a hundred Victorias, all waiting to pounce.

"Did you read it?" asked Bree tentatively, prodding.

"How did you happen to meet...um, the writer of the letter?" I asked slowly.

"I was in a shelter," she said with a grimace. "She came and offered to give me a place to live and she pays me to be her personal assistant. It was really nice of her to trust me like that. Most people wouldn't, because I don't have any job experience. Most people don't trust me anyway." She fumbled at the end of her sentence and looked down at her hands, already nervous that she'd spoken too freely, given too much away.

Of course. Bree must have run away from home. Or been orphaned, or removed from a bad home by social workers and then forgotten, or something else that would lead to her falling through the cracks in a big city like Seattle. It explained why she had that cagey look about her, and why she'd been desperate enough to work under the table for someone she didn't know. She couldn't have been homeless long, though, or she wouldn't have been so trusting herself. I guessed runaway.

There were actually two objects in the envelope: the letter from Victoria, and what appeared to be a paper napkin wrapped and taped into its own little envelope around something flat and square. I ignored this for now and started reading Victoria's message.

Miss Swann, it read.

First, pleas do not be afrade of me. I do not wish to harm you. I am James wife, or was, before his murder. I know that non of this was your falt; one canot help ones blood I know, and I was once the very same as you, without so much as a singel frend to look to for ade. So I do not blame you.

But you oght to know that I was very very close to perswading James to give up the chace when your wachdog tor my loves head from his shulders and extingwished his life, and with it, all my reason for living. We wuld have been gon soon. Now James is gon forever.

I do not blame you tho. I blame the wolf.

I know that the wolf was a frend of yours. You will not like what I ask of you now, but you shuld cunsider carfully before rejecting my offer.

Give me the wolf as paymint for my husband. Give me the boy and save the lives of many. Give me the boy and let justis be served. Give me the boy and I will kill him and then mysef, and you will never have anythin to fear from me agen.

If you do not do this...well, you will see wat hapins if you do not. I have inclosed a little sumthing to express my ernestness, wich you may look at in your own lesure time. I think you are a kind-harted girl, and I think in the end you will do the rite thing.

Think about it. I will be in tuch.

Victoria

PS Is Bree not sweet? It is a teribel shame but there are so many like her in Seattle. I wish I could help them all to a better life. Dont you?

I slowly lowered the letter and looked at Bree, my heart hammering.

"Are you finished with it?" she said, her eyebrows quirking upward in the middle. I nodded. "I'm supposed to tell you a message." She closed her eyes for a moment, focusing, perhaps, on the wording of what she had to say. "She said to tell you, 'Bring it alone to where the most recent one happened'."

"That's all?" I asked, perplexed.

"That's all," confirmed Bree. "Say it back to me."

"'Bring it to where the most recent one happened'," I quoted.

"No, it's 'bring it alone to where the most recent one happened'," she corrected, smiling to show she didn't mind helping me learn my line. "Try it again?"

I complied. "What does that even mean?"

"You don't know?" said Bree, looking disappointed verging on apprehensive. "I thought for sure you'd know. I guess you better just remember it in case it makes sense later. She said to make sure you memorized it."

"'She'?" I repeated, just to confirm to my own sense of morbid anxiety that this was all happening, actually and really.

"Vicki," answered Bree with a little crinkle of pleasure at each outer corner of her eyes. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions. I wanted to ask her how much she knew. Not much, I was sure. Not her own danger, probably.

But I was paralyzed by the sound of the nickname falling from Bree's lips, so short and informal, far too mundane for so terrifying an owner. Victoria. James's wife. Vicki. Before I could squeeze out another word, Bree had darted away, slipped into a beater I didn't recognize, and driven off the property.

Slowly, unwillingly, I removed the secondary packet from the envelope and untaped it. There were a few words written in ballpoint on the napkin, in a different hand from Victoria's.

621 tompson st basement rick help, it read, which made no sense until I looked at the two items the napkin had been wrapped around.

The first: a Polaroid of a young black woman, smiling in a distant, candid sort of way. Labeled at the bottom as Tamara Jones

The second: a Polaroid of the same girl, one half of her face gently spattered with red, the other half torn away.

I stumbled through my classes like a zombie. Edward asked me repeatedly what was wrong, first at lunch and then in the English Lit class we shared. But I told him I was just thinking; he must have chalked the scent of vomit that hung around me to morning sickness, and I didn't mention that for once it had nothing to do with that. My stomach had voided itself in reaction to the pictures, once I got over the light-headedness. Not crying was taking up a good deal of my energy. My instinct was to tell Edward everything, show him the letter, be comforted as much as possible as soon as possible. But there was a smaller instinct hidden underneath the first, telling me to wait, not to tell him yet, not to risk rousing him to action before I knew more about what was going on. Possibly there was an element of self-punishment in there, too: I didn't feel that I deserved to be comforted, not even in the minute way signified by sharing the burden with someone else. Which was insane and ridiculous, but there you had it. I read and re-read the letter every chance I got, but it never yielded up any new information, never revealed any further insight.

I stuffed the photographs and napkin back into the envelope and didn't look at them again.

Edward drove me straight to the Cullens' house after school, so I could tell the family my decision and get another check up.

The Cullens fell along predictable party lines when Edward and I told them I had decided to try to carry the baby to term. Rosalie hugged me carefully and took my hand and promised that she would start living in her lab in an effort to turn up something that would help keep us both safe. Esme stroked my hair and told me not to be afraid, that she would be there for me. Carlisle immediately began scheduling tests he wanted to run on me to find out more about the state of things. Emmett enthusiastically predicted that this would be "the kickassest kid ever born". Jasper obviously started using his power on Alice, because Alice became first sanguine and then testy, and finally pushed him away from her.

"Knock it off, Jas," she said irritably. And that was all she would say for the rest of the morning.

But later, when Edward and I were sitting together in his room after dinner—him trying to discover whether my distracted and deeply disturbed manner was a sign of reconsidering about the baby, me trying to find a way to bring up the letter without vomiting again—she knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. "I think you're making a mistake, Bella," she said without preamble.

"Alice—" began Edward warningly, but I interrupted.

"I know that," I said as calmly as I could, but my voice was still shaking. "I know this isn't the choice you would make, Alice. Up until now, I never even thought about having kids, at least not this young. But I won't be human much longer anyway, and he's here now, and it looks like this is pretty much it. I've made up my mind. Your family has never been very...orthodox. This will be just one more strange thing that happens before I join you properly."

"Bell," she said, crouching in front of me as I sat on the bed, gazing up into my eyes with golden ones which brimmed with emotion. "We just got you. You're my sister now. We can't—I can't lose you this soon. Please, please—"

"You're my sister, too," I said. "And I hope—I believe—that we will go on being sisters for a long, long time. But I'm going to need help. There are things you can do that no one else can. You could really make a difference, Alice."

"You know I can't see your future, Bella," she said. "I don't see what I could possibly do."

"Maybe you can't see her future," said Edward, "but that didn't stop you helping when James was here. You couldn't see the wolves, either. What did you do then?"

"I, um...I just looked around the edges of things," she said uncertainly. "I kept an eye on anyone who might know Bella was in Brazil, so if anyone got talky I could...I could…"

She stopped abruptly, a faraway look on her face. Edward shifted beside me. I wondered what they were both looking at.

"What is it?" I asked. "Guys?"

"I think I may know how to help you," said Alice briskly, all pleading gone from her voice. "But I have to go. Now. Jasper, sweetie, pack the bags, we're going to Brazil." She didn't say this last part loudly and Jasper certainly wasn't in the room, but he must have been in earshot, because I heard swift feet running lightly past Edward's room in the direction of the suite Jasper and Alice shared.

"Wait, what?" I said. "Why?"

"Jasper has some friends who might be able to help us," she said. She kissed me on the cheek and hugged Edward, and was gone.

"Um…" I said.

"I'll explain tonight," said Edward, standing up. "Bella, I have to go look a few things up. Do you mind if my mom drives you home?"

"Of course not," I said. "I'll go dig her out of the kitchen."

Edward smiled and kissed me. "No need," he said. "She heard. Come on, I'll walk you down to the car."

"How are you feeling, Bella?" said Esme as she pulled out onto the winding forest road that led from the Cullen place back to town. I settled into the sheepskin that had been thoughtfully placed in the passenger seat for me. There was a full shopping bag at my feet, but since this was a Lexus I had plenty of room.

"I'm okay," I said automatically. Then, without ever having planned to say a word about it, I blurted, "Actually I'm awful. A girl I don't know gave me this letter today. I don't know what to do about it. I can't stop thinking about it." I pulled out the letter—now much-creased from all the handling throughout the day—and handed it to Esme, who accepted it without taking her eyes off the road.

She read it at a glance. Her breathing remained steady and our speed did not slacken, but I felt a shift in the air. I could practically hear her thinking.

"She also had Bree tell me to bring him alone to the place where the most recent one happened. Which I can only assume meant...this." I held out the napkin and the two photos. Esme's eyes flickered over them briefly, then over me for a second, and I thought I saw anger there. But it passed before I could be sure—or, more likely, the anger remained, but became invisible. I had a sudden thought that Esme angry was a lot scarier than, say, Edward angry, or even Jake in wolf mode. And she wasn't even frowning.

"I think I understand," said Esme. "Bella, I do not believe I would be out of line in declaring this to be an utterly shitty situation Victoria has placed you in. Utterly shitty."

Coming from her, the curse packed a lot of punch, enough that I felt the tears I'd been suppressing all day welter up.

"What do I do?" I said, my voice wavering.

"About this? What can you do?" This was rhetorical. "You cannot betray Jacob to this woman. That would be wrong on a great many levels, not least of which is that I think Jacob has already outgrown the stage where he can be easily led into traps. No, Bella, I think you had better try your utmost to put this out of your mind while I look into it."

"I don't think I can," I said in a small voice. Esme looked over at me again, thoughtfully.

"Perhaps if you redirect your focus to the more immediate matter, it will serve as a suitable diversion. Babies tend to do that, as I recall." She indicated the shopping bag at my feet, which was stuffed with pregnancy books. I picked one up and read the cover: What to Expect When You're Expecting, it read. Underneath, handwritten in Sharpie to match the title font, (A Vampire-Human Hybrid). I smiled feebly through my tears.

"I've notated the margins wherever possible. Carlisle told me everything he knew or could guess, and I'm sure much of it is universal anyway, even if it's speeded up in your case. Of course, I won't dally with your intelligence by advising that you hide these from your worthy father. But I do think it will help." She looked at me sympathetically for a few seconds. "There's nothing you can do about dear Vicki at the moment, but there are some things I can do. I'll do them and you just worry about the baby for now."

Well, I certainly had more than enough worrying to keep me busy without also trying to solve this new shitfest all by my lonesome. "Thanks, Esme," I said sincerely. She smiled at me, and we spent the balance of the drive talking about the sprog.

Edward didn't come tapping til well past midnight, by which point I'd dozed off on top of my covers. I stumbled over to the window to let him in and snuggled back into bed with him—under the blankets, this time.

"So," I said when we'd both gotten settled. "What was up with Alice? Why'd she need to go to Brazil? Is she going to Isle Esme?"

"No," he said. "This is something separate. It's a bit of a long story."

"I'm plenty awake," I assured him. "I want to know."

"Well, I don't know how much you've heard of Jasper's personal history, but at one point he ran away from his sire and traveled into the Amazon basin alone. There he happened to run across a small coven of females, who took him in and allowed him to live with them for a while. As rare as it is for human-drinkers to form family bonds, Zafrina and her two sisters are truly a family. Jasper stayed with them for some time in their home in Brazil. And there he began to hear...stories."

"Stories?" I echoed.

"Zafrina, Senna and Kachiri didn't live among humans as we do, but neither were they nomads. They had little to do all day but run around the jungle discussing interesting tales they heard from humans who lived in the villages they preyed on. They told Jasper of cannibal gods and sun gods who were honored with human sacrifice. They told him of a Mayan demon, Paqok, who travelled by night and preyed on women, sometimes stealing their life all at once, sometimes over several months. They told him of the Supay, an Incan god who cursed women with impossibly difficult pregnancies, waited for them to die in childbirth, and then stole their infants from their still-warm bodies. Supay was a fearsome god, and the only way to divert his attention was to shed infant's blood in his presence."

"That's horrible," I said, shivering. Ordinarily I would take a more anthropological view of this story, but it felt chillingly relevant right now. "I still don't see what you're getting at, though."

"Jasper assumed they were silly human superstitions. Zafrina always seemed to think there was some truth in the stories, but she never explained why. But Bella, don't you see what this might mean?"

"Not particularly," I said. "What does any of this have to do with...our situation?"

"What if they weren't just tales? Think about it: stories of gods who attack women in darkness, curse them with difficult pregnancies, wait for them to give birth and then steal the resultant offspring? Gods who can only be appeased by a spilling of human blood, and who accept human sacrifices?"

My eyes widened as the ramifications of this struck me. "You mean…" I said quietly, "the gods are just...just vampires?"

Edward nodded vigorously. "Possibly," he said. "There might have been whole covens of vampires who fathered half-vampire children, or it might have been just one working alone over the centuries. Or they could be just stories. There's only one way to find out. That's what Alice is doing now."

"Did she have to go all the way to Brazil?" I asked a little wistfully. As stressful as it was having Alice so clearly set against my decision, I would miss my friend. I hoped she came back soon—preferably with answers.

"I'm afraid so," said Edward. "The three sisters don't have a phone. Jasper isn't even sure they still live in the same place. Alice is the only one in the whole family who has a power that's even remotely useful in long-distance tracking, and she had to go with him."

"Of course," I said, inclining my head. "I didn't mean to whine."

"You're not being whiny," said Edward gently, tucking my crown under his chin, and holding me tight. "And even if you were, you have a good excuse. I miss her, too."

"Excuses I've got in spades," I muttered. At Edward's questioning look, I went on to explain about meeting Bree at school. "You have to swear you won't do anything or say a word to anyone about this," I said. "But she had a letter. From Victoria."

Edward stiffened into a marble statue beside me. His immobility was alarmingly complete. "What did she say?" he asked through clenched teeth.

"To give her Jake or she'll murder a bunch of homeless people in Seattle, essentially," I said.

"Have you told anyone else about this?" said Edward tensely.

"Just your mom," I said. "I left the letter and the, um, accompanying images with her. You can read them yourself, if you want. They're pretty awful, though. I'm just trying to forget. I'm sorry I didn't go to you first, but I didn't know how you'd react. You have to swear you won't try to do anything."

"What did my mother say?" he asked, not heeding my request.

"She said to let her deal with it for now. You're not going to do something crazy, are you?"

"Victoria's the crazy one," said Edward. "I don't want to do something crazy, I want to track her down and very sanely dismember her. That she could have the gall to come at you like that—"

"But you're not going to do anything, right?" I clenched his hand, trying to ground him before he actually did something "very sane" but still totally stupid.

"I won't do anything without talking to you and Esme about it first," he said reluctantly. "That this should happen now, of all times…"

"Well," I said, "you know problems always come in threes."

"First James and now this," said Edward. "Gosh, I can't wait to find out what the third thing is going to be."

In spite of everything, I was overwhelmed by an irrational surge of joy. He'd forgotten to count the pregnancy as a problem.

1. So, Victoria. Somehow, this nobody wound up as the villain of not one but two interminable books, even though the Twiverse contains scores of infinitely more badass adversaries. New Moon at least had the novelty of werewolves to lend it excitement, but Eclipse was just a big boring mess from beginning to unsatisfying end. The reason Eclipse sucked so much is that we could all plainly see what was going on at least several chapters before the book characters pulled their heads out of their asses. Victoria's plan was labored and nonsensical, and it only had a chance at succeeding because the Cullens, it turns out, are even dumber than she is. It was both frustrating and disappointing to be subjected to that horse-and-pony show which was clearly staged only because Smeyer had a wordcount to fill/couldn't think of anything better. Since I'm smashing the plots of the last three books into one story and reworking the Victoria conflict into something less yawningly illogical, that shouldn't be a problem here.

2. There is no such thing as a "libishomen" myth. Presumably this is a misspelling of lobishomen, a creature of South American lore. However, while they do indeed drink blood, I can't imagine Alice reading too much into stories about Brazilian lobishomen, who are supposed to be two-inch tall monkeys derived from Portuguese myths about werewolves. I am not sure why Smeyer fixated on the nothing-like-vampires lobishomen for Alice's super secret clue when even the most preliminary of searches turns up the demon-gods Paqok and Supay. Put those two together and you wind up with something that exactly resembles a godlike vampire who goes around impregnating human women and stealing their babies. Seriously, all I had to do was Google "South American vampire myths" for like, ten minutes and these guys just fell into my lap. I didn't even have to try.

Also, Alice is doing this now instead of waiting till the last possible minute. This is because she cares about Bella and wants to do all in her power to ensure that her friend survives this pregnancy, rather than lounging around uselessly complaining. And because my Alice is in fact intelligent, she's going to do that thing Smeyer hates so much, research. Basically, my characters are all doing what the book characters do, but I'm not manufacturing drama by having them wait till it's an emergency before they make mental connections that were obvious to readers three pages in.