After I got out of school that day, I went to visit Carlisle in his home office, on the first floor of the Cullen house. I'd only been in here once before, looking for a pen, and I was surprised to see it now completely altered. There were racks and racks of the sorts of things I would expect to see in an examining room. There was machinery in one corner and an adjustable table in the other.

"We thought it might seem strange for you to be going to the hospital all the time," said Carlisle, holding out a hospital robe that was obviously of Alice's making, seeing as it was couture-quality and quite flattering. "This way you don't have to worry about anybody finding out until we know what we're dealing with." Carlisle was dressed for home, in dark trousers and a subdued sweater, but his voice sounded as doctor-y as I'd ever heard it.

"Thank you," I said gratefully. Carlisle left the room so I could change into the robe. It was cleverly designed with various overlapping panels, so that different parts of my body could be exposed without everything falling out. Holding this object that Alice has obviously put much time and effort into made me miss her even more. I wondered how she and Jasper were faring; Edward had explained that they would call as often as they could, but that there was poor cell phone reception where they were going.

When Carlisle returned, Edward entered the room with him and stood beside me, his hand over mine.

"Thanks for coming," I said, smiling at him.

"Well, I do live here," he pointed out. "I mean, when I'm not living in your bedroom…"

Carlisle took my blood pressure and my temperature, and then weighed me. Even I was shocked at the number on the scale—I hadn't weighed so little since before I grew boobs. It was a little alarming.

"Don't pregnant women usually gain weight?" I asked nervously.

"It is normal to lose a few pounds in the first trimester," said Carlisle, "but I wouldn't have expected this significant a loss in someone of your starting weight. How have you been eating?"

"Same as usual," I said. "Oatmeal and plain toast, three times a day."

"Well," said Carlisle, indicating that I should set myself up on the examining table, "I would like you to begin on a new diet. You aren't getting the nutrients you need. Even without the pregnancy draining your resources, such a diet would be unwise for long. I'll make up a list of the things that you should begin to incorporate into your meals. To keep it from coming back up, I would recommend that you eat little and often, as often as you can manage it. Keep crackers by the bed at night, for example, and eat a few every time you wake feeling ill. And there is one small experiment I would like to try. From the blood samples I've taken, it is apparent that your blood cell count is lower than even your diet can account for. Not just your red cells, but plasma and platelets also. It was Rosalie who first suspected that the fetus might be draining your bloodstream of its essential components. Of course, the fetus is small now—we'll be measuring it in a few moments," he added, gesturing to one of the machines which I recognized as an ultrasound machine. "But as it grows, it may require more and more of certain nutrients which will certainly be beyond your body's ability to provide. How much do you know about fetal nourishment?

"Um, I know he's getting his food from my blood. It goes through the umbilical cord. Right?"

"Correct. Sometimes a fetus may require nutrients that are not present in the mother's bloodstream, or not present in high enough quantities. This condition will often present itself to the mother as an insatiable craving for a food which contains the missing nutrient. Fulfillment of this craving increases the availability of that particular nutrient to the fetus. I'm simplifying the issue greatly, of course; cravings may represent nutrients that the fetus is not getting enough of, but they may also be an unrelated result of hormonal changes in the woman's body, altering her senses of both smell and taste. Or they may be entirely arbitrary. Still, cravings can sometimes provide insight into the needs of the fetus—particularly, which needs are not being met."

"I'm with you so far, Doc."

Carlisle sighed. "I apologize for offending your sensibilities, but I need to ask you a little more about the episode you recounted before, in which you found your appetite roused by open cuts on your hands. How are you normally, where bloodshed is concerned?"

"Normally?" I repeated, looking at my palms which had all but healed. I couldn't smell any blood on them now. "Um, normally it makes me feel sick. And faint. If there's enough of it, and if I haven't eaten in a while, I might actually pass out."

"I see," said Carlisle. "It must have been strange, then, the impulse you felt to drink blood."

"That's one way of putting it," I said. "I thought I was just cracking up. You think it was because of the baby?"

"It may have been," said Carlisle.

"You want me to drink blood, don't you?" I said flatly. I tried to remind myself that this would have been my lot eventually anyway, once I became a vampire. But a lifetime's aversion to blood was screaming at me to not talk crazy.

"I don't think that is the solution," said Carlisle. "You see, the human body is not set up to drink more than a little blood at a time, and the fetus's needs will surely increase beyond your capacity to, er, drink away the problem. But I do think that this craving offers us a glimpse at the way forward. Your blood—the blood you have now, depleted of nutrients—won't keep you healthy. It will barely keep you alive long enough to give birth." I caught a glimpse of Edward out of the corner of my eye, glaring at his father. "I'm recommending a transfusion."

My eyes drifted back over to the equipment in the corner. There was a tray already set up, holding lots of little vacuum-sealed plastic packages of things that Carlisle was probably going to have to stab me with. Great.

"I don't know what nutrients precisely the fetus requires; I haven't had a chance yet to perform a full analysis of your blood. Maybe, by nature of his species, the fetus has a need of certain nutrients human babies don't, which he extracts from your blood alongside all of the usual nutrients. He may be snatching red- and white cells along with the usual protein, fatty acids, minerals and so forth. Or maybe he needs only what every human baby needs, but is growing so fast that he drains your blood of nutrients beyond your body's ability to replace them. Whatever the cause, the sooner we can get your levels back to normal, the greater the fetus's chance at survival. And, I hardly need add, your own."

Well, if it was for the grasshopper… "Okay," I said. "Let's do it."

Carlisle stood and rolled the tray over to where I was sitting. I looked away while he stuck me full of about half a dozen different catheters and hooked them up to an extremely complicated-looking maze of tubing and plastic bags, some empty, some bulging with blood. The empty ones began to slowly fill up with my own blood. I blinked and stared at it. Was it just me, or did it lack the deep garnet tones of the donor blood? It almost looked a little...sickly.

"You haven't actually lost any of the bulk of your blood, technically speaking," Carlisle was saying, "so a straightforward transfusion won't do. This is an exchange transfusion. I'm drawing some of your blood and replacing it with an equal quantity of new blood. I'll only be replacing a small amount today; we'll need to monitor how well you do on this and adjust future transfusions accordingly."

Throughout the whole procedure, Carlisle talked to me calmly and authoritatively, and I wasn't as nervous as I might have been. I could smell the drop of blood that had welled up around each puncture in my forearms.

"You're sure I can't just drink it?" I asked, half-joking, gulping in deep breaths. "'Cause, I mean...yum."

"I know what you mean," said Edward, swallowing.

"I can't believe you just have a bag of blood on hand," I said. "How did you even know my type?"

"Well, I do have access to all of your medical records," Carlisle pointed out. "In fact, I have access to all kinds of things." Beside me, Edward choked on a burst of laughter.

"Seriously, Dad?" he spluttered, shaking his head in disbelief. "This is nuts."

"What?" I said, looking from father to son. "What is?"

"One of the risks of blood transfusions," said Carlisle, "is that the new blood might be rejected. Obviously that risk is greatly reduced if one uses only compatible blood types. But I was a little worried about flooding your system with donor blood. After all, what we're really doing here is replenishing the fetus's food source. I wondered if the fetus mightn't be better off with his mother's blood than with a stranger's."

"And you're...not worried about that now?" I said, knitting my brow.

"It turns out," said Carlisle with a smile, "your father is a very civic-minded man. He's been donating regularly for twenty years. He also happens to share your blood type exactly. I may have...ah, requisitioned some of Charlie Swan's most recent donations. Not much, mind you; I've only got what he donated in the last eight weeks. Still, the blood that is presently flowing into your wrist is as close to your own natural supply as it can possibly be, under the circumstances. I don't know if it will make a difference, but it is a comfort at any rate. And I must emphasize that the closer you hew to the diet Esme has worked out for you, the fewer transfusions will be necessary."

Finally Carlisle extracted the tubes from my arms and covered the tiny puncture holes with cotton and bandages. Then he invited me to lie on the adjustable hospital bed in the corner opposite the transfusion station. He slathered some blue jelly on my abdomen and pressed a paddle into it, moving it around till he found what he was looking for. Then he paused, looking in confusion at the screen.

"What is it?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

Carlisle turned the screen so it was facing me. All I could see was a white oblong shape in the middle of it, but I didn't know what I was supposed to expect. "What's that?" I asked. "Is that him?" Isn't he supposed to have limbs or a heart or something? I wondered nervously. What to Expect had been fairly clear on that. I wouldn't be feeling movement if he didn't have, like, things to move.

"That is the amniotic sac," said Carlisle. "It appears to be too dense for the ultrasonic waves to penetrate. Vampire flesh behaves much the same way under ultrasound. I believe the amniotic sac might be made of the same substance as our skin."

"Is that bad?" I asked, my voice rising in pitch. Stay calm, Bella, stay calm. The grasshopper wiggled around and I saw the white oblong wobble rapidly, but other than that nothing changed.

"Actually," said Carlisle with a smile, "this strikes me as very good news indeed. One of our primary concerns is the strength of the fetus compared to your body's ability to sustain damage. This sets my mind greatly at ease."

"Translation, Edward?" I asked, too confused to be comforted.

"In other words," said Edward, "the fetus won't be able to break through the amniotic sac and wreak havoc on your insides. It's contained."

"If the sac were breakable, as human placentas normally are," said Carlisle, "you could not possibly carry to term. This is good news, since you are planning to see this through."

"Good," I said, sinking back on the table in relief. "That's good." I hadn't even known that might be a possible problem. And now it wasn't. "Hey," I said, knitting my brow as a new thought occurred to me. "If the amniotic sac's unbreakable, how's my water gonna break? How's he gonna get out?"

Edward and Carlisle looked at each other. "Oh, there are ways to breach vampire skin. Vampire teeth, for example," said Edward. I decided that was something I would have to ask about later, when I wasn't actually staring at an image of the thing that would have to be bitten out of me. This whole pregnancy jam was just getting weirder and weirder.

Carlisle instructed me to come to the house every day after school, where either he or Rosalie would perform my daily transfusion. Then Edward and I went into the dining room, where Esme had laid out a spread of the sorts of things that might be expected to soothe my nausea. I ate as much as I thought I could handle, and then spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in the living room with Edward and Carlisle. For the first time in way too long, I felt relaxed, and I wasn't famished. Edward had informed me that Rosalie and Emmett were going out to Seattle to check out the place on Tompson Street where I was meant to bring Jake. Maybe they'd get crazy lucky and find Victoria, or at least scare her enough she decided it wasn't worth the risk anymore. I actually felt like this might turn out after all.

I was killing time on a computer in the school library during homeroom when I felt and heard someone slide into the seat next to me. A pale hand slid into my field of vision, bearing a sealed envelope.

"Hi, Bella!" whispered Bree enthusiastically. "Jeez, they don't look at IDs or anything at this school. Anyone can walk in!" I said nothing. She looked great, better than last time I'd seen her. Healthier. Better-fed.

She kind of looked like me.

"Bree," I began very seriously, "I don't know how much you know about your, um, employer, but I really don't think you should go back to her."

"Vicki's totally cool," said Bree reassuringly. "She pays me really well. I don't ever have to worry about anything!"

"Aren't you missing a whole lot of school?" I prodded.

"Vicki signed me up for online classes. I learn better from reading anyway. I'm sort of a bookworm."

"But you know nothing about her—"

"I'm not stupid, Bella," she said impatiently. "I know there's got to be a reason for all this secrecy. I know there's some reason she's not just mailing stuff to you. I don't really want to know what it is, I don't care if it's a drug thing or embezzlement or whatever. I'm making good money."

"Not enough for what—" I started to say, but Bree cut me off and suddenly she didn't look so young anymore.

"It's more than the money," she said, her voice hardening. "How could you even understand? You have people to take care of you. God, compared to me, your life is perfect. But me? My whole entire life, ever since I can remember, adults have seen me wearing long-sleeved shirts in the dead of summer and said nothing. Seen my arms taped up in stupid homemade casts and seen black eyes I couldn't completely cover up with makeup and seen how I would just start crying in the middle of class for no reason. They always complimented me on my grades and got this stupid concerned look and said that if I ever needed help they'd help me, but they didn't. They wanted me to be the one to come up with a plan, even though I was a kid and I didn't know half of what they knew about it, just by being grown-ups with eyeballs and world experience. They didn't just do it. They should have. Someone should have helped me and now Victoria is. Can you understand that, Bella?"

I gaped at her. She had tears on her cheeks, but it was unclear whether she was aware of this. Instead of answering, I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, as cautiously as if I were a vampire and she were a human I was trying not to break. She resisted for a moment, then slumped into me and let herself be hugged.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know. It's okay, honey, I'm sorry..." Her breathing slowly settled and her shoulders lost their tension. By the time this baby was born, I would be a champion comforter. "I won't say anything about Victoria, but do you want to at least come over after school or something? Just to talk?"

"I really can't," she said. "But thanks. I guess I'll probably see you soon, anyway, huh?" She sniffled, wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands, then smiled weakly and left. I watched her grow smaller and smaller until the between-classes mass of students swallowed her whole. Then I looked down at what I held in my hands.

I didn't want to see what she'd brought me. But I couldn't stop myself. I tore it open, trying to be slow, not to rip the envelope, but my hands shook and everything ended up spilling out onto my lap. Using peripheral vision only, I dug through the Polaroids—there were too many of them. Six, not two. And three of those six were, to my side-eye, too red, too blurred, too obviously dead girls. I didn't look at these. I dropped them into the bottom of my backpack and looked at the rest.

I picked up a photo of a girl. Brown hair. Pale skin. Young, like Bree. Smiling. It was a school photo, cut from a yearbook. The name underneath read Jennifer Mosley. Jennifer Mosley wore her hair like mine, parted in the middle, falling around her face in waves.

I dropped the photo and picked up a note written in pencil.

Carrie if you get this I'm at 1742 Baker St by the water in one of the shipping containers. Please call the cops, I love you.

Then a blonde-haired teenager, Shelly Simpson. 1742 baker was all her note said, but it was signed with a complicated doodle of a flower and butterfly, and it was heavily stained with tears.

The third, a Hispanic preteen. Olimpia Moreno. John Estoy en un almacén en la calle Baker venga rápido.

It went on like this, through Katy Costello and Erica Lane and Aesha Johnson.

I couldn't breathe. Six. Not one. How many would it be next time Bree showed her face? I didn't understand the rules of this horrible game. I didn't want to.. My hands shook as I dropped Aesha's note and picked up the last thing to fall out of the envelope.

Bella,

It wold be unwise for any more Cullins to come looking for me. Next time anyone but the wolf comes to a drop off I kill twenty.

your frend

Victoria

First things first: I belatedly realized that last week's A/N was confusingly worded and undercooked, leading many of you to (quite logically) draw conclusions I never meant to express. That was my fault and I feel kind of bad about it. I've re-written it for clarity and sense-making. If you have two minutes and the inclination, I'd love for you to click back and read the new note on Ch. 11.

On to the pregnancy! I always knew that my Carlisle, being a doctor with quicker-than-usual mental faculties, would figure out that a half-vampire fetus would have dietary needs different from a human fetus's, and he wouldn't wait till Bella weighs 65 pounds to make that leap. But there were a couple of different ways to handle this issue. I'll walk you through my thought process.

1. My first thought was that if Bella is losing blood to the fetus she can't just drink more blood. I mean, if a stabbing victim were rolled into the ER gushing buckets, would Carlisle hand them a bowl of O neg and a straw? No, if the baby is drinking Bella's blood, she needs a transfusion, not a sippy cup. Then again, this is a pregnancy, not a stab wound. I needed to figure out if she's losing blood to the baby or just losing the stuff in blood to the baby. Casual online research, ahoy!

2. Fetuses don't actually use their mouths to eat. The mother's blood pools in the awesomely-named "blood lakes" which are basically human yolks. The placenta filters the stuff it needs out of those lakes and passes it along to the baby's bloodstream via the umbilical cord. Furthermore, this baby is still only the size of an angrily clenched fist; it isn't big enough to actually steal enough of Bella's blood for her to miss it. Instead, the fetus must be absorbing more stuff from Bella's blood than she is capable of replacing; the baby may even absorb the blood cells themselves, in which case Bella's blood is mostly water by the time the baby's done with it.

3. But would drinking blood actually replenish Bella's used-up supply of nutrients? Hard to say: some cultures thrive on diets rich in fresh blood and milk, but since Bella didn't grow up in one of those her body wouldn't be used to it. The baby may have erased Bella's aversion to blood, but being pregnant hasn't changed her body's ability to eliminate excess iron (we humans are notoriously terrible at that). The amount of blood Bella's going to need over the course of this pregnancy is way higher than a human's capacity to drink it without dying horribly. Which is not even to mention that some of the things the fetus needs might be lost if they have to go through Bella's digestive tract first. Drinking blood is not a very efficient way to replenish Bella's and the fetus's respective bloodstreams.

4. Okay, so Bella can't just drink the blood, but she hasn't technically lost any fluid (the fetus is absorbing nutrients, not the water &c. those nutrients are suspended in), so an ordinary transfusion might have undesirable effects on, say, her blood vessels; she still has five liters of something pumping through them, even if that something is a nutritionally-bankrupt diluted sludge, and they may not take kindly to suddenly being flooded with more fluid than they are used to. Wikipedia to the rescue! In an exchange transfusion, Bella's watered-down, depleted blood is slowly extracted and replaced with healthy blood. She still needs to keep producing blood of her own, of course, and filling it with all the human nutrients she and the human half of the fetus require; the exchange transfusion is mostly necessary to help her keep up with the loss of blood to the vampire half of the baby.

Did I miss something important? Any biologists out there who can add to/disprove/correct my theory?

*Thank you to Jansails for biology help!