When I was finished feeding, Edward led me out of the enclosure. His hand felt almost fragile in mine; if I squeezed it, I knew I could hurt him. And so I very carefully didn't squeeze, but let him guide me as if I were still human. Soon I found myself in another small building, this one containing a large, open shower which Edward turned on for me. I ripped myself out of the blood-soaked bed gown I'd been wearing. It was different from the one I'd died in, I dimly recalled. They must have changed my clothes and my bedding while I was under, so that I wouldn't wake up to the smell of Bella Swan's fresh-shed human blood. Thank god for that. I stepped into the shower.
The warm water hitting my skin felt wonderful. I scrubbed at my skin and under my nails, dabbled my feet against the wet tiles on the floor, opened my eyes under the spray. It stung, but not as much as it would have if I'd been human. Eventually, I stepped out and let Edward dry me off with a fluffy towel.
As Edward was ducking into the shower to turn it off, I noticed a full-length mirror against one wall. I just managed to avoid sucking in a searing breath when I saw myself reflected in that mirror. I leaned forward as if being a few inches closer to my reflection could make some sort of sense of it. I still looked like me, generally. But I didn't entirely recognize what I was seeing—it was like looking at a photo of myself, so different from the flipped image I always saw in mirrors. There was a proportionality apparent in my features that felt alien, a symmetry that didn't exactly mask the basic Bellaness of the image I was seeing but did force me to work harder to feel in touch with my own reflection. Nose, lips, cheeks, jaw, all the same and yet subtly altered. My skin, stripped of its pink undertones, now glowed a gentle ivory. And those eyes—how would I ever get used to eyes so hideously, vividly, gorgeously red? The whites were as white as paper, divested of all those little veins at the corners, the usual pink of my tear-ducts replaced by a pearly gray. I watched in fascination as the aperture of my eyeball narrowed, focusing. Holy crap, my eyesight was good. I could count the stripes in my irises. I could practically see into my brain through my own pupils.
This was too weird. I searched my face for signs of familiarity. There, that cluster of freckles underneath my right eye, although there were definitely more of them than I remembered. And my left eyebrow was still more of an arch than its sister, a feature which had always given me a curious, skeptical expression. I tried raising it higher and got tangled up in my facial muscles for a few minutes before everything sorted itself out and I found myself smiling at the mirror like a goofball. I turned my head to see that my pierced ears had closed up. I spotted fine, golden-brown peach fuzz at my hairline. If I looked closely I saw the delicate hairs that covered my once-mammalian flesh, pale brown against the whiteness of my skin. And vampires did have pores, I could see; they were simply very small and clean.
I took a strand of chestnut-colored hair between my fingers and inspected it: I could see my own split ends, feel the scales of each shaft. It was strange to think of a vampire with split ends, but then again, I couldn't imagine why the venom would have had any affect on my hair.
"That'll grow out," said Edward, noting my area of interest. "It'll come in thick and strong, too. You'll like it."
My figure was completely new. Most of the weight I'd put on with the baby had been, well, baby. But I did have what I guessed might be about ten or fifteen pounds on the Bella of six months ago, distributed more or less evenly around my body. I'd read about what happened to post-pregnancy bodies, knew all about the jacked-up torso muscles and floppy skin and wrinkled, deflated belly. The venom seemed to have put all my abdominal bits and bobs back in the right places, smoothing out the longitudinal stretch marks I'd acquired in recent weeks, stitching the muscles back together and erasing the scar from the caesarean section. I didn't look like I'd given birth three days ago, but I had certainly shed that metabolism-of-a-teenager skinniness. Yet somehow, even with my cute new curves, I looked awkward and ungainly. Why was that? I looked again at Edward in the mirror, standing behind me, hands in his pockets, knees loose, feet apart, and then back at myself. Ah, that was it: my stance was completely unnatural, too fixed and unbalanced, tilted at the waist with all my weight on my toes. It was disconcerting. Experimentally I tried redistributing my weight so I was standing like a normal person, with my hip jutting out and one foot extended. Thinking about it so hard, my movements felt peculiar, smoothly jerky, if that made any sense. I was going to have to relearn everything I knew about interacting with objects in space. Including my own body.
I turned away, bored of my own reflection. It was hard to take in my pretty face as a whole, because my eyes kept trying to focus in on individual features. I liked my substantial new bod; my tininess had always made me feel meek and breakable in the past, and it was nice to be taking up more space in the world. But it didn't feel like me at all. And there were more interesting things to look at, anyway. For example...
Edward took his hands out of his pockets and slid them around my bare waist. Ohh, this was nice. Edward kissed my cheek and then my neck, and it felt so good that I gasped in pleasure, the largest breath I'd taken since feeding.
And our moment was over, because I couldn't think around the pain of that gasp. In a second, I was hunched in the fetal position, rocking in Edward's arms, the echoes of my ravaged groans bouncing around the tile walls.
If I thought about it with my conscious mind, drinking those doomed feral cats and dogs made me feel like a total monster, which was irrational because I knew that this solution was best for everybody. So when it came time to feed I always turned a blind eye to the squeamish, conscious part of my mind and let instinct took over. I didn't turn my higher brain back on until after I'd showered in the facilities adjoining the kennel, and changed into clean clothes. I always required Edward's help in these enterprises. I ruined a lot of perfectly nice outfits trying to get dressed unassisted. And we never did manage to make very good use of this naked alone time before the fire was back, worse than before.
With the feeding ordeal out of the way, Edward and I returned to the house to be with Laelia, whose scent (and face, and laughter) was the most reliable medicine for the pain in my throat. While she watched from some aunt or uncle's arms, I would test my abilities. I did this in a variety of ways. Once, Emmett and I had a digging contest. We both dug with bare hands into the soft soil in one corner of the yard. Alice timed us for exactly one minute, at the end of which time I'd made an Emmett-sized hole and Emmett had made a Bella-sized hole. We dropped into each other's pits and stood there laughing like maniacs. I was laughing so hard that if I'd been human I would have had tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn't even knew what I was laughing at, just that it felt wonderful to have something as pleasant as laughter take over my whole body for once, instead of agonizing thirst.
Another time, the girls took me out for a jog around the property. The speed was incredible—and I had always suffered so from motion sickness! But now it seemed nothing could touch me: I leaped ecstatically across the undergrowth, whirled past trees at breakneck speed, burst like a comet through thick tangles of brush which tore viciously at my clothes but made no mark on my glowing ivory skin. Alice let me hold a little bicycle odometer and I watched my speed rise above twenty miles per hour without difficulty. Then thirty. Forty. Fifty. I topped out at seventy-one, although Alice and Rosalie started to fall behind at sixty. We came to a stream; impulsively I knelt in it in my bare feet and picked up handful after handful of water to fling skyward. The drops seemed to float weightlessly for several seconds, glittering austerely in the gentle grey light, before raining back down on my upturned face. Then I was off again, leaping like a kangaroo, trying to catch the topmost branches of trees in passing.
Not all of my self-testing was so much fun. Breathing was a constant battle for me. It was easiest when Laelia was close, but when she was asleep I would flee, out of smelling-distance just so I could get used to the pain. Edward was the only one who came with me; I didn't want the rest of them to see me like this.
"You don't have to do this, Bella. It'll get better on its own. You shouldn't force it," said Edward one night while we stood together under the trees a few miles from the house. I had fallen back against the trunk of a cedar, my teeth clenched tightly together, my breath coming in short bursts. My mouth and throat were in such agony that not even the purple-tinted beauty of the evening could distract me. My eyes lolled back in my head and I clutched my arms against my stomach, wheezing pathetically. I slid down the trunk until I was crouching, then curled up in a ball on the carpet of needles that littered the ground. A thin moan leaked through my lips, which were curled away from my teeth in a grimacing snarl. Edward was still trying to convince me to return to the house and the comfort of Laelia when he stopped suddenly and hurled himself at me, his arms pinning mine to my sides. Instinctively I fought him off, not understanding what he was doing—until I took my next breath.
Suddenly the burn that had reduced me to this quivering huddle exploded into an searing blaze. Lightning jolted through my legs and I was on my feet before my conscious mind had even noticed the change. There was a scent of...of something on the wind, something so carnally appealing that it did not even cross my mind not to seek it out. I shook Edward away from me as briskly and unthinkingly as I might have shaken off a fly. And then I ran.
"Bella!" Edward yelled after me. "Bella, wait—please, just don't breathe—"
I ignored him. The scent was not merely in my nostrils, it was in my veins, pounding through my head, boiling through my limbs. I heard him crashing behind me, always just a step behind, but beginning to lose ground. I didn't care. I cared about nothing but getting to the source of that scent.
But Edward had more experience than me, and even without newborn strength he was fast. He knew how to read my movements, knew how to figure out what route I would plot through the forest a second before I did. He corralled me against an embankment I couldn't easily leap. The footing here was not good; Edward waited for me to overbalance on some loose gravel and then leapt for my throat. He pinned me to the ground, one hand pressing close around my neck and the other firmly clamped over my nose and mouth. This left my hands free to scratch violently at his face, which I did; but I couldn't rise to my feet from this awkward position. My whole being was begging for me to drink in that scent, to follow it, to consume it. I knew that I could hurt Edward if I wanted to. I was just enough out of my mind to try it. I let my teeth close around the flesh of his palm and tasted a drop of venom well up at the cut.
Then I stopped. His venom was in my mouth, slithering around my mouth. The taste of it slammed into me like a freight train, the sharpness, the texture of it too intense on my tongue. It cleared my head of the scent of the human, enough at least for Edward's voice to filter through the roaring in my ears.
"Hold your breath and think of our little girl," he was muttering desperately. "Do it for her. Just don't breathe, Bella, please, please don't breathe…"
I forced my bucking limbs to still. This was the hardest and most painful thing I had ever done in my life: the urge to fight Edward off and sprint headlong toward murder was unbelievably powerful. It didn't matter that I knew I would regret it for all eternity. Right now, I was a slave to my senses.
The only answer was to head those senses off at the pass. I held that drop of his venom on my tongue and forced myself to taste its unpleasant sharpness, forced myself to focus on that sensation instead of the other. After a moment, I slowly nodded into Edward's anxious eyes. Without releasing his hand from my nose and mouth, he hefted me into his arms and then ran hell-for-leather back the way we'd come.
After several minutes, he told me that the scent of human was gone, that I could breathe if I wished. Experimentally I tried it: the burn in my throat was barely lessened since the magic scent roused it, and the pain was enough to drive me half-mad. I swallowed that drop of venom, and tried with all my might not to remember what I had just almost done.
"You did so well, sweet," whispered Edward, over and over again, stroking my hair. "You made it. I'm so proud of you."
"I bit you," I said. "I'm so sorry, Edward…"
"You were meant to bite me," said Edward. "The taste of pure venom can sometimes work as a distraction, provided the newborn in question is in a cooperative mood. Jas taught me that move. I'm so sorry I had to use it on you."
"If you hadn't—" I began, but then the blaze in my throat choked me off again and I couldn't speak around the pain. I spent the rest of the night in Edward's arms, a distant keening howl the only sound in my ears. It was hours before I realized the sound was coming from me.
The next morning, after a hardcore cuddling-session with my child to return me to my mental factory setting, I wandered off in search of Esme only to find her neatly filling a suitcase.
"Are you...going somewhere?" I asked, surprised. She paused in her packing and smiled at me.
"I'm afraid so," she said. "I'm off to Ireland in a few hours. I thought I'd just get the packing out of the way now." She sat on the edge of the bed, patting the spot next to her. I sat down too, and she put one arm around me.
"I didn't want to dump this on you first thing," she said, "but it's...it's about Bree."
"No," I moaned, all the calm from breakfast draining from my body. "Is she…?"
"She's not dead," said Esme. "She's been turned. For whatever that's worth."
My hands flew to cover my mouth. "What happened?" I whispered.
"The Denalis and the Aonair coven—they're the Irish, Siobhan's family—have been on Victoria's case constantly. She took Bree with her, first up to Belfast, then out into the farmland, presumably in hopes of losing them. Eventually she must have figured out that Bree was only going to be a liability and turned on her. She bit Bree, opened up a vein, spilled a lot of blood, and then picked her up and threw her forcibly at her pursuers. Laurent was present, and he's been struggling with his diet lately. He started to rampage. When the others had no choice but to put their energy into restraining him, Victoria slipped away. Bree came to just yesterday, I'm told," said Esme. "The Denalis are roaming now, trying to pick Victoria's scent back up. Siobhan has agreed to take Bree in until I can get there. She is in a much less stable state than you, because she was totally unprepared for this, and they haven't got a Laelia to keep things calm. We have a house in Alberta where we might be able to keep her safe. I'll know more when I arrive."
"Can't she come here?"
"I wish she could," said Esme regretfully, "but I don't even think we can be sure of staying here. The treaty we worked out with the wolves forbids the presence of any vampire lacking self-control in the presence of humans. It's more than simply an edict against biting or harming a human. It's about risk as well. We couldn't stay here when the treaty was first signed because Emmett had only been turned for two years and we couldn't guarantee that he wouldn't make a mistake. We weren't anticipating that a human might ever wish to be like us, or that someone like Laelia might come along, who we can all agree shouldn't be held to the same standard of responsibility as rational adults. So there is some gray area where you are concerned, but I think it is unlikely that the wolves will agree that we shall remain here once they've learned what has happened. Their first priority is to protect the tribe, and if we push them they will fight to the death to accomplish this. We knew this was a strong probability. We've been making plans for some time."
"So we have to leave all this," I said, looking out the window sadly. Charlie was in town, and I liked being near him even if he couldn't know I was. I liked knowing that Jake wasn't far away. I liked knowing that even if I was a stranger in my own body at least I could still live in a place that felt like home. But Esme was right, the wolves were dangerous, and it wasn't worth risking Laelia's safety. Or, if I was honest with myself, the safety of the humans who lived in such terrifying proximity to me.
"Probably," she agreed. "We may have to leave, but it is possible that when you are no longer a newborn and emotions are no longer running high, they will agree to let us return. Until then, we will have our home in Alberta, which is further from human settlements and therefore much more suitable for you and, if she wishes it, Bree. As long as we are safe, and together, things will come out right."
Laelia grew so fast you could almost see it happening. She sprouted an inch over the next two days. Her back was strong enough to sit up on her own for short periods. I'd have been worried about where this was going if Alice hadn't met the other hybrid.
About a week after I woke, I was sitting in the front yard with the family when Alice's face grew blank and then cleared. She had her phone to her ear before it had even rung.
"Nahuel," she said. "How are you?"
"Hello, Alice," said an accented male voice. I could hear it more or less perfectly, along with quiet static and background noise coming through the phone. "I got in touch with my aunt. She had some...there is something I didn't tell you. If Bella survives the birth, you must not let the baby near her for a few hours, or a day. It will have venom when it first comes out. It will bite the mother if it possibly can. I didn't...I turned Huilen. I never knew. She never told me. But—"
"Nahuel," Alice broke in gently. "It's okay. We know. I was going to call you soon anyway, to let you know the baby was born. She's beautiful. Her name is Laelia."
There was a silence. Then, slowly, "And...the mother? Bella?"
"She made it," said Alice. "And...well, Laelia did bite her."
"I'm so sorry," breathed the voice in the phone. "I wish I'd told you—"
"I have an idea," said Alice. We were all staring at her. "Why don't you talk to Bella yourself?" She tossed me the phone.
"Nahuel?" I said, holding the device gingerly so as not to break it to smithereens. "I...we wanted to thank you for helping us so much. If I didn't know it was normal for her to grow up so fast, she'd be freaking us all out right now. Thank you for that."
"You were changed, then," he said in a voice I couldn't read.
"We knew it might happen," I said. "I mean, not that Laeli would do it, but if the birth was really bad Edward was going to bite me anyway. If there was no other way to survive. So please don't feel bad. In fact, you should come up and see us. Or we could go there. To thank you in person." He said nothing. I heard wind coming through from his end. "I'm happy, Nahuel. Without knowing about you, I would be so scared right now. We would be in the dark. But you know what? My baby's alive and I'm alive and we're going to be just fine. So please don't feel bad."
"You're alive," he echoed.
"Very much so. Come and see for yourself, if you need more convincing."
"Maybe I will. I never knew it was possible for the mother to survive. When they told me they were hoping you'd make it, I thought they must be crazy. But they were right."
"Well, Carlisle's a very good doctor."
"He must be. I may...I may come see you, after all. I've got some things to look after. But I'll call again soon. Thank you."
Laelia was an easy baby, or so everyone kept informing me, although since I had no experience of babies I had to take their word for it. She mainly got cranky when she was tired or hungry or overstimulated. Every morning she would wake with the sun, yawn widely, and then begin bleating for her breakfast. While she had hers from a nice civilized bottle, Edward and I would trek out to the kennel and thin the herd, as Carlisle euphemistically called it.
Certain things about being Laelia's mother were very simple and intuitive. I could spend a whole morning sitting on a quilt in the living room, holding stuffed toys in front of her for her to grab. She was very good at reaching for things and pointing at things, and she could communicate very effectively with or without using her gift. No matter how hungry or cranky I got, I could always find the patience to read her We Are In A Book! thirty times in a row, although she had to learn to turn the pages for me. I was so flabbergastingly in love with the little creature, there was nothing I wouldn't do for her.
But there were things I couldn't do for her. Edward patiently tried to teach me how to change a diaper and prep a bottle, but I didn't have the fine motor control. The one time I managed to get a diaper on Laelia, I wound up stabbing her with a pin. She began to wail like her heart was broken and I spent the next hour feeling like a horrible demon from hell. Jasper tried to convince me that Laelia was fine, she was just crying for attention—as if she wasn't drowning in attention constantly!— but I didn't get over it until I saw Laelia start gnawing on her own fist without so much as a crocodile tear.
"Faker," I said affectionately, removing her hand from her mouth even though I knew she would just put it back in. She let out an indignant squawk and put it back in.
Luckily, Edward was good at all that dad-stuff, and even if he hadn't been, there were more than enough people around who could pre-warm a bottle or wrestle her kicking legs into a onesie without totally disintegrating it.
Sometimes I would hold her while she slept and try to figure out if I felt like a mom yet. I'd been so used to her living invisibly, an inarticulate moving mass hidden inside my body, and now when I looked down at my once-huge belly all I had to show for it was a moderate convexity under firm, unblemished skin. I wondered if experiencing all the physical difficulty of a post-natal healing process would have helped me feel more in tune with motherhood. I wondered if all those hormones that weren't rushing through my body were going to set me up to be a bad mother, forever. Was I missing some vital biological cues about how to care for my daughter? I adored her passionately, but I couldn't be sure it was enough.
1. The pregnancy is noted for its dramatic effects on Bella's body, yet when vampire!Bella looks in the mirror, she apparently notices nothing unusual about her figure. This is odd given how much she whined about it during the previous three books. Some questions I will be asking Meyer in our future imaginary tea paries: You've already told us venom "fixes" axial asymmetry and such hideous disfigurements as brown skin and freckles; does it also "fix" undesirable weight and height? If so, according to what algorithm? Are there any short, fat vampires, and if so, why don't we meet any of them? Why are all the Cullen men between four and ten inches taller than the average for their time and place? Do you consider short, fat humans too heinous-looking to attract vampire predators? How can Rosalie fit the beauty ideal of both 1930s Rochester and 2006 Sports Illustrated? You do know that beauty standards change over time, right?
2. Being unconnected to the circulatory system, the hair on a human's head should not change in any way during a transformation. So all vampires should just have regular, weak, breakable human hair on top of their fancy vampire heads, right? And new hair never grows in, right? So how is it possible that any vampire over the age of two has any hair left at all? I wouldn't expect human hair follicles to be any match for a hairbrush repeatedly wielded by a vampire with the strength of a thousand trains; hell, even if they never touch their hair, that stuff'll just fall out or break simply be being exposed to the elements. Why aren't all those tall, gorgeous Cullens as bald as peeled eggs? My version of vampirism allows for hair that grows, skin cells that replenish themselves, and organs that still organ. I've no idea what Meyer's excuse is.
3. Canon!Bella's first hunt was so irresponsible I have trouble believing this family has ever dealt with a newborn before (and they've dealt with four! And that's not even getting into Jasper's expertise!). I know that accidents happen, and they didn't expect that hiker to be there. But they made the choice not to bring Alice along, even knowing a human might cross their path, and Edward didn't have a contingency plan in place. So when a very predictable high-risk situation occurred, all that saved that hiker's life was luck, and Bella's specialness. Unforgivable.
4. I don't need Bella's child to be a miniature adult who immediately understands the boundaries of her existence. I need her to be a baby. Babies are selfish. They cry when they're unhappy, and they get unhappy about some pretty dumb shit. Babies are stupid and they're curious and they're patient about the weirdest things and impatient about everything else, and they are the best-smelling and worst-smelling things on the planet, sometimes simultaneously, and they make a ton of mistakes trying to do the things that adults do without even thinking, because everything they see and hear and smell and try to do is completely foreign to them. And you know what? That's what makes them awesome. They are tiny little learning machines, blank slates, clean pages. They can't feel empathy at that age, and yet simply by being their own selfish, ignorant, miraculous selves they inspire empathy in even the coldest adult hearts. Renesmee, who somehow comes out of the womb already knowing how to put others' needs before her own, who makes few if any mistakes, who comprehends and processes emotions far outside of her personal experience, doesn't feel like a real baby to me. She feels like a porcelain doll, perfectly manufactured to suit the needs of newborn vampire Bella Swan, just as Bella learned to be the perfect daughter for a kind yet unreliable mother. A sad inversion of a healthy parent-child dynamic.