My own life meant little to me today.

I didn’t have to look to know who it was; this was a voice I would know anywhere—know, and respond to, whether I was awake or asleep… or even dead, I’d bet. The voice I’d walk through fire for—or, less dramatically, slosh every day through the cold and endless rain for. Edward.

Well, Gran, you might have noticed that my boyfriend glitters. It’s just something he does in the sun. Don’t worry about it…

Edward stood beside me, casting no reflection, excruciatingly lovely and forever seventeen.

I couldn’t feel anything but despair until I pulled into the familiar parking lot behind Forks High School and spotted Edward leaning motionlessly against his polished silver Volvo, like a marble tribute to some forgotten pagan god of beauty.

How many times have you been a senior?

Attention is never a good thing, as any other accident-prone klutz would agree. No one wants a spotlight when they’re likely to fall on their face.

College was Plan B. I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human…

Money meant next to nothing to Edward or the rest of the Cullens. It was just something that accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market.

You want a nice stereo? Drive your own car.

Edward had drawn many careful lines for our physical relationship, with the intent being to keep me alive. Though I respected the need for maintaining a safe distance between my skin and his razor-sharp, venom-coated teeth, I tended to forget about trivial things like that when he was kissing me.

Do you think I’ll ever get better at this? That my heart might someday stop trying to jump out of my chest whenever you touch me?

No matter what might ever happen to me, you are not allowed to hurt yourself!

Put me in danger! I thought we’d established that all the bad luck is my fault?

What if something did happen to you? Would you want me to go off myself?

If I develop this film, will you show up in the picture?

Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.

Edward stood over me, still protective, still not breathing.

Well, that’s everyone. I can clear a room, at least.

I couldn’t imagine anyone, deity included, who wouldn’t be impressed by Carlisle. Besides, the only kind of heaven I could appreciate would have to include Edward.

If he’d asked me whether I would risk my soul for Edward, the reply would be obvious. But would I risk Edward’s soul? I pursed my lips unhappily. That wasn’t a fair exchange.

Carlisle sews faster than any other doctor I’ve had.

Charlie was never surprised to see me bandaged.

I’d rather die than be with anyone but you.

He smiled my favorite crooked smile, and then he disappeared into the darkness.

Which is tempting you more, my blood or my body?

The guilt made my head bow and my shoulders slump. I’d run them out of their home, just like Rosalie and Emmett. I was a plague.

Surely Edward could wait a year. What was a year to an immortal? It didn’t even seem like that much to me.

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for normal human behavior today.

Edward looked just as beautiful as he did in real life, staring at me out of the picture with the warm eyes I’d missed for the past few days. It was almost uncanny that anyone could look so… so… beyond description. No thousand words could equal this picture.

The contrast between the two of us was painful. He looked like a god. I looked very average, even for a human, almost shamefully plain.

He smiled my favorite crooked smile, but it was wrong. It didn’t reach his eyes.

I don’t care! You can have my soul. I don’t want it without you—it’s yours already!

You… don’t… want me?

With shaky legs, ignoring the fact that my action was useless, I followed him into the forest. The evidence of his path had disappeared instantly. There were no footprints, the leaves were still again, but I walked forward without thinking. I could not do anything else. I had to keep moving. If I stopped looking for him, it was over. Love, life, meaning… over.

The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under. I did not resurface.

I didn’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I was pretty sure that it didn’t work unless the subject was relatively honest. Sure, I could tell the truth—if I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a padded cell.

The scene kept cutting between the horrified face of the heroine, and the dead, emotionless face of her pursuer, back and forth as it closed the distance. And I realized which one resembled me the most.

I sat down on the bench outside the theater door and tried very hard not to think of the irony. But it was ironic, all things considered, that, in the end, I would wind up as a zombie. I hadn’t seen that one coming.

It was depressing to realize that I wasn’t the heroine anymore, that my story was over.

It was inevitable that I would have nightmares, but they wouldn’t be about zombies.

Option one: I was crazy. That was the layman’s term for people who heard voices in their heads. Possible.

Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.

As if he’d never existed? That was insanity. It was a promise that he could never keep, a promise that was broken as soon as he’d made it.

Reckless in Forks—now there was a hopeless proposition.

To be reckless in Forks would take a lot of creativity—maybe more than I had. But I wished I could find some way… I might feel better if I weren’t holding fast, all alone, to a broken pact.

Who would want to ride a motorcycle here? It would be like taking a sixty-mile-per-hour bath.

I wanted to be stupid and reckless, and I wanted to break promises. Why stop at one?

I liked my truck very much, but Jacob seemed to consider the speed restrictions a shortcoming.

You grew again!

Wait a sec—are you legal yet?

Only a teenage boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education.

Many of the words they used were unfamiliar to me, and I figured I’d have to have a Y chromosome to really understand the excitement.

I was enjoying myself—how strange.

I’m bankrolling this party. You just have to supply the labor and expertise.

So where to, Mr. Goodwrench?

It’s not my fault you’re a freak.

By the time we got back to La Push, I was twenty-three and he was thirty—he was definitely weighting skills in his favor.

I was beginning to get annoyed with myself. I might as well have been packed in Styrofoam peanuts through the last semester.

Had all the people she was habitually nasty to caught her behind the gym and scalped her?

I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing here. Was I trying to push myself back into the zombie stupor? Had I turned masochistic—developed a taste for torture?

I guess I am taking advantage of your very underpriced mechanical skills. But as long as you let me come over, I’ll be here.

I threw my arms around him instinctively, wrapping them around his waist and pressing my face against his chest. He was so big, I felt like I was a child hugging a grown-up.

This didn’t feel anything like the last time someone had embraced me this way. This was friendship. And Jacob was very warm.

It’s hard to believe I’m two years older than you. You make me feel like a dwarf.

Let’s not start with the albino cracks.

That doesn’t sound right. Aren’t both brakes kind of important?

This had to be it, the recipe for a hallucination—adrenaline plus clanger plus stupidity. Something close to that, anyway.

I’m an easy bleeder. It’s not nearly as dire as it looks.

Racing down the road like that had been amazing. The feel of the wind in my face, the speed and the freedom… it reminded me of a past life, flying through the thick forest without a road, piggyback while he ran—I stopped thinking right there, letting the memory break off in the sudden agony.

Charlie seemed to buy my story about falling in Jacob’s garage. After all, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been able to land myself in the ER before with no more help than my own feet.

As always, Jacob was game for anything I wanted. No matter how strange it was.

I was like a lost moon—my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation—that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

I’m in the mood for action. Bring on the blood and guts!

I’m giving up—I can’t top this one. So you win. You’re oldest.

How was I ever going to fight the blurring lines in our relationship when I enjoyed being with him so much?

Do you honestly expect me to remember where all my scars come from?

I waited for the memory to hit—to open the gaping hole. But, as it so often did, Jacob’s presence kept me whole.

He deserved better than that—better than a one-room, falling-down fixer-upper. No amount of investment on his part could put me back in working order.

How much I wished that Jacob Black had been born my brother, my flesh-and -blood brother, so that I would have some legitimate claim on him that still left me free of any blame now.

. I’d give Billy a week, I decided, before I got pushy. A week was generous.

I wasn’t really listening to his warnings; I was much more upset by the situation with Jacob than by the possibility of being eaten by a bear.

It was ridiculous that I should be so elated because a vampire knew my name.

Was I nor in the worst danger imaginable? The motorcycle was safe as kittens next to this.

I was beginning to babble. I had to work to shut myself up.

His name burst through all the walls I’d built to contain it. Edward, Edward, Edward. I was going to die. It shouldn’t matter if I thought of him now. Edward, I love you.

Granted, the wolf was monstrous in size, but it was just an animal. What reason would a vampire have for fearing an animal?

I guessed that, between the two choices before me, being eaten by wolves was almost certainly the worse option.

At least I’d come here alone, to this fairytale meadow filled with dark monsters. At least Jacob wasn’t going to die, too. At least I wouldn’t have his death on my hands.

What was with the Quileute boys? Were they feeding them experimental growth hormones?

There was a darkness in Jacob now. Like my sun had imploded.

More than anything, I wanted to be fierce and deadly, someone no one would dare mess with. Someone who would scare Sam Uley silly. I wanted to be a vampire.

I’d thought Jake had been healing the hole in me—or at least plugging it up, keeping it from hurting me so much. I’d been wrong. He’d just been carving out his own hole, so that I was now riddled through like Swiss cheese. I wondered why I didn’t crumble into pieces.

Sam Uley says Jacob can’t be my friend anymore.

When did you ever promise to kill yourself falling out of Charlie’s tree?

A wide grin spread slowly across Jacob’s face; he seemed extremely pleased with himself. It wasn’t the grin that I knew and loved—it was a new grin, one that was a bitter mockery of his old sincerity, on the new face that belonged to Sam.

For me, this was all essentially voluntary. I protected the Cullens’ secret out of love; unrequited, but true. For Jacob, it didn’t seem to be that way.

What kind of a place was this? Could a world really exist where ancient legends went wandering around the borders of tiny, insignificant towns, facing down mythical monsters? Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?

Wasn’t one myth enough for anyone, enough for a lifetime?

Jacob, the only human I’d ever been able to relate to…And he wasn’t even human. I fought the urge to scream again.What did this say about me?

There was no cult. There had never been a cult, never been a gang. No, it was much worse than that. It was a pack. A pack of five mind-blowingly gigantic, multihued werewolves that had stalked right past me in Edward’s meadow…

Jacob was my best friend, but was he a monster, too? A real one? A bad one? Should I warn him, if he and his friends were… were murderers? If they were out slaughtering innocent hikers in cold blood? If they were truly creatures from a horror movie in every sense, would it be wrong to protect them?

It was bad enough that my best friend was a werewolf. Did he have to be a monster, too?

Could you… well, try to not be a… werewolf?

I’m nothing but a human, after all. Nothing special.

It was just luck that she hadn’t found me yet—just luck and five teenage werewolves.

I’m sort of used to weird by this point, you know.

When I dreamed, I stood in the forest again, but I didn’t wander. I was holding Emily’s scarred hand as we faced into the shadows and waited anxiously for our werewolves to come home.

Last spring break, I’d been hunted by a vampire, too. I hoped this wasn’t some kind of tradition forming.

Jake could say what he wanted about us being a messed-up pair—I was the one who was truly messed up. I made the werewolf seem downright normal.

I’d forgotten how hard she was; it was like running headlong into a wall of cement.

Your best friend is a werewolf?

What did you think you were going to find? I mean, besides me dead? Did you expect to find me skipping around and whistling show tunes? You know me better than that.

Well, run along now. Go tell Sam that the scary monsters aren’t coming to get you.

Why does everyone keep doing that to me? I don’t smell!

The prince was never coming back to kiss me awake from my enchanted sleep. I was not a princess, after all. So what was the fairy-tale protocol for other kisses? The mundane kind that didn’t break any spells?

The sense of deja vu was nearly stifling by this point. At least, unlike the last time—when I’d run away from Forks to escape thirsty vampires rather than to find them—I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to Charlie in person.

The image of Edward in the meadow—glowing, shimmering like his skin was made of a million diamond facets—was burned into my memory. No human who saw that would ever forget.

Sheesh, Alice. Could you pick a more conspicuous car to steal?

I wasn’t going to make it. I was stupid and slow and human, and we were all going to die because of it.

Was it really such a loathsome idea? Would he rather die than change me? I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

It was heaven—right smack in the middle of hell.

It took less than half a second for me to realize that, as long as I was truly insane now, I might as well enjoy the delusions while they were pleasant.

I’m dead, right? I did drown. Crap, crap, crap! This is gonna kill Charlie.

If I was in hell, you wouldn’t be with me.

His mouth was on mine then, and I couldn’t fight him. Not because he was so many thousand times stronger than me, but because my will crumbled into dust the second our lips met.

My problems are a lot worse that a handful of adolescent wolves getting themselves into trouble.

This isn’t just about you anymore. You’re not the center of the universe, you know. If you’re going to bring the Volturi down on us over something as stupid as leaving me human, then your family ought to have a say.

Thank you. For wanting to keep me. I feel exactly the same way about all of you, too.

The fairy tale was back on. Prince returned, bad spell broken. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do about the leftover, unresolved character. Where was his happily ever after?Charlie… is probably not going to kill you, but he’s thinking about it.

The sting of betrayal washed through me. I had trusted Jacob implicitly—trusted him with every single secret I had. He was supposed to be my safe harbor—the person I could always rely on.

Let me go! I’m going to murder him! Traitor!

I’m already grounded! Why do you think I haven’t been down to La Push to kick your butt for avoiding my phone calls?

The only thing that Jacob would want from Edward would be his absence.

Charlie might just send me to military school. But that won’t keep me away from Edward. There’s nothing that can do that.

I knew that last glimpse of his face would haunt me until I saw him smile again.

Edward was here, with his arms around me. I could face anything as long as that was true. I squared my shoulders and walked forward to meet my fate, with my destiny solidly at my side.

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