PREFACE
I FELT LIKE I WAS TRAPPED IN ONE OF THOSE TERRIFYING nightmares, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can't make your body move fast enough. My legs seemed to move slower and slower as I fought my way through the callous crowd, but the hands on the huge clock tower didn't slow. With relentless, uncaring force, they turned inexorably toward the end - the end of everything.
But this was no dream, and, unlike the nightmare, I wasn't running for my life; I was racing to save something infinitely more precious. My own life meant little to me today.
Alice had said there was a good chance we would both die here. Perhaps the outcome would be different if she weren't trapped by the brilliant sunlight; only I was free to run across this bright, crowded square.
And I couldn't run fast enough.
So it didn't matter to me that we were surrounded by our extraordinarily dangerous enemies. As the clock began to toll out the hour, vibrating under the soles of my sluggish feet, I knew I was too late - and I was glad something bloodthirsty waited in the wings. For in failing at this, I forfeited any desire to live.
The clock tolled again, and the sun beat down from the exact center point of the sky.
Chapter 1 PARTY
I WAS NINETY-NINE POINT NINE PERCENT SURE I WAS dreaming.
The reasons I was so certain were that, first, I was standing in a bright shaft of sunlight - the kind of blinding clear sun that never shone on my drizzly new hometown in Forks, Washington - and second, I was looking at my Grandma Marie. Gran had been dead for six years now, so that was solid evidence toward the dream theory.
Gran hadn't changed much; her face looked just the same as I remembered it. The skin was soft and withered, bent into a thousand tiny creases that clung gently to the bone underneath. Like a dried apricot, but with a puff of thick white hair standing out in a cloud around it.
Our mouths - hers a wizened picker - spread into the same surprised half-smile at just the same time. Apparently, she hadn't been expecting to see me, either.
I was about to ask her a question; I had so many - What was she doing here in my cream? What had
she been up to in the past six years? Was Pop okay, and had they found each other, wherever they were? - but she opened her mouth when I did, so I stopped to let her go first. She paused, too, and then we Goth smiled at the little awkwardness.
"Bella!"
It wasn't Gran who called my name, and we both turned to see the addition to our small reunion. 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.
Even though I was always thrilled to see him - conscious or otherwise - and even though I was almost positive that I was dreaming, I panicked as Edward walked toward us through the glaring sunlight.
I panicked because Gran didn't know that I was in love with a vampire - nobody knew that - so how was I supposed to explain the fact that the brilliant sunbeams were shattering off his skin into a thousand rainbow shards like he was made of crystal or diamond?
Well, Gran, yon might have noticed that my boyfriend glitters. It's just something he does in the sun. Don't worry about it...
What was he doing? The whole reason he lived in Forks, the rainiest place in the world, was so that he could be outside in the daytime without exposing his family's secret. Yet here he was, strolling gracefully toward me - with the most beautiful smile on his angel's face - as if I were the only one here.
In that second, I wished that I was not the one exception to his mysterious talent; I usually felt grateful that I was the only person whose thoughts he couldn't hear just as clearly as if they were spoken aloud. But now I wished he could hear me, too, so that he could hear the warning I was screaming in my head.
I shot a panicked glance back at Gran, and saw that it was too late. She was just turning to stare back at me, her eyes as alarmed as mine.
Edward - still smiling so beautifully that my heart felt like it was going to swell up and burst through my chest - put his arm around my shoulder and turned to face my grandmother.
Gran's expression surprised me. Instead of looking horrified, she was staring at me sheepishly, as if waiting for a scolding. And she was standing in such a strange position - one arm held awkwardly away from her body, stretched out and then curled around the air. Like she had her arm around someone I couldn't see, someone invisible...
Only then, as I looked at the bigger picture, did I notice the huge gilt frame that enclosed my grandmother's form. Uncomprehending, I raised the hand that wasn't wrapped around Edward's waist and reached out to touch her. She mimicked the movement exactly, mirrored it. But where our fingers should have met, there was nothing but cold glass...
With a dizzying jolt, my dream abruptly became a nightmare.
There was no Gran.
That was me. Me in a mirror. Me - ancient, creased, and withered.
Edward stood beside me, casting no reflection, excruciatingly lovely and forever seventeen.
He pressed his icy, perfect lips against my wasted cheek.
"Happy birthday," he whispered.
I woke with a start - my eyelids popping open wide - and gasped. Dull gray light, the familiar light of an overcast morning, took the place of the blinding sun in my dream.
Just a dream, I told myself. It was only a dream. I took a deep breath, and then jumped again when my alarm went off. The little calendar in the corner of the clock's display informed me that today was September thirteenth.
Only a dream, but prophetic enough in one way, at least. Today was my birthday. I was officially eighteen years old.