“Let’s do this,” I agreed.

The big one, Emmett, pushed forward on Edward’s other side, with the hungry-looking one, Jasper, right behind him. I really didn’t care. Maybe my pack would clean up the scraps when they finished me off. Maybe not. It didn’t matter.

For the tiniest part of a second my eyes touched on the two standing in the back. Esme. Alice. Small and distractingly feminine. Well, I was sure the others would kill me before I had to do anything about them. I didn’t want to kill girls… even vampire girls.

Though I might make an exception for that blonde.

“No,” Bella gasped, and she stumbled forward, out of balance, to clutch at Edward’s arm. Rosalie moved with her, like there was a chain locking them to each other.

“I just need to talk to him, Bella,” Edward said in a low voice, talking only to her. He reached up to touch her face, to stroke it. This made the room turn red, made me see fire—that, after all he’d done to her, he was still allowed to touch her that way. “Don’t strain yourself,” he went on, pleading. “Please rest. We’ll both be back in just a few minutes.”

She stared at his face, reading it carefully. Then she nodded and drooped toward the couch. Rosalie helped lower her back onto the cushions. Bella stared at me, trying to hold my eyes.

“Behave,” she insisted. “And then come back.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t making any promises today. I looked away and then followed Edward out the front door.

A random, disjointed voice in my head noted that separating him from the coven hadn’t been so difficult, had it?

He kept walking, never checking to see if I was about to spring at his unprotected back. I supposed he didn’t need to check. He would know when I decided to attack. Which meant I’d have to make that decision very quickly.

“I’m not ready for you to kill me yet, Jacob Black,” he whispered as he paced quickly away from the house. “You’ll have to have a little patience.”

Like I cared about his schedule. I growled under my breath. “Patience isn’t my specialty.”

He kept walking, maybe a couple hundred yards down the drive away from the house, with me right on his heels. I was all hot, my fingers trembling. On the edge, ready and waiting.

He stopped without warning and pivoted to face me. His expression froze me again.

For a second I was just a kid—a kid who had lived all of his life in the same tiny town. Just a child. Because I knew I would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edward’s eyes.

He raised a hand as if to wipe sweat from his forehead, but his fingers scraped against his face like they were going to rip his granite skin right off. His black eyes burned in their sockets, out of focus, or seeing things that weren’t there. His mouth opened like he was going to scream, but nothing came out.

This was the face a man would have if he were burning at the stake.

For a moment I couldn’t speak. It was too real, this face—I’d seen a shadow of it in the house, seen it in her eyes and his, but this made it final. The last nail in her coffin.

“It’s killing her, right? She’s dying.” And I knew when I said it that my face was a watered-down echo of his. Weaker, different, because I was still in shock. I hadn’t wrapped my head around it yet—it was happening too fast. He’d had time to get to this point. And it was different because I’d already lost her so many times, so many ways, in my head. And different because she was never really mine to lose.

And different because this wasn’t my fault.

“My fault,” Edward whispered, and his knees gave out. He crumpled in front of me, vulnerable, the easiest target you could imagine.

But I felt cold as snow—there was no fire in me.

“Yes,” he groaned into the dirt, like he was confessing to the ground. “Yes, it’s killing her.”

His broken helplessness irritated me. I wanted a fight, not an execution. Where was his smug superiority now?

“So why hasn’t Carlisle done anything?” I growled. “He’s a doctor, right? Get it out of her.”

He looked up then and answered me in a tired voice. Like he was explaining this to a kindergartener for the tenth time. “She won’t let us.”

It took a minute for the words to sink in. Jeez, she was running true to form. Of course, die for the monster spawn. It was so Bella.

“You know her well,” he whispered. “How quickly you see.… I didn’t see. Not in time. She wouldn’t talk to me on the way home, not really. I thought she was frightened—that would be natural. I thought she was angry with me for putting her through this, for endangering her life. Again. I never imagined what she was really thinking, what she was resolving. Not until my family met us at the airport and she ran right into Rosalie’s arms. Rosalie’s! And then I heard what Rosalie was thinking. I didn’t understand until I heard that. Yet you understand after one second. . . .” He half-sighed, half-groaned.

“Just back up a second. She won’t let you.” The sarcasm was acid on my tongue. “Did you ever notice that she’s exactly as strong as a normal hundred-and-ten-pound human girl? How stupid are you vamps? Hold her down and knock her out with drugs.”

“I wanted to,” he whispered. “Carlisle would have. . . .”

What, too noble were they?

“No. Not noble. Her bodyguard complicated things.”

Oh. His story hadn’t made much sense before, but it fit together now. So that’s what Blondie was up to. What was in it for her, though? Did the beauty queen want Bella to die so bad?

“Maybe,” he said. “Rosalie doesn’t look at it quite that way.”

“So take the blonde out first. Your kind can be put back together, right? Turn her into a jigsaw and take care of Bella.”

“Emmett and Esme are backing her up. Emmett would never let us… and Carlisle won’t help me with Esme against it. . . .” He trailed off, his voice disappearing.

“You should have left Bella with me.”

“Yes.”

It was a bit late for that, though. Maybe he should have thought about all this before he knocked her up with the life-sucking monster.

He stared up at me from inside his own personal hell, and I could see that he agreed with me.

“We didn’t know,” he said, the words as quiet as a breath. “I never dreamed. There’s never been anything like Bella and I before. How could we know that a human was able conceive a child with one of us—”

“When the human should get ripped to shreds in the process?”

“Yes,” he agreed in a tense whisper. “They’re out there, the sadistic ones, the incubus, the succubus. They exist. But the seduction is merely a prelude to the feast. No one survives.” He shook his head like the idea revolted him. Like he was any different.

“I didn’t realize they had a special name for what you are,” I spit.

He stared up at me with a face that looked a thousand years old.

“Even you, Jacob Black, cannot hate me as much as I hate myself.”

Wrong, I thought, too enraged to speak.

“Killing me now doesn’t save her,” he said quietly.

“So what does?”

“Jacob, you have to do something for me.”

“The hell I do, parasite!”

He kept staring at me with those half-tired, half-crazy eyes. “For her?”

I clenched my teeth together hard. “I did everything I could to keep her away from you. Every single thing. It’s too late.”

“You know her, Jacob. You connect to her on a level that I don’t even understand. You are part of her, and she is part of you. She won’t listen to me, because she thinks I’m underestimating her. She thinks she’s strong enough for this. . . .” He choked and then swallowed. “She might listen to you.”

“Why would she?”

He lurched to his feet, his eyes burning brighter than before, wilder. I wondered if he was really going crazy. Could vampires lose their minds?