“Give me a second, Carlisle,” Bella panted.

“Bella,” the doctor said anxiously, “I heard something crack. I need to take a look.”

“Pretty sure”—pant—“it was a rib. Ow. Yep. Right here.” She pointed to her left side, careful not to touch.

It was breaking her bones now.

“I need to take an X-ray. There might be splinters. We don’t want it to puncture anything.”

Bella took a deep breath. “Okay.”

Rosalie lifted Bella carefully. Edward seemed like he was going to argue, but Rosalie bared her teeth at him and growled, “I’ve already got her.”

So Bella was stronger now, but the thing was, too. You couldn’t starve one without starving the other, and healing worked just the same. No way to win.

Blondie carried Bella swiftly up the big staircase with Carlisle and Edward right on her heels, none of them taking any notice of me standing dumbstruck in the doorway.

So they had a blood bank and an X-ray machine? Guess the doc brought his work home with him.

I was too tired to follow them, too tired to move. I leaned back against the wall and then slid to the ground. The door was still open, and I pointed my nose toward it, grateful for the clean breeze blowing in. I leaned my head against the jamb and listened.

I could hear the sound of the X-ray machinery upstairs. Or maybe I just assumed that’s what it was. And then the lightest of footsteps coming down the stairs. I didn’t look to see which vampire it was.

“Do you want a pillow?” Alice asked me.

“No,” I mumbled. What was with the pushy hospitality? It was creeping me out.

“That doesn’t look comfortable,” she observed.

“S’not.”

“Why don’t you move, then?”

“Tired. Why aren’t you upstairs with the rest of them?” I shot back.

“Headache,” she answered.

I rolled my head around to look at her.

Alice was a tiny little thing. ’Bout the size of one of my arms. She looked even smaller now, sort of hunched in on herself. Her small face was pinched.

“Vampires get headaches?”

“Not the normal ones.”

I snorted. Normal vampires.

“So how come you’re never with Bella anymore?” I asked, making the question an accusation. It hadn’t occurred to me before, because my head had been full of other crap, but it was weird that Alice was never around Bella, not since I’d been here. Maybe if Alice were by her side, Rosalie wouldn’t be. “Thought you two were like this.” I twisted two of my fingers together.

“Like I said”—she curled up on the tile a few feet from me, wrapping her skinny arms around her skinny knees—“headache.”

“Bella’s giving you a headache?”

“Yes.”

I frowned. Pretty sure I was too tired for riddles. I let my head roll back around toward the fresh air and closed my eyes.

“Not Bella, really,” she amended. “The… fetus.”

Ah, someone else who felt like I did. It was pretty easy to recognize. She said the word grudgingly, the way Edward did.

“I can’t see it,” she told me, though she might have been talking to herself. For all she knew, I was already gone. “I can’t see anything about it. Just like you.”

I flinched, and then my teeth ground together. I didn’t like being compared to the creature.

“Bella gets in the way. She’s all wrapped around it, so she’s… blurry. Like bad reception on a TV—like trying to focus your eyes on those fuzzy people jerking around on the screen. It’s killing my head to watch her. And I can’t see more than a few minutes ahead, anyway. The… fetus is too much a part of her future. When she first decided… when she knew she wanted it, she blurred right out of my sight. Scared me to death.”

She was quiet for a second, and then she added, “I have to admit, it’s a relief having you close by—in spite of the wet-dog smell. Everything goes away. Like having my eyes closed. It numbs the headache.”

“Happy to be of service, ma’am,” I mumbled.

“I wonder what it has in common with you… why you’re the same that way.”

Sudden heat flashed in the center of my bones. I clenched my fists to hold off the tremors.

“I have nothing in common with that life-sucker,” I said through my teeth.

“Well, there’s something there.”

I didn’t answer. The heat was already burning away. I was too dead tired to stay furious.

“You don’t mind if I sit here by you, do you?” she asked.

“Guess not. Stinks anyway.”

“Thanks,” she said. “This is the best thing for it, I guess, since I can’t take aspirin.”

“Could you keep it down? Sleeping, here.”

She didn’t respond, immediately lapsing into silence. I was out in seconds.

I was dreaming that I was really thirsty. And there was a big glass of water in front of me—all cold, you could see the condensation running down the sides. I grabbed the cup and took a huge gulp, only to find out pretty quick that it wasn’t water—it was straight bleach. I choked it back out, spewing it everywhere, and a bunch of it blew out of my nose. It burned. My nose was on fire.…

The pain in my nose woke me up enough to remember where I’d fallen asleep. The smell was pretty fierce, considering that my nose wasn’t actually inside the house. Ugh. And it was noisy. Someone was laughing too loud. A familiar laugh, but one that didn’t go with the smell. Didn’t belong.

I groaned and opened my eyes. The skies were dull gray—it was daytime, but no clue as to when. Maybe close to sunset—it was pretty dark.

“About time,” Blondie mumbled from not too far away. “The chainsaw impersonation was getting a little tired.”

I rolled over and wrenched myself into a sitting position. In the process, I figured out where the smell was coming from. Someone had stuffed a wide feather pillow under my face. Probably trying to be nice, I’d guess. Unless it’d been Rosalie.

Once my face was out of the stinking feathers, I caught other scents. Like bacon and cinnamon, all mixed up with the vampire smell.

I blinked, taking in the room.

Things hadn’t changed too much, except that now Bella was sitting up in the middle of the sofa, and the IV was gone. Blondie sat at her feet, her head resting against Bella’s knees. Still gave me chills to see how casually they touched her, though I guess that was pretty brain-dead, all things considered. Edward was on one side of her, holding her hand. Alice was on the floor, too, like Rosalie. Her face wasn’t pinched up now. And it was easy to see why—she’d found another painkiller.

“Hey, Jake’s coming around!” Seth crowed.

He was sitting on Bella’s other side, his arm slung carelessly over her shoulders, an overflowing plate of food on his lap.

What the hell?

“He came to find you,” Edward said while I got to my feet. “And Esme convinced him to stay for breakfast.”

Seth took in my expression, and he hurried to explain. “Yeah, Jake—I was just checking to see if you were okay ’cause you didn’t ever phase back. Leah got worried. I told her you probably just crashed human, but you know how she is. Anyway, they had all this food and, dang,”—he turned to Edward—“man, you can cook.”

“Thank you,” Edward murmured.

I inhaled slowly, trying to unclench my teeth. I couldn’t take my eyes off Seth’s arm.

“Bella got cold,” Edward said quietly.

Right. None of my business, anyway. She didn’t belong to me.

Seth heard Edward’s comment, looked at my face, and suddenly he needed both hands to eat with. He took his arm off Bella and dug in. I walked over to stand a few feet from the couch, still trying to get my bearings.

“Leah running patrol?” I asked Seth. My voice was still thick with sleep.

“Yeah,” he said as he chewed. Seth had new clothes on, too. They fit him better than mine fit me. “She’s on it. No worries. She’ll howl if there’s anything. We traded off around midnight. I ran twelve hours.” He was proud of that, and it showed in his tone.