The List

Chapter 26: Awake and Alive

BellaPOV

Awareness returned to me in stages.

First there was the roiling pain of molten fire moving at a torturous pace from my fingertips and toes up my arms and legs. As the heat receded from my extremities, the cooling relief was barely noticeable as the conflagration got sucked into focus in the middle of my chest.

Then there was a strangling explosion in my heart that suffocated me and stole my equilibrium. The agony of it threw my body into uncontrollable convulsions and all I could think was 'oh, please, let this be the end'.

Then everything went dark, still, and silent. I was floating, suspended, in merciful nothingness. Neither here nor there.

And then the world exploded around me in an orgy of sensory input.

I gasped down a sucking breath that brought in smells, scents, tastes. Some were familiar but so different from what I remembered or expected; some were completely foreign - intriguing and terrifying at the same time. Sounds met my ears but were garbled, indecipherable - and at any rate they seemed deafeningly loud. I tried to send the message to my hands to cover my ears but couldn't tell if my arms responded or not. Struggling to make sense of the cacophony of existence surrounding me, I finally managed to get my brain to relay the message to my eyes to open, but was so overcome with the Technicolor vision that fed back up through my optic nerve that I groaned and rolled over and buried my face into...wait. Where am I?

Still folded in on myself, I pushed my head up a little and chanced my eyes again. I recognized the thing that I was looking at - it was soft and flat and warm and comfortable - but couldn't immediately find the word for it. At lightning speed my brain sorted through my available vocabulary and though the words were familiar, I was having a hard time matching words together with their meanings.

Through the myriad sounds, one caught my attention on an instinctual level. It was a small noise, hardly noteworthy amongst the symphony of sounds my ears perceived. Just the soft brush of movement across a surface. But it told me something very important, and I froze: I'm not alone.

I looked up and found two sets of brilliant gold eyes staring down at me.

A screaming sound roared through my ears but I couldn't be worried about that as I scrabbled across the soft surface in an effort to get away.

My back slammed into a barrier that made a cracking noise as I ran into it. But then I was trapped, cornered.

"Bella?"

As opposed to the screaming noise from a moment ago, this sound was beautiful, melodic. And it captured and held my attention in a way nothing else had so far. My ears traced the source of the sound to the owner of one pair of those gold eyes.

My whole body erupted in tremors as I brought my eyes to his.

"Bella. Oh, Bella," he encouraged softly. "You came back to me. You're okay. It's all okay."

A quick scan around the room identified seven others here with me: six with gold eyes, and one with black. I stared at the black-eyed a beat longer than the rest. He had the most peculiar expression on his face - it was fierce and concerned and protective and relieved all at once. I had the curious sensation of both being afraid of him and wanting to...thank him?

But it was the golden-eyed, bronze-haired one closest to me that most held my attention. I felt a primal pull to him that frightened me because I didn't understand it, or him.

A chance glance downward distracted me. I gasped as I saw the way the lamp light reflected off the...damn, what is the word? Oh, come on!...the shiny, glassy stones on the...ring!...on my finger. Colors refracted that I didn't have names for, not because my brain wasn't pairing words and meanings together, because they were colors I'd never before seen.