Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter One

1 Isabella Marie Swan Cullen remembered little of the birthing process. There were flashes of images: terrible, sickening, unnameable pain in her back, followed by a nasty, awful, wet cracking sound (her body! Oh God, oh God, her body was breaking in half, she was breaking, tearing up, dying, breaking, tearing ripping bleeding dead dead dead oh God oh God oh God what had she done to herself what had she done oh God) and then numbness; blood everywhere; the ground flying up to meet her, and Edward carrying her up into the mansion's second story; excited voices chattering, but no pain, no pain, no anything; blotches of blackness mixing with the glaring lights, as her consciousness slipped away; more voices; some pain on her chest - something biting her, ripping through skin and fat and muscles and tendons with razor-sharp teeth, chewing on her flesh, the stench of it unbelievable, the horror, the horror, oh God the horror. Then...

...then, there was blackness.

Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

Fire burned through her veins. Liquid acid, dissolving her tissues from within like necrotising fasciitis, eating the life out of her, scooping it away cell by cell, burning, ripping, shredding, killing. She could not move her legs; her spine had been broken. She could not open her eyes; her eyelids had melted onto the eyeballs, as if someone had pressed a red-hot iron against her face. Her arms shook uncontrollably, making it worse, making it all so worse, as her old skin stuck to the surface of the metal table she lay on, freezing and burning her at the same time, ripping off in strips, filling the air with the horrible stench of putrefaction.

Her lips were welded together as well, so she could not scream. In her mouth, her gums dissolved, her teeth tumbled backwards into her throat, making her vomit guts and acid into her mouth, her throat, her airwaves, her lungs. Her tongue swelled and cracked open like a slug in a microwave. Hot, putrid blood and festered tissue trickled down her gullet. Every breath was ash and fire in her poor, mangled, pureed lungs. She writhed upon the table, twitching, whimpering, trying to breathe, trying not to throw up from the pain and the stink of her decay and her last incontinence ever, trying to endure, trying to pray for an end, just an end to all this, God, please, just one second of no pain, no suffering, no burning melting dissolving ripping rotting dying, just nothingness, oh God.

Amidst all this, there was one crystal-clear thought though in her fractured mind: part of her prayers were being answered, even if in the most cruel of ways. She was dying, after all. She'd gotten her wish, hadn't she? Edward, her husband, the love of her life, had bitten her, and it had not been too late: she was shedding all of her that was human. She was becoming a vampire.

2 She had no idea how long it took, this awful process of...transformation? How to call it? Why call it anything? Whatever it took to make the pain go away, she'd do it; whatever they told her to say or do or think or be, anything, anything to just make it stop make it stop make it finally stop. She was liquefying inside her decomposing, sore-covered skin; her body had been broken and was now rearranging itself piece by piece, wrecking all that had been to make place for the new. What was this new, anyway? What was this going to do to her? How was it going to end? Did it even matter? The beauty, the allure, the sparkling glory, everything was just a dim memory dissolving inside her rotting brain, the images fractured and distorted into nightmare fuel: the beauty was marred, the perfection decayed, the gods of her fantasies turned into gibbering monsters of black eyes and unhinged jaws, dripping poison.