Love Bite

Chapter 23

I DO NOT OWN CHARACTERS OR TWILIGHT

Alice never ran so fast in all her hundred and eight years of living. The world was a meaningless blur around her, nothing but an irrelevant smear of darkness and flashes of moonlight as she sprinted. Nothing mattered, nothing but getting to Bella, getting to her now.

Because Bella was bitten.

No.

Because Bella was hurt.

No!

Because Bella was dying.

NO!

With a huge spurt of speed Alice exploded out of the forest across the road from the Swan house and ran full tilt for the front door. She slammed into it, shattering the lock and bursting into the house with the sound of splintering wood.

She tasted the blood on the air before she smelled it.

And it did not invoke the animal in her. There was a different kind of animal inside her, a more raw, powerful one. It did not taste like ambrosia.

It tasted like the end.

Alice found her sprawled out on the living room floor. The vampire let out a soft noise of desperation and appeared at her side, falling next to her lover's unmoving body. The floor beneath Bella's head was stained red, although the two gaping, torn puncture marks in her throat were clean of any blood. Her skin was pale, the pallor of the already dead. When Alice pressed her shaking hands to her cheeks, she felt no warmth. Bella's chest did not move, did not rise and fall as it should.

She was not breathing.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Bella should be screaming in agony as she mutated into a vampire. She should be flailing and writhing, but she lay so very still. And if she was not changing, if she was not turning, then she could only be dying.

Bella's body was rejecting the change. She wasn't going to make it.

Oh god. Oh god, no, please. She's not dead. It didn't happen. She's not, she's not!

"Bella, baby," Alice gasped, terrified. "No, no, no!"

The feeling was more than Alice could bear.

Not Bella.

Anyone but Bella.

Anyone but this sweet girl, this innocent, beautiful young woman with the heart of gold, the light in the dark that Alice loved, the one that never judged her, never looked at her as anything less than worthy and bright and lovely, who accepted all her faults and flaws and understood her and loved her anyway, who did not deserve to lose her precious life, who had never asked to be brought into the world of vampires and all their darkness and danger, not Bella.

Not her Bella.

And Alice, who never gave into denying the truth for the sake of self preservation, did so then.

It could not have happened. Bella was not dead. She was simply having a delayed reaction to the venom; soon she would wake and begin her painful transformation. Even now Alice would trade the sleep of death for that unbearable agony, if only it meant that Bella was not gone, was not leaving her to a place where Alice could not follow.

Because she could not bear it. The mere thought ripped at her soul. There was no one like Bella. There was no one who could compare. There was no one Alice loved quite so much, had ever loved so much that it hurt to feel it fill her heart till it was fit to burst, and she knew it by the way she felt the eternity of her future slip into a black despair, because without Bella nothing would ever be right again.