Love Bite

Chapter 34

I DO NOT OWN CHARACTER OR TWILIGHT

With the issue of the wolves settled in a better way than any of them really could have hoped for whether the sulking nomads (or Rosalie and Emmett) wanted to admit it— a few other issues needed to be taken care of.

The first was taking care of Bella's father, Charlie. After she cried away her stress, sort of (not really), on Alice's shoulder, they went inside to find Esme sitting on the couch looking extremely worried and waiting impatiently for their return.

Unfortunately for Esme, Bella jumped down her throat in a heartbeat, demanding to know what had happened with her father.

The guilt in Esme's eyes had frightened her beyond measure, but Esme ended up explaining a power to Bella that Bella had never even known she'd had. Apparently Esme had the capability to 'glamour' people like the vampires in the movies did. But unlike in the movies, it was a very rare gift instead of something all vampires could do. It was the ability to use her will to convince someone of whatever she desired.

Bella's shock at having never been told this was high, but Esme explained that she didn't like to talk about it because it wasn't something she was proud of, or liked doing to people, and wasn't a very powerful gift anyway. It didn't even work on other vampires; only humans. Bella was still slightly resentful that it had been kept from her considering how close she was to the Cullens, but in the grand scheme of things it didn't really seem to matter.

Esme informed them that Charlie was safely at home which relieved Bella so much she almost started bawling again, and thanks to Esme's gift, was once more under the impression that his daughter was quarantined at the hospital with an extremely contagious but nonlethal virus.

Instead of a not-vampire about to go to war alongside werewolves and actual-vampires against the most powerful beings on the planet.

It was a bittersweet solution. Bella hated that her father was being lied to, but she would do anything, anything at all to keep him safe from the danger her life had become so saturated with. Besides, Esme told her, the glamour wouldn't last forever. It would weaken with time, and within a month would break completely, at which point Esme would have to reapply it to keep him in the dark.

Bella really hoped it wouldn't take that long for them to deal with the Volturi. If this crushing weight and fear didn't stop soon, she felt like she might have an absolute break down. If Alice hadn't been there to hold her, wrap her in the comfort of her arms, Bella wasn't sure what she'd have done. She hadn't stopped shaking for ten minutes, had never felt so small and out of control.

She had remembered with startling clarity how young she really was compared to the rest of these people, how small and inexperienced she really was in the face of pure bred vampire killing werewolves, and had no idea how she'd managed to step up as she had. If Leah's life hadn't been at stake, she might not have. She probably would have cowered away, hidden behind Alice, and then there really would have been a fight, and Bella had already seen how she fared when the real fighting broke out.

Which led them to the new problem that needed to be addressed.

It was something Leah pointed out that Bella had been hopelessly trying to ignore the very next day while Carlisle was busy both wrapping a clean bandage around her rapidly healing throat and conversing with Leon and Gabriel on the phone about what came next.

"You know your whole magical voodoo is really cool and everything, Izzy, really useful," Leah drawled to Bella, who watched as Carlisle gently wrapped her neck in fresh gauze. "But besides that, you can't fight for shit."

Bella had immediately grimaced, but didn't try to deny it.

It was so obviously true and had been weighing on her mind as well since the confrontation with the shape-shifting tribes. In the two scuffles she'd been in since being changed into... Whatever she was, Bella hadn't fared well. Yeah, she took on Seth fairly well (and was still planning on never telling Leah about that) but only because he was so young and new to what he was, too. She'd proven to be horrible at controlling her instincts if her other subtler gift of survival wasn't at play, causing her to choose her battles unwisely.