Empty Veins | Quil Ateara [4]

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Andy tripped over her feet, stumbling back away from the new puddle of blood staining the couch, away from the chaos that was disappearing up the stairs.

Jacob was shouting something, Edward calling as a voice of reason, and she found herself darting up the stairs, banging her knees painfully against the steps when she slipped on her way up. It felt like she was skidding, sliding in and out of control as she chased after them, forever too slow to keep up with them.

She found them in the room set aside, put together expertly by Carlisle in his work to make the change as successful as possible because she knew, treaty be damned, that they weren't just going to let her sister die because of some stupid treaty that told them no. She would find a way to travel back and change the rules herself if she had to, everyone else be damned.

Everything seemed so far away from her now, skidding and blurring as if she was running in place, forced never to move. The room was like a light at the end of a long tunnel but the walls were closing in and she was strapped to the floor, frozen as if time itself destined she become a statue forever meant to cry in place, forever meant to hear, to witness but never see.

Then there was more yelling, a hair-raising shriek that blossomed a flare of white-hot fire shooting through the torso — ripping her in two as her stomach split and her back screamed it's protesting. Andy went stumbling in the wall, a silent scream coming free as it punched through her chest.

It came out in a burst of white bolts that were jagged and rough, pulsing it in a wave as she crashed down to her knees.

Warm hands, fiery hands, grab her around the middle pulling her away from one blaze only to fall into another. Thoughts muddled, she can't get out a comprehensible word that describes the pain that ebbed back, drawing away the further they pulled her away to be replaced by her sister's screams in her ears instead of her own.

"No! NO! Take me back! Take me back to her!" she shrieks, kicking as much as she could in such a tight hold.

"Stop! Stop, I can't! Jasper!" the sweet voice in her ears didn't match the temperature that enveloped her, didn't match the heat that flared up her spine and made her legs numb.

"I have to be with her!" she screamed, voice cracking on the sound.

"You can't be near her," Alice told her firmly, hefting her up and into her arms firmly as she carried her down the stairs and out of the house into the cold of the night.

Fresh September air burst into her lungs and she slipped to her knees with a pant, shaking in place as feeling slowly began to return with the clearing of the cloud on her thoughts -- shedding the sense of bearing broken and torn apart to feel it all for a mind-numbing sense of nothing as she sat listlessly on her legs.

The glow of the house did little to illuminate the darkness of the forest that stood before her, the shadows in the trees picturesque as she took in the luminescence that mixed with the night. Her fingers itched for a camera, twitched with the need to hold something to steady her to this moment.

There was nothing, only a vast emptiness and a dampness on her cheeks.

Alice returned back inside. She could hear her struggling to restrain Rosalie, working to get the blonde back under control as Jasper stayed firmly at her side, hovering by her shoulder in silent support.

If anyone could understand what it was that she was feeling right now, it was him no doubt. He was in tune to these things as well, had been the one to teach her how to separate herself from everything else, how to make it less personal.

But it was all too late for that, and sometimes it just couldn't be helped as she found herself drowning under the rippling effect -- slipping down, down, down, further and further from herself as she floats empty.