The Rise of Lydia Rowe ↠ Jasper Hale (ON HOLD)

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SHE WOKE UP to an ache in her neck and the faint smell of smoke.

It took her a moment to gather her bearings. She was laying in Gwen's backyard inside a patch of freshly-burned grass. Just like her transformation, her clothes had burned away. On the bright side, there was no one around to see her, but still—the whole losing-your-clothes-after-death thing was quickly getting annoying, even only after her second death.

Biting back an irritated groan, Lydia quickly got up and hurried into the house. She grabbed a fresh set of clothes from Gwen's room and changed, all the while trying to get her hands to stop shaking.

After her initial transformation, Lydia hadn't given much thought to death. It was a temporary thing for her now, so the idea wasn't nearly as frightening as before. She'd never considered what it would be like the first time she was killed.

By her best estimate, she'd only been unconscious for a few minutes. Just a few minutes ago, she'd been dead—no heartbeat, no brain activity, no conscious thought. She hadn't seen anything, only darkness. Was that was death was for mortals? Just an endless abyss of darkness?

It didn't seem right, like she was breaking some sacred law that had been written when the universe first came to life. Maybe she had. Maybe at some point far, far in the past, someone had been the first to break that law, and the immortality in her veins was the remnants of a lasting punishment.

Watching mortals age and die while you stayed forever young; watching the rise and fall of empires throughout time; watching the world evolve all around while you yourself never changed—it sounded like the perfect cosmic punishment.

She leaned her weight on Gwen's bathroom counter, trying to steady her uneven breaths. Her heart thundered like a pounding drum in her chest, so loud it was all she could hear through the roaring in her ears. Or maybe the roaring was her heartbeat. Her thoughts were so scattered she couldn't tell the difference.

She'd counted thirty-six breaths when her phone rang downstairs. Taking another deep breath, Lydia pushed away from the counter and walked down the staircase, heading to where she'd left her phone on the kitchen counter.

After checking the caller ID, she answered and pressed the phone to her hear. "Hey."

Her voice must have sounded shaky even over the phone, because Jasper's response on the other end was a worried, "What's wrong?"

The breath she exhaled was shuddered. "A vampire just killed me," she said quietly.

"What?" Jasper's tone was half-frantic, half-furious. "Where are you?"

"Gwen's house," she answered.

"I'll be there in a second," Jasper promised.

She opened Gwen's front door just as Jasper arrived, Rosalie and Emmett right behind him.

As the latter two hurried to see if they could track the vampire's scent and find out who it was, Jasper held her face in his hand, studying every inch of her to make sure she was okay. "What happened?"

Lydia shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "I was going to lock their back gate and they snuck up behind me. I don't know how I didn't sense them or hear them or—" Her voice broke, and she swallowed against the lump forming in her throat. "I'm not supposed to be defenseless anymore. I should've—I should've been able to fight back."

"Don't," Jasper said, the gentleness in his voice a complete contrast to the fire in his dark gold eyes. "This isn't your fault in the slightest, okay?"

Lydia tried to force herself to believe it, but the momentary helplessness had shaken her to the core. She was a phoenix now—an immortal being that could summon fire at will and could die a thousand times and get back up. How had it been so easy for that vampire to take her down?