Frozen Flames

Frozen Flames; A Million Ways

Chapter Seven; My Nightfall

My day had passed as it should – with no catastrophes, approaching attacks or any other throb of my unfortunate luck. Just us, doing what we wanted to. The change was a very welcomed one.

Rose and Alice had started another extensive fashion project for Renesmee, much like the one they had completed when she was first born, but this time with less infantile dresses with frilly headbands and more sophisticated styles from the designers. That had kept them busy all day and they’d already planned out the week ahead with detail: where they were going shopping for her, exactly what they were going to buy, the list went on. Emmett had been wrestling with Edward for a while in the garden to the amusement of both Esme and I. It was nice to watch something that we wouldn’t know the outcome of. Emmett had his strength, but Edward had his talent and his intelligence, therefore it was one of the most even fights we could get.

Their violence didn’t really bother me anymore. Previously, if Edward was ever thrown to the ground or tossed through the air into a tree nearby, I would spring to my feet and rush over to check if he was alright. Of course, he always was, because I was always wrong. Fighting for myself had taught me how difficult it was to permanently injure our kind. And Emmett would never do anything like that anyway. No matter the facade he put on, they were brothers, and he would have a lot of people to answer to if fought too strongly...

Carlisle had been at the hospital all day for his first day of work. I should think it was nice for him to know that he wasn’t going to a place like that for the reasons that we had done in the past, but that he was going to take up the occupation he loved to do more than anything else. I had an immense amount of respect for my father-in-law. Hardly any others of our kind would give up all the happiness and pleasure they could have gained from hunting every minute of the day and feeling warm blood run down their throats often. But he did, and he managed to find the moral rightness inside him to come up with an idea of the life he wanted to lead, even when there were so many other temptations. If I had come into this mad world with no one to explain anything and no one to lead me in the right direction – just like he had – then I was pretty certain that I probably would have run head-on down the easy route and avoided anything that would make it more difficult. He would be my role-model for the rest of my existence.

Renesmee had stayed out of everybody’s way, and nobody had summoned the courage to go and talk to her in case they’d gotten their heads torn off. Sometimes she was in a mood where any contact with anybody else would wreck havoc with her emotions and then the next moment she’d be perfectly happy to converse again. Trying to comfort her was a lost hope. We just had to wait for the clouds of depression to run their course...

Jasper, well, I hadn’t seen him all day. He’d probably taken the opportunity to hunt while we were all preoccupied. I’d noticed that he drank more than the rest of us, or maybe second to me sometimes when my newborn urges arose again, but compared to the rest of them. There was quite an obvious explanation that had formed in my mind. He’d drank human blood for so long and thought it okay that he sort of... well, binge-drunk. To replace the large amount of human blood he’d had to adjust to gaining the same strength from animal blood, which meant hunting for hours, and hunting often. It had been decades since Alice had rescued him though, and before recently I’d never picked up on the difference in how long he hunted. Maybe it was just the stress of what had happened that was making him drink so much. I hoped it was nothing serious...

“Lost in daydream again Bella?” Emmett called, grinning from where he held Rose on the couch opposite. I couldn’t help noticing how the direction of his taunting gaze changed from being at me, to being sent at Edward. I guess it was clear who’d won overall then.