Blood Moon [a Twilight Saga FanFiction]

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ALL THREE OF US WERE SMILES AS WE FINISHED LUCY'S ROOM. The atmosphere was peaceful, almost as if it were impossible any bad could happen now. I had the love of my life, I had a daughter. My existence couldn't be happier and I wasn't letting that little voice in the back of my head tell me that such darkness and pain always followed this kind of happiness; after all, no one can be happy forever.
     Unless they're taking something.
     Lucy raced down the stairs and stood on the patio outside, her hands over the base of her neck.
     "Can we hunt? Like, all of us as a family," Lucy asked. She looked over her shoulder to me and smiled. "I'm not ready for the night to end just yet."
     "I suppose that is a perk of being an immortal, Luc, and never sleeping," Igor responded. "The night never ends."
     "Let's hunt," I said.

Somehow, the joy we had all just witnessed had made everything else seem, light. Soft. It was almost breezy as we ran through the trees, jumping over the small lake, going towards the mountains.
     Lucy found the herd of elk, I hadn't heard them before she turned on them with a teeth-bearing grin. It was a rather large bunch so Igor and I joined her in the feast.
     Just as the last elk's heart stopped forever, Lucy gave a small but definite whimper and the wind changed, blowing the scent of humans towards us.
     The monster, awoken by the recent feast, roared in anticipation. In ecstatic joy. The lust for blood burnt like fire all through me.
    What snapped me out of my bloodlust was the look on Igor's face. Rage, desperation. A battle inside his head.
     I ran up to him and rested a hand on his cheek but at the same moment, Lucy ran off towards the humans, a deep, thirsty growl echoing behind her.
     "Lucy!" Igor shouted and ran after him.
     I wasn't quick enough to stop him before he took off, so I ran too.
     "Lucy, stop!"
     Igor was faster than me, but not that much faster. I watched as Lucy turned in her hunt, pupils pinpoint, snarling and staring daggers at Igor. He held his hands up towards her, palms forward. Then he coughed.
     The cough was wet, musky... his breathing was raspy and bubbling at the same time. His knees caved and my dead heart dropped with him.
     I dropped to the forest bed beside him, supporting him upright as his body fought off Lucy's attack.
      "Lucy," I pleaded and looked at her, Igor starting to shake through his coughs in my arms. "Lucy, you're hurting him. I know you don't want to hurt him."
     Her eyes shot to me, I had never seen such blind greed in someone's eyes before, greed turned to rage fueling the hunt.
     I couldn't scream, it wasn't that I didn't want to, I did. The pain was excruciating, though I had felt worse, at the moment, I couldn't remember, couldn't think of when.
     My throat, lungs, head... they all started to burn. The burning was hot and it paralysed me. All I could do was cough as my own body attempted to expel something that wasn't there.
     Or was it?
     I could feel, something, filling my lungs, rushing through my body making my limbs shake, my body weak.
     Igor's shaking hand gripped mine and I forced my eyes open. Lucy was still staring, snarling. All I could feel, all I could smell, was my own death. The sight was another question, all I could see was Lucy and even that was a challenge, everything was so blurry.
     "Lucy," I managed to choke out. "Don't... let t-the... monster win," I coughed. "Remem...ber who you really are."
     The wind changed again...circling around us now as if fate were on our side.
     Lucy blinked and suddenly, in a single blink of a moment, all the pain, the burning, everything, was gone.
    I kept my hand tight around Igor's as we both got up off the floor. Lucy looked more terrified than I had ever seen her. And I had seen her face fire.
      "Lucy, are you alright?" I asked.
     "Am I alright?" she gasped. "I hurt you! Both of you!"
     "Lucy, you're new," Igor said softly. "This is our fault. We should have been more careful with where we were hunting-"
     "How is this your fault? I'm the one with the crazy intuition, I should have known it wasn't safe!" she yelled, guilt breaking her voice.
     "But you did, didn't you?" I encouraged. "The happiness we were all feeling, that blinding joy, it made us all unaware of the potential dangers. Made us all, live in the moment, I could say. Cancelled out everything else so we could just enjoy it. But you whimpered, right before the wind changed you whimpered. Your intuition told you it wasn't safe, it wasn't until your mind was preoccupied with something other than pure joy, that you finally felt it."
     "That's not a good enough reason, I need to be better! How can I be expected to protect the family from the Volturi or any future threat if I can't even feel what I'm feeling when I need to feel it!"
     "It is not your responsibility to bear-" Igor began to argue.
     "You said so yourself! If Alice sees something or I feel something! You're relying on my intuition and I can't listen to it-"
     "Lucy Tia Arnold Farkas," I snapped. I felt both sets of eyes look at me, I took a deep breath and approached her softly. "You are new to this life, new to your talents, new to everything that makes you who you are now. We never expect you to be perfect at it, especially not this early on. You are not responsible for our safety, you are not a weapon to be trained and used for battle. You are a fourteen-year-old girl.
     "Yes, we want you to listen to your intuition. Figure out what it is it's trying to tell you, but only because we love you and know you need to practice your talents. There is no other reason. You are not responsible for our safety, you are not the wall the Volturi have to get through to get to us. So stop thinking like you are, and let's go home before the wind changes again."
     She nodded and ran back off towards the house, head low.
     Igor chuckle. "You used her full name," he said.
     "I have no idea where that came from."
     "Your maternal instincts coming through."
     He kissed me, took my hand, and we ran side by side back to the house. Lucy was already back on her violin, so I ran up to get a sketchpad and charcoal, returned downstairs, sat on the ground and got drawing. Igor sat on the couch behind me and flipped through the channels on the television.
     I found myself, for some strange reason, I wasn't sure why she had come back into the front of my mind, but I was drawing Didyme.
     After half an hour, Lucy joined us downstairs.
     "Who's she drawing?" she asked.
     "Someone who's been dead for a very long time," Igor answered and sighed.
     "How'd she die?"
     "Best we do not tell you that-"
     "Actually," I said, giving Didyme some more shadow under her chin. "It'll be better if she knows. I think I'd prefer the Volturi be terrified of all of us know as opposed to the two of us." I finished Didyme's portrait and leant back to look at it. "This, Lucy, is Didyme. She was the sister of the ruler of our kind, Aro."
     "He's the ruler of the Volturi," Lucy stated with a soft nod. Her intuition filling in blanks for her. Impressive.
     "He's the point of the spear, but he has other rulers. Brothers, he calls them," Igor added. "Caius and Marcus. Though, with Aro's talent, they both follow him."
     "A long time ago, Didyme lived with the Volturi and with her brother. She and one of Aro's co-leaders, Marcus, fell in love," I said.
     "They both had a gift," Igor continued. "He knew who could be trusted, she made people love her without even trying. She didn't need that gift for Marcus."
     "It became apparent to Aro that both Marcus and his sister were going to leave the Volturi. Be on their own. Be happy. Aro... he didn't want that. He was too power-hungry, too thirsty for the gifts they had. So he made a choice"
     "Who's gift did he value more?" Igor growled. "At the time he already had Chelsea, someone who could make others want to stay with the Volturi, so his sister, his own blood, she wasn't a necessity. She was..."
     "Replaceable," I finished. 
     "He chose Marcus," Lucy guessed and sat down.
     "Aro took his sister out for a nights walk in the forest and burnt her alive. He didn't even tear her apart first. His last words to her were that he loved her. He returned to the castle without her and told the others that they had been attacked, Didyme didn't survive."
     "What a lying jackass!"
     "Luc," Igor said slightly more firm. "You know why we can't know this, don't you? Why Elizabeth protects her mind from what Aro can do."
     "What can he do?"
     "With one touch, he knows every thought you've ever had," I answered. "Ever since I caught his scent and learnt the truth, I haven't let him touch me. I've found ways around meeting with him; I've avoided him all because I know that if he knew, even for a second, that I knew. I'd be dead. I was afraid when I told Igor, scared of what was to happen to me for knowing and therefore, him as well. Now I believe it's better for the family, excluding Carlisle's side of it, of course, to know so Aro has more people to fear."
     "How could someone kill their own sister, for power?" Lucy mumbled.
     "I still don't know."