Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,269

tiny stitches that another surgeon would not be able to duplicate under perfect conditions even with mechanical assistance. I wished he would take a break and get some painkillers into her system, but I could hear under his controlled calm that there was more damage to her head than he liked. She’d lost so much blood.…

With a sudden jolt, Bella twitched half upright. Carlisle caught her head in his left hand to steady it in his iron grip. Her eyes flew open—the whites bloodred with broken vessels—and she shrieked with more strength than I would have guessed she had left.

“My hand is burning!”

“Bella?” I cried. Idiotically, for an instant I could think only of the fire raging though my own body. Was I hurting her?

Her eyes fluttered, blinded by blood and blood-soaked hair.

“The fire!” she screamed, her back arching despite a groaning in her ribs. “Someone stop the fire!”

The sound of her agony stupefied me. I knew that I understood the truth of what she was saying, but panic scrambled all the meanings in my head. It felt like someone else was forcing my head to turn away from her face, forcing my eyes to focus on the crimson-stippled hand she was thrusting away from herself, the fingers seizing, twisting to the torture.

A short, shallow slice was torn through the skin across the heel of her hand. It was nothing to her other injuries. Already the blood was slowing.…

I knew what I was seeing, but I couldn’t form the right words.

All I could gasp out was, “Carlisle! Her hand!”

He glanced up unwillingly from his work, his fingers pausing for the first time. And then the shock hit him, too.

His voice was hollow. “He bit her.”

There were the words: He bit her. The tracker had bitten Bella. The fire was venom.

In slow motion, I saw it replay in my memory. I ripped through the door. The tracker lunged. Bella’s hand shot out in front of her. I slammed into him, forcing him away. But his teeth were exposed, his neck extended.… I’d been a millisecond too slow.

Carlisle’s hands were still motionless. Fix her, I wanted to scream at him, but I knew, as he did, that his efforts were worthless now. Everything broken inside her would knit together on its own. Every shattered bone, every gash, every tiny leaking tear beneath her skin, all would be whole soon.

Her heart would stop and never beat again.

Bella screamed and writhed in misery.

Edward.

Alice had returned, finding some new resolve that let her crouch beside Carlisle now, red seeping into her shoes. Lightly, she brushed the hair from Bella’s blood-spotted eyes.

You can’t let it happen this way. She was thinking of Carlisle.

Carlisle was also remembering. The teeth marks on his own palm, and the long, protracted suffering of his change.

Then he thought of me.

A phantom burn raced along my hand, my arm. I remembered, too.

“Edward, you have to do it,” Alice insisted.

I could make this easier, faster for Bella. She didn’t have to suffer as long as I had.

She would still suffer. The pain would be unimaginable. The fire would torture her for days. Just… not as many days.

And at the end of it—

“No!” I howled, but I knew my protest was useless.

Alice’s vision was so strong now it seemed inevitable. Like history, not future. Bella, stone white, her eyes glowing a hundred times brighter than the slaughter scene surrounding us now.

My own memory intruded, shoving another image into juxtaposition with Alice’s vision: Rosalie. Resentful, regretful. Always mourning what she’d lost. Never resigned to what had been done to her. She’d had no choice, and she’d never forgiven us.

Could I bear to have Bella stare at me with the same regrets for the next thousand years?

Yes! the most selfish part of me insisted. Better that than to have her disappear now, to slip away from me.

But was it better? If she could grasp every ramification and every loss, would she choose this way?

Did I even fully understand the cost? Was I aware of everything I’d traded in exchange for my immortality? Had the tracker just met the same black wall of nothingness that I was destined for someday? Or would there be eternal flames for the both of us?

“Alice,” Bella groaned, her eyes sliding closed. Was she recognizing Alice’s return, or was she just giving up on my help? I was doing nothing but falling apart.

Bella started screaming again, a long unbroken wail of agony.

Edward! Alice shouted at me. Her impatience with my hesitation was