I rested at the bottom step, gathering my strength to get out the door.

Rosalie was on the clean end of the white sofa, her back to me, cooing and murmuring to the blanket-wrapped thing in her arms. She must have heard me pause, but she ignored me, caught up in her moment of stolen motherhood. Maybe she would be happy now. Rosalie had what she wanted, and Bella would never come to take the creature from her. I wondered if that’s what the poisonous blonde had been hoping for all along.

She held something dark in her hands, and there was a greedy sucking sound coming from the tiny murderer she held.

The scent of blood in the air. Human blood. Rosalie was feeding it. Of course it would want blood. What else would you feed the kind of monster that would brutally mutilate its own mother? It might as well have been drinking Bella’s blood. Maybe it was.

My strength came back to me as I listened to the sound of the little executioner feeding.

Strength and hate and heat—red heat washing through my head, burning but erasing nothing. The images in my head were fuel, building up the inferno but refusing to be consumed. I felt the tremors rock me from head to toe, and I did not try to stop them.

Rosalie was totally absorbed in the creature, paying no attention to me at all. She wouldn’t be quick enough to stop me, distracted as she was.

Sam had been right. The thing was an aberration—its existence went against nature. A black, soulless demon. Something that had no right to be.

Something that had to be destroyed.

It seemed like the pull had not been leading to the door after all. I could feel it now, encouraging me, tugging me forward. Pushing me to finish this, to cleanse the world of this abomination.

Rosalie would try to kill me when the creature was dead, and I would fight back. I wasn’t sure if I would have time to finish her before the others came to help. Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t much care either way.

I didn’t care if the wolves, either set, avenged me or called the Cullens’ justice fair. None of that mattered. All I cared about was my own justice. My revenge. The thing that had killed Bella would not live another minute longer.

If Bella’d survived, she would have hated me for this. She would have wanted to kill me personally.

But I didn’t care. She didn’t care what she had done to me—letting herself be slaughtered like an animal. Why should I take her feelings into account?

And then there was Edward. He must be too busy now—too far gone in his insane denial, trying to reanimate a corpse—to listen to my plans.

So I wouldn’t get the chance to keep my promise to him, unless—and it was not a wager I’d put money on—I managed to win the fight against Rosalie, Jasper, and Alice, three on one. But even if I did win, I didn’t think I had it in me to kill Edward.

Because I didn’t have enough compassion for that. Why should I let him get away from what he’d done? Wouldn’t it be more fair—more satisfying—to let him live with nothing, nothing at all?

It made me almost smile, as filled with hate as I was, to imagine it. No Bella. No killer spawn. And also missing as many members of his family as I was able to take down. Of course, he could probably put those back together, since I wouldn’t be around to burn them. Unlike Bella, who would never be whole again.

I wondered if the creature could be put back together. I doubted it. It was part Bella, too—so it must have inherited some of her vulnerability. I could hear that in the tiny, thrumming beat of its heart.

Its heart was beating. Hers wasn’t.

Only a second had passed as I made these easy decisions.

The trembling was getting tighter and faster. I coiled myself, preparing to spring at the blond vampire and rip the murderous thing from her arms with my teeth.

Rosalie cooed at the creature again, setting the empty metal bottle-thing aside and lifting the creature into the air to nuzzle her face against its cheek.

Perfect. The new position was perfect for my strike. I leaned forward and felt the heat begin to change me while the pull toward the killer grew—it was stronger than I’d ever felt it before, so strong it reminded me of an Alpha’s command, like it would crush me if I didn’t obey.

This time I wanted to obey.

The murderer stared past Rosalie’s shoulder at me, its gaze more focused than any newborn creature’s gaze should be.

Warm brown eyes, the color of milk chocolate—the exact same color that Bella’s had been.

My shaking jerked to a stop; heat flooded through me, stronger than before, but it was a new kind of heat—not a burning.

It was a glowing.

Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space.

I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was.

Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing—to the very center of the universe.

I could see that now—how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.

The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood.

It was the baby girl in the blond vampire’s arms that held me here now.

Renesmee.

From upstairs, there was a new sound. The only sound that could touch me in this endless instant.

A frantic pounding, a racing beat…

A changing heart.

No longer just a nightmare, the line of black advanced on us through the icy mist stirred up by their feet.

We’re going to die, I thought in panic. I was desperate for the precious one I guarded, but even to think of that was a lapse in attention I could not afford.

They ghosted closer, their dark robes billowing slightly with the movement. I saw their hands curl into bone-colored claws. They drifted apart, angling to come at us from all sides. We were outnumbered. It was over.

And then, like a burst of light from a flash, the whole scene was different. Yet nothing changed—the Volturi still stalked toward us, poised to kill. All that really changed was how the picture looked to me. Suddenly, I was hungry for it. I wanted them to charge. The panic changed to bloodlust as I crouched forward, a smile on my face, and a growl ripped through my bared teeth.