I told Charlie I had a lot of homework to do, and that I didn't wantanything to eat. There was a basketball game on that he was excitedabout, though of course I had no idea what was special about it, so hewasn't aware of anything unusual in my face or tone.

　　Once in my room, I locked the door. I dug through my desk until I foundmy old headphones, and I plugged them into my little CD player. I pickedup a CD that Phil had given to me for Christmas. It was one of hisfavorite bands, but they used a little too much bass and shrieking for mytastes. I popped it into place and lay down on my bed. I put on theheadphones, hit Play, and turned up the volume until it hurt my ears. Iclosed my eyes, but the light still intruded, so I added a pillow overthe top half of my face.

　　I concentrated very carefully on the music, trying to understand thelyrics, to unravel the complicated drum patterns. By the third time I'dlistened through the CD, I knew all the words to the choruses, at least.

　　I was surprised to find that I really did like the band after all, once Igot past the blaring noise. I'd have to thank Phil again.

　　And it worked. The shattering beats made it impossible for me to think —which was the whole purpose of the exercise. I listened to the CD againand again, until I was singing along with all the songs, until, finally,I fell asleep.

　　I opened my eyes to a familiar place. Aware in some corner of myconsciousness that I was dreaming, I recognized the green light of theforest. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks somewherenearby. And I knew that if I found the ocean, I'd be able to see the sun.

　　I was trying to follow the sound, but then Jacob Black was there, tuggingon my hand, pulling me back toward the blackest part of the forest.

　　"Jacob? What's wrong?" I asked. His face was frightened as he yanked withall his strength against my resistance; I didn't want to go into the dark.

　　"Run, Bella, you have to run!" he whispered, terrified.

　　"This way, Bella!" I recognized Mike's voice calling out of the gloomyheart of the trees, but I couldn't see him.

　　"Why?" I asked, still pulling against Jacob's grasp, desperate now tofind the sun.

　　But Jacob let go of my hand and yelped, suddenly shaking, falling to thedim forest floor. He twitched on the ground as I watched in horror.

　　"Jacob!" I screamed. But he was gone. In his place was a large red-brownwolf with black eyes. The wolf faced away from me, pointing toward theshore, the hair on the back of his shoulders bristling, low growlsissuing from between his exposed fangs.

　　"Bella, run!" Mike cried out again from behind me. But I didn't turn. Iwas watching a light coming toward me from the beach.

　　And then Edward stepped out from the trees, his skin faintly glowing, hiseyes black and dangerous. He held up one hand and beckoned me to come tohim. The wolf growled at my feet.

　　I took a step forward, toward Edward. He smiled then, and his teeth weresharp, pointed.

　　"Trust me," he purred.

　　I took another step.

　　The wolf launched himself across the space between me and the vampire,fangs aiming for the jugular.

　　"No!" I screamed, wrenching upright out of my bed.

　　My sudden movement caused the headphones to pull the CD player off thebedside table, and it clattered to the wooden floor.

　　My light was still on, and I was sitting fully dressed on the bed, withmy shoes on. I glanced, disoriented, at the clock on my dresser. It wasfive-thirty in the morning.

　　I groaned, fell back, and rolled over onto my face, kicking off my boots.

　　I was too uncomfortable to get anywhere near sleep, though. I rolled backover and unbuttoned my jeans, yanking them off awkwardly as I tried tostay horizontal. I could feel the braid in my hair, an uncomfortableridge along the back of my skull. I turned onto my side and ripped therubber band out, quickly combing through the plaits with my fingers. Ipulled the pillow back over my eyes.

　　It was all no use, of course. My subconscious had dredged up exactly theimages I'd been trying so desperately to avoid. I was going to have toface them now.

　　I sat up, and my head spun for a minute as the blood flowed downward.

　　First things first, I thought to myself, happy to put it off as long aspossible. I grabbed my bathroom bag.

　　The shower didn't last nearly as long as I hoped it would, though. Eventaking the time to blow-dry my hair, I was soon out of things to do inthe bathroom. Wrapped in a towel, I crossed back to my room. I couldn'ttell if Charlie was still asleep, or if he had already left. I went tolook out my window, and the cruiser was gone. Fishing again.

　　I dressed slowly in my most comfy sweats and then made my bed — somethingI never did. I couldn't put it off any longer. I went to my desk andswitched on my old computer.

　　I hated using the Internet here. My modem was sadly outdated, my freeservice substandard; just dialing up took so long that I decided to goget myself a bowl of cereal while I waited.

　　I ate slowly, chewing each bite with care. When I was done, I washed thebowl and spoon, dried them, and put them away. My feet dragged as Iclimbed the stairs. I went to my CD player first, picking it up off thefloor and placing it precisely in the center of the table. I pulled outthe headphones, and put them away in the desk drawer. Then I turned thesame CD on, turning it down to the point where it was background noise.

　　With another sigh, I turned to my computer. Naturally, the screen wascovered in pop-up ads. I sat in my hard folding chair and began closingall the little windows. Eventually I made it to my favorite searchengine. I shot down a few more pop-ups and then typed in one word.

　　Vampire.

　　It took an infuriatingly long time, of course. When the results came up,there was a lot to sift through — everything from movies and TV shows torole-playing games, underground metal, and gothic cosmetic companies.

　　Then I found a promising site — Vampires A—Z. I waited impatiently for itto load, quickly clicking closed each ad that flashed across the screen.

　　Finally the screen was finished — simple white background with blacktext, academic-looking. Two quotes greeted me on the home page:

　　Throughout the vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figureso terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with suchfearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nordemon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysteriousand terrible qualities of both. — Rev. Montague SummersIf there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of thevampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-knownpeople, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof ismost complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

　　— RousseauThe rest of the site was an alphabetized listing of all the differentmyths of vampires held throughout the world. The first I clicked on, theDanag, was a Filipino vampire supposedly responsible for planting taro onthe islands long ago. The myth continued that the Danag worked withhumans for many years, but the partnership ended one day when a woman cuther finger and a Danag sucked her wound, enjoying the taste so much thatit drained her body completely of blood.

　　I read carefully through the descriptions, looking for anything thatsounded familiar, let alone plausible. It seemed that most vampire mythscentered around beautiful women as demons and children as victims; theyalso seemed like constructs created to explain away the high mortalityrates for young children, and to give men an excuse for infidelity. Manyof the stories involved bodiless spirits and warnings against improperburials. There wasn't much that sounded like the movies I'd seen, andonly a very few, like the Hebrew Estrie and the Polish Upier, who wereeven preoccupied with drinking blood.

　　Only three entries really caught my attention: the Romanian Varacolaci, apowerful undead being who could appear as a beautiful, pale-skinnedhuman, the Slovak Nelapsi, a creature so strong and fast it couldmassacre an entire village in the single hour after midnight, and oneother, the Stregoni benefici.

　　About this last there was only one brief sentence.

　　Stregoni benefici: An Italian vampire, said to be on the side ofgoodness, and a mortal enemy of all evil vampires.

　　It was a relief, that one small entry, the one myth among hundreds thatclaimed the existence of good vampires.

　　Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob's stories ormy own observations. I'd made a little catalogue in my mind as I'd readand carefully compared it with each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, paleskin, eyes that shift color; and then Jacob's criteria: blood drinkers,enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very fewmyths that matched even one factor.

　　And then another problem, one that I'd remembered from the small numberof scary movies that I'd seen and was backed up by today's reading —vampires couldn't come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to acinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.

　　Aggravated, I snapped off the computer's main power switch, not waitingto shut things down properly. Through my irritation, I felt overwhelmingembarrassment. It was all so stupid. I was sitting in my room,researching vampires. What was wrong with me? I decided that most of theblame belonged on the doorstep of the town of Forks — and the entiresodden Olympic Peninsula, for that matter.

　　I had to get out of the house, but there was nowhere I wanted to go thatdidn't involve a three-day drive. I pulled on my boots anyway, unclearwhere I was headed, and went downstairs. I shrugged into my raincoatwithout checking the weather and stomped out the door.

　　It was overcast, but not raining yet. I ignored my truck and started easton foot, angling across Charlie's yard toward the ever-encroachingforest. It didn't take long till I was deep enough for the house and theroad to be invisible, for the only sound to be the squish of the dampearth under my feet and the sudden cries of the jays.

　　There was a thin ribbon of a trail that led through the forest here, or Iwouldn't risk wandering on my own like this. My sense of direction washopeless; I could get lost in much less helpful surroundings. The trailwound deeper and deeper into the forest, mostly east as far as I couldtell. It snaked around the Sitka spruces and the hemlocks, the yews andthe maples. I only vaguely knew the names of the trees around me, and allI knew was due to Charlie pointing them out to me from the cruiser windowin earlier days. There were many I didn't know, and others I couldn't besure about because they were so covered in green parasites.

　　I followed the trail as long as my anger at myself pushed me forward. Asthat started to ebb, I slowed. A few drops of moisture trickled down fromthe canopy above me, but I couldn't be certain if it was beginning torain or if it was simply pools left over from yesterday, held high in theleaves above me, slowly dripping their way back to the earth. A recentlyfallen tree — I knew it was recent because it wasn't entirely carpeted inmoss — rested against the trunk of one of her sisters, creating asheltered little bench just a few safe feet off the trail. I stepped overthe ferns and sat carefully, making sure my jacket was between the dampseat and my clothes wherever they touched, and leaned my hooded head backagainst the living tree.

　　This was the wrong place to have come. I should have known, but whereelse was there to go? The forest was deep green and far too much like thescene in last night's dream to allow for peace of mind. Now that therewas no longer the sound of my soggy footsteps, the silence was piercing.

　　The birds were quiet, too, the drops increasing in frequency, so it mustbe raining above. The ferns stood higher than my head, now that I wasseated, and I knew someone could walk by on the path, three feet away,and not see me.

　　Here in the trees it was much easier to believe the absurdities thatembarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousandsof years, and all the myths and legends of a hundred different landsseemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cutbedroom.

　　I forced myself to focus on the two most vital questions I had to answer,but I did so unwillingly.

　　First, I had to decide if it was possible that what Jacob had said aboutthe Cullens could be true.

　　Immediately my mind responded with a resounding negative. It was sillyand morbid to entertain such ridiculous notions. But what, then? I askedmyself. There was no rational explanation for how I was alive at thismoment. I listed again in my head the things I'd observed myself: theimpossible speed and strength, the eye color shifting from black to goldand back again, the inhuman beauty, the pale, frigid skin. And more —small things that registered slowly — how they never seemed to eat, thedisturbing grace with which they moved. And the way besometimes spoke, with unfamiliar cadences and phrases that better fit thestyle of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first-centuryclassroom. He had skipped class the day we'd done blood typing. He hadn'tsaid no to the beach trip till he heard where we were going. He seemed toknow what everyone around him was thinking… except me. He had told me hewas the villain, dangerous…Could the Cullens be vampires?

　　Well, they were something. Something outside the possibility of rationaljustification was taking place in front of my incredulous eyes. Whetherit be Jacob's cold ones or my own superhero theory, Edward Cullen wasnot… human. He was something more.

　　So then — maybe. That would have to be my answer for now.

　　And then the most important question of all. What was I going to do if itwas true?

　　If Edward was a vampire — I could hardly make myself think the words —then what should I do? Involving someone else was definitely out. Icouldn't even believe myself; anyone I told would have me committed.

　　Only two options seemed practical. The first was to take his advice: tobe smart, to avoid him as much as possible. To cancel our plans, to goback to ignoring him as far as I was able. To pretend there was animpenetrably thick glass wall between us in the one class where we wereforced together. To tell him to leave me alone — and mean it this time.

　　I was gripped in a sudden agony of despair as I considered thatalternative. My mind rejected the pain, quickly skipping on to the nextoption.

　　I could do nothing different. After all, if he was something… sinister,he'd done nothing to hurt me so far. In fact, I would be a dent inTyler's fender if he hadn't acted so quickly. So quickly, I argued withmyself, that it might have been sheer reflexes. But if it was a reflex tosave lives, how bad could he be? I retorted. My head spun around inanswerless circles.

　　There was one thing I was sure of, if I was sure of anything. The darkEdward in my dream last night was a reflection only of my fear of theword Jacob had spoken, and not Edward himself. Even so, when I'd screamedout in terror at the werewolf's lunge, it wasn't fear for the wolf thatbrought the cry of "no" to my lips. It was fear that he would be harmed —even as he called to me with sharp-edged fangs, I feared for him.

　　And I knew in that I had my answer. I didn't know if there ever was achoice, really. I was already in too deep. Now that I knew — if I knew —I could do nothing about my frightening secret. Because when I thought ofhim, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of hispersonality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now. Evenif… but I couldn't think it. Not here, alone in the darkening forest. Notwhile the rain made it dim as twilight under the canopy and pattered likefootsteps across the matted earthen floor. I shivered and rose quicklyfrom my place of concealment, worried that somehow the path would havedisappeared with the rain.

　　But it was there, safe and clear, winding its way out of the drippinggreen maze. I followed it hastily, my hood pulled close around my face,becoming surprised, as I nearly ran through the tree............