Chapter 1

Eyes.

I remember everything and nothing…

I opened my eyes and glanced up slowly.  Tonight the sky was utterly black; perhaps there was no moon tonight-a lunar eclipse, a new moon.

A new moon.  I shivered, though I wasn’t cold and let my eyes wander around the empty darkness.  I saw nothing but black, a hollow void, before my eyes began to adjust.  I blinked slowly; once.  Twice. 

That was when I saw them; that was when I saw the eyes.

Even in through the nothingness, they seemed to glow a dim, eerie blue.  I squinted in a vain attempt to see the owner, but my eyes refused to focus. Narrowing my eyes, I could vaguely make out what looked like a human physique.  Pale.  Almost feminine. 

The form stood motionless in the brush roughly 5 yards away.  I wanted to call out—to demand who was staring at me—but my mouth, like my body, was too numb. 

The stranger and I continued to gawk at one another, neither one of us moving nor speaking. 

“Bella!”

My eyes darted to the side out of confusion.  Someone was shouting my name in the distance.  It was muted, muffled by the wet growth that surrounded me, but it was definitely my name.  The voice was deep and commanding, yet still youthful, not one that I was familiar with.  Briefly, I considered answering, but my body was unresponsive and I was still focused on my current spectator.  It took a long time to come to the conclusion that I should answer, but, by then, the calling had stopped.  I glanced back to the eyes, however they, and their owner, had vanished.

I breathed a heavy sigh and pushed myself on my back.  Glancing up into the branches above me, I almost screamed in surprise, but all my lungs could afford was a gasp.  Perched in the tree above was the pale form with the glowing eyes.  Cocking its head to the side, almost in confusion, the figure leaned forward from the tree, almost like it wanted a closer look.  It was then that I remembered something; a conversation from what seemed like another lifetime.

“Don’t go into the woods alone,” he had said to me.

“Why?”

“I’m not always the most dangerous thing out there.  Let’s leave it at that.”

My mind began to race with several possibilities:  Could another vampire, a non-vegetarian, have happened upon my scent?  Was I dinner tonight?  Or was it something worse, something that I had not prepared myself for. 

Prepared myself for? I internally laughed bitterly.  As if I could ever have truly prepared myself for anything that had happened in this past year.  How could I have known that in moving to Forks, I was going to meet the love of my existence and the greatest friend I have ever had? 

Maybe this was just a hallucination; maybe I was so grief stricken and tired that I was seeing the one being that might make me feel safe.       

If that was the case, then why would I see someone or something that I couldn’t recognize?  Another sigh escaped my lips slowly and my eyelids became the weight of ten bricks.  I don’t know if I was utterly exhausted, or my mind had reached its emotional limit, but sometime during my private conversation I fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.

I don’t think I’d really fallen asleep, just lost in an unthinking stupor.  Maybe I was holding on to the numbness, which kept me from realizing what I didn’t want to know. 

As I let my drowsy eyes trail over the forest, the thought of the eyes, staring at me in the night, clawed its way to my memory.  I glanced up, expecting to see the pale figure perched in the tree, but, to my disappointment, the tree was empty.  Unwrapping my arms from around my legs, I tried desperately to shield my face from the freezing droplets.

“Bella!”

The shouting was farther away this time and sounded like several voices were calling at once. As I breathed deeply, feeling the cold chill run through my lungs, I knew that I should answer, although I doubted they would be able to hear me. 

In a halfhearted attempt, I sucked in a deep breath of air and opened my mouth to scream. 

However, before a sound could leave me, there was a gigantic burst of light.  The entire forest was illuminated for a few seconds as the lightning danced across the sky, in a jagged line.  The light was bright and continuous, just long enough for me to see them.

They stood in a semi-circle, about 10 feet from me.  One, the pale one with the blue eyes, the second a tall one with long rain soaked hair, and the third was shorter but muscular.  They stood next to each other, only inches away from each other.  Their faces were still masked by the night, so I couldn’t make out much.  The flash in the sky faded and burst, almost instantaneously again.  However the three figures had disappeared.

Before I had the chance to wonder where they’d gone, there was another sound, startlingly close.  A kind of snuffling—an animal sound.  Whatever it was, it sounded big, and I briefly wondered if I should feel afraid. I didn’t-just numb.  It didn’t matter.  The snuffling went away.

The rain continued, and I could feel the water pooling up against my cheek.  I was trying to gather the strength to turn my head when I saw the light.

At first it was just a dim glow reflecting off the bushes in the distance.  It grew brighter and brighter, illuminating a large space unlike the focused beam of a flashlight.  The light broke through the closest brush, and I could see that it was a propane lantern, but that was all I could see-the brightness blinded me for a moment.

“Bella…”