Breaking Dawn - Stephenie Meyer [115]
But there was nothing there, just me, just him.
Working over a corpse.
Because thats all that was left of the girl we both loved. This broken, bled-out, mangled corpse. We couldnt put Bella together again.
I knew it was too late. I knew she was dead. I knew it for sure because the pull was gone. I didnt feel any reason to be here beside her. She wasnt here anymore. So this body had no more draw for me. The senseless need to be near her had vanished.
Or maybe moved was the better word. It seemed like I felt the pull from the opposite direction now. From down the stairs, out the door. The longing to get away from here and never, ever come back.
Go, then, he snapped, and he hit my hands out of the way again, taking my place this time. Three fingers broken, it felt like.
I straightened them numbly, not minding the throb of pain.
He pushed her dead heart faster than I had.
Shes not dead, he growled. Shes going to be fine.
I wasnt sure he was talking to me anymore.
Turning away, leaving him with his dead, I walked slowly to the door. So slowly. I couldnt make my feet move faster.
This was it, then. The ocean of pain. The other shore so far away across the boiling water that I couldnt imagine it, much less see it.
I felt empty again, now that Id lost my purpose. Saving Bella had been my fight for so long now. And she wouldnt be saved. Shed willingly sacrificed herself to be torn apart by that monsters young, and so the fight was lost. It was all over.
I shuddered at the sound coming from behind me as I plodded down the stairs-the sound of a dead heart being forced to thud.
I wanted to somehow pour bleach inside my head and let it fry my brain. To burn away the images left from Bellas final minutes. Id take the brain damage if I could get rid of that-the screaming, the bleeding, the unbearable crunching and snapping as the newborn monster tore through her from the inside out
I wanted to sprint away, to take the stairs ten at a time and race out the door, but my feet were heavy as iron and my body was more tired than it had ever been before. I shuffled down the stairs like a crippled old man.
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 thats 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 Bellas 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 wouldnt 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.