Her heart beat once more, and then grew still. Silent.

Despite pressing hard into her chest, breathing what felt like his last breaths into her still body, nothing was happening. Bella was dead. Not the type of dead that he'd been most afraid of, but actually dead. Not I've-turned-into-a-creature-that-could-easily-tear-you-limb-from-limb-and-know-that-you-would-do-nothing-to-stop-me dead. Actually dead. Really dead. Not breathing, not smiling, not laughing. Jacob could feel every fibre of his heart tearing itself apart.

"Rosalie, take the baby. Get it out of here. Emmett, you go with her. We spoke about this, you know what to do."

Edward rushed over to his side. Looking down at the body, at Bella, Jacob could feel the ice statue next to him shaking. Actually shaking. Taking deep breaths that weren't actually going to do anything.

The other kind of dead.

It took Jacob a while to realise that Edward had come to stand by him for a reason. The breaths that he was drawing in were not the gasps of a heart broken man. Edward was filling his lungs with Jacob's scent, allowing what he had described as a foul scent take the edge off the blood lust. Jacob felt disgust well up in him. Bella was dead and it was all Edward could do not to tear into her cooling flesh and such her dry. He had already taken everything else, why not just give up and take the shreds of Bella's dignity as well. He deserved it. Good fight. Good fight.

But Edward didn't stand still for long. Jacob realised that, in reality, barely any time had elapsed at all. Only the space where there should have been a single heartbeat. Edward pushed Jacob's trembling hands aside. They weren't doing any good.

Edward didn't stop there. He continued to move, and through the fog that was invading his head Jacob registered that there was some order to Edward's ministrations. He still hadn't given up. He was going to try to bring her back.

Jacob's ears rang as if a bomb had gone off, but he knew that all around him people were yelling. Carlisle was saying something to Edward, pushing Jacob out of the way as he went to his son. They were trying to save her. But Jake knew that it would be too late. She was dead. And not their kind of dead.

A single sound punctuated the haze that Jacob had once called his sanity. A baby screaming. Babies did that, Jacob reminded himself. And there was a dead person. This must be a hospital. That's where this sort of thing happened. So why should it mater that there's a baby? They belong in these types of places, right?

A dark voice growled in his head. Not this one. This one doesn't belong on this earth. This one killed her. This one isn't even human. It killed its mother. Kill it.

Someone yelled something, voice harshly glazing over the shield that Jacob's insanity had forged. The screaming stopped. Or perhaps it was just further away now.

Jacob's rational mind made a brief comeback appearance before flickering out again. But the damage had been done. This child, this thing. It was an abomination, and Jacob couldn't let it live. Couldn't let it exist while Bella sat on a cold table, slowly cooling to the temperature of the metal below her.

Jacob walked out of the room full of rushing people, of yells. There was nothing that he could do. Nothing that would bring her back. But he could kill the thing that had done this to her. And one day, he would kill its father.

He felt his shoulders drop as he slinked through the house, predator mode activated, one of the pack had once joked when they had been out practising.

The pack. Sam had been right. Jacob was wrong to have doubted them, wrong to have broken the way that he did. She was dead. He couldn't save her.

The house was empty. Jacob slunk through room after room, hoping to find the blond bitch and the Abomination. He couldn't smell where they were, the whole house was ripe with the smell of them and of Bella's blood. He growled, low notes grinding out of his chest and throat, lost to the darkened house. There was no one here. Somewhere behind him, the war for Bella's life was ending. A final battle they couldn't win.

They should all stop fighting, Jacob thought. And join me.

No heart beat in the silence. Dead hearts don't beat. But the child's should. Jacob had heard it. When it had been inside her, killing her slowly. While she lovingly fed it what it was taking from her anyway.

Jacob finally picked up the scent of blood. Bella's blood. But it wasn't from the body on the table. This blood had been wiped away, the smell of some soft chemical altering the scent slightly, just enough that Jacob knew what it was. He followed it outside, his own blood pumping in his veins, in his head.

But the faint sent dissipated out into the night. He could smell instead the distinct odour of a car, knew that Rosalie was long gone. The abomination with her.

Jacob could feel his hatred building. They had taken it away. Away from him. Away from his once chance to correct his mistake in letting it live in the first place. Bella had died for nothing. For a monster. And they had protected it. Jacob could feel the shift building up in him, running up and down his spine in fervid activity as behind him the noises grew softer. They had stopped trying then. Her heart had stopped beating too early and they hadn't been able to change her. Not in time. Edward's venom hadn't taken to her blood stream. She couldn't be fixed. Misery flooded into his body alongside the shuddering hatred. He couldn't bring himself to be glad that she hadn't become one of them. Even that kind of dead was better than this. She still would have been. She would still be.

Still human, at least physically, Jacob screamed out into the darkness. The woods heard his call, but nothing answered back. He couldn't stop the change, not now. He didn't want to. He didn't want to have to go back inside. To see the only sight that might possibly tempter his anger. To see that the grief on that bloodsucking Cullen's face would be a perfect mirror of his own.

Shifting silently, Jacob ran straight towards the trees, not looking back as he heard the house behind him fall into complete silence. Bitterly he wondered if Edward was still hoping that it had worked, that he had been in time.

It didn't matter. If Edward was suffering now, it wouldn't stop Jacob from making him suffer later.

(...)

Edward heard the last heart beat and counted the millisecond, the microseconds until the next one. When it didn't come, he felt his long dead heart almost beat in panic. Jacob was still trying to resuscitate her when Edward went to stand next to him. At least the dog was good for something. Edward couldn't stop hating the man standing behind him. His emotions were all running high, everything was magnified tenfold. His lucid mind partially understood that it wasn't Jacob that he hated. It was himself. It had always been himself. But as the urge for self-reservation kicked in, self-depreciation went out the window. He knew himself too well, knew that blaming himself now would lead to consequences he couldn't face while there still might be a chance. Even a small chance. That he could save her.

There was so much blood. It saturated the air. Even though he had spent so much time with her, let the scent diminish as time went on, with it covering everything in front of him he was finding it hard to concentrate. So yes, the dog was good for something.

Edward wasn't about to give up on her. Esme, Rosalie, Emmett. They had all been broken, in one way or another, when they had been turned. They could still save Bella. If they could only keep the blood pulsing through her veins, instead of going just about everywhere else, poisoning their determination.

Jacob's hands were resting on Bella's chest. He had given up, and simply forgotten to move his hands from where they had been trying to coax the still body back into life. Edward pushed them out of the way. Carlisle could get the syringe, and Edward could still put his teeth on her while trying to do what Jacob had failed.

He heard his daughter crying in the background, Rosalie making small comforting noses. Why were they still here? They knew the threat of having the child in the house. Carlisle had told Rosalie to leave, but she was still here. Edward turned slightly to growl at her and Jacob was pushed from his side and replaced by Carlisle. Rosalie left. Reneseme with her.

Reneesme. My daughter, Edward thought, before returning his attention to the task at hand. Saving her mother.

Carlisle injected the venom directly into Bella's heart as Edward tried to simulate beating.

It wasn't working.

Edward could hear feel his mouth shaping the words, but couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear anything beyond the sickly squelch of his hands on her blood soaked skin. Below them, a rib cracked, but Edward kept moving. There was nothing that he could do to her now that would worsen the situation. There was nothing he could do to break her any further.

Edward paid little attention to anything else that happened. He just focused on the sound of his hands upon her skin and the feel of it slowly cooling.

It ended. It all ended. Carlisle stopped. They had done all that they could do. Now they had to wait. Ether it had worked, or it hadn't. They would know in the next twenty four hours. Until then, there was nothing to do but wait. Outside, Edward heard an inhuman cry echoing into the void of space. He wished that he was free to do the same, but he had no control over his body. He was slumped into a chair, and wouldn't move until she woke up. Because she would wake up. She had to.

Edward sat still. And he remained seated and still. The world moved around him. But Bella didn't. Didn't move. There was nothing that showed improvement or worsening. There was just nothing. Carlisle came in every hour, noted little things but didn't say a word.

That was enough. Edward knew. Because his father would have told him even if there was the slightest hope.

Edward was glad that Rosalie had taken Reneesme away.

Their home had turned, even more so than usual, into a house of death.

(...)

In the end, there was a closed casket funeral after all. But it wasn't because they had to hide a new Bella from the people she had once known. Or because there was no body. The body was torn, ripped to an extent that no disease could claim. There were distinctly humanoid bite marks covering the china white skin. Bella had died. Truly. Horribly. And no one was allowed to know the truth.

Jacob seemed to remember people crying. Talking to him. Those kids that Bella had used to hang around with, when she wasn't with him. Or the bloodsucker. Before she'd decided to get married, and try to play her own twisted version of house and happy families. Vampire style. Before the bloodsucker had sired a creature that had eaten Bella from the inside out.

Yeah, before all of that.

The vampires didn't cry. Jacob wasn't sure that they could. But just looking at them tore his heart apart again. Vampires might not be able to cry, but Jacob knew that they could love. He had lived with them, for crying out loud. Esme, Alice, Jasper, Carlisle. They loved Bella like she was already one of them. Jacob didn't hate them. Couldn't. They were hurting. The rest of the Cullen Clan were gone. Somewhere else. And the child with them.

Jacob didn't cry. Where was the point in that?

Edward. Edward stood by the coffin. He technically had a right to be there. But Jacob resented him his position. Jacob wouldn't blame the rest of the Cullens. But he could blame Edward. The bastard must have known the danger that he was putting her in. He must have known that there was more than a chance that this would happen. Jacob couldn't help hating Edward.

It was all he could do not to kill the man, right there, as they all crowded over the cherry wood coffin. Just reach over and crack that cool Façade. Everyone would freak out, Charlie would try to stop him, but only until people began to see the truth. Once everyone understood just how unnatural, how inhuman the bloodsucker was, no one would stop him. No one would be able to stop him anyway. And if any of the others got in his way, he wouldn't hesitate in taking them down too.

Jacob knew that Edward could hear what he was thinking. All of it. The darkness of his thoughts was flowing between the spaces beyond them. Jacob had developed quite the imagination, and had stocked it with a thousand different images of Edward's death. He called them all forth now, not caring that he was giving Edward the advantage, letting him know that there was a danger very close by.

Even with the vicious images flitting across to them, Edward didn't look up. Didn't flinch. Didn't move at all. More than Jacob had ever seen, the statue was completely still. Inhuman. Unmoving. Jacob knew that the man could hear him, and could only draw one conclusion from the man's stillness. He wanted Jacob to do it. He wanted to die.

Jacob remembered the state that Bella had fallen into when Edward had left, the catatonia, the irresponsibility. And she had known that he was alive. What would it be doing to Edward, to see Bella, know that his eternal life would forever be void, because she was gone?

He still hated Edward, still blamed him for everything. He had taken Bella and broken her. He had caused all of this, he hadn't been able to protect the one girl that they both loved, even if it had been to different degrees.

Edward looked up and met his eyes. The white skin was shallow, sunken, and he looked as terrible as a vampire could. He was already dead, but he looked like he was dying. His eyes were a dull black, not the sparkling gold that Bella had been enchanted by. He looked empty, hollow.

Jacob stared back. Edward was resigned to his fate. Utterly helpless in his desolation. The look in his eyes held a single message, one final flicker of light, one indication that anything mattered except for the death of his forever. Jacob could read it as clearly as if he had Edward's ability.

Only me.

Jacob understood with shocking clarity. Edward would let him kill him, as long as he didn't harm any of the rest of his family. To any of these people who had loved Bella. He had nothing left, and yet he was pleading for their lives.

Jacob couldn't help the contempt that welled up in him. He hated Edward, and wanted him dead, more than almost anything. But he didn't want to kill a broken man. So much had been taken from the bloodsucker that he would welcome the end of his days. Jacob would be giving him exactly what he wanted most. And Jacob wasn't feeling very generous.

He stared at Edward for a little longer. Noticed that Carlisle had a firm grasp of the man's upper arm. Alice was standing close by. Remembered what had happened when Edward had thought that Bella had died jumping off that cliff. The man wanted to kill himself, and his whole family knew it. They had allowed him to come to the funeral because Alice obviously hadn't seen anything dangerous in their futures. But Alice couldn't see Jacob's future, nor where it collided with Edwards.

For the first time, Jacob wished that it did. That he could know what he was going to do, his own fate before it came. Because through it all, a blood-lust was aching in his lower stomach. His deepest instincts told him to give into his urge, the natural instincts of the wolf. But his mind, and his heart, was telling him that this, living without her, forced to endure the lonely, empty, unending hours, this was the real torture.

Fighting the anger and the hatred, Jacob turned and walked away from the grave site. Forks cemetery was a small place, but it bordered a wood on two sides that lead who-knew-where. Jacob was planning on finding out. No one would question his disappearance. They all knew that he needed space, needed time.

No one would mind that he disappeared, except for the empty figure who pleaded with his dull eyes for Jacob to come back and fulfil his promise.