Chapter 1
Bella lounged in the hotel bathtub, pretending that the edge of the tub was not giving her a crick in her neck. She'd folded herself into the tub in an attempt to get as much of her body under the hot water as possible; she missed being warm.
She had once thought that the hardest part about being a vampire would be the bloodlust.
She had been wrong. It was the never ending cold that radiated out from inside her.
Sometimes she wondered if when Laurent had changed her if he's cut open her stomach and shoved a bunch of snowballs in here as a prank. She knew he hadn't: she'd checked. Shed's obsessively checked, in fact--cutting open every part of herself to look for the snow and ice she was sure had to be there. Why else would she be so cold? She would say it seemed like something Laurent would do, that he had always been a trickster of a guy who enjoyed a morbid laugh here and there, but she barely knew the guy.
When she'd woken up in the meadow, she'd been alone with just the frost. She'd never seen him again. But no matter how many years passed, the frost had always remained.
What a fucking joke being a vampire was. She could cut her stomach open with her own hands on a Tuesday morning searching for imaginary icicles, only to be magically stitched back together in time for the evening news as if nothing had happened, but she couldn't get her body temperature above freezing. At least she finally understood why vampires glittered in the sun; they were covered in hoar frost. They froze the air around them constantly, creating soft frost along their skin.
Hoar frost is formed when water vapor skips the liquid phase when changing from a gas to a solid. Bella often finds herself identifying with that in a way, having skipped so many phases in her own life since becoming a vampire (and really even before that).
The frost glitters because it's made up of these tiny intricate ice crystals that reflect light from all angles. When she first woke up after being changed, she'd been blinded by that: the sparkling light bouncing off the facts of all those little crystals that had previously been too tiny to see. She'd had to lay there for hours for her eyes to adjust enough to even see the remains of the meadow.
Funnily enough, she'd known about hoar frost longer than she'd known about vampires. She'd actually learned about it not in science class but rather in bible study. She hadn't been Christian by any means, nor was she now, but like most American teens, she'd tried out youth group once or twice when looking for somewhere or something to belong to.
The youth pastor had been desperate that day for a relevant hook that wasn't just a plea for them to stop fucking in the church parking lot afterhours or yet another call for Sunday school volunteers, and it'd been one of the few times that Phoenix had actually gotten somewhat cold. So, he decided, in all his wisdom, to talk about frost as if it was something new, relevant, and exciting. From what Bella remembered, it didn't go over well with the other teens. Nobody in Phoenix gave a rat's ass about frost after all. Nowadays, the city hadn't even had a temperature below 32 degrees in over 6 years, longer than she'd been been a vampire.
Her transformation had wiped most of her memories, but some, like this one remained. They were different though. Sometimes they were patchy and missing pieces, like they'd been tossed through a food processor before being added back into her mind. Other times, they had more detail than she'd remembered them having before the change. It felt like watching a movie with the saturation cranked up to allow her to see every pimple and sweat stain. There was no pattern to the memories she'd lost or the ones she'd kept. The color of her stepfather's eyes eluded her, but she could remember the pastor's odd little greasy mustache tickling the top edge of his lip as he read from Job: "Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?"
At the time, the pastor had said this was a way of asserting God's complete control over the entire natural world, everything and anything, even the creation of ice. He was supposed to be all powerful in creation, but Bella had never believed that.
Now that she was a vampire, she understood some of Edward's warped hatred of himself; she hated herself too, though her hatred came from a different place than his.
Raised Christian, he'd believed he'd blasphemed himself by becoming some undead monstrosity. She'd wished she'd remembered this chapter of Job then. She could've read it to him, told him there was nothing wrong with him. If God were such a powerful creator, He would've had some had in crafting the bodies and desires of vampires, wouldn't he? He'd created everything, so how could any one of his creations be inherently a sin.
Of course, it was never that simple, was it?
Edward would've had a rebuttal to anything she said. He always did. He knew more than her, being older, being wiser, being more than her. Nothing she'd ever said had held weight in his vampiric mind given that she was a simple human with a simple human mind. Of course, she couldn't blame him. Now that she was a vampire, she thought the same of humans. But, he'd loved her, which should've made her different, should've made her the exception, right?
The bathwater was becoming colder by the second. She missed when she was human and could lay in the bathtub till her skin turned red and the mirror became obscured by steam. She could lay there for hours reading, flipping pages with damp pruned fingers and escaping the world. Nowadays, she had only minutes at best.
She could keep the faucet running and overfill the tub, bathe in warmth. She thought about doing so often.
But a byproduct of living forever was becoming highly conscious of the environment and how much humans were fucking it up. The ever dwindling supply of water lay heavily on her mind. She knew the statistics. The average bath uses about 30 gallons of water. To let the faucet run would be delightful yet disastrous. So she treated herself only rarely to these baths, only on days like this where the world threatened to overwhelm her and she felt the static of anxiety skittering across her chest.
She closed her eyes, trying to remember what it felt like to be warm. The feeling floated right to the edge of her memory but stayed out of reach. She knew she had once been warm, but she couldn't explain what that meant. She couldn't find the words. She knew she'd once laid out to tan under Phoenix sun and felt the rays roil across her back and thighs. She knew she'd drank scalding coffee that had burnt her tongue. She knew she'd roasted marshmallows at a bonfire where the fire had been close enough to almost lick her cheeks. But, the temperature of those memories was gone, a lost sense. She could only remember the cold.
The pastor's words returned to her mind, and she let them sit there, heavy in her brain. She'd often wondered how long vampires had existed for. She'd never been able to get a straight answer out of any of the other vampires she knew. She wasn't even sure if they knew to be honest. Had they been around as long as the earth? Did they predate the earth, having been born amongst the stars and eventually making their way to the planet? Were they created as miracle of evolution or with a simple wave of God's hand?
Had Jesus known vampires personally?
A laugh almost escaped her. She would think it a ridiculous question if she didn't really wonder it.
Perhaps Gad had not spoken of true ice to Job in that verse. Perhaps he had spoken of her kind, the people of ice who grew frost upon their skin, the cold ones. Perhaps He had even meant her when he said "the ice" and "the hoary frost." It was hard not to think of yourself as important enough to be mentioned by God in creation stories when you couldn't die. Immortality can give one quite a complex based on all the vampires Bella had met over the years.
Bella used to believe so strongly in evolution. It had been the only thing to make sense regarding the creation of the world. She'd scoffed at every religious fairy tale about the creation of the world. She'd though herself more intellectually aware, above those who attended church and shunned science.
But the longer she lived as a vampire, the less evolution made sense. The less anything made sense.
The humans thought they ruled the world. They killed everything and took it for themselves, hoisting deer heads and elephants tusks onto their walls, but really they knew so little that it was laughable.
She often wondered if their invention of religion and science was just an attempt to make sense of all the magical bullshit swirling around them. Humans are great at trying to reason through the unknown. Even she had done that when she'd fallen in love with a vampire. She'd invented reason after reason after reason to make things made sense. She'd convinced herself that she'd understood it all. But she hadn't. She hadn't even know the half of it. The only thing that she knew now was that she really knew nothing at all.
Bella had slowly begun learning things as a vampires by running into others like her and unlike her, by listening to whispers on message boards and in feasting halls and coffee shops. The Cullens had isolated themselves so well that they'd known so little of the real world. They lived in their own reality, and Bella was determined to live in the real world instead. She collected information constantly. She'd learned the ruling class of the vampires the Volturi, owned Vanguard, one of the largest American investment firms the same day she learned that BlackRock, the other largest firm, was owned by fucking wizards, actual wand-waving old men in point hats and cloaks.
The water was beginning to turn to ice around her, slowly crystallizing. She pulled the plug out of the drain with her toes, a maneuver that she'd practiced since before she'd become a vampire. She watched the thin sheet of ice shatter and crack as the water beneath it pull away.
She laid in the tub, naked and still cold, and stared at the hotel bathroom ceiling. As a human, her skin would've turned into gooseflesh in a moment like this, all puckered and pilled. But it was flat like stone, glimmering slightly, and she hated it. She eyed the faucet and debated turning it back on.
What she wouldn't give to feel warm again.
What she wouldn't give to feel alive again.
But she knew the answer. She wouldn't give up the world for her own desires. That's why she was here at this stupid hotel for the summit to figure out how to save the world before it all went up in flames. She couldn't help but wonder if the world caught fire if she would finally feel warm.
She shook her head and unfolded her body, standing. As she reached for the towel she'd laid out for herself, she found herself thinking of the end of Job 38: "Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?"
It reminded her of something Edward said once, "And so the lion fell in love with the lamb." It'd been one of the first times they really had confessed their feelings to one another. She should've taken the comment for what it was: a warning. But she couldn't help but find herself wondering if she had hunted prey for the lion like God had done for his lions. Was she foolish enough to compare herself to God? Was she foolish enough to think that she could remake the world? Save it from the path of destruction it was on?
Wrapping the towel around herself, she looked into the mirror. She knew the red eyes were her own, but she still barely recognized them. Vampire's eyes were meant to hypnotize prey. Legends said that vampires couldn't see their own reflection, but truly it was just that vampires avoiding looking into their own eyes. If a vampire wasn't careful, they could hypnotize themselves and get stuck, thinking themselves both predator and prey.
She repeated the words she'd said to Edward all that time ago and his own response: "What a stupid lamb. What a sick, masochistic lion."