28. The Future

Chapter Synopsis

Although Carlizzle and Eddie-kins try to find Irina, she is far more skilled than they at the game of hide-and-seek. Bella, as usual, feels terrible, because Alice “saw” that Irina was coming to Forks to make peace with the Cullens, only to get pissed off again when she saw Bella playing BFF with werewolf-Jake. Back in Denali, Tanya and Kate haven’t seen Irina since before Bella and Ed’s wedding, and Alice gets the sense that Irina isn’t headed back there. She can see Irina wandering in “directionless grieving.”

Plans for Italy are still on. And, when Bella returns, the Cullen clan will be heading to South America to try and track down some Ticuna Indians in the Amazon to try and learn more about the legends they have about children like Renesmee. Bella is fretting about how to break the news of this longer trip to Claude, while Emmett and Jasper (or “Em” and “Jazz”) are looking forward to hunting badass things like anacondas in the Amazon.

Alice is moving slower than usual — clearly worrying about Irina — and Jasper tries to calm her down by filling the whole room with the warm fuzzies. And then, it happens. The vase Alice is holding slips from her nimbly-bimbly fingers. She DROPS it, and it shatters into a million sparkly pieces. (Can she drop Bella next?) Dun dun dunnn.

Everybody freaks out — vampires don’t just go around DROPPING things! Clearly something catastrophic has happened. And then, at the same time, Alice and Edward announce that “They’re coming for us. All of them.”

Bella immediately, instinctively knows who “they” are — the Volturi, of course. A barrage of questions fly at Alice — why? when? why? when? Alice says in a little over a month. And she stresses again that they’re ALL coming — Aro, Caius, Marcus, even the wives. This clearly isn’t just about Bella being turned into a sparklepire.

Bella knows it has to be about Renesmee. B..but why would they want to kill her pretty baby? Why do they want to steal her happiness from her? As Alice tries to look back and find “the trigger,” everything falls into place. And everything points to Irina.

As Irina was headed to the Cullens’, she spied Bella, Jacob, and what would have looked to her like an immortal child — an “exquisitely beautiful” child clearly more than human. And this is Irina, whose vampire mother was destroyed by the Volturi for creating an immortal child way back when. DUH! She’s going to squeal! And, duh, the Volturi don’t take the time to brood over these sorts of things — they act, and they act swiftly. Which is why it’s already “decided” that they’ll come, even though Irina hasn’t yet reached them in Italy.

And if the Volturi come to destroy, Edward points out, they aren’t going to stop and listen to reason. They’ll see what Irina saw, and believe her. So what now? It’s too late to catch up with Irina.

Emmett puts forth the only other option: to fight. Jasper says they can’t win, but Emmett points out that they can’t exactly run; not with Demetri around. Fighting makes more sense. Plus, the werewolves are around. And there are other vampires, too. Bella and Carlizze aren’t in favor of sentencing their friends to death, but Emmett suggests that if they can get enough support behind them — enough to make the Volturi pause — then perhaps they can show them that Renesmee is different. Speshul.

Alice goes into overdrive, rattling off a list of vampires they’ll have to find and convince to be witnesses — Tanya’s family, a bunch of nomads, the Amazons, and various sparklepires with weird, ethnic-sounding names that we haven’t met yet. But she’s frazzled because Jacob is on his way, and she “can’t see.” She grabs Jasper, saying she needs to get further away from all her blind spots, and they dash off.

Jacob arrives, far too chipper for the occasion, and Bella has to inform him that they’ve all been sentenced to die.

Best Worst Lines

“Her eyes were halfway here and halfway locked on the future, wide, staring, filling her thin face till they seemed to overflow it. Looking into her eyes was like looking out of a grave from the inside; I was buried in the terror and despair and agony of her gaze.”

“It felt oddly expected now. As if I’d somehow always known that the Volturi would come to take my happiness from me.”

“The immortal children — the unmentionable bane, the appalling taboo…”   (What’s appalling is this writing…)

“His voice was still quiet, gentle, velvet… and yet the pain and desolation in the sound was unavoidable. His voice was like Alice’s eyes before — like the inside of a tomb.” (548)

“Was this the limit, then? I’d had more happiness than most people ever experienced. Was there some natural law that demanded equal shares of happiness and misery in the world? Was my joy overthrowing the balance? Was four months all I could have?” (549)

Things That Really Irk Us

Bella, who has been so completely clueless in the past, is suddenly full of insight and understanding about why the Volturi are coming for her family. Character development fail.

The fact that things have been moving so painstakingly slow up to this point, and now suddenly something HUGE is happening in the span of a few pages. We have a feeling the last ten chapters are going to be a flurry of plot-like events that won’t really add up to any sort of real conflict, but somehow end happily. BOTHERED.

Final Thoughts

We are fantasizing in our heads how other authors could take this new twist and make it awesome. But we know SMeyer will only disappoint us in the coming chapters.

Go to Chapter 29.