It was worse than my own transformation.

Having to sit by and watch, unable to do anything meaningful, to share Bella’s pain, to comfort her in any way, was the most perverse of tortures.  All I could do was witness it, and wait.

Morphine, we knew from our spectacularly failed experiment with Emmett, would only protract the pain, twist it into a sluggish and surreal throbbing agony – which, as Emmett had colorfully and deliriously informed us between angry screams, was, in a strange way, far worse than the stabbing, insistent torment he’d felt without the drug.  And, ultimately, his transformation had taken nearly four days.  It might not have had anything to do with the morphine – it might have been the strength of his human body, resisting – but we couldn’t be sure.  A study of one subject didn’t mean that Bella would react the same way; but I wouldn’t risk it, and neither would Carlisle.

So here Bella lay, two and a half days after our wedding, sweat-drenched and tangled in the sheets of our marital bed, alternately shrieking my name in pain and terror, and then pushing me blindly away when I embraced her, my own body too cold to hold her blazing one.  She was incoherent, as I had been, and she whispered strange things under her breath, her eyes darting from wall to wall as if she read ghastly edicts there.  She called out for Charlie and Renée and God and Jacob and even some of her classmates from time to time.  She muttered the names of people and places I didn’t recognize.  She started sentences that she never finished, or finished hours later. 

But she murmured Carlisle’s name reverently, and almost smiled when she spoke Alice’s.  She asked for the rest of our family, even Rosalie, and they each came to her at once, whenever they were summoned, to hold her hand and speak softly to her, whether or not she seemed to hear them.

My name alone was a command on her lips during her most anguished moments and a mantra during calmer ones.  It lilted and danced around nearly everything she said.  She enunciated it more clearly than any other word, as if she were trying to remember it, or me.