One thing is certain: this edgelord staring daggers at her rather than paying attention to class is not fiancé material.

For one thing, the Church is insistent on exactly two types of wife for a Belmont scion: sweet, devoted, and entirely normal humans, or improbably young seasoned mages and warriors with useful magical bloodlines. It won't be any different for husbands of a Belmont scion.

For another thing—well, she's never done any live combat with the horrors of the night, so she isn't sure what he is; that takes experience. But she's a purebred Belmont, and can tell this dude is some kind of demon from a mile off, which is significantly further than she is right now. In fact, she's sitting right next to him.

Well, he stalked off abruptly when the bell rang.

"Excuse me," she asks the teacher. "That boy left his pen behind." She twirls a spare pen to punctuate. "What's his name, so I can get it back to him?"

"Edward Cullen. I think his next class is honors literature, if you have time to track him down. By the way, since you've just transferred in, don't worry about the homework I assigned. Just spend some time catching up."

Functionaries from the Church bureaucracy do her homework, forging good-but-not-exceptional answers. It would actually be more inconvenient to tell them to skip it. She smiles and thanks him anyway. She isn't going to track the unknown demon down; a name was enough.

For someone who is thinking about nothing but Bella Swan, Edward isn't actually thinking that much about her. He has to get out of here before he eats a person. Maybe he'll live in the woods for a century or two and hope the human lifespan doesn't get extended too much while he's out there.

He stalks angrily right out of school and in an arbitrary direction. Feels like north. Good, more land that way.

She returns home after an uneventful remainder of the school day. Cygnus won't be there for some time; his ordinary job is chief of police, yet this town is somehow not the Church-protected sanctuary it was meant to be. She phones a Church handler.

"A boy at my school named Edward Cullen feels distinctly unholy," she explains. The Church will check his background; she'll practice combat forms with whip and stake and knife and flask of holy water (well, flask of water, for practice; flasks just cost money, a real, effective blessing costs opportunity for a priesthood already stretched thin).

She's fine being the Belmont; every Belmont is raised to expect they may one day be called upon. She's not comfortable being the last Belmont, in such proximity to the forces of darkness. It's too late for her to secure the bloodline with an unauthorized teen pregnancy now, with evil lurking in the same town; she wishes she had done it as soon as she realized she could. Functionally, there is no Belmont, with her too important to risk.

The Church will probably evacuate her within the week, with this sanctuary compromised. Until then, she has to be ready to kill, every moment of every day.

Cygnus returns with a dossier on the Cullens and sheepish apologies; Bella is still annoyed at his fumbling of his duty, but she's not going to express that, it wouldn't help and he's probably in enough trouble. She skims the dossier. Some kind of cult, maybe, or vampires good at passing. If she was in the same room as a vampire, she's going to be pretty upset. They can reportedly sense the presence of the hunter bloodlines, albeit without that much detail; this may explain the weird glare. But if he's got the self-control not to attack, why doesn't he have the self-control not to glare?

The Church informs her late at night that she's had a vague family emergency as cover for the moment and they'll have more in the next couple days. She's still training when they do. It would be so much simpler if she had a child.

It doesn't take very long for Carlisle to track him down.

"What's happened?"

Edward has been crying a bit. "Someone transferred into the school. I can't be around her. I can't think about anything but the smell of her blood."

"Edward."

Edward looks at Carlisle, blinking back tears.

"You don't have to strike out alone, Edward. You have a home and a family to come back to. If you can't be around her, you don't have to be around her. But you did well to keep control, Edward. You're not the only vampire this has ever happened to. I'm proud of you for that. But the next time you want to run, run home."

Bella isn't sleeping. She's just getting more upset as she thinks about all this. She's sure he's a vampire. She doesn't have much evidence to go on, she just knows. How can she even blame Cygnus? There isn't much you can do about vampires, unless you're a Belmont, or close enough to being one. Right now, vampires the world over have free rein to prey on humanity, and why is that? Because of the stupid Church. Because of her, mainly.

Without much in the way of conscious thought, she's already raiding the basement for the real holy water. She never changed out of her combat gear to begin with. Her whip is flowing quicksilver, the finest product of modern alchemy, which is to say it may as well be a paper party streamer compared to the whip. It's still not nothing. Nothing is meekly leaving town while vampires have the run of it.

The Cullen house is large; she should have brought more holy water. She can stretch it further, being a Belmont, but that won't help much with what she plans to do. She settles for pouring it around the porch, mostly; she can watch the smaller, more awkwardly positioned back doors. She considers smashing the nearby car for gasoline, but it may have a car alarm, and the holy flame would end up dilute, anyway; not as harmful to her quarry.

Standing back from the house, she tosses her final flask, this time imbuing it with the sacred power of her bloodline.

The porch erupts into holy blue flame. Bella unclips her whip.

Faster than sound and sight, the vampires appear, sonic cracks stuttering out as they slam into the aura of a Belmont's ire like birds into a modern glass skyscraper. A Belmont is a mere human, and yet in the presence of one girded for battle, whose blood is singing its ancient war cry, the creatures of darkness are oppressed by its weight, forced to be merely superhuman.

So these are vampires. The ancient enemy. Five of them? How is Forks not a charnel house of blood and horror? No Edward here, so at least six, and she may as well assume that the full complement of seven residents are all vampires.

She flings a knife unerringly into the heart of the largest vampire, which is more of a dueling formality than an attempt to do damage, given vampire physiology. At least it is hallowed, like every weapon that leaves her hands.

She's in danger and shouldn't be here. She should have saved some holy water to define the battlefield and lead the enemy into her killing ground, as she has always preferred in training; she should have saved her precious lineage by staying at home.

But Bella is a Belmont, for the first time, the morning sun come to vanquish the horrible night.

She'll need to immobilize the vampires; decapitation will do for a start, and then she can see if any of them can stand and grow faces in their chest, grow wings from their severed heads and spit fire, or otherwise continue to fight. The bodies can be tossed into the growing holy inferno engulfing the house.

No way left to divide the battlefield—foolish of her—but the largest vampire is charging ahead of the others. She squares her stance, unyielding like mighty Simon. She prepares to throw a knife—a feint—and when he is close enough, her whip moves, catching the vampire around the neck, burning him with what paltry holy power it has. He topples to the ground. She does throw the knife, but at the next closest vampire, a woman, who is staggered out of her advance.

Her poor planning is hurting her more now; with a wall of holy fire, she could have a few seconds to deliver a coup de grâce to the downed vampire without being swarmed by the other four, who are steadily getting closer.

He smells her blood before he sees the inferno, and is already running ahead of Carlisle in blind panic. Not this, it's the same as killing her himself, he can't even run, and why is the house engulfed in horrifying blue flame?

He runs blindly, staggering as he hits the aura, like powerful hands reaching out of the Earth to hold him down, but he has always been fast even among his kind and is fueled by panic and horror.

"You can't hurt her!" he shouts desperately to his family, who are already advancing on Bella, and it's all his fault, he is a damned monster. He tries to grab Bella and pull her away, but his eyes finally take in the unexpected scene as a knife finds his throat. He staggers away, as Bella stretches her whip taut and backflips away, so that Edward is in front of her along with the other vampires. Emmett is dragged by his neck along the ground, choking and burning.

"No," she agrees, "you can't hurt me."

Perhaps it's a distraction in combat, but she thinks on the epics of her ancestors, mighty Simon, brave Richter, loyal Trevor, as she thinks of what words her grandchildren should hear she spoke this night. She wonders what peerless Julius said to the Dracula, the night he slew him forever.

"I am the breaking dawn, the end to your saga of twilight," she declares. She really should have thought about this before combat.

Edward's voice is a bit garbled thanks to a knife having been in his throat a second ago, but he shouts again.

"Leave her alone! Let her kill me! I deserve it!"

He turns to Bella as Carlisle arrives, slamming into Bella's aura, disoriented.

When Edward arrived, she decided that the next vampire to arrive behind her would get knives to the throat and the heart, which the new one does.

This is rapidly becoming a worse situation, but Edward is either somehow deranged or trying some sort of con, which might be useful leverage on the situation.

Edward charges at Alice, attacking her furiously! Looks like she didn't predict that!

Okay, he's deranged. Maybe she can sneak in a quick decapitation, the large vampire is looking pretty uncomfortable and it'll really be a mercy.

Actually, the vampires she knived are not out, but they do seem more down than she predicted. The woman she knifed is standing, but looks a bit wobbly and uncertain, and the man who just arrived already yanked out the knife in his heart, but is fumbling at the one in his throat.

She draws her holdout cleaver from her ankle and chops, making sure to put her arm in it (as well as holy power). Now she's only facing six bloodthirsty vampires, two of which are infighting and two of which are staggered for the next few seconds, and she has her whip back.

Unfortunately, all the vampires are a lot closer. She cracks her whip in a savage circle, feeling it strike one, two, three, four, five vampires, staggering them in their advances. One of the women is too far back.

Carlisle Cullen was a Church vampire hunter briefly before he was a vampire, and he actually recognizes what's going on. Not from personal experience, but he's heard stories. He had understood the Belmonts to be extinct, though.

Carlisle pulls the knife out of his neck, waiting precious seconds for his throat to heal enough to speak clearly. He has to make a good first impression, or he may not get a second.

His family are foolishly charging the Belmont, not really adapting to not being much faster or stronger than their enemy at the moment. From what he understands, she can't really take a hit from any of them, but they're not going to hit her acting like this. She just decapitated Emmett, who was probably the first to rush in. Emmett will be fine... if he's not tossed into the unpleasant-looking blue inferno consuming their house.

Edward appears to have gone mad. Is he attempting to fight on the Belmont's side? There's one obvious implication this has about just what girl they had been discussing earlier, which only makes it more important that this fight stop now.

"Belmont!" he shouts, his voice mostly working.

"Vampire," says Bella.

She's excited. In all the poems and stories, she's heard the words of vampires entering battle, cursing God and rejecting their humanity. She hopes her words will be good enough. She whips at a vampire who has made it a bit too close, but her attention is on the one who spoke.