By this point, Beau is a vampyre while Bella is not. This really just means that Stephanie Meyer wanted to wrap up her rewrite of Twilight, rather than commit to releasing cash grab rewrites of the whole series (better known in the industry as “The E. L. James”).
So to briefly go over what happened in this chapter of the original Twilight (for our completionist audience, I guess):
- Bella wakes up in the hospital, very much not a vampire
- The Cullens explained Bella’s injuries by making up a story about how she fell down the stairs. It’s remarkable how many touchstones of the abusive relationship Twilight manages to cover.
- Edward makes Bella apologize to him for “very nearly taking yourself away from me forever”, because, seriously, the abusive relationship overtones
- Edward explains that he refuses to let Bella turn into a vampire and experience the burden of immortality. Bella argues that her being a human complicates their being together. They realize they’re at an impasse. Three sequels are written – four if you’re counting the movies.
But what if, instead, Bella did become a vampire right then and there?
Life and Death: Chapter 24: Change
During the transformation to a vampire, Beau remains in excruciating pain. As things start to wind down, Edythe starts filling him in on his upcoming new life as a vampire. She starts with obvious stuff, like the thirst for blood, that he can’t see his parents ever again because it must be kept secret that vampires exist, and… a massive infodump about vampire political history?
“Beau. Do you remember the painting in Carine’s study— the nighttime patrons of the arts I told you about? They’re called the Volturi— they are… for the lack of a better word, the police of our world.” […]
She told me about […] how they’d joined forces during the Mycenaean age, and begun a millennia-long campaign to create peace and order in the vampire world. How there had been six of them in the beginning. How betrayal and murder had cut them in half. Someone named Aro had murdered his sister— his best friend’s wife. The best friend was Marcus— he was the man I’d seen standing with Carine. Aro’s own wife— Sulpicia, the one with all the masses of dark hair in the painting— had been the only witness. She’d turned him over to Marcus and their soldiers.
I mean, cool, but, uh, if Life and Death is supposed to stand on its own (evidenced by how Beau is literally already a vampire so as to wrap up the story), then why the fuck do we need to know any of this? Like, does this really add anything to your understanding of the story you just read?
Mele, the one Edythe had called a servant and a thief— who had a gift of her own. She could absorb another vampire’s gift. She couldn’t use that stolen gift herself, but she could give it to someone else who she was touching. Sulpicia had Mele take Aro’s gift, and then Marcus executed him. Once she had her husband’s gift, Sulpicia found out that the third man in their group was in on the plot. He was executed, too
I’m sure there are even less necessary things to make a reader read during the denouement than a pages-long infodump explaining the backstory of characters and a world that didn’t even feature in the book they just read. I can’t think of fucking any of them, though.
Edythe explains more vampire things to Beau. If you’ve been paying attention to the book you’ve been reading, though, you already know what they are. The other Cullens fill Beau in on some fun vampire facts too:
Carine sat on the ground next to me and told me the most amazing story about Jules’s family— that her great-grandmother had actually been a werewolf. All the things Jules had scoffed about were straight history.
Now thinking about it, it’s really weird how much the original Twilight skimmed over that there were fucking werewolves in it.
They also all fill Beau in on their various pre-vampire life stories. They’re not particularly worth including in our summary, except Royal’s is so batshit insane that I can’t not:
He told me about a life consumed with vanity, with material things, with ambition. He told me about the only daughter of a powerful man— exactly what kind of power this man wielded, Royal hadn’t entirely understood— and how Royal had planned to marry her and become heir to the dynasty. How the beautiful daughter pretended to love him to please her father, and then how she had watched when her lover from a rival criminal syndicate had Royal beaten to death, how she’d laughed aloud the whole time. He told me about the revenge he’d gotten.
HOLY SHIT. Could we get that story instead?!?! That’s like some fucking James Bond/mafia/Game of Thrones/Kill Bill shit! Stephanie Meyer just accidentally wrote a plot synopsis of the Twilight fanfiction ever.
However, in the much less interesting alternate Twilight story that Meyer actually wrote, Beau completes the transformation. Like everything else in Twilight, it’s an opportunity to appreciate how hot Edythe is.
My heart sputtered twice, then thudded quietly again one more time.
There was no sound. No breathing. Not even mine. […]
I stared up at Edythe in wonder. I felt like I’d taken off a blindfold I’d been wearing all my life. What a view.
Beau is vaguely hotter now too.
If someone had cut an outline of my human self, this version would still fit into that space. But though I took up the same volume, all the angles were different. Harder, more pronounced. Like someone had made an ice sculpture of me and left the edges sharp.
…apparently.
Beau discovers and gets a grasp on his new vampire abilities, and Edythe suggests they go hunting. She expresses confusion that Beau is mostly in a good mood and in control of his senses, as opposed to unbearably thirsty. And then expresses frustration that Beau isn’t mad at her for ruining his life, but Beau concludes that it’s cool, and also love.
“You aren’t angry at me for what I’ve done to you?” she asked quietly.
“Edythe, you saved my life! Again. Why would I be angry? Because of the way you saved it? What else could you have done?”
“How can you…? Beau, you have to see that this is all my fault. I haven’t saved your life, I’ve taken it from you. Charlie— Renée—” I put my finger over her mouth again, and then took a deep breath.
“Yes. It’s hard, and it’s going to be hard for a long time. Maybe forever, right? But why would I put that on you? […] If I had to die, Edythe… isn’t this the most amazing way to do it?”
They talk about this for a really long time, which makes my job super easy since I already explained this. Like, over and over again ceaselessly throughout this entire book.
Anyway, this is the last chapter (before the obligatory epilogue, which we’ll cover next week). So let’s see how this gender-swapped version of Twilight ends:
We ran together into the darkness that wasn’t dark
Oh, this is good.
I was unafraid. This would be easy, I knew, just like everything else.
Wait, when exactly was everything else easy? Somehow I missed that during the 3/4 of the book that was constant sexual tension and the 1/4 of the book that was a manhunt.
