Eclipse Chapter Eighteen

Whew, I feel grounded again. The opening dialogue helps me out for this one.

“That had to be the longest party in the history of the world,” I complained on the way home.

No Bella, it only felt like that. It might have gone quicker if you weren’t so disdainful of your friends and family. You could try being social and stop dreaming about the upcoming embrace. Then maybe those of us reading would be suffering here.

Everything’s fine apparently. The Cullens are all calm now, no longer stressed. I guess they dropped a couple tranquilizers and they’re feeling cool, mellow even. If only Bella would stop harshing their buzz man.

Bella starts what she does best, complaining. Oh no, they’re going to have to fight. Someone might be killed. Please, no, stop. The sheer number of times this has been brought up has got to be reverse foreshadowing. I’m going to make a bold prediction and state that no one Bella likes will die.

Edward tries to use the Push to tell her she’s too tired. It doesn’t work, probably because of all the minute brain hemorrhages, from all the times he’s used it on her before. She tells him she’s going along and if he doesn’t she’ll just get Jacob to take her. Good girl Bella, you get a cookie.

Bella finds Charlie on the couch at home and sends him to his room. She then goes up to her rooms where Edward is already waiting. Can’t he just use the front door? I mean he’s supposed to have stealth as part of his vampire skill set, right? Why not just come in behind Bella and wander up the stairs rather than bothering with the cumbersome windows? Heck, just have a door installed and a balcony, complete with stairs. Then the next line happens.

“Come here,” I said, taking his hand and pulling him to my bed.

Otis keeps getting awfully suggestive. Are these teens going to give in to the hormones or not lady? I’d even settle for a deep kiss followed by the light being flicked off with a transition to the next morning. Is it so wrong that I just want them to act a little like real teenagers? I know I’m asking a lot here because it would violate the strict ethics of the author but your characters don’t have to live up to the ideals you believe in Otis. If they did, no one would ever write a book about hitmen except real hitmen.

Bella keeps worrying about the upcoming fight. Edward says it’s going to be easy because the fledglings don’t know about the wolves. Bella continues to worry. For another two paragraphs. This is getting more redundant that New Moon and her whining about her chest hole.

Edward tries one more time to ditch the beard so he can go to a rave and pick up on a young tan kid from San Diego named Bruce but she’s not having it. He sighs and runs with her to the baseball clearing from Twilight. Bella blabbers on about patterns and repetition. I think that’s a Freudian slip.

Then she says that she always saw Victoria as a hurricane, implacable but predictable. Really? I didn’t get a real clear impression from her in spite of being the antagonist from New Moon. How would we, the audience, come to view her as a credible threat anyway? She had no lines in Twilight and she was a no call no show in New Moon. That’s about as scary as shower appliqués, animated by the enchanted loofah of Svengal. Dance my starfish appliqués, dance!

Bella finally puts all the pieces together like a toddler putting the block in the square hole. The break in and the mysterious murders AND Victoria are connected? Get out of town! No really, pack you bags and fly to Italy, get the Volturi involved and wrap this up.

As dumb as madam Dishrag is, she’s apparently chief engineer of CERN compared to the Cullens. She tells Eddie explicitly what’s going on. Victoria learned how to screw with Alice’s vision from the Alaskan family via Laurent. She got the idea using fledglings from the south when Eddie chased her there.

Eddie compliments her on her perceptiveness. No Ed, she just doesn’t have plot induced blind spots. Ed verbalizes his desire to hurt anyone that hurts Bella. Again this is supposed to endear us to him ‘hes sew protictev and shivrlrous!’ but it’s a little worrisome in light of his prior behavior.

The wolves show up and there’s more of them than we knew about. Convenient. Eddie has to act as a translator because the wolves don’t trust the Cullens enough to be in their human form. They trust them enough to hold to an ancient treaty but not to talk to vampires in their human form. Are you sure this scene wasn’t just a gratuitous use of Eddie’s power, Otis?

The wolves and vampires banter back and forth. There’s some discussion on who gets what number of fledglings to kill. Jasper says they’re strong so stay out of their grasp. They demonstrate with Emmett which gives us a line I imagine has to appear in a number of fanfics.

Jasper had him from behind, his teeth an inch from his throat.

Jasper then proceeds to show Bella why she shouldn’t worry. He attacks Alice and she borrows a move from Anime and flash steps out of danger. That’s all well and good, for Alice. The rest of the Cullens aren’t miss Cleo’s undead cousin. They don’t have magic, predict my enemy’s next move abilities. Of course I thought this power was negated by the presence of the wolves?

Edward then play fights with Jasper. More flash step fighting that’s too fast for us to see. Then Esme and Jasper do the same. Bella gets sleepy and they finish up. The wolves get scents from the vampires, I imagined them sniffing everyone’s butts to make it funnier. We then get dozens of lines telling us who gets sniffed. Twilight, the series that boldly states what’s going to happen and then does it!

For some reason Bella searches for Jacob among the pack. He grins and then licks her face and she laughs. Really? It’s not okay for him to kiss you but when he licks you in beast form it’s cool? Will we next see Jacob testing other boundaries in his wolf form? It doesn’t sit well with Edward though and Jacob laughs.

Jacob wanders off, changes and puts on pants and comes back. Bella drools over his muscles and is glad Eddie can’t read her mind. They start talking abut what to do with Bella and for once she kind of gets upset about it.

I scowled. “Are you talking about me?”

Quiet, sugar lips. The men folk are talking. Why don’t you go do laundry in painstaking detail or cook diner for your father? So they decide to put Charlie with Billy and send Bella out into the wild where nothing bad will happen to her, except for her slipping on bear flop and breaking a heel because she has the coordination of Rob Schneider.

Oh but there’s one problem. The fledglings will be able to smell Bella’s trail. Luckily Jacob remembers vampires hate wolf scent. He picks Bella up and takes a quick jaunt to see if it works and it does, something that apparently takes three pages to get across.

Oh wait, how will Bella get ahold of the help if she needs it? Well the Cullens could use their endless budget to buy and arm her with a satphone and a Barrett M82. I don’t care how rock hard the bad vamps are, that will mess them up good. Jacob’s idea is to leave a wolf nearby so they can signal with their telepathy.

Edwards asks if the wolves have good range and Jacob says at least three hundred miles. Yes, but they pay roaming so they use it sparingly. They also get good rates on scent messaging, a rare feature on most networks. Can you smell me now?

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Chapter Nineteen>>