A Different Twilight

What if Bella wasn’t exactly human?

What if she was clearly “other”?

If she knew that vampires and werewolves existed?

What if she was a witch, who could read minds?

I don't own the Twilight characters, but I do own my imagination and that's what this story is about, an exercise in imagination. The characters are sole property of SMeyer who brought to us to the world of Twilight.

ETA Summer 2009:This story is in dire need of a rewrite for major/minor grammatical corrections. When I started this, I wrote it on the fly and it shows.

Chapter 1: Leaving Home

I’m moving Forks to be with my father. My mother, Renee, is traveling with her new husband, Phil. He’s a great guy, and he makes mom happy, but he travels a lot and I don’t think I can handle the road. I don’t want her to have to stay behind with me, so I came up with the great idea of moving to Forks, Washington, to be with my dad, Charlie. I was packed and said my goodbyes to Phoenix. I'll miss the warm, dry air and the sun, which I won’t be seeing much of anymore unless I conjured a small sun-spell. Being a witch is interesting. I’m really going to miss my grandmother even more when I'm gone. It feels odd not having her around, and although she died last fall, talking about her in past-tense feels weird.

I'd spent the last couple of summers with my Grandmother Marie, and she clued me in on this whole “witch” issue. I’ve seen been careful around Mom and Phil, because the magic skipped mom. My grandmother told me how they – the members of our family that didn’t get it – seldom seem to understand it. I don’t know why exactly, it’s really not a big deal. It’s nothing like the movies or TV – the closest it gets to the real thing was that Willow character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before she went over the deep end and used magic for everything from showering to closing window-blinds. That’s not magic, that’s laziness. Magic scale-wise, I’m more “floating pencil” Willow, only because I’m a klutz and fear I’ll blow the power grid in the city if I try anything greater.

The only thing I’m good at is elementals, and that’s because I just follow the flow. Water and fire are easiest, because you can see their movement, and earth is fairly simple because you can feel it. It hums at a pitch that witches can hear. Air is the hardest; the one I’ve had the most difficulty with, because I have to focus a lot more. I can see sand-storms coming and can smell the coming rain in the air a day or two before it hits the city, but I can’t read the air the way animals do. Air, oddly enough, happened to be my grandmother’s strongest elemental, because she grew up high up in the mountains and was more attuned to it.

I landed in Forks and it was raining. Apparently Forks is the rainiest place in the entire continental U.S., so the rain was something I would have to get used to, pronto. My dad Charlie has lived in Forks all his life and is the town sheriff, so I got to ride home in his cop car. I’m planning on digging into my savings to buy myself a car of my own. I’m really not looking over to be chauffeured by him everywhere in the squad car. We got home and Charlie let me settle in. Like me, he’s not all too talkative, which is nice. I went to bed restless, nervous about school in the morning. Man, it sucks being the new kid in school.