In Which I Suffer Through New Moon: Chapter 12 -- Intruder · 2:05pm Mar 26th, 2018
Hearing something scratching at her window, Bella freaks out, thinking it’s Victoria. No, it’s actually Jacob, climbing a tree to try to get into her room. Bella opens her window to let Jacob in, which brings up lots of bad emotions.
I’d cried myself to sleep over this boy. His harsh rejection had punched a painful new hole in what was left of my chest. He’d left a new nightmare behind him, like an infection in a sore — the insult after the injury. And now he was here in my room, smirking at me as if none of that had passed. Worse than that, even though his arrival had been noisy and awkward, it reminded me of when Edward used to sneak in through my window at night, and the reminder picked viciously at the unhealed wounds.
CM + 1
Also, he’s shirtless. Get used to that.
Jacob apologizes and tries to tell her what’s going on, but finds himself physically unable to. It’s not his secret to give. He does his best to get around it, telling her to think about the stories he told her that day on the beach way back in the first book. However, the only story Bella can remember is the one about vampires. Both of them get frustrated by the lack of progress, so Jacob decides to leave in the hopes that sleeping on it will churn Bella’s memory. He had to sneak out and doesn’t want the others knowing about it. Before this all happened, he and Bella had the wrong idea about them; it’s not any of their faults, what’s happening to him, and Sam was actually cool. He still advises Bella to stay away, as it’s dangerous.
Bella dreams about Jacob turning into a wolf and connects the dots as soon as she wakes up. She remembers the stories about Quileute ancestors being wolves that turned into men, and about werewolves and vampires being enemies. Ding: Jacob’s a werewolf. As Bella tries to grasp it all, we get a paragraph that’s a pretty concise description of the weirder side of Equestria:
What kind of a place was this? Could a world really exist where ancient legends went wandering around the borders of tiny, insignificant towns, facing down mythical monsters? Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?
Bella puts more pieces together and realizes that Sam’s gang isn’t a gang, it’s a pack. Desperate to see Jacob again and make sense of it all, she rushes downstairs to drive to La Push. She runs into Charlie in the kitchen, who advises her to be careful. There’s been another attack by the wolves, with the hiker involved just disappearing. The rangers are going all-out, taking hunting parties into the forest to try and catch some of the wolves. He’s going along with them.
Once he’s gone, Bella ponders her conundrum: her father’s going out to try and shoot her best friend. She’s split; on one hand, she thought she knew Jacob and would’ve doubted he’d do anything like this. But on the other, all the evidence points to the werewolves killing hikers, after all (although there’s also the little matter of Victoria, the vampire roving around who wants to kill Bella; somehow, she never thinks about that).
Jacob was my best friend, but was he a monster, too? A real one? A bad one? Should I warn him, if he and his friends were… were murderers! (Sic on that exclamation mark.) If there were out slaughtering innocent hikers in cold blood? If they were truly creatures from a horror movie in every sense, would it be wrong to protect them?
Sounds like the Cullens, especially since Edward’s admitted to being a murderer. To be fair, Bella sees this connection, too, and starts drawing comparisons. The biggest one is that the Cullens try to be better than they are, but she has no evidence of the werewolves doing the same. Bella’s split: try to save her best friend or let a monster die?
Interesting ethical problem, right? Too bad it gets resolved in the very next chapter.
Clinginess Meter: 42 x 3
This girl has a depressingly narrow definition of sanity and normalcy. After all, there is no truly supernatural force, merely extra-Horatian ones. That which is not dreamt of in our philosophy still exists to be studied and tested by it.
Sorry, kind of went all science-mage there.
In any case, darn shame about that ethical cliffhanger. I guess any complexity got left behind with Jacob's shirts.
As Bella watched a dragon flying overhead, she wondered how the supernatural had ever managed to hide in the first place.
Oh my god, it's almost like she has intelligence or something. :O