Chapter Seventeen: Party animals.

It's party time, much to Bella's chagrin. While she prepares to greet all her nervous friends who are seeing the inside of the Cullen home for the first time, word gets around to the whole family about Bella's realization -- that the vampire army being bred in Seattle is meant for her.

Bella's friend arrive, nervous because they're walking into a house full of vampires. Sure, they don't know that the Cullens are vampires, but they're just a little off-putting nonetheless, and the party lights don't look quite so natural coming off sparklepire skin. Nonetheless, once people start dancing, everyone's paying attention to Bella more than the creepy family.

Then, two things happen almost simultaneously to liven up this party. First, Alice has a vision...but before Bella can find out what that was about, the doorbell rings. Bella forgot -- she invited werewolves to the party! Jacob seems happy to be there, Quil and Embry less so. Bella may be the least happy at all, considering her last interaction with Jacob was punching him.

Bella tries to get rid of Jacob, but he made her a homemade graduation present, and he won't leave until she takes a look at it. He even pulls off a fantastic guilt trip to make her apologize to him, even though he's the one who sexually assaulted her the other day!

So, Bella opens her present. Well, actually, first she thinks the bag its in is the present, because...well, because she's Bella. Once she does open it, she finds a silver bracelet with one little charm -- an intricately carved wolf that Jacob made. Temporarily dazzled by shiny jewelery, Bella decides that it's time to be nice to Jacob again. He notices that Bella seems nervous about something, and wants to know what it is.

Oh course, Bella needs to know everything before she can really share the news with Jacob, making it time for a chat with Alice. Despite some initial tension, Alice decides the werewolves do have a right to know what's going on with the newborns. Turns out that Alice saw that the Cullens won't be heading up to Seattle to fight the young sparklepires; they're going to come to Forks.

Now there's a big problem. If the Cullens fight the newborns, they can win, but they're not going to be able to stop all of them; some will get to Forks and cause havoc, probably killing some of those unnamed high school students, or even the named ones that you couldn't care less about because they do absolutely nothing of consequence over the course of this series. Nonetheless, Jasper thinks it's an even fight, so they might be able to handle it in the end.

Jacob has a better idea -- why let it be an even fight at all? If the werewolves and the sparkleCullens fight separately, they're all in danger of getting killed. If they work together, they're confident they'll be able to kick some newborn ass with no real risk.

Bella is still completely against having the werewolves around, because Bella is a moron. I mean, to begin with, she still has this idea that her werewolf friends can't handle themselves when fighting sparklepires, even though she's never seen anything to suggest this is the case and has a lot of evidence to the contrary. Not only that, she apparently doesn't think that making things easier on her soon-to-be vampire relatives is a good enough reason for the werewolves to help out. In summary, Bella has no faith in her friends who are giant insta-healing werewolves, and wants her family to die.

The vampires and the werewolves set a play date for 3 am that night, so that everyone can get some instruction on how to murder people who were recently quite innocent, but are now temporarily bloodthirsty vampires. Bella still doesn't want the vampires involved at all, but thankfully for everyone involved, nobody even pretends to listen to her.