Chapter Thirty-seven: Vampires shouldn't talk this much.

I just spent a couple hours reading a much better book with vampires in it, so why not write about a shitty vampire book before bed?

The two sides get within 50 yards of each other, meaning that, because they are super-sparklepires, they're basically withing instant striking distance. Caius is pissed off, because he wants to kill some Cullens, damn it! But Aro is still formulating strategy.

See, Aro sees that everything is all true about Renesmee, and that they can't just slaughter objectively innocent sparkly ones in front of so many witnesses. It's just not good business. The witnesses, for their part, are not exactly ready to crush, kill and destroy anymore.

Bella tests her powers. Yup, just as incredibly amazing as always. Even more so, maybe.

Okay, Caius is on to Plan B: werewolf discrimination! The Volturi have been hunting werewolves for thousands of years, so how can they let these werewolves live?

But Aro has seen everything, and knows that this plan won't work ever. See, because the La Push werewolves aren't werewolves! They're just shapeshifters. If they were real werewolves, they wouldn't be wolves during the day, and such. They are not Children of the Moon, even though Meyer didn't bother telling us that for the first 3.9999 books.

Caius tries to make the charge stick, but Aro subtly points out that any obviously flawed accusations will probably turn the vampire world -- like 80% of which is in this damn field -- against them instantly. By the way, with all these vampires here, they should totally start up an impromptu vampire baseball league, or even a vampire soccer league, since a lot of them traveled from Italy, where there's very little baseball. Vampire sports in general would be awesome.

Caius decides he wants to talk to Irina, who clearly screwed this all up from the beginning with her false accusations. But hey, it was an honest mistake. He just wants to know why Irina made the accusation in the first place. If you recall, she was pissed because the were...shapeshifters killed her love interest, Laurent. Irina has the option of making a formal complaint about the fact that the Cullens were okay with the La Push Pack taking down her sparklelover.

But Irina refuses, showing a good deal of moral fortitude, and saying that there was no crime. As a reward, she is killed instantly. Good times! Irina now becomes the most significant character that we're supposed to like that's been killed, though on a scale of 0-100, her level of relevance is about a 0.5, so it's not exactly as big a deal as Meyer probably thinks it should be.

But the idea is to rile the sparklepires up, and it pretty much works, since a couple people on the Cullens' side decide to jump out at the Volturi. There's a struggle, but of course, nothing bad happens, and everyone is held back just in the nick of time.

Look, this is all going nowhere. Let's skip ahead a couple pages, okay?

So, back to the matters at hand, Aro speaks to some of the witnesses. He goes to Amun, who witnesses that Renesmee does grow and stuff, and that she probably doesn't need to die or anything. He then runs away to safety. Siobhan says that the kid isn't a danger at all, and that no laws were broken. Aro agrees, but then says that she is an unknown factor, and thus is dangerous, since they can't know she'll always keep quiet about the whole vampires are real thing. Apparently, he's even concerned that humans might be able to kill them now, what with nukes and whatnot. It makes you wonder why they needed to be so secretive in the first place, if humans never posed the slightest danger to them until recently. Aro says it was for the sake of convenience...but how is that convenient at all?

The nomad Garrett offers another, rather obvious perspective, that the Volturi are basically making up anything they can to come up with an excuse to kill lots and lots of vampires. This takes like three pages, but I've pretty much summarized it already.

Aro says people basically have three choices: agree with the Volturi, fight against them, or leave peacefully even if they disagree, which seems a little out of place, but I guess it scores them political points with the undecided voters. A lot of the Volturi "witnesses" decide to take the third option, since this is all getting a little ridiculous at this point.

Aro points out to his army that they are now outnumbered, but they confirm that they're okay with fighting to "protect their world" even if that would mean they lose a few of their number in the battle.

So Aro, Caius and Marcus counsel. It is boring.

Meanwhile, Bella prepares Renesmee and Jacob to leave. It's supposed to be touching, but it's really not.

Everyone says their goodbyes to their loved ones, just in case. If you cared about 99% of the characters here, this might be meaningful.

And then Bella feels the pressure of the mental attacks from the Volturi start to push against her shield, and the battle is ready to begin! This would be exciting, if this weren't Twilight.