Chapter Twenty: It's all about the Grovers, baby.

Bella and Alice race into Volterra, but can't get there too fast; unless Bella reaches Edward just seconds before he gets himself killed, there won't be enough drama to make teenage girls cry about the possible death of their beloved sparklepire. Alice reminds Bella that she needs to run for Palazzo dei Priori, because Edward will be making his grand appearance there right under the clock tower.

Reaching the town gates, Alice attempts to bribe the guard who isn't letting cars into the city during the big festival. Alice bribes him with a roll of thousand dollar bills.

That's right, thousand dollar bills! With the help of Wikipedia, I learned a bit about these guys. They feature Grover Cleveland's picture on them, and were last printed in 1945, along with other even more absurdly large bills. There are still over 165,000 $1,000 bills in circulation. Apparently the Cullens own approximately half of them, since they're happy to give big clumps of them away in Italy. How did those get through customs, anyway?

So, yeah, the guard lets them through. Alice gets as close as she can confidently go without tripping off Edward's mind detector, and has Bella run from there. She has two minutes -- what drama! Let's add some more: Alice notices that the Volturi are everywhere! Anything could happen, as long as anything include "Bella stopping Edward at the last second."

Bella runs. Her love for Edward is so strong that she doesn't even trip of anything. Oh, she runs into a fountain in the middle of the plaza, but still -- for her, the bruise she sustains is an impressively minor injury. She runs across the pool (never falling...the truest love ever, indeed!).

And now the chiming of the clock starts. It's noon! "Wow," thought Stephenie Meyer as she wrote this passage, "this will be amazing in the movie." The clock chimes once per paragraph, with Bella performing about 15-60 seconds worth of actions between each chime. Are we sure Alice didn't turn her into a vampire already?

When Bella finally sees Edward -- you mean she did get there in time? How incredible! -- he's even more beautiful than ever, blah blah blah, godly sparklepire, and so forth. And wouldn't you know it, even though he doesn't see or hear her, she runs into him at the EXACT MOMENT he lifts his foot to move into the sun.

And as soon as she touches Edward, she's happy and whole again. Yes, Edward instantly fills every single one of Bella's holes, in that special way that only vampires can. I promise, that's the last hole joke ever! Probably.

Up until this point, Edward has been a pretty smart guy. I mean, he's a creepy old manpire, but you do learn a thing or two over 100 years. And yet, for some reason, his first assumption is that he's died and gone to Heaven to live with Bella forever and ever. Or possibly Hell. Whatever.

Of course, when Bella points out that there are really old and dangerous vampires around, Edward snaps out of it. Sure enough, a couple of the Volturi arrive on scene instantly. Edward makes a few pithy comments to them, but they insist on having a chat with Edward in a less sunny location. Edward tries to leave Bella behind, but she's a guest of honor at this little party. When Edward refuses to agree to take Bella with them to this meeting, the Volturi take the only reasonable course of action -- kill Edward immediately, of course!

Once again, with the best of timing, Alice shows up to even the odds. With the parties seemingly at an impasse, and nearby humans beginning to notice that something weird is going on, it appears that the Cullen party might be able to make a hasty exit...until a little girl-pire shows up. Her name is Jane, and for some reason, all the others -- including Edward and Alice -- do whatever she wants without putting up the least resistance.

Jane asks everyone to follow her, and the group heads underground. They're headed to the headquarters of the Volturi, where some stuff is going to happen. But first, there's about five full pages of them walking there that I'm skipping to get to the end of the chapter. You can thank me later!