Chapter Eleven: Werewolf storytime.

Werewolves eat. A lot. Jacob and his buddies have been eating ridiculous amounts of food all night, and as fun as that might be, Bella isn't really all that turned on by the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, so this isn't doing it for her either. But the pigging out isn't what this meeting is really all about.

No, this night is about legends, the legends that are actually stories, since they're all true. Quil's going to hear them for the first time since he's become a wolf, and Seth and Leah Clearwater are there too, so Bella's not going to be the only one joining the reader on the backstory train. All aboooooard! This is a long trip, and there's no bar car.

Billy Black starts off. Apparently, the Quileutes have always been a small tribe, but have survived thanks to the magic in their blood. But they couldn't always turn into wolves. At one point, they instead relied on their spirit warriors to fight their enemies. The spirit warriors were, in a lot of ways, cooler than werewolves. They could leave their bodies, and though they couldn't touch their enemies in their spirit form, they could do all sorts of other awesome stuff, including talk to animals, who in turn COULD touch whoever happened to be making the spirit warriors cranky that day.

One day, a jerk named Utlapa came along and decided that he thought the Quileutes should be using this power to enslave other nearby tribes. Nobody else agreed, but when he and the chief entered the spirit world, he snuck into the chief's body and took control. He also was smart enough to kill his old body, giving the chief no way of coming back into the physical world.

Utlapa pretended to be the chief for a while, which was a pretty sweet gig, but then he started making new rules, like "no going into the spirit world" and "every month starts with Utlapa Appreciation Day." Oh, and he took extra wives. Because really, what's the sense of being an evildoer impersonating the chief everyone loves if you can't have a few extra hot young wives?

Meanwhile, the old chief found a wolf who was willing to share his body with him, allowing him back into the real world again. When the wolf started singing songs and dancing slightly better than the average wolf, one of the spirit warriors got curious and went into the spirit world, where the real chief filled him in on all the details.

Utlapa figured out what was going on, and killed the warrior right as he was coming back into his body. The real chief watched from his wolf-body, furious. He had the first ever transformation into a form that looked like the spirit-version of the chief, and kicked Utlapa's ass. Then he went on to have many children with many wives, because he was pretty much the man at that point. Many of his sons could shapeshift too...and now, many many generations later, his descendants eat a lot of food and hit on high school girls from Forks.

Eventually, that super-chief gave up the wolf gig and started to age again. Around that time, some sort of trouble hit a neighboring tribe, as many of their women went missing, and not because werewolves were accidentally eating them. All six of the chief's wolf kids go looking for whatever did it, eventually going far away from their lands. Three of them headed back home, and the three who stayed were never heard from again.

A year later, trouble starts up again, and the remaining three wolves decide that maybe they'll have better luck this time. Of course, when they find the sparklepire, they assume they can kick its ass easily, and one of them dies right away. The other two manage to kill it, but it takes one of them out as well. So the sparklepire is dead, but the Quileutes are down to a lone wolf.

Unfortunately, that vampire they killed had a mate, and when she shows up, she eats a lot of Quileutes before wolf boy can show up to fight her. It's a pretty close fight, but in the end, he loses. His old dad (the super chief!) turns into an old wolf, but his wife (at this point, his third) is pretty sure he can't win without a distraction, so she comes up with a plan: she'll throw a knife into her own heart right in front of the vampire lady, distracting her enough for the chief to kill the sparklepire.

Good news -- it worked! And thanks to the rage caused by their mother's death, a couple more of their sons instantly turn into wolves to help out. Score one for the wolves.

After that, the wolfiness is passed down from father to son. There were never more than three wolves at a time, and sometimes none if a sparklepire hadn't shown up in a while, but that was plenty. Now that they knew how to fight the vampires, they were much more successful at doing so, and never really had much of a challenge defending the tribe. Once in a while, a single wolf would die, but that was the worst of it.

One day, the Cullens showed up. But they were really nice, so everyone tried to play nice for a while. The only result has been a larger pack than ever before, since the Cullens are by far the largest group of vampires that's ever been around; usually, vampires only hang out alone or with a mate. And then Bella became friends with every supernatural creature in a 50-mile radius. The end!

Bella falls asleep, dreaming of that third wife who saved the tribe by heroically killing herself. Uh-oh, I think Bella's getting ideas...

She wakes up to find herself in Jacob's car, heading back to the checkpoint where she'll be handed back to Edward. When he takes her home, she falls asleep pretty quickly, and has yet another way too literal dream about her with a knife, and Billy as an old wolf, and Rosalie as an attacking vampire lady...yeah.

Bella wakes up from the dream in a huff. Edward is there, and he had been reading Wuthering Heights. After Bella gets back to sleep yet again, and wakes up yet again (this time for good), she takes a look at what Edward was reading. It seems he was on a passage where Heathcliff (the character, not the cat) was speaking about how though he might have hated a rival suitor with a passion, he'd not have done anything to him as long as the woman he loved still wanted to spend time with the other guy. Once she didn't like him anymore? Then he'd kill him, but until then, they were cool.

Of course, Bella gets hung up on the phrase "drank his blood" and pretends there was no way that was what Edward was reading. She sure has a knack for getting things completely wrong! I'm surprised she didn't come out of the werewolf stories with the idea that the Quileute tribe came to America on the Mayflower. Sigh.