Chapter Eighteen: The most amazing thing I've ever read.

The official chapter title (remember, it's from Jacob's perspective, and the chapter titles reflect this) is "THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR THIS." Jacob is damn right about that, but I'm going to try. This is the big one, folks. If you have read these books, this is the chapter you've been waiting for me to write about. This is the chapter you want to know how the hell they're going to film when it comes time to make the Breaking Dawn movie(s). For this is the chapter in which Bella gives birth. Game on!

We start the chapter with a blood-soaked Bella convulsing all over the place. Normally, the convulsions would at least mean her body was doing something, but Jacob notices that it's mostly whatever is trying to get out of Bella that's causing the commotion.

The vampires take Bella up to the hospital-esque room that they've set up for her care, and Rosalie rips Bella's clothes off to prep her for, umm, surgery. Jacob feels a little conflicted by this. I mean, he doesn't like that his best friend is dying and covered in her own blood while a monstrous creature is attempting to claw its way out of her womb, of course...but at the same time, he DID spend a lot of time imagining her naked. How ironic that now that he gets his wish, it's during a time when, on balance, it's not something he can be happy about. Poor Jacob! And Bella too, since she's near death and all that.

Carlisle isn't around -- remember, he's conveniently out getting more blood, which they put off just long enough to risk this happening -- but it hardly seems to matter, since Edward and Rosalie apparently have no problem diagnosing exactly what's going on. The baby is suffocating! The placenta detached!

Bella manages to come around during all this, and starts screaming at them to take the baby out now. Her screaming causes blood vessels in her eyes to burst, just adding to the bloody mess. Then there's more blood, which stops her from continuing to scream. Really, if Stephenie Meyer wants you to get one thing out of this part of the chapter, it's that Bella has lost about eight people worth of blood already.

Edward wants to wait for the morphine to spread before they attempt to take the baby out, but Rosalie is convinced there's no time: they need to act now. In an attempt to be demonstrative about this, her hand lands on Bella's stomach, and you guessed it...more blood! This time though, it comes as a bit of a surprise to Rosalie, and causes her to lose focus. In one sense, it might not be a big deal, since the plan is to eat the baby out of Bella anyway; but since they'd rather not eat Bella during the process, this is not a positive development on the whole. Jacob tackles Rosalie, who doesn't put up much of a fight as Alice drags her out into the hallway.

With Rosalie out of the room, there's a new plan; Jacob performs CPR while Edward tries to get the baby out. Hurray for Jacob, now he gets to pretend he's making out with Bella again AND potentially save her life. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Then another crack rips through Bella -- it seems that the baby loves her so much, it decided to break her spine so she couldn't feel the pain of it ripping its way out of her womb. Aww! Jacob also points this out, telling Edward that he really doesn't have to worry about the morphine anymore since Bella won't be able to feel a damn thing anyway.

Edward gets started on delivery while Jacob deals with keeping Bella going. He can hear her heart beating softly, but she's not breathing, so he tries to breathe for her. The first thing he notices? That Bella's lips taste like blood. Funny, that; maybe it's the geysers of blood coming out of her.

Edward starts with the delicate surgeon's touch of the scalpel. Then he decides that that subtlety needs to be thrown out of the window, and dives in face first, ripping apart Bella's insides with his own teeth. Jacob remarks that it sounds like metal being torn apart as Edward bites his way into the womb; somehow, this observation is among the least traumatic imagery in this chapter.

Jacob keeps Bella's heart beating and lungs breathing as Edward pulls the baby out. It's a girl, maintaining Bella's record of being wrong about everything ever. Her name is Renesmee, which will unfortunately doom thousands of children over the next two decades to being given that awful name by terrible parents. If your name is Renesmee, and you're reading this in the year 2025 or so (either in its original blog form, the sure bestselling book that will follow, or in some sort of 3D format, since that's what all the kids are into now), it's nothing against you, of course. I blame your parents for naming you after a fictional half-vampire, that's all.

Bella, momentarily calm, wants to hold her daughter -- a perfectly reasonable thing to want, of course. But in a matter of seconds, she's gasping again, because the baby has just bitten her, causing yet more blood (how much more can she have left?) to come pouring out of her chest. Edward scolds his daughter for this. It's not right to be biting people and drinking their blood without asking properly first, Renesmee!

Bella's eyes roll back into her head, and she heads off near death again. Jacob goes into full CPR mode, trying to keep her heart and lungs moving for as long as possible. He gently reminds Edward that this might be a good time to start vampirizing Bella, but he needs somewhere to put Renesmee down first. After Jacob suggests throwing her out the window, they reluctantly settle on giving her to Rosalie, who promises not to eat Renesmee.

Edward momentarily gets Jacob to stop pumping so that he can have a turn. He injects a syringe of Edward-grade sparklepire venom directly into Bella's heart, hoping that it might speed up the process a little. Then Jacob goes back to pumping, hoping to spread the venom around her body as fast as possible, while Edward starts biting Bella in every place you can imagine, and quite a few that you can't.

But at some point, Jacob decides that this is all futile, because Bella isn't responding at all. From his point of view, they're working over a corpse, and while playing doctor is sometimes fun, it's less so when the patient is your dead best friend. Jacob feels a pull to be elsewhere, anywhere but in the room with definitely dead and not about to be a perfect sparklepire Bella; hearing his thoughts, Edward invites him to leave then, and reiterates his confidence that Bella's going to be just fine.

So Jacob leaves. He's tired and broken, so when he sees Rosalie on the couch downstairs playing with the baby, he kind of loses it. Maybe this is what she wanted all along, to let Bella die and take the kid as her own. Come to think of it, that would have been a pretty clever plan on her part, and now, no matter what this book tells me, I'm going to assume that was exactly what she intended. It certainly makes the story more interesting!

Jacob hears Renesmee feeding on blood, and declares her a little monster. Not just any monster, the monster who killed his best friend who is definitely NOT going to be saved at the last minute. No, the baby needs to die. Rosalie's too distracted to stop him, and so what if her, Alice and Jasper would kill him after he did it? At this point, he's not all that concerned about what anyone thinks or feels. The only sensible course of action is to kill a newborn baby. Totally justifiable, even if it was the exact same idea that caused him to leave his wolf pack just a couple weeks earlier. But this is different, because he's mad, and therefore infanticide is a perfectly rational plan!

Stupid or not (and it is stupid), Jacob proceeds with operation Kill the Baby. He moves in for the kill, when Renesmee gets one good look at him from over Rosalie's shoulder...and it's all over. Remember that pull Jacob had to Bella's bulging stomach? Remember how the werewolves are all imprinting on people...even infant people?

Yeah. You can put two and two together. Jacob feels a million giant steel cables connecting him to Renesmee, meaning he will forever be connected to her. Yes, he's basically in love with a baby that's less than five minutes old. Imprinting isn't creepy at all!

On the bright side, Bella's dead, right? At least we won't have to deal with her for the last twenty chapters or so. Wait, what's that? Jacob hears a new heart beating furiously again upstairs? Sigh -- we should have known we'd never get that lucky. On the bright side, this really is the end of werewolf-vision; Bella's going to narrate the rest of our journey. The rest of our sad, boring journey of wish fulfillment.

Enjoy?

Bonus: for a shorter, more visual summary of the birth, this animated .gif may help.