Twilight

The nomadic vampire James becomes fixated on Bella after sensing how protective Edward and the Cullens are of her, and he decides to hunt her as a game. To keep her safe, Edward and his family split Bella away from Forks, sending her to hide in Phoenix with Alice and Jasper while the rest of the family tries to throw James off the trail. The plan unravels when James calls Bella and convinces her that he is holding her mother captive, using details from Bella's own house to make the lie convincing.

Bella sneaks away from Alice and Jasper and goes alone to the address James gave her, an old ballet studio from her childhood. There is no hostage; it was a trap. James attacks her, breaking her leg and biting her wrist to begin the transformation into a vampire, and he films the encounter to show Edward later. Edward and the rest of the Cullens arrive just in time, and they kill James before he can finish her off.

With the immediate threat eliminated, Edward is left with a new problem: James's venom is spreading through Bella's body and will turn her into a vampire if left alone. Rather than let this happen, Edward sucks the venom back out of her wound, stopping the transformation at Bella's urging that he stop before he takes too much of her blood. Bella is rushed to a hospital, where her injuries are explained away with a cover story that she fell down a flight of stairs and through a window, protecting the Cullens' secret from her father, Charlie, and the rest of the human world.

The book closes back in Forks, with Bella recovered enough to attend her school prom, which Edward insists on taking her to since he doesn't want his presence in her life to cost her ordinary human experiences. On the dance floor, Bella tells Edward that she wants him to turn her into a vampire so that she can stay with him permanently and stop being a liability that needs constant rescuing. Edward refuses, making clear he does not want that fate for her, and the story ends with their relationship intact but this fundamental disagreement about her future unresolved.

Bella Swan has moved from Phoenix to live with her father, Charlie, the police chief of Forks, Washington, and has fallen in love with Edward Cullen, a vampire who, along with his adoptive family (including his telepathy-blocking effect on Bella and his siblings Alice and Jasper, among others), survives by drinking only animal blood rather than human blood. Edward and the Cullens' vampire nature is now fully known to Bella and kept secret from the rest of the human world, including Charlie.

Over the course of the book, Bella also befriends Jacob Black, a boy from the local Quileute tribe at First Beach, who first tells her the tribal legends that lead her to suspect the Cullens are vampires. This friendship is established but not deeply developed yet by the end of the book.

The central conflict of the book was a nomadic vampire named James, who targeted Bella as prey for sport after noticing the Cullens' protectiveness of her. James lured Bella to Phoenix with a fake claim that he was holding her mother hostage, then attacked her at an abandoned ballet studio, breaking her leg and biting her before Edward and the Cullens arrived and killed him. Edward saved Bella from turning into a vampire by sucking James's venom out of her bloodstream, and her injuries were covered up with a false story about a fall for the benefit of Charlie and the hospital.

The book ends with Bella and Edward attending her school prom together, their relationship stable and public knowledge between the two of them, though still secret in its vampire dimension from the wider world. The major open thread going into the next book is that Bella explicitly asked Edward to turn her into a vampire so they can be together permanently, and he refused, unwilling to condemn her to that existence. This disagreement over whether and when Bella should become a vampire is unresolved as the story closes.