Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Charlie has to drive with windows down yet again because the AC in the cruiser won’t work, and he refuses to bring it into the shop to get fixed. Hot, sticky air blows against his face as he speeds down the road.

He switches the station on the radio and wipes the sweat from his brow.

“Come on out to Shreveport, y’all. This is jazz and blues rhythms on KTRN, Caddo Parish. And next on the track is the newest single from our very own, Randy Crawford.”

As he drives further down the road, the number of houses become fewer and smaller, and the Spanish moss becomes thicker. The paved road turns into a dirt road covered in patches of moss and surrounded by tall grass and wildflowers. 

He spots Waylon standing near a cluster of trees wrapped in caution tape. He waves with a grim expression on his face.

“Cajun moon, where does your power lie

As you move across the southern sky

You took my babe way too soon

What have you done, Cajun m–”

Charlie turns the engine off and tosses the keys into the passenger seat. He removes his aviators to mop his face with a handkerchief. Waylon walks to the car with hands on his hips, squinting under the rays of the sun.

“Well?” Charlie says, bracing himself. “Gimme the gory details.”

“It’s a goddamn massacre, if I’ve ever seen one,” Waylon informs him. “Whole wedding party got wiped out by some giant animals, by the looks of it. Except the bride.”

Charlie pauses as he exits his car. “What about ‘er?” he asks.

“Looks like she got slashed in the face by whatever animal ran through here, but she died from two bullets.” Waylon makes a gun with his fingers and taps his temple. “Execution style.”

“Shit,” Charlie grunts. He rubs a hand over his mustache. What a way to start a Thursday morning. “Alright. Let’s see what we got.”

They duck under the caution tape. The ground is covered in mud, wildflowers and greenery. When they get to the scene of the crime, everything is stained bright red and littered with viscera. The air reeks of death.

Charlie removes his hat and whistles. “My word,” he breathes. “What kinda crazy fucker would do such a thing?”

“Maybe not so crazy,” Waylon hedges. “It’s a rampage alright, but it’s too neat. There’s no animal tracks. The hounds can’t even catch a scent out here. Whoever did this, they’re real good.”

“How the hell can someone organize somethin’ like this around here?” Charlie wonders. 

“Don’t know, sir,” Waylon says. “You heard them stories about werewolf sightings on the news? They can live forever, and they got scary blue eyes. Bullets don’t hurt ‘em neither.”

“Don’t you start with that nonsense again. It’s a load of hoodoo crap. Ain’t no bullet proof werewolves howlin’ at the moon or slaughterin’ folks,” Charlie warns. “There’s a logical explanation for all this.” He steps around the bodies and blood splatter, crouching beside the felled woman in the gauzy white dress. “Who’s the bride?”

“The name on the marriage certificate says Julia Jones.”

Charlie snorts. “That’s a fake.”

“Figured that. We’ve been callin’ her The Bride on account of the bouquet in her hand.”

“Whoever did this had to be crazy, messin’ up her face like this,” Charlie says. He leans closer. “She was a good lookin’ gal. Like a… blood-splattered angel.”

An unexpected spurt of blood hitting his face makes Charlie flinch. As he wipes his cheek, he sees a bullet leeching its way out of the woman’s chest. The bullet clatters to the ground, and a trickle of blood leaks from the hole left behind. Seconds later, her chest stutters with a weak gasp.

“Uh, she ain’t dead,” Charlie announces. 

Waylon scrambles over on his knees, removing his hat from his head and holding it to his chest. The bullet wound near the woman’s heart sluggishly closes. The trauma to her face is still ghastly looking, but slowly piecing itself back together. The bullet in her forehead slowly pushes to the surface.

“I told ya! Whattaya make of that!” Waylon yells, pointing frantically at her face. “They’re real, Sheriff!”

Chapter Text

Leah wakes with a gasp, shooting into a sitting position. Her head whips around the room, disoriented. Her nose is bombarded with the scent of antiseptic, staleness and death. Everything in the room is too bright, too vivid. She can’t focus on one sound for too long, and she feels like something is crawling under her skin and ready to burst forth. It’s nauseating.

She leans over the side of the bed and vomits. Her hair, impossibly longer than she remembered, falls around her face like a black curtain. She sits back up when her stomach is finally empty and shakily wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Something scratches against her lips.

Looking down, she notices the band around her wrist. The hospital bracelet reads ‘Jane Doe’ and nothing else. Glancing around the room, she realizes there are other occupants lined against the opposite wall and on either side of her, all asleep.

Leah snatches the TV remote from the bedside table and flips through the channels until she finds a weather channel. Her eyes lock on the lower corner of the screen in horror.

May 17th, 2010 4:13AM

“Four years,” she mouths, clutching her middle and slouching forward. “Four fucking years.”

Her wedding was held in the deep bayous of nowhere in Louisiana, surrounded by Spanish moss, dark waters and endless greenery. The humidity made her white dress cling to her body like a second skin made of lace, and the bouquet of flowers in her hands wilted by the minute.

The officiant, an old man and neighbor of Leah’s who she had grown close to, rattled off the closing remarks of his wedding script, but Leah could hardly hear him. Her attention was solely focused on the beautiful man she was marrying on that hot summer day, standing in front of her in a beige linen suit.

She met him seven months ago in a supermarket, having just moved into one of her safehouses. She was cradling her then three-month old brother, Seth, in one arm while trying to reach for flour with the other. The bag was just out of her reach until someone else grabbed it for her with ease.

A dark skinned man, with the nicest smile she had ever seen, held out the bag of flour to her. “Your son is beautiful,” he murmured. His voice had a Creole drawl that made his words slow and persuasive.

Leah automatically opened her mouth to correct him, but thought better of it. “He is,” she said instead, nuzzling her nose against Seth’s. Her eyes turned back to the stranger. “Thank you for grabbing that for me…”

“Laurent,” the man supplied. “Laurent Da Revin.”

“Thank you, Laurent.”

Laurent cocked his head to the side. “You got a name, pretty lady?”

She told him her name was Julia Jones, and the rest was history.

There was something about his perfect smile and his Southern charm that drew Leah in. His pretty brown eyes with gold flecks in them were like molasses, full of sweetness and affection just for her. And his hands, large and strong, played with Seth during the day and held Leah tenderly at night.

“By the power invested in me by the state of Louisiana, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may now kiss.”

Laurent cradled her face with his large hands and pressed his lips against hers in a searing kiss. The force of it alone weakened her knees, and she melted against him as he continued to lavish her lips with slick kisses until the officiant uncomfortably cleared his throat.

They briefly parted from each other with matching mischievous grins. Laurent crushed her to his chest with a deep, imperious laugh that made her stomach do funny things. 

Leah turned her gaze to their audience, a lonely party of two. The officiant’s granddaughter was holding a now ten-month old Seth in her arms. The girl picked up Seth’s hand to wave at the couple, and Leah melted at the sight. She broke from Laurent’s hold to grab up her brother and blow raspberries into his belly.

Seth giggled with delight and clapped his chubby hands. Behind her, Leah felt Laurent press a kiss to the crown of her head before he gave a loud, smacking kiss to Seth on the cheek. Seth’s giggles grew shrill as he reached out with grabby hands.

“C’mere, big man,” Laurent cooed, taking Seth and spinning with him in his arms.

“There was nobody else around to invite to your wedding?” The girl asked.

“I have all the family I need right here,” Leah murmured, gazing fondly at her brother and husband. 

Leah heard Sam before she saw him. Dread curled in her gut as she stiffened, but everyone else stood around none the wiser. 

Out stepped Sam from the moss draped around them like white cobwebs, looking as handsome as ever in a white button down and dark denim. His slow clapping and calm swagger in his walk were at opposite poles with his angry expression.

Everyone quieted, even Seth, at Sam’s panther-like approach.

“It seems like congratulations are in order,” Sam said, deceptively calm.

“What are you doing here?” Leah bit out.

“You know why I’m here,” Sam purred. He gave her a lustful onceover. “You make a beautiful bride.”

“Who are you?” Laurent demanded. At the same time, Leah growled, “Get out of here, Sam!”

“This is where you’ve been staying? In a dump like this?” He glanced around the bayou with a smirk. “Sure doesn’t seem like this joker you’re marrying makes a lot of money to support you. Not like I could.”

“We’re going to do just fine,” Leah snapped.

“As opposed to jetting around the world, killing without a care and getting paid bank to do it?”

“Yes,” Leah hissed. “I won’t let you kill Seth!”

Laurent grasped her forearm. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“He’s an abomination!” Sam roared, his eyes turning an ice blue. The buttons of his shirt popped one by one and his jeans began to tear as his muscles ballooned to an unbelievable size. He let out an ear-splitting howl. A chorus of howls answered.

Leah was completely unprepared for the attack. Without her weapons, she would be useless against them. “Sam, no! You can’t do this!” she cried.

Her pleas fell on deaf ears, and the bayou turned to chaos. Two giant wolves, silver and chestnut colored, descended from the thick of the forest, black lips curled back in snarls and saliva dripping from their maws. The officiant and his daughter screamed in terror, and they’re the first to be torn to shreds.

Laurent tugged on Leah’s hand, tucking Seth against him like a football and urging her to run. She followed, but she knew they were done for. Turning your back to a wolf was a death sentence. The chase was only a game for them, and with their pitiful human speed the couple could only make it so far.

A charcoal wolf with a dusting of white on its ears skidded in front of them, licking its black lips. It was the only thing that stood between the couple and their only hope of escape: a fishing boat on the marsh. Wolves were notoriously terrible swimmers, known to sink and drown in deep waters. They wouldn’t be able to follow in the water, and that could buy Leah some time to think of a better plan. But that was wishful thinking.

The charcoal wolf charged at them, wasting no time raking its claws across Leah’s face. She screamed in horror and agony, clutching at her face as it gushed torrents of blood and burned like fire. She fell to the ground and tried to blink away the blood from her left eye, the other now rendered blind. 

Seth was sprawled on the mossy ground, red-faced and crying, kicking furiously at the air. The wolf had Laurent in its jaws, thrashing him like a rag doll. He screamed in pain and Leah covered her ears against the noise.

“Run, Julia!” Laurent shouted. Even as the wolf was tearing into his bowels, he still thought of her safety. “Go, now!”

With a sob, Leah rushed forward to grab Seth as the other wolves began a slow, mocking trot toward them and ran for the boat. The adrenaline coursing through her veins allowed her to briefly ignore her agony, but she knew it wouldn’t last long. 

The boat engine hardly kicked on before the wolves ran near the edge of the marsh, snapping their teeth and growling at her as the boat sped forward. Their angry sounds were wrenched into silence when Sam walked behind them, his clothes now torn, staring after Leah with a blank expression. She stiffened, wondering what game they would play now.

She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

Long, pale white fingers grasped the edge of the boat, and a pair of red eyes broke the surface of the murky water with a laser focus on Leah. Long brown hair, turned teak from the water, floated along the surface in loose tendrils. Leah slowly shook her head as the creature began to crawl into the boat, silently baring sharp canines from an otherwise innocent, youthful face. She lowered Seth into a pile of blankets behind her and grit her teeth.

“You fucking leech-”

The vampire lept, its arms like an iron cage around Leah’s body as they both plunged into the warm water. As they sank, the vampire pressed its fangs into Leah’s neck and drank from her artery. Leah’s blood left a red cloud in the water, and her strangled screams sounded empty underwater. She was being pumped full of a paralytic venom, the kind vampires use on their prey to ensure they stay still as they feed.

Now limp, Leah panicked as water began to fill her lungs, but she couldn’t move a muscle in her body to do anything about it. The vampire pulled back, briefly smirking at Leah before it swam back to the surface, dragging Leah by one useless arm.

Leah coughed and sputtered when they reached the surface. She was being dragged by the vampire still, the joint in her shoulder radiating with pain and the skin of her back screaming as it scraped against rocks and twigs. Without warning, her wrist was released, and Leah’s numb arm fell to the ground with a thud.

“Do you think I’m sadistic?” Sam asked, standing over Leah’s battered body. His head cocked to the side.

She ignored him in favor of trying to breathe through the agony as she painfully turned her head toward the direction of Seth’s cries on the boat. She just wanted to see his little face, to confirm with her own eyes that no one touched him.

Sam crouched beside her head, blocking her view. He wiped her stinging face with a handkerchief that had his name embroidered on it with blue thread.

“I’m sure you’re aware enough to know there’s nothing sadistic in my actions.” Sam paused to chuckle. “Well, maybe towards those other jokers…” He caressed her cheek, whispering, “But not you. Never you, Lee-Lee.”

Leah finally met his gaze, hurling all of her rage toward him with a glare from her one working eye. He knew how much she hated that stupid nickname he gave her. It was a nickname that used to suffuse her with love all the way to her bones, but now it filled her with pure hatred. Her eye socket burned as a violent red haze enveloped her vision. 

Sam straightened from his crouch and shook his head. “If you won’t be one of us, you can’t run around knowing our secret anymore. Liability and all.” He pulled a gun from his back pocket and aimed it toward her face with a bittersweet smile. “And Seth, well… I had high hopes for him, but he’s just another genetic disappointment.”

Leah wheezed, slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Sam,” she choked out. “He’s just a baby-” 

Sam pulled the trigger, lodging a bullet in her head. He fired off a second shot, sending an additional bullet through her heart.

Leah flinches. The explosive bang of the gun is still ringing fresh in her ears. The bullet must’ve caused significant damage if she’d been comatose for four years. She draws in a ragged breath, frantically patting her neck, chest and face, but there’s no discernible scarring under her searching fingertips.

She snatches the metal tray by her bedside, knocking off the medical instruments on it. What appears in her reflection almost makes her scream. 

Ice blue eyes stare back at her, both intact. Her skin is unblemished, only flushed and glowing with the perfect picture of health. She tosses the tray to the ground, disgusted.

She crawls to the edge of the bed and lifts the clipboard from the folder on the frame.

JANE DOE

FEMALE

20s

COMATOSE. NO INJURIES UPON ADMITTANCE.

Leah flips through the rest of the pages, but there’s nothing of note. Nothing about her husband or her neighbors. Nothing about Seth.

The door opens, and she turns toward the sound with a growl. The male nurse freezes in shock, dropping the coffee cup in his hand. He squeaks, pointing a shocked finger in her direction.

“Y-Y-Y-You-You’re-”

Leah decides in that moment what her game plan is. She tosses the covers from her legs and leaps from the bed, landing on top of the nurse. He topples to the floor and whimpers in fear, opening his mouth to scream, no doubt. His cries are smothered by Leah’s hand.

“Shhhhh,” she cooes. The side of her hand slams into his neck, and the nurse is out cold.

She drags him to the corner of the room, patting his pockets. With his wallet and car keys in her possession, she quickly disrobes the nurse of his scrubs and puts them on. The clothes are a terrible fit, but she makes do.

The other nurses and doctors in the hallway give Leah funny looks as she briskly walks past them, but she doesn’t allow anyone enough time to ask questions. She takes the elevator to the garage and presses the panic button on the key fob. The alarm of a vintage red pickup truck goes off on the second level.

Leah turns the ignition and switches the radio on, checking the stations to get her bearings. They’re mostly familiar to her, and she takes that as a positive sign. Not quite near the safehouse, but still within the state of Louisiana.

Her mood plummets when she catches a glimpse of those stupid blue eyes in the rearview mirror. She screams in anger. Of all the times for the werewolf gene to finally decide to kick in, why now? She was the first in her family of generations of werewolves to present as purely human. Seth suffered the same fate as the second, and he paid for it with his tiny life.

She hits the steering wheel once, and it dents under the force of her blow. She stops, staring in disbelief between her fingers, now sprouting claws, and the wheel. Another blink, and the claws return to her normal fingernails.

With an annoyed groan, Leah switches the gear into reverse and peels out of the parking garage. The hospital is three hours away from her home tucked in the backwoods.

By the time she arrives the moon is hanging in the sky and the swamp is swallowed in black. Her new eyes have no problem navigating in the dark now.

Her home, a cottage really, is rundown and unkempt from years of neglect. The door is unlocked, and the scents within have long gone stale. She drags a finger over a photo, covered in a thick layer of dust. 

It’s a photo of herself smiling at her baby brother, who’s laughing in joy at the funny face Laurent was making at him. She rips the picture from the fridge and presses it to her heart.

She sobs once, and it releases the floodgates she’d been holding back. The tears falling from her eyes seem endless. Loud, ugly sobs tumble from her mouth. She cries for Laurent and his untimely death. For the loss of their loving, beautiful relationship. For the loss of their home, built painstakingly from the ground up by their own hands. For the loss of her human life. For the loss of her sweet, innocent baby brother.

Conviction curls in Leah’s stomach, and it gives her enough strength to lift herself from the kitchen floor and into her old bedroom. She quickly dons her old clothes, now covered in dust and cobwebs, and pulls an old shoebox from her armoire. Fake passports and credit cards, cash, and a burner are inside. She tosses the necessities into a duffle bag and rushes to the front door.

Leah pauses, glancing around one last time. She pats the front door as a way of goodbye and speeds away from her almost-life without a look back. 

The airport is even further away, and the gas tank is just about empty by the time she arrives. She abandons the stolen truck in the parking lot and navigates through the windy maze of the airport until she finds the ticket counter.

She needs a weapon, a really fucking good one for this mission, and there’s only one place where she can get that kind of quality from.

The agent at the counter greets her with a smile. “Welcome to Hawaiian Airlines. How may I help you?”

“Molokai. One way.”

Chapter Text

The afternoon sun beats down on Leah’s bare back and arms as she walks across the beach. Her soles are warmed by the gritty sand, and the incoming tides tickle her toes. She pauses, lifting her sunglasses to gaze at the sparkling blue ocean and the lush green mountains in the backdrop. Seagulls caw in the clear skies, and a gentle breeze makes her sundress flutter around her legs. It’s nothing short of a paradise here.

Leah stops in front of a hole-in-the-wall a few paces from the empty lifeguard post. Straw roofing provides shade over the concrete patio, and the lack of walls and windows allow for the breeze to freely weave through the empty restaurant. It’s silent, save for the fan sputtering on the bar’s counter and the low chattering of a TV in the back room.

A woman stands behind the bar, hacking away at a watermelon with a cleaver. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face in two braids that fall past her waist. She’s tall and tanned, dressed in a bright, oversized red top with a tacky floral print. She glances up at Leah with a smile on her face, and freezes.

The woman locks her gaze on Leah as she takes a step back. In a split second her eyes switch to an aquamarine and she snarls, instinctively reactive to an unknown werewolf breaching her territory. She remains eerily still except for her eyes, which frenetically rake over Leah’s form. Her nostrils flare once, and confusion shifts her expression.

“Your eyes haven’t cooled yet,” she realizes. “You’re a pup still.”

Leah nods sullenly. “A late bloom,” she confirms.

The woman finally relaxes her stance with a slight nod, granting Leah entry.

Leah ducks her head, loosening her own tense muscles and stepping past the invisible line that marks the woman’s domain. “Good afternoon...” Leah begins. She glances at the woman’s name tag and fights a smirk. “...Kim.”

“Aloha,” ‘Kim’ greets her with a renewed smile. “You don’t smell like a wolf, you know. But your scent is still… other. It’s unique.”

Leah nods, coming to a stop in front of the bar. “It’s been that way since I was born,” she replies. Her family didn’t know what to make of it, and neither did she.

‘Kim’ hums. “How interesting.”

Leah glances at the empty barstools, and her eyes catch on that tacky shirt again, noting the peculiar way the fabric is draped over her form. It takes her a second, but Leah’s ears prick at the sound of a soft, fluttering heartbeat. ‘Kim’ narrows her eyes and places a protective hand on her stomach, highlighting the swell hidden beneath her shirt.

Leah averts her eyes to show she's no threat. “Mind if I sit?”

“Go right ahead,” ‘Kim’ says, relaxing. She whips out a napkin and places it on the bar in front of Leah. “One second…” She turns around, cupping a hand around her mouth and yells, “Em, come take this customer’s order!”

There’s a groan, and a male voice yells back, “I’m watching my soap operas!”

‘Kim’ sneers. “That fucking brat,” she hisses. She stabs the cleaver into a cutting board. “Fuck your soap operas and bring your ass out here!”

Leah snickers. “He sounds like a lovely employee.”

‘Kim’ snorts. “My brother is a piece of work,” she grumbles. She slides a few wedges of watermelon toward Leah. “Sometimes I question if we’re related.”

“Hey!” the man yells indignantly.

‘Kim’ slams her fist against the counter, making Leah jump. “What the hell did I just ask you to do, and why aren’t you doing it?!” she shouts. She snatches up the cleaver and begins to angrily chop the rind from a pineapple. “Lazy fucker…”

“Alright, alright already!” the man complains. “Goddamn hormonal woman…”

There’s stomping footsteps and the beaded curtain covering the entrance to the back room swishes to the side. The man steps out with a sour expression on his face. He’s even taller than his boss, with equally long hair pulled into a ponytail and black gauges in his ears. A well worn Metallica t-shirt is stretched taut over his lanky form. His hazel eyes bleed into blue when he sees Leah, but a tch from the woman makes him settle.

He pouts and moves into Leah’s personal space, asking in a bored voice, “What do you want?”

Leah angles away from him with a quirk in her eyebrow. “A mai tai,” she responds.

The man looks incredulous as he leans against the counter, moving further into Leah’s face without much care. “A mai tai? In the middle of the day?”

‘Kim’ growls and points her cleaver at the man. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, Embry! If she wants a mai tai, then get her a fucking mai tai!”

Embry scowls. “Why do I always have to get the drinks?” he demands. He grabs Leah’s stool, scurrying to her left side and pointing angrily at ‘Kim’ as he leans his head over Leah’s shoulder like her body is a shield. “Why can’t you get it for once?!”

“Because I’m the boss,” ‘Kim’ hisses, raising the cleaver threateningly. Embry backs away with a yelp. “Now shut up and get this woman her drink!”

Embry stomps toward the back door and pauses. “Maggie got poisoned by Heather,” he blurts out. He ducks out of the way with another yelp when ‘Kim’ shrieks in outrage and throws the cleaver toward his head.

“I told you not to tell me any General Hospital spoilers!” she screams.

Embry’s laughter echoes in the back room, and Leah covers her mouth to hide her smile. ‘Kim’ rolls her eyes and yanks the cleaver out of the wall.

“Sorry about that…” she mutters, returning to her chopping. She glances up at Leah. “First time in Molokai? We don’t get much of our kind visiting around here.”

Leah nods. “Yes. I came to see a woman, actually.”

‘Kim’ wiggles her eyebrows. “You have a special lady friend in Molokai?”

“Not quite,” Leah says. “I’ve never met her.”

“You came all the way out here for someone you’ve never met before?” ‘Kim’ wonders at that. “May I ask who this mystery woman is? It’s a small island. I might know her.”

“You would know her, since it’s you,” Leah says, resting her chin on her hands. “Rebecca Black.”

She stops chopping, and in the back room glass crashes to the floor. “What do you want with me?” she asks in a light voice.

“I need a weapon.”

The Black family was renowned for making weapons imbued with wolf magic, designed to kill vampires. The art was passed down from several generations, and as the firstborn in the latest generation, born mere minutes before her twin sister, Rebecca was trained up to take the mantle as the next weapons master of the Black family.

“Why?”

“I have vermin to kill,” Leah replies in an even voice, clenching her fists on the bar.

Rebecca stares at her for a few seconds, assessing. She sets the cleaver down with a huff and turns the fan off. “Descriptive,” she mutters under her breath. She rips the name tag off and says in a clipped tone, “Come.”

She shimmies from behind the bar, calling over her shoulder for Embry to watch the shop while she’s gone. Leah follows her outside to a secluded area in the bushes. She watches Rebecca crouch with a grunt and brush some sand away, revealing a trapdoor. Rebecca lifts the hatch and gestures for Leah to go first.

Leah walks down the sandy stairs, yanking on a pull-chain that brushes against her shoulder. A light flickers on, and Leah is greeted by wall to wall shelves of Rebecca’s arsenal of weaponry. There’s an array of firearms and blades, and the hairs on Leah’s arms stand as she feels them all pulse with dangerous magic.

She reverently runs a finger against the shelves. Her eyes are bright as she takes everything in, full of excitement and trepidation all at once. Her hand reaches out for a sickle with a red gemstone embedded in the handle, but Rebecca’s voice makes her halt.

“Not that one,” Rebecca calls. Leah freezes, glancing over her shoulder at Rebecca watching her with careful eyes. “Try the second one down.”

Leah turns back to the shelf and her eyes dart to where Rebecca indicated. Her eyes land on a machete sheathed in a leather scabbard. Slowly, carefully, Leah lifts the machete from the shelf and shudders at the sheer power she can feel radiating from the leather alone. With a jittery laugh, she unsheathes the machete by an inch. A low hum emits from the blade as she stares into her reflection, and her eyes glow a brighter blue of their own accord.

She unsheathes the machete entirely, and the singing of the blade is even louder. She pants with the intensity of it, finding herself oddly aroused. A flush envelopes her cheeks.

“Funny,” Rebecca remarks, weighing a brick in her right hand. “You’re the first one to have that kind of reaction.”

She hurls the brick at Leah without warning. Leah reacts without thought, swinging the machete at the projectile. The brick breaks into two, and the sliced ends of the halves are charred and glowing. Small pillars of smoke rise from the blade.

Rebecca gives her a proud smile. “You have a lovely technique,” she says.

Leah nods her head, lowering her arms. “Thanks,” she whispers.

“But you should know, I’m not making any weapons at this time,” Rebecca informs her. She places a hand on her belly. “Not until Jacob Jr. is born. That kind of magic takes too much energy, and I’m already depleted from growing this little guy.”

“Then give me one of these,” Leah insists.

Rebecca holds her hand out for the machete. “These aren’t for sale. They’re either other people’s orders, or they’re being held for sentimental value.” She sheathes the weapon with a chuckle, returning it to the shelf and walking back to the stairs. “Besides, why should I help you?”

“Because my vermin, among many others, is Isabella Marie.”

Leah dodges a tanto knife thrown near her head. She turns to Rebecca with a snarl, but the woman is staring back at her with unseeing, hate-filled blue eyes. Her hand, frozen in the air from her throw, curls into a fist as she brings it back to her side. Her expression melts into an apologetic grimace.

The Black family’s hatred for Bella is soul deep and grievously personal; they all blame her for the death of their youngest boy, Jacob Black. Consumed with grief, Rebecca moved away from her homeland to the quiet island of Molokai when her father’s devastation over her younger brother's death became too much to live with.

“What did she do now,” Rebecca spits.

“Massacred my husband and friends,” Leah says without emotion. Her voice cracks with anger at her next words. “Helped kill my little brother.”

Rebecca’s answering snarl makes Leah’s hair stand on end.

“So I’d say you have something to gain from this, too, don’t you think?” Leah whispers.

Rebecca sighs shakily, wiping a trembling hand across her eyes. “I truly can’t make you anything good in my condition,” she murmurs. “Embry will have to do it.”

“Is Embry-”

“Not the father. Sol is away on tour. Embry is my half-brother.” Rebecca shrugs. “He and Jacob were thick as thieves even before we found out. Em is just as capable as I am and he’ll be more than willing to do it. He has our father’s blood in him.”

Leah nods, mollified. “Alright.”

“You can stay with us,” Rebecca continues. “It’ll take a month to put something together for you.” Her eyes lock with Leah’s. “I suggest you spend that time soaking up as much sun as you can. This might be your last opportunity... You’ll be a wanted woman after this.”

A month later, Leah’s skin is bronzier than she ever thought it was capable of, and her eyes have finally returned to their original brown. She sits in front of a bonfire, and on the other side sits Rebecca and Embry, both dressed in the red and black regalia of their tribe. Sol, a silent, herculean sized man with black tattoos on his chest and forearms, sits on his knees dressed in a sarong a few paces behind them.

They’re seated on the beach, performing the gifting ceremony under the stars.

Embry presents her with the first weapon: a dagger. The handle is fashioned from jade, and the blade is pure silver. He holds the dagger out above the flames, and Leah gingerly takes it from him. She admires it in the light of the flames with a smile.

“We don’t usually fashion weapons to kill our own kind,” Rebecca murmurs, “but we’re making an exception given the… circumstances.”

Her second and final weapon is a katana, and it sings from within the wooden scabbard. Embry holds the bottom end of the scabbard and thrusts the katana into the flames. The scabbard remains unscathed and the symbols carved into it glow a bright red.

Leah pulls the handle to unsheathe the blade, and once again she is aroused by the blade’s serenade. Embry walks around the flames, holding the scabbard, and Leah sheathes it once more. She nods in thanks to the duo.

Embry’s face is a dark cloud. “It’s my finest work,” he intones. 

“Make sure that bitch knows where those blades came from,” Rebecca says in a quiet rage. “And send her straight to hell!”

Leah’s eyes burn as they turn blue. A wicked smile spreads on her face, and her teeth feel sharper than usual. “Yes,” she hisses.

That evening she books her flight back to her childhood home: Washington state.

Chapter Text

In the airport bathroom Leah changes out of her sundress into a pair of jeans and copper leather jacket. She dumps her old clothes into the garbage and makes her way to the rental car center. The young man at the counter only has dismal pickings left.

“Sorry, ma’am. We only have a Jeep or a Volvo available this afternoon,” he says. Neither of the vehicles look conspicuous in the least.

Leah sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Give me the stupid Volvo.”

After an hour’s drive Leah pulls her rental in front of a modest sized home in a quiet, suburban neighborhood. All of the houses look like clones of each other, equally spaced out with perfectly trimmed lawns and shrubbery. The siding of this particular house is a periwinkle blue, and the window panels are a contrasting canary yellow. It’s an eyesore, and it makes Leah want to gag.

She yanks the keys from the ignition and steps out of the vehicle, pausing in front of the mailbox. The name ‘Wolfe’ is etched on the side. Curious, she opens the mailbox and skims through the envelopes stacked inside. They’re primarily addressed to a ‘Jacob Wolfe’ or ‘Eric Yorkie’ of 342 Deer Street in Neah Bay.

Of all the aliases, he had to choose that one? 

Leah snorts, tossing the envelopes on the ground. She steps around the children’s toys that litter the lawn until she makes it to the porch, and rings the doorbell.

“Coming!” A deep voice calls out. The door opens. “Babe, since when are you home this early-”

Leah only allows Quil half a second to register who he opened the door to before her fist slams in his face with a satisfying crunch. She shakes out her hand with a grimace and watches with a sick fascination as the skin of her split knuckles seal back together.

Quil stumbles into a coffee table in the living room with a snarl. The glass shatters and the wood buckles beneath his weight. He stands, shaking the disorientation away from his gaze, and charges toward Leah like a bear as blue begins to bleed into his brown irises. 

As he approaches Leah feints left, and, like the gullible fighter he’s always been, Quil follows her motions. She dodges to the right when he stoops down to grab her and angles her leg to kick him in the groin. He lets out a pathetic shout and doubles over. Leah takes the opportunity to leap onto his broad back and hook her arms around his neck in a chokehold.

Quil’s meaty hands claw and punch at her arms, but her hold is steadfast. He chokes and sputters until he’s bright red in the face and falls forward. His hand frantically reaches out, grasping a pokerstick from the fireplace and whacking Leah in the forehead with it. 

Leah drops off of Quil’s back from the unexpected blow and blinks the stars out of her eyes. She brings her forearms up to block his continued hammering strikes. It rips at the sleeves of her leather jacket until she can feel the hits directly against her skin. She catches the pokerstick mid-strike when Quil changes the angle to stab her with it instead, and their arms violently shake in a match of strength.

It makes Leah huff. He hasn’t changed one bit.

Throughout their match, Leah knew Quil wouldn’t phase. Some idiotic part of him still balks at having an “unfair advantage” over Leah by fighting in his wolf form, a principle he followed since they first met when it became known that she would never turn into a werewolf like everyone else. He must not realize how Leah has changed, partly because of his infamously poor observation skills and general lack of thinking before charging headfirst. He was in for a surprise.

The pokerstick snaps in half under the pressure of their strength and they both jump away from each other. With matching sneers on their faces, they both readjust their grips on their severed halves of the pokerstick and slowly circle each other.

A school bus pulls to a stop in front of the house, and Quil hesitates. His eyes dart nervously between the window and the makeshift weapon in Leah’s hand. Leah follows his gaze.

The bus doors open, and a tiny girl with pigtails tied in frilly pink bows and a matching dress hops out. She skips across the lawn with a smile on her face, showing off several blank spaces where she’s missing baby teeth. The front door opens, and the girl calls out,

“Daddy, I’m home!” 

Leah and Quil are quick to straighten up when the girl fully walks through the door, and they hide the pokersticks behind their backs.

“H-Hey Claire Bear,” Quil pants with a quivering smile. “How was school?”

Claire stares in quiet shock at the carnage that is now the living room and the tousled appearance of the two adults in front of her. 

“Daddy…” she says in a trembling voice. Her eyes lock on Leah’s as she takes a hesitant step forward. “What happened to the living room?”

“You can’t come in here, Claire,” Quil says hastily. He gestures at the floor. “There’s, uh, there’s glass everywhere, see? You don’t want to get cut.”

Claire won’t take her eyes off Leah, who returns her stare with unnerving eyes. “Who’s she?”

“An old friend of daddy’s. We haven’t seen each other in… in a long time.” Quil looks at Leah for help, but she remains silent. “Claire Bear, this is-”

“How old are you, Claire?” Leah interrupts.

Claire swallows noisily and tightens her grip on the straps of her backpack. “I’m five.”

“Five? Wow,” Leah breathes. She turns her scathing eyes to Quil. “You know, I had a little brother once. He’d be about your age by now, too.”

Quil plasters on an even wider smile and steps toward Claire. “Claire Bear, my friend and I are having a grown up talk right now. Why don’t you go to your room and watch some TV, hm?”

Claire glances uncomfortably at Leah again. “But Daddy-”

“Claire!” Quil snaps. He tilts her chin up with his hand so she’ll have no choice but to look at him. “Go to your room, and don’t come out until I say so.”

Claire tentatively nods, walking past the living room with wet eyes still trained on Leah. Quil watches her disappear up the staircase to the second floor with a sigh, and he tosses the pokerstick away when the sound of a door closing reaches their ears. He turns to Leah with an annoyed expression.

“Do you want some coffee?” he grumbles.

Leah rolls her eyes, dropping her weapon on the floor, too. “Sure.”

She follows Quil into the kitchen, electing to stand near the counter. She watches as he picks through the cupboards to retrieve mugs. It’s strange seeing him in a domestic setting; his hulking frame looks out of place in the homely kitchen. He looks even stranger dressed in khakis and a striped polo. There’s even a pair of bunny slippers on his feet.

Those large hands of his, carefully working the tiny coffee machine on the counter, used to turn into claws at the drop of a hat and tear into his targets without much care. He used to run around exclusively in designer jeans, usually ripping them to shreds without a second thought when he phased, and with a quick swipe of his credit card he would simply buy another replacement pair. 

But that Quil, formerly known as Nighteyes, is no more. He’s been replaced by a domesticated, stay-at-home father named-

“Jacob Wolfe?” Leah asks drily. “Seriously?”

Quil glares at her from over his shoulder, and a blush stains the tips of his ears. “Shut up, Leah. You look like a goddamn oompa loompa with that tan, so you have no room to talk,” he growls, and it makes Leah smirk. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I guess it’s too late for an apology, huh?”

“You guess correctly.”

He stops his tinkering with the coffee machine and stalks toward Leah with a frown on his face and a steaming mug in his hand. “You can’t do this shit around my little girl, Leah.”

Leah takes the mug from him. “I won’t kill you in front of your daughter,” she assures him. “We can do this somewhere else. I know the area. You certainly didn’t stray far from home.” 

That made him one of the easiest people on her list to find, and why she chose him first. Their childhood home in La Push was only an hour out from here.

Quil squints, gauging her words. “You’re more rational than we ever gave you credit for.”

“I lack sympathy and forgiveness,” Leah murmurs, taking a sip of coffee. “Not rationality.”

Quil purses his lips. “Look, Leah, I know what I did was fucked up, and if I could take it back then I would. But I can’t.” He goes to the fridge and pulls off a picture of Claire cuddled with an Asian man who Leah can only assume is Quil’s partner. “You have to let this go, Leah. Do you want my baby to grow up without her daddy?”

Leah’s expression doesn’t change. Trying to dredge up family sympathy points won’t work on her, especially after that they did. “She still has her other daddy,” she points out. 

Annoyance flashes through Quil’s eyes. “I’m a different person now, Leah,” he pleads, exasperated.

“Congratulations! I don’t care,” Leah whispers. She leans her elbows against the counter, clutching the mug in her hands with a sneer. “Where do you wanna die, Nighteyes?”

“You’re funny, Frostfur,” Quil growls, throwing the photograph down. “Real fuckin’ funny!”

He lunges forward, fingers curved in front of him like claws as his bones shiver under his skin and his eyes glow once more. It seems like he’s disregarding his fair play rules for a quicker ending to this match.

Leah smirks, tossing her mug aside. Leaping over the counter, she meets Quil halfway in the kitchen. She pulls her arm back and swings unexpectedly, raking her own claws across his face.

Quil shouts in shock, clutching at the spewing gashes in his face. He crashes into the cabinets behind him and glass rains down. As he looks up with his good eye, Leah wastes no time stabbing him through the heart with her silver dagger. He jolts with a grunt and sinks to the ground. His hand drops from his face, and his eye is wide as blood seeps through the cotton of his shirt. 

“You… you’re a…wolf?” Quil rasps. 

Leah steps over him, snarling in his face. She feels a burning in her eyes as they glow the same shade of blue as his. Quil heaves once, twice, and his heart finally gives out. The blue in his eyes revert back to a dulled brown. 

She pants like a racehorse as she pulls the dagger out, listening to his skin sizzle from the silver, and watches with grim satisfaction as blood continues to weep from the wound.

Leah spins, holding the dagger out threateningly when she senses someone behind her.

Claire stands in the doorway with wide eyes and flecks of blood on her face, staring in mute horror. Leah curses under her breath and turns away, snatching a dish towel from the counter. She begins to clean off the gore from her dagger. 

“It wasn’t my intention for you to see this. I’m sorry about that.” She glances back at Claire. “But you can take my word for it... Your father had it coming.” 

Claire stares on, frozen and dumbfounded. 

Leah sticks the dagger back into her thigh holster and turns to face the little girl, bending at the knees until they’re eye level. “When you grow up and that wolf gene kicks in, and you still feel raw about this…” she whispers, gesturing at the cooling body of the girl’s father on the floor. “I’ll be waiting for you.” 

Still, Claire says nothing. Leah straightens with a sniff and pats Claire on the head as a goodbye, and makes her way out of the kitchen.

One down.

Chapter Text

The disdain is evident on Sam’s face as he watches with a curled lip as a group of children clamor and climb around on his yellow Porsche. 

They’re unkempt looking kids dressed in second hand clothes and tattered sneakers. Sam swats their hands away when they brush their sticky fingers against the expensive material of his clothes as he walks past them.

He removes his D&G sunglasses with an exasperated sigh. “These are the kind of people you choose to live with?”

Typical Sam. Always looking down on people who he thought were lesser than him (which was nearly everyone on the face of the planet). Once Sam got his hands dirty and started earning larger and larger sums of money, he was never the same.

Paul shifts in his lawn chair, shirtless, and he smirks when Sam comes to a stop in front of him. He never liked that about Sam, his Alpha and brother. Sam likes to forget where they came from and the little they grew up with in La Push.

“Not too long ago this is how we used to live when we were kids, remember?”

“Sure,” Sam replies. Still, the grimace won’t leave his face. “But we haven’t needed to live like this for a long time.”

“I like it here,” Paul quips.

It was true. The little trailer park Paul lives in was exactly where he used to live when he was a kid, before he moved to the reservation with his father. It’s in a poor neighborhood of Tacoma, which, to Paul, is the most ideal place to live as a retired assassin.

The other trailer homes are spaced far from his own, and his neighbors mind their own business. No one knows him here. No one bothers him or asks him questions.

The most attention he gets is from the cops, who generally watch the neighborhood like vultures and peck at anyone who exhibits “suspicious” behavior. Paul scares them off every time, and they eventually learn to stay away from him, but a few still come every now and then. They only feel brave in numbers; all bark and no bite. Paul has plenty of bite for them.

“Or did you blow all your money on hookers again?”

Paul narrows his eyes. “That was one time, and it was for fun,” he growls. He doesn’t need to pay anybody for sex. People fall at their feet just for one night with him. “I keep it all in my mattress.”

Sam snorts. “What good is it doing in there?”

“Why are you here?” Paul snaps. The incessant small talk was another thing he dislikes about Sam. He could never get to his point without giving a stupid monologue first; his brother loves the sound of his own voice.

Sam pushes Paul’s feet off the cooler serving as his footrest and takes out a beer. He throws another one to Paul and takes a few gulps before he speaks. Paul watches him impatiently.

“Leah killed Quil,” Sam finally says. “Her eyes were blue. Claire saw it. She’s a wolf now.”

Paul whistles. “She cut down Quil? In front of his daughter?”

Sam rolls his eyes at Paul’s question and shrugs. “One could argue we cut down all of her friends in front of Seth, so…”

“Women sure do know how to hold a grudge, don’t they?” Paul laughs humorlessly. He pauses, tipping his beer bottle toward Sam. “Or maybe, you just tend to bring that out in her...” He shakes his head. “You should’ve shot her with silver bullets, man.”

“She was human then. We couldn’t have known she’d make the first phase.” Sam quirks his head to the side. “Will you fight her if she comes?” he asks quietly. 

Paul takes a sip of his beer. “I’m a fuckin’ bouncer in a titty bar now, man. If Leah wants to fight with me all she has to do is come down to the club, start some shit, and then we’ll go at each other. It’ll be just another day on the job.”

“This isn’t a joke, Maugrim,” Sam snaps, using that ridiculous codename of his for the first time in years. “You need to start taking this seriously, because it won’t take Leah long to guess where you are, and she’ll come to kill you.”

Paul shrugs. “I don’t dodge guilt, Sam. That woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die,” he murmurs, staring absently into the horizon. He downs the rest of his beer and trains his eyes on his brother. “Whatever happens will happen. So I guess we’ll just see who comes out of this alive then, won’t we?”

Paul shows up to the bar later that evening for a shift, standing by the door to check IDs and kicking out anyone who gets too rowdy, but Leah is a no show.

The flimsy costumes of the dancers glitter under the pink strobe lights as they dance on the platform stages. Singles are thrown in the air and scatter across the floor. Sultry music pulses from the overhead speakers. Half naked women and unsavory looking men mill about.

It looks like just another average night, but Paul knows better. He knew Leah wouldn’t come here. It was never her style to kill in front of a crowd. She likes to catch her prey in a private setting, somewhere they would least expect an attack.

No, Leah wouldn’t attack Paul here, but she would show up at his trailer. Leah’s moves were always so predictable.

Paul laughs at the thought, but his eyes are glued on the stage as his favorite dancer completes her final set in a split that drives all the men surrounding her wild. She catches Paul’s eye as she collects her tips and walks over to him. Even in six inch stilettos, she’s still smaller than him.

She plucks a dollar from her leopard thong and brushes Paul’s face with it. “Like what you saw up there?”

“Lauren,” he growls, pulling the bleach blonde close by her hips and playfully nipping at her neck.

Lauren laughs breathily, pushing at his shoulders. “Hands off the merchandise, Lahote.”

“Come home with me tonight,” he whispers in her ear. 

She shivers, pretending to think about it, but there’s no doubt that she will agree. Paul is her favorite, too, after all. The other dancers he’s been with are subpar, but a decent lay nonetheless. Lauren is one of the better ones– she’s the only human around here who’s been able to take every last inch of him without too much fuss. And the things she could do with her mouth were divine.

“What’s in it for me?” she asks, playing coy.

Paul raises a brow. “Besides the best fuck of your life?” She bites her lip at that. “I have something fun we can do tonight.”

“Oh?”

Paul licks his lips. “When the time comes, I’ll do this,” he pauses, sinking his teeth into the flesh of her ear, “and you’ll have to be real quiet. Then the fun starts. You in?”

Two hours later, he’s balls deep in Lauren and she’s loudly enjoying every minute of it. His bed rams against the wall of his tiny trailer, and knick knacks around them skew about and fall to the ground. The whole trailer is rocking with the force of his thrusts.

Lauren is beneath him, screaming and sweaty, but her makeup doesn’t budge. She rakes her acrylic nails across his back and her stiletto clad feet curl in the air. Her eyes watch the hypnotic rhythm of his hips slamming against hers with a gleam of dazed astonishment before she throws her head back in pleasure.

“You’re a goddamn animal tonight,” she moans.

Paul laughs. If only she knew.

He finishes inside of Lauren with a roar and collapses on top of her. She cradles his head against her chest, murmuring slurred praises of his performance as she runs her fingers through his hair.

Paul circles a finger around her belly button, absently wondering if she insisted on forgoing a condom for a particular reason. Women tend to think he’ll have something grand to offer them if they secure a child from him, sensing something otherworldly about him. He doesn’t mind– Paul has plenty of bastards running around all over the globe, including a few in the bellies of some of the women living in the trailer park. What was one more?

He tenses when the hairs on the back of his neck prickles, anticipating danger nearby. It could only be one person… No one from the trailer park, not even the cops, would dare to approach his trailer at this hour, let alone with killing intent. He bites Lauren’s ear to silence her and walks to the window above the kitchenette’s sink.

Glancing out, he sees nothing and smirks. He grabs a cup from the counter and fills it with tap water, chugging it in one go. So she’s playing it like that, huh?

Paul stands by the front door, the only real way to enter his home, and gestures for Lauren to come to him. Her heels are silent against the grimy carpet as she makes her way toward him. He pulls a double barrel shotgun from an overhead cabinet and stands behind Lauren, wrapping his arms around hers and positioning her hands in the proper positions on the barrel. They stand in complete silence and nudity, waiting.

The front door flies open. Paul presses his finger over Lauren’s to pull the trigger, and with a loud, crashing boom a figure soars through the air and lands several feet away. Lauren shrieks and giggles in delight, dancing back and forth on her feet. Paul laughs with her, taking the shotgun and slowly walking out of the trailer.

None of his neighbors bother to investigate the noise, just as he likes.

Paul slings the shotgun over his shoulder as he comes to a stop. As he suspected, it was Leah at his door. Now she lies at his feet.

“Bet that stings like a bitch,” he grimaces.

His eyes catch on the silver dagger glinting under the street light. Seeing the insignia of the Black family makes him huff with laughter, and he kicks the weapon out of reach.

“Rebecca made you that? Women really do hold grudges,” Paul remarks with a shake of his head. He empties the barrel and shows off one of the hollow shells. “Too bad you didn’t account for a double dose of silver shrapnel in your tits, huh?”

Leah glares at him, coughing up blood and wheezing. The leather jacket she’s wearing is embedded with tiny, jagged pieces of silver and blood splatter. Paul can easily pick up on the sound of her skin sizzling underneath that layer of leather.

Paul crouches beside her head and smirks. “I always thought you had a nice rack.”

Leah’s eyes turn blue as she spits at Paul. Blood and saliva smack Paul’s cheek. She tenses, bracing herself, but Paul simply roars with laughter. He stands, kicking Leah until she flips onto her stomach and jams a needle full of sedatives into her ass. She stills within a minute.

“Lauren, baby,” he calls. Her green eyes peek out from the doorway. “There’s some chains in the trunk by the bed. Bring ‘em out and tie her up, would ya?”

Lauren scurries out of the trailer in her heels and a lacy black robe, and she quickly approaches an unconscious Leah with the chains. He can feel his eyes burning blue from the adrenaline, but Lauren doesn’t bat an eye. She always suspected something was off about him, like all of his bed partners do, but she wisely keeps her mouth shut.

Paul retrieves his cellphone and a beer from his trailer before he comes back outside and settles in his folding chair as he watches Lauren secure the chain around Leah. He dials one of the few numbers programmed into his phone and waits for an answer.

“Sammy?”

“Wrong brother, ya hateful bitch,” Paul says.

Emily sighs on the other end of the line. “Paul… what are you calling me for?”

“You’ll never guess who I just caught,” he sings.

Emily pauses. “Is she dead?”

“Not yet.”

“She’s my kill. Not yours! Mine! I was the one who was supposed to kill her. Sam sent me first!”

“Sam called you off the first time, and for whatever dumb reason you listened to him,” Paul reminds her. “It’s a fair game, now. Finders keepers and all that. But don’t worry, Em. I’ll make sure she suffers.”

“Paul-”

“If you wanna visit her grave, come by in the morning. I’ll give you all the gory details in person.”

“PAUL-”

He hangs up before the harpy can scream his ear off anymore than she already has.

“All done,” Lauren chirps, dusting her hands off.

Paul waves her over as he dials another number in his phone. As Lauren gets closer, he spreads his legs and her eyes rake over him hungrily. She wastes no time getting to her knees and working magic with her mouth on him. He purrs and fists a hand in her short locks, forcing her down further. She doesn’t protest, only looking up at him with her sultry green eyes.

The phone finally stops ringing, and a groggy voice answers. “Hello?”

“Hey, Jared– Oh, fuck. Shit, that’s good!” Paul pulls the phone away from his ear, watching Lauren bob up and down. That trick with her tongue never fails. She winks at him.

“Dude, ew,” Jared complains.

“Shut up. I got a job for you. Bring a shovel and your truck,” Paul says.

“You better be paying me…”

“I said it’s a job, didn’t I?!”

Paul walks over to the bed of the truck when Leah’s coughing alerts him that she’s awake. He peers over the edge, staring down at her with a smirk.

“Rise and shine, bitch,” he says sarcastically. 

He grabs Leah by her ankles and drags her from the truck. As expected, she doesn't say a word to him. She merely glares, turning her eyes from him to her left, where Jared is finishing up with digging a six foot, coffin-sized hole into the ground of a neglected cemetery.

A shovel is tossed from the hole first, and then Jared leaps from it and lands in a crouch. He stretches his arms to the sky before walking over until he’s beside Paul.

“Holy shit, look at those eyes,” Jared whistles. “Brightest blues I’ve ever seen. She’s pissed.”

Paul chuckles. “Shoulda seen what we did to her the first time.”

“Jesus,” Jared mutters under his breath. “I’ll get her feet, you get the head?”

Paul shrugs, grasping Leah’s arms. Naturally, she struggles against them both until Paul abruptly drops her and shoves a can of mace directly in front of her eyes. She freezes up, and her shrieks are swallowed into silence.

“See this? It’s not that regular shit. This has silver particles in it,” Paul whispers. “You’re going in the ground and I’m gonna bury you, like it or not. Now… you can either shut the fuck up and go in peacefully, or I’ll finish this whole can in your eyes and bury you anyway. It’s your choice.”

Leah averts her eyes and bares her neck to him. They grab her arms and legs again, and although she’s stiff as a board, Leah doesn’t fight them when they throw her into the coffin. 

The inside is coated in a layer of pure silver. If it weren’t for the layer of protection offered by her hair and clothes, her skin would immediately start to boil. Leah stiffens even more, her eyes darting around frantically as she realizes the predicament she’s in.

Paul pauses, staring down at Leah as he holds onto the silver lid of the casket. It sizzles under his hands, but his expression remains empty.

“Any last words?” he asks.

Leah silently stares back at him with wide, hate-filled eyes. She was always such a frosty little bitch.

“This is for breaking my brother’s heart,” Paul says with a nonchalant shrug. Sam was devastated when Leah ran off.

Leah looks like she wants to spit on him again. She sucks in a sharp breath when the lid is secured over the coffin. With each slam of their hammers, he can hear her whimpers grow louder as he and Jared work together to seal the coffin shut. 

When the last nail is in, Paul kicks the coffin into the hole with a grunt. Leah shrieks as it lands in with a resounding thud.

The duo quickly shovel the dirt back over the coffin, and Leah’s muffled sobs and gasps of panic slowly get drowned out until the last layer of soil is laid down within minutes. Any noise she makes won’t be discernible to the human ear anymore.

Paul and Jared straighten, dusting their hands off. They stare at their handiwork with matching smirks on their faces.

Here lies Leah Clearwater, buried alive under the headstone of Riley Biers.

Chapter Text

The sliver of moonlight seeping through between the lid and the box disappears with each slam of the hammer, until finally… Leah is engulfed in pitch black. The sounds of her breath and the dirt landing on top of the lid are her only companion in the darkness.

For a few seconds, she’s quiet, and then she lets out a loud sob as panic settles into her brain. Her breaths grow rapid and her heartbeat pounds in her ear as sweat drips from every pore, sliding uncomfortably against her leather jacket. 

The heat trapped within the tight space becomes unbearable, but each slide of her exposed skin against the silver interior makes her skin hiss and sting. 

Still, she thrashes about, kicking out her feet and clawing at the lid until her fingers are singed raw, hoping that somebody, anybody would just– 

“Help,” Leah screams.

As soon as the words escape her lips, the hysteria is abruptly snuffed out of her system.

Panicking will get her nowhere.

She stills, clenching her chain-bound fists as she takes a deep, shuddering breath. In through the nose and out through the mouth. It stomps out the frightened child she almost succumbed to, allowing her to think. 

Once she’s grounded, Leah glances around the coffin.

There’s no easy way to get out. Paul made sure that. The space was too small to phase, and the amount of silver she will have to break through first is too much to take on with her limited air supply. 

She’s only left with one option of escape, and it’s a complete shot in the dark. The irony.

“Fucker,” she mutters to herself.

Leah closes her eyes, relaxing her entire form, and steels herself for what she’s about to do next. 

It was an ancient technique called spirit walking, exclusive only to those with werewolf blood in their veins. And even then it was a rare ability to master. 

It was even rarer to find a willing teacher. 

By chance, Sam knew of one master that lived in the secluded mountains of northern Canada. Sam was his apprentice once, and like many others, he failed to learn spirit walking. He bet his chances on Leah being successful- he’d hoped she could gain some magical aptitude with her then dormant werewolf blood. 

“If you can’t use phasing in your arsenal,” Sam said once, “I’ll make you the best damn assassin with what you can do.” 

Leah appreciated his vote of confidence, although she was skeptical of her skills at the time. If her blood was dormant, how could she access the magic within it? Would this master even bother accepting her as a student? 

Still, they made the long journey by air until they reached an area inaccessible by planes or cars. They continued on foot, climbing treacherous, snow capped mountains by day and feverishly entangling with each other for heat at night. 

They finally made it to a nondescript cave entrance, where Sam told her to wait for him. He went ahead alone, returning an hours later with bruises coloring his face and a limp in his step. 

“Sam,” Leah cried, rushing forward. 

He took her in his arms and brushed the snow from her hair. “Shh,” he soothed. “He wasn’t too happy to see me, but he’ll take you as his student.” 

“Who is this man?” Leah asked.

“Taha Aki,” Sam replied quietly. He nodded when Leah stiffened. “He was one of the first wolves in existence. The only one left of the originals, in fact.” 

“Sam,” Leah hissed. “Did you forget he’s a purist?” 

“It’ll be okay, Lee-Lee,” Sam assured her. “You’re a pureblood.” 

“I’m a deadblood,” Leah argued bitterly. 

“But you come from pure lines nonetheless. Strong lines. And I convinced him to take you on. He won’t try to kill you, I promise.” 

“Sam...” 

“Just do what you do best and he’ll see your worth.” 

Leah reluctantly nodded. They parted after a steamy kiss, and she continued the walk through the cave entrance on her own. 

The entrance was quiet and cold, but the temperature gradually rises as she walked further inside, enough to make her shed her winter gear. 

She came to a stop when the path split off into two exits, and by instincts alone she took to the left. The hall was covered in darkness for all of thirty seconds until torches lining the wall appear, lighting the rest of the way. 

What she saw at the end of the tunnel was completely unexpected. 

Bathed in candlelight, there was a labyrinth of stone staircases along a cavern that led to a large, open plateau below. Distantly she could hear rushing water, and she could feel the humidity of the air dampening her skin. 

“Come, little girl,” a deep voice echoed from below. An intense pull in her chest urged her to listen. 

With a gulp, Leah hurried down the endless winding staircase, avoiding the hot wax of the candles that lined them. When she reached the bottom, her feet moved on their own accord against the smooth stone. She came to a stop in front of a raised platform, promptly lowering to her knees and pressing her forehead against the floor. Then, she waited. 

“Your name?”

“Leah Clearwater,” she said. 

“Samuel thinks you’re a worthy student. Are you?” 

Leah hesitated. “I’ll do my best.” 

“That doesn’t answer my question.” 

“I don’t think I’m worthy,” Leah said honestly. “But I would be grateful for the opportunity to learn from you.” 

“I could kill you right now. There’s no need for defects tainting my bloodline.” 

Leah shivered. 

“But... As much as Samuel is an idiot, he also has a good eye. If he thinks you have potential, then you must have some.” A pause. “Raise your head.” 

Leah did so slowly. A rough hand grasped her chin, and she was suddenly eye to eye with Taha Aki. 

His eyes were narrow and black, the same shade as his hair that fell to his waist in a thick braid. He had strong facial features, making him look like every bit of the warrior he was since birth. His skin, a rich brown and completely unblemished, belonged to someone in their early 30s rather than a thousand year old being.

He tilted her head left and right, examining her features with a keen eye. 

“Interesting,” he murmured. 

Taha Aki released her chin, and without warning, slammed the palm of his hand against her chest. 

The force knocked the breath of out her, sending a burning sensation through her chest that radiated throughout her entire body. As abruptly as the pain spread, it disappeared, and Leah suddenly felt as light as a feather. 

When she opened her eyes, she screamed. 

Before her stood a massive brown wolf, larger than any she’d seen in her life. It was easily twice the size of Sam in his wolf form. 

Around him the world looked... off. Dull, almost. 

Through her eyes, all color appeared muted and objects were faintly translucent. The only things that maintained any kind of vibrant color were the golden light from the candles and the giant wolf, who was outlined in his own golden light. 

“This is the spirit realm.” 

Leah jumped. The wolf’s mouth didn’t move, but she could hear it speak perfectly. 

“How-” 

“Look behind you.” 

Leah turned. She screamed once again, jumping back. 

Crumbled on the ground was her own body. 

Leah glanced at her hands in panic. She was outlined in gold too. Was she... was she...- 

“You are not dead,” Taha Aki said. “I extracted your soul from your physical body. This is spirit walking. This is what you will learn to do on your own.” 

Leah stared at him in disbelief.

From that moment on, she underwent intense training for months. 

For the first few months, Taha Aki would shove her soul out of her body without warning. He would leave her to figure out a way back into her physical body on her own.

Her longest record outside of her body was just shy of 72 hours, and it was pure agony. 

When she finally managed to fit her soul back into her body, the separation had already taken a huge physical toll. Her muscles were weak, and a ceaseless migraine rendered her blind and immobile. It took her two weeks to fully recover. 

They eventually worked toward having Leah leave her body on her own, but it was a feat she couldn’t nail down. Meditation did nothing. Fasting did nothing. All methods of sensory deprivation did nothing. 

After burning through different methods, they eventually learned that pain was something Leah could concentrate with the best. She would often wake up from a trance with several aching wounds, and Taha Aki would praise her for her success...

But she realized upon waking that she couldn’t fully remember what she did to push herself beyond the physical plane. It was like trying to recall details from a dream. Like clockwork, her memory failed over and over again.

Leah left the mountain after a year, not a complete failure, but not a complete success either. 

There was no room for an unsuccessful attempt this time. Leah will run out of oxygen within a few hours. 

“Come on, Leah,” she murmurs. “Just wade to the other side. Chase the fucking rabbit and you’re golden…” 

She takes another deep breath, pressing her forehead and hands against the metal of the coffin. The sound of her skin burning sounds like bacon sizzling in a pan. Swallowing against the pain, Leah grits her teeth. 

At first, there’s nothing. Just burning, burning, burning.

A piercing ring threatens to burst her eardrums. She open her mouth to scream– 

The burning stops. 

Leah’s eyes fly open. Above her, the night sky is grayscale, but the light from the stars twinkle with an intense gold. 

“Shit,” she gasps, holding up her glowing hands. “I did it.” 

She walks through the graveyard in search of signs of life anywhere. In the distance, she sees two sparks and runs after it. 

A man is walking his black lab near the graveyard. He doesn’t notice anything unusual, but the dog does. It freezes, staring at the spot where Leah stands. 

The dog only moves when the man tugs on the leash. 

Leah approaches until she’s walking in step with the man. The dog glances back at her every couple of seconds. 

Well, here goes nothing. 

“Listen-” Leah glances at the dog tag. “Juno. I need you to do me a favor. Run into the graveyard.” 

Nothing. 

Leah growls. Taha Aki had no problems talking to animals whenever he demonstration. Why did nothing come easy for her?

She stops walking and lowers into a crouch. 

“Juno,” she calls in a sing-song voice, holding her arms out. “Juno, c’mere girl! Come to me!” 

The dog stops, turning around and giving one slow tail wag. 

“Juno, come!” 

The dog stiffens, as if electrocuted, and barrels toward Leah. The force tugs the leash free from the man’s hand, and he shouts after his dog running in the opposite direction. 

Leah runs too, yelling over her shoulder, “Come, Juno, come!” 

The dog skids to a stop when Leah pauses near her temporary grave. It sits, wagging its tail and looking to Leah for more instruction. 

“Good girl,” Leah coos. 

The man approaches after a few minutes, gasping for air as he catches himself on his knees. 

“What’s gotten into you, huh?” he asks. 

As he bends to grab the leash, Leah stands behind him. She shifts closer until her spirit is aligned with his, closing her eyes. When he straightens, Leah forces herself within his psyche. His own spirit struggles with hers for a minute until she overcomes him entirely. 

When Leah’s eyes open she’s holding the leash in her hand, staring out into the empty field. She glances down, and her hand is a pale, masculine one. A wave of vertigo passes through her. 

“This is insane,” she murmurs. She jumps at the sound of her– his voice. 

That was going to take some getting used to. 

Scowling, she steps forward and drops the leash. The idiot who helped bury her left behind a shovel. She grabs it and begins the three hour agony of digging herself out of the grave. 

The first hour was smooth. Midway through the second hour, Leah has a hard time getting the man’s limbs to cooperate as seamlessly; the man’s psyche was beginning to push back against hers. By the third hour, Leah is fighting through the ache in the man’s arms. She forgot how quickly human bodies tire out. 

Leah screams in frustration, cursing when the man’s arms shake with exhaustion and become clumsy. That, and she’s slowly losing her grip on his body. Any minute now, she was going to be kicked out. 

Ding. 

The vibration travels through the man’s bones as the shovel meets metal. 

Finally. Fucking finally! 

She knocks away the soil and gets to work prying the screws out of the lid with the lip of the shovel. It takes an agonizing amount of time until she’s able to pry the lid open. 

And there her real body lies, covered in sweat, grime and third degree burns. She looks hideous. 

Leah closes her eyes, pushing until the connection tears and she’s ousted from the man’s body. He collapses beside the casket. She mirrors him, falling backward into her physical body. 

Another wave of vertigo, and she sits up with a groan. One flex and the chain around her pops. She staggers onto her feet. 

She leaps from the coffin and lands in a heap among the pile of upturned soil. She moans at the dirt agitating her burns and prays that the blackened, bubbling skin will heal faster. 

“Fuck,” she hisses. She rolls over, picking out the silver shrapnel from her chest piece by tiny piece.

Beside her, Juno whines. 

It took hours for a human body to undo what a werewolf would’ve been able to accomplish in minutes. But even then...

She spirit walked. She still couldn’t fucking believe it.

Leah rests for a few more minutes. She eventually forces herself to her feet, and she follows her nose until she comes across a 24-hour diner in the middle of nowhere. 

She stumbles through the door, and collapses into a stool at the counter. The lone employee at the cash register stares with wide eyes, bewildered at the sight of her. 

Leah awkwardly folds her hands together. “May I have-” She stops to cough out some dirt trapped in her throat. “May I have a glass of water, please?” 

The cashier picks up a plastic cup without breaking eye contact.

“D-Do you, uh, want ice?”

Chapter Text

An unknown number is calling Emily’s burner. Very few people know the number, and only one person contacts her on it these days. Emily sits up on the bed in her cushy hotel room in anticipation, licking her lips.

“Sammy?” she asks in a hopeful tone. It’s been so long since he called her, and even longer since they warmed each others’ beds after she was hired for a hit in Silicon Valley.

“Wrong brother, ya hateful bitch.”

Emily scowls, releasing a sharp sigh.

“Paul… What are you calling me for?”

Between the two brothers Paul had certainly inherited the worst personality traits, although he was definitely a force to be contended with in the sheets– she’ll at least give him that. 

“You’ll never guess who I just caught,” he sings.

Emily freezes. There was no way.

No fucking way. 

“Is she dead?” she barks.

“Not yet,” Paul answers in that stupid sing-song voice.

Emily knocks over her chair as she gets to her feet.

“She’s my kill. Not yours! Mine!” she shouts. “I was the one who was supposed to kill her. Sam sent me first!”

“Sam called you off the first time, and for whatever dumb reason you listened to him,” Paul reminds her. She can hear the smirk in his tone and wants to rip it off his face with her claws. “It’s a fair game, now. Finders keepers and all that. But don’t worry, Em. I’ll make sure she suffers.”

Fair game? He was stealing a moment that belonged to her.

“Paul-”

“If you wanna visit her grave, come by in the morning. I’ll give you all the gory details in person.”

“PAUL-”

The asshole hangs up before she can get another word in. 

Emily screams in frustration, throwing her phone across the room. 

Paul was intruding on her kill! She’s meant to be the one that’s supposed to finish Leah off– it’s been her fantasy since the stupid girl joined their ranks. She never belonged among them. 

“I should’ve killed her the first chance I got,” she growls under her breath.

Emily walked through the lobby of the hospital with a smile plastered on her face. She nodded politely to the nurses at the front desk and turned the corner. 

Her heels clacked against the floor as she continued her steps down the hall. She stopped in front of the bathroom door and locked it behind her when she stepped inside.

Dropping her bag from her shoulder, she made quick work of removing her clothes. She pulled out a costume nurse’s dress and admired the stark white fabric in the bathroom light.

Emily slipped into the tightly fitted dress and pulled on nude stockings that rolled all the way up to her thigh. She adjusted the nurse hat on top of her head and slipped her white heels back on. And for the final touch, a kitschy white eyepatch to cover her damaged right eye.

After spending a few minutes admiring herself in the mirror, flicking her hair to and fro, she pulled out a tiny jar of poison and needle.

Emily filled the needle with the poison and placed the loaded needle on a silver tray. She exited the bathroom and walked down the hallway to the second to last room on the right. 

Through the window, she could see Leah laying on the bed looking peaceful and defenseless. 

Emily smirked. The girl had no idea what was coming for her.

She entered the room and set the tray on Leah’s lap, leaning in to get a closer look at her face. 

Whatever drudges of wolf magic Leah could manipulate had managed to heal her ugly mug. Too bad it wasn’t enough to fix her brain. 

A sneer lifted Emily’s lip as she glanced around the room.

“I never liked you, you know. You were always in my way, always one step ahead of me somehow,” Emily said to the sleeping woman. She tilted her head. “Everyone was so infatuated with you, the little ordinary human who could do a few magic tricks. I never understood that. You were never all that.”

Emily pulled the needle from the tray and reached for the IV tube. “Too bad for you, you don’t get a warrior’s death. You get to die in your sleep, like the boring bitch you always were-”

The shrill ringing of her cell phone interrupted her thoughts. She dropped the needle and dug through her bag. After checking the screen, she answered with a dreamy sigh.

“Hi, Sammy.”

“How is she?” he asked without preamble.

“Comatose,” Emily replied cheerfully. She tapped Leah’s nose. “She and I were just having a nice girl’s chat together.”

“Atta girl,” Sam purred. The sound made her shiver in delight. “Em, I’m aborting this mission.”

No. No. What?!

Emily looked at the phone with disbelief. “Are you kidding me? Why?”

“She’s owed better than this, Em,” Sam said.

“I don’t owe her anything! And neither do you!” Emily shouted. She ignored Sam’s shushing noises and paced to the window. “She’s in a fucking coma! It’s not like I’m disturbing her sleep!”

Sam waited for her angry breathing to quiet. 

“You scratched the hell out of her, and she didn’t die. Bella damn near drained her dry, and she didn’t die from that either. I put two bullets in her, and she still Didn’t. Die. We’ve done enough, Emily. Anything more would be shameful.” He paused. “Don’t you agree, Mrs. Uley?”

Emily preened at the sound of her new last name, and her eyes turned to the glittering ring on her finger. A reminder that she won him in the end, not Leah. 

“Of course, Sammy,” she gushed.

“Then come home, honey,” Sam crooned in a low voice. “And keep that nurse outfit on until you get here.”

Emily bit her lip. “You got something for me?”

“Come home and find out,” he whispered with promise. An ache spread between her legs.

The call ended.

Emily stared at the phone with a smile. God, he was an outstanding lover. 

“I love that man,” she murmured.

Emily turned around and glared at Leah still laying on the bed, immobile. Untouched. 

Alive. 

Her blood boiled at the sight.

“Word of advice, bitch,” she hissed, leaning over the bed railing. “Keep those eyes shut.”

Disappointment wasn’t a sufficient word to describe what Emily was feeling.

Of all of the members of the Deadly Lupine Assassination Squad, Leah met her demise at the hands of Paul. Maugrim, the sloppiest of the Uley brothers, who always stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. 

Emily snatches up her purse before she storms out of her hotel and impatiently flags down the valet to bring her car around to the front. Her Vanquish pulls up seconds later, and soon she’s barreling down the highway for the rest of the night to reach Tacoma during daylight hours. 

After hours of driving, Emily finally arrives at Paul’s rinky dink trailer in the late afternoon. She pauses to reapply her nude lipstick in the rearview mirror after she cuts the engine, ignoring the sudden swarm of dirt covered children around her car. She snaps her compact closed and finally turns her attention to them.

“How many of you have that gremlin as a daddy?” Emily asks, pointing to Paul’s trailer.

Over half of them raise their hands. The number of children he fathered exponentially grows each time she visits.

Emily doesn’t entertain any of the children’s follow up questions for her. Rather she steps out of her car and fishes for loose change in the cupholder, throwing them in the air like breadcrumbs. The children scream and flock to it like seagulls.

“Really, Emily?” 

She turns at the sound of Paul’s voice and watches him take a long stretch like a cat, arms braced against the doorway of the trailer. He looks like he just rolled out of bed.

Emily scoffs, hooking her purse in the crease of her elbow and pausing on the final rickety step so they’re eye level. 

“Is this really how you’ll spend your life here, Paul? Sowing your fucking seeds in anything with a hole?” 

Paul smirks as he assesses her cocktail dress with shameless eyes. “I can plant one if ya too, if you’d like.”

Emily lifts her chin. “I don’t think your brother would appreciate you propositioning his wife,” she whispers. 

“That’s never stopped you before,” Paul purrs, leaning close as his irises begin a slow color transition.

Faster than even she can register, Emily is tugged inside of the trailer as Paul’s lips attack hers in a frenzy. It’s unrefined and beastly, all tongue and clashing teeth. 

The chorus of jeering children behind them is muffled as soon as Paul yanks the door shut. He pins her against the door and they share ragged breaths between them, staring into each other’s bright blues.

It typically annoyed Emily when Paul played with toys that weren’t his, but this was an allowance Emily always indulged him in. Like attracts like; she too had an inclination toward a lack of moderation.

Her purse drops to the floor, and her dress and heels follow. It takes no time at all to have Paul on his back, grasping her hips as she rides him into the lumpy mattress with everything she’s got.

Any of Paul’s attempts to switch positions is met with snapping teeth and a slash of claws. Emily has never allowed him to put her on her back, but that doesn’t stop Paul from trying. He’s a glutton for punishment. A masochist, really, when it comes to her. 

It’s exactly why Paul called her to break the news. He knew she would come. He knew he would be punished. 

Emily responds in kind with deep scratches to Paul’s chest, digging until she draws blood that crusts under her claws. The wounds seal closed almost as soon as she makes them, but still, she enjoys the faces he pulls and the growls that escape his throat. He makes for an excellent scratching post.

As soon as Paul’s left eye twitches Emily bores into his chest with more harshness than before, making him whine like an innocent pup. But she knows better– she has all of his tells and tricks memorized by now.

“Not inside,” Emily hisses. She immediately halts her movements and raises on her feet to pull him free. 

She wouldn’t dare to carry his pups, but Paul on the other hand likes to play with fire and tempt fate whenever possible. It would certainly sign both of their death warrants by courtesy of Sam, who had a deadly intolerance for disloyalty.

Paul groans as he spills across his chest. “Fuck,” he grunts, and his eyes revert back to brown.

Emily pushes him back down when he tries to sit up. “Where are you going?”

Paul scoffs. “To get a fucking beer. What does it look like?”

“I didn’t finish,” she sniffs. 

Emily shuffles forward until she’s crouched above his head, smirking as he licks his lips in anticipation. Her thighs tighten around his head, practically suffocating him whenever he tries to push her off and test his limits again.

She doesn’t allow him any reprieve to come up for air, not that he really needs it, until she says otherwise. Just as she likes. And Emily always gets what she likes. 

Only after she’s finally sated with Paul’s tongue does she give him a break and release him from her grip, crawling into the space beside him. 

Paul relaxes with a gasp, closing his eyes. He eventually catches his breath and clasps his hands behind his head, looking like a cat who ate a canary with that smug look on his face.

Emily flips her hair over her shoulder and picks at the dried blood under her nails.

“What’d you do to her, Paul?” she finally asks, watching him out of the corner of her good eye.

Paul sighs, as if answering is a great burden. “Chained her up and buried her six feet under at the cemetery a couple miles west from here. The headstone is Riley Biers,” he says. 

“Silver lined?”

Paul nods once. “You know it.”

Emily whistles, impressed. “That’s a pretty fucked up way to die.”

“She came after me with one of Becca’s modified daggers. It was self-defense.”

“Rebecca Black gifted her a blade?” Emily asks incredulously. “To kill a wolf?”

Paul snorts, shaking his head. “Fat load of good it did for her. Idiot didn’t even get a chance to use it.”

“Where is it?”

“Outside somewhere. One of those kids is probably playing with it.” Paul shrugs. “Doesn’t matter anyway. Becca shouldn’t make shit like that in the first place. It’s fucking blasphemy,” 

Emily raises a brow, surprised he knew such a big word.

“So how’s it feel?”

Emily stops picking her nails, only offering confused silence as a response.

“I got rid of Frostfur, so now you two can’t settle your stupid little rivalry anymore. You’re the winner by default, I’d say.” Paul squints at her. “So tell me, what are ya feeling? Relief, or regret?”

Emily purses her lips at the bitter reminder, clucking her tongue. “A little bit of both.”

“Horseshit,” Paul chuckled. “I know damn well that you feel one more than you feel the other. And my question was, which one is it?” 

“Regret,” Emily admits after a pause.

Paul nods thoughtfully. “Thought so. Sam thought she was so damn smart. And I tried to tell him… a girl can’t have big tits like that and have a brain.” Paul blinks at her chest with faux innocent eyes. “No offense.”

Emily rolls her eyes. The little prick. “I could use a drink...” she trails off suggestively.

“You know where the liquor is. Help yourself.”

Emily scowls at his lack of hospitality… but what was she expecting, really? This is Paul she’s dealing with after all.

She crawls from the bed and makes her way across the tiny space into the kitchenette. 

The scotch is in its usual spot: the furthest cabinet above the sink. She pulls out two somewhat clean mason jars, tipping a generous pour for each of them. Upon returning to the foot of the bed, she finds Paul already palming his crotch for round two.

“Wrap your lips around that,” she murmurs, holding out the jar to him.

“Wrap your lips around this,” he retorts, splaying his legs open.

Emily answers with a lick of her lips and they toast each other, clinking glasses. Paul downs his whiskey in one gulp while Emily watches with a contemplative look over the rim of her glass.

Paul suddenly gags harshly, dropping the glass to grasp at his neck. He scrambles with uncoordinated limbs and crashes onto the floor at Emily’s feet. His bulging, bloodshot eyes are pinned on Emily as he chokes through grit teeth and spittle.

She tuts at him and takes a step back when he tries to make a weak grab for her ankle. His hand falls limp on the floor, fingers clawing uselessly against the stained carpet.

Emily watches with disinterest as she pulls out a glass vial of clear fluid from between her breasts.

“I’m sad to report that you just swallowed a nasty dose of vampire venom.” She empties the vial onto the carpet and watches the fibers as they begin to smoke and disintegrate. “I planned on using this on Leah once upon a time, you know.”

“Em…ily…” 

The skin of his neck turns green and black, and more spittle accumulates at the corners of his mouth. His face is already drained of color, only blotches of red spread across his cheeks. 

Paul tries to phase– she can tell from the way his form shifts under his skin and how his eyes flicker between blue and brown, but he can’t hold the shape for long. Not when he’s being charred from the inside out.

“Fascinating substance, that vampire venom.” Emily takes a sip of her whiskey and grimaces at the burn. God, he always picked the worst brands. “You remember those old stories the elders used to tell us when we were kids? There was a saying:

“‘Out of all the things in the world, a silver bullet can kill you, a silver blade can kill you, and a vampire can kill you. But only with a vampire there’s a chance they’ll skull fuck you before you meet certain death,’” she recites. “Remember that?”

Paul gurgles something unintelligible, his face now puffy and blood streaming from the corners of his mouth.

“Of course you wouldn’t. You have the memory of a goldfish. I guess I’ll just have to give you a crash course...” Emily sighs theatrically, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

“Vampire venom is a neurotoxin, meaning it fucks with your brain like an infection. And that’s why, since the dawn of time, we refer to vampires as parasites.” 

Emily drains the rest of her whiskey and runs a hand across her mouth. “They have two kinds of venom. One turns humans, and one just causes paralysis.”

She tosses the empty jar over her shoulder, excitement making her eyes wide as she counts off her fingers. “The paralytic is harmless to us. It’s like a temporary sedative to the nervous system. But the other kind? Well that’s the most effective poison for our kind– it breaks down tissue faster than we can regenerate it. It can even cause hallucinations.” 

Emily leans forward with her hands on her knees and quips, “Did you guess which one you got yet, dumbass?”

Paul, unable to answer, wheezes and twitches uncontrollably. Bloody foam froths from his mouth. The skin at his neck has already deteriorated enough to reveal the graying, atrophied muscle underneath. He stares unseeing at something above him.

“A single bite from a vampire administers a ten milliliter dose. That’d kill one of us in an hour.” Emily grimaces with over-exaggerated sympathy. “It’s too bad you just swallowed thirty. I think that math puts you at a pathetic ten minutes.” She taps her chin in contemplation. “But then again, I am really bad at math. Must be the big tits, huh?”

Emily laughs at her own joke. 

“I suppose in these pitiful little moments you have left, I’ll answer your question from earlier more thoroughly,” she decides. “Right at this moment, what I feel the most is regret.” 

Her lips curl into a snarl. 

“Regret that my prey met her end at the hands of a piece of shit like you!” she shouts, suddenly furious all over again. “I deserved that kill! I deserved to brag about it! But you took it from me!”

She straightens, taking a deep breath. “You disrespected me, Paul. And I can’t let that go, no matter how much I like your pretty dick.”

Paul takes his last breath.

Emily spins on her heel, stretching her arms until she hears the joints crack. She slips back into her abandoned dress. 

Returning to the bedroom and stepping over Paul’s body, she rips open his mattress with her claws. A hefty amount of cash is stuffed in the center, just like he always claimed.

She unceremoniously dumps the cash into her purse. No point in letting it go to waste, right?

Again her cell phone rings, and she pulls it out from a side pocket and cradles it between her ear and shoulder.

“Sammy…” Emily breathes sadly. “I have some tragic news. Your brother’s dead. I am so sorry, baby.”

“What?” Sam snarls.

Emily cringes away from his tone. “She managed to poison him with venom, but I took care of her,” she lies. 

“Is she…?”

Emily rolls her eyes. She never understood his soft spot for that girl.

“Let me put it this way: if you ever start feeling sentimental, come out to Tacoma Cemetery,” she says with false cheer. “When you get here, pick up a bouquet and look for the headstone marked ‘Riley Biers’. Because you will be standing on the final resting place of Leah fucking Clearwater.”

Sam seems to be at a loss for words.

Emily sighs impatiently. “Look, I can catch a flight and get there in a couple hours. Do you want me to come over?”

“You didn’t complete the other job, Em,” Sam begins to say.

“No, no, no,” Emily rushes to reassure him, jamming her feet back into her heels. “You need me, I’m there in a heartbeat.”

“...Come over, then.”

“Okay, I’m leaving now,” Emily chirps. “Make sure those pink handcuffs are ready for me when I get there, okay baby? I’ll be there soon!”

She hangs up, already planning her route to Sea-Tac. Her foot kicks the door open as she contemplates whether or not she should snatch up that fancy dagger before she leaves.

Standing on the other side is Leah, looking like a wraith caked in dirt and grime. Leah, who’s supposed to be dead.

Emily drops her purse and phone in shock.

Leah lunges, white fur exploding from her face.

Emily manages to hold her back by her shoulders, dodging the sharp teeth of the wolf head that snaps in her face. She isn’t sure what she’s more shocked by: the fact that Leah can truly phase now, or that she has such control she can isolate the phase to specific limbs already.

“You just don’t know how to die, do you?” Emily grunts. But still, she grins widely, excitement raising goosebumps on her skin. 

Emily kicks Leah back to put some distance between them and cracks her knuckles. She watches Leah skid backwards, slamming into the Vanquish.

The children that still lingered in the area shriek and scatter.

“Now I’m gonna fucking kill you for real,” Emily hisses.

Leah’s face snaps back into human form as she straightens, dusting herself off. “Raksha,” she murmurs.

Emily frowns. “Frostfur.”

“There’s something I’ve always been curious about,” Leah says, taking slow steps toward the trailer where Emily stands in the doorway. “Just between us girls…” Her eyes shine with mirth. “What did you say to Taha Aki to make him scratch out your eye?”

Emily’s frown deepens as she reaches up to touch her unseeing eye. “I called him a miserable old fool.”

Taha Aki slashed her across the face for that comment during a grueling training session. The wound took days to heal, but her eye was eventually restored. Her vision, on the other hand, was not. Years and years have passed, and still– not even a flicker.

Leah gives her a mock grimace. “Bad idea.”

It makes Emily see red.

She phases on the fly, destroying the trailer’s doorway as charcoal fur bursts from her human skin. 

Leah follows suit, charging forward in snow white fur through a plume of tattered scraps that was once her clothes. The white wolf meets her head on, baring sharp teeth.

The force and momentum behind their impact destroys Paul’s trailer in one fell swoop. The trailer capsizes, raising sparks in the air as metal rakes across gravel. Screaming rises from the neighboring trailers, and bystanders peek through blinds or rush outside. They have front row seats when both wolves continue to fight among the destruction.

Leah and Emily clash against each other with matching snarls, ramming and twisting around each other while exchanging brutal bites that gouge their hides.

They’re both evenly matched until Emily delivers a particularly vicious bite into Leah’s shoulder. She sinks her teeth in deep and whips Leah about. Just like she did before she finished off Laurent.

The memory flashes through their mind-link, fresh as the day it happened. Laurent, coated in blood and viscera and bruises. The taste of his blood as fangs disembowel him. His screams quickly fading to rattling breaths, barely heard over Emily’s endless laughter– 

The sound Leah makes couldn’t be described as a scream.

But it hurts Emily’s eardrums nonetheless, shocks her enough that it almost throws her off balance. Leah becomes uncoordinated in her anger, lashing out at Emily without thought or finesse.

“I always wanted to make you sing,” Emily sneers.

She bats Leah away like an annoying gnat, watching her roll away. On the last tumble, Leah knocks into the Vanquish again, phasing back to her human skin and curling into fetal position. How sad.

Not.

Emily takes her time trotting over, high from the knowledge that she knows she’s about to win. That she’s about to settle this and rightfully claim her kill once and for all.

She presses a paw against Leah’s back, peeling her lips back to deliver the finishing blow so she can play with the corpse like a hacky sack.

Leah glances over her shoulder, one bright blue, tear-filled eye trained Emily. Her gaze looks demented as she works her jaw.

“Fuck. You,” she says in a halting whisper.

Emily rears back.

But not quick enough.

Emily catches a glint of something as Leah abruptly lashes out at her.

At first, Emily doesn’t react. She doesn’t notice anything. And then she feels blood trickle down her fur, and a sudden stinging pain that follows. She realizes, to her horror, that she can’t see. She can’t fucking see, and her eye won’t heal. 

Everything is bathed in black.

Her howls of rage transition into screams of bloody murder as she phases back. She clutches her eye, the one good eye she had left now rendered useless, and screams again, falling back. Not in pain– the blow itself barely hurt– but in shock and acute disbelief. The horrible knowledge that her eyes will never burn blue again, that she’s fucking… blind? It’s too much.

Emily screams again.

All the sounds around her reverberate in her ear all at once, making Emily unable to locate where any specific noise is coming from. She hears metal hit the ground, the sound of thirty-odd rapid heartbeats, people screaming and panicking, and then there was sobbing.

Leah is somewhere, fucking sobbing like the sniveling little bitch she is.

“You bitch!” Emily shrieks, blindly swiping at the air with her claws. Trying to cut something, anything– fucking Leah to exact her revenge. “Come here, you fucking bitch! I’m gonna fucking kill y-”

An arm weaves around Emily’s neck like a serpent, constricting tighter until her windpipe struggles to deliver air to her lungs. She bucks and claws against the arm around her neck, undoubtedly drawing blood, but the arm remains steadfast.

She still completely when she feels the whisper of something sharp tap against the skin over her heart. Her skin sizzles from the fleeting contact, and she stiffens even more.

Rebecca’s dagger.

Leah’s lips are right next to her ear as she whispers, “Where’s Sam?”

“You-”

A stab to her stomach makes Emily shout and double over. It’s quick, nothing more than a sharp flash and it’s over, but the lingering sting knocks the breath out of her. The oozing wound does not close.

“Where’s Sam?” Leah repeats, her voice rising.

Before Emily can respond or react, Leah stabs her again. Emily howls.

“Where the fuck is he, Raksha?”

“You think I’ll tell you?” Emily rasps.

The next stab makes her wail and writhe as Leah cruelly twists and jerks the blade. When Leah finally yanks it out, Emily can’t stop the faint tremble in her limbs. Her energy leeches away along with the blood pouring from her wounds like air escaping from a deflating balloon

Leah sighs, frustration coloring her tone. “This would go so much quicker if you’d just tell me,” she growls. “But I do know one more person I can ask.”

“She won’t tell you either,” Emily slurs. “Bella is loyal to Sam.”

Leah scoffs. “We’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”

Emily weakly snarls, trying to summon enough strength to phase again and tear into Leah one last time. Her bones and muscles shimmer under her skin, but nothing further. Just like Paul.

“I’ll never let you have Sam,” she threatens anyway.

Fingers dig into her scalp and painfully yank her head back. “I don’t want Sam. You can have him all to yourself in hell. In fact, go wait for him there. I’ll send him to you real soon,” Leah whispers.

Emily feels the abrupt, blazing hot pain in her throat as the blade rakes against her neck. Leah abruptly releases her hair, and Emily falls over without the support, clutching at her neck. She makes an unrecognizable sound, unable to speak.

“The only man I want is dead,” Leah says somewhere in the abyss. “Because of you.”

A blow against her head– from a foot, Emily thinks– dislodges several teeth and sends her brain on a nauseating spin.

Emily coughs, or tries to, as blood continues to weep down her throat and arms, coating her like a layer of honey. Every nerve ending in her neck throbs painfully, and a pressure builds in her head as the air in her lungs is overtaken by a deluge of blood, until her throat feels as dry as the Sahara desert. Each breath is a fight, like breathing through thick smoke, and then– 

Nothing.

Chapter Text

Bella is dreaming.

She’s in the desert again, running and screaming. Running down a never-ending plain of red soil and cacti, a bright blue moon illuminates her path.

The air is charged with a chorus menacing howls. 

How dare you, they cry to her. Give him back!

Jacob is there, just out of her reach in the distance, a mangled corpse standing among a circle of fire and brimstone. Pale arms burst from the ground like white serpents, scratching and clawing at his legs.

He stares at her with wide brown eyes as tears stream down his bloodied face.

Turn around, Bells, he begs. Don’t come here. 

She doesn’t listen. How could she?

She needs to get to him. She was lost without him. She would die without him. 

The accusing howls suddenly cut into silence, and the hands clawing at Jacob still before they slither away. 

Bella frowns, her legs abruptly coming to a halt. This isn’t how the dream usually goes.

Jacob’s expression transforms from agonized to solemn as he glances up, staring at something behind her. He closes his eyes and turns his head away, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. 

What have you done, Bella? he whimpers.

Curious, Bella turns on her heel and lifts her gaze. The sight leaves her bewildered.

This is wrong. All wrong.

There are two blue moons in the sky. 

She squints, leaning closer, and then she feels it: A huff of air that blows her locks away from her face. A vibration throughout her body from a growl so loud the ground shakes with it. A heart that has long since stopped beating in her chest drops into the pit of her stomach.

Nothing is going the way she remembers.

The shroud of darkness before her parts like a curtain, unveiling a large white muzzle. Trembling lips peel back to show off rows of sharp and gleaming canine teeth. Its jaw opens wide, unnaturally so, and the base of its throat glows with the light of hellfire.

The beast surges forward with a thunderous roar of a thousand voices. 

HOW. 

DARE. 

YOU.

Bella can only stare into the mouth of the approaching beast before it quickly overwhelms her, and then she’s swallowed whole and falls into a pit of agonizing flames– 

Bella’s eyes snap open into sudden awareness as she sits up ramrod straight, silk sheets pooling in her lap. The last dredges of her dream dissipate as she blinks at the blackout curtains surrounding her bed. 

The sleep cycle of a vampire was akin to a set of nesting dolls. An endless, repetitive anomaly, vampires are eternally cursed to always rise and rest in the cover of darkness. Always in darkness, never to bask in the warmth of the sun again. 

Bella always thought it was an ironic and fitting punishment for what she’s done.

In layman’s terms, it was a temporary death. Sunrise compels a vampire’s body to drop everything and seek shade, followed by forced dormancy and short-term rigor mortis. At sunset, vampires reanimate and pick up right where they left off. Like a flip of a switch, consciousness turns back on.

After 30 years Bella is used to the routine, but the dream… It was an anomaly. Any time she did dream, as rare as the occurrence was, she always saw the same sequence of events. It became predictable to the point that Bella had every moment memorized down to the millisecond. A memory she was forced to relive, over and over again.

Except now. But what did it mean?

Bella hisses under her breath, frustrated.

In the next second, she snatches her arm away when spindly fingers tentatively curl around her wrist. Her eyes swivel to the right, snagging on a pair of cautious red eyes staring at her under mused bronze locks.

“Dreams again, love?” Edward asks quietly.

Edward Cullen, head general of a coven of vampires called the Holy Crows, was her latest immortal lover. He was smitten with Bella from the moment they were introduced to each other, instantly wrapped around her finger like cling wrap.

She used his infatuation to her full advantage, and thanks to his coven’s help she was able to get rid of several of her enemies on her quest to the top.

“Yeah,” Bella acknowledges with a nod.

Her eyes turn to the left, watching the shallow rise and fall of her other bed partner’s back, Angela.

Bella took a liking to the doe-eyed half Italian, half Mexican human who was originally meant to be a midnight snack once upon a time in Rome. Meek as a mouse and fully willing to offer her neck after she was lured into a back alley, Angela’s demeanor charmed Bella so much she was spared from being drained completely dry that night. 

Admittedly, she struggled to leave just enough blood for Angela to survive the night, but not enough for her to make it to the next morning without a blood transfusion.

And it certainly wasn’t the last occurrence either.

Just last night Angela once again found herself dancing with death after another bout of Bella’s insatiable hunger; her neck was ravaged in celebration after a key victory that finally secured Bella’s spot as the sole leader of the world’s vampire royalty, the Volturi.

Wars among vampirekind were common, whether it was for expanding territory or simply for survival, but Bella’s gambit had nothing to do with either. Bella’s reason was simple: 

It was for Jacob Black. Always, always for Jacob.

Years ago, in Bella’s first life, she was born and raised by Renee and Phil Dwyer in the rainy peninsula of Forks, Washington. Just an hour west of Forks was a Quileute reservation called La Push, and every summer Bella’s family would venture to First Beach when the sun was out.

It was on one such sunny day that Bella met her first childhood crush, Jacob Black, at the tender age of ten years old. While her father was paddling in the waves and her mother was sunbathing on a piece of driftwood, Bella was inspecting shells as she roamed along the span of the beach. 

By pure chance, or perhaps by fate, Jacob was also wandering along the beach to collect shells, and they both bumped into each other while reaching for the same shell.

When Bella looked up, she saw a boy who suffused her being with warmth like the sun. When Jacob looked up, he saw a girl who pulled at his soul like the moon.

“Woah,” they whispered at the same time, and then, “Jinx!”

They both burst into peals of laughter. 

“I’m Bella,” Bella murmured shyly.

Jacob’s eyes glittered in wonder. “Jacob,” he said. “But my friends call me Jake.”

They couldn’t stand to be apart from that moment on, and all the moments that followed between them were as easy as breathing.

“Kindred spirits,” Jacob’s family would tell them later.

His father, Billy, thought it was cute. His elder sisters, Rachel and Rebecca, were decidedly unamused; they were especially protective of Jacob since their mother died, leading to strong suspicion of anyone outside of their pack.

Jacob came from a long line of werewolves and weaponsmiths; generations of magic ran deep in his veins, and Bella was sworn to secrecy with everything she learned. He was destined to step into the role of Chieftain as soon as he was considered fully mature in the eyes of his family.

But he loathed his lack of freedom and his inability to choose his future.

In their secret meadow, full of vibrant foxgloves and dragonflies, Jacob would vent about his impending fate. It was a place they stumbled upon accidentally on a hike one day, and Bella would bring him there to talk whenever he seemed really upset; it was the only place they could speak freely and away from prying eyes.

“Isn’t there any way for you to get out of it?” Bella whispered. “Couldn’t one of your sisters lead instead?”

Jacob shook his head. “I’m the firstborn boy, Bells.”

“That’s misogynistic.”

“That’s tradition for you.” He laughed bleakly. “I’m in this for life.”

“What if we ran away? Just you and me,” Bella implored. “What if we left home, and left it all behind?”

“It’s not something I can run away from, Bella,” he whispered. “I would run with you, though, if I could.”

It wasn’t the last time they spoke of this; they repeated that conversation for years. Bella would suggest that they should run away together, and Jacob always declined, but the pressure continued to wear on him.

Finally, in an impulsive attempt to avoid his fate, Jacob snuck out of his home as soon as the clock struck midnight on his eighteenth birthday. He climbed the tree in Bella’s front yard, crawling through her bedroom window she always left unlocked for him.

Bella was already awake, sprawled on her quilt and reading a weathered copy of Romeo and Juliet.

“You and these old books,” Jacob said with a playful shake of his head. He plucked the book from her hand.

“Jake, give it back,” Bella complained.

“‘O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.’” Jacob scrunched his face into a grimace. “How do you read this stuff? What does that even mean?”

“Juliet doesn’t want Romeo to swear his love by the moon because it’s always changing, and she wants his love to be constant.”

“Sure, sure.” He turned his cheek toward Bella. “Forgetting something?”

Bella huffed before she leaned forward, intent on kissing his cheek. At the last second, Jacob shifted his head so she kissed his lips instead. It was soft and sweet, like everything else about their relationship.

“Happy birthday,” she whispered when they parted.

“I have something for you,” Jacob said, digging through his pocket.

“Jake, it’s your birthday, not mine-”

Jacob dropped to a knee beside her bed, and for a beat Bella was stunned into silence.

“What are you doing?” she gasped.

“It’s not like that, Bells.” He held up a braided strip of red thread in front of her eyes. “This is a promise bracelet.”

Bella still felt nervous. Marriage was a personal taboo that made her want to run in the opposite direction. “Okay…”

“You always told me we should get out of here. Get away from it all,” Jacob said, excitement raising his voice. “I’m ready. Right now. I want you with me all the time, just like I’ll always be there for you. Forever.” He swallowed nervously. “That’s my promise to you, Bells. What do you say?”

Bella took one look at the tiny wooden wolf hanging from the bracelet, and she knew she would follow him anywhere.

“Shotgun,” she answered, holding out her wrist. 

Jacob tied the bracelet to her wrist, laughing. “That’s a given. You drive like a grandma.”

“Hey! I obey the speed limit!”

“Sure, sure.”

They disappeared that same night.

Escaping from the pressures of Jacob’s family left them free of the responsibility of leading a pack and tribe, but Jacob could never escape the instinctual mandate to hunt and destroy vampires.

During the day they would travel in stolen cars or by foot, and at night Jacob ran on four paws with Bella on his back and set up camp wherever they could.

For years, they were hunting companions and lovers. It was effortless. Easy as breathing. Just Jake and Bells, a lone wolf and a human girl, hiding out together as backroad nomads across the States. Young and naive, they believed they were invincible.

Bella made her first acquaintance with death at the age of twenty-three. 

In the Sonoran Desert, she witnessed the death of Jacob Black at the hands of the Volturi’s most ruthless henchman, James. 

Arizona was meant to be a rest stop on their way to Texas, where the rumor mill whispered of a vampire coven showing exponential growth by the day. 

Their temporary lodging, an abandoned home with no neighbors for miles, was attacked by a swarm of vampires dressed in all black at sundown.

Bella fought with the weapon Jacob cast aside whenever he phased: a katana with his family crest on it, made by his father. Without the magical prowess to activate the magic, she needed to thrust the point of the sword into fire. The blade would be engulfed in flames that could only be extinguished by its scabbard– perfect for slicing through vampires.

They fought beside each other, picking off their enemies one by one until the only vampires left were a duo, male and female, who watched the chaos from the sidelines with sinister smiles.

James faced off against Jacob, and Bella fought the female who donned ginger hair and candy apple lipstick.

Bella should’ve known then that the duo was the real trouble. The vampires they destroyed were the easy pickings, minions that only served as a disposable frontline to wear them out. 

Tired and clumsy, one misstep from Bella earned her a bite from razor sharp teeth to her wrist. The sword clattered to the floor while Bella screamed and writhed beside it, clutching her burning arm. Her veins were cauterized by liquid fire as it coursed through her bloodstream.

Before the redhead could spring on Bella for a second taste, Jacob interfered.

Jacob, whose fur was covered in lacerations and matted with blood, swiveled away from James charging at him head on to body slam the redhead out of the way. His back leg was caught by the blonde, and he was left with a savage looking bite that audibly sizzled and would not heal. 

The venom quickly spread through Jacob’s system and weakened him, but he stood guard in front of Bella regardless, gnashing his bloodstained teeth and snarling froth.

The duo paused to look at each other and laughed. Even through the haze of pain and fire, Bella would never forget their laughter: one like a rabid hyena and the other Iike a bubbly child’s. 

“Light ‘em up, Victoria,” James said.

Victoria lit a match and set the dusty living room curtains on fire. The duo fled the scene as they laughed again, and Bella screamed at their retreating backs.

The house began to slowly collapse in on itself as the flames spread and destroyed everything in its path.

Jacob slumped onto his side, his fur receding as he phased back to his human form. The damage to his leg looked worse without the fur disguising it; his paling skin around the bite turned green and black, and black was visibly spreading beneath his skin. He stared at Bella, sweating and wheezing, as she struggled to move closer to him. 

“Get out of here, Bella,” Jacob begged. “You still have a chance to live.”

Bella ignored him and continued painfully dragging herself across the floor as the fire in her veins grew worse and worse. Her heart was working overtime, threatening to beat right out of her chest.

“I won’t leave you, Jake. We promised each other,” Bella cried. 

“I’m already dead,” Jacob growled. “If you stay then you’ll die, too.”

“Then I will! If you die, I die!” Bella snapped back. She sobbed once. “How can you ask me to go on without you?”

Jacob’s voice became fainter. “No… Go now… Don’t stay. Please, Bells… Please.”

Bella, having finally made it over to him, stared into his desolate eyes and accepted the situation for what it was. There was no one nearby to rescue them, and Jacob had no pack to fall back on. His family was hundreds of miles away. 

“‘These violent delights have violent ends,’” she muttered to herself.

Jacob was going to die.

Bella was going to die with him. 

Shakily pulling herself up on her arms, Bella leaned over to press her lips against Jacob’s. His mouth was full of blood, and the venom pumping through her veins already made his werewolf blood taste like brimstone to her. 

Jacob lost most of his strength after that kiss, turning sallower by the second.

“Bella, plea-”

His eyes rolled in the back of his head, and froth began to drip from his mouth as he trembled and moaned. Bella laid over his chest with a sob, covering as much of him as she could to protect him from the flames and falling debris. 

For a few precious moments, she was overcome with a deep sense of contentment, until the flames grew uncomfortably closer. The venom sent her new instincts haywire, and she couldn’t resist the compulsion to get away from the flames, a natural deterrent for vampires. 

Bella fruitlessly struggled against her body as it stiffly lifted itself up and away from Jacob without her permission. 

“No, no, no,” she moaned in horror.

Her body’s self preservation instincts could not be ignored.

Screams and cries of denial left her lips and she fought herself, but still, her body haltingly backed away from Jacob and trembled as she fought her own movements. 

“Jake! Jacob!” Bella screamed, trying to reach out to him. “J-Jacob, I can’t– No. No! I won’t go!”

Jacob regained some lucidity, eyes rolling around in his head until he was able to focus on her. 

A weaker version of that sunny smile of his bloomed on his face as he murmured, “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”

He was always trying his best to make sure Bella felt nothing but love and comfort in his presence. Even so close to death, he was still trying.

“I love you, Jacob,” she choked out.

Jacob’s bloodshot eyes softened, and a trickle of blood dribbled from his nose.

“Love you more,” were his last words to her. 

The house fully collapsed when Bella finally made it to the lawn, and she wailed in terror. Her body wouldn’t let her take not one step forward. She cried and shouted as the flames grew higher and turned everything to ash.

There was nothing she could do anymore. There was nothing left for her there now.

Bella continued to stagger through the empty desert until she fully succumbed to the agony of the venom and collapsed. She heaved for what felt like an eternity, her body rejecting all the food she consumed during the day; vampires were unable to ingest nutrients of that nature. Her throat was left dry and raw, already screaming at her with an intense thirst for blood.

Despite the pain in her throat, the agony in the rest of her body rose to a higher severity, but she vowed to never let another scream leave her lips in defiance. Her heart strained painfully in her chest. She would not give it a voice.

Sensing the approaching sunrise and feeling a renewed sense of urgency to get away, Bella mechanically dug a hole in the ground until it was deep enough for her to lay in. She covered herself in soil until she was fully submerged in the earth.

When the sun broke through the horizon, her heart gave out. After three days, she emerged at sunset as a full-fledged vampire. 

Her first instinct was to return to the house. The only remains were blackened debris and Jacob’s unmarred sword in its scabbard. The hilt burned her hands when she pulled it free from the rubble. She held it for hours, frozen still and unseeing in her silence, until her palms were charred to the bone.

The pain was nothing compared to the loss of Jacob. Negligible, even, when she finally found the nerve to return to La Push. 

Jacob’s family deserved an explanation.

Bella was greeted by a wall of wolves as soon as she crossed onto their land. They snapped at her in warning and prowled closer, preventing her from taking another step. She bristled on instinct, swallowing back an answering snarl. Her teeth ached to tear and destroy. 

The reaction shocked her. These wolves were her friends, and some had become like family to her, but every cell in her new body recoiled from their presence.

Three of the wolves stiffened with wide eyes, straightening onto human legs. The other wolves fell silent.

Jacob’s father and elder sisters stared at her in shock. For a beat, they stood in silence with the pack as their black hair billowed in the wind.

“Bella?” Billy eventually gasped.

She could only respond with a wounded noise, nodding helplessly.

Billy swallowed before he narrowed his eyes, searching behind her. “Where is my son?”

After unclasping her satchel, Bella revealed an urn full of ashes that she collected from the aftermath of the fire. 

The twins let out a sound that wasn’t human. It was an inconsolable, broken cry that would have made Bella’s heart squeeze if she still had a heartbeat. 

Rachel caught Rebecca as she fell to her knees beside their father. They both sobbed in each other’s arms.  

“Give him back,” Rebecca wailed. “Give my Jacob back.”

“You did this to him!” Billy shouted, his voice echoing in the woods.

Bella stiffened, taken aback by the accusation and fighting the urge to attack. “N-No! A group of vampires found us, and they bit us-”

Rachel shrieked in outrage, stunning Bella into silence. “You lured him away from us! You encouraged him to abandon the den,” she screamed. “Your foolishness got him k... ki...” She couldn’t finish her sentence, dissolving into tears again.

Bella set the urn on the ground and backed away, sensing danger. 

“I’m sorry,” she croaked. Tears of venom fell from her eyes. “Please, tell my parents-”

“Leave his blade here,” Billy demanded.

Bella unconsciously reached for the sword strapped to her back. She shook her head in denial. “No, I-”

“How dare you keep something that isn’t rightfully yours! It was made to kill your kind.” Billy spat the last words. “You have no right to wield it!”

Bella clutched the wolf charm on her bracelet, shaking her head again. “I’ll avenge him with it, and then I will return it to its rightful place.”

“YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH,” Rebecca roared, rising to her feet as her eyes flickered blue.

More wolves appeared in the underbrush, snarling and howling, blue eyes twinkling like fireflies in the night.

They chased her for miles.

Since Jacob’s death, Bella had sworn to exterminate all vampires involved in the night that irreversibly changed their lives. She tracked his killers– her makers– across the globe on a two decade campaign of death and destruction. First James in Paris, then Victoria in Germany. Killing them didn’t feel like enough.

Where one Volturi member fell, two more took their place. 

Unsatisfied, Bella shifted gears and made it her mission to do away with the Volturi entirely. If she couldn’t defeat them then she would join them, and ultimately destroy the faction of soulless monsters from the inside out.

Feeling her vengeance was still incomplete, she refused to return Jacob’s blade.

A vampire hell bent on killing other vampires just for the sake of it was unheard of, but it was how Bella gained the attention of Sam Uley, becoming the first and only vampire ever inducted into his assassin squad. She was quickly regarded as one of the top contract killers in the world under his leadership.

Operating under the codename “Red,” Bella only took vampires as a target, refusing to kill humans for hire. She took her doctrine a step further, swearing to never kill humans when she had to feed; it was her way of honoring Jacob and everything he stood for.

After the massacre in Caddo Parish, Sam deemed Bella worthy enough to back her in several battles during her global power struggle against other vampire covens to gain a foothold with the Volturi. 

“You scratched my back, I’ll scratch yours,” Sam told her.

With his financial support and fighting prowess, Bella was able to secure her seat and assume power over the Volturi. Decades of effort had paid off, culminating with an unholy coronation taking place tonight.

Her unholy coronation.

Bella stands from the bed, eyeing Angela’s pale skin and the dried blood around the puncture wounds on her neck. They would have to act quickly if there was any chance of her survival yet again. Humans were so delicate, after all.

“Summon Carlisle,” Bella commands.

Edward tips his head. “Yes, Bella.”

“And fetch my gown.”

“Yes, Bella.”

Edward flits from the bed, already dialing a number on his tiny cell phone and speaking so quickly his voice would be unintelligible to anyone without supernatural hearing. He returns seconds later, impeccably dressed in a black three-piece suit with paisley designs only visible at certain angles under the light. He brandishes a garment bag and unzips it with a flourish.

The gown inside is a midnight blue and velvet soft. It fits Bella’s silhouette like a glove as Edward assists dressing her. He murmurs words of praise as he closes the fastens at her back, brushing his fingers against her exposed skin for longer than necessary.

Bella purrs at the attention and spins, and the cape sleeves of her gown flutter with the movement. She drags Edward closer by his lapels and kisses him hungrily. Ever the aggressor, she purposefully nicks his tongue with a fang. She draws his tongue into her mouth and laps at the dregs of Angela’s blood that remains in his system.

When she pulls back, Edward’s eyes are pitch black with hunger. “Bella-”

Bella smears the corner of his bloodstained lips, silencing him. “Later,” she says with promise.

Edward swallows heavily, nodding. He straightens his suit and leads her out the room.

They walk down an unremarkable hallway, flanked by the rest of the Holy Crows. Just beyond a rusted metal gate is a long, spiraling tunnel built from damp stone that leads further underground. The torches that line the walls are unlit. There's no need for light, as a vampire can see clear as day in the blackest of nights. At the end of the tunnel is a large wooden door, and through it she can hear the murmur of several voices.

Edward pushes open the door and announces, “May I present your new leader, Isabella Marie.”

Bella walks ahead, turning her gaze to each former Volturi leader currently sitting at a large table. Her guards fan out behind her as she stands at the head of the table. 

“Welcome to the new regime,” Bella says brightly, tilting her head to them in acknowledgement. 

Caius, one of the founders of the Volturi, smacks his hand against the table, causing the surface to crack and crumble under the brute force. The other council members turn toward him following his outburst.

“Caius!” Vladimir shouts in alarm. “What is the meaning of this? We are supposed to be celebrating!”

“And what exactly are we celebrating?” Caius spits, curling his lip. “The perversion of our once flawless council?”

Aro leans away from his companion with nervous eyes. “Caius, have you gone mad?” he squeaks. 

Out of the entire council, Aro fears Bella’s strength and power the most. He was quick to surrender his position when she finally came for him. In a show of fealty (and to keep himself in her good graces), Aro gifted her with a gaudy diamond necklace from their vault of precious jewelry and gold. 

That very necklace sits on Bella’s neck, glittering under the fluorescent lights.

“Of what perversion do you speak?” Bella asks quietly.

“I started this council with Aro and Marcus thousands of years ago. But while you all sit there…” Caius glares at his council sitting at the table. “And laugh like fools, everything we have worked for is crumbling before our very eyes by a fledgling who has not lived to a century yet! She even employs humans in our conclave. It is unheard of!”

Bella raises an eyebrow. Out of the entire council, she expected his insubordination, but not to this extreme. He didn’t seem to have a shred of self-preservation in his body.

Stefan gasps in outrage. “It is you who insults this council, you bastard!” he screams. The others begin to shout in agreement.

“Everyone,” Bella yells over the noise. She addresses them all with a sickeningly sweet smile. “Caius obviously has something on his mind. Let the man speak.”

Caius faces Bella with a sneer. “I speak of the blasphemy done to this sacred council– by making a werewolf-loving bitch from the States its leader!” he bellows. 

His words are followed by a choked scream as Jane, Bella’s tiniest personal bodyguard, subdues him with her powers of affliction. 

Caius writhes awkwardly in his chair, and Jane laughs with childlike delight.

Bella leaps onto the table, landing in front of Caius. She pries open his mouth with her bare hands, pulling until his head tears free at the joint of his mandible. 

Beside the headless body, Aro releases a shrill, demented laugh. 

Bella holds Caius’ head, grinning as his tongue hangs uselessly from his mouth. His eyes roll around his head in outrage; still alive, but without his lower jaw he cannot speak. 

She turns to face the rest of the council, who stare back with varying ranges of shock in their expressions. The silence is tangible.

“I’m only going to say this once, so listen carefully,” Bella warns. “Under my leadership, there will be things you'll simply have to get used to, even if you disagree with it." She pauses, her eyes boring into each ex-council member. "The subject Caius just brought up is off limits.” 

The smile on Bella’s face is as dazzling as the diamond at her neck. “Anyone who brings up my furry associates as a negative will forfeit their life, and I’ll collect their head as an offering to my dead mate.” 

Bella holds Caius’ head up higher. “Just like this fucker right here,” she adds.

Jane giggles again, and Bella offers her an indulgent smile.

“Does anyone else have something they would like to share?” 

Bella’s question is met with silence. Her smile widens. “I didn’t think so.” 

She jumps from the table, tossing Caius’ head into Edward’s hands and readjusting her skewed necklace.

“Edward, take care of that, will you? I want to sit on my new throne.”

Absorbed in her own world, Bella feasts on a very eager and vocal young man. Her rolodex of humans was diverse, filled with flavors of blood that balance all five basic tastes; she keeps a roster of humans on rotation, choosing flavors depending on her mood. 

Tonight’s menu was citrus with hints of ginger.

The man was completely at ease as Bella drank from his neck. He sits between Bella’s legs at the foot of her throne. Every few seconds, as if timed on a queue, he moans theatrically while Bella sucks mouthfuls of his blood from his artery. 

Bella can’t get enough of it, still floating on the high of her triumph. She sucks with renewed vigor, gripping his shoulders tight. 

“Easy now,” he breathes. 

Bella ignores him and yanks head back by his hair to gain more access to his jugular. 

The man begins to panic, and the fear only makes his blood turn sweeter.

“H-Hey,” he cries, trying to pry Bella away. His feeble strength is nothing against her iron grip. His flailing hands are like feathers brushing against her skin. “Let me go,” he whimpers. 

He bucks against her grip until he loses strength. His limbs fall slack as Bella steadily drinks her fill, tiny whimpers and gurgles escaping his throat as he feebly paws at her hands.

The rhythmic thump of his heart slows and stutters to a halt. The zest of his blood turns stale.

Bella sits back, taking in large gulps of air as if she were a human held underwater for too long. She feels engorged with blood, lost in the ecstasy of it, craving more and more.

“Another,” she gasps.

She pushes the body from her throne, watching with uncaring eyes as it tumbles down the dais.

Another human takes his place at her feet, and Bella wastes no time with pleasantries or gentling as she sinks her teeth into his neck.

I finally did it, Bella thinks. Can you see me, Jacob? Are you proud of me?