Dark sky.

Dark air.

Dark intentions.

Darkness hung over the land like a sheer veil over a temptress' face.

A cloaked figure paused their confident gait and instead stood still, their back stiff, but their eyes never ceased in their scanning of the area around them.

Tension rolled off the figure, anger emitting from their form as if they were aflame.

Then, the figure was moving.

In a burst of motion, they threw their hood back to reveal the shadowed face of a young woman. Her body twisted in the air as she swiftly drew a short sword that rested at her waist, the metallic ring of the blade chiming through the silence.

Her blade was met with the pale neck of a man who stood quietly just behind where she had stopped moments before.

He didn't waver at the sight of her weapon, instead, his golden eyes regarded the sharpened blade with something akin to yearning.

"Miss me that much, did you?" The man asked, his voice tight, stretched thin with pain and lack of use.

The woman didn't move at his words but her hazel eyes stayed locked with his own. Her muscles were unyielding as she kept the blade extended before she suddenly dropped it, sheathing the weapon in one fluid motion.

"What are you doing here?" She asked. "Last I heard you were all in Washington- in America."

The grimace from the other didn't go unnoticed by the observant woman and she sighed heavily after a moment of silence passed between them.

"Come on then. You may not feel the cold, but I certainly do." The woman stated, turning on her heels to walk back up the darkened alley she had been striding down when she caught wind of his presence.

She heard the brush of her new companions feet over the pavement as he followed her, a feat within itself, but if she hadn't been able to hear such things then she would have been dead a long time ago.

"I didn't mean to frighten you, Keegan," Edward said, his voice still as supple as honey.

The unnatural smoothness of the tone usually served to send shivers down Keegan's spine, but not from him.

Not from anyone in that particular vampire's family.

The woman sent a withering look over her shoulder at the pale man's words, nearly snorting in response to them.

He had not frightened her.

"I am not so easily frightened, Edward. Not like I once was." She told him.

His words had reminded her of a day not so long ago, especially not in comparison to Edward's never-ending life.


Keegan's family had always been rather unique.

They were an oddity in her town and from the day that she was old enough to walk, she began to understand why.

She never attended school with the rest of the people in her town. She never went to the park or the movies.

From the moment Keegan took her first toddling steps, she was trained to run.

To fight.

There were few in the world that held the same bloodline as the armed woman did, and there were even fewer that took up the dangerous career she had all but fallen into.

Vampire hunters were a rare breed.

They were mortals in every sense that a vampire could detect.

They had a beating heart, flowing blood, and the scent of a particularly delectable mortal.

The better to draw the beasts in with.

What differed between them and the mortal human race was substantial as well.

Keegan had been thrown from rooftops without breaking a bone. She was only 21 years old and knew that she would look the same for the next three or four decades thanks to her extended lifespan. She had sharper senses and faster reflexes than a vampire, but still, she could be wounded.

Still, she could die.

She was stronger than mortals, a match for vampires, but not their equals in terms of sustainability.

She had to sleep, had to eat, and had to breathe.

She was cold more often than not and she craved pickles nearly every second of the day.

It was thanks to this unique quality of her family that she had met Edward and the rest of the Cullens.

Only 16 years old, Keegan thought that she could take on the world.

She was aware of her duties at that point and knew that she would be expected to break from her family the day she turned 18 and travel and hunt on her own.

The only time she would see her mother, father, or sister again would be if she needed help with a hunt.

It wasn't likely that she would ever admit to such a thing.

Given her rather stubborn nature, Keegan had found a newspaper article that her father had left out on the table for her mother. It detailed the disappearance of three boys from the town next to the current one they were staying in.

She had seen this as her chance to prove herself to her parents.

She needed them to know that she was strong and just as capable as her older sister.

That night, Keegan armed herself to the teeth and hopped on the next bus out.

She found herself in a popular nightclub courtesy of her fake ID, drawn in by the tingling in her fingertips.

Finding a vampire in a sea of mortals was fairly easy for one of her bloodline.

Without pause, Keegan had approached the pale and eerily beautiful man.

He had two humans draped across him as he reclined on a couch in one of the private areas, his face bored but his eyes dark as he convinced them to come home with him.

Keegan had nearly sliced his throat then and there, but instead of acting rash, she used the strongest weapon in her arsenal.

Just as she could sense vampires, the immortal beings were unexplainably drawn to her kind.

It only took moments to have the blood-sucker gliding out of the club after her. She put on a show of stumbling into the alleyway behind the building, leaning against the wall and fake giggling to herself.

He was drawn in like a fish on a line.

His cold hands rested on her hips, roughly turning her around and she didn't resist the action despite her body's screams for her to do so.

She couldn't show her hand too early.

With a smile on her painted lips, Keegan ran a hand down the monster's chest just as he began to lean into her, words of empty comfort and affection falling from his lips as he prepared to rip out her throat.

One of her hands dipped to the hem of her dress, casually reaching for the blade that she was going to use to send his granite head falling to the ground separate to his body.

Her fingers closed around the handle just as the vampire was suddenly wrenched from her hold, or perhaps her from his.

She watched with wide eyes as the beast was pressed against the brick wall opposite of her by a dark-haired man.

The tingling in her fingertips increased and her breath stuttered in her throat.

Another blood-sucker, a bloodsucker who was... helping her?

"Are you okay?" A small voice chimed from her side and much to her horror, she turned to see a small female vamp looking up at her with golden eyes.

"We've frightened her. She knows what he was- what we are. She planned to kill him." Another voice said as a bronze-haired male strode down the far end of the alley.

He was?

Sure enough, Keegan's eyes flickered over to the vampire that she had planned to be the prey of her first hunt, ruined by the other monsters surrounding her, to find that his head had been ripped from his shoulders.

"Thinking of us as monsters is a weird way to thank us." The bronze-haired vampire told her, his amber eyes on hers and she felt panic course through her.

How did he-

"It's a gift." He stated simply and she swallowed hard.

"My name is Alice." The female vampire chirped next to her, drawing Keegan's eyes though her attention was still trained on the mountain of a vampire who had killed her prey and the bronze-haired mind reader.

If she let her guard down, she could be killed.

"I am Edward and that is Emmett. We are not going to kill you." The mind-reader, Edward, said.

"And I'm supposed to just believe that?" Keegan hissed in return, finally finding her voice.

"We've got a lot to explain, but I can already tell that you and I are going to be great friends!"


"Alice was very afraid that we would never hear from you again after that day," Edward said, his voice less pained now that it seemed he had his mind off of whatever was bothering him.

As soon as the thought passed through Keegan's head, however, his shoulders dropped as if the world had come crashing back down upon them.

Unlocking the door that led to the hotel room she had currently been living out of, the vampire hunter gestured for the immortal to followed her inside before locking it all back.

Even with Edward there, she was unwilling to take any risks.

"Alice would have never let me not hear from her again." Keegan replied.

It was true, since the day that they had crossed paths, Keegan and the Cullens had been in regular contact, not that anyone else knew.

Not that there was anyone to know.

Pushing those thoughts away, Keegan focused on her friend as she plopped herself down on the foot of her bed.

"What are you doing here, Edward?" She finally asked after a moment of them simply sizing one another up.

"I came to ask you a favor."