Author's Note: Welcome to Twilight:Hunter's Moon. I should make a warning; fans of the books are going to be more than slightly disappointed, but in writing this, it was assumed that Bella was an unreliable narrator. Very unreliable. Details like names and location are correct, but minor details...well..you'll see.
Alice ran as fast as she could, her feet slamming against the grass as she ran through the forest, the clothes she'd thrown on sticking to her body as she continued to run. She'd known that Edward's plans would bring the sword down on all of them, but she could still escape! She could escape the men in the visions, who she saw slaughtering her kind. Men in Fauks and Italy. She saw her home in flames. She saw the end of her father, but she didn't see herself. Nothing said she had to die.
She fell down as another set of visions ripped their way through her mind, despite her best attempts to resist them. She saw them, in all their hellish glory. She saw a man with a chiseled chin grinning as he fired a shotgun in a bar and a man in a white trench-coat froze one of her kind in place. She saw a much paler vampire discussing Bella over the phone. She saw God's Left Hand, the man who helped end Dracula's Coven, facing down her father. She saw Satan's son, with his massive hands, standing over Edward's child. She forced herself to keep moving now, no longer caring about the direction, because the next vision was the worst. It was always there at the end, no matter what else she saw, almost as if it was looking at her.
She saw the eyes that always characterized the beginning of the vision, the hundreds of searching eyes staring at her straight from the abyss. She scrunched her own eyes close and screamed as loud as she could. It didn't matter, the vision continued, a grinning madman in a red trench coat, staring down her brother. A monster given human shape, the greatest of the vampires, and the most feared. As the vision reached it's end, Alice starts to breath again. He didn't see her, she was still safe. Her head turned back; she had left Fauks entirely by this point, not even the werewolfs were this far out. She finally breathed a sigh of relief; she was safe. She didn't matter to the Hunters, none of the visions involved her, nor was she involved even slightly in what Edward was doing. She had called it a fool's dream that would be the death of him...and she had been right, judging by the constant visions.
I sat with a gin smirk across from Walker, my mind raising over the amount of money he'd just offered. It was frankly the largest sum he or anyone else had ever offered to pay me for anything. He had directly informed me that the new Authorities needed this job done, needed the destruction of the entirety of the 'Cullen' clan. They'd been causing trouble on the Street of the Gods and were threatening the stability of the entire Nightside. No small feat for a clan of vampires, regardless of the type.
The Nightside was not the type of place one goes to cause trouble, mostly because it emodied the phrase, 'Always a bigger fish.' It was the kind of place were demons formed street gangs to protect themselves from the real dangers. Constructed by my dearest mother long before man began recording history to be free from Heaven and Hell's intervention, it was ironically only a wrong turn away from the latter. It was literally the place were souls were traded daily as the predominant currency. The last thing that had shaken it up was the arrival of The Walking Man, God's fury given form. I had fixed that problem personally, but that was a story for another time.
"Walker, I've told you before, I'm not an assassin for you to hire out to solve your problems. You can go to any down on his luck Name and get them to do that for you." That was definitely true. Stars burned out every day in Nightside, and several of them could be persuaded to do even the most menial of work for a quick buck.
"This isn't a cleansing, or I would just let the Church handle it. They've sent out a man or two of there own after the clan. I need someone to investigate this side of the issue; the man they sent hasn't ever set foot in the Nightside, so I need you to figure out just what these 'Cullens' are trying to accomplish. You don't have to kill them all; that would simply be perferable."
"...Fine then. If only because you asked so nicely, Walker." That was a lie. He'd been planning to accept the job regardless, but first he had to make sure Walker understood he wasn't going to go there with the intention of wiping an entire family of vampires off the face of the Earth.
Walker got up from his seat, moving towards the exit before turning back as I yelled, "Where do you want me to start looking?"
"Italy. Rome. The Volturi." Lovely, had Walker always been this unhelpful?
Coming here from London was far easier when you don't fly coach. Thanks to a favor he owed me, a nice mouse provided a Door to this town. Sitting in some shop that sold donuts, I quickly concluded that Americans have to taste buds. I sat there for perhaps five minutes wolfing the confection down. You learn to eat fast, in the Nightside, or the food might come back to life and eat you. I must have presented a ridiculous sight, a tall man with salt and pepper hair in a white trenchcoat, eating a donut. On my way out, I bump into another man, taller than I am, looking like a reject from the set of El Dorado. Kids these days.
I head through town, looking by hand for the clan. I didn't use my gift, not wanting to draw attention to myself. Then I hear gunfire, coming from a nearby bar. I don't like guns; never used them, never needed to. I enter the establishment. It's a kid, with some form of shotgun. I don't recognize the model; my girlfriend probably has one. He's facing some sort of vampire.
Stepping forward, I catch the vampire's attention, and prey that my carefully crafted reputation extends this far. "My name is John Taylor. You might want to stand down."
The man turns to look at me, showing off that one of his arms seems to have been replaced with a chainsaw, grins, and says, " Get down this sumbitch is a blood drinker!" Before kicking a table over, ducking behind it and firing another round at a place man at the other end of the bar. I look over at the man, though kid might be a better description. The kind of runt that would be eaten up withen two minutes on the streets of the Nightside. If he was a vampire, then he was definitely a member of the Volturi, in which case he might have the information I need.
"Kid, I think we can work something out. If you tell me what I need to know, then you don't have to get killed." The kid, clearly a redhead, now that I can actually get a clear look at him, responds by dashing towards me with his arms outstretched. Pity. With a little effort I call upon my gift and find his weakness; that skin of theirs is diamond hard and reflective. I don't know what magic keeps them flexible, but I found the one-in-a-million chance it would fail, and it was the easiest thing in the world to enact that chance. Eternal life as a statue would probably teach the kid a lesson. Not to mention it would establish my reputation outside the Nightside.
The man with the shotgun and chainsaw turns to me with an incredulous look and says, "Thanks, but right now we know two things about where the Volituri leaders are; Jack & shit and Jack left town, so unless you know where they are then you might want to undue that!" Heh. He really didn't know much about his targets if he didn't even know the correct way to say their name. He'd also just basically screamed that he was an American with the way he was cursing. Still, the kid has some skill, and more than a little bravery. He and Shotgun Suzie would get along great. They'd probably compare shotguns, or something. And then I remember where I had seen that particular model before.
"Name's John Taylor. I find things. Somehow, I don't think the Volturi will be any harder to find. That's a Remington, isn't it? My girlfriend has one mounted over her bed, and two more on her bedside table."
"She's got taste then." The man walks over to the vampire statue and begins tapping it, "Name's Ashley Williams. Yes my parents named me that. No, I've never had a sex change. My main goal is to take out the leadership on these 'Volituri', then wipe out what's left of the mooks, so do you know where the leaders hide out? " Clearly the man didn't have civilized conversations often with the way he talked. More likely his conversations were limited to taunts, followed by death for whoever he was taunting. You didn't need to have a Private Eye to tell that.
"I will soon enough. To find something, I need a starting point. A specific question, to which I get a specific answer; this vampire will do. Where have you been, little bloodsucker?"
I reach out once more with my private Eye, with only heritage my mother left me. I focus on the glimmering statue that was once some sort of vampire. I won't get the location of the Volturi from this. What I will get is a trail. Every place that the vampire has gone, he has left an imprint in the surrounding reality. I can track that imprint. He appears as a ghost, pale and translucent, walking backwards through time. I place my hand on the 'Ash's' shoulder, and let him see the apparition as I do, see the faded image.
Ash looks at me for a moment with his eye raised, not to mention his mouth open. Clearly whatever in the supernatural he tended to interact with was the more violent, less controlled variety.
"Well isn't that an interesting peace of information...which still leaves me in the position of finding them in some run down theater, which I can't find in this god-forsaken town!" He shakes his head for a moment. I wanted to ask how he knew they were in a theater, but he quickly continued, "Would you happen to know where it is?"
"No, but I can find it anyone else he's talked to or interacted with." It was child's play really. Having a moment I added, "And how do you know it's a theater?"
The man merely says, "A source that I don't trust for shit." After that he mulls over my words and grins, "Groovy, let's do that and after we send the bloodsuckers to hell, you wanna get a drink? I could already go for a stiff one."
Frankly I could already agree. This didn't seem to have the makings of a simple or easy case. If it was, Walker wouldn't be paying me nearly so well. "Not here. I know a place that's not far, though. It's called Strangefellows." The oldest bar in the world, and a great place to wind down at when a case was over. Ash smiles and the two of us walk out of the bar. Somehow this seemed like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Update's should be rather fast. As for recommended reading for background to this, I'd suggest every Nightside book, along with the Van Helsing film, the Evil Dead films, Hellboy comics, various comics with a certain Marvel vampire, and finally the Hellsing anime.