Disclaimer: I do not own anything twilight related. It all belongs to Stephanie Meyer. Excerpt is from The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. If you don't like spoilers, don't read this. The beginning is the last few pages of that book to make the story flow better.

Chapter 1

I turned and really ran for the trees, suddenly positive that Diego's presence here was just another of Riley's lies.

And if Diego wasn't here, then he was already dead. This fell into place for me so easily that I thought I must have known the truth for a while. Since the moment that Diego had not followed Riley through the basement door. He'd already been gone.

I was a few feet into the trees when a force like a wrecking ball hit me from behind and threw me to the ground. An arm slipped under my chin.

"Please!" I sobbed. And I meant please kill me fast.

The arm hesitated. I didn't fight back, though my instincts were urging me to bite and claw and rip the enemy apart. The saner part of me knew that wasn't going to work. Riley had lied about these weak, older vampires too, and we'd never had a chance. But even if I had a way to beat this one, I wouldn't have been able to move. Diego was gone, and that glaring fact killed the fight in me.

Suddenly I was airborne. I crashed into a tree and crumpled to the ground. I should have tried to run, but Diego was dead. I couldn't get around that.

The blond vampire from the clearing was staring intently at me, his body ready to spring. He looked very capable, much more experienced than Riley. But he wasn't lunging at me. He wasn't crazed like Raoul or Kristie. He was totally in control.

"Please," I said again, wanting him to get this over with. "I don't want to fight."

Though he held himself ready, his face changed. He looked at me in a way I didn't totally get. There was a lot of knowledge in that face, and something else. Empathy? Pity at least.

"Neither do I, child," he said in a calm, kind voice. "We are only defending ourselves."

There was such honesty in his odd yellow eyes that it made me wonder how I believed any of Riley's stories. I felt…guilty. Maybe this coven had never planned to attack us in Seattle. How could I trust any part of what I'd been told?

"We didn't know," I explained, feeling somewhat ashamed. "Riley lied. I'm sorry.

He listened for a moment, and I realized that the battlefield was quiet. It was over.

If I'd been in any doubt over who the winner was, that doubt was gone when, a second later, a female vampire with wavy brown hair and yellow eyes hurried to his side.

"Carlisle?" she asked in a confused voice, staring at me.

The blond, Carlisle, glanced back at her, and the he straitened up a little, though I could see he was still wary.

"We have no wish to harm you," the woman said to me. She had a soft, soothing voice. "We didn't want to fight any of you."

"I'm sorry," I whispered again.

I couldn't make any sense of the mess in my head. Diego was dead, and that was the main thing, the devastating thing. Other than that, the fight was over, my coven had lost and my enemies had won. But my dead coven was full of people who would have loved to watch me burn, and my enemies were speaking to me kindly when they had no reason to. Moreover, I felt safer with these two strangers than I'd ever felt with Raoul and Kristie. I was relieved that Raoul and Kristie were dead were dead. It was confusing.

"Child," Carlisle said, "will you surrender to us? If you do not try to harm us, we promise we will not harm you."

And I believed him.

"Yes," I whispered. "Yes, I surrender. I don't want to hurt anybody."

He held out his hand encouragingly. "Come, child. Let our family regroup for a moment, then we'll have some questions for you. If you answer honestly, you have nothing to fear."

I got up slowly, making no movements that could be considered threatening.

"Carlisle?" a male voice called. And then another yellow-eyed vampire joined us. Any sort of safety I'd felt with these strangers vanished as soon as I saw him.

He was blond, like the first, but taller and leaner. His skin was absolutely covered in scars, spaced most thickly together on his neck and jaw. A few small marks on his arm were fresh, but the rest were not from the brawl today. He had been in more fights than I could have ever imagined, and he'd never lost. His tawny eyes blazed and his stance exuded the barely contained violence of an angry lion.

As soon as he saw me he coiled to spring.

"Jasper!" Carlisle warned.