A/N: What if Bella had lived during ShadowRun? My take on Bella if she had a spine, if Edward had been portrayed properly as what he was, and if Harry Potter had taken a step out of the closet. Contains Edward Bashing, Potter Bashing, and room for some serious violence. No pairings, though, just bashing. As a side note, I do not own any of the worlds, characters, or anything else presented here, and it is not presented for profit, only fun. Enjoy, R&R please. I really want to know what you think.
Seattle, Salish-Shidhe Council Lands
August 17th, 2072
It was raining again. Not a hard rain, just sort of a mist that seemed to settle around anything that impeded its descent. This included buildings, cars, humans and meta-humans. The sun was just setting, casting a dim orange glow through the smog shrouded sky, adding a sickly tint to the mist. The Barrens stretched for as far as the eye could see, older buildings run down, the people that were about where shabbily dressed, huddled, scuttling about their business without really looking around. It was safer that way. If you didn't notice people, then you couldn't be coerced to be a witness by the Star, or any of the corporate security people. The only people who seemed to keep their heads up where the gangers, proudly sporting their colors in bandanas or decals on their jackets.
There was a third type of person, though, one who didn't fit in with either group. Standing on the corner was one of them, a young woman wearing a long, heavy jacket that hung around her, hiding her body from sight and, more importantly, hid the tools of her trade from the very occasional patrol of Lone Star cops and the wandering eyes of the gangers. She was about as nondescript as anybody in this part of town could get. A black long coat, dark clothes, a battered fedora topped her head with the majority of her long brown hair tucked up under. She wore sunglasses despite the gloom, hiding her brown eyes behind the tinted lenses. Her eyes were locked on a building across the street, though her periphery took in her surroundings, as well as the images that and information that popped up on her Image Link. It would be a little while before the sun was down far enough, and she couldn't help letting her thoughts go back to the meeting a few days before.
She had met her contact in the back room of the talismonger shop, a meeting that had, in itself, taking a day to set up. The ork women had used the ubiquitous title of Mrs. Johnson, but Bella had known that she was no corper. She wasn't neat enough. Her shirt was neat and clean, but her jacket was frayed, and the long skirt had stains that no amount of scrubbing or laundering would ever get rid of. And then there was the subject of the meeting.
"I can't offer much, only a couple of hundred Nuyen," she said by way of greeting.
"We can talk about money after you tell me what it is you need," Bella answered, leaning as casually as she could against the doorframe. The first lesson one learned in the shadows was that you never dealt with a dragon. The second was to never trust your Johnson.
"Uh, yes, that… I… represent a small, uh, corporation," she said hesitantly. "We have something of a pest problem, and I've been told that you are one of the best."
"Well, that depends on the pest in question," Bella responded. "Why don't you tell me about them."
"They have, uh, well, one has been attacking kids, uh, children," Johnson said, looking down at the table in front of her. She was a bad actor and an even worse liar, but the part about the children was true enough. "A bunch of kids have gone missing, and the ones who haven't have been showing up pale and sick. Mostly it's been girls, but some boys, as well. And they all have these wounds, like two little circles on their inner thighs, according to the nurse anyway."
"Vampires…" the word came out in a hiss from Bella's bow shaped lips. "Has anybody seen them?"
"No, at least they haven't said anything if they did. One boy said that they had had red hair, freckles, but couldn't remember anything else."
"That son of a bitch," Bella growled. She knew that description, though there could have been any number of leeches with similar looks, but only one she knew that liked to prey on children. "Alright, I'm in. Don't worry about how much you can pay."
"But… I thought…."
"I said don't worry about the pay. Where are the attacks happening?"
"The Barrens," she replied. She brought up a map of the area on her comlink, linking Bella in so she could see the information as the ork highlighted the neighborhood. "This is where all the attacks have been happening."
There hadn't been much else to say after that, and Bella had spent the next couple of days talking up her contacts, listening to word on the street, and in generally stalking the leech. Even now, standing on the street corner opposite the abandoned building that she was sure housed the leech, she couldn't help but think back to her younger years in Forks-Angeles. The two towns had grown together over the years, formerly being the towns of Forks and Port Angeles. Now they were incorporated under the title of Forks-Angeles, one big, unhappy conglomeration of small businesses and corporate owned warehouses and storage facilities. Her father, Charlie, had been part of the Star there, the division captain for the town. Her parents had divorced when she was little, and her mother moved to the tribal lands in what used to be Arizona. When she was 15 she moved to Forks-Angeles, moving in with her father while her mother brought her boyfriend in to the house, a professional Street Brawl heavy who her mother wanted to follow around for the season. She had seen the ginger vampire on her first day of school at Forks High School, the name kept despite the incorporation of the town. Beautiful, fair skinned, golden eyes with hair the color of polished bronze and a smile that would melt the panties off of any woman. She had become the focus of his attention almost immediately, and she was happy for it until she found out the truth.
Edward Cullen had stalked her for more than a month. She hadn't realized it at first, not until her father showed her the security footage. Even then she just thought that he had just wanted to be close to her, showing up in her bedroom at night, standing over her bed. He had called her his own personal brand of NovaCoke, an addiction that he couldn't get enough of. That was proof that he just wanted to be near her, wasn't it? The camera had always cut out at some point, but Bella remembered waking up in the mornings feeling drained, sick, tired. It wasn't until another of his kind showed up, Alice, a beautiful little pixie of a woman who spoke nearly too fast to be understood. It was her who had warned Bella that Edward was dangerous, not to be trusted. He was a renegade from their clan, and they were looking for him. Still Bella found it hard to believe until the night Alice, Carlisle, Jasper, and Emmett had shown up at her house. Edward was there, in her room, and the four of them burst in. The fight had been horrific, and Bella had barely managed to escape. Only the intervention of the High-Threat Response Team from DocWagon had saved her life, and allowed Edward to escape into the night. Carlisle and the others had disappeared, as well, to lick their wounds and start their hunt again.
Bella snapped herself out of her reverie, angry at the intrusion of the angelic looking ginger vampire into her thoughts ten years later. The attack that night had awakened something inside of her. She had been an outcast before and she was even more of one after it came out that she was magicly active. While others who were magically active became mages, shamans or adepts , she followed a different path, one that straddled the line between mage and adept called a mystic adept. At her fingertips she held the power of the universe, spells that she could twist and cast at her will, but also an enhanced physique that allowed her to do things that had only been replicated in ancient Kung Fu movies with wires and stop-motion photography. She began taking classes on magical theory and application in high school, and when she was 17 she entered the Lone Star Academy. She spent six years in the Star after graduating from the academy, two as a beat officer and four in the Paranatural Investigations Division attached to the Special Victims Unit.
It was during her tenure with the Star that she ran into the Ginger again. A case involving the molestation of young boys and girls in the Puyallup area of the Seattle Metroplex. She and her partner, Detective Harold Potter had caught the case, and they chased down the leads to an old school that had fallen into disuse. Bella had Edward in her sights, had pinned him with a stake to the wall and was just starting the incantation to summon a ball of fire to destroy him, but something had happened. Something had hit her hard, hard enough to drop her to the floor, nearly unconscious. Her vision had been blurred, her ears ringing, but she thought she had seen Potter walk past her, stroking Edward's cheek, even kissing him before he pulled the stake from the vampire's chest.
Bella didn't have any proof, and even the Internal Affairs Division couldn't find anything, but she knew in her heart that Potter had betrayed her. She had resigned from the Star less than a month afterwards, and had begun working as a private contractor, hunting down and neutralizing paranatural critters that were causing problems for people. Vampires, Wendigos, Banshees, Ghouls, Weres and others had fallen to her spells, sword, and firearms. All the time, though, she had focused on finding just one specific vampire. Now was her chance, if this vampire was the one she thought it was. Edward Cullen would die tonight, finally, forever.
Her attention was drawn by the arrival of an unusual vehicle for this part of the Metroplex. A sparkling purple Mercury Comet, complete with chrome rims and dark tinted windows pulled up to the curb on the street opposite the corner that Bella was standing on. The plate was personalized "WIZ ONE" leading Bella to instantly assess the pretentiousness of the driver. Her observation was confirmed a moment later when said driver stepped out of the Comet. He was average height, which was taller than Bella, with short brown hair and black framed, round glasses perched on his inauspicious nose. His eyes were a bland shade of brown, paled out slightly by the filtering on the lenses of the glasses. He wore a full length, real leather great coat in purple with silver and gold stitched into arcane patterns. Beneath the great coat he wore a three button sports coat in dark blue, dark slacks, and a white shirt with black tie. He looked a little older than Bella remembered him, but he was a man she would never forget, with his insipid smile and slight squint to his eyes.
"Detective Potter," Bella sneered, standing up straight and shoving her hands into the pockets of her coat.
"Inspector, actually," Potter responded. "Isabel Swan, what a sight for sore eyes." He stopped a few feet away from her and looked her over with a slight look of disgust. "You wouldn't happen to be doing some illegal hunting, now would you? I would hate to have to arrest you for violating 'Plex law or Paranatural rights."
"Potter, we both know that you would love nothing better, and we also both know that Paranatural rights do not cover murder or molestation of children," she responded angrily. "I think the only thing that you would hate about it is having to touch a girl." Potter's eyes narrowed even more and he shoved his hands into his own pockets, as though the idea had suddenly left his hands dirty.
"You little bitch," he snarled. "Of course, anybody with a brain would be disgusted with touching such a filthy slut like you. How many men now? A dozen? A score?" Bella snorted in response.
"Not that it's any of your business, but none. Ever," she said with a shake of her head. "But you wouldn't care about that since the only thing that can even get you excited is the thought of some soulless ginger shoving his cock up your ass, isn't it?"
"I don't have to take this from you!" Potter screeched, his voice raising an octave. "One more word and I'll arrest you and throw you into the deepest part of the jail!"
"You are such a little girl," Bella said quietly. "But, really, why are you here? Looking to protect your boyfriend again? Just like you did three years ago?"
"Don't blame me for your inadequacies," Potter snarled, his voice still higher than normal. "It's not my fault that you are such a pathetic waste of…" He didn't get a chance to finish his statement as Bella's fist connected with his jaw. Potter's glasses flew off his face and into the street at the mage fell to the filthy pavement. Bella followed with a swift kick to Potter's face, splitting his lip and breaking his nose, splashing blood onto the ground around him. "Wha… huh… you can't do that!" Potter's voice rose to an even more pathetic whine than before as he held his hands to his face to try and staunch the flow of blood. "You can't attack me like that! It's not fair!"
"Tough drek, Potter," Bella snarled. "Nobody ever said life was fair. Now take your pansy ass out of here, and don't ever let me see your little faggoty ass again." Potter scrambled to his feet, whining loudly as he ran across the street to his car, the sound of his whining only cut off by the closing of the door. Bella sighed, grateful for the silence as she turned her attention back to the building and the gathering darkness. It was almost time. It was dangerous to fight a vampire on their own turf, especially at night, but she wanted Edward to suffer, and killing him while he slept just wasn't going to be satisfying enough.
