Disclaimer: Despite the fact that this is the sequel of the sequel of an AU, Twilight and its ever reaching universe is thanks to Stephenie Meyer.
AN: After writing the sequel to East of Albuquerque, continuing on after that just seemed...logical. However, logic and inspiration rarely go hand in hand. And then I remembered that I'd left Victoria alive in the first story, and yet I had never had a good reason in my head as to why. She comes in handy now. This is sort of a combination of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn (Part 2?) in idea and plot. But time-wise it stands in for Eclipse, taking place in the spring the year after Bella and Edward first meet. The title, for kicks, means West of Rome, and this time I didn't fudge it!
The story stands thus: Jasper and Alice took care of James, but Victoria escaped. Bella didn't end up bitten and nearly die. She isn't quite as injured during her disastrous birthday party as in New Moon. As such, Edward doesn't leave and is slightly less overprotective. They spend the fall applying for colleges. In November they make a trip to Dartmouth which lands Bella in the hospital. Edward decides he can't live without her and agrees to change her...eventually; but first he wants her to go to college. The Cullens plan to move to Vermont in September.
Seattle is a large enough city to get lost in, even for a vampire. A missing homeless person here, a prostitute there and no one even bats an eyelash. Though they are not her favourite and the kill isn't nearly as fun when the victim has given up on living anyways, she manages to keep herself fed for a few months.
It is a few months of misery. James is gone and she doesn't know what to feel or what to do. She's so angry and so grief stricken at losing her mate and yet the very idea of acting on thoughts of revenge leaves her screaming for hours. James would not want her to run off and destroy herself attempting to kill his murderer. So she wallows in her grief and hesitantly contemplates bad revenge plans, one after another, all of which end in her death. She knows she can't do it on her own.
And then she just gets bored. Victoria has been a part of a coven for over fifty years and suddenly there is no one. She's lonely and grieving and Kenny is sort of an accident. As much as biting a human and not draining them can be an accident. He's a bit too pretty, even as a human, but at least it's something to look at. He can never be James; never be anything other than entertainment and annoyance all wrapped up together, but it does relieve the boredom. Kenny is willing to follow her around like a little lost puppy; happy to lick at her heels and take whatever she gives him. And he never complains about listening to her rant and rave about the Cullens day in and day out, even if he can't comprehend why she's so pissed off.
Two months after Kenny first wakes up to his new life, bitching about being thirsty – he's graduated from mindless bloody massacre of a homeless man by the docks at least to the ability not to wear his food – Victoria is restless once more and decides that she needs to get out of Seattle and away from Forks. She needs space and time and a good idea that won't get her as dead as James.
And Kenny, unsurprisingly, has never even left the state before. Once he gets through the first few months of newborn bloodbloodblood, Victoria discovers that he's not half interesting. He's not as smart as James, but he'll do. He wants to taste his way across America and Victoria agrees, with barely a moment of hesitation, to let him do just that. Constantly moving is the best thing for them. She's not stupid enough to think the Cullens will just give up. She saw the scars on the blond southern one. He's fought the war and won and if the human child is as important as they all made her out to be, Victoria knows they'll be hunting for her. But America is large and mostly anonymous, and two vampires who move through towns and cities at night don't even make the most obscure news reports.
They reach the east coast in November, just north of the border between Virginia and North Carolina. Kenny spends a long time staring out at the Atlantic from the dockyards in Norfolk until Victoria finally gets bored enough to ask him what he's thinking about.
'Can we go across?' he asks, sounding like a child for the first time since the insane newborn thirst wore off.
'To what? Africa? Europe? Asia? We can go anywhere we want, Kenny.'
'I want to go. There are all those people over there. No one will miss them. We can feast for days and no one will care.'
Victoria stands next to him, looking out across the ocean, and smiles. 'That's not a half bad idea. Let's find a ship.'
They could swim, but that long in salt water without anything to feed on except shark is not her idea of luxury travel. They hop a container ship two days later instead. Victoria knows the minute they break away from the dock that she's leaving behind a red flag. Short of feeding from the limited ship's crew – they've got days to go before they reach land – she and Kenny have gorged themselves on whoever they could find. At least one of the bodies, when it's discovered floating in the harbour, will probably make the news. The Cullens, hopefully, will have no idea it's her.
It turns out the cargo carrier is headed for Lagos on the African coast. Victoria keeps Kenny confined to a tight corner near the bow, well hidden between the containers and well away from anything with a heartbeat. They find a way to entertain themselves for the week. He's not James, but he is a nice distraction.
She didn't really stop to think about how sunny Africa was. They come in to port in the already deafening city of Lagos an hour after dawn. The sky is bright blue and Victoria is hungry again. This time, it isn't Kenny who's chomping at the bit to go and he has to spend the better part of the day trying to stop her from taking a bite from one of the docks crew. When the sun sets, Victoria is annoyed at herself and happy to agree with Kenny's plan to use the cover of darkness to run as far north-east as they can. There are villages by the millions here, and a human here or there will be written off as an animal attack. If they can get far enough into the interior of Africa, away from the coastal cities, it's possible even an entire village won't be missed. The thought makes her smile.
Africa is so different from America. Even the smallest outlaying downs in the rural areas of the central States are not nearly as remote as the majority of this continent. By morning they have passed through the densely populated areas near the ocean and are well on their way towards the dessert. In Nigeria (though Victoria has no idea that that's where they are), they have a better chance of finding food. It doesn't take long. Despite the fact that they are both hungry again, the ingrained need to be careful still preys on the mind. They steal a villager here or there, mostly while they're out collecting water or hunting. They rip the body to pieces and make it look like lions or whatever else passes for the head carnivores in these parts.
Two weeks later they stand on the edge of the end of the world. Victoria has seen many places since she took up with James and Laurent. She has seen the wide desert areas of the southern States, but that is nothing against this landscape.
Kenny starts laughing uncontrollably.
'What the hell is so funny?' she demands, but he's laughing so hard he can't even answer her. Annoyed, Victoria wanders away, leaving him to his humour. They'll have to go around, probably to the west, and follow the coast line up to the Mediterranean. But after just two weeks she's already heartily bored of the sand, the sun and the heat that doesn't physically bother her. The sand, especially. And the fact that Kenny is having far too much fun.
'Oh, come on,' he finally says, coming to stand beside her. 'This is freaking Africa! What's your problem?'
Victoria annoys him, because she isn't quite sure what her problem actually is. 'How about that village?' she asks instead.
Kenny's red eyes glow.
They find a suitable target two days later, on the border of Mali. There can't be more than two dozen people, nearly half of which are children and won't make a great meal; skin and bones and probably diseased as they look. Still, that means the village is less likely to be missed, but Victoria has stopped caring. She hates Africa, hates the people and their taste, hates the weather and just wants back to civilization – such as it is for nomadic vampires. At Kenny's urging they attack in the early morning, and for a few minutes Victoria enjoys the chase, the attack, the blood, like James taught her to. But there are measly few people and it is soon over. Kenny proceeds to clean up, by which he means chucking the bodies in the huts and setting them on fire. If someone does come looking, it's unlikely the locals will know what happened.
'That was fun, right?' he asks as they leave, heading further west back towards the sea.
Victoria remains stonily silent. It wasn't exactly 'fun', but for a brief while it felt like it used to when she and her coven would hunt. She felt the thrill of power and control and the indescribable feeling of gorging herself on a human's essence. And now, already, she wants to feel that again.
It doesn't take much urging on Kenny's part after that. They hit three more villages over the months that follow before they reach the coast again, in Morocco, and return to the cities. Here, it is the tourists that prove the best hunting, a skill for which Kenny seems to have become adept, though not nearly like James had been. He enjoys the chase and finally the kill and Victoria enjoys watching him.
After a few days surrounded by bustling crowds and things worthwhile stealing Victoria begins to come back from the brink of insanity and to realise what they've done. But it's the news report showing in a bar where Kenny has decided to start his hunt one night that brings the point home. Victoria doesn't need to understand the language to get the gist of it. The video shows pictures of the decimation; the first two villages had been destroyed by fire, but the last one they'd hit, just the week before, hadn't burned as much as they had hoped. The massacred bodies were too obvious, even in the grainy images.
Kenny is in the corner, talking up two American backpackers and probably contemplating how to get both of them out into an alley so he and Victoria can have dinner. Victoria doesn't care one bit about dinner now, though. They have much, much bigger problems. If the villages have already made the news in Morocco, the reports will spread and this is the sort of publicity vampires can't have. It may be unexplainable to the humans, but any vampire that has been around for more than a decade will know the truth. And Victoria is old enough to know this will mean trouble.
And old enough to fear their discovery by the Volturi.
Right, please read the following: I am going away for the next 9 days. There will be no update until I get back. Some of you will think I'm evil for starting a story and then running off to the Continent for a holiday, but I figure that most authors don't update more than once a week anyways! I hope I will be forgiven. Once I'm back there will be regular updates until the story (hedging at 12 chapters) is done.