Chapter Two: Backstory
A/N: Thanks to everyone who is reading! I've so enjoyed your comments! And now some of you know the answer to a particular question. How do you get a snippet at the next chapter? Well, you can always review. ;-)
Levi tore loose with a string of words in the traditional language of his people, Quileute. It wasn't widely spoken except by the old ones, but the Pack learned all they could. It was a secret language. When they had begun phasing into wolves again, in the manner of Taha Aki, it had become imperative that they start keeping secrets from everyone.
Even from their parents and children. But not from their imprints.
He shoved the memories deep inside himself and focused on the woman in front of him. Woman? No, she didn't smell like a woman. She smelled like one of them, damn it. A vampire. He himself had been on patrol since her first scenting. Since Linda had died two years ago, he had needed to keep himself occupied and had taken over a majority of the patrols. As many as he could handle without fading entirely into stupidity. Thankfully, there were women who had been good enough to mostly mother Josh...
He heard himself growl, "You're being tracked?" He reined in his temper. She was a bloodsucker but she hadn't known the boundaries and had hurt no one. He tried to remember that. "What the hell? Who tracks a vampire? Who hunts one of you?"
She tilted her head and angled her brow to look up at him with a tangible dry humor. "You guys?"
Levi pushed out an exasperated sound. "Besides werewolves."
"Vampires."
"Like you?"
Bella the bloodsucker held very still as her focus shifted to her feet – Levi had noticed she was able to hold stone-still. Still like a statue at a museum. "Not like me. I am not one of them. I will never be one of them. No. But yes." She paused and lifted her head to meet his and Ephraim's eyes. "They've got red eyes, the trackers."
Levi didn't know what to think about that. On the one hand, he wanted the bloodsucker gone. Gone and far away from his son, damn it. The presence of the Cullens had made him, Ephraim and Quil start phasing – a circumstance Levi both hated and appreciated – and even Young Quil had started. Levi had hoped that the phasing would end, though, since there were no more vampires.
Except there was. Right here in front of him. She had to leave.
"Stay." Ephraim's surprising directive made Levi jerk involuntarily. He stared at the Alpha of the Pack. Ephraim only had eyes for the bloodsucker, it seemed. The possibility made Levi twitch again. Damned stupid vampires! "Stay with Levi, you'll be safe in our territory until we decide what to do with you. How many follow?"
"Two," the female said, her voice wary and edged even in the one word.
He wondered. "Are they warriors?"
The female blinked. "Yes."
"And you're clearly not," Levi stated flatly. An unwelcome need to protect a lonely female started spiking in his gut, but he quashed it. "Look, bl – Bella–"
The barest line appeared between her arched brows as she held up her hands. "Look. I don't want anyone to be in danger because of me. If you point me in the right direction, I'll just get out of here and leave you safe, all right?"
Levi's tongue got stuck on his immediately-thought affirmative and Ephraim would have negated it anyway. "No, Bella. Let's, uh. Hm," the Chief rubbed on his jaw with his knuckles as he scanned the local trees and held private counsel in his own thoughts. "There's a cabin. I know that the rain isn't hurting any of us, but I'd be more comfortable inside."
"The trapper's cabin?" It was about half a mile in on the other side of the Reservation. "We'll need a fire, then."
"Why?" the female – Bella – asked. She gripped the strap to her haversack tightly and Levi found himself actually wincing.
"Sorry. I only meant to dry clothes."
Ephraim had the gall to laugh out loud. "Did you think we'd run across the Rez just to set you on fire? Come on, Bella. Run with us." With a subtle hand signal, Ephraim directed Levi to flank Bella while he himself led the way through the wet forest, avoiding all the homes of the villagers on their way to the other side of their land.
Levi wondered about phasing again, just in case, but Ephraim had not indicated that there would be any real danger from this vampire.
They ran, the vampire with a silence which seemed to punctuate the rhythmic breaths Levi heard from himself and Ephraim. He and his chief had run in tandem times without count. He knew how the ground felt under his paws and under his bare feet as he felt it now. Knew the sounds that should surround them. Knew the scents that meant safety versus the ones that hinted at danger.
He was surrounded by "danger signals" at the moment, but they were all associated with the vampire who had been invited to share her story with them on the Reservation. It felt all kinds of wrong in his gut but –
But he also felt he and Ephraim were doing the right thing by giving this bloodsucker temporary shelter. What the hell?
Her steps were silent, more silent than the woods around them. He and the rest of the Pack had learned that their padded paws allowed them to run with a near-silence through the forest – barefoot, he did fairly well, too – but the vampire was even better at it.
"How big is your territory?" the bloodsucker asked with a puff of breath.
"Not too big. We'll be at the cabin in a minute. There's some honeysuckle that grows nearby –" Levi bit off the rest of his sentence. Linda had loved honeysuckle.
"Not too bad for an abandoned trapper's cabin," Ephraim offered, veering to the right a little. There, between a double-trunked oak and a low-branched tree of the same species, was the cabin. "And I think we're just in time."
Sure enough, the clouds seemed to start dumping bucketfuls of water on their head, through the cover of the trees. The impact wasn't so much drenching as it was annoying, Levi decided as they slowed up just in front of the cabin's door.
"Looks cozy," their "guest" said, her voice conciliatory, Levi decided. "It'll be nice to get out of the rain."
Ephraim inhaled deeply, as did Levi. "I only smell squirrel," he informed his chief. They exchanged a smile and Levi found himself cocking a smile at the bloodsucker. "I don't guess you eat squirrel?"
She eyed him narrowly, her eyes still golden. "Only when I'm really hungry."
"Come in, you two. Let's get the fire started so we can get dried off. Bella?"
With way more manners than Levi thought were necessary in dealing with a vampire, Bella was ushered into the small cabin. Her sniffing at first offended him but then he realized she was just doing as he would have done in an unfamiliar place: Getting an understanding of his surroundings through her nose.
He couldn't even remember when he didn't rely on his sense of smell. He had started phasing wolf when the Cullen coven came to the Hoquiam lands, back in 1936. He had been twenty-five at the time. In appearance, he was still twenty-five, though in actual years he was thirty-three. Though he and the others hadn't discussed it, they all were kind of planning to remain phasing until their children were adults, to keep them safe and to know that they'd be able to protect them against any threat. It was an option they had – the ability to protect – and they all planned on exploiting it to its fullest.
"Would you like to sit down, Bella?" Ephraim offered, indicating one of the two rough-hewn chairs with a wave of his arm.
Levi didn't heed her answer. Instead, he turned. "I'm going to get some wood to burn."
"It'll smoke," the chief cautioned.
"We can still dry off with it." With that, he jerked the door open and left again. There was wood still, under a rotting shelter that was set up on one side of the stone chimney outside. No mortar had been used in its construction – it was all dry masonry. Plants grew in small pockets up the stony column, but Levi didn't really worry about that. There wasn't enough for a fire, and if they got smoked out, no loss.
So what were they going to do with the bloodsucker? Why was Ephraim going to such lengths to learn about her? Well, it was good to know what threats were out there, that was one reason, Levi supposed. And if she had danger following her, it might wind up on the Pack's doorstep and that was something they had to know. Fair enough. And if she had to feed, she was a proven animal hunter, so it was more than likely that she wouldn't endanger their families and friends.
None of this made him less grouchy as he returned to the cabin's interior. Ephraim and the bloodsucker were seated, facing each other and conversing casually.
"So they've got POW's over there in Michigan?"
Bella nodded. "I didn't talk to them of course, but yes. They're in barracks and working. It seemed – relatively comfortable."
Ephraim stiffened and pushed himself up from the chair, back straight. "It is never comfortable to be confined, Bella. My people have been pushed to small corners of land and even when it's lush, as it is here, it's never as comfortable as it would be being able to live wherever we wished without judgment."
Bella rose too, Levi saw as he stacked the wood on the flat river rock that made up the hearth. Primitive this place might be, but it had been built sensibly a century or so ago. "Chief Black," she stammered, "I – I meant no offense. I know what it's like to be confined against my will."
Levi paused then to glance up at her. There was no light in the room, save what came in from the three open squares that served as windows, but her skin still seemed to glow faintly to his heightened senses. Wet clothes pressed against her form and it irritated him to no end that he noticed. She had set her haversack on the floor, so her hair fell in a dark wet river down her back to her waist. She smoothed a section of it off her face with a grimace as Levi determinedly refocused his attention to starting a fire. Let Ephraim talk to her.
"I want to hear about it, Bella. I do. And to hear who or what is following you." Thunder rolled over them and the rain started to pound hard on the aged roof of the small structure. There were broad eaves, so very little water splashed indoors. "Then I'll tell the Council and we'll see what is to be done with you."
Bella nodded, stepping to the eastern window, to the left of the fireplace. "Fair enough. I have nothing to hide."
"I'll phase then, and let my clothes dry out while you tell your story."
Both Levi and the bloodsucker snapped their heads in his direction. "What?" they protested simultaneously.
"Ephraim..." Levi began.
"Worried about being the only human with the vampire, Levi?" Ephraim teased, his good humor never too far from the surface. "I'll be right here, I promise."
Bella snorted quietly and covered her mouth as she looked again out the window. "I'm guessing you'll be all... All wolfy while your clothes dry?"
"Yeah."
"I'll just cover my eyes then."
"When I'm phased, Bella, I want to hear your story."
"Will you be able – Oh, of course. Yeah, sure. I'll tell you."
Before Levi had entirely wrapped his mind around the whole idea, Ephraim had stripped and phased and Bella had arranged the chief's clothes in front of the fire over the back of a chair. For himself, Levi felt the heavy discomfort of wet denim rubbing against his skin and wished he could get dried off, too. It helped to sit closer to the fire, so he did, while Ephraim backed away from it, nearer to the door.
The vampire remained standing, casting an occasional look at the wet canvas haversack. "I told you I don't remember my last name. They think, though, that I was about twenty when I was changed."
Ephraim was sitting on the floor, his tail curling back around his haunches, ears at attention. He was a black wolf and appeared as an ominous shadow as the flames grew in smoky intensity within the stone confines of the hearth. He made a deep chuffing sound that Levi knew was irritation, but he didn't know if it was the situation that had the Alpha Wolf irritated or the vampire's account of herself.
Levi took the chair that she had vacated, ignored the burnt-syrup-over-death smell and straddled it, not quite looking at her and not quite looking away. She irritated him but he had to listen for the good of the people.
"I don't remember anything but the pain," the vampire continued. She stood upright, her posture model-perfect as she focused her gaze on the stones above the fire. "And when I stopped burning –"
"Burning?" Levi blurted. "But I thought you couldn't survive a fire?" The legends said so, anyway.
The female angled her head to meet his eyes. Her own were distant as she spoke without passion. "The change – when one is made a vampire – is like burning for three days. The venom of the siring vampire goes through the body, burning the humanity away. We feel it all. For most of us, it is our first memory and it will never fade."
Damn, Levi thought. That's a lot to survive. His unwilling respect for her rose a few notches. He nodded slowly, wordlessly asking her to continue.
"Aro – the leader of the Volturi, the one who changed me – found that I had a gift and he wanted me to stay with them."
Ephraim chuffed with a questioning whine to the sound. Levi started to translate but the vampire understood.
"A gift. Some vampires have special abilities when they are changed. Mine is to keep my mind private. I have a shield, Aro said. A shield that kept him out of my head when he touched me. My thoughts are my own and I can't be heard or influenced through my mind through the special powers of other vampires."
"Are you, like, bulletproof or something?" Levi wondered out loud, thinking she sounded like some comic book hero. "Why would you worry about being tracked if you have a shield?"
The vampire went on to tell him how her shield wasn't like that. And then she shared about how she felt she had been used by her sire – this Aro person that Levi disliked from the first mention of his name – for experiments with his own intrusive gift of mind-reading. Then, she detailed the ways in which she tried to escape.
"I first tried in 1905. I got as far as Rome before they found me." The fire hissed as Levi added a few slender branches to it. "They brought me back and... Aro was displeased."
Levi couldn't help himself. "What happened?"
She met his dark gaze with her own darkening one. It alarmed him to see how rapidly her eyes shifted in color. "I really would rather not discuss it. It has no bearing on this situation. Just know, Levi Uley, that I would do almost anything not to have it repeated." She paused and moved to lean against the wall farthest from him. "And it was repeated. I tried again in 1909 and again in 1910. That had been foolish of me. But I did it. They were on to me by then and I barely got out of Volterra. But then..." She smiled a little and looked down at her shoes. Levi noticed that she wore lace-up sneakers. It was a detail so oddly human that it made him blink and stare at her again.
"But then what?" he whispered, caught up in her tail of rebellion. That a vampire would rebel against their own kind surprised him. In a good way. Which felt wrong to him but also right. Right that she should rebel. That she would try to live on her own.
Ephraim relaxed, sinking into a resting position like – like a dog did when at home and secure. He scratched his claws lightly on the floor in a "go on" motion that Levi had to smile at, albeit reluctantly. Weirdest thing in the world, he thought. "This is like something out of a children's book," he murmured.
"What?" Bella asked. He thought of her in terms of her name for possibly the first time and that had him shaking his head, too.
"A werewolf and a vampire and a man were in a cabin in the woods..." he said, as if he were reading a story to Joshua. "Sounds like a story for Halloween." A bright flash of white teeth caught his attention and Levi smiled in return. He couldn't seem to help himself. "So. How'd you get to the Reservation, vampire lady?"
"I stowed away," she confessed, a challenge in her eyes. They were golden again and Levi learned something he hadn't picked up from the Cullens. Black eyes did not only mean hunger. They were also an emotional indicator. He put that information in his mind to remember later. He refused, though, to answer her challenge. He only asked, "When did you do that?"
"In 1912. The ship, um, sank...?" Again, that playful challenge in her eyes. He didn't get the joke and he wasn't going to ask.
Ephraim, though, laughed in the way they had when they were in their wolf form. I'll ask him later, or wait 'til we're both phased and get it from him, Levi told himself.
After a minute spent staring at her, waiting for her to continue – okay, so he felt kind of like an idiot for not asking about the ship but also he felt like he didn't want to encourage her. Hell, Ephraim was already trying to be friendly. With a vampire. After a minute, then, he waved his arm in his own "go on" kind of gesture. "So you got here after the ship sank and then what?" He knew vampires didn't have to breathe and he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of rubbing it in that she could have walked across the ocean to get to America.
"Well, I've spent the last thirty years or so working my way this far." She shrugged in a self-deprecating manner that was – again – very human. "I've had some narrow misses. The trackers... The men following me?" Levi and Ephraim both nodded in their own ways. "One is named Demetri, the other James. Demetri is from Corsica, originally. James was originally from New York, if you can believe that. He was changed in the 1890's. Anyway, one or the other have them have been hunting me down periodically for the last thirty years. I am not going back to Volterra," she stated, her voice suddenly hard and flat. It reminded him of a belly-flop off one of the cliffs. Pain was conveyed in tone, but a pain so much a part of her that it didn't register in any other way. "I don't want them to come here, though. I can see you're watch-wolves or something and I don't want anyone hurt."
"Killing vampires is what we do, Bella," Levi reminded her, rising off the chair and putting more wood on the fire. Ephraim rose, too, as the sound of the rain had decreased somewhat. "We aren't afraid of two vampires. Trust me."
She studied him, then turned her focus to Ephraim, who was stretching out wolf-style by elongating his torso and stiffening his tail before kind of doing that in reverse. Then he shook his head. Levi shook his, too. Ephraim was deliberately downplaying the threat they made to a vampire, but he figured that was for Bella's benefit. "I will. Trust you, I mean. Chief Black? Do you need me to leave?"
Ephraim made a surprised sound from his muzzle and Levi chuckled. "Uh, he just wants to change, I'm thinking."
"I'll go outside."
Ephraim barked softly; Levi understood. With a sigh, cursing his still-damp denim trousers, he crossed to the door. "I'll come with you." Guard duty. This was looking to be a big pain in the butt.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle and Levi wondered when he'd get to go home to his son. Within the cabin, he could hear – and imagined vampire ears did, too. – Ephraim walking on human feet to the chair where his clothing had dried. The sounds of denim against skin, of a chair being scooted across the floor. Bella stood motionless against the side of the cabin.
"You can come in now," Ephraim called with a smile in his voice.
Levi exchanged an impassive look with Bella and they returned indoors. "Now what?" he demanded of his Alpha.
"Now you stay here. I'll go down to the Council. My guess is that Quil already has them alerted. When we have a plan, I'll come back."
"I'm starving," Levi stated.
Bella's lips twitched. "You could always hunt with me."
"No way!" both men called, disgust in their voices. "We've tried it, Bella, but it's not what we do if we have a choice."
Levi sighed loudly as Ephraim left the cabin. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"We caught you hunting on our lands," he reminded her. "Do you need to hunt?"
His stomach took that moment to rumble. They both looked at his bare midriff with a pair of smiles. "If you can stay here hungry, I can stay here hungry. It's only fair," she said. "Maybe you can tell me your story, since we're still stuck waiting together?"
"No." The denial was immediate and almost instinctive. Her smile disappeared and the brief flash of camaraderie went with it. "I'll follow my chief's example and get my clothes dry."
Chapter Three is titled…
Naked
Yep.
[Don't ever worry. I have rated this as T and it will remain such. I promise.]