We've hit double digits. Yaay!
Victoria was furious. That stupid newborn had come back without Laurent because apparently he got eaten by giant wolves. She had heard the stories of the children of the moon, how Caius Volturi drove them to extinction. These animals were much larger than the stories of the children of the moon described them. That and the fact that Laurent was killed in the middle of the day led Victoria to believe that they were dealing with something else.
Regardless of what they were, they were obviously protecting the stupid girl, which meant that she needed more vampires for her army. She let Riley think that he was comforting her before she cried about her fears of their army not being strong enough. He gathered a small group and set out to feed and collect more members.
Victoria stared into her fireplace as she said her goodbyes to Laurent. She'd somehow outlived the oldest vampires she knew. The two that brought her into this world, her family. They had both been killed by the people protecting Bella. She wanted to kill that cheeseburger now, more than she ever had before. A small voice in the recesses of her mind told her that it might be the end of her too. "I promise you, James, I will kill Bella Swan, even if it's the last thing I do."
Riley stood on the upper level of an abandoned warehouse. He looked down to see eighteen bodies piled on top of each other in the center of the room. Him and the three newborns he brought with him fed on some people and dropped them off at the warehouse while they went to pick up others from off the street. Everyone was bitten and now, they were all in transition. They writhed around, some screaming at different times.
Two of the newborns he brought with him had run off, he could hear them a few yards away, using their strength to destroy some abandoned cars. The other newborn was right beside him. Diego was almost as old as him. He'd become somewhat of a right-hand man, so Victoria let him stay. The world was so different to him now, but if Riley were to use a phrase from his past, Diego was the closest thing to a best friend.
"It's like something out of a sci-fi movie." Diego's comment pulled Riley out of his thoughts. "What is?" He turned to see him watching the soon-to-be newborns. They stayed connected in a ball, all of their individual movements making them more intertwined. The screams varied in volume and pitch. Sometimes the right combination would occur, and the screaming voices would harmonize.
"It's the thing at the bottom of the hole. The mother alien that shits out all the smaller ones you've been shooting at. You've got to get to the pit after everyone's gotten off the ship and you sacrifice yourself by throwing the bomb at it and blowing the whole base up."
"That's so stupid. Why would you kill yourself?"
"Well, you don't want to do it, but somebody's gotta kill the mother alien."
"Not if you're all on another ship. Just fly away and let the aliens have the ship. They'll starve to death if there are no humans to eat, and the ship is in the middle of space. It'll run out of fuel and with no one navigating, it'll just float off and become another rock in the aether."
Diego gave him a half-hearted punch in the arm, it sounded like two rocks colliding. "Come on, man. That's nowhere near as fun as blowing a bunch of aliens to shit."
"You can still do that, just don't die. Drop the bomb in the hole and run onto the other ship before it goes off." Diego shook his head at this. "How the hell are you gonna drop the bomb and get on the getaway ship?" Riley turned to his friend, a sarcastic smirk appearing on his face. He placed both hands on his friend's broad shoulders and shook him lightly.
"We're vampires, Diego. We can drop that bomb in the pit and make it to the getaway ship before it even reaches the bottom." Diego swatted his hands away. "If we were vampires, we wouldn't be the heroes. Vampires are the monsters."
"Yeah, the chalky, old, and slow ones who are allergic to garlic and wood. We're Op, my friend."
"True." They turned to a window, where they could see one of the vampires throwing a truck off of a building. He and the other vampire cheered as it landed on the car they'd placed below it.
"What are you gonna do, after this?" Riley turned to see the playfulness had left his friends features. "After what?"
"After we fight that other vampire group, the coven. Is Victoria gonna keep making more, are we gonna go around fighting other vampire groups forever. Is she gonna set us free, or kill us all, what's the plan?" Diego's tone was calm, though you could tell which option he preferred.
Riley let out a sigh as he looked back onto the transitioning group, even they had gotten quiet as the tone of the conversation changed. "I don't know, man. She doesn't really tell me much."
"But, aren't you two like. . ." He let the sentence fall off and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Riley threw his hand up to block Diego's face from his vision. "STOP!" They chuckled lightly, glad they could break the tension.
"Kind of. I mean, we fuck, but we're not close or anything. I don't really know anything about her." He could tell that Diego was starting to feel sorry for him.
"What would you do?" He watched as Diego's attention was successfully redirected. His eyes glazed over and a specific smile spread across his face. "I would go somewhere with Bree. We'd go everywhere. She talks about running, sometimes. Just taking off in a random direction and not stopping till we hit the water. Seeing if we're fast enough to run across the ocean."
Riley sighed. The way he talked about her. The look on his face, how his eyes went hazy. He and Victoria didn't have that. She's damn sure never looked at him like that before. She didn't even mention afterward. It was just about getting the army to kill the coven and saving a redhead and a human for last. Nothing else. In fact, he was pretty sure that the person who did make her eyes go hazy was the reason they were doing this in the first place.
She would talk about the coven being three times as big as her coven had been when they met them. How it was just her, Laurent and some guy, and they killed the guy, just because they could. She never gave him a name, and would just skip past any part of any story she was telling if it had him in it. He had never loved someone before, but he imagined that if he did, he would raise an army of the dead to avenge them.
"You could come too." Diego offer, gaining his attention, yet again.
"And what, be the third wheel, the whole time?" He was only half joking.
"Others might come too. We could make our own coven. . ."
"If we survive, and she lets us live after the battle."
"Or before that," Diego said it so softly, that only the vampire standing next to him could have heard it, and he almost missed it over the screaming. They both turned away from each other, and back to watching the transitioning newborns. Riley kept the comment tucked away in his pocket.
He didn't want to abandon or betray Victoria, but he knew for a fact that he couldn't say for sure if she felt the same, and that meant that he needed to consider every outcome of the situation and develop plans accordingly. He trusted Diego, he was the dreamer to his realism. He had no doubt that they could make it on their own. He hadn't spent much time with Bree, but she had to be at least tolerable if Diego was so whipped already.
They spent the next few days in the warehouse waiting for the new lot to come too. Riley asserted his dominance and filled them in on their new lives, abilities, and the agenda. He'd gotten the welcoming song and dance down to a science. He was pretty good at it, by this point. Running back to the base, he couldn't help but think about the offer again.
Being the leader of his own coven, it wasn't the worst idea.
Victoria went to Forks. It was a stupid idea that Laurent and James would have talked her out of doing, but they were gone, and she had to get a little desperate to know how the other side would respond.
She circled the woods of the town three times before she ran into that horrid smell and picked up on the sound of feet coming after her. She took to the trees and turned back to see the giant wolves right on her tail, pun intended.
She giggled at them as she stayed just out of reach. They chased her to the edge of a river. She jumped to the other side and was surprised to see that they did not follow. She took in the sent of the forest around her, no wet dog smell, only the faintest trace of other vampires.
"A town divided by species, how convenient." She waved goodbye and took off, following the general direction of the scents. She came upon a house and stopped, inches from the front door. Laurent's scent was here, and so was the girls, but the rest of the coven was long gone. The house abandoned and dusty.
Victoria watched as her reflection grew a grin that almost sent shivers down her own spine. The sound of pounding feet came back into range, and Victoria ran back to the water. She jumped in and proceeded to swim along the very bottom, all the way back to her cabin.
The coven had left her behind. Unprotected, save for a few guard dogs. Now she knew what the chess board looked like. She would bring her army soon. They'd kill the mutts and She'd torture and mutilate the ever protected Bella Swan. She'd scatter the town with pieces of their bodies. She'd set her army on the dismal population. Then, she'd wait, while word reached them.
They'd come running back to see their safe haven destroyed. Maybe she'd fashion jewelry out of Bella's bones. Shed cover herself in the girl dried up organs and matted hair to drive them into an uncoordinated frenzy. As her army defeated the rest of them, she'd take Edward and tear him into pieces. She'd let his severed head watch as they burned the whole place to the ground. Then she'd travel the world, burying parts of him all over, saving his head and some other parts to play with as she pleased. Finally, she would lock his head in a safe and toss it into the ocean. He'd never get the satisfaction of dying to be reunited with her again. He'd live and suffer until the sun swallowed the planet whole. Victoria cackled hysterically as she walked into her cabin.
The plan was perfect, and she had everything she needed to make sure she didn't fail. Nothing could stop her.
Hey there!
Thanks for sticking with me so far. We're closing in on the meeting and getting into the main story.
That cheeseburger line was a very deep cut if anyone noticed.
Stephanie Meyer, in defense of the nomads, compared the whole ordeal to someone you just met killing your boyfriend over a cheeseburger. It always stuck with me as the perfect way to describe vampires so I had to put it in here, somewhere.
Until next time!