Double the length than usual!
This chapter is for reviewer Esmeraude11 who requested: the first time some fragment of Lucifer shows herself to Edward and the Cullens or even to the Quiluetes.
Many thanks to everyone else who reviewed as well :]
Bella looks at the pale children with golden eyes who are arrayed around the cafeteria table like statues of long dead royalty, and thinks to herself, abominations.
She smiles, bright and sharp and a little too hungry, and makes her way towards their table.
The children, the human children, maintain a careful distance around their table. They are an island of cold still silence in the crowded room.
She sees the way that they play at being human, the careful, measured adjustment of limbs at random intervals, eyes that don't blink quite often enough, and the trays of food that sit in front of them. Every few minutes one of them will pick at their food, move it around and around in each of the little plastic squares.
The male with flaxen hair and soldier's posture slices away at the meat product on his tray in a way that manages to seem threatening. Bella thinks it's cute.
He is the first to react to her approach, his shoulders tensing ever so slightly and his eyes darkening to something like bronze. What would be confusion in a human translates into a familiar wariness in the pale creature's eyes. His movements still, into a tense preparedness.
The others, two males and two females watch her out of their periphery. They are inhumanly still, their postures uncomfortably stilted. It makes her want to twitch how obviously other these children are.
She honestly thought that they'd be better at being subtle, spending as much time around humans as they do. But perhaps they don't need to be, she thinks as she looks at the children milling around the room, obviously unaware of the creatures within their midst. People are really very good at explaining away what they don't understand, and barring that, ignoring it. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
Not really the best survival strategy, but considering the human population of Earth it seems to be working for them.
Bella nabs a chair from a nearby table, drags it to the one the creatures are sitting at, and drops herself down into it in a boneless sprawl. The boy with the unreasonably windswept coppery-brown hair stares at her as if torn between wanting to crack her skull open and inspect her brain and running far, far away. The others are also staring at her, mostly in a sort of wary confusion. Except the big one. He's gone sort of vague and there's a rather faint smile stretching across his pale lips.
She stares back, mostly at the squinty windswept one but she also manages to stare at the others in her periphery. She's got this. She's never once lost a staring contest that she can remember. This is, of course, a necessary step in asserting her dominance over these creatures and not at all a childish whim. She narrows her eyes and widens her smile past the point of public decency. Copper-brown flinches on the inside (not on the outside, his face remains passive, but Bella can tell anyway) and looks away. HA. Bella wins.
The others cast quick worried glances at their...comrade? coven-mate? Whatever it is that they call each other. She never bothered asking Victoria about things like that. She had better things to do with Victoria's time than ask silly questions. Fun things.
She leans forward, arms on the table, smirk on her face, and drawls, "Well. Isn't this adorable. What's a bunch of cute lil vamps like you doin' in a place like this? ".
A/N. As always if anyone has a particular request just leave it in a review and I'll get to it when it fits in the story