This one belongs to AnjieNet and for the love of cullens.
Prompt #11: Defeat
I wasn't used to creeping around.
After all, being at the top of the food chain and for all intents and purposes immortal tended to make one fairly bold. At least when it came to walking around on cloudy days.
But no, not any more. Back in Seattle after not another run, but the first direct flight from Fairbanks, I was reduced to slinking around campus like some kind of vicious criminal.
Though going by the statute of limitations on murder, I supposed both descriptors were accurate enough.
You see, Tanya had been righter than she'd ever dreamed, and as a result, the beautiful, knowing smirk she'd worn as I'd fled those northern icy confines would taunt me for decades to come.
Twenty-four hours?
I'd lasted less than ten.
After having finally reached my destination, understand, I'd had no other form of distraction – aside from escaping the claws of a willing and tenacious wishful lover, of course. But in all seriousness, as I'd traipsed through the Alaskan wilderness, searching for sport, for food, for anything to occupy my attention, instead, as if my own mind were out to smite me, everywhere I'd looked – on every tree, every rock, every web of bony antlers – I'd found that damnable, delusional girl's face. Those dark, reproving eyes. The hard, quivering brace of her jaw. The way her lips had stretched and frowned as she spat at me to be on my merry way.
Ignoring the outrageous and nearly all-consuming allure of her blood for a moment, the girl's behavior was downright infuriating, not to mention naïve and foolish in the extreme. Threatening a vampire, especially one who wanted nothing more than to eat the one doing the threatening, was just bad form.
Yet at the same time, however, there was something about the challenge this girl presented. It wasn't simply the puzzle of her vault of a mind, but also how she'd named me for what I was. Very few humans could name us on sight. In fact, I'd never encountered a single one who had landed on the truth by more than happenstance. But not this girl. No, she knew immediately what I was; I'd heard it in the quickened wet thump of her heart.
So for a creature such as myself, one who was rarely gifted the sensation of surprise, I came to the conclusion that she was utterly fascinating. Captivating even, never mind I knew next to nothing about her.
Fury, curiosity, and raging bloodlust was a very, very dangerous combination, by the way.
It turned my resolve to mush and somehow convinced me that the girl held no power over me after all. It told me that she was a mere mortal and that my internal fortitude was mightier than my baser instincts. And it made me tell my family that I needed no supervision.
How wrong I was.
Especially when the moment I stepped into my first nine o'clock class, after having skipped that first week, that same pair of angry eyes widened in shock and the scent of her blood hit me like a ton of bricks.
Again.
PROMPT #12?
Quick note: Since it's been brought up by a couple of people, I am using a lot of canon here in the beginning (and will use other pieces as we go along), but this won't just be a retelling of Twilight. Keep in mind at 7k words, we're still in the set-up phase, if you will, and I'll contend a mostly canon Edward would behave well… mostly in canon given the circumstances. Hence the Midnight Sun parallels. New stuff coming up (after all, we have a Bella who already knows about vamps and we don't know how she got that info…). No worries there. Thanks for reading!
