I didn't actually black out, despite the blow to the head. Honestly, I think the jarring pain that shot up my ravaged left arm upon impact after being thrown was enough to keep me conscious no matter how hard the kick to my temple. That's what it was, I realized, after the dizzy, sickening few seconds of seeing stars. Whoever had yanked me out of the car had slammed a foot into my temple hard enough to knock me on my side. When I could see straight, I rolled as quietly as I could to my other side so I could see what was happening, eyes wide and terrified. Had Edward come for me? Had he heard what I'd said to James, and gone into a rage?
James was still in his hunter-crouch, poised to pounce or lunge, face twisted with animal fury. And standing between him and me, hair flipped casually over one shoulder, was Victoria.
I tried to keep my breathing as quiet as possible, though shock made me want to gasp. The redheaded woman—vampire—wasn't in a fighting pose at all, one hip cocked to the side, her hand resting on it with brash, cavalier confidence. Her back was to me, but I could hear the lilting, throaty roll of her laughter.
"Oh, James, and to think I was worried!" She said his name so casually, warmly, even, like it was her right to use it. I supposed it was, but it stung just the same. What stung more, to my dismay, was the sight of James easing out of the crouch to lean against the ruined side of the Taurus, one elbow lifting to rest on the hood, the other hand dipping into the pocket of his jeans. One corner of his mouth tilted up in a familiar smirk.
"Victoria," he said, drawing out the name. "What the hell are you doing here?" The words should have been hard, angry, but instead he sounded almost amused. Lying on the ground with my heart pounding and my tongue stinging, I nearly missed the lightning-quick flash of his eyes to mine before he returned his gaze to his former lover's face. I did catch it, though, and caught the message in it: don't move. She stepped forward, her hand going from her hip to trace a light pattern on his chest. I watched, frozen, almost afraid to breathe lest she realize I wasn't actually unconscious.
"When you… disappeared," she began, her finger drawing a circle around the breast pocket of his jacket, "I didn't know what to think. So I went to the only source of information I could think of." James lifted his chin as her hand spiraled up towards his collarbone, nostrils flaring. Victoria chuckled again, and continued. "I asked the Cullens." At the name, my lips parted, my body tensing. "And what did they tell me?" James hummed, almost a purr, and rolled his head on his shoulders.
"I don't know," he drawled. "What did they tell you?"
"That you had run off with their little human friend. The girl from the field that day, the one you wanted to hunt." She stopped, but there was a clear delight in the brief silence, an obvious dramatic pause. James tilted his head, the panther once more.
"And?" Victoria stepped closer, mere inches between them now. James's eyes flicked to mine once more, or maybe I just imagined it. I held my breath, listening with everything I had.
"And," she went on, "the little pixie one, the one who sees things… She told me the most interesting thing. It made the mind-reader very upset, you know. He practically threw a tantrum," she added, amused. "He wanted to come with me, but they convinced him it was useless. I still came, though. I'm not so quick to believe in visions." James bent towards her, one hand still in his pocket, the other absently twining a lock of her wild red-gold hair.
"What did she tell you, Victoria?" he asked, voice barely loud enough for me to hear. She leaned into him, tilting her face up to whisper something in his ear. James jerked his head away, brows going down, and Victoria threw back her head and laughed. "But here I came all this way and you were eating her after all! So she must have been wrong."
"Must have been," James agreed. He sounded so controlled that I dropped my eyes to his left hand; sure enough, I could see it clenching through the pocket of his jeans. Victoria purred, slipping her hands along his shoulders.
"So why don't we share her and go find something a little more wild? Make… a night of it…" she added, and licked his cheek. James inhaled sharply, his eyes going feral. I swallowed hard, trying to push myself up but forgetting not to use my broken wrist. I fell back to the ground with hiss of pain, and Victoria spun around. She saw me, her mouth curving wickedly, and ran her tongue along her lower lip. "Mm," she said, one hand still on James's shoulder, "she's a feisty one. I can see why you like her." She took a step towards me, eyes flashing to black, and I scrambled backwards in a pathetic, awkward crabwalk. Before Victoria had gotten more than a foot, James's hand darted from his pocket and caught her by the arm. She froze, twisting her head towards him, body still poised to come for me.
"She's mine," James said, voice low and strained. Whole body shaking, I focused on his face. He was looking at the other vampire, but his nostrils were flaring regularly and I knew he was overloading on the waves of my fresh terror as well as the undeniable lust radiating from the redhead. Victoria frowned.
"Yours? I know you're possessive, but don't I get a free pass?" She tugged at her arm. I couldn't see the movement, but James must have tightened his grip because Victoria winced and stopped pulling. With an irritated huff, she shook her arm free and stepped out of the way. "Fine," she said, glancing at me. "Kill her, then. I'm bored here."
I stopped inching backwards, my eyes locked on James. He stood before the Taurus, body straining forwards like a dog on point, everything about him taut. There was an instant of just that, just me on the ground and him by the car with Victoria standing watch like some nightmarish critic of our little play. Then I was on my feet, mind blank with a kind of white noise, arm screaming with the pain of having shoved myself up as I ran as fast as I could for the trees.
My heart was hammering so quickly that I couldn't even hear the separate beats, just a steady thrum of blood pumping through my veins as I hurled myself through the air with as much speed as my body would allow. There was nothing but running, nothing but getting as far away from the blackness eating up the air behind me, the blackness that had been threatening to take me over from the day Edward Cullen came into my life. I made the treeline, a low branch slicing a thin fiery line across one cheek, blood pounding in my ears. Then, my foot caught on a downed mess of trunks and I went sprawling, landing in wet leaves and mud. I screamed when I fell, more out of surprise than anything else, and managed to claw my way to my knees before he was on me.
James leaped over the fallen tree I'd tripped on and twisted in the air, landing directly in front of me. He went down in that awful, predatory crouch instantly upon hitting the earth, one hand shooting out to knock me backwards. I toppled, arms windmilling in a futile play for balance, and went down on my back in the undergrowth. I flung my good arm up in front of my face as James fell on me, catching him in the throat with my mud-smeared forearm. He snarled and batted it away, slamming me down by the shoulders when I tried to roll out from under him. I screamed again, the cry dissolving into a ragged sob, twisting my face away and squeezing my eyes shut against the sight of him on top of me, totally lost to the animal need to feed. The tenderness, the hesitance of when he'd touched me in the car, was gone, ripped away by Victoria's throaty laughter and my sweet, sweet fear.
James was heavy on me, knees pressing into the ground on either side of my hips, hands hard on my shoulders as he lowered his head and roughly nuzzled my throat. This time, when I felt his teeth on me, the scrape was abrasive and painful and I sobbed again, an awful, wheezing noise, the side of my face pressed into rotten leaves and wet moss and the musky stench of mud.
"Don't," I said as his teeth closed around the side of my throat, not biting yet, just testing my skin the way a cat will test a mouse before tearing it in half. "Please, James, don't do this, not like this, not like this, oh fuck, oh god, oh god, James, please!" The words became a spill, a torrent, helpless and breathless and torn from somewhere deep inside me. He paused, mouth hot on my neck, hot with my sweat and terror and humanity. "James," I said again, desperate, opening my eyes to stare wildly at the undergrowth and tree trunks I could see directly to my right. "James, you can hear me, I know you can hear me, James, please!" There was a terrible moment of hard, deep pain as his teeth tightened and dug into my flesh, and then his head lifted. I swung my head upright, frantically searching for some sign of him beneath the hunger. His eyes, black and dangerous and cruel, stared back unblinkingly. The forest around us was very still.
Then, he took a ragged breath.
"Bella," he said, eyes wavering. I didn't dare move. James swallowed, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were red. A flood of relief so intense I nearly fainted swept my system. He shook his head, seeming almost confused. "I really want to bite you," he told me hoarsely. "Why aren't I?"
"You don't want to kill me," I said, nearly crying with it, the words blurring together. "Oh, Jesus, James, you don't want to kill me." Slowly, as if forcing himself away from a fifty-dollar buffet, he sat back on his knees and let me hike myself up on my elbows beneath him.
"She'll expect me to do it," he said then, more to himself than to me. "She'll think something's… wrong…" He frowned, eyes going distant, and I thought of the way his face had changed when Victoria had whispered whatever Alice had seen in his ear. I swallowed, not really wanting to wait for him to decide that, whether he wanted to or not, killing me really was the only option. My suicidal impulse in the Taurus, now that I'd been horrifyingly close to a death far more vicious than the one I'd foolishly imagined when he'd asked me what I wanted, was well and truly gone.
"Drink, then," I suggested shakily, before I could talk myself out of it. "Drink from me, but don't… don't take it all. Tell her you're keeping me for that. Tell her I taste better than anyone else. Tell her anything." His mouth twisted distractedly before the words sunk in, and then James's eyes snapped down to mine.
"What?" I was breathing hard again, my heart fluttering somewhere around my throat.
"Cut me somewhere and drink enough to prove you did. I won't get—I won't get what you have, and you won't have to kill me, and she won't think you've lost your mind." He studied my face, as if searching for some kind of trick, and then gave a short, humorless laugh.
"I'd have to stop," he said. "I'd have to stop before I took too much."
"You stopped before," I reminded him stubbornly, shaking my hair away from my face. James's face went very still. He tilted his head towards me, breathed in.
"You trust me, then?" he asked. I took in a breath, let it out.
"I do," I lied, and then he'd flashed a jackknife from his jeans pocket and my stomach shrieked as he opened a gash just below my ribcage. I shrieked too, good hand flying up to fist in his ponytail as he shoved my shirts up around my breasts and bent his head to my abdomen.
It hurt. It hurt bad. My stomach felt on fire, my head going woozy as he drank. His hands slid roughly from just beneath my breasts along the curve of my waist to my hips, thumbs pressing into the knobs of bone that arched alongside my belly. I bucked my hips, spine arching, hand spasming at the nape of his neck as my heels kicked the useless watchful earth. He groaned against me, low and sexual and hungry, and the sound sent a jolt of pure lust through the pain. James dragged his head up, chin smeared crimson, and kissed me on the mouth. He swallowed my gasp, my own blood sharp and metallic as his tongue tangled with mine. The kiss was brief, passionate, ferocious, and then he ducked his head again and lifted me up by the hips to meet him as he returned to the wound on my stomach. I cried out as his mouth invaded me, my blood racing to him, my heart pumping for me, for him, for this. He let go of my waist, hands struggling with the waistband of my pants; I tilted my head back as my own blood dried sticky and warm around my mouth, and wriggled my hips to help him shove the sweatpants down my legs. I felt the ground, cold and damp against my bare skin. James laughed, guttural, the wet sound of blood leaving my body mixing with the vibration. I tugged at his shirt, mindless, lost somewhere in a swirling fog of pain and desire, and he whipped his jacket off and lifted his head just briefly enough for me to yank the shirt away. His hands fumbled at his belt and I sunk my teeth into my lower lip, snarling, hands snaking up his bare chest to claw down his back as he managed to jerk down the zipper on his jeans.
He thrust into me with no hesitation, whole body moving with the same primal rhythm as he drew blood from my stomach and angled my hips with his own. A harsh, shocked sound fell from my lips as my head whipped from one side to the other, my red-stained mouth falling open, my broken wrist slamming up above my head as my good hand ripped away the band that held his ponytail and wound tightly in his hair. James growled, the rumbling going from his chest to mine, and I struggled to stay conscious as blood loss and adrenaline swept my head into a dizzy spin. I was moving with him now, my hand in his hair keeping his head pressed against my stomach, my own eyes squeezed shut as I felt his body moving in mine. There had never been anything like this. There would never be anything like this.
When I came, it was with a violent, crashing burst of spotty white light. I gasped, yanking his head up and kissing him hard enough to hurt, blood tacky on my cheeks and wet in my mouth. He kissed me back, shuddering, before tearing his head away and fastening his lips once more to my stomach. My hand fell back, hitting the damp earth with a hazy, slow-motion smack, and I felt him pull away as the world began to go dark.
My consciousness was dim at best as James lifted his head at last, my breath coming in shaky, uneven little pulls. I rolled my head slightly to watch him work my pants back up my legs to settle loosely at my hips, my lips moving soundlessly as James did up his own zipper and turned to grab his abandoned shirt. I lifted my right hand dazedly, trying to touch him, maybe, but it fell back mere inches off the ground.
"Don't try to move," he said roughly, an undertone of panic running through his tone, or maybe I just imagined that. I was quite sure, though, that he folded the white undershirt and held it against the wound on my belly, hands firm and strong as he applied pressure to the gash. I tried to look down, tried to see what he'd done to me, but all I could make out over the fragile heaving of my own chest were the backs of his hands, stained red, more blood seeping up through his fingers.
Keeping one hand on the folded shirt, James managed to roll me up to brace my shoulders with his other arm. He snagged his jacket and tucked it around my waist.
"Hold onto that," he told me, taking my right hand and placing it over the makeshift compress on my abdomen. I blinked, mouth very dry, and tried to press down. Doing so hurt too much, and I let out a weak cry of pain as he bit out a curse and swung me up into his arms. My left arm dangled in the air, the splint knocking against his knee as he ran with me. I had a brief sense of déjà-vu, remembering him walking with me in the inn earlier, but now his arms were almost too tight, his stride fast enough that my eyes hurt watching the trees blaze by.
We reached the ruined Taurus in a matter of seconds, James twisting one hand to apply pressure to the compress when it became clear that I was unable to do anything more than whimper. Victoria was sitting on the roof of the car, her legs swinging childishly in and out of the passenger seat through the hole left by the door that now rested at a jagged angle on the ground. When she saw us, she jumped down and cocked her head in the same darkly inquisitive way that James did.
"Correct me if I'm wrong," she said, lips turning down in a pout, "but that doesn't look dead."
"She's more fun alive," he told her, and I let out a short, humorless laugh. Neither of them looked at me. Victoria paused, studying him, and then smirked.
"She was right, wasn't she?" James's hold on me tightened another notch. "The Cullen girl."
"Alice," I whispered, and again, was ignored by both.
"Of course not," James scoffed, taking another step forward. Victoria shook her head.
"Don't lie to me, James," she warned him, shoulders rising dangerously. "I know you."
"Then you know to leave now," he replied coldly, the feral, wicked heat of their last conversation gone. Victoria smiled, just as cold.
"Don't worry," she said. "I want no part in this. We had good times, but if you're going to turn into another pathetic human-lover, I don't-"
"I'm not," James broke in harshly, taking another instinctive step towards her, "turning into one of those—" He stopped, shook his head. "It doesn't matter, Victoria. There's nothing for you here."
"Not even you?" she asked, and for the first time I saw the hurt simmering just below the affected disdain. I remembered him talking about her in the car, the slight laugh, what I could now recognize as fondness. Twelve years. They'd been together for twelve years, and now, after three days with me, he was telling her to go.
James didn't answer for a long time. Then, Victoria ducked her head and laughed, eying the ground, shaking out her hair.
"So you're really doing this," she said, a half-smile tilting her full lips. James just watched her steadily, face impassive. "All right."
"You won't come after us," he said, not a question, and she nodded once.
"That's a little ironic," Victoria said, voice light over the disappointment I could read in her too-contained stance. "After everything, all we owe each other is staying out of the way."
"Was it ever going to be something else?" he asked, and she shrugged, conceding the point. And then, while the night came ever on, while I huddled in James's arms and bled, Victoria turned and vanished into the treeline.
As soon as she was gone, James braced me against his chest, flipping my left hand up to cross my stomach with the other, and starting running.