A/N: MOUNTAIN DEW VOLTAGE AND A PINT CAN OF ROCKSTAR.
I am scraping the skies right now. Excuse the ways it might affect my writing quality.
Not the same Jason, so dun think too hard about it. Trying to save names.
Chapter 2-11: Storm Without An Eye
A Street in a Middle-Class Seattle Neighborhood, 12th October 2010, 9:36 PM
The air was thick with a chill mist that condensed onto everything in the area.
Someone was shouting not very far away, a mixture of a celebratory exclamation and a drunken scream.
A bunch of kids were standing around the wall of a nearby school building, oddly quiet compared to their friends who could be heard clearly even from behind closed doors.
Two girls, clearly dressed for an indoor popularity show rather than the chilly Washington outdoors, were impatiently tapping their feet and chewing on their cigarette filters.
The tallest of the two, a girl in an open fur-collared jacket and badly done black hair dye, searched around in her pocket for something, and judging by her scowl, she wasn't too happy that it was still there.
"Where the hell did that bitch go? I brought the money. You did too, right?"
The other girl, a brown-haired, skinny kid just out of her tween years, tugged her jacket a little further down and shivered, muttering under her breath before speaking.
"What ya think? Course I did. If they got Jace with them, I trust them."
Someone slinked out from behind a wall, creeping up beside the girls.
"We're here. Happy?"
The brown-haired girl nearly bit her smoke in half as the shady figure tapped her on the shoulder. She took a few moments to calm herself down, then sneered at the person in front of her.
"Fuck off. It's not I wanna talk to you, bitch. Where's Jace gone? You know, right?"
The figure was lit up by a flickering motion-sensor lamp clicking on under the school roof. She was skinny and dressed in a black hoodie, jeans and army surplus boots, a thick cloud of clove-scented smoke billowing from the cigarette between her lips. She'd pulled her hood down over her eyes, which seemed to serve no practical purpose with people who already knew her.
Three tall silhouettes, also clad in mostly black, closed in from opposing ends of the street.
The girl in the hoodie took a deep pull of her clove cigarette, blowing a thin stream of smoke out between her lips for several seconds, obviously savoring her temporary position of power as long as it lasted.
"Don't you worry. I'm gonna tell you where Jason is. We're not stupid enough to set you up. So, you got the money?"
The two girls looked at each other, scowled and pulled out their wallets.
The brown-haired one fished a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills out of her pocket and began counting.
"You asked for one grand and two hundred? Fuck you to hell."
The hooded girl stifled a smug laugh and spat the rest of her cigarette out onto the cracked pavement.
"Fork it over. This is on our terms."
The three shadowy figures behind her had stopped being threatening and had begun talking to each other, but the implication of three guys and only two skinny high-schoolers didn't elude the girls, who took out the money, folded it and handed the bills to the girl in the hoodie.
"Good, good. The deal is done now." Her face split in a wide grin that showed her teeth and made her eyes just thin slots in her face, filled with giddy expectation. "I'm gonna tell you what happened to your widdle Jason. Do you believe in ghosts?"
The black-haired girl gave an incredulous stare and spat out, "Are you fucking with us? We're gonna get that fucking money back and teach your little gothy buddies a thing or two, you wannabe vampire."
The girl flicked back her hood, showing short, mussy hair, a slightly bent nose and a missing earlobe on her right ear. She pulled a new cigarette out of a crumpled plastic envelope, held it between her teeth and lit up, obviously taking her own sweet time with the whole thing.
"Wannabe? That's where you've got it wrong, you braindead whores."
The two girls looked at each other for a second, then burst out laughing.
"So you're saying you're fucking Dracula? Then we're vampire hunters!" The brown-haired tween pulled out a small cross necklace from beneath her shirt collar, gaining no reaction from the short-haired girl except for a slightly annoyed expression.
"Since you seem to think I'm so fucking funny, sit back and listen. It's not nice for us to get a cross shoved in our face, but if you're not the Pope or some born-again who really believes in it, you can shove it right up your ass. Nine out of ten times, if you flail that thing at me, I can walk right over and rip your head off."
Those words incited another half-minute fit of laughter, broken by the black-haired girl.
"See what I said, Claire? She's finally gone out there. "Rip our heads off"... oh fuck, I'd love to see her get locked up for that."
The girl in black took the clove cigarette out of her mouth, ashed it and leaned up against a railing two feet away.
"I said, sit back and listen. You should have guessed by now why we brought you here at the party. Jason told us to get you out here with one grand each for him. He needs money to buy blood packs and duct tape for his friends, so they turned me and got me out here to fetch the girls who were always cuddling cute little Jace."
As expected, Claire and her friend began laughing again, this time a little less hysterically. No matter how hard they tried to seem disbelieving, they couldn't conceal their interest.
"So. You're saying Jace is a ...a vampire or someshit, and that he made you into one so he could make us into them too? Seriously, this is not funny anymore. Go talk to someone who can help you. It's seriously scary."
Claire turned to walk away, but gasped and reached up to touch her shoulder. Somehow, her hand couldn't quite seem to touch, like something invisible was resting on her shoulder. Her friend opened her mouth, but it was left flapping in fear when someone faded into existence, hooking a tartan-shirted arm around Claire's shoulder. A short, blond boy with ruffled hair, blue eyes and just the faintest hint of stubble had appeared behind her, a beatific smile on his face as he hooked his left arm around her shoulder, catching her in a disturbingly intimate embrace from behind.
"I think I owe you the favor, really. That... one... night..."
He panted out the last three words into her face, his breath leaving none of the expected white clouds. While his voice was unsettlingly suggestive, his smug smile couldn't be anything further from that.
The girl in the hoodie stood back and smirked while the boy licked Claire's collarbone with a dry tongue that left no trail of saliva. As he finally ripped into her throat with a savagery absolutely unfitting to his suave demeanor, the girl turned her head away and shielded her face in an excessively theatrical gesture.
Claire's friend had taken advantage of the situation and started running. She squeezed into a gap between two buildings, pulled out her cell phone and began typing her home number.
The phone fell out of her hand, and something else hit the earth with a dull scattering sound. She froze for a moment, whereafter her pupils widened in panic. Her teeth began chattering, and she began whimpering under her breath.
Blood was rapidly pooling all over her bare legs, spilling onto the ground as she helplessly tried to pick up her phone.
A flick knife was lodged in the dirt beside her, wet with blood. Obviously in denial, she fumbled for her now-ruined cell phone until her hand hit something. That very instant, all the color drained from her face and her hands began shaking uncontrollably, the stumps of her fingers splattering blood and dirt all over the brick walls. The knife had managed to slice off seven of her fingers, now scattered on the ground and rapidly paling as the blood flowed out of them. Her right little finger was hanging on by a thin thread of flesh, tugging at her wound every time she so much as flinched. Her whimpering faded as she finally comprehended what was going on, pawing at the stumps on her right hand with her left, fingerless hand. She choked back vomit for a few seconds, then let out an ear-splitting shriek, tapering out into ululating, panicked gibbering. As she attempted to form words, glancing madly over her shoulder, the passage was darkened by someone stepping in between the buildings, pulling out a longer knife.
"You need to control yourself, Lily. For every single chick that Jace goes around turning, there's one more that we have to kill."
The voice was female and oddly ageless - the speaker seemed to switch from a mature tone to a petulant, disgruntled plea in the middle of the sentence.
"Fine, you can call me Lily and all, but would you please not do it when you're about to play skip rope with someone's guts? It creeps me out to be compared to the person who taught you how to do that."
Someone else was speaking, someone else with that peculiar tone of voice. A young woman's voice, though with the sharp edge of a spoiled child who was used to having her way.
"I'm not gonna stop, you know. That name just won't go out of my brain. If you'll excuse me, there's someone I need to show my respect to."
The person walked further into the passage, her long, curling hair billowing down past her shoulders. Claire's friend was growing paler still, fumbling at the ground with fingerless hands and only getting dirt in and blood out.
The long-haired girl grabbed the girl's bloodstained collar, pulling downwards and ripping her clothes open in a single tug.
"I'm not going to apologize. I can't say sorry, because Lily would never be sorry for this."
She turned her face towards the sky, then shook her head slightly and looked into the ground.
"Watch what your Nessie's gonna do. We're always gonna be friends."
Renesmee ran her fingers gingerly across the girl's chest, causing her to look up in confusion.
"Sorry, but you're not going to get any."
With a hard thrust of her hands, Renesmee smashed her hands into the girl's chest. She easily splintered the sternum, grabbed onto the ribs and ignored the girl's gurgling screeches.
"Don't you worry, this is gonna be fast. We can't have the cops coming over."
Renesmee wrenched her hands outward, ripping open the girl's ribcage and exposing a bleeding, pulsing mass of organs. The screaming was almost inhuman now, a throat-flaying cry of absolute panic that ended with a gurgle when Renesmee stomped her shoe into the girl's heart and left lung. Using her stance as leverage, she ripped free ten of the girl's ribs, tearing off a huge lump of flesh from her back with it.
When the girl's eyes had lost what life remained in them, she threw away the slabs of flesh and bone, flicking them onto the roof with an effortless throw.
"They're gonna be trying for ages to find out how this happened. With some luck, they'll arrest some guy who looks burly enough to rip someone's ribcage apart. Now the problem is to find some new clothes."
The other figure closed in from the entrance of the passage. Surveying the carnage with detached interest, she looked up at Renesmee with a smile on her face.
"Y'know, you'll have to admit that it's kinda sick naming me after a dead chick. But if this is what she asked you to do" - Renesmee nodded while mangling the girl's identifying features with her knife - "I'd really love to fill her role. What do you say? I bet you I can off someone in a more fucked-up way than this one. After all, you gave me the right to do it."
The girl called Lily looked towards the sky, between the bloodstained brick walls and up into the clouded sky.
"You've given me a new perspective on existence, Nessie. Trust me on that. Sure, Jace is awesome as a vampire, but the coolest thing is that I don't need to be human anymore."
She chuckled a bit under her breath and stroked a knife handle sticking out of her coat pocket.
"I'm gonna bathe in guts until someone kills me, and I know you'll do the same."