A/N: Don't mind me, just doing my business.
Disclaimer: The Twilight saga universe, including the characters I'm borrowing, belongs to S. Meyer.
The sky is clearing, red bleeding into black until it's all muddy orange.
"C'mon. Everyone should be back by now. It's time you met at least the heads of the gang."
Jazz takes me to what he mockingly calls their headquarters. I follow him to the outskirts of the city, through an abandoned building, and onto the roof.
It's actually a cluster of buildings that are roughly the same height, separated by alleys that are maybe four feet wide. As I watch a girl just casually leaps over one of them and drops one story down to the roof of the next building.
If this is where they stay, I understand Jazz's ease with rooftops. They live twenty stories from the ground.
There's maybe twenty, twenty-five of them here right now, eating, smoking, laughing. They have music. It's amazing how relaxed they are.
Jasper starts pointing people out.
Jim and Tori, which I've met, and Laurent – Shadow Guy – wave at me with a smirk. Then there's a group Jazz refers to as 'the Pack' – golden skin, long jet-black hair, they're all guys, six foot tall, and ripped. They're all tattooed, too. It's always a wolf, though it's never the same. Sometimes it's tribal, sometimes it's more realistic. Sometimes it's the whole thing, sometimes just the head. One of them just has the teeth.
In the middle of the circle, there's a tiny girl with two eyes on her collarbones. She's having fun, entertaining them, animatedly talking, hands fluttering. She spots me first, and stops dead. They all turn, and though some of them just look unimpressed, others are downright aggressive. I swear the girl growls at me.
"Leah'll come around." Jazz is nudging me, signaling me to keep walking. I comply.
Then there's a small cluster of pale, dark-eyed, disturbingly still people. They all stare, unblinking, as Jazz introduces me, and I can feel their eyes on my back as we walk on. Somehow I have a feeling that, though they have yet to utter a word, they manage to convey their thoughts through blinks and nods. Whatever opinion they have of me, I can sense that they all have the exact same. They seem to act and think as one.
As we walk on, towards the highest building of the cluster, we hear a bell-like, tinkling laugh, and Jazz visibly relaxes. Then he jumps up, and I clamber behind him, and I'm met by a handful of people that I just know are the inner circle. The lieutenants. The Capos.
These guys have been here from the beginning, and will be till the very end. It shows in the way they look at her.
In the middle of their loose cluster, there's the girl from last night. Her hair is much redder in the daylight, and her eyes in the sun look like sugar melting in a pan.
On her right, there's a guy that looks twenty, with thirty-year-old eyes. They're blue and deep and sad, like they've seen too much and want to turn back time. His face is sharp, chiseled jaw, defined cheekbones, and his smile is kind when he invites me to take a seat.
Clasping his hand is a small, heart-faced chick. Her eyes are like her hair, warm caramel, and she looks like she can't decide between hiding from me and walking over to hug me. When I meet her eyes, my tentative smile is greeted by her own gigantic one and I know she's just decided on hugging me. Esme, Jazz tells me. Carl's girl.
On the other side of "Nemo" is another chick. Her eyes are steel, like Jazz's, and I guess before he tells me that Rose is his sister. She's tall and blonde and sculpted like an Amazon and apparently couldn't care less about me.
The guy holding an arm around her waist is absolutely huge, and his dimples can't hide it. Neither can his baby blues or his flashing smile. I'm gonna be wary of "Em" for a while.
When I turn back to Jazz, I almost jump out of my skin as I notice the midget that's been kissing the shit out of him for apparently over five minutes. She's ridiculously tiny, and her spiky black hair doesn't do much to compensate. When she finally decides to let him breathe, she turns to me and introduces herself ("Alice, but you can call me Pix, like everyone") and her eyes are compellingly terrifying. They're gray too, but instead of Jazz and Rose's steady, metallic glare, they look like tiny clouds of mist and smoke. I swear they change color as I look, the gray swirling and darkening, shifting around like fog in a crystal ball.
Pix smiles softly.
"I know. It takes some getting used to."
A/N: So. Now that we've met everyone, we can get down to business, shall we?
On another note, my words are getting a bit lonely out here on their own. Maybe you could send out some of yours, to keep them company?