Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.
His paws gripped the shifting earth beneath him. His muscles, more powerful than those of any mortal being, flexed hard enough to tear. The surrounding night was brilliantly lit. If he were still man he would see none of it. But these eyes did not belong to man.
Faster, faster. In the blink of an eye he had crossed the length of a football field. More speed. He could run like this and leave the foliage intact. His newer brothers had trouble still. Running behind them was like running behind an angry tank; your path was a debris field. But he didn't have to worry about that. He was the fastest of them all.
'Keep dreaming, Jakie!'
Jacob growled. His thoughts echoed the real grinding sound that came from his throat. A white blur just off his peripheral vision caught up to him and sped past.
'Leah! Get back in formation!' Jacob shouted. Actually he shouted in his mind. Wolves did not possess vocal chords after all. But that wasn't an issue thanks to their peculiar ancestries. Giant, magical Indian wolves can read each other's mind. Figures.
'No fracking way you mutt!' Leah shouted back. Mental images of himself licking his anus assaulted his mind and, from the laughter of the other wolves around him, their minds as well. 'Why should I stare at your mangy ass all night when I'm the fastest of you lot? I go in front!'
Aarrghh, he spit and yapped at the offending figure clouding his view but Leah, much to his chagrin since she phased, was indeed the fastest of them.
'Enough,' Sam's heavy voice sounded from his left and Jacob immediately halted all outward forms of aggression. His thoughts on the other hand...well, even Sam's alpha voice had a limit.
'Leah is the fastest,' Sam said, and Jacob could barely contain his indignation at his next words: 'She can lead, for now.'
She can lead, for now...Jacob fought off the urge to openly mock his Alpha. Psh, what a load of bull. Sam was just looking for any opportunity to give Leah something she wanted. Anything if it meant she'd turn down the angst directed at him and Emily...the angst that they could all feel like it was their own.
Leah's grievances may be a pain in the ass for the pack to deal with, but it was Jacob's churning thoughts that were lately the bigger annoyance for them. Jacob's state of mind these days was...unruly at best.
It was all her fault.
Everything was her fault. Everything.
Bella Swan murdered his mother. Bella Swan was spreading those leeches' scents all over the region, forcing his kind to phase. Bella Swan was why Seth and Leah's dad was dead. Bella Swan was why his own dad was almost killed.
His sped up, almost reaching Leah but not quite. The rage that he felt was like a hot knife. And the sadness. Bella Swan...she was his best friend before all of this. How could she do this to him? How could the impossibly beautiful and kind girl she loved be one of them? And now she was the poster child for every ailment he and his tribe experienced. The leeches at least couldn't help what they were. Bella Swan was a human like him. Only she was a human who liked to kill...
'There!' Sam shouted, breaking up his thoughts and forcing him back into the real world. 'Jacob, Leah, Jared: flank them from the right! Seth, you're with me!'
Instincts meshed with the Alpha's orders and the group split up in a heartbeat. One. Two. Three. In the time it takes to count to three the pack had ventured to their assigned places, running faster now, running as one to catch the monsters.
They're villains! All of them! Bella included…
But these weren't Bella's leeches. It was the other two, the ones that attacked his dad.
Payback's a bitch, he thought.
And he lunged.
"Hush it you two!" Bella exclaimed frantically. "You're going to get me fired!"
Emmett chuckled louder yet, paying no heed to Bella's warning nor, even worse, to the stern older man behind the reference desk.
"Bella Bear, your first day as a librarian and you're already shushing people," Emmett shook his head in glee. "Wait till I tell Jasper."
"Will you please stop shouting?!" Bella replied, amazed that Emmett really had no idea how loud he was. "And shelving books doesn't make me a librarian."
"Maybe you should challenge that guy to a few rounds of trivia then," Emmett said, though he finally brought his voice down to an acceptable whisper. "I'd like to win my money back from Jas-"
He was interrupted by a sudden intake of breath from Alice, who up until then was enjoying "helping" Bella with her new job in Forks' public library, and who was listening to her brother and Bella banter back and forth. Bella too looked at her, then unceremoniously deposited the book in her hand quickly on a shelf. Alice looked downright panicked.
"What's wrong?" Bella whispered, looking around. There weren't many people in this corner of the library. Aside from the irate librarian at his desk and a couple of elderly people perusing the rows of newspapers, there was no one else in this side of the library save herself and the two vampires. The other side of the building was teeming with children however. But aside from a faint echo of happy squeals, there was nothing in the area that signified danger.
Alice blinked and looked from Emmett to Bella. "I can't see us!" She said.
"What?" Emmett asked, bewildered. Well of course she couldn't see Bella. She rarely got a glimpse of their human these days.
"I can't see any of us," she whispered furiously.
If Alice couldn't see even herself and Emmett, that meant only one thing...there was no future for them.
Bella hissed and shoved aside her cart. The nomads. Were they going to attack? They would not get past her, she thought angrily. Bursts of liquid fire coursed through her body. Let them come. Bella was itching to burn something and Victoria and Laurent would do nicely.
When the main door opened Bella really did half expect to see the pair walk through it. She didn't get to see them but from Jasper's descriptions, they were hard to miss. But through the door, no red hair or dreadlocks, no bare feet, no pale skin, and certainly no fangs or red eyes appeared.
It was a young woman with bronze skin and fine brown hair cut short just past her chin. Bella barely had a chance to get a second look when she-and her friends beside her, froze dead in their spots.
Bella looked quizzically at the girl, whose former neutral expression had to turned to shock upon catching sight of the vampires. And she knew...this girl...she knew.
"She's one of them," Emmett whispered. Along with the intense dislike that was the norm when the subject of the Quileutes came up among her friends, Emmett's voice was also laced with beguiled surprise.
"One of the tribe? Are you telling me they all know about you?" Bella asked in shock.
"No," Alice said impatiently. "She's one of them. She's a wolf."
"Oh," Bella still didn't understand the reason for the acute surprise. Ok, so they weren't exactly expecting to see a wolf in the library, but-
Wait a minute. "I thought only the men..."
"Yeah," Emmett nodded. "We thought so too."
Bella continued to evaluate the girl across the room. Her body screamed danger, and her posture was rigid as if a fight or flight reaction was imminent. Bella had mentally rehearsed what she'd do and say if she came across Jake or the other boys in the pack, but all that retreated to somewhere she couldn't reach as she watched this girl wolf. What could she say? 'Hello' seemed comically inappropriate. So did 'congratulations on joining the pack.'
But a second later it was painfully clear that no chance of any conversation was likely to occur between any of them. The girl's face contorted from deer in headlights to loathing. The change was sudden and the effect absolute. The abhorrence creeped over every one of her features until her eyes shone with brilliant anger and her face contorted in disgust. Indeed her entire body wound itself so painfully tight with barely controlled acrimony that she looked about ready to spring.
She did...she sprang back out the way she came.
"Well..." Emmett gave them a long side glance. "Think you can find a book in here that might explain Quileute genetics?"
"Curious," Alice said slowly, glassy eyed and looking into the distance. "I can see again."
Curious, indeed. Bella pondered on it with Alice and Emmett, or at least she appeared to. The girl's burning eyes flashed in her mind, and though she did not fear for her life in the least bit, she still shuddered. The girl's hateful expression did not come about when she looked at the vampires. Her face had changed from shock to hate when her eyes met Bella's.
All that malevolence...it was directed at her.
The ball was made of strips of flame sown together in a tight, heavy sphere. Laying on her back in bed, Bella tossed it up into the air and caught it when it came down. She threw it back up. She caught it once again.
Once upon a time, a girl liked to play with fire.
She smiled at that.
Her toy was hard to control, as one would expect. But when it got the better of her, it wasn't her who got hurt. It was everyone around her. She used to fight it. When she did, it would hurt her heart. It used to hurt very much.
It used to. Bella remembered the agony of it. The agony of fighting with herself. When she defeated it, the monster would make her pay in ways invisible to anyone but her. No genuine flames may have touched her, but that didn't make their burning any less real. Her body, inside and out, was a patchwork quilt of invisible scars.
But the monster was defeated. She learned to tame it.
It used to control her. Now she controls it. It no longer acts without her consent.
But she was wrong. The monster wasn't defeated after all.
Screams. James' screams echoed like a symphony in her memories. Day by day, it grew more and more beautiful. She wanted to hear it again. The ball of fire rose and fell, rose and fell again and again. In it she saw his burning flesh. She saw his eyes straining in their sockets. She saw his head splintering off of his body. All the while his screams sang like an Ave Maria.
Instead, the monster and she became one.
What did the wolf girl know that made her detest her so much? How much could Jacob have told her? How much did Jacob know?
Isn't killing his mother enough for them to hate you?
She had killed no one since. No one. Well, not including James. And a small squirrel.
So what did that girl see? What does she know, or thinks she knows about me?
She should talk to Rosalie. Or Esme. Hell, even Edward might have some good advice; he's seen through the wolves' minds after all. All of them were awake and just a couple of miles away.
But when she closed the door behind her and took to the sky, it wasn't in the direction of the house.