Worlds Clash
Chapter 2
She's lead through the home and up the stairs and down the hall to a door with a tiny, tiny, room that seems to be covered in smooth rock.
She jerks to a stop as her muscles lock up and physically won't let her go any further. The golden haired girl looks back and gives a soft encouraging smile.
"It's okay," She says, and tugs the cat girl into the room.
She stands back and seemingly waits for something.
Unsure of what to do, the cat in human skin blinks up at the blood drinker.
She frowns and reaches across the girl and twists a knob. There is hissing sound that makes the stranger recoil, and then water streams from seemingly out of nowhere.
The blond watches the other girl gape in awe at the showerhead, with a kind of sadness.
She didn't even know what it was?
The cat girl eagerly clambers into the spray, giggling at the tickling pellets.
It's just like the rain!
She remembers dancing in the rain as a kit, carefree before she was old enough to start training. That's not to say she never had fun, but there is just something different about the simplicity that the joy came from.
She tilts her head up into the warm spray and opens her eyes to stare at the source that the water comes from.
She only realizes the danger of her distraction when a cold hand brushes her shoulders and she snaps her head around to watch as the blood drinker very gently rubs the mud and blood from her skin.
She then grabs a tube of something that smells floral and rubs the paste into her scalp. A purr rumbles in her chest as her head is massaged and she's scratched behind the ears like her momma always did before bed.
She closes her eyes against the suds dripping into them, allowing herself to be bathed and the metallic and earth scents washed away.
Something in the air shifts and she jerks, flinging water as she whirls on the new addition to the small room.
It's the female with hair like the night, holding a pile of human garbs.
"It's okay," the blood drinker named Rosalie coos soothingly. "This is my sister, Alice."
Breathing deeply through her new caution, she relaxes enough to step out of the stone bowl when the water stops with another twist of the knob.
A soft white cotton cloth envelops her.
It dries her of water quickly.
Rosalie, who had been carefully inspecting the young girl since she showed up, pauses in her work to brush her fingers over a burn mark that looks to be a brand. Anger makes her hands shake, but she dare not let her anger out lest she chance hurting the innocent girl.
"The pants are Esme's but I thought your shirt would fit her best," Alice sub-whispers.
The blond gives an almost undetectable nod before throwing the towel on the drying rack.
"You can just put these on and come downstairs when you're finished."
The girl blinks up at her before looking down and gently touching the clothes Alice had set on the counter.
She briefly wonders if the girl even knows what she is saying, but she seems to, so she lets the thought go.
She pulls Alice out of the bathroom and down to the kitchen where everyone else was already waiting.
The blond immediately folds herself into the arms of her husband, seeking comfort from the dark thoughts that present themselves.
Alice was likewise doing the same with her own husband.
"What do you think happened to her?" She asks softly, listening hard to the movements just upstairs.
There is a second before all the vampires turn to the mind reader of the family for answers.
All he can do though, is shrug helplessly.
"Her thoughts are so strange. She doesn't think like a normal human."
"How do you mean, Edward?" Carlisle asks ever curious.
Edward's eyebrows furrow in uncertainty.
"It's like...you know how sometimes there is a word on the tip of your tongue, that no matter how much you try, you can't remember it? You know exactly what the word is, but all you have is the idea of it and it had no solid form? All of her thoughts are kind of like that. She's not thinking in words or pictures like most people, but fragments of ideas. It's almost impossible to make anything out of it."
Strangely, it's not Esme who holds the most concern, but Alice and Rosalie.
"Does she even know English, or any language?"
He nods to Esme's question. "Sometimes, she thinks in full sentences. I've been able to catch 'will they attack' and 'it's like the rain'. I get the impression that a lot of what she is seeing is new to her."
Because they are so focused of the girl, they hear exactly when she comes out of the bathroom, pauses, and starts padding her way down the stairs.
She appears around the corner with a small frown and holds out a small item.
"Where does this go?" She asks, speaking for the first time.
"Oh," Rosalie says, taking the panties. "It goes under your clothes," she explains softly.
"Clothes," she mumbles with a frown, before tugging on the shirt she had unknowingly put on backwards.
It's lifts up past her belly button, revealing just the tips of her breasts, before Rosalie lunges forward to yank it back down with wide eyes.
"Don't change here!"
The cat girl blinks dumbly up at Rose.
"In the bathroom so the boys can't see."
She blinks, turns her attention to the males in the room, and then looks back to Rosalie. She shifts in discomfort with her confusion.
Rosalie's expression softens, and she reaches out to the girl to manually pull her down the to the downstairs bathroom were she helps the stranger back out of her clothes and coaches her on how to put on the garments correctly.
The scarred girl tugs at them uncomfortably, shifting her muscles under the foreign press of material.
Rosalie guides her out of the bathroom and into the kitchen where Esme had prepared a lot of food, unsure how much a human girl would eat.
"What's your name?" Esme asks softly, putting a plate down in front of she cat.
"I am called Bella," she responds, looking strangely at the meal laid out before her. She takes a little sniff at it, and it makes her mouth water, so she digs in, completely bypassing the utensils.
"Bella?" The smallest vampire asks after exchanging glances with her family. "How did you get all that blood on you?"
Bella picks up her glass of water and guzzles it down.
"He killed him. I have to find him."
Edward winces at the bloody images that flash through her mind, snarling, mud, pushing dirt over a body, and a prayer to someone called Sekhmet.
"Do you mind if I examine you? I'm a doctor and I just want to see if you're okay."
It's odd for the she cat to communicate aloud; she hasn't talked this much since she was a kit.
"Okay," she allows. She knows what a doctor is; there are a few in the pride and other tribes.
He guides her up to another room with a large wooden box with white sheets and other strangely shaped rocks that are actually soft to the touch.
The doctor clears the flat wooden slab and asks her to take her clothes off and have a seat on it.
These vampires are weird. Put on the clothes, take off the clothes, don't take them off in front of others, take them off again.
Regardless, she complies. They gave her food, and it tasted better than anything she's ever had, though the green things weren't very good and she avoided those.
"Carlisle, was she..." Rosalie asks hesitantly from down stairs, as she hears the older vampire shuffle around to examine the naked female.
The doctor stops his study of the strange brand on the stranger's shoulder and rounds around to the front.
"Bella, is it alright if I just take a peek down here?"
She bends her knees and spreads her legs, allowing him to see her sex, all the while giving him an odd look.
These are such strange beings.
"It doesn't look like it," the vampire whispers quickly and quietly under his breath. "At lead not recently."
Rosalie, and everyone else waiting impatiently down stairs, breathes a sigh of relief.
"Thank you Bella, you may get dressed again."
He ends up having to awkwardly help her, much like Rosalie had to.
A/N: Hey guys, I'm glad you like my shifter stories; they are pretty fun to write. Please be patient with my updates; I will try my best to keep up with all my stories.
Reviews, as always, do inspire and encourage me and my writing.
~Silver~
