The hooded stranger drops lightly into a tree on the far side of the La Push Native American Reservation, looking out at the Pacific Ocean below as it crashes into the cliffs below. Snapping his hood back, white hair gleams in the cold afternoon sun and his breath puffs white in the chill.
White-blue eyes explode into a brilliant glow as Zeraphim surveys the forest below.
Pulling the gloves off of his hands, he stretches long, powerful fingers with tips that glow a faint purple-blue. Z pockets the gloves and sits on the branch. Waving his booted feet beneath him, his eyes flash brightly.
The boots vanish in a shower of blue sparks.
Springing upward to his now bare feet, he scampers along the branch lightly and leaps off.
Sailing through the air, he slaps into the trunk of another of the massive trees native to the area and bounds off again. Striking another tree, he repeats the process. Effectively covering massive distance very quickly, he travels through the forest to a rough dirt track running alongside the cliffs. Slamming into the side of another tree, he stops, stuck there like a bug to the massive trunk.
Slinking around the tree on all fours, he crawls out on a limb over the track and waits.
XXXXXX
Shit, she caught me. I'm dead.
Fighting back tears, that line was all that kept repeating in Bella Swan's head. That, and how upset Edward was going to be that she'd thrown up all the cotton candy.
Although, that seemed rather secondary.
He was going to be pissed when he couldn't find his Sparrow.
Deciding finally that tears are really counterproductive, Bella sits up to take stock of her surroundings. Wincing against her cast and bound wrists, she drags her legs up onto the backseat of the little blue Honda she was locked in. Looking out the window, she saw the thickening forest outside of town and glanced at her driver. A kid, no more than 17 or 18 and sweating bullets, was white-knuckle on the steering wheel. Driving like he was in a Hollywood-style car chase. Bella leans over to the side to try and see if she can figure out who it is.
The kid seems to twitch as he notices her looking at him and turns his face sharply away. The car swerves just a hair and Bella decides on not doing that again.
Car accidents had this annoying way of not always being fatal.
Glancing at her cast, she rolls her eyes.
Yeah, you would know. You really are a masochist.
Arching an eyebrow at her own thoughts, Bella ducks her head about and looks out the window. She was hoping Edward was okay and wasn't tearing apart Forks already trying to find her or anyone who knew where she was.
Lost in thought, Bella drifts listlessly in the backseat simply waiting for whatever came next.
Suddenly, the car starts slowing and she furrows her brow, looking out the windows again. A tiny gas station about 15 miles out of town came into view around the next bend in the road. The driver whips the little blue Honda through a screeching turn into the parking lot. The car tears across the asphalt, around the side of the station, and pulls up next to an empty old Toyota 4x4 pickup. The kid cuts the motor, shoves the door open, jumps out, slams it hard, and takes off around the corner to vanish inside the store.
Bella, wide-eyed, just stares after him.
What now?
Two of the older guys from the Rez appear from behind the gas station striding quickly toward the car. Each held black cloth in their hands. Bella starts fumbling with the locks on her door, trying to keep them out.
Too little, too late.
The passenger door is yanked open and she's pulled by both legs violently from the vehicle. She lets out a short scream at the shooting agony burning its way up from her cast. A wad of black cloth is shoved into her open mouth and tied in place by skilled hands. A black hood is cast over her face, sending everything into inky darkness, and she's hefted like a sack of potatoes, carried away.
The door of a vehicle opens and she's tossed roughly into the passenger seat of the truck she was sitting next to. She could smell that telltale scent of old leather and engine gunk from unwashed tools. She's strapped tightly into the seat by the seatbelt and her bound hands wedged beneath it, her cast shoved roughly into the floorboard.
They didn't seem to give a rat's ass about her leg.
The door slams and all is silence and darkness for a moment.
A driver hops in and cranks the truck quickly, the old 6 cylinder roaring to life. Gears crunch and the 4 tires kick up dirt as the truck rockets around the back of the gas station, turning sharply. Bella feels the back end of the truck sliding in the mud and it suddenly dawns on her why they'd switched vehicles.
They needed her at La Push for whatever they were going to do and they knew the police would be watching the Rez what with the all the crap going on with Renee.
But the police would be watching the roads into La Push.
They were in a 4x4; they didn't need roads.
Sighing softly in her hood, Bella slumps against the seat and consigns herself to wait patiently for death or torture.
Or whatever the hell Renee is going to do to me.
She hears the tires hit black-top and knows she's got a good hour's worth of riding to do before they even get to the Rez from this crappy little gas station. Then it was no telling how long they'd be driving through the woods to get wherever the hell they were going.
Slumping even further down into the seat, Bella's head falls to the side, facing the faint sunlight lancing through her hood.
I wish I had my Edward.
XXXXXX
About an hour and 30 minutes later, Zeraphim lay draped over the branch he'd perched on earlier. His eyes were closed and he looked for all the world like he was taking a catnap. His body, in fact, was doing just that.
His mind was elsewhere though.
His consciousness had departed shortly after he went to his perch. He'd traveled, manifest as the wind itself, over the small town of Forks and watched for the little blue Honda with the girl inside. It hadn't taken long to spot them. Her panicked energy was radiating out of the car as intense to his god-senses as staring too long into the sun or the screaming of the condemned.
Floating on the thermals a couple thousand feet above the world, he followed Bella Swan's fear out of town and watched the entire episode at the gas station. The elder teen that left with the younger boy in the blue Honda had extended his lease on life by parting ways with his older friend.
But only for a few hours.
As Bella drifted into a deep depression sitting in the passenger seat, Z had dropped his consciousness to the bed of the pickup and gone along for the ride. But he had a much deeper purpose. The back windshield was no impediment to his thought-being at all.
He'd entered both their minds like a breath across the back of the neck.
Bella, he'd gently coerced her mind into sleep.
She was in for quite a shock very soon and she'd need the rest.
The boy he simply made sure turned off-road at the right time, heading down the track he'd found earlier in the day and decided was a nice quiet place to conduct a re-kidnapping. As the kid rocketed down the mud path, Z waited til he saw his perch and his napping body to leave the pickup.
The eyes on the body snap open, exploding into white-blue brilliance.
Z focuses sharply on the pickup as it approaches. A compulsion is sent at the mind he'd so recently left. A simple mental block; one that merely obscured the white-haired monster from the driver's sight. The boy never falters as he barrels down the dirt track.
The truck passes into the tree-line and into a narrow corridor, the trees a blur of green and brown as they whip by.
Corridors make such wonderful places for ambushes.
As the pickup nears Z's tree-limb, the astral being abruptly springs to his feet and leaps out into the void over the mud track. The pickup passes beneath Z just as his leap was turning into a dive.
The astral being's eyes flare blindingly and he slams into the ground with a dull boom.
Razorblades, an inch long at the tip of all 10 fingers and glittering purple-blue in the sun, shear through the front of the truck like it isn't even there. The sudden stop and the downward force toss the pickup airborne up and over Zeraphim's crouching form, his gaze following it overhead.
White-blue eyes flash again and he vanishes.