Inside the cab, Bella woke screaming along with the boy in the driver's seat.
FUCK! AGAIN? What is with my fucking luck and cars?
She couldn't see much and what she could feel was weird as hell. She was pretty sure the truck was in the air. Upside-down and spinning.
That can't be good.
Suddenly, there are hands on her shoulders with an insane grip. It didn't hurt but struggling was so pointless against hands that solid. A whisper crawls across her synapses, which was a patently weird sensation to say the least.
"This is going to feel strange."
Bella's eyes go wide behind the hood as the already topsy-turvy world spins out and goes even crazier. Her only points of reference were the hands on her shoulders and 2 really bright eyes staring into hers through the hood.
Everything else was even more insane. The daylight filtering into her hood changes color, shifting through an entire rainbow of shades in the time it took her to draw breath. She might as well have not even have had an equilibrium for all the good it was doing her.
Everything felt like up and down at the same damn time.
The scent of rain hits her nostrils and she feels, as well as hears, a faint sheen of water brush against the skin of her arms and face.
But it felt like the rain came from every direction at the same time.
This doesn't even make sense!
Suddenly, everything rights itself and she's set lightly on her feet. Adrenaline had washed her senses the moment she'd woken in the truck, giving her the strength she needed to manage standing awkwardly on her cast, blind and unable to speak as the hands leave her shoulders.
BOOM.
The truck slams into the ground in front of her, shaking the ground beneath her feet. Cringing involuntarily, she ducks her face against the onrushing wind off the impact. She waits for a moment for the explosion she was expecting, wondering ironically if she was actually going to die in this car accident.
Then one of the strangest things she'd ever felt happens.
The hood and gag melt.
Or something like that.
Looking down at the black cloth as it began to drip down her body, her eyes go wide as fabric impossibly turns liquid and then seems to shift again into gas….or shadow? Her eyes didn't quite know what to make of the complete insanity they were seeing. The black cloth that so recently had her blind and mute turns into living, moving shadow and slithers into the all the normal places shadow should be, freeing her hands as well.
Blinking to clear her vision, she looks back up for the glowing eyes she'd seen a moment ago.
Man, am I losing it or what? How is that even possible!
Before her was a scene from a dream. Although, not necessarily a good one.
Frozen in the act of slamming into the ground, the pickup was upside-down and facing the way they'd come. The boy inside was still alive, the cab of the truck a little less than a foot from the ground, but just as frozen in place as the rest of the vehicle. Bits of metal from the truck were halted in mid-air, flying away from the impact.
Standing in front of it was something that looked like a man but definitely not human.
His skin was so pale, it was almost too bright to look at in the sunlight. His eyes glow and pulse with white-blue brilliance and his long, straight white hair fell down in front of a too-perfect face. He'd have been more attractive to her if he didn't seem so crafted to be that way.
The whisper slides across her mind again, making her eyes go wide.
"That's actually intentional. I don't want to be attractive to you."
Bella quirks a brow as her mind is read and responded to without her ever even phrasing a thought. Her head tilts and she works her mouth a moment, trying to find words.
The whisper comes again.
"Time is paused. Hence the mess behind me. I had to make sure you were steady on your feet before I finish up here. Oh, and living shadows are actually rather common around me."
Bella finally manages a question.
"What the fuck are you!"
The white-haired creature in front of her laughs with this deep, rich baritone and flashes this bright grin that would have been goofy if he didn't have fangs. Like, no shit, glittering k9 fangs. He finally speaks vocally to her.
"All in due time, Miss Swan. I have business to tie up here. Meet my cat. He'll get you more acquainted with that living shadow thing I mentioned."
With that, he turns away and leaps atop the time-paused truck, perching on the edge of the rear-bumper. Purple-blue tracers shear the air as the razorblades on the ends of his fingers slam into the metal, steel crunching together as he grips the pickup.
The whisper slithers across her mind again.
"You might want to sit down. When I release time, the adrenaline that is keeping you on your feet will dissipate almost instantly."
Bella blinks and does as he suggests, figuring he probably knows what he's talking about.
Suddenly, all the sounds of the forest that she hadn't noticed were missing begin and fill a silence suddenly broken as the truck crunches into the ground. The scream that starts is cut off almost before it begins, the driver crushed near-instantly.
Bella winces at the gruesome sound and turns her face away. A sudden rush of wind and a dull boom makes her look upward.
The stranger was flying up and out of the trees, a mangled truck in hand. It was about half the length of its original size, the bloody cab completely crushed in. Z spirals off toward the ocean and darts out of sight, CRACK, like a gunshot echoing through the forest as he takes looks at the ground where the truck had landed, looks for the blood she knew was there.
She wondered if he'd left her alone on purpose to deal with what just happened.
After all, she knew she should feel bad for the kid that had just died a rather unpleasant death. As evidenced by the red mud she was staring at. But…with everything that had happened in the last couple of months and where the guy was taking her…
Bella didn't care. And she wasn't too sure if that bothered her or not.
Am I really that callous?
Her thoughts are broken by yet another strange sound; a meow.
But no cat she'd ever heard in her life sounded like this one. It was a weird, otherworldly echo of a meow. It almost sounded like it came from the forest itself but Bella spun and looked around anyway.
Trotting down the path toward her was the source of the sound. Black silken fur shifts between solid and shadow as the feline-shaped creature pads down the track toward her. Two luminescent purple eyes with no pupils lock with hers. Bella is almost taken aback by what she sees there.
There was a dark and powerful intelligence lurking within the gaze of the little cat-thing.
It pads up to her and sits down, peering up at her with those shimmering purple eyes. Its form appears solid and air-thin all at the same time. Bella blinks her eyes to make them stop twitching as they tried to focus on the weirdly shifting shadowcat.
"Um…" she pauses and bites her lip, furrowing one side of her brow and chuckling softly. "You are his cat, I guess?"
The eyes glitter and the cat dips its head in a nod.
Bella laughs a little, "Oookay. So uh…what's your name?" Her nose crinkles as she says it, feeling silly for asking a cat its name.
The cat dips its head again and hops to its feet. Scampering past her, it heads over to the small patch of blood-soaked mud. Bella winces as she shifts around, leg on fire. Just as she gets turned about, the little shadowcat flicks out a paw tipped by claws that only seem made of a thin, ethereal light. It dips the claws in the blood-muck and scampers back over to her.
Rearing up on its hind legs, it slashes a name in the air in front of her. Liquid red traceries glowing with the light of the creature's claws hover in the air between them.
Tien
Bella's face goes through a few things. Confusion, awe, confusion, then complete amusement.
"Ok. So you're Tien. Um…what now?"
Before the cat can respond, the forest stillness is shattered by a dull boom off toward the cliffs. They both glance off toward the sound and she looks back at the shadowcat.
"What was that? I know you know."
The cat meows at her.
Bella blinks and tilts her head.
"What?"
The little feline stands and meows at her again.
Bella laughs, "Wait…you can understand me just fine but can't really talk to me? Without…drawing it in the air?"
The cat dips its head again then pads over to her cast, sniffing at it. Bella furrows her brow as it zeroes in on the drawing her boy had put there.
"What are you doing?"
The two bright purple eyes blink at her and the cat mews again before padding up and onto her cast. She stiffens but her curiosity quickly quells her fear; the creature weighed nothing. It was like it wasn't even there. She supposed she shouldn't be surprised that living shadow doesn't weigh anything but it was still way weird.
"May I help you?" she asks with a quirky smile.
The little shadowkitty mews at her and shakes its head No. Then it drops its face and licks her jean-covered leg at the top of the cast, its tongue the same purple luminescence of the creature's eyes.
Something weird happens.
Cool, soothing waves slither up her leg from where the cat licks at her. Her pain washed away and the ache in her leg subsided to almost gone. Bella gasps as a pain she was used to goes away. The cat stops and looks up at her, mewing softly.
Bella looks at the cat, her face awed.
"Did you heal my leg?"
The shadowcat's face drops and it mews again, the echoing sound distinctly melancholy. It shakes its head No again.
She reaches a timid hand out, "It's ok. Thank you anyway. It's much better, whatever you did."
Tien's eyes seem to flash like his master's and it nuzzles her proffered hand.
As Bella stretches her fingers to pet the shadowkitty, it surprises her.
Slinking forward wicked-fast, it slithers up and along her arm to her shoulder and buries its face in her hair. She laughs and leans forward, arching her neck as the critter sniffs around in her hair. It tickled and she was trying not to fall over, giggling the whole time.
After a few moments of playing with the cat, the whispering voice slinks into her mind again.
But it was far different now; a myriad million voices whisper all at once, yet never in unison, and a deep, guttural, and ethereal growling give the words weight.
"You two seem to be getting on just fine."
The intensity of the voice in her mind was far stronger than before and caused her to look up at where the growling seemed to come from.
Perched on a branch over the track, the white haired stranger. Still bare-foot, still dressed in black, eyes still glowing. Only difference was his claws and fangs were missing. His strange eyes narrow at her and she starts to ask a question.
He cuts her off by standing up abruptly on the branch.
The white-haired stranger just falls backward. Lazily twisting through the air, he turns a slow back-flip and lands in a silent crouch. Standing and padding over to her quietly, he offers her a hand with glowing fingertips.
The single whisper returns.
"Come on. Your day isn't quite over yet. We've a short trip to make."
Bella arches a brow at him and shakes her head, hand halfway to his.
"You still haven't told me your name and you are already taking me places?"
The strange glimmering eyes seem to roll at her and he just leans down, taking her hand and lifting her to her feet like she weighed absolutely nothing. His rich baritone rolls across her ears.
"We have to go stop your boyfriend from doing something stupid tonight. I'll be the one doing the stupid shit this evening, thank you very much."
Bella withdraws her hand from his and looks up at him.
"So…how are we going to do that?"
He'd started to turn away but stops to peer at her sidelong.
"By using you as bait, duh." The last is said with a crooked grin.
Before she could ask him anything else, he turns away from her and pads over to the puddle of blood-muck. Thrusting both hands downward at the ground, two barely visible waves of thin blue energy warp down into the mud and turn it a blinding white, the sudden light forcing Bella to squint against it.
Tien slinks around her feet, distracting her for just a moment. It was just as well. What she saw when she looked up made less sense than anything else had today.
Lines of brilliant light streak out from the patch of mud the stranger stood over, coursing along the ground and up the sides of the trees. Into the underbrush and up each little bush. They branch out into the leaves of all the greenery in the forest around her, setting her entire world ablaze with glittering white light.
Suddenly, everything crumbles away.
The entire forest around her literally comes to pieces, decaying and spiderwebbing with cracks. The sunlight above rapidly fills in the gaps as the material world withers away. Even the ground she stands on shatters like slate and falls to nothing, leaving her standing in a blank sunlight-filled void with the white-haired stranger and his cat.
Bella waits for a couple of heartbeats, the sound thrumming the strange invisible walls of the empty light they floated in. The sound of an anxious young girl's strong heart eerily thumps their tiny spaceless world.
Before she could open her mouth to ask a question, her voice shakes the light-walls around them.
Where the hell are we?
Bella goes wide-eyed as her thoughts spoke for her mouth.
The stranger turns to her, his eyes narrowing and seeming dim against the glare of the sunlight they stood within. The whispering millions of his voice ripple smoothly from the invisible walls.
"The space between spaces. It looks far different to me than it does to you. Your mind, as it is, isn't quite equipped to handle all of the things your senses are trying to take in right now."
Her anxious, excited mind speaks before her mouth can get to it again.
The space between spaces? What the hell does that mean?
He grins and his laughter causes the light they float in to flicker.
"Extra-dimensional space. Meaning…I could sit here with you for the next hundred years to explain it and no time at all would have passed when I sent you back home."
Bella responds with a quirked brow and an intentionally phrased thought.
Uh, yeah…can we not do that and pretend we did?
As the stranger spins away from her in the void, his laughter shimmers the walls again.
"That was the plan."
A young girl's laughter rattles the walls, her amusement resonating harder and sharper than the white-haired stranger's. Bella tries to hide her smirk with a hand but catches the shimmering white-blue eye the man had cast over his shoulder at her. Knows he's laughing too and hopes he can't see how red in the face she is.
Those curiously glowing fingertips draw a couple of intricate patterns in the bright emptiness, purple-blue tracers leaving lines in the sunlit nothing.
A nothing that is suddenly not anymore.
Lines, the hard black lines of reality and order, jump out of the formless walls and begin rapidly shaping themselves into predictable geometric shapes. Bella starts making out cubes and rectangles. The more she becomes able to make sense of the basic shapes, the faster the image begins to come together in her eyes. Tien jumps into the scene, its form shattering into a mist and seeping into the darkening lines, giving the room's edges shadow and definition. As soon as she realized that the big rectangle lying on its side in the center of the room was a bed...well, suddenly the rest of the room made sense now.
Bella takes in a full, deep breath and smiles as bright as she had all day.
She was in Edward's bedroom.
The white-haired stranger stood at the sliding door out to the balcony, peering intently outward, the glow of his eyes bouncing off the glass and lighting up the room. Bella hops awkwardly over to the bed and flops down on it, sucking in a huge draught of her boyfriend from the smell of him on the sheets. She lay there, happy as ever for just a moment, and then sits up abruptly, ignoring the ache that was slowly returning to her leg.
"So…Mister…we're baiting him to come back by putting me in his bed, is that it?"
The stranger just turns an impish grin at her and answers vocally.
"Of course. Who'd say no to that?"
Bella just laughs and grins back, "Good trap, sir."
The stranger turns to face her and swings one arm out in a playful bow.
"Thank you. Tricks & traps are but a few of the things I do exceptionally well."
Bella goes wide-eyed for a moment. In her head…
Did he really just say that?
But what she said was, "Wow! How old are you?"
He laughs and pads silently over to the couch and hops atop the arm, perching there on his toes. His fingers steeple in front of his face and the glow of his eyes dims abruptly and completely, two very bright, glittering blue eyes showing through the dying light.
Bella furrows a brow because the change that subtle gesture had affected was dramatic.
With "human" eyes, the hair seems less starkly white and his skin almost darkens to a tan. His features soften just a hair. Even his posture changes a bit; he didn't look like a predator anymore.
All in all, he looked much more…normal to Bella. Her mind yells at her.
Another trick! He looks human so I feel more comfortable sitting and bullshitting with him. Wow, living with this guy day to day would be maddeningly confusing.
He smiles, bereft of the fangs from before.
"Something like 15 billion years. It's been a long time. I mean…who'd really count after the first ten thousand years? Or worse, the first million?"
Bella laughs a little and wrinkles her brow again, almost taken aback at how nonchalant he is about it. She knows he can hear her thinking. "You just seem like a young guy. Playful, ya know?"
He laughs again.
"Well, yeah. I mean…15 billion years is a long time! Ya gotta find something to laugh about. Besides, would you really have been so calm about all this if I had been a dick about it?" He laughs again as he finishes and flashes a legitimate smile at her, eyes twinkling.
Bella laughs too and shakes her head at him.
"Ok then…so…what now?"
The stranger didn't seem to have heard her though. His eyes were focused on the door. His nose twitches once or twice like he'd just smelled something tasty. He definitely had the predator-thing going again, if not as intense this time. Bella almost opens her mouth to speak but decides to try something else.
Hey! What is it?
His head twitches to the side and a half-smirk crosses his face as he glances at her. The whisper slinks through her synapses again.
"Well, aren't you a quick study."
Bella half-scowls at him and flips him off.
A breath later, an image of her flipping him off…from his eyes…flashes through her mind. She twitches and blinks, then goes wide-eyed at him.
Neat trick. You really weren't lying when you said you see the world differently than I do. A lot of colors. Colors I've never even seen before. Now…what is it? What's got you looking like you're about to go eat someone?
He just smiles at her and his whispering voice dances with the neurons in her head.
"You should probably prepare yourself. I believe Carlisle heard us talking and laughing. He's checking his phone for messages from Edward. I get the impression he's been trying to call his son for awhile now. Needless to say, voices from the room he wants his boy in right now would be rather disconcerting. He'll be coming up the stairs in a moment."
Bella sits for a moment as he lays it all on her and blinks once or twice.
You know all that from sitting there and sniffing the air for 30 seconds?
The look he answered with is all she needs. His face screamed Oh, if you only knew…
Bella suddenly wished she could read his damn thoughts back and starts to sit up. Moving too quickly, she jars her leg against the end of the bed and gasps. The glittering blue eyes of the stranger flick to her leg and he drops to his feet, across the room in a blink. Bella starts, wide-eyed, and tries instinctively to back away from a fast-moving predator.
One of his pale hands clamps down on the cast. Bella squeezes her eyes shut in anticipation of the agony. Instead of flaring pain, she finds herself instantly and completely immobilized by his insane grip. A cool, numbing sensation floods the slowly-healing bone in her leg, radiating out from his fingers.
Suddenly, white-hot, so hot it's cold. The bone itself!
She screams in her mind, unable to do anything else and knowing he can hear her.
NO! What are you doing? That's so intense!
He never responds. The grip never lessens. The shocking cold wrapping the bone in her leg was so painful but at the same time…it was something she had no problem dealing with. She starts to wonder why he'd gone to all this trouble just to fuck with her in the end.
The cold abruptly increases a thousand fold and Bella screams in her mind.
She could feel the bone stitching itself together. Almost like it was freezing back together.
As jarringly as it began, it stops.
He stands and lifts his hand from her cast, stepping back and shoving both hands in his pockets. Bella takes a deep breath as she is released, able to move freely again. She gasps and pulls her leg up to her chest, regardless of the cast.
Before she can form a coherent thought, the whispering voice drops back into her mind again.
"You gonna miss that thing?"
Bella looks up and wipes a tear away that she was surprised hadn't come already. She looks at him for a minute. Fingernails drum on her cast gently and she bites her lip nervously as she chews over everything this enigmatic creature had done for her in the last 2 hours or so. And then tops it all off with a joke about her cast.
Finally, she looks up and laughs a little.
"Maybe just a little. Did you….really just heal my leg? Like…it's not broken anymore?"
He nods quietly and opens his hands to her, as if questioning.
"Yes. I'm sorry that was so painful. I hadn't the chance yet to closely study how badly broken your leg was. Restoring it to original condition was a…rather involved process. If it hadn't been so cold, you'd have felt all the bones moving and wiggling and….just…eh. For the unpleasantness, mi dispiace. If you'll give me your leg back, I'll remove the cast also."
Bella thinks a moment and then sticks her leg out, the pain completely and utterly gone. The cast seemed little more than dead weight now.
No. I won't take the apologies. Thank you. Thank you very much.
The stranger glances at her briefly, something off in his glittering gaze. He never says anything though; he very quietly takes a razortipped finger that had been normal, albeit glowing, and runs a seam down the back of the cast and up the bottom of her foot to the toe. The razortip vanishes as quickly as it came and nimble, deft fingers lift the cast off with the faintest of effort, the material cracking gently as he pulls it apart.
Bella's pale foot falls free and she immediately sets her toes wiggling, stretching long-disused muscles.
Before she can say anything, that razortipped finger appears again and he quickly slices the drawing Edward had put on the cast free. Lifting the brittle papery substance up, he claps if flat between both palms.
His eyes flash blindingly and little arcs of electricity crackle around his hands.
As sharply as it started, it stops.
His eyes dim to "normal" again and he holds the little card-shaped piece of cast out to her. Furrowing her brow and biting her lip, Bella takes it and looks at it closely. What she saw made her gasp. The material had become hard and thickened a bit, becoming something that felt like a piece of polished stone, cool to the touch. All the colors within the drawing, even the black, shimmered and pulsed with an energy that looked suspiciously like the electricity that had played about the stranger's fingers an instant ago.
Looking up with wide eyes, tears of a different sort welling in them, Bella struggles to find anything to say to him.
He just smiles and waves her off, pointing at the door.
"Carlisle will be coming through that door in less than a minute. I have to go."
Bella gives him a WHAT THE FUCK look, "How the hell do I explain this?" She points at her foot, which she was wiggling about.
"Wing it. Deflect. Evade. Tell them Sasquatch is real and he's a like a big, hairy druid or something. In my experience, the more insane the story is at first glance, the less questions are asked when the person asking is more concerned about your safety in general than they are how you got safe."
Bella frowns at him and just thinks at him, for speed's sake.
Great. I can't tell them about you?
He shrugs and gets a ooh, touchy subject look.
"Actually, you physically can't. Part of the rules I'm bound to is that the mortals I come into personal contact with either have to come live in my world or have a physical compulsion embedded that keeps them from speaking about the specifics of our contact. Or…they have to be killed."
Bella goes wide-eyed.
And I don't fit the first choice or the last, right?
He simply smiles and nods.
She starts to ask him his name again but the doorknob turns and she glances over quickly.
Carlisle swings the door open and steps into the room. He goes wide-eyed as he locks gazes with Bella. Then his eyes drift to the sliding door across the room and go even wider. Bella gets a funny look and looks over.
She gasps when she sees what he does.
Traced on the door in glass-fog was an intricate drawing of an ornate gothic cross, slowly fading into invisibility.
"Bella?"
Bella blushes and turns to face her boyfriend's father.
"Um…hi, Dr. Cullen."
The doctor was standing at the edge of the bed, arms crossed over his chest, looking down at her leg and the discarded cast. Bella cupped the energetic little stone disk the stranger'd given her in her palm, out of sight, and tries to figure out how she was gonna talk her way out of this one.
Awesome. Get kidnapped, then re-kidnapped, and dropped off in your boyfriend's bed. And the first person I get to talk to is his DAD.
The now-familiar whisper slithers across her synapses again, tittering with amusement.
"You'll do fine, little birdy. And you can call me Z."
Bella manages to keep the smirk off her face and instead gives Carlisle her best shitty salesman grin and takes a deep breath, prepping to do her best at Professional Bullshitting.
Yeah…and if you buy this, can I interest you in a lovely beachfront estate in New Mexico?