Bella may have had the 'newborn advantage', but a surprise attack can catch anyone off guard.
The blond vampire bull rushed her, hitting her middle with her shoulder and sending Bella straight into a tree. She didn't even have time to detach herself from the vegetation before the vampire was on her again, grabbing her by her throat.
Bella was used to feeling a bit of pain in her throat from the constant burning that accompanied her hunger pangs, but the cracks forming on her marble skin along with a fierce pressure made her panic. She brought up her legs and kicked the vampire in the torso, shoving her across the clearing.
"Wait!" Bella shouted. "Just hold on for one second. I'm not here to fight you!"
The blond stood up from her prone position and cocked her head curiously at Bella. She took that as a good sign and continued.
"You're Irina, right?"
The blonde's eyebrows scrunched in confusion before she gave a slow nod.
"My name is Bella Swan. I'm a friend of the Cullens." Her name seemed to get some recognition, and Bella could see Irina's eyes very slowly changing from black to a dark gold.
"The Cullens said that Bella Swan was a human." Her voice flowed across the clearing. Bella didn't think she could ever get used to how vampires sounded – like every word was a musical note, part of a grand symphony. Irina looked Bella up and down before giving a pointed stare at her red eyes. "It seems a lot has changed since we last saw our cousins."
"You have no idea." Bella muttered under her breath, but from the way the blond gave her a questioning look, she had overheard her comment.
Bella could feel every muscle in her body still strained, waiting for an attack, and she tried to relax herself, straitening until she was no longer crouched. Irina responded in kind, coming up from her own stance and giving Bella a perplexed, yet intrigued look.
"Look," Bella started, "This is gonna sound kinda ridiculous, but the wolves haven't done anything wrong."
Whatever animosity that had been lifted by Bella's attempt at calming the situation down returned in an instant. Irina's eyes were back to black and her fingers curled, making her hands look almost like claws.
"Those mutts killed my mate!" She snarled at Bella. Bella quickly threw her hands up in supplication.
"Yes…Yes, they did, but—" Bella tried.
Irina let out a roar that would have curdled Bella's blood if she'd had any left, and once again launched herself at her. Their bodies met with a booming 'crack', almost like the sound of thunder, and Irina had Bella pinned to the ground in a matter of seconds.
Bella may have had more strength and speed, but she also had absolutely no fighting experience. She didn't know how old Irina was, but she was obviously the senior vampire here.
She could feel Irina's teeth snapping at her neck, held at bay only by the raw strength of Bella's hands holding her back, when she heard another voice.
"Bella!" Jacob screamed as he rushed forward, flanked by two wolves and followed by more.
"Stop! Just wait!" Bella yelled back from her position under Irina. Surprisingly, they listened to her, the wolves falling back to the tree line and Jacob stepping back to meet with Sam who had just come out of the woods, not shifted and in small jean shorts in even colder weather than last time.
"Irina!" Bella shouted once more, trying to break through to the vampire pinning her to the frosted ground. "I can't hold them off forever, and you can't fight them all by yourself. Can we please just talk for a second?"
"That sounds like an excellent idea." Came a voice from the other side of the clearing, opposite the wolves.
Four more vampires walked into the light, led by a woman with strawberry-blond hair and a stoic expression.
"Irina, it would be best if you stopped for a moment." The leader said.
The vampire above her growled, before sitting up, still straddling Bella, and speaking to the newcomer.
"Tanya, these are the wolves that killed Laurent! They should pay for their actions against our coven! Against me!"
The leader, Tanya, looked over at the wolves just barely restrained by the trees and the two men with them, then back to her coven-mate. "And did this vampire do something to upset you?" She gestured to their position.
Bella hadn't moved since they'd started talking. Eventually, Irina had stopped using pressure to hold her down, and now she was just sitting on her, but Bella didn't want to do anything that might provoke the blond, so she'd remained still beneath her. Now, after Tanya had mentioned her, Irina looked down at Bella, prompting the newborn to give a hesitant smile up at her. Irina looked amused for a second, before frowning again.
"She's with them! She probably helped them kill Laurent after the Cullens turned her." Irina said to her sister.
Tanya looked more confused that satisfied with that answer. "The Cullens?" She questioned. "Ah. This must be that Bella we've heard so much about." She looked at Bella as she said that, and Bella waved shyly from the ground, looking upside down at the vampires. The blond vampire that hadn't spoken yet let out a snort.
"Um, hi. Yes, I'm Bella. Could I please get up now?" She aimed this at Irina, and Irina seemed to half-heartedly consider it, before almost playfully answering with a shake of her head. Bella pouted, and this time more than one laugh came from the vampire side of the clearing, and a few huffs of breath that could be interpreted as laughs came from the wolves.
"And the Cullens didn't turn me. Laurent did." The laughter cut off, and the vampire above her stared at her, disbelieving. It was Tanya who spoke, however.
"Laurent changed you? When was this?" She spoke commandingly.
"Um, a few weeks ago maybe?" Bella answered. "I've been kind of out of it for a bit, so I'm not sure as to the exact time."
"Two and a half weeks ago!" Jacob yelled out from the other side of the clearing.
Bella nodded, her head scraping the ground a bit with the motion. "Right. Two and a half weeks ago." She answered the coven leader.
Tanya opened her mouth to speak, but Irina beat her to the punch.
"That's when he left to hunt." Irina informed everyone, though it seemed as though she was talking mainly to herself. She refocused on Bella. "Why did you ask Laurent to change you, instead of the Cullens? And why would you help these wolves," She spoke the word derisively, "kill your maker?"
Bella looked up at her, before shifting her sight to take in the entirety of the coven that had appeared. Each of them wore some version of a confused or questioning expression on their faces. It seemed to her like none of them knew what had happened. None of them had been involved in the attack on her. A quick look to the other side of the clearing informed her that Sam and Jacob had come to the same conclusion. She turned back to Irina before answering.
"I didn't ask Laurent to change me." She began. "He didn't even mean to change me. He was there to kill me." Ignoring the sharp gasps that the vampires emitted, Bella continued. "The wolves saved my life. They showed up right after Laurent had bitten me, and they drove him off."
Everyone's attention was on her when she said that, and she could tell that many of them were trying to tell if she was lying. Irina looked up at her coven leader, a question on her face. Eventually, it was Tanya that gave a sigh and said, "She's telling the truth, Irina."
The blond above her shook as the truth settled on her shoulders. Her hands clutched at Bella's jacket, almost seeming to draw some kind of comfort from it, before she let out a loud sob.
"No, he…no that can't—" Irina whispered brokenly.
The wolves, even in full wolf form, looked very awkward in the moment, but they didn't leave Bella alone to the strange new vampires, instead choosing to sit on the sidelines as the sad scene played out.
As Irina cried, her coven mates watched with matching expressions of sympathy, the pain on their faces mirroring Irina's, as if they could feel exactly what she was going through. Irina's body lowered even more onto Bella, and Bella's hands came up to awkwardly clasp the blonde's shoulders as Irina sobbed into her neck, holding her to her in an attempt to comfort her. She may not know these vampires very well, but she knew what it was like to lose someone you thought to be your mate.
As she rubbed her hands down Irina's back, her hands started to tingle.
"God damnit, not now!" She hissed as the world turned blurry as the corners. Irina withdrew her head from its position against Bella's chest, and her eyes widened as the vampire beneath her seemed to fade for a second. Bella's hands dug at the ground beneath her as she tried to pull back from whatever was yanking her away, but it was useless.
She could only hear a startled 'what the-' before she faded out and a very confused vampire fell about half a foot to the floor.
OOOOOO
Bella 'woke up' on her back in a dark room.
The scent of mothballs and damp earth filled her nose when she took a deep breath, trying to get used to the sensation of being thrown through reality. Around her were barrels as far as the eye could see, stacked all the way to the ceiling, though the ceiling was quite low. The floor below her was dirt, but there were stone looking steps that led to a door above her, so Bella was hoping that maybe she'd been wrong before. Maybe she hadn't been sent to the past all of those time, she had just ended up in some isolated village, not a time period before metal-working.
Bella stood, and a cloud of dust rose with her. She'd been in the corner of the room, and the dust had been sitting on the floor for a while judging by the thick layer of it. In the middle of the room, and on the stairway leading up, the area was cleared out a bit of dust, just from general usage and foot traffic. It became obvious that not too many people came down to this dark, dank room, and ever fewer had tried to clean it. There was a box, half opened and with some kind of rags spilling out at the base of the stairs, and Bella stepped over it as she made her way to the top step, stopping and pressing her ear to the door. After about a minute of complete silence, Bella pulled back and grabbed the handle to the door, slowly cracking it open.
A long hallway led in either direction from the door, and more doors lined the hallway on the side that held the room Bella was currently in. There were torches hanging in sconces on the walls, and the walls themselves were lined with pedestals that held beautifully painted pots and marble-looking busts. None of this, however, held her attention as much as the center of the room.
It wasn't even a room, per say, but more of a cut out of the house. Giant pillars held up the walls around a large circular area. Green plants and flowers were planted along pathways that led to the center, where an incredibly detailed sculpture of a muscled man held out his cupped hands, with water held in them and in the fountain base below.
Damn.
It must've taken years just to design the masterpiece, and even longer to create it. The whole room spoke of money, and Bella was hoping that whoever the owners were, they were lenient on the whole 'breaking and entering' thing. Especially since she hadn't technically broke in.
The soft pitter-patter of tiny feet registered to Bella, and she slowly let the door close the inch she had opened it, slipping back into the darkness. The passed by her, and it seemed like whoever it was, they were running.
Bella hoped this wasn't another scenario where someone was trying to kill them, because she was kinda full from the last one, and the person sounded really small, like a child. Bella could only briefly wonder who would want to harm a child before she heard the sounds returning from where they had passed her.
The steps seemed to slow a bit, and quick breaths and a racing heart was all Bella heard for a moment as the person seemed to stop just to the right of the door Bella currently stood behind.
Another pair of footsteps, these ones accompanied by a loud and grating voice calling out, echoed in the distance, also closing in on her location, and it seemed whatever decision the child had been stuck on was made as the door in front of Bella suddenly swung open, and a small child rushed in, closing the door behind it.
The little girl put her back up against the door, closing her eyes and leaning on it as she took a few slower gulps of air, trying to calm her breathing and remain quiet.
Her blond hair was stuck to her face in a few places, and Bela could tell that this chase had been going on for a while now. The few strands that weren't plastered against her neck and face were tied back with some kind of rope, and one strand of hair was swaying back and forth in front of her with the heaving breaths of the girl who couldn't be more than five or six.
She stayed in that position as the second pair of feet rushed past the door, the owner screeching all the while, and when they finally rounded the corner, their voice trailing off with the distance put between them, the girl let out a breath of air and opened her eyes.
Those tiny blue eyes widened to the size of saucers, and Bella felt the urge to slap herself in the face for forgetting to hide.
Bella towered over the child. She hadn't moved back apart from a foot to close the door, and the child now took up that small space, leaving the vampire hovering over her, staring down with red eyes that glinted in what little light was let in from the crack under the door.
Bella had always been told by any and all vampires that she knew while she was human that she had little to no self-preservation instincts, but they were wrong. When she had first seen the Cullens, she had felt that same sense of gnawing fear that all humans feel when confronted with a predator that could kill you before you blink. Humans always had an aversion to vampires, some instinct inside them warning them away, and Bella was no different. It was just that her insatiable curiosity had overrode that hesitance, that primal fear, and led her directly into their dangerous arms, regardless of the feelings she fought against to get there.
She couldn't tell if this girl was the same as her, or if she really was lacking in any kind of self-preservation instincts, because moments after seeing a tall, imposing figure with red eyes hiding in the dark and leaning over her, she laughed.
The girl laughed.
Honest to God giggled in the face of a blood thirsty creature of the night.
Bella blinked. She'd been standing there as still as a statue, but this completely senseless child was laughing at her. Before becoming a vampire, Bella hadn't known she could feel simultaneously amused and offended. She was a vampire for fucks sake.
The girl should be afraid of her.
But no. Instead she laughed.
A small hand came up to cover the girl's mouth as she tried and failed to suppress her laughter. Her small eyes narrowed then, turning to Bella with an almost accusing glare, before she brought one finger to her lips and shushed her.
The girl laughed in her face, now she was shushing her. Seriously?
If there had ever been a better example of shock then Bella's face at the moment, she wasn't sure she wanted to hear that story.
"Athenodora, Ubi es?" The screecher was back, and this time, they had company. "Athenodora, veni huc!"
A myriad of voices coming from all over the garden area that Bella had seen earlier sounded out, all seeming to call for this 'Athenodora' person, and Bella narrowed her eyes at the child suspiciously.
The cheeky little brat just smiled back up at her, keeping her finger to her lips.
The girl, Athenodora, turned back to face the door, keeping her ear against it as the people behind it searched for her, calling out her name, and Bella couldn't tell if this was some kind of hide-and-seek situation, or if the little trouble maker was just hiding, and the role of seeker was forced upon those outside.
She didn't have longer to ponder on it before things started to blur again. It was a silent thing, not some loud 'pop' or 'boom' that announced her gift. She was simply whisked away, fading out of existence in once place, and coming back in another, so the child in front of her was left unawares as Bella 'left'.
When the girl turned back to make sure her strange accomplice wouldn't blow her cover, she found the room empty behind her, the dust on the ground the only thing disturbed.
OOOOOO
Bella was laying on the ground in the clearing, in the exact place she left, though this time without a crying vampire on top of her.
The wolves and the vampires were gone, but their scent lingered in the air, only a couple hours old.
The first time she was supposedly gone weeks, and the next two times, only hours went by before she returned? Maybe it had something to do with her change, but Bella couldn't figure out how this whole 'gift' of hers worked.
She sighed, standing up from the cold forest floor, and began following the smell of the wolves and the vampires back into Canada, resolving to think about her new power after she dealt with the wolves and vampires that wanted to kill each other.
Why couldn't anything ever be easy?
OOOOOO
A/N: Thank you, everyone who is sticking with me on this journey! I'm trying not to rush things, while also not leaving you guys getting bored without the girls getting together. I gotta warn you, I'm a bit of a slow burn fan, though I'm shit at writing it, so I don't know how this is going to turn out yet.
I'll try to keep updating whenever I can as I've been doing so far, but classes are starting up again soon and I have to move into my new apartment! So, it might not be as often as I've been doing it. I hope you keep reading and reviewing. I love reading your comments!