A/N: Hello dear readers. :D Here is the second chapter of First Blood. Please read and review- give me your opinions so I can build on them.

Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight. Sure wish I did though… The only things I own are my original characters.

-There is No Loss Without Love-

The airport was a busy place in a world of humans. However, that was mostly in the daytime- and since Anastasia Baryon, who, for obvious reasons, did not venture outside in the light of day, entered a relatively calm and composed La Guardia airport at around 2 a.m. to catch her flight to Seattle.

She hefted her large suitcase easily on her shoulder, receiving a few odd looks from the sleepy businessmen sprawled out on the benches in the waiting area for gate 01. She hissed quietly to herself for forgetting to play down her vampire strength- she was no newborn, after all- and slowly put the suitcase down.

"Sasha?"

Anastasia's head whipped around in shock when she heard her old nickname. It had been years since someone had been close enough to her to be known by that name. If she had been human, she would have surely suffered a bad case of whiplash.

The first thing her superhuman vampire brain registered was a huge pair of sunglasses. They took up nearly the entire face of the slim man in front of her. Supporting the sunglasses was a large hooked nose, and beneath the nose lay a pair of thinly smiling lips.

Above the sunglasses were a pair of outrageously pink-dyed eyebrows, which proceeded to waggle themselves at her in an equally outrageous manner. The tension in Sasha's shoulders immediately dropped and she threw herself into the man's arms, mentally thanking the lord she'd thought to wear two jackets under her encompassing peacoat. If she had just worn a t-shirt, the cracking sound of colliding boulders would have echoed throughout the airport- and no one wants loud noises in a place where people are regularly taken to jail for having terrorist shoes.

"Oh my God… what are you doing here?" She whispered to the man with the neon pink hair and the massive sunglasses, stroking his cheek. Tears slipped out the corners of her eyes before she could stop them. "Liam."

The odd vampire took off his sunglasses and winked his bright red eye at her. As she stepped back, he rolled his black-swathed shoulders a few times.

"You are getting stronger every day, my dear. It has indeed been too long," he sighed, amiably tossing her suitcase over his own shoulder and beginning to walk, sleepy businessmen be damned.

Liam Modigliani was Sasha's mentor and professor who had taught her how to move, how to hunt, how to kill- how to steal. How to master her abilities. She had found him one wet day in New York, hiding in a dumpster due to the sudden strong daylight. He had grumbled in a strong Italian accent about how there was supposed to be a storm that day, that the sun had come out and caught him unawares. She had thought it was odd at the time, considering he was an ancient vampire- though he'd already told her his age in the first few days, she could feel it in her bones (although he looked physically to be around 23).

Professor Modigliani had come to New York in search of a special weather vane, or some such knickknack. Being a vampire with the power to predict the weather, his head was a little muddled sometimes, he had explained, and it was hard to know when sudden sunbursts would occur.

Sasha had given the 800 year old vampire a place to stay until nightfall. When nightfall indeed came, she had begged him to take her with him back to Italy. He was one of the few of her kind she had met since the war- her war- and she knew if she was to survive in a nest of humans without being discovered eventually, she would need instruction from one so experienced.

And, to her surprise, he had agreed.

--

"WATCH your flank…" barked the man with the mass of spiked pink hair as Sasha flew from gargoyle to pillar on top of the ancient cathedral. Being a vampire, she did not get out of breath, but she did get confused. And right now she saw no threat to her flank as the old fart (as she lovingly called her master) had described. She stuck her tongue out at him as she flew past for the umpteenth time.

Only she and Liam could see each other, moving at the high speeds just out of the range of the naked human eye. This was part of her training- crazy, she thought; just insane enough to work, he thought. Modigliani had instructed her to hop as fast as she could from spire to spire on the towers of the cathedral. That was easy enough, sure, she had thought. But then with a subtle flick of her professor's wrist it had started pouring, thunder and lightening cracking like bones snapping between strong jaws. And of course the spires had acted as lightening rods.

Only too late did Sasha feel the searing burn of the lightening on her left side, and barely managed to position for a correct emergency landing before she toppled, screaming in pain, from the highest spire of the highest tower.

--

"Ah, the old days," chirped the quirky professor over his coffee at her. Sasha made a face. She didn't know how Liam had acquired a taste for Starbucks, but against all odds…

They had been catching up after she ran into him in the hall. Together, they sat cross legged on the floor in front of gate B92, declining to sit in the regular waiting area chairs because the ancient vampire swore he would set himself on fire before sitting in a place where countless humans had vomited. Sasha was about to ask him if the floor really was any better, but stopped herself before he called up a blizzard and blocked her flight. Liam would do that. As a practical joke, of course.

"So, will you be going back to Italy?" Sasha probed. She still had no idea why he was here, or where he would be going.

"Eventually, yes," he sighed dramatically, clicking his fingernails, oddly painted a bright canary yellow, against the tiled floor of the airport. "I am searching for another fascinating gothic carving here I thought I had lost forever… lovely thing, centuries old…"

Sasha fervently mumbled a hail-Mary as her plane pulled up in front of the gate, and the sleepy receptionist mumbled over the intercom that flight 678 was boarding. When Prof. Liam got started about a gothic carving, he didn't end. Period.

She stood up and stretched, fixing her old mentor with large crimson eyes. Of course, right now they were a brownish color, as she had put on some green contacts for the journey. She leaned forward and gave him another hug.

"Alright Liam, you old fart," she teased. "I'll visit you sometime if I can."

"Right, right," sighed the professor, his eye-popping hair swinging back and forth as he shook his head. "I just had to see you, mi amore. It has been thirty years, has it not." He winked. "But that is only 3 months to ones such as us, no? Goodbye Sasha."

And he disappeared, leaving no trace of yellow nail polish behind. Sasha smiled slightly. He had taught her well in the 1960s and 70s.

If only she hadn't been in love with him too- maybe that would have saved her the scar she bore on her left side from that fateful lightening strike. Distractions were dangerous.

--

Sasha opened her eyes as the plane touched down hours later in Seattle. It was raining.

'Perfect,' she thought happily. 'This is exactly the weather I was hoping for.'

Gracefully rising from her seat, she walked sedately along with the rest of the early morning rush to the baggage claim.

It was at times like this that she thanked Modigliani for his instruction. If he had not trained her to completely ignore the scent of human blood at will, she would have been in a dire mess here, pressed on all sides by strong, healthy specimens, their hearts beating strongly enough to be heard for miles. Before he had taught her this life-saving technique, she had been a mess. Of course she had managed on her own for a while, learning to resist most of the time, like any mature vampire. But even adult vampires would have trouble in New York city, where one lived in a crowd. Sasha fed only once a month. She saw no point in waste.

'Maybe it's because of how I was raised,' she joked to herself sarcastically as she swung her suitcase off the carousel.

In the taxi out of the airport, Sasha put in new contacts. Her old ones had been absorbed by the venom in her eyes.

She watched the increasingly green landscape fly by under the ghostly veil of the light rain. Wondering at the canopy and density of the forest, she could hardly keep herself from pressing her cold porcelain face to the plexiglass window of the cab to gawk.

And then she saw it. Something was moving in the forest. And, according to her highly sensitive vampire eyes, it was neither animal nor vegetable. And it certainly wasn't mineral, though it was the color of highly polished and worn white marble.

The last thing she saw was a pair of bright golden eyes. Red and gold locked for all of an eightieth of a second, and then the form in the forest disappeared. The cab rolled to a stop soon after.

"Here we are, ma'am," coughed the taxi cab driver awkwardly, uncomfortably aware of the fact that his client's was face mooshed up against the window in a most undignified manner. "Shall I take your suitcase up while you… get some air?"

Sasha quickly yanked her nose away from the window, and tried to step out of the cab in the most frigid way possible. She looked down her nose at the cabbie and swished her raven hair behind her.

"I am fine, thank you," she told him with a cool smile, and gently tossed the heavy suitcase onto her shoulder. "Here is your fare."

As Sasha lay down in her new apartment in Forks, she wondered about a few things. First, how would she find a job here that she could do during the night? Second, what was that thing she had seen in the forest?

If she had been human, chills would have run down her spine. Something was definitely off about Forks.

--

A/N: Hope you all liked the second chapter.  Feel free to ask me anything and please REVIEW. :D Love you all.