A/N: Hey guys, sorry about the delay- we kind of had a hurricane down here in Texas. It didn't help that the hurricane was the size of France. But anyway, here is another chapter.

Reviewer responses:

BrokenGlassNinja: I'm glad you like it and hope you keep reading!! Yes, I do like a kickass vamp girl ;o.

Disclaimer: Don't own Twilight.

-Wild Fire: The Manifestation-

If Sasha had been human, she would have been gasping for breath. She'd been running for hours from her pursuer, ducking and weaving through the trees in the forest surrounding the general vicinity of Forks. The wind howled through the branches, adding to the air current made by her faster-than-a-bullet motion from branch to branch, whipping her black hair behind her like a long silk ribbon.

During the war so long ago, she'd run from many newborn brawls in the dusty alleyways of the cities near the Mexican border, narrowly escaping being torn to shreds by the ravenous young vampires. Therefore, by managing to keep up with her as long as he had been, Jasper was doing considerably well. A grudging admiration rose in the back of Sasha's mind as she used her peripheral vision to spot the blond vampire flitting from tree to tree just as fast as she was, if not a little faster. Damn.

The leaves and branches flew past faster as she put on an extra spurt of speed; damned if she was going to let the man catch her! Here she had been, fully intending to smoke him and leave him wondering where in the high hell she'd gone, and he was actually gaining on her. What a mess.

Thunder rumbled in the overcast sky, causing her to look up with slight annoyance, and quickly glance behind her again- Jasper was indeed gaining, with murder in his topaz eyes, standing out like burning jewels above his stark ivory cheekbones. How boring, she thought as it began to pour, immediately soaking her clothing and hair through and splashing wetly all over her face. I might actually have to explain myself.

Sasha smirked as she banked a quick left over a dry bluff, rocketing through the pine trees on its dusty surface. Not if I can help it.

A quick glance behind her showed Jasper was easily following her over the little cliff, hopping lightly over the pit and into the pine trees behind her. He was concentrating hard, his marble skin tightened slightly around his eyes, a small twist to his perfect mouth. A mouth that hardened into a flat line after she suddenly stopped dead and turned to face him.

'What in tarnation,' Sasha could almost hear him thinking, as he froze to a halt about three feet from her. An expression of indescribable glee suddenly spread on her face as she suddenly vanished. Just poof, gone. Nowhere.

Under the curve of the bluff, clinging to the ceiling (about four feet from the water quickly filling hollow under it), Jasper's furious snarl of frustration could be easily heard echoing from the trees above. Sasha smiled. She'd confused him by stopping, instead of continuing to run, and then putting on a massive spurt of speed to flash to her current, spider-like, position. He was sitting right on her, and he didn't even know it! The rain would hopefully mask her scent. She prayed, clutching the hard-packed dirt as hard as her fingers would allow without digging into it and causing her to plummet into the icy water pooling beneath her. And speaking of plummeting into the water…

Damn. Double damn. Triple damn, quadruple damn… Sasha counted feverishly up to about ten multiples of damn as she realized her possibly fatal mistake; she was soaking wet from the torrential rain, water drenching every orifice and surface of her body and clothes. And in due time, that water would respond to gravity and begin to drip! She prayed that Jasper's hearing wasn't that good, because she knew that some vampires, with their massively enhanced hearing, would be able to hear those stupid fat drops plopping down into the puddle beneath her through the rain- and realize that they were concentrated in a suspiciously human form. Well, vampire form, but who was quibbling.

Sure enough, in about ten seconds, rotund little domes of water began gather and hang from her skin, clothes, and hair; Sasha watched nervously with huge red eyes as the first two pulled away, and fell toward the swirling brown mess of rainwater only a few feet beneath her. The thick curtain of rain outside her little overhang continued to fall, drumming loudly into the ground above it and around it. The unbroken surface of the water below seemed to pulse with its own sort of derisive laughter, as if it intended to receive those specific drops with the most noise possible.

At this point, I'm screwed either way, she thought. If he can't hear me, I'll have to wait until he gives up looking and leaves, which could take hours if he's annoyed enough. Or he'll catch me, sooner or later. Texans… if you give them any decent chase to speak of, they'll hunt you till they've successfully brought you home, come hell or- she looked ironically at the mess below her- high water.

And of course, after about three minutes of the water slowly dripping off her body and splashing into the muddy maelstrom, hollow thumps sounded right above where her chest was pressed to the ceiling of the overhang. Sasha could feel the light vibrations to her core, and pressed the side of her face even harder into the hard-packed dirt. Jasper had stopped. He would probably be inhaling the thoroughly wet air, trying to catch a scent.

Then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped, as if a giant hand had covered the spout of a massive watering can. Sasha froze completely. Her cover was, as they say, blown. It didn't help her strung-out nerves when no less than a few seconds later, Jasper's head popped over the edge of the cliff and stared at her upside-down, breaking out into a smug grin.

"There you are, you little varmint. You evaded me for quite some time. About five minutes, was it?" he said, extremely pleased with himself. Sasha rolled her eyes, and then glared at him. She almost flipped him the bird, but then remembered that she was clinging to a flat surface like a bat, and would fall into the mud if she lifted a hand.

"Go to hell," she spat. Really, there was nothing else to say. Jasper frowned for a moment, his face darkening as his mouth twisted down sharply at the corners.

"Already bought a ticket, honey. It seems to go with being one of our kind," he said softly, staring.

Then, quick as a flash, he grabbed a huge branch floating by in the morass, and aimed it for dead center of the overhang. Sasha's eyes went wide as she realized that he fully intended to stab that branch straight through the dirt, effectively crumbling her surface and sending her tumbling into the murk, along with all the dirt.

"Go ahead. I won't melt," she growled at him, baring her fangs in a feral grin.

Jasper's face fell again, as if his fun had been spoiled.

"Close your eyes then," he said, shrugging. "Wouldn't want 'em all water-logged."

Sasha cursed herself as she obeyed automatically, and then exhaled as she felt the queer sensation of rough-and-tumble vertigo. But the icy touch of the water below never came. Instead, as her eyes flew back open, she was dumped unceremoniously on the wet ground under the pine trees she'd been leading Jasper a merry chase in only a few moments earlier. She was on her feet in an instant, and spitting mad at that.

"Too frightened to dunk the scary lady today?" the female vampire scorned her erstwhile pursuer.

The pursuer pursed his lips slightly, frowning at her. He was completely soaked, his blond hair plastered to his head and hanging off in tight curls.

"Too frightened to face the crazy man chasing you through the forest?" he shot back evenly.

Sasha knew he spoke of the childish prank she'd played on him earlier today- she'd falsely informed the teachers that his transvestite grandfather "Al" had kicked the bucket. He'd left an unexpected wake of emotional destruction in his attempt to find his apparent lover, Alice, who he'd assumed to be dead. Error on her part.

She shrugged, brushing water off her pea coat uselessly, as it was drenched through, and looked at him coldly.

"You overstepped my boundaries the other night, boy," Sasha stated, enjoying how calling him 'boy' made his angelic face even more hostile. "Your arrogance was unnecessary, uncalled for, and completely out of place.

"Out of place, of course, because you are no match for me," she continued while walking slowly past the seething vampire. "You- and your little coven- would do well to remember that."

Sasha stole a glance over her shoulder at Jasper's back, which she could see was tight with the tension of his anger at being insulted and belittled. She smirked. I'm getting to him. I wonder what he's thinking.

Jasper turned gradually, standing tall and looking the female vampire dead in the eyes, his stare as cold as ice and his features as smooth as glass. For a full minute he kept his eyes locked to hers, seemingly trying to bore through her with only his vision. Then, suddenly, after time had passed, the corner of his perfect mouth quirked up slightly into a sardonic smile.

"Now, we'll just see about that, Anastasia," he said, flashing his sharp white teeth in a dangerous grin. "However, I do believe I have other pressing matters to attend to right now, so you'll be kind enough to excuse me for the moment. Begging your pardon."

And with a sarcastic mime of tipping his hat that Sasha didn't appreciate in the slightest, Jasper disappeared into thin air, running faster than the speed of light.

"Impudent man," she grumbled as she began running home herself. "Who does he think he is, the king of Siam? Oh, wait. They changed it to Thailand."

Shaking her head as she entered her apartment a short time later, Sasha wondered how the encounter could have shaken her so much that she'd forgotten that simple fact. It just went to show that spending any more time than was necessary around that cur caused her very brain cells to deteriorate. Well, that can be easily fixed, she thought, rolling her eyes at herself. I'll just avoid his coven as much as possible. Right.

Sasha slid out of her muddy wet clothes as soon as the door closed behind her, wanting to be rid of the feel of the clingy, squishy feeling of the mud-and-rain-soaked cloth. After she took a quick, scalding hot shower, she dumped her disgusting clothes from the day into the washer and turned it on to the normal cycle.

Her tiny apartment was one bedroom and one bathroom, the bedroom occupied sparsely by a twin bed, a small desk, and a tall, slim chest of drawers in which she kept her clothes. The walls were a soft forest green, the furniture a dark but cheaply made plywood. The cheap carpet on the ground was sand-colored and thin, but she didn't really notice it, not caring if it was threadbare. She'd slept in much worse places.

After drying off, Sasha walked naked to her dresser and chose four sticks of incense from the jar on top, which was stuffed full of the scented sticks. She lit and set them out equal distances from each other, to form a square in the center of which she sat down on the threadbare carpet.

In the sixties, she'd taken up the healing art of meditation, enticed by the peace it brought her. She didn't know if her method was unorthodox, but it helped calm her down and gain insight on matters that frustrated her more than most. Furthermore, it seemed to focus her abilities. She hadn't gathered her thoughts since leaving New York, and now was as good a time as any to do so.

She sat up ramrod straight, her head held high and her chest up. Her raven tresses brushed her bare ribcage softly as she began breathing slowly and rhythmically, much slower than was physically possible for any human to do. She closed her eyes, and simply felt the air around her, establishing her relative position in space. The heavy, spicy scent of the incense slowly began to permeate the air. Sasha could feel the molecules moving against her skin, knew the difference between the molecules of smoke and those of the air not yet permeated by it.

Slowly she began to push out with her senses- there was the small bed, there was the dresser. There was the dark wooden desk. There was the slightly chipped doorway to the tiny bathroom. She could feel the way the molecules changed occupying the different spaces, and how the air flowed around the solid objects. Her eyes were still closed. After ten minutes or so of the concentrated breathing, not missing one beat, Sasha felt completely calm and knowledgeable of the physical presence of every object in her room. She could feel them.

Opening her eyes gradually, Sasha breathed the smoke of the incense in deeply. It flowed warmly into her, filling her with exotic spice, like a gaseous wine- and equally intoxicating. She could still feel where everything was in the room as well as see it. Taking a deep breath, she felt for one of the incense sticks burning in its holder before her, gaining an awareness of each of its particles and their individual motion.

Then she let it rip.

The purple nub of the incense stick, at that point nearly completely burned down, suddenly roared into orange flame three feet high from its holder. Sasha held the flame for a few seconds, feeding it with air molecules, and then built it to six feet. One after the other, the remaining incense sticks each exploded into flame, until the vampire was sitting in a square of fire. Then, all at once, the fire disappeared.

Sasha glided up out of her sitting position and cleaned the ash from the incense holders, putting the little dishes away on the dresser next to the jar. Everything seems to be in order.

Ever since she'd been turned to a vampire, Sasha had had the strange ability to make anything burst into spontaneous fire. As a human, her life had been full of chaos and random occurrences- in fact, she had always seemed to attract chaos like a black hole. That was probably why she could control the molecules in the air around her- the ability to make anything burn instantaneously was chaotic and unnatural. Meditation helped her to refine and concentrate her abilities, to make only specific molecules to burn.

This was why her Italian mentor, Liam Modigliani, had decided to train her- he was fascinated by her ability, but saw she needed help when she erroneously made things burn hundreds of meters from her actual target. And then there had been that incident on top of the chapel so long ago- getting hit by the lightening had taught her just how fast the particles could move, and her power had therefore increased drastically.

Stretching like a cat, Sasha threw on a nightgown for no particular reason, and lay down on the bed. She remained in this position, deep in thought, until morning.

--

Jasper sat, dazed, only a few feet away underneath the windowsill of the bathroom. What a day. Jasper had had a few shocks that evening. First, when he'd come home to check on his Alice, she'd just laughed at him. What a ridiculous story! she'd said. Al? Right. Of course I'm fine, you lovesick fool.

Lovesick fool, am I?

He groaned inwardly, rubbing at his eyes in frustration and staring at the dirty brick in front of his nose.

Secondly, after he'd gotten bored and decided to follow Sasha back to her apartment, he'd seen a few things that explained a lot. And felt a few things which didn't explain much at all. The fire had been a shock; he'd nearly fallen off the windowsill from which he was spying. Fire. Fire.

It was no small wonder that Alice couldn't see worth anything around that creature- her power was so explosively spontaneous, seeing the future would be impossible within any close range. Just like the werewolves, nature was subject to unnatural, quick shifts around her- except that the molecules themselves were being forced to change shape, not unlike the shape-shifting power of the wolves. A fine mess.

Not to mention she'd been naked the entire time. Jasper had, to his annoyance, felt something below waist level respond immediately when Sasha had swayed out of her bathroom completely nude, her translucent skin molding her hourglass frame, sliding smoothly over the mounds and dips of her curves and bones. She was beautiful beyond imagination.

Fire. He still couldn't believe it. As he leaped down to the ground light as a feather and began running through the forest, he wondered how Carlisle would react.

A/N: Woo, another chapter done. Love you all SO MUCH. READ AND REVIEW PLEASE? :D