"Clear Water is dead," Emmett says, in a dry, distant voice as he rises to his feet. "You should know."
Bella nods, her loose hair swinging freely alongside her ridged, deformed face. She doesn't want to think about the statement. Her eyes look past him, toward the door in the hall that he ran from.
"There might not be anything in there," Emmett continues. There's little effort to keep from drawing attention to the sound of his voice. "My evening hasn't been easy."
The feel of her tongue running against the grooves between her fangs distracts her from the Emmett's flippancy. There's a calming satisfaction in his safety, but it mixes like water to the oil of his attitude. The gap of her nose shifts as her face tenses and her brow crinkles, her eyes narrowing to at his.
Frustration building in his willful silence, she brusquely moves past him toward the open door. Her fingers grip tightly against her rifle as she briefly rest her shoulder against the frame before rapidly turning in to room. Over the top of weapon, raised and ready, the sight surprises her.
The room is far from empty. The dusty cinder walls are lined with faded and rusty lockers and cabinets. Rolled tubes of paper poke from the crevices between them. Bland-looking folding tables stand tightly together in the center of the room, a few folding chairs atop them in an unorganized fashion. The moon peering through the window adds a forbidden air to the sight, as if the place had been suddenly abandoned for a reason. Its beams bounce off the floating specs of dust and concrete dislodged by the recent barrage of bullets.
She lowers her gun and steps further in to the room, Emmett's heavy footfalls behind her. They split apart, slowly beginning to circle the tables in the center of the room. Their eyes dart to the shadowed spaces and their hearts thud in tense anticipation. An index finger taps against each trigger, the rhythmic sound interstices with their heavy breathing. It's a slow, deliberate few minutes before they rejoin on the other side of the room.
"Clear," Emmett says, setting his weapon down on the table. "Intel?"
Bella nods, placing her sniper rifle beside his. She knows they need to rejoin Edward and Jacob, but finding information is always a higher priority. Her back muscles ache she squeezes her wings closer to her body in a clumsy effort to move more easily through the cluttered space.
The scratch of old metal and shuffling paper surround them as they begin opening every drawer and rifling through every pile. Memos typed on thinned parchments are scanned. Plans and schematics are unfolded, the motion after years of isolation causing them to rip at the seams.
"He saved me," Emmett says, a period added to a fruitless dig through a paper-filled drawer.
Bella refuses to look up from her search. The image of her diminutive friend's body floating in the black water, the vacant gap of his face, rams against her mind. With a dismissive sniff, she keeps her head down.
"He always seemed scared of me," Emmett says in her silence, "But the bastard actually saved me."
There's a prodding tone to his voice. If it's deliberate, Bella isn't sure. She rummages louder, the room-filling clack of a jerked-open cabinet momentarily blocking Emmett from her mind.
"My lungs were filled with water. I could feel them seize in my chest. I lost a lot of blood." His voice softens with an uneasy melancholy that lingers after each word. "But he figured it out."
Pursing her lips, she looks up from stack of folders and files in front of her squeezes her eyes shut. She feels their ache spread through her face. Curiosity, sadness and anger finally getting the best of her, she faces him.
His remorseful frown briefly turns up with appreciation as their eyes momentarily meet before he turns toward the window. His brow furrows in the moonlight while he recounts the encounter with the anadas in the tunnel. His futility. His electrocution. He absently rubs his neck, where the implanted radio exploded during the electrical surge.
Swallowing back the flood of emotion, Bella patiently listens. She understands. The sadness filling the room. Emmett's apparent need to explain everything. Underneath her own sea of mourning, an appreciation that Emmett trusts her enough to be this honest swims deep.
"I lost my taser," he continues. "Near the end of the tunnel, another anada grabbed him and just pulled him under." His eyes flutter as his face contorts in disbelief. "I couldn't do anything. Couldn't find him. Couldn't help him. A few minutes later he floated back up."
A knot shifts in Bella's shoulders and she fights for stoicism against the welling sadness that makes her breath heavily. She allows the few tears that escape her eyes to run down her face, their salty trails zigzagging and warm. After decades of knowing Emmett, moments like these are few. She remembers each one, but with Clear Water it's much harder.
She focuses on her feet, keeping them in place, as the want to embrace him runs through her. It's a sensation she needs, but she knows it would only anger Emmett.
"Thanks," he finally says, after several moments of contemplative quiet.
She smiles sweetly, her fangs pressing hard against the inside of her lips, and nods. Returning to her search, her pang of sadness subsides. Clear Water is dead. But he saved Emmett. He did an amazing thing.
I need to get him on the wall, she thinks. The thought distracts her as her clawed fingers flip quickly through the papers. He wasn't a member of Lilim, but he was an asset. She imagines his name etched in the black iron plaque in the lobby. The idea of it erases the remaining vestiges of mourning in her heart.
Wordlessly, they continue their search as quickly as they can. The screech of a rusted drawer. The flutter and flop of papers shifting and falling. The unrestrained click of a shutting cabinet. The room is filled with the steadied, hurried noise.
Midway around the room, Emmett comes to a chest-high tower of papers. In increments as large as his hands allow he whittles it down. Each stack lands on the table with a loud thud. The frail, uneven legs shuttering on the tile at the impact before he fans them out to scan. It isn't until the pile is waist high that he sees the gap behind it. The papers stand just over a foot away from the wall. The cabinet next to it stands away as well, a dark recess that light has no chance to reach.
"Flashlight," he says. He turns to face Bella as she quickly tosses it to him.
She furrows her brow and turns, pausing her search.
"I think there's something back here," he says, illuminating the room with a narrow beam of light. He leans over the stack of paper, it's uneven side casting weird shadows that dance within the narrow space. At the bottom, between the flaking metal of the cabinet and the dusty wall, a curled shape reflects back up. It shines with a light ripple of grays and white like the surface of a river.
He follows the length of it with the light. A hard bend halfway causes the upper portion to turn sharply upward as it's wedged tight in its hiding spot. With a single hand, he grips the back of the metal cabinet and yanks it away. Its sharp feet scream as it digs in to the tile with the motion, momentarily filling the room with a scratching, metallic wail.
Abandoning her efforts on the opposite side of the room, Bella stands nearby as Emmett reaches behind the cabinet. With a hissing plop, the remaining papers fall to the floor and spread across the tile as he stands, the object in his hand.
"Saran wrap," he says. His finger wrenched tightly in the plasticine surface. Once it's fully removed, he drops it atop the mess of files and papers with a heavy thud. Emmett frowns and meets Bella's eyes. A muted mix of colors is just visible beneath the near-opaque wrappings. "Feels like a body."
The twirling, sinking weight from before returns to Bella's gut as she kneels. The clawed ends of her wings tap against the floor. She runs a single, sharpened claw down the length of the wrapped form. With a dull purring sound, it opens like a zipper and releases a wet, thick, rank of decay and rot. The smell is a revolting explosion that causes both of them to quickly step back.
"Yep," Emmett says, the shredded remains of jacket held over his nose and mouth. "That's a body."
They allow the released stench to dissipate before nearing again. They wordlessly exchange anxious glances over their covered noses. Bella feels her heart fiercely beating within her, and her mind wanders to Vicky.
"Okay," Emmett says. He presses his jaw forward into his jacket, tightening the fabric so that stays against his face as he lowers his hand. The reek is less powerful, but the smell still seems to permeate through their clothes and rub against their skin.
With a solid tug, Emmett uses both hands to rip the plastic cocoon away and expose the female body within. She's naked. Her pallid flesh is loose and limp on the bone. With wide, dull eyes and gaping mouth she stares at nothing. Burgundy hair, thin and matted, sticks to the sides of her face, haphazardly framing her blank visage.
Bella and Emmett's attention is drawn to her throat, though. The massive gash highlights a near-black crimson bib of blood that covers the corpse's upper torso. The wound is deep and wide, nearly wrapping around the neck completely. Emmett kneels down and unceremoniously pulls the head back, opening the wound wide. Grayed splinters of chipped vertebra dot the violet muscles and red pooling.
"Utlunta," Emmett says, standing back up. He absently wipes the blood off his hands onto his pants leg as he turns to continue search the room.
Definitely, Bella thinks. She frowns at the acknowledgement. The vacant fear in the girl's face burns in Bella's mind. This girl saw the utlunta. Felt its deadly finger. Felt the warmth of her blood as it left her body. The dead girl doesn't look too old. Early-twenties, maybe.
An uneasy sadness grows within her. Bella allows her eyes to move down the corpse's body, away from the sliced neck. A second wound in the abdomen, a puncture about half an inch wide, is hidden beneath the red stain that covers the girl like a shirt.
The skin is moist in Bella's palm as she reaches around the body's side, lifting it slightly while she lowers her head to look at its back. The puncture wound goes all the way through the body, a viscous pool of blood beneath her.
From the thick redness, a glint of gold catches Bella's eye. A thin chain, stained pink, winds through molasses-like pool with a decorative locket at the end. With the claws of her thumb and middle finger, she gingerly plucks it from the blood.
"Em," she says as she carefully lowers the body back to the ground. She stands, quickly wiping the back of hand across her opposite sleeve. Holding the locket out, it sways gently between her fingers as her eyes meet Emmett's.
Furrowing his brow, he purses his lips at the sight. He rejoins Bella as she flicks the locket open and holds the flashlight up to see inside.
Two photos stare back at them, discolored from wetness and flaked with blood. One, a slightly younger picture of the body lying between them. She smiles broadly, her hair cut short and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. The second picture takes the hair from Bella's lungs. A mess of fiery red hair and happy green eyes.
Her hands drop to her waist and she stares ahead with a vacant stare. Vicky's voice whispers in her mind; 'My cousin.' It's hard to swallow as Bella's throat suddenly dries. Her gullet seems to shake with every beat of her heart.
"What?" Emmett asks. The flashlight causes menacing shadows to cover his face, but Bella doesn't notice.
The sharp tips of her teeth draw blood as she chews the inside of her lip. Her suspicions were right. The utlunta replaced Vicky's cousin. As her heart continues to pound within her chest she can only ask herself, 'Why?' What is the utlunta doing here? And why does it seem so adamant about staying?
"Bella," The sound of Edward's voice in her ear doesn't break her reverie, "I hope you found Emmett. Meet us on the west side of building D-24. We found a November-Charlie."
The term rings in her mind before ceasing on a nerve that awakens her. It's the cousin. Heidi. The utlunta.
"Fuck," she angrily spits as she grabs her rifle. She tucks the locket into her pouch and bounds past Emmett in to the hall.
"The hell?" Emmett shouts, re-arming himself before giving chase. "What did he say?"
Their heavy footfalls echo through the building as the blood-stain girl stares vacantly up from her split plastic shroud.