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Chapter 17

The hunt

The bar was everything Bella would have expected from this small, old-fashioned town.

Yellow wood glowed mellow in the dim lights, dented and scarred and shined by decades of service.

A television in the corner, above the heads of the customers, was attached with screws that were two years – maybe three – away from pulling out of the water-stained plasterboard.

It was playing old reruns of Sanford and Son with the volume turned down.

A few ailing tables were scattered near the far end of the building, most empty.

Someone was asleep at one of the wall booths, and three or four men were clustered near one end of the bar.

The reaction to Bella's entrance was immediate, their stares like a physical force pressing against her.

The sensation reminded her of her pool hustling days. She grinned, glanced around, moved toward the bar, away from the cluster of men.

"Help you?" The bartender looked to be in his late fifties. His voice was all Jim Beam and Camels. Dark, scraggly hair, three days of stubble. Not the one.

"What's your best red wine?"

"Nothing you'd probably consider good." At least he was honest. Bella smiled at him, looked to the beer taps.

"Just a Molson, then, please."

"Do I need to card you?"

"Don't know. Do you?" The bartender turned away, grinning. She watched the glass fill with the amber liquid.

The idea of actually drinking it seemed a foreign concept to her now. After the blood, everything else had lost its appeal.

Bella doubted she would be able to stomach it, even if she were to try. But she wasn't going to try.

By the time the glass arrived in front of her, she'd found the one. Dark, quiet, withdrawn.

His thoughts were black things, and she could feel them on the air like tendrils of wet mist.

Edward was right. The violence of which he had spoken seemed to exude from this man in waves, and with it something else – an undefined ease that told her the rest of what she needed to know.

There was no guilt here. No remorse. This man had murdered his own wife and child in cold blood over the breaking of a glass, and sat here now feeling justified.

He looked at her now, and Bella could see the beginning of desire in his eyes. She stretched, her nipples outlined against the white cotton of her shirt, navel exposed, and glanced at him with smoky eyes.

She could hear the blood pounding faster in his veins. The glance had been perfected during her time with Mike.

She tossed it out, caught her prey, and began to reel him in. Phantom images seemed to dance across her mind: a woman's horrified eyes, terror becoming distant and detached in death. A shovel. His breath in the cold moonlight.

Bella smiled at him as he moved toward her, hand on the bar, drunk and unsteady.

"Hello." Her voice was sweet sugar, long and slow and husky, full of promise. He nodded to her, sat down on the stool next to her, glanced at her untouched beer.

"One for the road?" he asked. Bella smiled.

"Something like that. I didn't come here for beer."

"Oh no?"

"I've been on a trip, and now I'm headed back into the city. Back to my boyfriend. But I couldn't go without one last stop. I couldn't go without …"

Bella let her eyes flick down, just briefly, then return. She could see his eyes darken as his brain, or perhaps another organ, completed the thought.

"Do you have a wife?" she asked him.

"No. Not … no."

"A house?"

"Yes."

"I'd like to see it." She left a fifty on the bar.

Edward and Rose were not there, but Bella knew that they had not gone far. She could not sense them, but she wasn't trying too hard.

They had no reason to leave, only to keep their presence unknown to this man. She was sure they wanted to watch. This was her first true moment as a vampire.

They walked along the road that, only minutes ago, Bella had travelled in the opposite direction. They didn't talk.

Bella was nervous, shuddery, trying hard not to show it. The thirst was growing in her by the moment. She could smell the blood now, so close to his skin.

"What was her name?" she asked.

"Who?"

"The wife that you told me you didn't have. The one you lied about." The man was momentarily taken aback.

He paused in his step, looked at her, eyes wide. Bella glanced back, the playfulness gone from her eyes.

"What was her name?"

"Look, I don't know who you think I am. I'm Peter …"

"I didn't ask who you were. I asked what her name was." Peter swallowed hard, shoved his tousled brown hair back from his forehead. Bella stepped toward him, touched a stubbly cheek, smiled again.

"It's a simple question, Peter." She moved her lips over his, barely touching, pressed the tip of her tongue to the centre of his upper lip. He opened his mouth instinctively, and the touch became a kiss, long and damp.

She touched below his waist, and what she found there was rock hard, despite his concerns.

The nerves were gone. They'd slipped off as the moment approached, and Bella was cold now.

She played her lips about his neck, tasting his salty sweat, not yet bitter from fear.

Peter's hands were limp at his sides, his breath speeding. With one hand she touched his hair. The other unbuttoned his pants, navigated beyond his boxers, touched skin to skin. He shivered.

"Were you hard like this when you did it, Peter? Tell me her name." Peter moaned. Fear? Lust? Bella's hand quickened. She smiled sharp teeth against his neck.

"Tell me her name, you fucking murdering piece of shit."

"Ch—Charlotte. Her name was Charlotte. Oh, God …" Bella pressed her teeth against the flesh, pressed hard, waited for the pulse. She had been here before, on the receiving end, and found the wait now even more interminable than it had been then.

That instant before release had seemed to her unbearable, but waiting for the moment when she could take the blood proved worse.

Peter stiffened. His heart pulsed. Bella bit down. What began as a cry of passion became a scream of pain, trailed into a moan somewhere between horror and ecstasy.

Peter sagged. Bella followed him to the ground, attached at the neck, lost in the blood. Ambrosia. Red and throbbing.

Tears at her eyes, carving hot little tracks down her cheeks. The heart stopped, the flow of blood ceased, and Bella pulled back, gasping. Crying.

She looked at the body before her, limp organ hanging from open pants, the neck a still shot from a horror film.

She stood; staggered backward, felt her heels bump the curb, felt her knees trying to buckle.

Bella sat down at the side of the road with his seed on her hands and his blood in her mouth, arms across her knees, head down, sobbing.