In response to reader complaints, I tried to end on less of a cliffhanger, but I couldn't entirely do away with the suspenseful element *cringes in anticipation of flying fruit* This is also the point at which this story pretty much stops resembling the plot of Twilight in any way and goes off in a whole new and hopefully more exciting direction.

Chapter 24: Exposed

Elle slowly straightened up and turned around. "You got Thompson to call me? I thought it was weird when he told me to drop everything and come here alone."

"Smart little human. Luring you in was too easy, though. I'm disappointed."

"Does this mean the game's over, then?"

"Not quite - the game only ends when you die. You see, I began hunting your kind because you present such a beautiful challenge, but over the centuries I've developed a taste for the unique flavor of your blood…" He inhaled deeply and gave her an appreciative smile. "…And you smell very appetizing."

"I bet I do-" in fact she would have been offended if he didn't think so "-but my dad didn't raise me to become a vampire's dinner. Guess I'll just have to be the one that got away."

James took a sudden step forward, and Elle raised her hands, prepared to defend herself if he came any closer, but he didn't. They both just stood there, sizing one another up. James cocked his head, staring at her as if she were one of the most fascinating things he'd ever seen. "No, actually, you won't be. There is one other who escaped me; her foresight must have warned her I was coming for her."

"You hunted a precog?" Elle snorted. Everyone knew they were ridiculously hard to catch, since they usually saw you coming.

Caught up in the memory, James nodded. "In the old days she would have been burned at the stake for her visions, but in the nineteen-sixties parapsychology was all the rage and the government wanted to study her kind. It took me weeks to find her again after her parents sent her and her sister to Coyote Sands, only to lose her in a sandstorm. I still regret that I never got to taste…" He returned to the present with a sigh. "You can imagine how surprised I was to see her again last night."

"Last night you saw…Alice?" Elle gasped as she put together his story of hunting a precog with her mental checklist of who he had seen last night. "You hunted Alice?"

"Yes, I did. Well, I suppose this will be some comfort to her coven - I get you, but they get her."

"You haven't got me yet."

James smiled. "Oh, but I have. The trap is sprung; I just haven't closed it yet, but now I think we've spent enough time on niceties, don't you? It's time we finished this." And then he pounced.

Fifteen minutes earlier

Edward had stayed by the window since Elle had left, watching the street and waiting for her to come back, until Alice called. "Elle's gone!" She sounded frantic.

"I know, she was bored so I let her go to a Starbucks down the street-"

"You don't understand - she's not there anymore! Her plans changed so suddenly that I didn't see anything until it was too late. I'm sorry, Edward-"

"Never mind that. Where is she?"

Alice gave him the Primatech facility's address. "We're on our way - Carlisle, Emmett, Jasper, and I left Forks after we lost James and Victoria and we'll be there soon, but I don't think you should wait for us."

Not bothering to reply, Edward hung up. The elevators were too slow, so he broke the lock on a door leading to a flight of service stairs in the back of the hotel and ran down to the ground level. Just as he reached his car a beep from his phone alerted him that he had received a new text message, but he ignored it, throwing the phone away into the backseat the instant the car's door was open. He already knew where Elle had gone, and nothing else mattered right now.

He broke at least three traffic laws, ran five red lights, and got flipped off and shouted at too many times to count, but he reached Primatech's Seattle office in just a little over ten minutes, which was something of an accomplishment considering that it was several blocks from the Holiday Inn. When he saw the parking structure with its 'Primatech Employees Only' sign his heart sank - it looked just like the kind of place Alice had described from her vision. Please, Elle, don't be in there.

He got out of his car, hoping to catch her scent…which, of course, led right into the very place she shouldn't be. Inside, without all the background noise from the street, he could hear hers and James' voices drifting down from one of the higher levels; she was still alive, at least for the moment. Edward started running, praying he would get to her in time.

As it turned out he did, but barely - he arrived just in time to see James preparing to spring at Elle and launch himself at the other vampire. They collided in midair and landed on a red sedan, crushing it. Edward immediately twisted away before James could get hold of him and leapt free of the wreckage, positioning himself between the tracker and Elle. "My family is on their way. You should leave now while you still can."

"Leave without finishing the hunt? I don't think so."

Edward bared his teeth and growled fiercely. "I won't let you harm her!"

James smiled. "And you're certain you'll be able to stop me, are you? You know, I saw how quickly you reacted when I threatened your little pet in the field where you were playing. You're faster than the others-" He rushed forward, grabbed Edward, and slammed him against one of the concrete columns supporting the roof "-but not stronger."

Elle had been holding back on using her power because Edward was in the way and she didn't want to hit him, but the instant she had a clear shot she aimed at James' back and blasted him with everything she had. He howled in pain and released Edward. "He does have me on his side though. That's gotta tip the odds in his favor, don't you think?"

Snarling furiously, James picked himself up and made another attempt at attacking Elle, but Edward seized his arm from behind and flung him away from her. James crashed into yet another car, this time making a huge dent in its side and rupturing the fuel tank. Seeing the gasoline spill out gave Elle an idea, but James freed himself from the car, which was bent into a curious semicircle shape, and ducked out of sight before she could carry it out.

Without a solid fix on the tracker's location, Edward backed Elle up against a van so he couldn't come at her from behind and placed himself in front of her.

Edward! His head turned toward her for a brief second before he continued searching for James; he was listening. Does fire kill vampires? He nodded. I need you to open the gas tank on the van behind me.

The metal gave easily under his fingers and he ripped it off, covering, cap, and all. At that moment James dropped from the ceiling directly over Elle's head. As Edward pulled her out of the way, she aimed for the exposed fuel tank and released her electricity. The gasoline ignited exactly as she had intended, and James was caught in the worst of the blast. She hadn't intended for Edward and herself to be so close when she blew up the van, though; the force of the explosion knocked them off their feet and hurled them apart.

Edward landed gracefully on his feet and immediately began looking for Elle, but thick smoke obscured his vision and her scent, and he couldn't hear anything from her, not even her thoughts - James' screams as he burned drowned out everything else. This is why we tear our kind to pieces before burning them. He quickly located the other vampire and ripped his head off, silencing him, then left him to be consumed by the flames.

"Elle! If you can hear me, answer me!" His shout was answered with a faint, What? that sounded in his mind rather than his ears. Latching onto the thought, he tracked it to its source. Elle lay crumpled at the base of a wall, where the explosion must have thrown her. "Elle!"

Her eyes opened slowly as he stroked her face. "Did I get him?"

"Yes, James is dead."

"Oh, good." She smiled. "It worked."

Edward sighed. "Couldn't you have waited until we were at a safer distance before blowing him up, though?"

"He could've got away if I waited. Besides, you know me - impulsive…" Elle's voice trailed off and she frowned slightly. "Did I get hurt?"

"Are you in pain?"

"No." Her frown deepened. "I just feel numb."

He took her hand and squeezed lightly. "Can you feel this?"

"I don't feel anything. Is that bad?"

Edward was positive it wasn't good, but he didn't want to scare her. "Carlisle's on his way; let's wait for him to look at you before we-" The familiar sound of Carlisle's Mercedes reached him from the lower levels. "He's here now. Just hold on, all right?"

Elle looked at him strangely. "Well, I'm not going anywhere."

It seemed to take an eternity for Carlisle to drive up to where they were waiting; for the first time Edward wished his telepathy wasn't only one-way, that he could send his thoughts to others as well as hear theirs so he could tell Carlisle to hurry up. When the doctor finally arrived Edward shouted at him, "Carlisle, we need you over here! Elle's been hurt!"

Carlisle sprinted over, and Edward found himself pulled aside by his siblings while Carlisle examined his patient. "Did a bomb go off in here?" Emmett wondered.

I saw what Elle did, Alice informed Edward through thought-speak, but I decided you should be the one to tell them. She was brilliant.

Edward nodded; Elle was brilliant. He just wished she'd channeled a little of that brilliance into taking care of herself. "She had me tear off the side of a van," he told his brothers, "and she ignited the gas."

"Blew the tracker to hell too from the looks of it," Jasper observed.

"Damn, I wish I'd been here to see that," Emmett exclaimed.

"It would have been better if we'd been here," Carlisle said, standing up and speaking quietly so that Elle wouldn't hear. "If we had been, she might not have been so badly hurt."

"What do you mean, Carlisle?" Edward asked anxiously. He scanned Carlisle's mind but came up with nothing; the older vampire's thoughts were carefully guarded.

"Elle's-"

"Someone's coming," Alice interrupted.

Minutes later, a Primatech van roared into the parking garage amid screeching tires and glaring headlights, and six humans jumped out and cautiously approached.

"What do you want?" Edward growled at them.

A tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who seemed to be in charge of the group raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Easy. We're just here for the girl."

"Elle isn't going anywhere with you," Emmett declared, taking a threatening step forward.

The man was unfazed. "As a matter of fact, she is. Eden!"

A girl with short brown hair moved up beside him. "Get out of our way."

The Cullens stepped back, clearing the humans' way to Elle; even though they didn't want to, they couldn't stop themselves from obeying the girl's command.

"Don't take losing her too hard," the man with the horn-rimmed glasses advised. "We sent her to you, and now we're taking her back, that's all."

"What do you mean, you sent her to us?" Edward demanded - Eden hadn't forbidden him to talk after all.

Noah Bennet sighed. The poor kid had obviously grown attached to Elle. I'd better deal with this now so he can get over her and move on. "We work for a company dedicated to understanding and helping people like Elle, and Eden here-" he put a hand on her shoulder "-and until recently we thought you were like them. Elle was sent to Forks to interact with you, 'study you in your natural habitat' if you will, and find out what your individual abilities were. Of course she ended up finding more than we expected, so the bosses in our organization decided she doesn't need to spend any more time on your family…or should I say coven? After all, we aren't vampire hunters." He looked over at Elle, and for a brief moment an expression of sadness crossed his face. "Unfortunately, it seems we got here too late. Somebody pick her up and let's get out of here."

"Wait," Carlisle said urgently. "Elle sustained a serious injury to her back in a fight with another of our kind. Moving her now could cause permanent damage."

Bennet shrugged. "That's not our concern." He nodded to a man with a medical bag who was performing a cursory examination of Elle's injuries. "Sedate her and get her in the van - the Company jet's waiting to take her back to New York."

The man nodded and carried out his instructions. Other members of their team took Thompson's body inside the facility; it would be shipped to his family later. Once their business was completed, they all piled back into the van and drove away, leaving the Cullens shocked and more than a little upset.

"If Elle really was part of some top-secret organization that 'studies' people-"

"She was, Emmett. I read enough in that man's mind to know he was telling the truth," Edward said quietly.

"Then why'd he tell us about it? Shouldn't he have kept it, well, secret?"

"Weren't you paying attention? Those people knew about us," Jasper snapped. "He told us everything because if we try to expose them, they'll do the same to us-"

"-And then the Volturi would get involved," Alice finished in a hushed tone.

"Do you really think they could do that?" Carlisle wondered.

"Expose us? Absolutely," Jasper said. "That man with the glasses was confident they - whoever 'they' really are - could handle any trouble we might try to make for them, and in my experience nobody's that smug unless they have a good reason to be. Also, he probably thought we'd let Elle go more easily if he said she was just here to spy on us-"

Jasper's words were cut off by the sound of shattering concrete; Edward had punched a hole in the wall. Jasper, Alice, Emmett, and Carlisle all froze. If Bennet's revelations about Elle were hard for them to process, then they must have hit Edward even harder. After all, he was the one who loved her.

Alice reached out, intending to offer comfort, but he slipped away from her. "Don't." His voice was unusually harsh. "Whatever you're going to say, if it's about her I don't want to hear it."

"What do you want, son?" Carlisle asked.

"I want to go home. We have no reason to hang around anymore."

Next chapter: Edward struggles to reconcile his feelings for Elle with what Bennet told him, and Elle deals with the aftermath of her fight with James and that permanent damage Carlisle mentioned. Basically our favorite characters are in for a rough ride all around, and there will be much angst.