I smiled awkwardly as the diners greeted my dad with familiarity, then, once they realized who I was, exclaimed how much I'd grown and expected me to remember them. To his credit, Dad did all the talking. It was the least he could do, since coming to Carver's was his idea in the first place. He took us to a corner table, which I did remember from when I was little, but definitely didn't have the nostalgia he was hoping for. He ordered steak and cobbler for us both, but before I could correct him I noticed something.

Well, someone.

He was seated at the bar with a coffee, and he was obviously not from around here. His clothes were… different in a way I couldn't place. His skin was pale like marble, like he hadn't seen a second of sunlight in his life. Our eyes met, and he seemed… surprised?

Wait. I had seen people this beautiful and graceful, just today.

"Hey, Dad?" I glanced back at him.

He immediately broke off his conversation, turning to me attentively. "Yeah?"

I nodded toward the gorgeous stranger. "Is he one of the Cullens?"

Dad looked over, then cocked an eyebrow. "Nope, but he is new around here."

I realized what was about to happen too late, and could only cringe inwardly as Dad beckoned the boy over to our table. I'd tried to be subtle, but… I was comforted when I saw that he looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

"Hey there, son!" Dad said jovially. "Don't recognize you. I'm Charlie, this is my daughter Bella. What's your name?" He held out his hand to shake.

"Ito Naoki," the boy said. His voice was lightly accented, his eyes slightly slanted.

Dad nodded. "Good to meet'chya, Ito. What brings you to little old Forks?"

Ito's eyes flicked over at me, then flicked back to Dad. I realized his eyes were golden. Not brown, gold.

"My grandfather lived here before the war," Ito explained. "He passed away recently, and I wanted to retrace his life. Plus, the scenery here is beautiful."

Dad laughed. "When it isn't raining or overcast and you can actually see it, it sure is. Where're you staying?"

"I have a room at the Roadside."

Dad grimaced, and I actually understood why this time. Roadside didn't have a good reputation, and hadn't even when I was a kid. What was a good-looking tourist like Ito doing at a dump like that?

"Well," Dad continued. "You just come to the police station and ask for me if you have any problems with your neighbors." He tapped his sheriff badge. "Roadside isn't known for handling that sort of thing very well."

Ito did a little bow—must be some Japanese thing. "Thank you, Sheriff Charlie." He glanced over his shoulder, then fluidly aside for the waitress bringing our food. "I will not interrupt your meal further."

...

Time passed me by with scarcely a whisper, my first days in Forks flowing by with practiced tedium. It had been a long time since I'd done rural work, and I'd expected the lower population to make things easier. Unfortunately, I was mistaken.

Back at Bucharest, I'd spent weeks mired in stolen murder and missing-persons reports before I found the pattern that led me to Vladimir. I'd pored over them for discrepancies, noted the usual explanations for vampire killings, then reviewed those again and verified as many as I could. It took ages, but that was still better than what I was experiencing here in Forks.

Which was nothing.

Nowhere was hiring night shifts, so I had to lurk the hard way. I eavesdropped through windows outside the police station, loitered in dark corners of bars, crouched in bushes outside the fire station. I even stowed away in a trucker's cabin for over twelve hours, listening to the inane chatter over his radio. All of this yielded me exactly nothing of interest.

Certainly, Forks was far from crime-free. People did stupid stuff when full of drink, got into accidents, got angry, got revenge. But there were no murders or kidnappings. Hell, there hadn't even been a proper hiking accident in the last decade.

The sky overhead began to rumble. Tiny raindrops, the dark clouds finally making good on their threat, dusted the leaves of my hiding-bush. This bush was special because it was less than a meter from the open window of a patrol car with two cops inside, and these cops were special because they loved to converse loudly about police business.

"Jesus, rain again?" one complained, as if he didn't live in Forks, Washington. He leaned down and rolled up his window.

The window didn't stop me from hearing them, of course. Their big mouths combined with my superlative hearing meant I still got to hear everything. I held perfectly still, letting the water coalesce and run down my face, across my eyes. As their conversation continued in inanity, I let my mind drift to the problem of Bella Swan, the apparently non-werewolf girl who was immune to my gift.

I'd never met a werewolf—they were nearly extinct in Europe and Asia—but I'd made sure to learn all I could before I came to America. The easiest fact to learn was that werewolves are completely immune to the psychic gifts of vampires. The next was that they were one of the only non-vampire beings capable of rending vampire flesh. The final was that they were supposed to have an extremely recognizable canine-adjacent scent.

And that was the problem: Bella Swan didn't smell like a dog. She resisted my ability, matching that crucial description of werewolf-kind, but smelled like a regular teenage human. That, coupled with the fact that Charlie Swan also smelled normal and didn't have the mystical ability to void my gift, convinced me of her humanity. I did confirm that she wasn't adopted, to be sure. But if humans could have gifts or immunities to gifts, then there could be many things that I did not know about my world. In fact, if that was true…

"Patrol Three, Dispatch."

"Go ahead, Dispatch."

I snapped my thoughts back to the cops in their car. This wasn't a normal check-in. Those occurred every hour, and the most recent of those had occurred thirteen minutes and twenty seconds ago.

"We got a situation down at Grisham Mill. Animal killing, apparently, over."

"None of the Mason County boys around? Over."

"They're all out on a sting, so you're the closest. Don't complain. Over."

One of the cops grumbled to the other about Mason County layabouts, then replied. "We'll head down and check up on it. Out."

The driver started the car up and pulled away from me and my bush, but I didn't need them anymore. The electric feeling of having something, anything, to pursue filled my veins. As soon as they were gone, I dashed back to my room at the Roadside, throwing aside the few strands of attention that crossed my mind, potential observers forced to ignore me blurring past their front windows in the waning light. I reviewed my map of the local area, memorized the route to Grisham Mill, then left.

My feet pounded the asphalt and the rain spattered across my face, each sensation feeling more real than anything else since Bucharest's final moments. I had a lead. As long as this wasn't a legitimate animal attack—and how could it be? I knew there were vampires in the area—then I would be one massive step closer to my quarry.

I didn't take the main highway. I'd caused an accident once by diverting a driver's attention, and didn't want to risk it again. Instead, I took back roads and hiking trails, leaping past switchbacks, over small ravines, and through inconvenient stands of trees. Because I wasn't confined to a set path, and because I was much faster, I emerged onto the Grisham Mill property after just ten minutes, easily half an hour ahead of the driving police officers.

The rain had taken the opportunity to become much heavier, though. I hadn't noticed. Moving so fast made most raindrops feel the same to me. I looked down and grimaced at myself. I also hadn't noticed the effect on my clothes. Strong branches that had barely registered to my crystalline skin had torn great gashes in my shirt and pants, leaving me wearing little better than rags. Now I'd have to be certain that no one saw me. When was the last time I'd made a mistake like this? Must have been during my training, nearly a hundred years ago.

But that didn't matter at that moment. For this moment, I was alone among the pipes and machinery of the mill. I squinted through the rain at the hulking shapes in the darkness, already beginning to dread having to search the whole place, until I realized that this was supposed to be an animal attack. I'd only have to search the outer areas, maybe the roof. With a mirthless grin, I jumped to it.

As a child, I would have never imagined a place so large could be dedicated to a single purpose. A bit of that child still remained within me, enough to marvel at the array of machinery, the maze of pipes, catwalks, silos, conveyor belts. Much of it was warm beneath my feet and against my hands, still operating enough to stay warm even at this hour. While I sniffed the air—mostly in vain, the rain making scenting the dead man almost impossible—I found myself trying to imagine what each part was doing. What was going through this pipe, exactly? What did that tank hold? And how did either of those things contribute to the function of the entire facility?

I found the poor man at the edge of a roof at the north end of the complex. His body was savaged, with jagged gashes all over his forearms and bloody chunks torn from his torso and neck. Something had gnawed one of his shins down to the bone and crushed it with a powerful bite. All in all, it looked exactly like what a vampire would think a human thought looked exactly like an animal attack. As a vampire myself, I figured they were probably right. This was North America, so a bear was probably meant to be the perpetrator. The broken leg with the tooth marks on the bone would be the selling point, as would the general state of the mauling. Humans, with no frame of reference for the devastating sharpness and strength of vampire teeth and hands, would have no choice but the default: a big, scary, well-understood beast had lived up to its well-earned reputation.

But I wasn't fooled.

Taken holistically, it would look like a bear mauling, but individually each wound was suspicious at best. The teeth marks on the shin bone were too narrow. The edges of torn flesh where chunks were missing from the torso and leg were ripped as if pulled apart, not as if cut by claws. The neck wound was the same. But the most damning evidence was the sunken skin. The wounds were all distractions from the fact that this man was missing ninety percent of his blood. Sure, some of that was on the ground around him, tainting puddles of rainwater, but even the rain and the horrendous wounds could account for how empty the corpse was. Even his left leg, almost completely undamaged, showed signs of exsanguination.

The guard had been sucked nearly dry, and probably by more than one vampire. I turned from the body and looked around the rooftop, trying to extrapolate the scene that had led to the guard's final repose. I created and discarded scenarios in my head as the evidence contradicted them, going through a dozen before I slapped my forehead as I realized the pattern I'd fallen into. The guard hadn't been killed here, he'd been placed. I located a catwalk that led to this roof and on its rails I found the clue that would piece it all together for me. There was, barely perceptible even to my senses, a hand-shaped indentation. I brought my fingers to my nose and sniffed: blood, belonging to the corpse.

And then I could see it. A vampire, flush with the ecstasy of a fresh kill and warm blood, the guard slung over their shoulder, gripped this railing more firmly than usual. Further back I found a chunk of the man's flesh, casually discarded as it was torn from the body as the first vampire carried it. Reconstructing their path with a trail of such clues, I found the actual kill site. I found the man's bloody flashlight, bulb cracked and useless. I found his service weapon, the barrel smelling of fire and sulfur; it was fired, and twice if the magazine's missing bullets meant what I thought. I found the mashed bullets not far away.

There was evidence of these vampires toying with their prey, displaying their physical indomitability and enjoying the power differential thoroughly before killing the man… there, against that large tank. There was a small dent with a bit of his hair—the skull must have fractured here—and a trace of his blood that hadn't yet been washed away. Taken altogether, I guessed there were absolutely two and probably three vampires evidenced here, but the rain made me less sure about the third.

Unfortunately my thoughts were interrupted by a flashing light and warbling siren. The police I'd outrun had finally arrived.

I kicked a puddle over the bloodstain and scuffed it until it was basically gone, then tore a scrap from my shredded shirt and wiped the bits of hair and flesh from the tank dent. I threw the useless bullets as hard as I could into the forest, then took the weapon and flashlight back to the corpse to fix the scene of the "animal attack." As much as I hated to help the local coven this way, it truly was better for the humans to believe this was the work of a bear. All it took was a single investigator thinking far enough outside the box to risk exposing the existence of our kind. If that happened, the coven would spook and abandon this place to escape Volturi wrath. I would lose their trail, and more people would die before I could pick it up again.

So I perfected the scene, bending the flashlight as if stepped upon by a great bear, positioning the pistol as if dropped by a man being mauled. That was all the time I could risk taking, each moment bringing the cops closer to my position. I leaped from the roof as their flashlight beams were about to reach me, and stayed long enough to hear their shouts of "Jesus Christ!" and "Holy shit!" before I left.

I took my time getting back to the Roadside Motel, trying to preserve what little was left of my clothes. If I moved at the same reckless pace as before, I wouldn't even be able to salvage rags from the remains. I also took special care to stay entirely out of sight using traditional rather than supernatural means, avoiding sight lines and only moving when I was certain there would be no attention to reject. Moving this way, it took me an hour to finally climb through the window into my room at the Roadside.

Once I was in actual clothes again, I began writing everything I could remember about the killing. Then I wrote everything I could extrapolate. Then I began making connections between all of that and anything related from my days of drudgery. Reviewing it all hours later, I decided that I was pretty sure there were three vampires in this coven, at a minimum. Nearly every reconstruction I sketched of the kill site made most sense with three perpetrators. So I was looking at a coven with at least three members. They did their hunting in neighboring counties to keep their true position hidden, which was pretty smart, I supposed. I'd have to expand my research, probably spending some time visiting the police stations of nearby precincts for records of incidents like tonight's "animal attack."

With hunting grounds so wide, there was a pretty good chance the coven had more than three members, maybe up to six. They were clearly careful, as all the "such and such in the next town over" type gossip around here didn't include a sudden rash of bear attacks or anything. That indicated that their kills were spaced widely across either timespans or distances. I guessed the latter, after tonight. I breathed a massive, non-essential, and extremely satisfying sigh.

I had a real lead. The half of me that had been doubtful that the Grisham Mill murder rejoiced with the rest of me. I was proud of the fact that I had a ninety-nine percent success rate once I picked up a vampire's trail, each initial discovery leading to an execution, barring one. All these years, I'd stumbled across Volturi scouts and messengers and enforcers, but zero of my five attempts to track them had panned out. They lived up to their own precepts, they were like ghosts. You didn't find them, they found you.

But I wouldn't let that singular failure dim my spirits this night. When the only vampires left in the world were myself and the Volturi, then all trails would lead to their bloody doorstep. I was one substantial step closer to that reality, and that grim excitement twisted my mouth into a smile as I worked through the rest of the night.