"Bella, how kind of you." Victoria smiled, her teeth on full display. "It was ever so troublesome getting around those wolves in Forks, so I thought I'd rendezvous with your boyfriend first. But how thoughtful of you to join us and save me a second trip."

Wolves? I wondered.

Victoria's companion, a small brunette vampire, lurked in the shadows behind her. Edward had dropped into a defensive crouch in front of me as Victoria spoke, and I realized he didn't know about the powers at play. I yanked him back, trusting Alice to telepathically explain why I needed to be the one on the front line.

Victoria's smile twisted even wider. "Good. I'd hoped I'd get to kill you first, Bella. It wouldn't be proper justice if Edward died before having to watch you—"

There was no point letting her monologue. There was no planning left to be done. There was nothing to say to Edward, the man I loved and the man I might die for; no point letting him crush my faint hopes and leave me emotionally off-balance for the fight. I was done with letting more powerful beings decide my fate. I was one of the powerful beings now, and it was time to spring forward and execute the moves I'd memorized.

Victoria screamed, "Now, Miranda!"

The brunette—Miranda—replied, but the words were at such a low frequency as to be unintelligible. I could see the exact moment Victoria realized the time distortion was already in effect, and not affecting me. Her eyes widened, her smirk dropped, and she sank into a crouch.

My fist sailed toward her face, but as she dodged, I was already aborting the motion. I twisted toward where I knew she would be, kicking out, and her ribcage cracked under the force of my foot. She sprang backward. Her body was already healing, but it was taking energy: she would be just a little slower until the next time she could feed, or so Alice had told me.

Victoria was mostly a defensive fighter, relying on her instincts to find the best evasion path, and only taking the very best openings to strike herself. To lure her in, I would have to leave a very obvious weakness. Fortunately, I was a novice fighter with no defensive skill and fairly high pain tolerance. When practicing with Alice, it had required no iteration at all to leave myself open to a painful–but not fatal–hit. I settled into an off-balance stance and Victoria lunged in to strike at my unprotected left. I knew exactly how she would move, and as I took the hit from her right arm, I intercepted her left arm's trajectory, gripping it at the shoulder. With my newborn strength, it was almost easy to rip through the connective tissue. Victoria hissed in pain and sprang backward, now missing a limb. Flinging the disconnected arm behind me, I advanced, lashing out with choreographed punches.

As Victoria dodged for the fifth time, my foot swept out, tripping her. She stumbled back, but regained her footing quickly—no, she was supposed to, but she didn't. She tripped on a tree stump and staggered further backward. It dawned on me that we weren't supposed to be fighting in this particular clearing: if we hadn't been iterating on Alice's visions, we would've caught up to Edward in a different section of forest, and the battle would've happened there. Alice couldn't have predicted this particular bit of terrain.

And now my memorized sequence was useless.

I didn't know anything about fighting.

Well, I did know that you were supposed to press your advantage after your opponent tripped. I launched forward and struck at her. Victoria evaded easily and kicked out at me in reply. Too slow to dodge, I took the foot to my ribs, and tried to grab her leg as it swung back down. I missed. She feinted left, then slammed a knee into me with enough force to knock me over. Then she was on top of me, gravity overcoming my raw advantage in strength, biting at my shoulder. I managed to throw her off, but not before her fangs had removed huge chunks of flesh. Lurching to my feet again, I circled her, desperately looking for a strategy that could bring me back to winning this fight. She was still missing an arm, and I was still stronger, but she was fighting too smart.

Too smart. Was there a way to make Victoria stupider?

"It'll be even more fun watching you die than it was watching your boyfriend," I taunted. The words didn't come naturally to me–in truth, I'd felt nothing but relief at James' death–but it seemed like the sort of thing someone would say to provoke a fight in a storybook. "Do you want us to put your ashes together? Oh, that's right, we dumped his remains in the garbage after we burned him. Guess you'll still be alone when you're dead."

If I was hoping that she'd howl in rage and charge me blindly, I was disappointed. She growled at me, but continued circling, waiting for a good opening. I realized that I'd paced too far to the side; if I went any further that way, she'd be able to dash around me and strike at Edward and Alice while they were vulnerable. Instead, I closed the gap between us again, grabbing for her remaining arm with the hope of disabling her further. She raised the arm to bait both of my arms into moving high, then lashed out with another quick kick at my exposed middle. I growled at the pain. Trying to kick back at her lost me a chunk of my leg.

I disengaged again. My one consolation was that I was probably fighting better than she expected. Newborn vampires were supposedly out of their minds with bloodlust, and I was at least vaguely strategizing rather than attacking blindly. Older vampires had usually learnt more restraint, at least when they weren't around fresh blood.…

Oh.

Committing to not breathing for the rest of the fight, I reached into my pack and drew out the last bag of blood. My razor-sharp nails punctured it, letting drops of blood spill out over the ground. Just the sight of it made venom well up in my mouth.

Victoria made the mistake of inhaling before she realized what was happening. Her eyes darkened, and she sprang forward, caution abandoned. She seized the bag from me and gulped it down, even as my arms locked around her other shoulder and pulled. It was harder to find the right angle without Alice's instructions, but I kept my hands locked on her even as she tried to wrest the appendage away, and eventually I was rewarded with another horrible ripping sound.

Missing both arms, there wasn't much she could do but run.

I was faster. I knocked her down, sank my teeth into her, and tore her head from her shoulders while my knees pinned her body to the ground. Then I separated her legs from her torso, and began shredding all the parts into smaller pieces. Drawing Alice's lighter from my backpack, I lit the whole pile on fire.

As satisfying as it would be to watch Victoria burn, it was past time to check on Edward and Alice. I turned to the other side of the clearing. They seemed to have the upper hand on Miranda: with all three under the same time distortion effect, the two-on-one advantage would be decisive even without the Cullens' ability to predict their opponent's moves. But with everyone moving twenty times slower than usual, their combat hadn't progressed nearly as quickly as mine. Miranda was stalling, waiting for Victoria to finish me off and join her.

It took me only a tenth of a second to cross the glade and end their fight. I knocked Miranda to the ground easily and positioned my nails at her throat in a clear threat.

"I surrender!" she called immediately. My companions surged to my side, and it was evident she'd stopped using her powers on them.

Did she think I was going to let her live just because she'd surrendered? She had volunteered to help kill Edward! I snarled, burning with anger and vengeance.

"Please." Miranda's ruby eyes met mine. "It was nothing personal. Victoria had blackmail on me."

"And what kind of blackmail," I hissed, "Could possibly justify helping that vile woman murder Edward?"

Miranda narrowed her eyes at me. "What, you think I'm going to tell you, so you can blackmail me next?"

"You're hardly in a position to negotiate," I growled. I shifted my weight in preparation to tear her arm off.

"She faked her own death to get away from someone, and Victoria threatened to tell him she's alive," Edward commented from over my shoulder.

Miranda glared at him from the ground. "How did you know that?"

"I read minds," he answered casually, moving forward into my view.

She stiffened. "Oh really? What am I thinking of?"

"The last time you played on a swing set, in the middle of the night in Wisconsin."

Miranda groaned. "Alright. Am I going to spend the rest of my life getting blackmailed, then?"

"I don't plan to use anything I heard against you. I apologize for the invasion of privacy, but I can't really help it." He smiled disarmingly. "I'm Edward, by the way. My obnoxiously psychic sister is Alice, and the incredible woman poised to dismember you is Bella."

"Charmed," the small brunette answered sarcastically. "I'm Miranda."

"I think you'd better tell them your story before Bella loses her temper," Edward advised, pointedly eying my grip on her shoulder. "I will if you don't, and I'm missing some details."

Miranda assessed the situation for a moment, then conceded. "Fine."

"You can let her up now, Bella," Alice added. "I'll tell you if she gets any ideas about running."

My newborn instincts were still aching to rip Miranda into tiny pieces, but I forced them down. I reluctantly unpinned my tiny opponent and scooted to the side, forming a loose circle with the four of us. She sat up, stretching out her still-intact limbs.

"Where do I even begin?" she wondered.

"At the very beginning," Edward encouraged. "Your human life. We've got time."

Miranda shot him a skeptical look, then began to speak.

2024-09-29 A/N: For anyone who's wondering how Bella got her bag of blood through airport security: according to the TSA website, they started restricting liquids in August 2006 (and in canon, Bella's encounter with Laurent happens in early 2006). I definitely knew that and worked it into my plot well in advance, so there was no panicking at all when writing last chapter's airport scene.