No.

No contact. Stay ahead. Follow rules. Don't die.

I'd narrowly avoided breaking the last rule. But I'd so carelessly forgotten that 'not dying' extended beyond only me. In breaking rule number one, I might have just killed my mom.

I stood there long enough that it took my phone's dying beeps to bring me out of my shock. Before it shut off, the screen lit up with a notification from an unknown number. It was a photo. I didn't have to open the message to see the blood on the walls, his face eternally an expression of surprise, her bones bent at unnatural angles.

My fury rose, swelling to a dangerous level. The energy came rushing back to my hands. Sparks flew from my palms, dancing deceptively close to the barn's wooden posts. The sparks grew larger in size until they became full-out flames. My phone disintegrated in seconds.

The flames looked as if they were a part of my hands, yet I didn't feel any bit of the heat. Mindlessly, I brought my hands to my forehead, thoughts racing through my mind so fast that I couldn't catch any. My mom was fine. She had to be. Victoria wouldn't really resort to killing my family. But she would. And she did.

Jessica and Lauren. She'd killed them first. What was it she said?

"They are a reminder that I do not make false promises. My words are not empty. The threat I pose is true."

Now, my mom and stepdad are dead. Murdered.

My rage boiled under my skin, the flames growing uncontrollable in my hands. My knees caved in and I let it out. I screamed. I screamed and shouted and cursed Victoria until my throat throbbed. Even then, I continued, my voice a rasp but still as powerful as the fire claiming the building around me. The firestorm raged until the tears ran down my face, and every last flame disappeared instantly.

I looked up, a tightness around my eyes through which I saw red. I was sitting in the middle of rubble. The wood that had made the pitiful excuse for a barn lay charred and ruined all around me. Miraculously, the destruction avoided me, creating a perfect circle around me. The wood under my knees remained untouched.

I was done. No more of her games. No longer was I going to play mouse to the cat. I had spent far too long feeling inferior to the world around me. The Cullens, the Quileutes, Victoria. Even the Volturi.

Did I know how to use my powers at will? No. Not yet. But I had more than I did four months ago. At least now I had a form of defense.

My mother was dead because of Victoria. No matter how much it hurt, I knew I had to bide my time. I had to make her think I'd play by her rules. Make her think she'd won. Victorious Victoria.

I knew I couldn't rush this. I needed a plan to take her down. My mind was falling short of ideas, and all I knew was that I had to lure her to me.

I'd figure out the rest later.

POV: Angela Weber

Having seven vampires in my house was strange.

Not a bad strange, but not a good strange, either. Their reason for being here wasn't because I'd suddenly become their best friend. If I was being honest, though, having Mike Newton on my couch with a beer in his hand watching tv like it's the Superbowl was the strangest thing.

If I'd have been asked to guess which was the supernatural creature between the Cullens and Mike, I'd have said Mike. Sure, the Cullens had their oddities. Their pale skin and golden-sometimes-black eyes didn't let them fit in, nor did their disappearance on sunny days, but who would've blamed them? Everyone at school had just come to the conclusion that they had a special diet which allowed them to look the same although they weren't related.

Well, technically, the people at school weren't wrong about the Cullens' 'special diet'. They just hadn't considered blood-drinking a diet. The Cullens are a special, exclusive type of carnivore.

Whatever. I've strayed from my point.

Regardless of whom I'd considered to be vampires, it was still weird to have seven of them hanging around my house. A week after Bella went missing, the press had found their home in the forest. That's when they decided I could be trusted enough to know their secret. Not because they wanted to double their efforts in finding Bella, but because they didn't want 'humans' near their precious forest. So, my house was henceforth and forever known as our base of operations.

Enlisting my help in finding Bella, as I said, hadn't been their primary focus when luring the media away from their home, but that was something that eventually happened. Perhaps it was because of my in-depth research and investigation board, or maybe because we just happened to be looking into the same thing.

Anyways, we were all here for one person and one person only.

Bella.

It had been four months. Bella's been gone for four months. The Cullens have been hanging around for almost that long. Mike's been here since day one. I was more used to the Cullens' presence than Mike's. He was her best friend - as he repeated every. single. day - but I never liked him. I probably never would.

"Angela."

I looked up. Emmett Cullen looked eagerly back at me, his golden eyes shining through his newly adopted glasses. "Hmm?"

"Have you looked into Toronto?" he asked. He held a folder of papers in his hands from when we checked out Singapore. It looked small in comparison to his rippling muscles.

Nodding, I turned to my whiteboard and marked off the city with the uncapped expo marker in my hand. "That makes half of Canada."

Esme, the vampires' appointed mother, sat at the table typing away on her keyboard. "It's unlikely that Bella would've gone to Canada."

Emmett turned to her while I looked over my board. I listened to their conversation as I squinted at the cities and countries we'd marked off. "Reverse psychology, ma. It's close, which is where we'd be expected to look first. But we wouldn't check because of its proximity. Because it's the last place we'd think she'd go."

"I understand, Emmett," Esme said placatingly. "But it's Bella. We know her. She wouldn't have risked it."

The man mumbled something that alarmingly resembled, "Clearly, we don't know her." I glanced over my shoulder and saw Esme's darkened expression, which confirmed what I thought I heard.

Relations had been unusually strained the last few days. I think it had something to do with their spouses being in different countries. "When will Dr. Cullen and Rosalie be back?" I asked in an attempt to diffuse the ever-increasing tension.

Esme looked at me, her expression softening. "They're expected back around five."

I glanced at my watch. 3:50. I nodded and turned back to my board. "And the others?" Alice and Jasper had left to do another search of the country. They left a few days ago, but I didn't know how long it would take two vampires to do a search of nearly four million square miles. Knowing them, though, they likely hadn't separated while they looked. Those two were so in love it was almost sickening.

"Sometime tomorrow," Emmett guessed. His shadow fell over me as he reached over my head to mark another city off the list. The marker squeaked and grated against my ears. "Edward and the wolves should be back next week."

By 'wolves', Emmett meant half of the Quileute tribe. The boys - and Leah - that Bella had been friends with were wolves. Shifters, if you want to get technical. If I remembered correctly, Paul, Seth, Jacob, and Leah had been elected to go search Mexico with Edward. The rest stayed to keep an eye on the reservation.

Despite all this searching and scouring numerous countries, our only real lead had come in the form of a dead Jess and Lauren. They'd been bitten by a vampire, presumably the so-called Victoria, but not drained. They'd been injured enough that the venom in their veins hadn't saved them.

At the time, I had worried more about if Mike and I were going to be next than grieving them. Jess, I eventually mourned. Lauren, not so much. When Bella fell into her depression after the Cullens left, Lauren had remarked that she should have died when she ran off to Arizona after she 'broke up' with Edward.

Of course, I'd since learned the real story. Part of me wished Laurent and Victoria had been in that studio so they could've burned with James. But then, Bella would more likely be dead than missing right now. One or more of the Cullens could've died, too.

I backed away from the whiteboard to look at it as a whole. Over half of the places she was most likely to be had been marked off. I shifted to face the wall that I had transformed into a record of sorts. It was where I kept track of any leads or tips we'd gotten. Dr. Cullen had taken the liberty of alerting his vampire friends to the situation. I was sure word spread fast, just as sure as I was that almost the entire vampire world knew about the search by now.

Dr. Cullens' friends had promised to call if they heard or saw anything. So far, nothing.

The world had almost 8 billion residents, which was as good a reason as any for why we couldn't find her. But, with all of the technology our finest minds had developed, from facial recognition software to fingerprint analysis, we came up with nothing.

There were sixteen billion eyes in the world, yet not one of them had seen Bella. I found that hard to believe. Someone had to know something.

I eyed the necklace that was pinned right in the centre of the wall. Edward had accidentally bent the metal in his efforts to get it out of that airport bathroom. Carefully, I stepped up to it and removed it from its hook and set it on the coffee table.

Enough people had touched it that the shiny coat had dulled. The engraving of the fierce lion had saddened. I raised the pendant so that it was level with my sight. I squinted my eyes and vaguely saw specks of white. "Emmett?"

He set down the papers in his hands, and they immediately disappeared into the mountain of files on the table. Somehow, the mess managed to completely avoid Esme, who continued working studiously on her laptop. "Yeah?"

"Can you come take a look at this?"

Emmett hopped off the chair. "Sure." He took the necklace from me and held it gently in his hands, examining the entire thing closely. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Do you see the mortar residue?" I asked. He squinted, then nodded. "How far does it reach?"

Still squinting, his eyes roved the pendant back and forth. "The lion's neck." He handed it back to me.

The pendant was large, and the lion was situated in the very center of it. Bella had shoved it into the wall tail-first. I frowned as my thoughts stitched together. "It takes tools to break mortar," I said. "So how did Bella, a human, get it so far into the wall? How did the necklace become so embedded that Edward, a vampire, had to break it to get it out?"

"What are you saying, Ange?" asked Mike, who had since busied himself with surfing the news channels. I hadn't heard him speak in days.

"I'm not saying anything. But the facts don't line up. The strongest man in the world, theoretically, could break mortar, but Bella, someone who weighs barely a hundred pounds herself, can't. It's impossible."

"Yet she did," Mike muttered.

Before we could further discuss the elephant in the room, the front door burst open and through it I heard the renewed shouts of nosy reporters that had been staked on my lawn 24/7. But I didn't pay much attention to the noise as my focus was solely on the two people who had all but flown into the room.

Spider web-like cracks ran along their arms and there was a dark scar around Alice's shoulder. Jasper's eyes were completely black and he had a protective arm wrapped around his mate.

Emmett immediately stood ramrod straight. "What in the hell happened to you two?"

"We were checking Jacksonville before we left Florida, but we caught a scent," Jasper began.

"We were ambushed." All eyes landed on Alice, who shrugged off Jasper's arm. The cracks on her arms and neck faded as she spoke. "There were four of them. Only one got away."

I felt the lines in my forehead wrinkle as I furrowed my brows. "Four of whom?"

"Undoubtedly Victoria's men," Jasper answered. "They were well-trained for newborns."

"N-newborns? As in, new-"

"Yes, Mike, as in new vampires. Get with it." He tended to get on my nerves more than usual in times such as this. Something was still nagging at me. "Wait, did you say Jacksonville? Where Bella's mom lives?"

Their faces instantly became grave and my heart dropped. "Phil and Rene were dead by the time we got there. They'd been that way for hours. Those men were waiting for us." Alice looked devastated, and I knew it wasn't because a woman was dead. How would Bella react to this news? Would we ever get to tell her?

I forced myself to focus on the conversation. "If they were waiting for you, and you still got them, does that mean they were… disposable?" My thoughts were bordering on speculation bordering on rage. Four men that were 'well-trained,' yet disposable to Victoria. The pieces connected but I didn't want them to.

Mike, for once, was on the same page. "Well, Victoria's got an army. Yipee. What does that mean for us?"

"It just means more complications," said Esme, who had otherwise been silent but observant throughout the conversation. "What we know is that Victoria said something to Bella that caused her to run. The only way she'll be able to come home is if Victoria's gone. Victoria and her army."

It was the most I think I'd ever heard the woman say consecutively. Though, in my head I knew that's what had to be done, it was the strangest thing to hear it come from the kindest, most non-violent person I know.

"They could be scattered. Anywhere." I pictured the process that had been explained to me. To become a vampire, one had to endure an average of three days of 'burning'. If she started the day Bella disappeared, Victoria could've turned upwards of 360 people. If she started the day James died, who knew how many she could've turned. I faced the map on the whiteboard. "They could be everywhere."

"What do we do now?" Mike asked. "Do we go after the army or Victoria?"

"Victoria," Emmett answered resolutely. "I don't know why, but I'm getting the feeling that the 'army' isn't actually an army. I think that they're there for a reason, but it's not as big as it seems."

The room lapsed into silence as we all succumbed to our own thoughts. Across from me, on the couch, Alice's eyes glazed over. She was having a vision. I knew that. It was still freaky.

After a few minutes where I was the only one aside from Jasper to notice her vision, she came out of it, blinking rapidly as she came back to her surroundings. "Emmett's right," she said. "There's only a dozen. Less, now that Jas and I killed the ones in Jacksonville. There's not an army, but they were created for something."

Mike shot to his feet, his eyes crazed. "I know!" he shouted with such confidence that I doubted for a split-second that I was looking at Mike Newton. He spun to Alice and Jasper. "They weren't waiting for you. They were waiting for her."

"'Her' who?"

"Bel-la," he said slowly, as if I was dumb for not putting it together sooner. "They killed her mother. Why else would they do that other than to lure her back?" Before any of us could digest his reasoning, Mike shook his head to himself. "No… no, that's not right. It doesn't fit the pattern," he muttered.

A few seconds later I could practically see the light bulb going off in his head. He clasped his hands over his mouth and dragged them down his face. "I can't believe I didn't see it sooner."

"Mike? Care to share with the rest of the class?"

"Dear old Vicky's playing with her."

"What?"

"Do you want to hear my theory or not?" he snapped. I glared at him and he continued. "Victoria didn't just use fear with Bella. She doesn't strike me as the type to act so impetuously. This was a thought-out plan. I think Vicky gave Bella some sort of guideline. Do one, two, and three, and four, five, and six won't happen."

My mouth popped open as I took in his absolutely ridiculous but yet plausible explanation. "You think Victoria just told her to leave and- what? She'd leave us, the Cullens, and the wolves alone?"

He pointed at me in a 'you-got-it' gesture. "Exactly. We know Bella, and unfortunately, so does she. Now, I think she's preyed on Bella's big heart. We're her vulnerabilities. In the mind of a vengeful sociopath, going after what makes my target vulnerable would be the way to go."

It unsettled me just how easily Mike was able to slip into the mind of a criminal.

"I think you've watched too much Dateline," Emmett remarked.

Mike raised an eyebrow. "It's come in handy, hasn't it? Anyway, I bet part of Victoria's guidelines are to not contact any of us. And so far, I think she's listened. But, I think something made Bella crack and she called someone."

"Her mom," Esme realized.

He nodded. "Victoria follows through on her threat- kills Renee. Bella knows Vicky isn't playing any games. I'm willing to bet that's why she killed Jess and Lauren."

Frowning, Alice said, "Victoria's been near the Amazon for weeks now. How could she have killed Renee?"

"That's where the newborns come in," answered Mike. "Still in the mind of a sociopath, I would know I have too many things to do. I'd have to enlist help, creating it if need be. That way, I wouldn't be spread too thin. I'd put my men near the people I threatened. Not too close for those people to notice, but just enough for my men to attack if I ordered it."

"There's one thing that doesn't make sense," Jasper commented. "Bella wouldn't risk anyone. If Victoria told her not to contact us, she wouldn't. She hasn't. Why would she do that now?"

Bella's necklace was still in my hand, and it seemed to burn into my palm. The strength she had to have possessed to embed it into the wall was inhuman. That was the elephant we hadn't addressed earlier.

I had a sneaking suspicion that something was going on with Bella, something that was important enough, something that scared her enough to forsake the guidelines and risk it.

She wanted answers, and she believed her mother had them.

Jasper felt my resolve even before I spoke. "You need to go back to Jacksonville," I said. "And you need to take me with you."

16 - Written: 8/6/22-8/14/22

Posted - 8/20/22

:)