Thunder crashed over my head, the rain pounding around me. My tongue still bore the delicious aftertaste of blood and my mind was fully my own again. The beast's blood was to my mind as the rain was to my face, and the red glazing both washed away. The hunger, the eagerness that had let me be diverted by my prey's clumsy misdirection wouldn't trouble me for another few days, at least.

The rain also washed away the physical tracks that would have made my task easier, the wind obscuring by buffeting broken plants itself. For another tracker, one neither a vampire nor myself, this would have made the task impossible. But my determination to not let my prey escape yet again gave me a kind of focus.

Plus, they were stupid enough to keep wearing Waylon's pungent leather coat. A scent like that wouldn't fade for another hour of a storm like this. Unless the rain and wind got stronger. But in any case, I was close enough behind for it not to matter.

The trail led me pretty deep into the mountains, further into the middle of nowhere than I had bothered to explore in my initial reconnaissance. I'd judged this area too remote, too wide, to be a reasonable use of my time. Maybe that had been an oversight?

I leaped from a pine tree to a maple, then let myself fall quietly to the ground. Here, beneath the decent cover of the tree's wide, five-fingered leaves, there were some actual, physical tracks. The footprints were deep, but only because the ground had been muddied by the rain. Rain filled them, rippling with further drops from my face as I leaned close. The jumble of mud confirmed that I was chasing three individuals. That was a pretty normal number for a coven; infighting and competition usually meant vampires couldn't form larger groups.

It also meant that I was catching up to them. Until this moment, I'd been following a wispy trail of whiffs and aromas, not footprints. But they weren't moving at more than a leisurely stroll, and I was practically sprinting. Now that I had a physical trail to follow, I could slow a little. I should slow, actually. It wouldn't be good to stumble over my quarry in haste.

So I let each patch of tracks be an arrow to the next, mostly ignoring the swathes between that were useless to me. I still moved faster than I judged their pace, but now I moved carefully to make minimal noise. The occasional crack of thunder and the incessant patter of raindrops made this easy enough. Honestly, if I'd been pursuing humans I wouldn't have bothered. But my prey had senses nearly equal to mine, so I had to care.

Now that I was so close, I considered methods of separating this coven. I was absolutely certain that I could take two opponents alone. The first would die not knowing what hit them, the second would die confused and panicked. But the third always represented a problem. Even with the advantage of my gift, the first two deaths would mean the third was neither surprised nor fully confused. A skilled fighter would still be able to fight me mostly effectively, and a cautious foe could leave their companions to die and flee to hide. That, ultimately, was the biggest problem for me. This coven had proved to be exceptionally careful. How many months had I spent in Forks, investigating them to no avail? Reduced to a single member that knew I was hunting them, they would go to ground and I'd spend the next century tracking them down again, killing to sustain themselves all the while. That loss of innocent life was unacceptable.

Before I could consider a separation strategy properly, I found something odd. It was a black cottonwood tree with a small crater in its trunk. Jammed into the center of that crater was a baseball. A baseball, of all things! I looked from it, then in the direction it must have come. The wind tossed the branches of the intervening trees, but there was a sapling that had been snapped. The ball was stained with the green of the leaves—and, apparently, sapling—it'd smashed through to arrive at this point. I knew of only one kind of strength sufficient to produce such a crater. I pried the ball free, it was mashed into the shape of a walnut shell, and sniffed it. There was no discernible scent beyond the chlorophyll staining it, when it should have smelt at least mildly of sweat and skin oil. A vampire had thrown or hit this ball. Vampires, playing baseball?

I shook my head and returned to my prey's trail, pocketing the ball. Even with such an odd occurrence, I couldn't abandon the trail I already had. But the oddity didn't end there. The trail first progressed nearly perpendicularly to the path of the baseball, but it made an abrupt southward turn, like their attention had been drawn. I followed, of course, and came to a wide clearing. It was massive for a mountain clearing, and it had a baseball diamond carved into the grass. There were leather bases at each of the corners, deep furrows where sprinting feet had slammed into the ground. When I reached home plate, I squinted into the storm, estimating the ball's trajectory from the batter's position. Yes, it seemed most likely the thing had been hit from here. It seemed the vampires had, indeed, played baseball.

But something had ended the game prematurely. The prints I was following were quick but confident, the loping stride of predators, while the tracks around the diamond felt more playful. If I was judging the timeline accurately, I could see as the first set neared the diamond, the playing sets suddenly abandoned their game and converged at home plate. I stood to the side of where they all met, letting the water run rivers down my face and neck. Then my mind reeled as it clicked into place.

There was not one, but two covens of vampires here.

The evidence could mean nothing else. The coven I'd been tracking, the coven I'd thought claimed Forks, was a tiny and entirely normal coven of roving murderers. The ones playing baseball, who'd had their game interrupted by the interlopers? They were the ones I'd crossed the Pacific to hunt, and I'd failed to detect even a single one of their atrocities. They were a coven massive enough to rival the Volturi, and I had failed to find hair or hide of them. My breakthroughs thus far were all pure luck on a monumental scale. If this normal coven hadn't stumbled onto taken territory, I could have spent years, YEARS, in Forks and found nothing.

I forced my mind back to the scene. I couldn't let my incompetence distract me. Certainly it was luck that I had a real lead on my true prey, but when had I ever rejected a lucky break before?

It seemed the two covens had conversed for a time before parting ways. The smaller coven had moved off back into the woods, and the stench of engine exhaust lay heavy around a series of deep furrows and splattered mud near home plate, obvious evidence of vehicles. I guessed the larger coven had left in a hurry, their wheels spinning and their pipes belching black smoke. Even a human could have smelled it. Even a human…there was something to that.

I took another deep breath through my nose. There was fear here, a tiny tinge of sweat mostly hidden by a pleasant perfume, all three nearly annihilated by the rain. Thunder clapped as I realized what that meant. A human had been here, accompanying the larger coven. A prisoner? The fear smelled too sharp—an acute moment of terror, not a long-lasting dread—so the human probably didn't realize they were a prisoner. But there was something else. I breathed in again, walking through the mud and rain with my eyes closed, trying to follow that faint aural thread and tease out the secret. It was familiar to me, a scent that felt feminine. I put out my hand, imagining this human being hustled back into a truck I could almost feel, asking what was wrong, trying to get the usually-confident creatures around her to explain why they were so worried. I could almost hear her voice, the voice of someone more confident than she knew, but too naive to realize she'd fallen in with vampires. But her persistence wouldn't work here, and why did I know she was persistent? Why did I get a feeling of undeniability to her focus? There was nothing in the waning scents to suggest that; it was my familiarity with this person supplying the idea. My eyes snapped open.

It was Bella Swan, the only human I'd ever met who I could not turn away.

I spun and kicked a clod of mud, moving suddenly to shatter the ice suddenly filling my chest and shouting in anger. Of course she was here! Of course she had to step in the middle and make everything more difficult! But how had she gotten entangled with vampires without me noticing? I paced agitatedly, wracking my mind for every interaction I'd ever had with her, searching for my mistake, the clues that I had missed. And it was there that I realized I barely knew anything about her. I had dismissed her, even with her remarkable ability to see me against my will. I knew her as the daughter of Charlie Swan, and as an inconvenience that periodically appeared at Carver's Cafe. Our every interaction had been an exercise in extraction and escape.

Gritting my teeth, I looked back at the two sets of tracks. One coven of three, wearing the trophy of one of their victims, and one coven of over a half-dozen, slowly entrancing a helpless Bella. One coven that was flagrant and cocky, the one whose murders I'd been tracking and whose victims I could practically hear begging for justice. They were right in front of me, I could probably kill them tonight.

I clenched and unclenched my fists; my fingers itched to bring vengeance to Waylon and the Grisham Mill guard, but that would mean ignoring Bella, who was currently in the clutches of a powerful and cunning coven, capable of evading my dogged investigation for nearly a year, all the while seducing a victim beneath my nose. Saving her from such a large coven would be difficult, and maybe I'd end up avenging her anyway. But damn it, I had to try, didn't I? Curse the girl for making me choose like this.

Even after a century of needing no breath, my body wanted to pant after such a protracted sprint. I'd run down the mountain, dashing down the barely-functional dirt road, and hadn't managed to catch up with Bella and her captors. Since she'd been in the vehicle, I'd been following the muddy ruts rather than her scent. But that meant they lost me as soon as they got onto paved roads. The storm washed the air clean of smells and the asphalt clean of mud. I was forced onto the back foot once again, and had to consider how to pick up the trail again.

I knew that some vampires liked to toy with their victims emotionally before killing them. They savored the emotional distress of betrayal, and I could only assume this was the intended fate of Bella Swan. So where would they take her, now? And how did it relate to the other coven? Bella had stunk of fear, but, as this was likely a love game to the bigger coven, I had to assume she felt threatened by the smaller one. If that was true, then her captors were playing at "protecting" her from danger. How far would they push the game? How committed were they to the deception?

The minimum commitment would be taking her home, I figured, which was what brought me to the front yard of Sheriff Charlie Swan. Off the mountain, the storm was diminished to a light rain, gently pattering off the roof and rippling puddles in the driveway. Unfortunately, while that driveway held both the Sheriff's and Bella's vehicles, the only light on in the house was the front room. I could see Charlie sitting in an armchair there, slumped forward, head in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. The television was on some news channel, but he wasn't paying it any attention. When he tipped his head back to drink, there were tears streaking his face.

Bella wasn't here anymore, then. I briefly considered asking Charlie what he knew, but quickly discarded the idea. While it would get me the information I needed very quickly, my sodden appearance and sudden concern for Bella would complicate everything too much. Instead, I circled the home, counting windows and doing my best to guess which room would be Bella's. I narrowed my eyes when I saw that one window was cracked open. An open window, during a thunderstorm?

A quick leap brought me up to the window; my fingers slotted easily into indentations left by a previous invader, and my feet smudged footprints already staining the sill. I let myself into what—by the decor—was obviously Bella's room. I spared a thought for the water I was dripping all over the carpet, the obvious evidence I was leaving of my presence, but speed overrode those concerns. She wasn't here, so how could I find out where she was? Her dresser drawers were hanging open and mostly empty, and the top had a conspicuous empty patch. It looked like she'd gone somewhere in a hurry. There were posters on the wall, a laptop on a desk, and a cork board above that desk. There were innocuous notes pinned to the board, but there was a photo that caught my attention.

I stepped up and pulled its pin. It was a photo of Bella, her arm around the waste of an insanely attractive, pale-skinned man. She had drawn a couple hearts near his head in pink Sharpie. I immediately recognized him for what he was: a vampire, like myself. Even through a photograph, his supernatural attractiveness was evident. So it was a love game, this man as her "boyfriend" and her as unwitting prey. Her smile was radiant, her love for him obvious, and my heart plunged as I considered what the betrayal would do to her.

I hesitated for a moment, replacing the picture, before opening her laptop. It was password protected, of course. I cast about for clues. I tried a band name from one of her posters, but that wasn't it. I tried her father's name, her birthday, her parents' wedding date and, willing to try anything at that point, their divorce date. Those were things I'd found in the court records I'd rifled through a few months ago. Wait, no, there was one I hadn't tried. I input Charlie's birthday, and that, to my relief, did it.

As the computer logged in, I felt a sudden reluctance. This was much more invasive than usual, for me. The information I usually stole was public in some capacity, like court records or police files. But this was just her personal computer, and…why was this a problem? I shook my head at my own foolishness. If a little snooping was the price for Bella's life, then so be it.

She kept an orderly desktop, which made my job much easier, as I didn't have much experience searching computers. She had a word processor open with a note left for her father. It explained how sorry she was for just running off, justifying her haste with stress and needing to be back at her home in Phoenix. She loved him dearly and planned to return, but just needed some time away. And besides, Edward would be there to keep her safe.

"Edward" must be the vampire from the picture, I thought. So, it was maximum commitment to the con, then.

I frowned at the city name. Phoenix? Wasn't that a long way from here? I couldn't recall any cities in Washington named Phoenix. Her taskbar had Internet Explorer, so I clicked that to see what she'd left open there. It seemed she'd been searching for airfare rates, taxi rates, and map directions to an address in Phoenix, Arizona. I memorized the address and the map of the area as best I could, then let myself back out the window.

Bella was in incredible danger. She was alone with a vampire who she thought loved her, thought was protecting her from some other vampire. I would be shocked if she made it back from Arizona as more than a corpse. The only thing keeping her alive was this "Edward's" sickening urge to play with his food and his sense of dramatic timing. I had to get there before he got tired of the game, which meant I would have to take full advantage of my tireless nature and sprint the whole way.

Hopefully that would be enough.