It was the smoke that decided it.

I skidded to a halt at a dark intersection of three alleys, then walked more carefully out onto the street. The next two studios—how were there so many in this damn city?—were, respectively, to my left and right some distance. Looking left, I squinted and saw a column of black rising against the deeper black of the sky. I doubted a human could have seen it for its dimness, but it drew me in that direction.

I couldn't smell the smoke's stench until I got much closer, nearly to the door of the place. I compared the front to the picture I held, then moved around the corner to compare again. It was the place!

The front door was already shattered, nearly flung off its hinges; glass was scattered everywhere. I stepped across that with care—the glass didn't threaten my bare feet, but the sound it made might give me away. I need not have worried, it turned out.

Most of the dance studio was an open floor with some pillars holding up a vaulted ceiling. The walls and pillars were covered in mirrors, or, at least, the remnants of mirrors. There was a fire burning in the back corner, and…

And someone was watching me.

I felt the gossamer thread of attention and swept it aside as easily as ever, but it was persistent, like someone trying to watch me. I spun around, scanning the flame-cast shadows and far edges of the room. There was no one that I could see, and yet that thread kept trying to attach itself to me until it just…vanished.

So the phantom spy had been here, too, until this moment. I crouched, my body tensing for a chase or a fight, but just like the other times, there was nothing. It was the same person, I was sure of it. The idea that someone was so good at evading detection, so good that, were it not for my gift, I would have never known them to exist, put a shard of ice deep in my chest. But I couldn't worry about that right now. Right now, I had to discover what I could about this place and the fight that had occurred here.

Finally ready to focus, I gave the room another once-over. The fire was an oddity, and how had I missed the pool of blood next to that pillar? I loped across the floor to it. Large and roughly shaped like a half-circle, it was marred by shoe-prints, smeared hand-prints, and a section that looked…yes, like a woman's hair had brushed through it. Someone had knelt next to her, but she'd been carried away soon after.

My eyes rose from the blood to the broken mirror surface of the pillar. A few of the shards bore traces of blood, and a small tuft of brunette hair had been caught in a crack and ripped free. I could see her, the human I assumed was Bella, in my mind's eye. She was held against the mirror and—no, she wasn't held there, she'd been thrown there. Not nearly enough blood on those shards for prolonged contact. So where…?

A spatter of blood continued the reverse story, and I pieced together what I could. Waylon's killer had lured Bella here, away from the 'protection' of the Forks coven. He'd taunted her, played with her like a cat with a mouse, eventually biting her—probably on the arm—and…abruptly thrown her against the pillar? The only possible explanation for that and for all the damage was that another vampire had come here. That one had to be Edward, if that was even his real name, come to reclaim his stolen prey. I could see now that Edward had interrupted the other's meal, heedless of Bella's safety.

I could trace their fight more clearly than Bella's struggle. The heavy footfalls of two vampires using their full power against one another left floorboards cracked and chunks of concrete pillars shattered. I wove around the dance floor, slowly coming to realize that even Edward's arrival, even the frenetic steps of a fight, couldn't explain all of the marks and prints. Even more vampires were involved. Who, though? The nomad coven? Or had Edward's coven belatedly supported his fight?

The fire once again drew my gaze. The answer would be there, disintegrating in the only thing that could permanently harm one of us. Wary against the dangerous heat, I stepped up to the flames and tried to discern their contents. From the scent I could tell the fire had been started with gasoline, and, squinting against the heat, I could see lumps in there. I counted the corpse bits and determined that only one vampire lay within.

When I found the torso, I could see it was wearing a coat. I darted in to grab it, hissing against the pain as flames licked my skin, and came out with the left breast of a leather jacket. The rest was nearly ashes and fell away, so what I held was basically just the breast pocket. There were a couple of pins stuck through it, including a distinctive winged pin. Even with the scent covered over by char and smoke, I recognized this jacket.

I knew who won the fight, then.

That told me the other markings were from the Forks coven, but didn't answer all my questions. For one thing, I still had to determine what became of Bella. Dead things—except vampires—have a distinctive scent to them nearly from the moment of death, and I could smell none of that here. Fear and despair, yes, but not death. It made sense: a dead human with "animal" marks dumped in a field or something could be rationalized away; a dead teenager in her childhood dance studio couldn't be anything except what it was, a murder. So the Forks vampires would take her somewhere else to have their little snack and dispose of evidence. It was surprising any of them contained their bloodlust, but it was the only rational explanation for the fact that bits of her weren't scattered across the studio.

I circled the studio floor, sniffing the air and watching the ground for clues about where they might have gone. I picked up a trace of her blood in heelprint tracks leading toward the back of the studio then followed that down a short hall to a back door. That had been re-locked behind them, but the pungent odor of a bleeding Bella continued in the alley outside. I hesitated in the doorway, though, looking over my shoulder.

There was a pool of blood on the floor, and the dead vampire's ashes would have fragments of leather and maybe bits of metal. Human authorities would know something horrible occurred. There would be publicity; the Volturi might…

But no, I didn't have time to keep cleaning up after murderers. Bella was in danger at this very moment, and if I delayed to play janitor she could die from my inaction. I grit my teeth, but promised myself I'd come back later and see what could be done.

Her scent was clear and guided me even after the bloody footprints faded away. They stuck to alleyways whenever possible, except at a crucial juncture. At a point when they could have gone left and exited the city, gone someplace where a body could be explained as an animal's victim, they turned right and went directly toward the city's largest hospital. I stood for a moment, stunned, but broke into a jog. Why the hospital? Why continue the ruse? It made no sense, but I supposed very little had made sense since I'd arrived in the United States.

I had to put my shoes back on and pull my hood up as I got closer to the hospital. I entered through the Emergency Room—the scent of her blood was lost in a cocktail of injuries, but where else would they bring her?— and braced myself to aggressively deflect attention, but I needn't have worried. I could barely fit through the door.

For the first time since I'd gotten to Phoenix, it hit me that this was, in fact, a large city. I'd stuck to deserted roads and suburbs and low-traffic areas so far, but the hospital was packed to bursting. I saw injuries of nearly every kind, from someone who'd tripped and broken his ankle to a guy who'd gotten an entire tree branch impaled through his chest. The nurses had a harried look about them as they shuffled people around and tried to get the most urgent cases seen the soonest; tree-guy caused a pretty big stir when he arrived. In any case, everyone here had more pressing things than a random Asian guy in a hoodie.

I gingerly found my way to a corner of the waiting room, deflecting the two nurses who noticed me toward people who actually needed the attention. I stood there and gritted my teeth against the sensations washing over me. I hated hospitals. You could never go within a mile of them without catching a dozen bloody scents, which sent a tainted excitement thrumming through my traitorous body. The bloodlust had never had any power over me because it nauseated me. But nausea still felt horrible, so I stayed away from places full of injured humans.

It took about an hour for me to hear anything useful, but my corner was near the nurses' desk and I finally lucked into what I needed. It came in the form of a conversation between two nurses, a man and a woman, discussing where to put a new patient.

"Just put him in Dr. Hagues' room."

"Isn't that girl with the sliced up arm still in there?"

"You mean Miss 'I wasn't committing suicide, I just fell through a window'? She's—ow! What was that for?"

"HIPAA mean anything to you, idiot?"

"Whatever. Anyway, she's got her stitches and blood and they've moved her upstairs to four-oh-three. Dr. Hagues is free now."

I discarded the rest and started elbowing—carefully so as not to further injure anyone—my way from the ER. They already had a cover story in place with the medical personnel, and it sounded like Bella was safe for the moment but…there was no way I could leave without verifying that with my own eyes.

It was easy to give security the slip and slink through the hospital grounds; it was much harder to actually locate Room 403 from the outside. I didn't know how they numbered the rooms, and I was only mostly sure that "upstairs" had meant in this part of the building and not someplace else. It wasn't a small hospital, and I really didn't want to risk wandering the interior and running into another vampire. Though I had no doubt I could give them the slip, they would be on high alert after their clash with the nomad coven; any oddities might set them off and make them unpredictable.

I did end up entering the building despite my wariness. There just wasn't any way to tell which room had what number. I had to find the cracked-open window of a sleeping patient on the fifth floor, then creep out into the hall and memorize the room numbers. I jumped nearly out of my skin when the motion sensors activated and brightened the hallway lights, then cursed myself for not thinking of security cameras. With that information, though, I was able to count off the even columns of windows and get myself in the right area. From there it was just a matter of peeking through windows until I recognized her face. Luckily, her window looked out over the roof of an adjacent building. A poor view for her, but convenient for me.

Bella was so pale I missed the rising and falling of her chest at first. In that moment I knew I had failed, that I had applied myself to the fullest and still come up short. What was the point of my conviction if I couldn't save just one human girl? It didn't matter how many lives I'd indirectly saved by killing the killers if I couldn't directly protect even a single soul.

But the moment passed as I saw her breathe in and out, heard the machines softly beep in time with her pulse. She had a thick bandage wrapping her right arm and a saline drip hooked up to her left. Her skin was drawn, like she'd been deflated just a little. My breath caught. That wasn't simple blood loss.

"I'm…so sorry," I whispered. "I didn't notice the signs, didn't realize you were in danger until…and…" I swallowed. "I'm sorry. I'll get you out of this, I promise."

It was stupid and meaningless. She couldn't hear me, in fact it would be disastrous if she did. But something constrictive in my chest loosened at the worthless apology, so…

So I stayed there for a while. I sat below her window and looked out over the hospital, telling myself the lie that I was watching, keeping her safe. But after not too long I couldn't believe the lie any longer. No one was going to sneak through the window and drink her blood. No, the one hunting her was so well-established as her "boyfriend" that he could just walk through the door. The door…

I heaved myself from the wall and dropped down to the hospital lawn. So far in this hunt, the coven I'd come to kill had managed to entirely evade my detection. I still had no idea how they managed it, but if this "Edward" was truly committed to his deception then he wouldn't have just dropped her off. He'd have to play by human rules here, which meant his proximity would be determined by doctors. I thought I could catch a glimpse of him, maybe his covenmates, in a moment like this, a sequence of events they could not have predicted.

So I circled around to the non-emergency entrance. This room was much quieter than the ER. So quiet, in fact, that I abandoned the idea of actually entering there and veered off onto the lawn to the left. There was a large window that, during the day, would allow a pleasant amount of sunlight to warm the waiting area. I crouched behind a prickly green shrub, then slowly rose until I could just see inside.

Only one person waited in the room. He sat in a chair against one wall, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. But those hands had pale skin and the pinkish residue of poorly-washed-off blood. His hoodie had a couple dark stains that I was sure were the same. As I watched, a young female nurse walked into the room and tapped the vampire on the shoulder. He looked up at her, and I got my first look at the bloodsucker calling himself Edward.

He had a statuesque face that was warped by pain. I read fear, worry, and desperation. Despite his obvious anguish, the nurse blushed when he met her eyes. She spoke some words I couldn't catch, and Edward jolted from his chair and sprinted out of the room. The nurse watched him go with a dazed expression and a dopey grin.

I realized I was gritting my teeth when my jaw started to complain, but it took me real, concerted effort to loosen it. All the nausea I felt in the ER returned to churn in my stomach and slowly metabolize into seething, pounding rage. I had just witnessed the face of the most disgusting sadist I'd ever seen. That creature was so consumed in his boyfriend role that he would sit, alone, in a waiting room and fake grief and worry. For what? The off-chance that someone would see? To maintain perfect authenticity? All in service of a perfect moment, the ultimate betrayal. Until this moment, I hadn't understood what I was hunting. But now I knew.

Edward would not simply lure Bella with sex appeal and a quick high school fling. He would teach her to trust him with every part of herself. Only when she was his in every conceivable way, only when the agony grew no further, would he finally take her lifeblood. Such was the cruelty of a killer so patient, so discerning of palette, that he could live among humans for years with no signs for a vampire hunter to follow.

I unclenched my jaw again, then forcibly turned away and left the hospital. I could have saved Bella right there, could have broken through the window, blown past the nurse, and torn Edward limb from limb. I could even have been a bit stealthier and killed him on the elevator ride up to Bella's room. And I wanted to. The urge to turn around burned within me nearly hot enough to scorch my flesh.

But I couldn't. With effort, I reigned myself in and thought with a modicum of logic. As horrible as it was, Edward's awful modus operandi meant that I actually had plenty of time for a more measured approach. It was such a strange way to find it, but it actually gave me hope that I could save Bella from his grasp. Besides, no matter how stealthily I did it, killing Edward within the hospital…there was no way such an act would fail to alert the Volturi. For all the reasons that had ever driven me to stealth, I could not afford alerting them.

So I left.