"Eagle One for Bella Ciao. Come to the Columbia Export terminal. Over."
Jasper reaches over to grab my phone.
"Garrett, for the last time talk normally."
An indignant huff can be heard on the other end of the line. "Where is the fun in...", Garrett begins to say before Jasper cuts him off.
"We'll be there in a minute."
"How about you drive and I swim, to confuse our tracks further?", I suggest.
"How about you drive and I swim.", Jasper answers.
"If this is some stupid protecting me spiel again I swear I will..."
"No", he whispers huskily, "It's because I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off you if your wet clothes are clinging to you."
"Upon making the suggestion,", I speak, a bit more high pitched than intended, "I had not considered that I would not be able to keep my hands off you either if you were in wet clothes."
My phone buzzes again. Of course, Garrett would be able to see our GPS tracker isn't moving yet.
"Get in the car.", Jasper says, a frustrated growl in his voice, while he gets in himself as well.
"On the way back home we are going to make a detour well out of our family's hearing range and do some very filthy things in the back of this car.", I say with feigned casualty. Jasper drives twice the speed limit.
We park the car in a secluded spot and walk the last part to sneak past the railway tracks. Kate flags us down and leads us into the dockyards.
We had been carefully combing through the city, working in pairs, to investigate what had been going on in Portland. The answer is carnage. At seemingly every other street block a dumpster or car was on fire. In the already burnt out ones you could spot bones between the ashes, betraying the bodies that they were set on fire to destroy. The occasional loose limb lying around was entirely drained of blood. There was no doubt at all that this was the work of vampires.
No doubt either that they had little to no control. Some effort seemed to be made to pick victims who would not be missed, and to thoroughly dispose of their remains. However, just too often they made mistakes.
And there were so many of them. So many different tracks. Jasper and I alone picked up a full dozen different scents in the area we scouted. The others found many more, and then we might still have missed some.
Jasper, Peter and Charlotte quickly concluded that this had to be some form of newborn army. Not quite like the armies they had seen in the south, but not that different either. Clearly there was some tighter form of organization going on. Perhaps they were led by a few veteran vampires, or controlled by special abilities. However there was definitely an element of irrepressible greed and carelessness that is typical of newborns.
Kate's face is grim as she leads us along the dockyard. A sickening smell of decay hangs in the air, and gets stronger as we approach an uncharacteristically serious Garrett, Peter and Charlotte. The source soon becomes apparent.
"Holy fuck.", Jasper whispers, disturbed. He echoes my sentiments exactly. Below the woodwork of one of the docks, several dozen bodies had accumulated in a watery mass grave. Lying rotting in the water for who knows how long had distorted them. They were bloated, with waxy skin, and some had clearly been gnawed on by animals. Beyond that, all were undeniably drained of blood in a decidedly non-human way.
Two werewolves are lying down on the docks with their paws pressed over their noses, I recognize them as Quil Ataera and Leah Clearwater. The smell must be even more offensive to them than to us. Leah's brother Seth is standing next to them in human form, and appears to be about to throw up.
"I'm glad the doctor couldn't come.", Seth says.
Carlisle definitely has a habit of collecting troubled teenage children, so once the Cullens and the pack reconciled he had been like a moth to a flame with Seth who had in a short timespan lost his father and most of his friends. The boy eagerly lapped up the attention. His mother had been working long hours to keep the family fed, and most of her spare time was occupied by the more pressing needs of her daughter, who had been sinking into an increasingly deep depression. On top of the other losses Leah had to contend with the breakup with her ex-fiancé Sam Uley, his later death, and being the first female werewolf in known history. Seth had a lot of compassion for his sister, but was nevertheless glad he could regularly run off to the less gloomy atmosphere of the Cullen house.
And Seth was right about not wanting Carlisle to see the mess we are staring at in the Portland dockyards.
"I made sure he wouldn't be able to come.", Jasper says kindly, looking fondly at the young werewolf. "I anticipated that we could find something like this, so I had Emmett hack into the hospital computer system to change Carlisle's shifts around."
"All right.", Garrett says. "I think we've seen enough. Let's clean this up and head home."
We spend the next day thinking of strategies for how to lure Victoria out. The main challenge is to take out her entire coven at once. If any of her newborns are left on the loose that would be chaos, Portland had proven that. If Victoria manages to get away she could just start over in another city. The only way to deal with this problem for once and for all is to get the lot of them together and destroy them. Preferably in a location with no humans around. But how could we even get her to leave Portland?
In the end there is no need to. The morning mail brings a postcard, ironically decorated with puppies, that simply says:
We're coming for you.
Love,
Victoria