The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella by Stephenie Meyer
I couldn't wait to tell Diego my plan. My gut instinct was that he would feel the same. Hopefully.
Suddenly, I wondered if this was what had really happened to Shelly and Steve and the other kids who had disappeared. I knew they hadn't burned in the sun. Had Riley only claimed he'd seen their ashes as another way to keep the rest of us afraid and dependent on him? Returning home to him every dawn? Maybe Shelly and Steve had just set off on their own. No more Raoul. No enemies or armies threatening their immediate future.
Maybe that's what Riley had meant by lost to the sun. Runaways. In which case, he'd be happy that Diego hadn't bailed, right?
If only Diego and I had taken off! We could be free, too, like Shelly and Steve. No rules, no fear of the sunrise.
Again, I imagined the whole horde of us on the loose without a curfew. I could see Diego and me moving like ninjas through the shade. But I could also see Raoul, Kevin, and the rest, sparkling disco-ball monsters in the center of a busy downtown street, the bodies piling up, the screaming, the helicopters whirring, the soft, helpless cops with their dinky little bullets that wouldn't make a dent, the cameras, the panic that would spread so fast as the pictures bounced swiftly around the globe.
Vampires wouldn't be a secret for very long. Even Raoul couldn't kill people fast enough to keep the story from spreading.
There was a chain of logic here, and I tried to grasp it before I could be distracted again.
One, humans didn't know about vampires. Two, Riley encouraged us to be inconspicuous, not to attract the notice of humans and educate them otherwise. Three, Diego and I had decided that all vampires must be following that guideline, or else the world would know about us. Four, they must have a reason for doing so, and it wasn't the little popguns of the human police that motivated them. Yeah, the reason must be pretty important to make all vampires hide all day long in stuffy basements. Maybe reason enough to make Riley and our creator lie to us, terrify us about the burning sun. Maybe it was a reason Riley would explain to Diego, and since it was so important and he was so responsible, Diego would promise to keep the secret and they would be cool with that. Sure they would. But what if what actually happened to Shelly and Steve was that they'd discovered the shiny skin thing and not run? What if they'd gone to Riley?
And, crap, there went the next step in my logical path. The chain dissolved and I started panicking about Diego again.
As I stressed, I realized that I'd been thinking things through for a while. I could feel dawn coming on. No more than an hour away. So where was Diego? Where was Riley?
As I thought this, the door opened and Raoul leaped down the stairs, laughing with his buddies. I hunched down, leaning closer to Fred. Raoul didn't notice us. He looked at the crispy-fried vampire in the center of the floor and laughed harder. His eyes were brilliant red.
On the nights Raoul went hunting, he never came home till he had to. He would keep feeding as long as he could. So dawn must have been even closer than I'd thought.
Riley must have demanded that Diego prove his words. That was the only explanation. And they were waiting for the dawn. Only... that would mean that Riley didn't know the truth, that our creator was lying to him, too. Or did it? My thoughts twisted up again.
Kristie showed up minutes later with three of her gang. She reacted indifferently to the pile of ashes. I did a quick head count as two more hunters hurried through the door. Twenty vampires. Everyone was home except Diego and Riley. The sun would rise at any moment.
The door at the top of the basement stairs creaked as someone opened it. I sprang to my feet.
Riley entered. He shut the door behind him. He walked down the stairs.
No one followed.
Before I could process this, Riley roared out an animalistic shriek of rage. He was staring down at the ashy remains on the floor, his eyes bulging in fury. Everyone stood silent, immobile. We'd all seen Riley lose his temper, but this was something different.
Riley spun and raked his fingers through a blaring speaker, then ripped it from the wall and hurled it across the room. Jen and Kristie dodged out of the way as it exploded into the far wall, sending up a cloud of pulverized drywall dust. Riley smashed the sound system with his foot, and the thudding bass went silent. Then he leaped to where Raoul stood, and grabbed him by the throat.
"I wasn't even here!" Raoul yelled, looking afraid--I'd never seen that before.
Riley growled hideously and threw Raoul as he'd thrown the speaker. Jen and Kristie jumped out of the way again. Raoul's body crashed right through the wall, leaving an enormous hole.
Riley caught Kevin by the shoulder and--with a familiar screech--ripped off his right hand. Kevin cried out in pain and tried to twist out of Riley's grip. Riley kicked him in the side. Another harsh shriek and Riley had the rest of Kevin's arm. He tore the arm in half at the elbow and threw the pieces hard into Kevin's anguished face--smack, smack, smack, like a hammer striking stone.
"What is wrong with you?" Riley screamed at us. "Why are you all so stupid?" He made a grab for the blond Spider-Man kid, but that kid leaped out of his way. His jump left him too close to Fred, and he stumbled back toward Riley again, gagging.
"Do any of you have a brain?"
Riley smacked a kid named Dean into the entertainment center, shattering it, then caught another girl--Sara--and tore her left ear and a handful of hair from her head. She snarled in anguish.
It became suddenly obvious that Riley was doing a very dangerous thing. There were a lot of us in here. Already Raoul was back, with Kristie and Jen--usually his enemies--flanking him defensively. A few others banded together in clusters around the room.
I wasn't sure if Riley was aware of the threat or if his rant came to an end naturally. He took a deep breath. He tossed Sara her ear and the hair. She recoiled away from him, licking the torn edge of her ear, coating it with venom so that it would reattach. There was no remedy for the hair, though; Sara was going to have a bald spot.
"Listen to me!" Riley said, quiet but fierce. "All our lives depend on you listening to what I'm saying now and thinking! We are all going to die. Every one of us, you and me, too, if you can't act like you have brains for just a few short days!"
This was nothing like his usual lectures and pleadings for control. He definitely had everyone's attention.
"It's time for you to grow up and take responsibility for yourselves. Do you think you get to live like this for free? That all the blood in Seattle doesn't have a price?"
The little clusters of vampires no longer seemed threatening. Everyone was wide-eyed, some exchanging mystified glances. I saw Fred's head turn toward me in my peripheral vision, but I didn't meet his gaze. My attention was focused on two things: Riley, just in case he started to attack again, and the door. The door that was still closed.
"Are you listening now? Really listening?" Riley paused, but no one nodded. The room was very still. "Let me explain to you the precarious situation we are all in. I'll try to keep it simple for the slowest ones. Raoul, Kristie, come here."
He motioned to the leaders of the two largest gangs, allied for this brief moment against him. Neither of them moved toward him. They braced themselves, Kristie baring her teeth.
I expected Riley to soften, to apologize. To placate them and then persuade them to do what he wanted. But this was a different Riley.
"Fine," he snapped. "We're going to need leaders if we're going to survive, but apparently neither of you is up to the task. I thought you had aptitude. I was wrong. Kevin, Jen, please join me as the heads of this team."
Kevin looked up in surprise. He had just finished putting his arm back together. Though his expression was wary, it was also unmistakably flattered. He slowly got to his feet. Jen looked at Kristie as if waiting for permission. Raoul ground his teeth together.
The door at the top of the stairs did not open.
"Are you not able, either?" Riley asked, irritated.
Kevin took a step toward Riley, but then
Riley permitted himself a tiny smile. The manipulation wasn't subtle, but it was effective.
"Kristie or Jen, who will lead us?" Riley asked with a hint of amusement in his voice.
Jen was still waiting for a sign from Kristie as to what she should do. Kristie glowered at Jen for an instant, then flipped her sandy hair out of her face and darted to stand on Riley's other side.
"That took too long to decide," Riley said seriously. "We don't have the luxury of time. We don't get to fool around anymore. I've let you all do pretty much whatever you feel like, but that ends tonight."
He looked around the room, meeting everyone's eyes, making sure we were listening. I held his gaze for only a second when it was my turn, and then my eyes flipped back to the door. I corrected instantly, but his glare had moved on. I wondered if he'd noticed my slip. Or had he seen me at all, here beside Fred?
"We have an enemy," Riley announced. He let that sink in for a moment. I could tell the idea was shocking to several of the vampires in the basement. The enemy was Raoul--or if you were with Raoul, the enemy was Kristie. The enemy was here, because the whole world was here. The thought that there were other forces out there strong enough to affect us was new for most. Would have been new to me, too, yesterday.
"A few of you might be smart enough to have realized that if we exist, so do other vampires. Other vampires who are older, smarter... more talented. Other vampires who want our blood!"
Raoul hissed, and then several of his followers echoed him in support.
"That's right," Riley said, seeming intent on egging them on. "Seattle was once theirs, but they moved on a long time ago. Now they know about us, and they are jealous of the easy blood they used to have here. They know it belongs to us now, but they want to take it back. They are coming after what they want. One by one, they'll hunt us down! We'll burn while they feast!"
"Never," Kristie growled. Some of hers and some of Raoul's growled, too.
"We don't have a lot of choices," Riley told us. "If we wait for them to show up here, they will have the advantage. This is their turf, after all. And they don't want to face us head-on, because we outnumber them and we are stronger than they are. They want to catch us separated; they want to take advantage of our biggest weakness. Are any of you smart enough to know what that is?" He pointed at the ashes at his feet--now smeared into the carpet and unrecognizable as a former vampire--and waited.
No one moved.
Riley made a disgusted sound. "Unity!" he shouted. "We don't have it! What kind of a threat can we pose when we won't stop killing each other?" He kicked the dust, sending up a small black cloud. "Can you imagine them laughing at us? They think taking the city from us will be easy. That we're weak with stupidity! That we'll just hand them our blood."
Half the vampires in the room snarled in protest now.
"Can you work together, or do we all die?"
"We can take them, boss," Raoul growled.
Riley scowled at him. "Not if you can't control yourself! Not if you can't cooperate with every single person in this room. Anyone you take out"--his toe nudged the ashes again--"might be the one who could have kept you alive. Every one of your coven that you kill is like handing our enemies a gift. Here, you're saying, take me down!"
Kristie and Raoul exchanged a glance as if they were seeing each other for the first time. Others did the same. The word coven was not unfamiliar, but none of us had applied it to our group before. We were a coven.
"Let me tell you about our enemies," Riley said, and all eyes locked on his face. "They are a much older coven than we are. They've been around for hundreds of years, and they've survived that long for a reason. They are crafty and they are skilled and they are coming to retake Seattle with confidence--because they've heard the only ones they'll have to fight for it are a bunch of disorganized children who will do half their work for them!"
More growls, but some were less angry than they were wary. A few of the quieter vampires, the ones Riley would have called tamer, looked skittish.
Riley noticed that, too. "This is how they see us, but that's because they can't see us together. Together, we can crush them. If they could see all of us, side by side, fighting together, they would be terrified. And that's how they're going to see us. Because we're not going to wait for them to show up here and start picking us off. We're going to ambush them. In four days."
Four days? I guessed our creator didn't want to cut it too close to the deadline. I looked at the closed door again. Where was Diego?
Others reacted to the deadline with surprise, some with fear.
"It's the last thing they'll expect," Riley assured us. "All of us--together--waiting for them. And I've saved the best part for last. There are only seven of them."
There was an instant of incredulous silence.
Then Raoul said, "What?"
Kristie stared at Riley with the same disbelieving expression, and I heard muttered whispers around the room.
"Seven?"
"Are you kidding me?"
"Hey," Riley snapped. "I wasn't joking when I said this coven is dangerous. They are wise and... devious. Underhanded. We will have power on our side; they will have deception. If we play it their way, they will win. But if we take it to them on our terms..." Riley didn't finish, he just smiled.
"Let's go now," Raoul urged. "Let's get 'em out of the picture fast." Kevin growled enthusiastically.
"Slow down, moron. Rushing into things blind isn't going to help us win," Riley chided him.
"Tell us everything we need to know about them," Kristie encouraged, shooting Raoul a superior look.
Riley hesitated, as if deciding how to word something. "All right, where to begin? I guess the first thing you need to know is... that you don't know everything there is to know about vampires yet. I didn't want to overwhelm you in the beginning." Another pause while everyone looked confused. "You have a little bit of experience with what we call 'talents.' We have Fred."
Everyone looked at Fred--or rather they tried to. I could tell from Riley's expression that Fred did not like being singled out. It looked like Fred had really turned up the volume on his "talent," as Riley called it. Riley cringed and looked away quickly. I still didn't feel anything.
"Yes, well, there are some vampires who have gifts beyond the usual super strength and super senses. You've seen one aspect in... our coven." He was careful not to say Fred's name again. "Gifts are rare--one in fifty, maybe--but every one is different. There's a huge range of gifts out there, and some of them are more powerful than others."
I could hear a lot of murmurs now as people wondered if they might be talented. Raoul was preening like he'd already decided he was gifted. As far as I could tell, the only one around here that was in any way special was standing next to me.
"Pay attention!" Riley commanded. "I'm not telling you this for entertainment."
"This enemy coven," Kristie interjected. "They're talented. Right?"
Riley gave her an approving nod. "Exactly. I'm glad someone here can connect the dots."
Raoul's upper lip twitched back over his teeth.
"This coven is dangerously talented," Riley went on, his voice dropping to a hushed whisper. "They have a mind reader." He examined our faces, looking to see if we got the importance of this revelation. He didn't seem satisfied with his assessment. "Think, guys! He'll know everything in your head. If you attack, he'll know what move you're going to make before you know it. You go left, he'll be waiting."
There was a nervous stillness as everyone imagined this.
"This is why we've been so careful--me, and the one who created you."
Kristie flinched away from Riley when he mentioned her. Raoul looked angrier. Nerves strained universally.
"You don't know her name, and you don't know what she looks like. This protects us al
That didn't make sense to me. Didn't the secrecy protect her more than it protected any of us? Riley hurried on before we had too long to examine his statement.
"Of course, it doesn't matter now that they've decided to move on Seattle. We will surprise them on their way in, and we will annihilate them." He whistled a single low note through his teeth. "Done. And then not only is the city all ours, other covens will know not to mess with us. We won't have to be so careful to cover our tracks anymore. As much blood as you want, for everyone. Hunting every night. We'll move right into the city, and we will rule it."
The growls and snarls were like applause. Everyone was with him. Except for me. I didn't move, didn't make a sound. Neither did Fred, but who knows why that was?
I was not with Riley because his promises sounded like lies. Or else my whole line of logic had been wrong. Riley said it was only these enemies that kept us from hunting without caution or restraint. But that didn't go along with the fact that all other vampires must have been discreet, or humans would have known about them long ago.
I couldn't concentrate to work it out, because the door at the top of the stairs had not moved. Diego...
"We have to do this together, though. Today I'm going to lead you through some techniques. Fighting techniques. There's more to this than just scuffling around on the floor like toddlers. When it gets dark, we'll go outside and practice. I want you to practice hard, but keep your focus. I am not losing another member of this coven! We all need each other--every one of us. I will not tolerate any more stupidity. If you think you don't have to listen to me, you are wrong." He paused for a short second, the muscles in his face shifting into a new arrangement. "And you will learn how wrong you are when I take you to her"--I shuddered and felt the tremor through the room as everyone else did, too--"and hold you while she tears off your legs and then slowly, slowly burns off your fingers, ears, lips, tongue, and every other superfluous appendage one by one."
We'd all lost a limb, at least, and we'd all burned when we became vampires, so we could easily imagine how that would feel, but it wasn't the threat itself that was so terrifying. The truly scary thing was Riley's face as he said it. His face was not twisted in rage, the way it usually was when he was angry; it was calm and cold, smooth and beautiful, his mouth curled at the edges into a small smile. I suddenly had the impression that this was a new Riley. Something had changed him, hardened him, but I couldn't imagine what could have happened in one night to create that cruel, perfect smile.