The wail of the police siren had long been shut off by the time Chief Charlie Swan's cruiser pulled back into his driveway. The rain was still coming down in heavy, relentless sheets, washing the residual mud and blood of the dockside crime scene from Charlie's heavy boots.
He parked the cruiser, turning off the engine with a heavy, exhausted sigh. The scene at the docks had been a nightmare. Waylon Forge, a good man, torn apart by what looked like a bear or a mountain lion. Charlie's mind was still trying to process the sheer brutality of it as he stepped out into the freezing downpour.
He looked up at the house, expecting to see the warm glow of the living room lamps. Instead, the house was dark.
Charlie frowned, his police instincts lightly buzzing. He looked at the driveway. Bella's faded red Chevy truck was gone.
He walked up the wooden steps of the porch, shaking the rain from his jacket. Right by the front door, sitting exactly where it had been dropped in an obvious hurry, was Mame's heavy tactical rucksack.
Charlie stopped, staring at the bag for a long moment. He rubbed a hand over his tired face, the pieces coming together with an easy, predictable logic. He had told Mame that Bella was out with Edward Cullen. Mame, who had made his intense dislike for the Cullen boy glaringly obvious, had clearly taken the keys, dropped his gear, and rushed out to crash their little baseball game.
A low, dry chuckle rumbled in Charlie's chest. The sound was a stark contrast to the grim reality he had just left at the docks.
"That boy," Charlie muttered to himself, shaking his head. "He's more protective of Bella than I am."
He unlocked the front door and pushed it open, dragging the heavy rucksack inside out of the rain. As he hoisted the bag—surprised, as always, by how dense and heavy Mame packed his gear—Charlie couldn't help but feel a strange mix of amusement and melancholy.
How did this happen? Charlie thought, locking the door behind him. He had taken Mame in just a few short weeks ago, an amnesiac kid off the side of the road. And yet, in that tiny window of time, Mame and Bella had forged a bond that felt entirely unbreakable.
Charlie sighed, carrying the bag up the stairs. "They've only known each other for a minute, but they're closer to each other than I am to either of them."
He reached the top of the landing and walked into Mame's room. It was meticulously clean, almost militant in its organization. Charlie set the heavy bag down at the foot of the bed. He felt a brief pang of paternal inadequacy. Maybe it was the age gap. Maybe teenagers just communicated on a frequency that a tired, middle-aged cop couldn't tune into. Or maybe Mame just had an instinct to protect the people he considered family.
"Well, at least I don't have to worry about Cullen trying anything funny with Mame around," Charlie mumbled, a small, genuine smile touching his face.
Charlie walked back downstairs, turning on the kitchen lights. He washed his hands, the cold water stinging the cuts from the day, and pulled a pan out from the cupboards. The house was quiet, save for the rhythmic drumming of the rain against the roof. He started pulling ingredients from the fridge, settling into the comfortable routine of making dinner, fully expecting his kids to walk through the door complaining about the wet weather any minute now.
He was completely, blissfully unaware that a lethal, supernatural tracker was currently closing in on his location, or that his adopted son was tearing through the woods at breakneck speeds to turn the front yard into a warzone.
The Tracker's Folly
James moved through the damp ferns like a ghost. The heavy rain did nothing to dampen his mood; in fact, the dreary weather made the hunt feel more intimate. He could smell the warm, pulsing blood of the police chief inside the house. It was an appetizer. A message to the Cullens and their little pet.
He took a step forward, his boot pressing lightly into the mud.
Click.
James paused. A mechanical sound? Before he could even look down, a hollowed-out cedar stump to his left hissed sharply. A pressurized cloud of fine mist sprayed directly into his path.
James inhaled reflexively, his hyper-sensitive tracker senses analyzing the air. He expected a poison, a chemical, something a human might foolishly try to use. Instead, a wave of absolute, putrid disgust washed over him.
It smelled like ancient, rotting, stale blood. The [Dead Man's Blood] didn't paralyze his supernatural muscles as it might have a lesser creature, but to a vampire whose existence was defined by the sweet aroma of fresh, living veins, it was utterly revolting.
"Pathetic," James sneered, his red eyes flashing with annoyance. With a casual, brutal swipe of his hand, he shattered the hollow stump into kindling. He stepped out of the foul-smelling mist, his nose crinkling in disgust as the rancid scent clung to his clothes and nasal passages.
He continued toward the house, thoroughly annoyed. But that annoyance was his critical mistake.
Because his olfactory senses were entirely overwhelmed by the suffocating stench of the stale blood, he was completely blind to the subtle, acrid scent painting the tree bark in the narrow gap ahead. He walked right into the choke point.
FSSSHHH!
A secondary tripwire snapped. From the branches directly above and the trunks beside him, a highly concentrated, pressurized spray of garlic extract, white ash, and pure bleach erupted point-blank into his face.
James shrieked.
To a human, it would have been a nasty blast of cleaning chemicals. But to a vampire—and specifically a tracker whose sense of smell was magnified a thousand times over—it was the equivalent of staring directly into a nuclear blast with no eyelids.
The sensory overload was catastrophic. The bleach burned his unblinking eyes, while the hyper-concentrated garlic and ash seared his nasal passages like liquid fire. James doubled over, crashing to the wet dirt. The elegant, lethal predator began violently rolling in the mud, clawing desperately at his own face as he tried to scrape the burning chemicals from his skin.
"RRAAAAGH!" James roared, the sound echoing through the storm not as a taunt, but as a scream of raw, unadulterated fury.
He scrambled to his feet, mud staining his pale skin. The sophisticated game was over. He didn't care about stealth anymore. He was going to tear the human inside limb from limb.
James lunged out of the treeline like a bullet. He didn't bother with the door. He hit the exterior wall of the kitchen with the force of a freight train.
KRA-KOOM!
The side of the Swan house exploded inward. Wood splintered, drywall shattered into dust, and the kitchen table was violently thrown across the room.
Charlie Swan didn't even have time to register the noise. The shockwave of the collapsing wall caught him completely off guard. He was thrown backward off his feet, the back of his head cracking sickeningly against the hard linoleum floor. The world spun into a dizzying, dark blur.
Through his groggy, unfocused vision, Charlie saw a pale, mud-caked demon step through the rubble of his home.
James snarled, his red eyes weeping black ash and his face twisted into a mask of pure hatred. He reached down, grabbing the disoriented Chief of Police by the throat, and hoisted him into the air with one hand. Charlie gagged, his hands weakly grabbing at the cold, stone-like fingers crushing his windpipe.
SCREEECH!
Outside, the tires of a heavy red Chevy truck locked up, violently skidding into the driveway.
James barely had time to turn his head toward the sound. The front door of the house didn't just open; it was ripped off its hinges.
Mame moved with terrifying Rank B speed. He crossed the distance of the living room and entered the ruined kitchen in a fraction of a second, his boots crunching over the broken drywall. He came to a dead halt ten feet from James.
The tracker bared his fangs, ready to snap Charlie's neck, but he froze. The sheer, suffocating pressure rolling off the boy standing in front of him wasn't human. It was heavy, dark, and utterly absolute.
Mame didn't yell. He didn't scream. He didn't even drop into a combat stance.
He just looked at the vampire holding his father, his dark eyes colder than the rain outside.
"Put him down," Mame commanded, his voice a low, vibrating hum that seemed to shake the remaining glass in the windows. "And you might live to see tomorrow."
James's red eyes narrowed, the burning sting of the bleach temporarily forgotten as he stared at the boy standing in the ruins of the kitchen.
To James, humans were cattle. They were fragile, slow, and completely devoid of any real presence. But the boy in front of him wasn't radiating the sweet, terrified scent of prey. Mame was projecting a crushing, apex-level gravity that made the tracker's supernatural instincts scream in warning.
A slow, twisted smile spread across James's ash-stained face. The easy, boring slaughter of a small-town cop suddenly lost all its appeal. This... this was something entirely new. A mystery. A real game.
James slowly opened his hand.
Charlie dropped to the linoleum with a heavy, limp thud, groaning weakly as he clutched his bruised throat. He was barely conscious, his eyes rolling back from the severe blow to his head.
Mame didn't flinch. His dark eyes remained locked on James as he took a single, slow step forward, briefly glancing down to confirm Charlie's chest was still rising and falling. His father was alive. That was all that mattered right now.
"Follow me," Mame said, his voice cold and devoid of any fear.
Without waiting for a response, Mame turned his back on the lethal vampire—an act of supreme, arrogant confidence—and walked right back out through the massive hole in the wall, disappearing into the dark, freezing rain.
James let out a low, breathless laugh, his fangs fully bared. The thrill of the hunt ignited his cold blood like gasoline. He ignored the groaning police chief entirely and darted out into the storm, plunging into the woods right on Mame's heels.
Not thirty seconds later, the air inside the ruined kitchen violently shifted.
Three blurs of motion materialized in the center of the room as Edward, Emmett, and Jasper arrived. They instantly dropped into defensive stances, anticipating a fight, but the room was empty of enemies.
Instead, a horrific, eye-watering stench slammed into them like a physical wall.
"Ugh!" Emmett choked, immediately throwing his massive arm over his nose and mouth, his eyes watering. "What the hell is that?"
Edward staggered a step back, coughing dryly as the hyper-concentrated mixture of garlic, bleach, white ash, and stale dead man's blood assaulted his enhanced senses. "It's a chemical trap. He turned the woods into a minefield."
"Damn," Emmett muttered, his voice muffled behind his sleeve as he looked at the shattered wall leading out into the dark. "Did Mame use this just to piss James off and draw him away from the house? Where did they go?"
Jasper wasn't looking at the wall. The empath had instantly homed in on the waves of pain and confusion radiating from the floor. He knelt beside Charlie, his pale hands moving with practiced, military precision as he assessed the damage.
"His pulse is steady, but he's taken a severe blow to the head," Jasper reported, his southern drawl tight and professional. "He has a concussion, and his airway is bruised. If he stays here in the cold with this head trauma, he might slip into a coma."
Edward looked torn, his golden eyes darting frantically between Charlie and the dark woods where Mame had just led a lethal killer. "We have to go after them. James will tear him apart."
"I will take Chief Swan to Carlisle," Jasper ordered, effortlessly scooping the unconscious police chief into his arms. He looked at his brothers, his expression dead serious. "Carlisle can treat the concussion safely at the house. You two go. Follow the trail, but be careful. If Mame laid traps that smell like this, there's no telling what else is out there waiting to blow up."
Edward didn't need to be told twice. He nodded firmly to Jasper and turned toward the gaping hole in the wall.
With Emmett right behind him, Edward launched himself into the freezing rain, fighting through the blinding stench of the chemical traps to follow the trail of the hunter and the hunted deep into the Olympic Peninsula.