The Albanians. Bella's eyes went sharp.
The memory of that day in Paris still rankled—those people had the predatory instincts of jackals, and they were deeply unpleasant company. So they'd laid low for a few years and were back to causing problems?
She didn't need Kim to walk her through it. The through-line was obvious. They hadn't finished cleaning up that Albanian network the last time around—hadn't uprooted the family, hadn't dismantled the organization properly—and now it had grown back.
"Don't worry. This is my business too. I'll get Bryan out."
She was still mid-sentence when a rapid string of footsteps echoed in the corridor outside.
Kim pressed a hand over her mouth. She could hear them getting closer. Her body was starting to tremble.
She'd known it was coming. The water trail she'd left on the hallway carpet had caught someone's attention, and they'd tracked it all the way up from the ground floor.
The Albanians had operated openly in Paris—kidnapping tourists in broad daylight. Istanbul was going to be even easier for them.
Three heavyset men with full beards, their ethnicity unmistakable, arrived at Bella's door. A brief confirmation and they started ramming the door without any preamble.
Bella scanned the other side. Her expression tightened. This hotel's security was laughable—presidential suite and all someone needed to do was walk up and start hammering. How was this organization operating so boldly?
"Get back—get down!" Bella kept her attention fixed on the door. She wasn't carrying a firearm tonight, but weapons were waiting in her pocket dimension. She was working out which pretext to use to retrieve one when a needlepoint of alarm spiked through her senses and she tackled Kim to the floor.
An instant later, the floor-to-ceiling window shattered. A round punched through the exact spot where she'd been standing.
7.62mm. Sniper rifle. Shooter at two hundred meters minimum.
Bang—the three men outside hit the door together with the force of charging bears. They burst through and swept the room immediately, all three of them hosing it down with compact submachine guns. The sniper outside was simultaneously probing for a firing angle with unhurried patience.
Continuous gunfire. Kim screaming. Bella stopped worrying about explanations, drew her M9 from her pocket dimension, and returned fire through the doorway.
Her side had one handgun. The opposition had three automatic weapons and at least one long gun. This was not a winning equation on its face.
The three men in the room were manageable—the sniper was the real problem. The shooter was hidden well enough that her senses couldn't isolate them in the surrounding sea of people.
Wait. Bella moved Kim through three different positions in rapid succession. The sniper tracked her every time.
New conclusion: there are two snipers.
The sniper coverage blanketed roughly eighty percent of the suite's interior. The accuracy was surgical—no ordinary gang operation maintained this standard. This was a prepared kill box, set up specifically for her. Someone had predicted her movements and laid a trap.
The range was too great for her magic to reach. Only one viable option: break for the front door.
"Stay on me. Don't fall behind. Just protect yourself." They were pinned behind a large wardrobe. Bella squeezed Kim's shoulder, stripped her heels off with one hand, and held up three fingers. Two. One.
She rose, arm extended, and fired at the men charging toward her.
Bang bang bang. Muzzle flash lit the room in short bursts. The first two men went down with a single shot each—headshots, clean. Coming up on the third, the man used a dead teammate's body as a shield and caught the bullet meant for him. The moment Bella's motion stalled—less than half a second—the sniper sent two rounds downrange. One for her forehead, one for her heart.
The rounds were too fast, too penetrating. The window of movement had closed. She pulled back.
The last man unloaded his submachine gun in her direction.
"You're dead." Bella hit him with a Mind Blast—a sharp psychic crack that seized his nervous system for a fraction of a second. That fraction was enough. One headshot and he folded.
"Go!" She grabbed Kim and ran for the door.
Five meters from the exit, a girl appeared in the doorway.
She looked about twelve or thirteen, standing barely 4'7" (140 cm). Her eyes were solid crimson from edge to edge, and there was a slow, contemptuous smile on her face. Her speed and strength were nothing like a human's.
"A vampire? And you think you can stop me?"
Bella was furious—she could see the whole mechanism now, one layer clicking into the next, every piece arranged to kill her specifically.
She teleported directly in front of the vampire. Before she could reach out, a sniper round arrived with apparently precognitive timing, landing exactly on her attack vector.
Simultaneously, the vampire girl launched her ability.
"Ahh——!"
The sensation hit like ignition from the inside. Bella felt fire erupt within her body—blazing outward from her core, accelerating impossibly fast, burning her to ash from the inside out. Her pain receptors detonated at ten times their normal sensitivity. Time itself seemed to slow tenfold.
"You're dead!" Her mental shield activated automatically, but the pain had still landed before the shield was fully engaged—some kind of supernatural gift, a psychic-immolation type of ability. The disruption cost her less than half a second.
In a normal situation, half a second meant nothing.
Right now, the sniper's bullet was already at her face.
Bang. A young man appeared from nowhere—moving with the same spectral speed the vampire had shown—and placed himself between Bella and the round. He took it with his own body.
"Edward?" Bella stared. "What are you doing here?"
Pale skin. A Batman-style square jaw. She knew exactly who this was—and she had no idea what to say.
After leaving Forks, she'd kept loose contact with the Cullen coven, though mostly through Alice. Conversations with Edward had been infrequent and deliberately kept that way. She'd made a conscious choice to put distance between herself and this particular vampire. Running into him here was more than suspicious.
"Go—now!" Edward positioned himself in the doorway, blocking the snipers' line of sight completely. He kept his voice low and urgent.
Bella was already moving. She'd summoned an Ice Arrow before Edward even spoke, and drove it straight at the female vampire's heart.
"You won't get out of our reach. Remember those words." The vampire girl just smiled and shook her head. The next moment, black smoke poured off her in waves and she simply ceased to exist.
What in the world is going on. No time to process it. The snipers outside hadn't paused, and Edward had taken two more rounds. Vampire physiology had kept him out of the kill zones, but he wasn't going to hold much longer.
Bella pulled Kim out of the room.
Once they were clear of the snipers' coverage, she finally had a moment to check Edward's wounds. Something didn't add up: "How did you appear just now? I didn't sense you at all."
Edward looked at her steadily. He spoke each word with deliberate weight.
"We live in a twilight world, and there are no friends at dusk."