We live in a twilight world, and there are no friends at dusk. Who said that?
Bella made a snap judgment. Not Lu Xun—she was certain of that within half a second. She wasn't a literature major, but her literary background was solid enough. The line surfaced quickly: Walt Whitman. American poet.
Back in her previous life, people had been forever plastering Whitman quotes as QQ profile signatures—a reliable path to looking profound with minimal effort. She knew his work well enough that this particular line wasn't unfamiliar.
But right now, hearing it from Edward Cullen's mouth—the male lead of the Twilight series, addressed to her, the series' original female lead—she felt a chill spread down her spine from somewhere around her shoulder blades.
Was Edward Cullen's twilight world related to the Twilight franchise she had literally stepped out of? Looking at it from any angle, it seemed impossible for the two not to be connected.
Her first thought: this man had been possessed by a transmigrator.
Her second thought went somewhere stranger. He could have fused with a parallel-dimension counterpart of himself. Or been swapped for one. Or he was a version of Edward from a timeline where the Twilight storyline had actually played out the way it was supposed to.
Every possibility was terrifying. The more you knew about how these things worked, the more frightening they became. Bella had scared herself half to death with her own imagination—she was actually breaking into a cold sweat—before she managed to rein herself in.
She kept her voice level. "Whitman? Why recite that line now, of all times?"
The corner of Edward's expressionless face moved almost imperceptibly. "Just to make sure you'd remember it."
Make sure I'd remember it. Bella stared at him. I nearly had a cardiac event and you didn't notice?
"Wait—your injuries." She looked properly at Edward's wounds for the first time and frowned. It wasn't that she was burning bridges and didn't care about her companion—she knew his vampire constitution would handle minor damage, that it healed quickly. But now, looking again: "Why aren't the wounds closing? What's going on?"
"The situation outside is still chaotic. We should split up—I'll find you later." Edward slipped into the crowd without another word and disappeared.
"You know where my safe house is? How are you going to find me?" Bella was full of doubts—Istanbul wasn't a small city. If she hid, how could he possibly find her? She watched his back vanish into the flow of panicking hotel guests.
The building had erupted into chaos. The continuous gunfire had sent everyone flooding toward the exits simultaneously.
Bella pushed the questions down and blended into the crowd with Kim, moving with the tide until they hit the emergency stairwell and took it all the way to street level. From there she guided Kim through the Istanbul streets in a loose, winding path until they reached a safe house maintained by the Assassin Brotherhood.
She waited a long time. Edward Cullen did not appear.
She called Alice.
Two sentences in, and Bella's composure nearly broke for the third time in under an hour.
"You're telling me—Edward has been home this whole time? Your whole family is in Turkey right now?"
On the other end of the line, the black-haired vampire's tone was light and curious: "Strange question. Why are you suddenly asking about Edward? ...Don't tell me you've developed feelings for him?"
Bella's urgent prompting pushed her past the playful jab. Alice's voice went serious: "No—we're all in Canada. Playing baseball, actually. Why would we be in Turkey? Are you looking for Edward? I can pass the phone to him—"
Bella stood with the phone in her hand for a full few seconds. Edward was currently in Canada. Playing baseball.
Which meant the person who had just taken bullets for her was—who, exactly?
Her reasoning moved fast. She had used the Time Stone more than three hundred times. Time travel wasn't a distant concept for her. But the Edward she'd just encountered hadn't felt like someone who'd jumped a point on the timeline and surfaced at a specific moment—the quality of his presence was completely different from what it felt like when someone arrived through the Time Stone. She couldn't articulate the exact difference yet, but she knew it wasn't that.
"...Never mind Edward. Here's what happened: I was just attacked by a vampire—looked like one of your kind, had a supernatural gift, no fear of sunlight. Could you check across the major vampire families for me and see who it might be?"
Alice caught the gravity immediately. "I'm on my way. I'll let you know as soon as I have something."
The vampire question went to the back of her mind. She turned to Kim.
The situation wasn't complicated, on its face: Albanian retaliation. The gang had taken Bryan to lure Kim out, and then they'd come after Kim too. By rights, none of this was Bella's problem—except the attack tonight had been perfectly calibrated to her. The kill box, the sniper positioning, every lethal flourish in that ambush had been aimed at Bella specifically. Someone in the dark had been watching her, modeling her reactions, and constructing a death trap around the pattern they observed.
Bryan Mills was just the hook. The target had been Bella.
Then there were the snipers' rounds. They looked like standard ammunition. Her psionic senses didn't flag them as anything unusual. But her instinct for death was screaming that those bullets were far more dangerous than they appeared—a contradiction that didn't resolve cleanly, and she couldn't shake it.
Bella pressed her fingers to her temple, sorted through the moving pieces, and then put a hand on Kim's shoulder.
"You're safe here. Get some rest. I'll get your father back—the Albanians are my enemies too."
She left Kim a handgun and walked out.
Kim sat there, her desire to help useless without any idea how to act on it. Every sound from outside made her spin toward the source. Her hands on the gun wouldn't stop shaking.
"Ha—can't even hold the gun steady. You really are a sweet little bird."
A familiar voice, directly in her ear. She spun around.
A young woman leaned against the wall behind her. Shoulder-length blond hair. An easy, almost careless smile.
Kim looked at her for a long moment, struggling to believe what she was seeing.
"Amanda? How did you get in here?"
Then something kicked in—a memory, cold and sudden. She stumbled backward and raised the gun. The barrel was shaking.
"You—I remember. I remember you died."
The figure in front of Kim vanished. The air filled with a sharp wave of sulfur.
Then she was behind Kim—arms looped around her waist, chin resting on Kim's shoulder.
"Don't you like me anymore?" Amanda's voice dropped to just above a whisper. "We had such a good time in Paris, didn't we?"
Kim hated this. Every instinct in her body was screaming. She felt like a snake had coiled itself around her, like every hair on her skin was standing straight up. She wrenched herself free, stumbled backward, and didn't stop until her shoulders hit the wall. She kept the gun up, though the barrel still trembled.