Descending Star

ENTREATY

Jasper and Alice ran on a northerly track, around the outskirts of San Antonio. They didn't speak. Alice concentrated on Victor's tenuous olfactory trail and tried to glean what little she could of its rapidly dissipating patterns. They had been chasing him ever since the jet crash north of Yosemite, and not once had they closed the distance sufficiently for Alice to get a proper read on him.

Maria had declined to do the rival Cullen family a favor by gutting Victor with the adamantium claws that she had found in old Tenochtitlan. She had put him to work for her own ends, instead. She had weaponized him, by sending him to Italy, to bring the Triad of Thrones west on a new purge.

"Maria influenced his decisions, it is true," Alice said on one of their brief exchanges, "but that doesn't mean she changed his mind."

Jasper countered, "Victor was rebuffed by the strongest coven in North America. He has nowhere left to go, but Italy."

Alice said nothing to that, but she didn't agree. Victor still had choices. He could still commit in desperation to a direct solo attack on Forks. His trail did not head east, for the ocean. His trail led straight up Tornado Alley, toward Oklahoma City, which supported her argument that Victor himself hadn't decided on a course of action.

The one thing they knew about his motivations was that he shied neurotically from confrontation. For every petty warlord he had engaged through Baja and Mexico, he had avoided three. His decision to plead his case to Maria had been remarkable, an act of desperation, and he had to know that Maria had her own agenda, and that if he went to Italy, he would be serving her ends, perhaps more so than his own.

In northern Texas, not far from the Oklahoma border, Victor's trail went cold.

They stood in a department store parking lot. "He stole another vehicle," Jasper said with a curse. They tried to follow the pickup truck's tire tracks onto the freeway, but it was hopeless. Even at two in the morning, the traffic overlapped and effaced their trail, and three miles north of the parking lot, the last dispersed remnants became totally obscured and lost in a layered cloverleaf system at the junction of three interstates.

They slowed to a halt, on the emergency lane of a four mile stretch of on and off ramps. Jasper shook his head with disgust.

Alice studied the road and surmised, "We've lost the track."

Jasper muttered, "We lost it miles ago. I've been deluding myself ever since the WalMart." He shook his head, cursed, and punched a deep dent into a galvanized steel guardrail.

They often styled themselves as near-omnipotent superbeings. This existence owed them something in return for their damnation, did it not? But on moments like this, rendered frustrated and impotent, they fell far short of godhead and felt all too human.

"I'm sorry I don't have a good read," Alice soothed, contrite. "All this way, and I never got close."

Jasper set his teeth and brooded, "Oh, we're close."

_________

Victor stood on a service catwalk atop a giant oil tank, the largest of a dozen structures clustered on the storage field of a refinery north of Oklahoma City.

He could hear, three hundred feet below the catwalk, the ticking of the engine within the sixth truck that he had stolen in the past hour. He paced the catwalk and kept watch, in the night, for fast moving vehicles on the streets below, stealthed, lightless vehicles especially. He watched also for unnaturally fast human figures. He knew that in urban settings, vampires were faster on foot than in vehicles, but they tended to ghost themselves in movement, particularly at night, where their infrared signatures stood out as the fastest objects on the landscape.