Starless Night (A Twilight/Stranger Things Fan Fiction)

Chapter 2: The Search

Two days passed before someone went looking for my body outside Bella's house.

I was lucky to be found by Carlisle, and I knew it. Lucky Charlie hadn't come out and seen my head lying in the grass, eyes still open and moving.

But I felt the furthest thing from lucky.

For two days, I went through it in my head over and over, trying to understand how that... how that creature had bested me. How it had bested me so quickly and then dragged my Bella away like she was nothing more than a sack of potatoes. And...

And the way she had screamed. That scream—the agony in that sound—I knew it would haunt me forever.

There had been so much blood. Blood everywhere, all over the forest floor. It was all I could do not to think of the questions that terrified me. Had she lost too much blood? Would she survive at all?

But the questions that haunted me most thoroughly were simple.

What was that thing, and where had it taken Bella?

Carlisle found me in the woods, searching for Bella with a party Charlie had put together after her disappearance. After my head was returned to its body, Carlisle knelt in the dirt by me. "What happened?" he asked. "I've been terrified. Was it another... vampire? Is Bella..." Is she dead? he thought.

"Not dead," I growled. "She..."

I gave up trying to explain it, though, and pulled Carlisle to his feet. He followed me to my car, still parked in the driveway of Bella's house.

You know, son, Carlisle thought, the people are going to suspect you had something to do with her disappearance if we waltz into town while she is still missing.

"Well, it's good that we aren't going into town, then," I growled.

I didn't know where I was going. Following a lead that would almost certainly lead to nothing. But it didn't matter. I didn't care. I would do anything.

"Edward," Carlisle said. He got into the passenger seat of the car; I revved the engine and backed up without checking behind me. I'd hear human thoughts if someone was behind me.

And Bella was most assuredly not in this realm at all.

"What do you want me to tell you, Carlisle?" I laughed wryly, without an ounce of humor. It wasn't funny. Nothing about this was funny. "That I took Bella into the woods behind her house to tell her—that I didn't love her? That I convinced her I didn't care for her anymore? And that as soon as I finished my speech an animal decapitated me and dragged Bella away through a hole in a tree that vanished moments later?"

Carlisle sat stunned and silent.

I drove faster, already in the backwoods that would lead to the house. "How is that—" Carlisle stammered, but he seemed to know better than to ask how it was possible. We had a great deal too much experience with the impossible to disbelieve anything anymore. "What are you going to do, son?"

I had smelled blood on that... hateful creature. Deer blood, a scent that matched that of the dead deer in the trees. Even if I did not know what the creature was, I knew something about it: it was like me. It was a predator, and the reason it had gone for Bella, rather than me, is because Bella was its prey.

"I have to figure out what the creature is," I said. "I have to find out where it took her. And then I am going to get Bella back."

When we arrived home, I sped upstairs and went to Jasper's room. He was there, reading a book on the balcony, and his files were there, too—dozens of filing cabinets along the wall. Jasper, of all of us, was the most interested in the past, and his fascination led him also to a fascination in the supernatural past. He kept many files—articles from newspapers in three languages—that seemed as though they might have to do with supernatural activity, particularly vampire activity.

"Jasper," I said.

In moments, he was back in the room. "Where have you been? Is Bella—"

"Do you still have the papers about the strange disappearances in Hawkins?" I asked.

Jasper's brows furrowed, but he turned and produced a stack of papers from one of the cabinets. I took the stack and rifled until I found the one titled Joyce Byers, mother of missing boy, raving about faceless man.

I'd read it in the nineties, in a fit of bored curiosity about the supernatural occurrences of the world. I hadn't known what to make of the faceless man, but the other papers had made it seem as though something was being covered up, which seemed to suggest Volturi involvement. Or... well, there were other powerful supernatural groups, too, groups we rarely—if ever—interacted with. The witches, the fae...

But now...

Faceless man. I thought of the animal I'd seen earlier today. Did it match that description? The victims of this case, in Hawkins, Indiana, had all been found with significant blood loss, and terrible teeth marks like... like the kind that I'd seen on Bella's leg.

It was close enough for me.

"Bella was taken," I said to Jasper. "By a creature with no face. It dragged her away after it decapitated me. I'm going to find her and bring her back."

Jasper shook his head, confused. "Shouldn't you have gone after her in the forest?"

I couldn't explain how I knew. What it was like to read that creature's mind. To feel its primal urges. The urge to drag its still-live kill back to its home, its realm, so that it could feed there.

"I... don't think she is in this world, Jasper."

I heard a crash downstairs and then Carlisle's thoughts: Another realm? Emmett cursed under his breath. Jasper's eyes widened.

"She is in another realm," I said, "and I am going to find her if it kills me."