Prey No Longer: Chapter 2, Travels, Mad Scientist

Bella set her prize down in the entryway to her hideout. He wouldn't be moving for a while. Vampires could recover from a brain injury as traumatic as a gun shot, but it would take time, venom, and lots of blood to fuel the process.

Funny thing, vampire injuries. If you lost a limb, it was gone forever, but internal injuries could be healed. Even damaged or lost organs would eventually reform, up to and including the brain, though if the majority of the brain was lost the vampire would die regardless. It wasn't only fire that could kill a vampire. Just one more lie to add to the list.

She loved this secret base of hers. It was a deceptively high-class secure apartment that was tucked away on the basement floor of an average apartment building in the middle of Manhattan. It was originally intended to be an underground storage area for the tenants above ground, but the original owner had it updated to his paranoid specifications.

Bella had come a long way in life that she had multiple secret bases and hideaways, not to mention her vast sums of wealth. Most of which could be attributed to her taking down one ancient vampire that had too much time and money on his hands.

Bella's favourite hobby was looting her enemies, without a doubt. All she had to do was kick some ass, interrogate a bloodsucker or two for their secrets and voila, instant wealth. Who knew becoming a millionaire would be so easy?

If her dad was still alive, she had no doubt that he would scold her for how she acquired most of her new assets, but most of her morality went out the window long ago.

There was one major reason she spent so much time at this property. One that she kept locked away, in the basement of the basement. She bypassed a few secure locked doors before she found one of her most prized possessions. On the mantel of an antique fireplace was the head of Joham, an ancient vampire and mad scientist.

She had most of his body parts locked away in various safes or buried in random parks around New York. Joham was too great of a resource to destroy, but he was too dangerous to ever be given a chance to escape.

That's why he spent most of his time as a severed head. She kept the upper half of his torso around so she could question him and pick his brain whenever the need arose. She hadn't needed any advice from the ancient scientist for months, so he remained a fixture above her fireplace, like a good pet vampire-head. The best part was he couldn't make a sound. No vocal cords and no lungs did not make for a happy vampire.

She had already milked all the info she needed from the sadistic vampire. Joham was a twisted bastard whose experiments on vampires and humans made most mad-scientist types look humane. From what she'd learned, the Volturi were monsters but even they would have hunted Joham to the ends of the Earth if they knew even a fraction of his crimes.

Joham had perfected hiding from the Volturi, and if Bella hadn't come across his son, Nahuel, completely by chance, he would likely still be doing whatever twisted immoral acts he wanted.

After leaving Forks, Bella had wandered, using her powers to hunt for vampires. She wanted to test herself and learn as much as she could about her enemies. She traveled south, eventually ending up in the Amazon rain forest.

While using her powers to hunt for dinner in the forest, as she'd started to do for training, she was attacked by three savage vampires. They were much more in line with the bloodthirsty vampires from legend, as opposed to the damn-near herbivores that were the Cullens.

She defended herself with her gift and had all three vampires at her mercy with ease. One of them tried to use some sort of telepathic gift on her, but she soundly rebuffed it with her mental shield.

Before her powers awakened she hadn't been aware of the shield encompassing her mind. If she were around Edward Cullen, she had no doubt she would be able to feel a constant pressure from his untamed telepathy.

Bella crushed them with her gift and the three wild vampires were at her mercy in seconds. As she held them to the ground, they offered information in exchange for their lives. They weren't expecting their meal to have teeth and the sudden threat of death left them very willing to do anything to placate the powerful human.

The vampires were named Zafrina, Senna, and Kachiri. They were the Amazon Coven and had lived in the vast forest for over three thousand years. Bella learned much about vampires from the three ancient women. She also learned about the presence of a vampire-human hybrid further south.

After she had squeezed them for as much information as she could, she moved onto their neighbors to the south. She left the Amazons as they were because she actually agreed with their normal feeding habits, which consisted of the blood of poachers and human traffickers.

She found far more vampires in the cities of South America than she was expecting, but she used them all as practice to hone her gift. They weren't like the Amazons and were indiscriminate in their killing.

Bella didn't believe that every vampire deserved to die, but most of them were only worth anything as training dummies, in her opinion. She would let the decent ones live, but didn't find many that were worthy. By the time she reached Chile, she was an expert at killing evil vampires.

While she was practicing flying over an isolated forest, she met Nahuel and his aunt, Huilen.

Bella became fast friends with the 150-year-old hybrid, though his aunt remained suspicious and aloof. They spent about a month together before Nahuel was subjected to a surprise visit from his father, Joham.

When Joham saw Bella for the first time, he sensed her power and tried to take her for himself. His desire to experiment on a human with a fully awakened gift was too great to ignore. He attacked Bella and was instantly torn to pieces.

Bella took her time putting him back together, talking to Nahuel and Huilen, who warmed up to her after she made Joham her bitch.

Turns out, when push came to shove, Joham was willing to do anything to survive. This included leading Bella, Nahuel, and Huilen to his hidden compound buried in the center of a mountain range. It was inaccessible to normal humans and where Joham kept his daughters along with his more sensitive experiments.

They lived there for months while Bella learned everything of value that Joham had discovered over the centuries.

Joham's greatest discovery was the method to transfer a vampire's gifts to a newborn, though it wasn't very useful to him as he was already a vampire. He was trying to find a way to steal the gifts of his contemporaries and add their power to his own. He failed, and the only procedure he managed to invent allowed for the transference of a single gift during the turning process. Useless for an established immortal vampire, but it was exactly what Bella needed.

Bella had been on the fence about becoming a vampire up until that point, but when she found the records of a vampire with a shapeshifting ability, she knew she had to have it. The vampire in question was one of Joham's old test subjects.

He was turned as a guinea pig and only allowed to live after Joham realized his gift allowed him to transform into anything, up to and including humans. With this gift, an immortal wasn't limited to life as a vampire. They could be vampire, human, or even a hybrid. Bella theorized that it would be possible to mimic the Quileute's wolf forms with greater mastery over the gift.

When the test subject eventually escaped from Joham, he barely had any skill with his gift. He could intentionally change his hair colour and eyes, but nothing else, despite many accidental shifts during the experiments performed on him. It was possible the man was incompetent, unable to control his mind through the newborn bloodthirst, or Joham crippled his ability to use his gift through his sadistic work.

Bella would put money on the last one. Joham's experimentation was needlessly cruel. The madman loved to inflict pain on his test subjects more than anything save advancing his knowledge.

All of which culminated in Bella having no qualms about appropriating his properties and assets. With Nahuel and his three sisters' assistance, it was easy to steal Joham's life's work. He had performed heinous experiments on his children as well. For the longest time, they didn't know any better and allowed their father to do as he wished with their bodies and minds.

When Bella came knocking, they eagerly accepted her as friend and ally, so long as she kept their father far from them.

Since then, Bella had been hunting Joham's runaway shapeshifter. Eventually, she found him. The man was barely out of his newborn phase and was hardly a strategist as a human. Tracking him down was easy, in the end. He never quite got the hang of his gift. Pity, it would have allowed him to walk the Earth as a ghost. The Volturi would not be able to find a human that constantly changed his entire being, after all.

Oh, well. His loss, Bella's gain. The procedure to transfer the vampire's gift to her wasn't complicated. In a very real way, a vampire's essence was contained in their venom. Vampires could be killed through fire, complete destruction of the brain, or by losing every last drop of venom.

If all the venom is removed from the body, so too is the vampire's life and consciousness. In other words, though some vampires would vehemently disagree, venom contains the vampire's soul.

The gifts of vampires were attached to their soul, so the transfer process was easy. The venom needed to be extracted in its totality and then transplanted into the new body. The turning process was more painful and lasted two days longer, but it was worth it for the right gift.

This was Bella's ticket to her perfect immortality. An eternity spent walking among the immortals with none of the downsides. The sun would not be a hindrance to her, nor would a vampire's diet. Between her veritable smorgasbord of powers, Bella would be uncontested amongst the other immortals.

She would soon be truly at the top of the food chain. All she needed to do was inject the essence of that loser in her foyer directly into every part of her body. Bella had to admit it sounded kinda gross like that, but didn't let that stop her from pulling out Joham's 'vampire transformation module' which looked like a high-tech coffin surrounded by tubes and needles.

Bella was ready. She didn't need a last meal, because it wouldn't be her last. This would work. By this time next week, she would be a vampire, and so much more beyond.