The town slept with one eye open. Rain had eased to a steady pulse, a soft percussion against the diner roof. Ethan woke to it like a metronome: steady, reliable, a pattern that let him count heartbeats and decisions. Manual Mode sat like a new rule in his pocket—an autonomy he'd given himself and now had to live with. He'd chosen to stay. That choice felt less like rebellion and more like responsibility.
He dressed slow and light: jeans, a dark jacket, the wolf-stone tucked into his palm for the comfort of weight. He checked the ledger beneath his sleeve without letting the glow show—1,070 PP. Numbers were private currency; the choices they bought were public responsibility. He told himself he'd use them sparingly, to mend things that would otherwise break.
Isla at the diner poured him strong coffee and slid it across the counter with the same practiced half-smile. "You staying another night?" she asked, a question that was both curiosity and courtesy.
"For now," he answered. "Town feels like it needs watching."
She nodded like that explained everything. "People were whispering about a red window last night," she said. "Old Miller's storefront. Said someone saw a light, then a shadow, then the light gone."
That was the way rumors began here: small, specific, oddly physical. Ethan tamped down the half-interest that wanted to open the Panel and look for a quick solution. He'd done that already, and the balance of power—his power—felt better when it hadn't been spent.
He slipped out into fog and walked the streets barefoot in sneakers, feeling the Terrain Module map the alleys as discreet lines. The module's whispers were unobtrusive, useful: a suggestion of where slick cobblestones hid, which drains spat back more light, the angle where a thrown stone would make a different sound. It rendered the town as a field of comfortable choices, not as a list of advantages.
The red window turned out to be literal. Old Miller's hardware, an empty storefront that had held a bicycle shop twenty years ago, had one pane in its upper story glowing with faint, unnatural light. Ethan stood in the street as the rain misted his face and watched the glow blink once, twice, then steady.
He moved toward it with the sort of slow certainty that felt earned. The Hunter Awareness Beacon he'd bought was in his satchel—silent and ready. He could have activated it from a distance to get a read on movement; instead he stepped close enough to smell the store's forgotten dust and the cold copper of old nails. He let natural senses do the first work; the Beacon was a tool of last margin.
A shadow moved behind the glass. Small at first, then a figure shifting shape—too quick. Not human, at least not in the way gravity treats humans. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. The Terrain Module nudged an approach path that kept him out of sightlines and gave him a three-second window to draw the Beacon if the shadow leapt.
He set the Beacon down beneath the stoop, soft as laying a card on a board. The device hummed between his fingers; only he heard the way it translated the space into a quiet awareness: two heat signatures inside, one moving with a calculated hunger, another standing still, resigned. The Beacon's readout fed him ticks: movement at 1.2 m/s in the back of the shop; a secondary signature at the rear alley. He closed his eyes for the space of a breath and breathed out.
He didn't announce anything. No one here saw the tiny, practical miracle he'd placed in the dark. To the world he was another stranger staring at a boarded window. To him, the Beacon was a set of eyes that did not blink.
A second figure stepped from the shadowed doorway on the sidewalk—young, small, but with a nervous urgency that suggested more than a vandal. She looked at the pane and then at the street, then at Ethan. Their eyes met. She was human, ordinary in the rain, but her hands shook in a way that betrayed fear more than adrenaline.
"Do you… see anything?" she asked, voice low.
He thought of saying nothing—letting her slip away to call for help would be risky if prey were being moved in or out—but he didn't want to skewer her with alarm. He cupped his hands over his mouth and said, "Not yet. Stay in the light. Don't go near the back alley. Call someone if you can—someone who knows the town."
She nodded and turned to go. Her departure left the street feeling hollow and stretched. Ethan stayed. He listened to the Beacon's whisper: the heat signature moved nearer the door like a shark feeling the water. The other signature—small, close to the floor—was a person curled up, breathing shallow.
Ethan's chest tightened. He had a dozen safe, logical choices: flash the Cullens and have them sweep, call the Quileute, deploy his Beacon's full alert and bring more hands. He also had a single private tool he'd been reluctant to use: the Vampire Physiology Primer—short, brutal, and effective. It would buy him raw speed and strength for a narrow window. After last week's decisions, his hand hovered over that tiny ceremonial ledger of cost and benefit.
The problem wasn't the money—it was the consequence of spectacle. Twilight's town folded around delicate rules. If someone saw him move with inhuman ease here—especially in a situation where vampires were suspected—it would invite watchers, rumors, and a scrutiny that would cause more harm than the one rescue would fix. Still, a life in a boarded store was immediate and not a rumor to be debated in the morning.
He activated the Primer for a narrow mission window—the sort of thing the Panel phrased in mechanical calm.
EXTRACTION: VAMPIRE PHYSIOLOGY PRIMER (Tier I) — 200 PP
EFFECT: Temporary: strength ×10, speed ×10, night-vision; duration: 120 seconds
CONFIRM? YES/NO
His thumb burned the YES.
The effect was immediate and private: his lungs took in night air like a bellows; his muscles knit into tight springs. Everything sharpened—the drip of rain became a metronome, the loose gravel a chorus. He felt absurdly wrong and exactly right all at once. The upgrade didn't make him less human; it gave him a human body wired to move like something the stories described.
He went through the back door.
It opened with a sound that should have been louder than it was. The first thing he saw was movement—fast, ungainly, and predatory. A pair of pale figures bent over a shape on the floor. One of them looked up with the lazy hunger of a predator caught at something it didn't expect. Their eyes did not register the Panel; they registered him the way an animal registers a new scent.
He moved.
Two seconds was the margin he'd bought. The Primer made that two seconds feel like an eternity of perfect choices. He crossed the floor in a sliver of motion, grabbed the nearer creature by the shoulders, and swung. Its motion that would have been a blur to most registered in his hands as a slow arc he could ride. He wrenched, sending the figure into a stack of boxes. The second figure lunged. He met its momentum, caught a wrist with one hand and drove his elbow into its side. The creature reared, surprised, and in the confusion he bent to the small body on the floor.
A woman. Youngish. Pale lips, eyes fluttering open. She coughed and drew in a deep, ragged breath like someone surfacing after a long bottom. Her fingers found Ethan's sleeve with a tiny, human gratefulness that made the Panel's hum feel like a private promise.
"Go," he said, voice low. "Run. Don't look back. Head for the light."
She scrambled, feet finding purchase on oily floorboards, and came out into the rain like someone reborn. Ethan didn't give chase; he had other work. One of the pale figures recovered and lunged. He stepped into the arc and used the Primer's edge to redirect the strike into a wooden beam. The blow splintered wood; the creature yelped.
The Primer wore off like a tide. Where there had been that impossible crispness of movement, there was now a thick, earned exhaustion. He stumbled as his body rebalanced to normal physiology and felt the nick in his forearm—real, red, no glittering effect to claim as a trophy. It would heal; he had PP for that too. But the Board window of purchase had closed.
He stepped outside as rain thickened into a curtain. The pale figures were gone—fled into the scrub or evaporated into other stories. The girl crouched in the doorway, shaking.
"Thank you," she said, simple and honest. "They— they were taking people."
"Get somewhere safe," he told her. "Tell them Miller's, tell them the store by the bakery."
She nodded and vanished into the night with the same practical terror that had met him in the street.
He checked the Panel under his sleeve: -200 PP. Balance: 870 PP. The numbers were private as always. No one had seen his hands move with impossible speed—only the aftermath: a rescued girl and a ripped splintered beam and one more story that would be told in hushed tones and without the name of the man who'd been in the room.
Isla found him back at the diner with wet hair and a nicked forearm. She pressed a towel to his cut with an efficiency that felt almost like kindness disguised as practicality.
"You saw something?" she asked. Her eyes were direct, not full of gossip.
"Just trouble," he said. "Nothing that needs more than a bandage and a good night's sleep."
She nodded. "Good. Keep sleeping, then."
He let her hand move over the wound and did not tell her about the Panel or about the purchase. He didn't tell Jacob or Bella; he didn't tell Edward. No one needed the ledger to get heavier.
Inside, his mind ran a checklist: small talk with Isla, a note to Riley in Beacon Hills to warn the pack that the Twilight node had hunters sniffing, a plan to increase the Beacon's passive radius by a marginal extraction if needed. All of those were sensible things. None required a spectacle.
He slept poorly that night, waking between dawn and morning with the memory of the Primer's speed like an ache under the skin. He had used the Panel the way he promised himself he would: in service, not for show. The numbers reduced but the ledger remained—one more honest adjustment in a life that balanced private power with public care.
In the quiet before the town woke, he wrapped his forearm in a clean cloth and pressed his palm over the wolf-stone in his pocket. He'd come to Twilight looking for answers. He'd found danger—and a life he could protect without telling the world how. The ledger under his sleeve was still his alone, and he liked it that way.