Chapter Text
Two blondes who looked very much alike stumbled into the room, and behind their backs, in the doorway, loomed two other blondes who didn't look alike at all. In short, Rosalie had knocked the door down — whether on purpose or not, I had no idea. And she was here in the company of Lilian, for reasons unknown to me. They clearly weren't friendly towards each other, which immediately raised the question of why they were together. Tanya's sisters, Ira (the blonde with the brick‑like face) and Katya (the blonde noise attack), didn't surprise me at all.
"Oh, to hell with this," I muttered wearily, covered my face with my hands, and tried to pretend I was in a little hideaway.
I really needed Tomiko's help right then and there, but she had just decided to run out to get some food. Something told me that the invasion of the blondes and the fox's absence were somehow connected, no doubt about it. Tomiko and I had already been hanging out here for three hours: first we recorded a cover of Linkin Park's Crawling, and then, on impulse, decided to pick something from a more distant future. Of course, it was the presence of the vixen that protected us from eavesdropping — I couldn't do that sort of thing yet. Otherwise, those ghouls would have known all the secrets long ago. Overpowered fucking jerks, I swear.
But what was Lilian doing here?
"Izzy, we've got a problem," Lilian said in an extremely worried tone. "They've been reading some nonsense on the internet about yokai, kitsune, gumiho, and huli-who‑knows‑what‑else, and they've decided you're a demon from Hell, or something like that…"
"Who explains things like that?" Rosalie cut Lilian off, irritably and, in my opinion, unreasonably harshly. "This is all your fault — I told you to stay away from us, but no… And now they're probably going to do some terrible stupid thing…"
"Tanya?"
I looked up at this woman, who still hadn't moved away from me, remembered that she'd tried to lure me over to the dark side out of the blue, and realised something was off — after all, she hadn't been in any particular hurry before, but now she was being all affectionate like.
"Explain it to me as if I had a brain the size of a nut, would you be so kind?"
"Those idiots found somewhere that foxes from those Asian mythologies eat souls, people, and are basically the equivalent of demonic possession."
I visibly tensed up at those words, and Tanya automatically patted my shoulder in an attempt to calm me down — but that wasn't what was bothering me, not exactly what she probably thought. It wasn't their delusions that worried me, far from it.
"The multiplicity of worlds is an objective reality. Each person in every parallel has the same soul."
From behind the blondes' backs, Tomiko's face appeared — indifferently curious, and her tone was just as even, which made it all the more odd given the news!
"Technically speaking," she continued, moving into the room and skirting around the obstacles in the form of the frozen vampire blondes — they hadn't noticed her approach, I gathered — "technically, this small part of Bella Swan's vast, interworld soul has joined the power of the soul, merged, become one with another interworld soul that doesn't belong to this cluster of the multiverse."
"Tomiko?" Lilian muttered and narrowed her eyes in suspicion. "You…"
"Technically, your idiots are right to some extent — but there are nuances."
***
“The multiverse is infinite, but there are clusters that are most similar to one another,” Rosalie repeated and summarised the fox’s long, rambling story, while Tanya massaged her temples and sighed loudly.
It was clear that this was just for show, not real distress, so I paid no attention to their conversation and munched on the food Tomiko had brought.
“That’s right, but you need to keep in mind that conscious entities — like gods, living concepts, and others of that kind — are aware of their other versions, though in most cases they don’t experience all the variants simultaneously…”
Now the other vampire women’s composure was starting to unravel too, and the ex‑one was sitting on the couch with her eyes closed, pretending to be a fern.
I was practically chomping on my burgers, having completely left those ghouls to Tomiko’s mercy. It was my way of getting back at them for dragging me into this downright deadly adventure.
As it turned out, those vampire “Black Eyed Peas” had decided they absolutely needed to complain about the werewolves who had finally caught up with them. This information came from Alice, who was also morally on our side but was tethered like a dog on a leash to Jasper. And Jasper was freaking out because Tomiko could wipe them all out like a fire spirit — so the guy was halfway in favour of an extermination, or at least scaring us a bit, me and the fox.
And with this lousy theory about unaccounted werewolves, our wounded ones fled to the Volturi, the world’s bloody elite of vampires.
Around the same time, the moralising idiots from the Cullen clan headed in that direction too.
Personally, I was hoping they’d run into each other and neutralise one another — but that didn’t sit well with those so‑called “two‑by‑two” ladies who’d been left in charge.
Yeah, I certainly didn’t understand half of it and ignored a third, but only one thing remained clear: if it weren’t for these blondes and their rather blunt way of delivering terrible news, I’d already be halfway to the middle of nowhere in Siberia.