Lucifer doesn't know why, but the first thing she does after regaining eons of memories and the rest of her Grace(realizing how alone she is), is seek out Victoria.

Victoria, who is just finishing her meal.

She's in an apartment that looks out over the ocean, calm and placid underneath a cerulean sky. Her meal(young, female, dark hair), is splayed underneath the red-head on the king-sized bed, naked. The girl's skin (she can't be more than sixteen) is waxy and pale, and her pulse is soft and light, like the flutter of moth wings.

Lucifer(bella) watches, silent and incorporeal, as Victoria slowly drains the girl's life from a wound on her throat. A few drops escape Victoria's lips where they are sealed over the wound, languidly tracing a path down the long pale throat before joining a red stain on the otherwise pristine white sheets.

Someone else might have called the scene hauntingly beautiful, or elegant. But Lucifer has seen beauty and seen death(as well as Death), and has never considered the two as capable of existing together. All she sees is something being taken, something being given. A life, ending. Another, continuing.

Just things happening, the way they always have.

The girl's pulse slows, slows, slows, until there is only the sound of Victoria's tongue laving at congealing blood and cooling flesh. The vampire licks away the rest of the blood, leans back and considers the corpse with a scarlet gaze.

Lucifer considers Victoria, silently.

Then she reveals herself to the vampire, manifesting too quickly for even vampiric senses to anticipate.

Victoria, ever vigilant, ever wary, reacts and has Lucifer by the throat before she even realizes who it is.

Her fingers clench ineffectually against Lucifer's throat. Her brow furrows in confusion, then recognition.

"...Bella…?"

There is wariness in her voice, as if she isn't quite sure. The corner of Lucifer's lips twitch into a smirk.

"Hello Victoria. Miss me?"

/brreak/

Victoria knew that there was something different about Bella since she met her in the desert that night. There had always been something...more, something deeper, to Bella than could be explained.

No matter how human Bella seemed, the creature part of Victoria never wavered in its certainty that the milk-skinned rag-doll of a girl was the most dangerous being she would ever meet.

Every moment in Bella's presence, no matter how benign she seemed, was an exercise in mingled fear and excitement. Sometimes, Victoria fancied that if she were to worship any being, exalt them above all else and lay sacrifices at their feet, it would be Bella.

But here, in this moment, looking at the being in front of her that she only knows as Bella, Victoria begins to understand that she may never comprehend her power. For the girl-shaped being in front of her is as different from the first Bella Victoria met as a vampire is from a human. Bella simply thrums with energy, like trapped lightning, or a star. And she's real, so real, nothing like a dream. She so real, in fact that all else seems false in comparison. She stands there, casually and assured with Victoria's cold fingers wrapped around her throat, and she is the axis mundi in that particular moment of existence.

And then Bella speaks to her, greets her, and every word is a caress more delicious than the taste of human blood.