Here is an outline of a five part story I did...
PART ONE BEAUTIFUL BLOOD
"I am the only daughter of Jaques Mauriddian, I am at this time only 18, but I fear...once this is found, I'll never live to see my next year. My father is a pirate. Something must be done... he is the scourge of the Cerulean Seas...he is the master of the Cruel Waters, a ship unsurpassed in speed and beauty... a crew unsurpassed in cruelty.
I know his blood will be on my hands should I be found out but there are sacrifices that must be made. For Pax, for civilisation..."
My great grand aunt had written those words, in a diary that she'd tried to hide under the loose floorboards of the room that I grew up in. She was right. When she was found out giving our families secrets away to the goverment of Pax, she'd been killed. Well, that's what the family told each other, whispered secrets of the House Mauriddian. But my mother told me once, while brushing back the long thick onyx strands of my hair, that my great grand aunt had been sold into slavery.
My mother was beautiful, in the way that all the women from the eastern side of the island are beautiful. Her skin shone like a golden dawn, tanned and lean was her body, her arms were works of art, long... curved...graceful...slender... her fingers tapered into delicate shell pink nails. Best of all though, her hair and eyes. Exact same shades of chocolate brown, shot through with gold and yellow. Her eyes were like cats eyes, large and apt to reflect the night when the full moon hit them.
I don't know how long I used to sit and stare at her as she would prepare for some event or another, candle light hitting those tigeress locks spinning them into mahogany and cherrywood. I always found myself lacking. Tall like my father with black hiar that hung straight to my thighs in one jet waterfall. My eyes were too large in my face, making me appear waifish...lost... they too were black as a starless night seen through velvet.My skin though...could never rival my mothers bronzed glow.
I was pale, skin like thrumming parchment pulled tight over my sharp bones, with the threading of my veins visable in the shadows of my eyes and in the shallows of my hips.
My father... I got my coloring from him. He was black of hair and eyes, though his sterness lent a coldness to the abyss of him. My father scared me, one vicious look from those hard shards of obsidian and I would have mortified nightmares for a week. But he loved my mother, Claudia, with an unabaited obsessive passion. I wondered how she could stand it, his hard hands on her, those frightful eyes looking upon her with that fierce love.
She gave him 13 children including me, 12 were males, huge rowdy males with her laughing mouth, but our father's viciously black eyes. He didn't stike fear into my siblings, never once did my brothers cower from him, eyes so wide that they hurt, body stiffening into lines of rabbitlike horror.
But then again, he never read to them from the diary of my great grand aunt, Thiessa, no...her tales of betrayal and murder were never told to them. They were a part of the secret there was no need to cow them into silence with tales of being slaughterd or sold. Just for me. I was a threat to my father's buisness. I was female.
Being female in Pax was a blessing and a curse. From our first year of life we are taught that we are pretty much liquid finance, to be bought and sold among the houses of Paxian nobility like pure bred puppies. Married to whom ever pays the highest fee, and sold to whomever is quickest.
But all is not dark and brooding on this tropical island where winter never comes, the waters that throw themselves upon the black sand beaches ate vibrant and warm, with little fish like jewels that weave among the tempermental waves. The island remembers when it was once a volcano, even down to threatening once every ten years with a subterriainan growl to assure us that she's only a sleeping beast, grown beautiful, slumbersom and fat...but still a beast below it all. Pax remained green most of the year... that is when it wasn't blooming scarlet and fuscia, orange and cobalt. Pax always smelled of growing things, and consquently... dying things as well. Somehow, between the explosions of color and life, was death...secrets and destruction.
The people of the island used that as a theme for thier orgy of life. our every moment was a dance between horrified shock, and beauty inspired awe. We were gargoyles with pretty wings, demons with honeyed tongues.
Tonight, there will be a ball. The eldest daughter of Pierre FitzNaurune is celbrating her engagement to the youngest son of the house Christappo. In some ways it is an insult for the fair Undeen. She was being used as a final stitch in a wicked tapestry that would come unraveled as soon at the patriarch of the Christappo's realised his life was forfit and had the decency to allow himself to be assassanated. Yes, I knew this. She knew this. The patriarch of the Christappos knew it. Undeen was a beautiful death threat, a perfumed and papered black dot.
But everyone knew how taboo it was to saysomething out loud about the pending death. It would be outrageous and crass. So instead, we will laugh and flaunt, dance and drink...be innane and befuddled ...until the moon rises.
Tonight I shall wear a sheer gown of black lace with panels of black satin covering my shockingly woman parts, but leaving my belly and legs viable through the lace. It fell like an inverted tulip to my feet, the slender straps over my shoulders and plunging neckline displaying the long expanse of my neck and the robe of diamonds that was wrapped around and around it, spilling in two tails down my back. The dress was backless showing off the black and grey tattoos that swirled from my shoulders to just below my hips. The dress dipped dangerously low over my hips but the black satin and lace kept it from being too risque. The tattoos were traced, for tonight, in shimmering slivers of silver. More diamonds were roped about my wrists in heavy cuffs, the same with my ankles. My shoes were almost nonexistant. Remnants of the days when women were not allowed footwear. My black hair had been brushed until it shone. It reached bast my calfs when unbound, but nouw it was twisted up into a massive bun and shot through with yet more diamonds. I sparkled, a setting for my fathers gluttonous wealth.
I met my siblings downstairs. They were all dressed in severe unreleaved black from thier shirts and caravats to thier cufflinks and shoes. Only Tinnaman had a speck of color on him. A rose so red it appeared bloody, stuck through the button hole of his jacket, his mark of military rank. Unlike me, they were not weighted down with a kings ransom in diamonds, it was a feminine weakness, I was told... though I myself didn't want to wear the cuff and collar of precious stones.
My mother joined us as well, her glittering gown of crushed black velvet with it's thigh high slits and almost non exsistant neckline showed off her golden skin to perfection, it was open almost to her belly button, her breasts only barely covered by the thick material. She smiled at me, and for a moment I was blinded by her beauty. The only jewels she wore was a thick heavy rope of diamonds and gold that wrapped around her throat again and again, hanging down the front of her dress, dissapearing into the velvet. I'd seen the necklace before... it wrapped about her waist again and again, held there until we appeared at the ball. At which time the end would be held in my father's hand as he guided her about on his arm her slender fingers wrapped about his strong forearm and the necklace tucked into the crook of his arm. A sign of marraige...of ultamate ownership.
As we trouped out to the cairrages, my mothers tattoos caught my attention they were like mine... like every woman's, from shoulders to lower hips swirling in fantastic black and grey patterns that shifted as she moved, for a moment I wondered why was it that we were always shown... through our markings, through the clothing and jewelry that we wore...that we were owned by the males in our life. But it was a thought my brother Sean would tell me later in life, that would get me killed. Drowned off the coast, my long beloved hair tied to boulders to hold me down. He called the women that died like that...mermaids. He would laugh when he told me that, only because he didn't know any better... none of us did.
The ball was a success, filled with whispers of tryanny and murder, madness and rage... allies and enemies. Though nothing was said above a whisper, nothing could be heard other than laughing and cellos. Society was based on the slyness of your endevors, the cutting eyes and curling smiles gauged your effectiveness, told the stories of how good you were at speaking without saying a word. Our blades were secrets, our amunition were half spoken truths, our victims....everyone.
The moon rose, full, deadly, yellow. Reflecting off the waters of the fountains, the waves of the sea, the white stones of the FitzNaurune house. The moon was heavy and pondersome, swinging into postion like the belly of a pregnant goddess. This was when the candles were blown out, the windows were thrown open and the whispers ceased.
No one spoke of the rites of Dianna. The dance of the moon. We were all animals under her yellow light. Our movements were slow and languid, lines of our bodies dark and promising we lost our names and our houses, and became lovers only through the dance, the feel of another against us. In a world were touch is forbidden, secrets could kill you and life is a panaorama of deceit, we danced under the full yet blurring light of the new moon. We moved to the thudding of drums, the thrilling of violins, the sound of our hearts and the rythem of our ever moving feet.
But it was this night that Undeen was kidnapped and murdered, bled dry. Her body found flung and broken upon the black sand beaches. Her tattoos had been carved from her body, her back a meaty disaster. I didn't see the corpse, the broken shattered girl that would bring about the downfall an entire house with only her presence. No, I heard about her sliced throat, her wide starteld blue eyes that stared up reflecting the moon...and the words... carved into her breast...BEAUTIFUL BLOOD...
PART TWO MONSTERS IN THE FLOWER BEDS
"there is something wrong with this morbidly beautiful island... our women, every few
generations end up missing or murdered..but no one ever speaks of it. It is... as so many other things are... forbidden..."
I had a sister once, I was told by my brothers that she was a creature of bravery
and beauty. I was told that Sangliebbe had been small and delicate like my mother with hair the color of darkest chocolate and eyes black as my fathers... like every shadow in the world moved within her. That she was a lioness roaring into the night, a firece thing with no fear, she repelled the whispers and shone through the deception that swirled throughout her everyday life. She was the first born... she would be 38 today if she had've lived. But she did something that got her namet taken from our family tree, that erradicated her from our collective memories...I sometime wonder how she would have looked, whom she would have married... if she hadn't been taken by the darkness.
That is what my father calls it, the darkness, something vauge and unimposing and
yet... so very threatening. The darkness. I would learn later that it was a term for those who were taken by the vampires. At the time though, I had no idea that they exisited... or that werewolves ate at the dinnertable. I didn't know that there was a war brewing that would shift my entire life away from the glowing shores of Pax.
I was blessed with igorance.
Why is it, that once you are shown how very little you actually see of the world
about you, you are doomed to always look about and wonder...just wonder... how much you are actually not seeing.
Undeen's death was only the beginning of the carnage. Two more young women
dissapreared, thier bodies found on the shore and another 3 in the mountains, all with their tattoos taken, and BEAUTIFUL BLOOD carved into thier flesh. At first there was nothing said about the string of broken girls snatched from various houses. We danced and drank, dined and plotted with our usual abandon, uncaring of the mothers of these girls... the weeping women that were shut away to deal in solitude with thier heart break.
I lived for the night during this time, when I was still able to attend balls and
parties, still able to greet the rising sun after hours of flinging my sweating body too and fro through the gauntlet of slanting eyes and whispered deviancy. But the killings kept coming. Almost at random at first, then a pattern appeared. We were stunned and shocked all of us, mortified at the utter decadency with which the killers acted.
So, the nightly parties drifted to a stop, the roaming of the candle light streets
of Pax was over... and we spoke of the killings, softly, in dark rooms... with fear our only serinade. We spoke of the dawning pattern with equally dawning horror. But I was too long a child of Pax to pay attenion, if any one of my childhood friends did pay attention.
We knew that Yanthanma didn't.
She was found days after her dissapearance, bloodless and drying on the black sand
beaches onthe far side of the island, we thought that she'd slipped out of her room in the night, flaunting the judgement of her parents and of the curfew that was upon us all. But... she'd been pulled from her bed in the night, her sleeping household none the wiser.
Panic.
All of Pax panicked.
..
I would wonder, in years to come, if the uproar was more about the girls being
killed or over the loss of such financial investment. But for now...I am 18, and tonight I am slumbering in my new bedroom deep within the center of the house. Protected from the killers, or so we thought.
My father had left on his ship, sailing away on the Creulean Sea in the Cruel Waters
leaving my mother and I inthe care of the servents and my siblings. I woke from a dead slumber to the sound of bodies hitting the floor outside my door, of a thick growling and a low rumbling snarl.I leapt frpm my bed and stumbled against the wall, my eyes were ide in my head and my thoughts were a whirling tumbling mass of nothing but white noise.
The door flung open, splintered on it's frame. A wolf, the color of white sand
tumbled into the room, scarlet at it's throat and shoulder. It came to it's feet and I was stunned by the sheer mass of the beast, my sluggish mind trying to wrap around the fact that itwas in the room with me, that it's copper scented blood was filling my head. The wolf turned towrds me and I screamed pushing back against the wall until i was almost standing on my toes. But the wolf had turned away again, facing the other beast that came into the room after it. I couldn't see it clearly, the wolf had sprung on it and pulled it to the ground before I could focus on it squarely. They rolled, claws and fangs, into the bed and I darted from the room. The hall was silent, deserted, and for a moment I wondered where the servents and my family had gone. I ran, my legs flashing through the material of my nightgown... I didn't know where I was heading, all I knew was that I had to get away from the preditors that had invaded my bedroom.
I found the bodies of the servents inthe kitchens, their corpses were arranged in an
almost fanlike positon, as if something had exploded into the middle of them and cut them down as they turned to run away. I fell, trying to slam to a stop on the blood soaked floor in my bare feet, but only succeeded in slamming to the floor in a spill of black hair and green silk my long pale legs akimbo. I tried not to cry out as I landed hard, sliding through the blood and gore, my body and clothing becoming coated...sticky with congealing blood.
I stood, my heart thundering in my throat, by back to the windows. My knees were
trembling, thighs turned to jelly. I pressed back against the glass, much as I had in my
bedroom as if I could sink through to the otherside. My gory hands slid on the glass, making high pitched squeeling noises. My breathing was wheezing in my chest, choppy and panting, but over it I heard the sound of somthing tapping on the window from the otherside. I froze and turned...slowly...
My reflection came back at me, shadowlike and faint. I had blood smeared across the left side of my face, the hair plastered to my head and body, my gown a mess of blodd and thicker things. But it was what was on the other side of the glass that stole my breath and send my spirit skittering off.
It was tall, slender... pawlike hands pressed against the glass, blunt black nails
clicking as it retracted and extended it's claws. From the hips up I could see it, like a
massive feine, more man than beast though, covered in dense dark fur. The rest of it was shielded by the tall flowers that had been planted outside the window. Black lips peeled back from ivory fangs and it seemed to smile as it leaned forward and ran it's tongue over the glass, level with my face.
I screamed. I couldn't help it. Backing away, I almost tripped over a body, my bare
foot slipping in the cold blood. The...beast...hunkered down until all I could see of it was it's slitted yellow eyes and sharp pointed ears. Then it darted forwards, ramming its muzzle into the window, it's head forcing the glass to crack, a silver spiders web.
I wanted to turn and run,but a gutteral howl of pain froze me where I was. The beast
slammed forwards again, shattering the glass...then it was through, long body flinging
itself upon me, bringing with it the cloying scent of the flowers it had stood in.
PART THREE MOONLIGHT
"... sometimes, when the moon is full during the Rites of Dianna, when we all dance as if our hearts were breaking... there are those that slip away... gone for hours until the light arches in the sky again... they return, smelling of wilding, woods, night dark waters... and blood..."
I remember hitting the far wall, the beast on me it's feral breath in my face, fangs less than an inch from my eyes. Blunt claws pressed into my skin and it's short dense fur was like rough cloth against me. I couldn't scream, couldn't gather enough air to. It's weight was compressing my lungs. My heart was trying to claw it's way out the back of my throat and I blinked up at it, my hands coming up and shoving at the open maw, cutting my palms on it's fangs.
Then it was gone, the sandy colored wolf barreled into its side tossing it away. I curled into a fetal positon with the wolf towering over me, hunkered down, snarling at the cat beast. The wolves fur brushed my face, and I think I screamed again. I could feel the dry rasping of my throat and the trilling of the sound... but I'd been pushed too far over the edge. The wolf looked to me, it's eyes the color of sunstruck mahogany and the beast used that moment to dart back out the broken window, slipping into the night from which it came. The wolf held me pinned there for a long moment, it's eyes warning or weighing me, I did not know. Then it too was gane, out the window, the tinkle of glass the only sound. I lay there, on my back among blood and corpses too shaken to weep, trembling as the ocean scented air rushed over me.
In the days that followed, I was hailed as a hero, the only one insofar to survive the attacks. The magistrate came to me, seeking the information I held inside my head, but there was nothing. I didn't know how my brothers came to be locked inside of thier rooms, or how my mother came to be attacked by some ravening beast, leaving her with her shoulder dislocated and torn and her neck ringed with bitemarks.
When my father returned he put an end to my rowdy visitors and thier loud talk and kisses, he sequestered me in a room alone for a day while he heard the story again and again from my mother. She claimed to know nothing, to have been knocked to the ground, and beaten unconscious. He asked her until tears poured from her sunstruck eyes and she had to lay down in her enormous bed and recouperate from my fathers acid tongue and painful fingers.
He came to see me shortly thereafter, stalking into the room, filling it with his presence until I was again backed against the wall, only this time... I knew the monster. He had not bathed yet, and the sea still clung to him. Salt crusted in his hair like diamonds, on his skin like the oceans first kiss. But his eyes, oh goddess... they bured out at me like a lighthouse bent on the destruction of my very soul. He gripped me by my arm and spun me around, slamming me against the wall, only my hastily upflung arms kept me from breaking my nose. My brother Jean made a sound of protest, but it was muted by a command from my father. He pushed my shoulders agaisnt the wall in a silent command to stay still, and I did. When he pulled his hands away from me, I stayed there trembling agiainst the painted surface, mortified.
I whimpered, a high pitched starteled noise, when he jerked the back of my gown, his heavy hands catching my hair as well, jerking tears of pain into my eyes as he snatched down and away. The gown came apart, the purple felt unable to stand against my father, I felt like screaming, scared... cold air caressed my back, buttocks and thighs and I could feel him staring at me. Jean made a soft noise in the back of his throat. A noise of shame and discomfort. There was the nasty skritch skritch noise of quill on parchement for a long time as I held my trembling position.
He touched my shoulder and I jumped, leaping against the wall like a trapped frog, but he only traced the line of one of my tattoos.
Then, the sound of the door slamming, and I was alone. My knees trembled and I sank to the floor my ruined dress pooling around me.
I will come to know, in later years, that my father had traced the lines of my tattoo and my brother Jean had sketched them out for him, and that together they had taken the drawings of my scrolling markings to the magistrate with plans of greed and diviance.
Today, as the moon rises over the waters of Pax, over the calm Maurridian bay in which my family docks thier ships, I am 18 and my mother is rushing into my room, her face paniced and pale.
"Get up!" she hisses at me, shoving a pack into my arms and pulling me to my feet. I stand there, watching her, my black eyes wide with confusion, hugging the pack. The remains of my ruined dress have been exchanged for a dark grey muslin gown, the color compliments me, making my pale face paler, eyes darker. But my mother doesn't compliment me, she looks at the gown and shakes her pretty head. "They will see that..." she says and rushes out of the room, only to return later with a black cloak with a deep cowl.
"You must hurry, come now my daughter, they will have you sold to finance your father's latest endevour, come come... hurry, I will die before I see you become one of the beautiful ones."
I didn't understand her, but she wouldn't allow me to ask questions, she shuttled me into the cloak, it engulfed me hiding my face and form, dragging on the carpets. She ran me down the servents hall, out the lesser entrance, through the back gardens. I was panting and scared, in responce to her fear and rushing movements.
She came to a halt and called out in a trembling voice, pulling me into the shadow of a palm, she called out again and this time there was an answer.
A woman stepped out of the moon flung darkness, the moon reflecting on the perfect white of her skin, the night making her appear to be cast in white, grey and black so that I could see nothing of her save for her huge eyes, like black satin.
"Take her, please, they would have her...she is one of them." My mother's voice was paniced frantic.
The woman nodded and took my hand from my mothers. I looked at her, "Mom?"
"Go." she said through heavy tears that bowed her shoulders and made her voice thick and clotted. "GO!"
And so we ran, the beautiful moonlight woman and I, away from the shore and into dense forests... it would be days before I found out that the woman with the satin eyes was my sister, Sangliebbe.
PART FOUR WALKING DEAD GIRL
"I am writing this, for fear of my very life. I will be married soon, to the heir apparent, Hornicet FitzNarune, he is to be assassinated on our wedding night, and so shall I be as well. My father watches me as if I were a broodmare going into heat, but I shall be dead before any seed quickens within me...the gossip mongers have forwarned me...by saying nothing... There's no way in hell he will sell me into marraige before I can reveal him to the light...Goddess forgive me, Dianna give me courage, God give me space and time..."
My dissapearance ended my mothers life.
Two daughters gone just as disaster was about to strike, two daughters lost, untold riches forfit.
Though no one said anything about the circumstances surrounding her death. Not out loud anyway, no that was sent into whispered conversations. Dark stories of the magistrate and his men surrounding my mother who was chained to the ground nude under the full light of the new moon. Henious whispers of the beast that ripped from her petite golden body and howled, screamed in a woman's voice as they beheaded it. There were whispers and under breath conversations about my father's tears, of his proclaming that the beast that attacked our home put a hex on my mother, making her one of the beasts.
Sangliebbe told another story. Her perfect mouth and black satin eyes turned into a play of fury and rage. Our mother had been a lycanthrope for years after my birth, our father knew of it but his ferocious love for her kept him from revealing her secret to the world, to the hushed hating throngs. But with the loss of yet another full grown daughter, his love had turned into something more hardedged and volitle
I did not see my sibling for many nights after our race from my father and the things that slaughtered in the night, and did not hear about my mothers moonstruck murder until 3 days after the following fulll moon. Sangliebbe deposited me in the arms of a redhaired youth, his green eyes were almost black in the torchlit cavern that she brought us to. She'd looked at me with those bottomless eyes and I swear there was hate or something even more solid in her roaring out at me. The red haired boy pressed my face against his chest in an oddly maternal geture and I broked down in sobs, not watching Sangliebbe and her disreguard leave.
His name would turn out to be Etienne and he was the only human among the walking dead. He stood a little under six feet, his pale skin scattered with constellations of freckles that ran in visable swirls over his body. His hair was red, the color of true flame and heart blood, and soft like a hare's pelt. I don't know if I fell for him or his humanity, for he seemed more real than all of Pax put together. In all my years I'd never seen anyone who could laugh until they cried. It scared me, I wanted to taint him in some way, smear him and see if he would still be as enchanting.
The first night he took me deep within the caverns, I didn't watch the passing rough hewn walls as they became smooth tiles and from there fine paneled walls and expensive paintings. But the dark torchlit cavern became a home of excruciating wealth. I recall looking about with astonished eyes and Etienne laughing. He led me to a small room with a plain bed and no windows, more like a cell than a bedroom. But I stumbled to the bed and fell across it, sobbing as if my heart would break. He watched me with those dark water-on-emerald eyes for a long time, until my tears ran thier course. He sat on the bed beside me, I looked up as the bed sank under his weight, and he touched my black braid like a worshipper. He met my eyes and smiled, there was no worship in the smile. It was a smile men gave my mother when my father was nowhere near, a smile of lust and cunning... a mans smile when he was sure of your answer. I recoiled from him, flipping my briad over my shoulder and almost falling off the bed.
He smiled again, and this time there was no carnal offerings, instead he left me there in the room alone. Sleep found me curled on the bed, staring out at nothing. My black briad wrapped about my body and clutched firmly in my hand.
In years to come, when Etienne's blood would be slipping through my fingers, and those deep dark eyes would go still, I would damn my choice... I would tell myself that I should have taken his first offer and not forced him to court me. Courtship among the dead...
Morning came and went, leaving me blinking awake in mid afternoon. I streached from the bed, yawning, body and heart sore. Etienne brought me a meal and stories, telling me jokes and myths dancing and cavorting. But I did not give him a smile for almost a week. I'd learned to keep my face bare naked but showing nothing too well, all my laughter tumbled on the inside until he finally stopped one day and looked at me, his face all turned down angles... even his hair seemed saddened.
"Do I just annoy you, Reschelle?" he asked in tones of utmost woe. I blinked at him, then snorted... astonished. No words came forth, they stumbled to a halt behind cutting wittisims and off hand sarcasm. All I could do was give him a smile and shake my head.
My days were filled with a general nothing, to the point that I started to wonder after my future. That is when Sandliebbe showed up again my dark little life. In the light of the candles her skin looked like pearls and white satin but her hate for me was still the same. I recoiled from her as I recoiled from everything. She was a walking dead girl, taken from our family by the darkness, not to be trusted even though she may have saved my life. She smiled at me then, a deadly curling smile and I saw glints of fang shimmering from between her full lips.
Goddess help me.....
PART FIVE DROWNING POOL
“My mother’s name is Besaba, meaning “I have kissed” she is cold, like shallow water left over night… but I have heard stories…tales…of Besaba’s beautiful days, her days of youth. She is the one who found my journal and called me a fool. A fool for writing this, for telling the magistrate of my father’s dalliances with piracy. She will not back me should anything go awry, no. She will leave me to the wolves. It is expected, I would jeopordise her way of living, her very life…”
Sangliebbe would show me no mercy when she came to me with her tales of bloodshed and woe, of the building tensions of the Paxian nobility as their daughters were murdered, harvested. Her tales wer dark and brooding, laced through with muddy acid, mocking me my pain as I heard name after name recited. Names I knew, names with faces. She told me that I was a fool, lucky through my connections with her, the moon daughter of the vampire noble. She didn’t ask me what I belived in, merely told me in tones of half hidden malice that the vampires ran all things political, that Pax had been a breeding ground for all things unseen, all things whispered in the dark.
Everything fears the dark, everything. Even the undead.
I was to be used as bait, for the walking dead to find the killers. The slayers of the beautiful blood. Not even the vampires with all their political clout could find out who they were. Etienne cried out against me being used as a meat puppet but his words went unheard, he was little more than a lackey, a child of a lower caste taken in by the head vampire, Aerniez, because of his beauty and irrepressible joy. But even this had very little clout or power … and so I was used, time and time again to bait, to lure the killers forward.
My dark eyes became hunted, shadowed, mortified with every time they drug me out into the dark and left me there for the hunters. My skin streached and pale over my hollow looking bones and I lept at every noise, startled and scared, even during the day when the sun beat down on my face and body, caressing it like a lover... even when the sun was high, I knew I was hunted.
Tonight is the 6th night. I am trembling alone on the shore my black hair plastered to my nude body, ice cold rain pouring over me. The moon was a cheshire smile in the black starving sky. I hugged my thin arms over my breasts and fought the urge to cry out loud. Tears mingled with the rain, salt and water, down my face. This was Sangliebbe's idea, to have me unable to shield myself from anything, man or beasts. She and the other dead walked the shadows she'd assured me, but like everything else, her assurances were tainted with a slow burning rage.
She'd struck Etienne when he'd come to my aide, telling her of my stress, of the constant fear that was breeding throughout my psyche. He'd flown like a doomed bird of paradise and fallen in a broken heap, mouth bloodied. All from a casual swing of her arm, like the motion one would make to banish a puppy from the room.
The hunters had come for me the other 5 times, but the dead had pulled me from my post just before the hunters had gotten to me..I'd never seen them...the hunters... just heard them fighting in the dark and only saw the walking dead when they came limping from battle, thier bodies slashed and open...but healing, closing up like slow winking eyes.
But unlike now, there was hiding places...here on the beach I am alone, exposed, with only my black cloak of hair hanging well past my knees and clinging to the curves of my body as the rain tried to wash me away.
I hadn't seen the face among the waves, floating there, looking out at me from the black water riding the currents. I blinked through the rain and focused, swallowing the fear that rose up like bile in the back of my throat... choking me.
It was a woman, her skin black as onyz, black hair floating about her body, black eyes like round river rocks unblinking. Only the moonlight shining off the white pearls threaded through her hair kept my eyes on her as she drifted too and fro.
At first I thought she was a specter, but slowly as she drifted closer I could tell she was real, that there was the glint of black scales on her shoulders and across her breasts. I stepped closer to the shoreline until the white foam washed over my toes and the back splash from the rian drops hitting the water struck my lower legs.
The water was growing shallow from her end and I could see that she was pulling herself along the ocean bottom. I tore my eyes from her angular and horrificly beautiful face with it's thin lips and almost non exsistant nose, to see, twisting behind her a long thing tail, like a fishes, but it was black, inky. Her fins were like onyx tissue paper highlighted by the foaming surf.
She was close enough to touch, looking up at me with a detatched intrest, blinking her pupilless eyes slowly, black on black lashes lowering over her cheeks. I was suddenly not cold anylonger, no... my blood rushed through my veins and the everpresent call of the waves seemed somehow louder, filling my head, and under it all was a trembling music.
She reached out to me, one black arm with it's thin black webbing between the long thing fingers. I started to reach back out to her, my own arm trembling hearing stories of mermaids and thier song crashing love struck sailors... but she wasn't singing, she was offering me her hand, and a life within a drowning pool of night black water and jewel toned fishes.
Her eyes flicked behind me, her mouth falling open in an expression of surprise, and I saw for the merest moment triangular teeth, like a sharks, before she was gone. Diving back into the water her tail curling on itself huge oily black scales wider than my palm catching the light. I turned and screamed.
The hunters were on me.
They moved with a loping grace, three of them, bounding across the sand thier huge paws like that of lions, but unlike a lion they ran on thier hind legs. They smiled, wicked long fangs glittered and shone and their eyes, like yellow suns come to earth for deeds unsung shone out at me. I screamed and turned to run, but I had no where to go but the water.
They had me long before that.