C14| How Quickly Things Change

Home.

Large, compared to the other houses around this part of town. A size my mother could be proud of, brag to her ‘friends’ about and lord over the other ladies at church.

It smelled different and yet exactly the same. Or maybe it was me who was different, so much had changed in so little time. In all of three days I was assaulted, tried and executed, then reborn as an immortal creature of the night. A blood drinking vampire, who had taken the long way home, to kill my parents, who’d actively participated in my murder.

Life sure did come full circle.

The walk over helped cool my head, smother the once boiling rage to a bubbling simmer, I felt I could think clearly now.

Decide, what I am to do with these people who brought me into this world without my consent, and thought their part in my creation was reason enough to take my life away. As if my very existence was merely a whim, a novelty they’d grown tired of clothing and feeding, parading around town to sell off to the highest bidder, instead of a girl who had dreams and hopes and fears.

It was for that girl I now lived, it was to avenge her and the many wrongs this town, these good God fearing people, had inflected upon her.

For the weak human girl, for me of 3 days ago, I would bathe this house in blood.

***

I think I’d always known my mother was a lost cause. Once I’d thought the fact that she too is a woman would be enough for her to side with me, her only child, I was wrong of course. But her betrayal had been the expected one.

My father’s was not.

He was everything to me.

My proud protector and my loyal friend, the man I compared all others too and found them wanting.

It was his betrayal that cut the deepest, from the wounds he inflected I bleed the most.

As if summoned by my thoughts the rage inside me burned bright, furious and unrelenting at the memory of him standing there, rope in hand and silver lining his eyes pain in he’s every expression.

It was as insulting as it was terrible. He did not get to be sad, to feel pain and loss but still pull the rope taut, still tear my bloody feet from the ground and steal the very air from my lungs. For what? For who?

I couldn’t understand why he was there, why he sided with that horrible man.

Why he abandoned me? Why did he kill me?

The house was quiet for this time of night. Usually, my father would still be up reading in the drawing room with mother prattling on about her day or heading out for a late patrol through the town before returning to bed. But not this night. No, the house was silent as the grave tonight, well almost silent.

The soft breathing of deep restful sleep from upstairs, it seems mother has already gone to bed- cruel, wicked woman, sleeping like a new born babe on the very same day she watched her only daughter die-and the shallow gasps of our housekeeper weeping silently-she must be getting soft in her old age-and the slow swing of something heavy through the air.

Swish. Swish.

Had someone left a window open, it was coming from our small library, my favourite room in the whole house well it was really reading enclave fitted with a door. Maybe my father had finally managed to fix the grandfather clock that had been sitting in the room for as long as I can remember. I decided on see the library one last time before the slaughter continued.

Perhaps I’d even keep my favourite book of poems, a reminder of where I’d come from and what had been done to me by the people I thought I could trust, by the people who said they loved me.

A reminder of the human girl I used to be.

I now knew I would live a very long life, and morbid as it was I wanted to keep this lesson of human cruelty till the end of it.