CHAPTER ONE:
Darkness
Dark thoughts. Dark streets.
A deepest, darkest fear, hidden flawlessly behind an immaculate façade of derisive words, behind a determined face hidden in the vast shadows once feared, behind the lone form blending in with the dark night, which hides the stubborn, desperate desire for revenge. A fear brought to life; a fear ruthlessly, mercilessly exploited. Unbeknownst to her, this sweet revenge will not satisfy the intense craving to seek the justice that has been so terribly, eternally lost. Revenge will not end it all.
The rain falls in thick, perpetually endless torrents; the cool water pelts her body from all angles as a brisk, invigorating mist fills her senses, restoring the fully dulled, but basic sense of reality that haunts her frenzied mind. The physical reminder of the earth she stands on, so incredibly real yet still so far away. A razor-sharp reminder of the icy, damp air around her, thick with the scent of rage and pain surging through her veins like burning, liquid fire. Sharp as the two long, gleaming, pointed canine teeth which have shown themselves, ready to puncture and kill, ready and willing to satisfy the inexorable want for revenge.
She can taste her fury; she can sense his revolting happiness. Bile rises in her throat. She needs to be sick. Soon she will come crashing brutally back down to absolute, sadistic reality. This she knows all too well. It a sick, endless cycle that has never before gone this far. But not just yet will she come crashing down. Not yet. She needs this time, she needs this rush. God be damned if it shall be taken from her already.
She is the eternally damned.
Wide eyes are blaze with unrestrained anger, flashing suddenly to an unrealistically bright shade of ice blue, then instantly changing to a deep, fiery scarlet, blaring out an intense anger never before known to the beholder. She scans the area so quickly that to the naked eye, the action would appear to be simply a blur of freakish, impractical movement.
He is gone. She's not been fast enough. Her senses have been stretched to the limit and far beyond. She bolts, simply a vague impression of blurry movement, running, with her heart pounding in her ears, threatening to violently explode in her heaving chest at any given moment. She pounds her feet against the ground at a bizarrely fast pace until she can no longer take it, and stops, truly breathless, to take a rapid succession of severe, gasping breaths.
He's gone. Gone.
But she cannot accept this. Her reckless, desperate, irrational need to find him and make him pay clouds her thinking. Her keen, clever mind, when hazed with overpowering emotion, has no room for rational thought or any amount of reasoning beyond what she feels is necessary. And rationality and sensibility have escaped her time and time again when certain situations arise. It is an almost unfixable flaw, --so deeply she has mistakenly embedded in her very nature--, that empowers her to a frightening level.
A raw surge of power courses through her body with this sick realization of defeat, and she can feel the sheer energetic anger, the pure, undiluted power radiating off of her tall, thin, but undeniably powerful form. The color of this power manifested glows an eerie, beautiful, terrifying shade of bright crimson. Her fists clenched tightly together, held straight at her sides, now whip up to shoulder level in a heartbeat. Open palms hold blazing fire, easy if they had always been meant to do so.
She has run as quickly as her nature allows, faster than the untrained human eye can see. But he is much older than her mere two years of immortality, he is in complete control. He was gone before she began. Sickeningly enough, he surely knows how to expertly elude her immature persona; potently dangerous though she may be, she does not possess the extent of knowledge she seeks to be able to use her power to the best of its ability. And that is what has undone her.
She turns her glowing face to the dark, dismal, endless sky above her, and she lets out a shrill, ear-piercing, gut-wrenching scream that can be heard perfectly for miles and miles away. She screams herself hoarse and sets her eyes upon the heavens that have betrayed her beyond comprehension. Her life has been brutally ripped apart at the seams and she cannot just stand there, helpless, and let the truth sink in.
Unfourtunately, there isn't much of any other option.
"Bell."
Long, winding tresses of silky raven hair lash out behind her as she whips her head around upon reaction, cascading in coiled ripples down her back and shoulders. However, an intentionally slow, poised turn brings her face to face with someone she does not care to see.
"What do you want?" She hisses enigmatically, her voice an unnatural tone; it is a double sound of her musically accented voice, combined with the disturbing tone of her eternal living death, that reverberates through the stormy night.
His eyes instantly darken to black. "I want you to stop being so childish and irrational."
The glowing red aura around her flashes a shade deeper. "Foolish?" She asks angrily, stepping heatedly towards a brick wall beside her and easily slamming her fist through it in a blind rush of anger, leaving a gaping hole but no lasting damage to her hand. "Irrational? He just killed the one thing he knows I need to survive! He wanted to kill you all because of me, if he wasn't simply making it up to piss me off, and you think that wanting revenge is irrational?"
"No," He replies calmly; firmly. "I think the way you're going about it is—"
"Funny that you should be the one to say that," She snaps cuttingly. "When I was almost killed, after you turned me, you left me unconcious and bloody on the floor and went after him—"
"We're not speaking about my past, now, Bellatrix, and that was a completely different situation."
"The past has a nasty little way of influencing the future, Aiden, and if you're stupid enough to think that this isn't almost exactly the same-- "
"You're not going to last much longer if you don't stop," He tells her evenly, eluding her baiting words and changing the subject. "Strength because of emotion is one of the strongest kinds of power, but it drains you so easily. Come the fuck down and save your energy. He's gone."
Glaring daggers at him with her blood red eyes, knowing he is right and loathing it completely, she complies. She closes her fists, letting the fire instantly extinguish itself, and with the blink of an eye, her stunningly bright aura is gone, leaving simply a formless impression of where it used to be. Her eyes are blue once again, but they are the unusually radiant shade of blue that is associated with vampirism.
She has crashed.
"Do you have your gun?"
"No." He's lying.
"Where have you got it hidden, then?" She crosses her arms across her stomach, digging her fingers hard into the delicate skin on her hipbones. She needs the pain to keep her from falling apart or acting insane.
"I left so quickly to find you, Bella, that I didn't exactly have time to run up and get the goddamn thing!"
"Give me the gun," She demands resolutely; a firm, dangerous, potent edge laced delicately through her determined voice. "Now."
He does not back down as she takes an intimidating step forward; she never has been able to frighten him into submission, and she knows it will now work now. He is composed as ever, his face almost entirely impassive, but his eyes give him away. His eyes show worry; they show compassionate anger for the "stupid stunt", as he considers it, that she has pulled. She's always been able to read him like a book. "You're not going to find him, Bell, he's gone."
"I know." She looks at the ground so he doesn't see the red flashing temporarily in her eyes. "He's not the one I want to use it on…"
He doesn't hear the last muttered part of her sentence. "You just narrowly escaped death once tonight!" He exclaims. "Why would you be stupid enough to risk it again?"
"He wouldn't have killed me," She hissed darkly at him, ice blue eyes once again hinting at just a small bit of the fiery red that has just receded back into submission. Scowling harshly, she takes a few short, quick steps forward. "At least not physically. He wanted to exploit my darkest fear. He played it like a fucking lullaby," She spat disgustedly, laughing a bitter, mirthless laugh. "He knew my weakness and he used it against me, so that my soul would die. He wants me to live on as a hollow shell of who I used to be. And I'm not going to give him that satisfaction. I missed killing him, so I'll do what he doesn't expect, what won't leave him feeling accomplishment," She explains dangerously. "Now give me the gun."
He stared her in the eyes. "No."
"You don't care if I live or die!" She shouts cuttingly, knowing full well as the words leap out of her mouth that they are entirely and undeniably untrue. But she is hanging by a thread and if she doesn't get release from this hell soon, then she'll break completely. "Give it to me!"
He gives her a long, withering, searching look, as if he purely cannot believe that she has just said those coldhearted, insensitive words. "Go home, Bellatrix," He says coolly, turning on heel to leave. "But don't expect your guns to be accessible when you get there. Or anything else you might try to injure…someone…with."
"Damnit, Aiden!" She swears vehemently, as his now ill-defined, blurry shape rushes immediately past her, leaving behind only the forceful gust of wind that his speed caused, which caresses her ethereally striking face, blowing back her jet-black hair. "Damn you!"
And she is left to stare broodingly into the shadowy, unforgiving night, which is her element, her refuge, her sin. Rain once again pours down onto her lone form, creating a misty, otherworldly feeling among the nearly pitch-black streets. This is the fateful night which has claimed the only surviving manifestation of her innocence and killed the single last remaining bit of her human soul. The soul that she kept buried deep down inside. Many eternals have so easily forgotten what it was once like to be mortal, to have human morals, feelings, thoughts, and emotions. That is what drives them down the broken, well-worn path of animalism, effortlessly transforming them into heartless, unfeeling monsters. She has sworn to herself to never be like that. But now that the last, fragile thread tying her to it has been broken, what will she become?
As she strides gracefully yet commandingly down the dark, isolated alleyway, soaked to the bone with rain and a horrible ache that has nothing to do with her physical wounds, her erratic footsteps clicking rhythmically on the concrete, this is what she wonders.
What is to become of me?
Yeah, I fixed this all up a bit, because it was so late at night when I posted this, and the note at the end was kind of messed up and didn't really make all that much sense. lol. I changed a few minor things, like making the conversation longer and fixing a few words, me being the freakish perfectionist that I am. (I also changed Adrienne's name to Aiden. I like it better.) So it's not like you've got to re-read it to understand it better, but I like the first chapter better now.
Hopefully I'm going to be getting the second one up any day now. I'm really excited to continue this story and see where it goes.
Please review!! And thanks so much to those who've already done so. I appreciate it a lot. It makes me happy inside. And gives me a WAFF. Yeah, that's right.
A WAFF. ahem is...
dramatic drum roll please
A
Warm
And
Fuzzy
Feeling
Don't let my random idiocy prevent you from reading on, please. I'm just a little oddball. hehe.
deannanic63-
Thanks for the compliment about the imagery. I really try hard with that, I'm glad you noticed. I'm pretty excited to be on someone's favorites lol.
losingmyfaith-
I attempted fixing most of the gramatical errors that I found, so hopefully they are gone. And I'll most likely update pretty soon. thanks for being the first review-er!