[fic] bad blood

[inthistwilight]

bad blood

Characters: Dylan.
Notes: No one knew where she had gone; no one knew where the body was. No one but the scrawny teenager creeping across the front lawn of their house in the dead of night.
Word Count: 811.
Prompt: 'Bad Blood' - Bastille.

 

‘There was nowhere else to go.’

The house was still.

Bouquets of dried, dead flowers laid at the front door, tokens of remembrance forgotten with each day that passed. The woman, who these tokens had been placed for, had still not been found. She’d been gone for almost a month now, a Charun demon. No one knew where she had gone; no one knew where the body was.

No one but the scrawny teenager creeping across the front lawn of their house in the dead of night.

‘And these are the days that bind you together, forever.’

Tossing her bag, she vaulted over the fence with little effort. She stalked towards the back door and stooped to pick up a key in a flower pot. Letting herself in, she quietly wandered through the house, looking around at the dead woman’s home.

She’d done it plenty of times before. She’d watch them, wait for them. They were ones that lived alone, had family out of town. Bodies were dumped in lakes, hidden in places they wouldn’t be found.

‘And these little things define you, forever, forever.’

She left her bag on a couch, moved through the den like a ghost. She ran her fingertips across the mantelpiece, gathering dust. And only then, she saw herself.

In the dim, she gazed back at the girl hunched in the mirror: thick, dirty red hair framed a gaunt face, the skin sickly in complexion. Her face was marked with bruises and cuts in varying states of healing. Her blue eyes dull and blood-shot, lips chapped with the cold weather. Evelyn Williams was no longer the girl she used to be so many years ago.

She’d picked out a new name for herself.

“Dylan.” She uttered to herself.

‘All this bad blood here, won’t you let it dry?’

The hot water was still on. She took the first shower she’d had in weeks, finally able to scrub away the grime, the red blood, the black blood, the white blood; a grim rainbow of colours that stained her skin. She watched it circle the drain and wondered to herself how many times she’d have to do this, how many times she’d have to scrub away the blood. It had been two years since she ran away, just over a year since she killed her first person.

‘It’s been over for years, won’t you let it lie?’

She did it for her mother. She fought to be strong, to be ready. She took lives away to prepare for what she’d dreamt of doing for years. She’d find the man; she’d take a knife to his throat. But she still had so much work to do until then. There’d be no stopping until then.

‘If we’re only looking back, we will drive ourselves insane.’

She was obsessed. Her mother was the one focus, nothing else in her life mattered. She never thought about where she’d be in ten or twenty years time. She didn’t really care about it. With the exception of looking toward that day, she looked back, not forward. She was wandering through life as if walking backwards. She never thought clearly anymore. She knew how much it hurt with each person she killed, she knew how much every day felt like a blur.

She continued around the house, explored bedrooms, stole money left in drawers or valuables she could sell. The demon wouldn’t need it anymore, would they? She never took too much, though. She took just enough to get her by, just enough to go on, as if she was never here. She picked at the rotten food left in the fridge, trying to fight off the hunger pangs. Food was hard to come by without money, she’d stopped at homeless shelters and soup kitchens when she could – but most of the time she ate out the trash, or when she got into homes like this – whatever was left. She never had to worry about getting things like food poisoning or salmonella – those fickle human diseases were beneath her now.

‘I don’t want to hear about the bad blood anymore.’

If she could, she’d sleep. For a little while, she could forget what she was, what she did. She’d forget about the blood, the white, the red and the black. She’d forget about the dead mother, the father she left behind, about the Calling, about the empty homes she burgled.

She could never stay for long, though. The houses reminded her too much of what she’d done and she couldn’t keep going with reminders all around her. Even if they belonged to demons, even if she didn’t care about them, she was only nineteen – she couldn’t yet fully let go of her actions, to kill without regret. For a little while longer, she had to shut out the ghosts.

Then maybe, they’d leave her alone.