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ALSIE had been surrounded by death and the tantalizing scent of blood for a very long time.

She had once been disgusted by the very idea that anyone's last moments on earth brought her delight, that she would be the cause of more graves being buried. When you're young, you tended to feel the guilt more easily and allowed the anxiety to tear through your mind and soul better than any good razor on soft flesh. But growing older, seeing the world and what it was really made of, made you grow cold and bitter until nothing but a wrenching hatred racked your body like a devastating illness.

In a black and white world, you didn't care to see the vibrancy life should be.

And as Alsie watched the flare of blood spray across the marble floors, heard the enraged yells of the warlocks around her, she could see only the colorless web of life bleed away until all that remained was a gorge of twilight smoke before her.

The silver glint of bullets hitting the walls was a shattering sound, but not as deafening as cracking skulls when one penetrated through the single turn of a head. Students lay dead in their own vomit, the smell of putrefying bile intermingling was a permanent perfume she knew too well. With each fall of a body, with every single cry of pain, Alsie could have sworn she saw the faces from those she had ended those many years ago on these boys.

Something tripped the wire in her mind as the scent of that sweet, lovely twang of magical blood tickled her insides and salivated her mouth. It was like honeysuckle, earthy and rich that it sent the tongue searching for it. Alsie's addiction with the peculiar blood was almost too difficult to be removed. Like a leech, she would continue to search and devour if gotten the chance.

Sweet heavens, it made her want to moan.

All the words she had spoke, all the earnest speech she had tried to justify herself with was thrown out the window as the mayhem inside her buried deep within her gut. She wasn't an animal, not anymore. But the hunger, the anger, the ferocity of the betrayal made the way she killed result back to the fine days of her early years.

A Flash of Red | JAMES MARCHWhere stories live. Discover now