BIRDS OF PREY, the vampire diaries

000 cat's cradle

prologue
CATS CRADLE

The truth is, Scout makes a lousy vampire. 

Three bodies in and her stomach continues to growl and crawl around inside her body, stomping its way through her belly and making her skeleton shiver and shake. Scout wondered that if a scalpel were to slice her open, would she bleed, or would she be hollow, void of all madness and consuming blood-lust. Perhaps, if she was being honest, her ribs would ferment and her veins would stick together like seaweed caught in a surge, nothing but an empty meanness leaking to the ground. Scout Gilbert wasn't human. She supposed she wasn't much of anything, not anymore. 

Some days she stops herself, bleary-eyed and seething with white-hot anger, a burning that forms cartilage in her veins and stops her blood from reaching her heart. Leaving a trail won't do her any good, sneaking into morgues isn't much better. Scout wonders if she's a ripper like her friend, too entranced in the euphoric high than the richness of satisfaction. Addicted to all seven of the deadly sins but never quite holding any of them in her grasp. Maybe that's her fatal flaw: Scout Gilbert has never, and will never be satisfied. 

Even when she was a girl, embedded with apprehension and longing. Even when her wild bones ached for release, Scout Gilbert took and took from the world and when she offered nothing in return, the universe took from her greedy hands and deemed her a sinner worthy of a fitting sentence. A grim reaper follows her around, picking up the crumbs of her mis-deeds and feeding back into the wicked whims of the world. Plagued by death, covered in blood. This is Scout Gilberts tragedy. 

The air around her shifts, as though there is no space left for her in this world, as if the moon can't bare the sight of her any longer, as if the trees no longer have it in themselves to keep swaying. Scout lifts her head in a half-dazed effort to stay coherent, the blood rings in her eyes and her high crashes her into a puddle on the floor of a forest, tucked away in some back-water town in the heat of Tennessee. Crippled by her actions, Scout stays there for a day, maybe more, time seems a blur and it's not long before the bodies attract flies and the blood grows mould. 

She's half dazed and covered with a jacket when her eyes, blinded by dirt, open again. She can barely make out the figure, he just stands there, staring, the way he always does. The way he always used too. He isn't brooding like her dead sisters boyfriend, nor is he enchanting and painstakingly arrogant like the other brother. He exudes a primal fire of confidence that sparks air into her lungs for the first time in days. She hates him, always has. 

He tilts his head, a challenge, giving her that look: the one that said 'God is dead, the position must be filled and I am the only worthy candidate.' Truthfully Scout was more likely to compare him to the devil down below than she would some sort of faux-god, built to strike terror and cause strife, made to stand at the top of the world and hold up the sky as if that would make him some sort of a fucking hero. Gods are not kind, she reminds herself, and supposes he is right. That angers her more. 

The image isn't lost on her, she might not be centuries old but Scout Gilbert knows a thing or too about a thing or too when it comes to power. Him standing, her kneeling, it leaves a bitter resentment under the tip of her tongue, so potent she can taste it over all the blood that coats her insides. Reminiscent of an old history book, they linger on the edge of a picture book, a moment so full of meaning, a moment so full of nothing. 

Her lips curl in a small snarl. She's angry. So full of anger, really, she is overflowing with bitter wrath: too close to becoming the embodiment of sin and it is written all over her face. Her eyebrows furrow when mad, her mouth tilts into a frown when sad, and now, in the middle of the forest, she breathes in a shaky breath of cold toxic poison that feels more like sunlight than pain.