Postmortem

Two Weeks After

I wouldn't be killing anyone tonight. Not because I didn't want to, but because my friends were far too jumpy and on edge. I asked Luna for a pen at school and she just about jumped out of her skin. No doubt their fear gave me a great deal of pleasure, but that same fear could make my task more difficult. And I couldn't kill Bruno just yet anyways. I had to wait.
For tonight, I would likely sit and think as I had been doing so often these days. I remember a phrase, from when I was alive, that I heard often, usually from Danni just before he took a shot of some cheap alcohol. "The good die young," he would say, as if to justify what was quickly becoming an addiction. I wonder sometimes if he said those same words before they took me into the woods that night.
Maybe the good do die young, maybe that was why I had died. But if I've learned anything (other than how to murder old friends) it's this: anyone can die young when someone kills them. It doesn't matter how evil or good you are, it only matters how well you can fight and the people you trust. I trusted the wrong ones and it cost me my life.
And theirs.
Even now I could feel the grave nipping at the back of my mind, waiting to pull me back under. I had traded Danni and Nickis lives for more time to fulfill my quest for vengeance, but I couldn't wait much longer before taking the last pieces of my payback. Two more lives needed to be destroyed before I returned to the icy caress of death. Death was a comfort to the lost, a being who made the loss of one's life something not wholly unbearable.
That didn't stop her from sending reminders of just how short I was on time from beyond the grave, however. I got my first reminder two weeks after my own death while sitting on my floor and thinking. A sharp headache started at the beginning of tonight, blurring my vision until everything in my room was hazy. I felt a vague sense of confusion while my ears rang. My hands went to cover them even though I knew it wouldn't help.
When my hand brushed something warm and wet at the base of my skull I understood what was going on. I was reliving the time before my death, the worst minutes of my life. It was another hour before the pain subsided enough for me to move again.
My head was swimming and standing was a shaky process but I moved to my bed anyway, with some effort. As I laid curled on my side, recovering from the pain of another lifetime, another flood of determination entered my very soul. It moved through every bit of my rotting insides to stick in the remaining chunks of my mind, in any pieces I had not yet lost.
They would suffer for doing this to me. I would take the venom they spat at me and infuse it into their veins. They would suffer at my hands, lose their minds and souls as thoroughly as they had taken mine. I would destroy them for their sins against me.
And I would revel in it.