Before The Dawn | Vanirian Nights

CHAPTER ONE

XENA

Winter rain brings a dazzling sparkle to the pavement beneath my feet. The combination of snow and rain on saturated concrete gave the illusion of glitter. It was stunning, the glistening, ruined only by the decorations wrapped around streetlamps which beheld all the wrong colors. The season called for reds and blues, for snowmen and snowflakes, not just the paleness of white. There hadn't even been any strategically placed candy-canes; the city was bathed in an uncomfortable aesthetic, made popular by people who were without joy, I supposed.

Twisted are the shadows cast by trees, their limbs stripped barren of their colorful hues, bending like paper. Bony things now shuddering in the cold.

There is no rush to escape the rain. It's a beautiful night, and the rain wasn't all that bad. It served to soothe me, and for that I was grateful.

Several blocks away, a woman returns from a spontaneous shopping trip. She'd been upset with her husband who claimed to have been so busy with work that he'd not booked a reservation for their weekly dinner. The lonely woman felt guilted and, instead of arguing with her convincing husband, she'd planned to rectify his stress and her hunger. Returning from the store just as the first of rains began to fall, the woman felt better about her husband's forgetfulness. After all, who wouldn't have been understanding when the great Mr. Marcel Reeves had pled his case. 

Fortunately for her, she hadn't been there when I arrived. The woman saved her own life by being a doormat to the dirtiest of scum in all of New Hampshire. His wife's screams are likely akin to a banshee, her bags haphazardly dropped, and the nights groceries spilled about onto her expensive rug. 

Though I cannot hear sirens yet, the sound is sure to pierce through this calm wintery night. All the woman needs to do is cry a little harder, scream a little louder, and surely the sirens will come.

Lovely, the sky. 

Pretty and pillowy in its bleakness, the clouds thick and low. 

A bit of fog, or perhaps a wafting mist that moves with the current of wind, and it would truly be a perfect night indeed. I'm only a few short blocks from my crime, but I'd felt lighter the second it happened. All the weight and pain and anger had left me the moment life had left his eyes. It was as if his death had collected every bit of it and when he died, he took with him all of my hatred for him. And all of the love, too. Sighing into the air only to watch my breath materialize in front of me, I continue on until I near one of the few bus stops I had seen earlier in the evening. I'd wandered around, bitter and ready to kill, so blinded by my hurt that I could hardly find my way around. This part of the city felt like an endless maze of either buildings or lavish homes, with no concise in-between.

Three men dressed in suits stand there looking extremely pissed off, and a sole woman looking quite sad. She's dressed in an evening gown unbefitting for a night like this, where the chill is a biting thing that must be nipping endlessly at her exposed toes. The beautiful four spare me a look filled to the brim with suspicion and scrutiny. It brings my mood tumbling down rather quickly and my polite look is replaced with one of equal scrutiny. They shift their postures and move to stand together as if there were safety in numbers, which would have been laughable if it hadn't been so offensive. I didn't look like much of a threat at all. If anything, I looked like I had lived in La-La Land, where I built snowmen and danced around a Christmas tree. Their night must have been foul, I deduce, for them to be standing and waiting for a bus, dressed the way that they are. I thought people such as this had drivers, or at least expensive cars.

The sirens raze the peace of night, and all three heads unanimously lift to attention. I'd expected it to happen sooner, and I'd found myself disappointed with the response time. What if he had been dying instead of dead? Would they have even been able to save him? Did no one care at all about a woman screaming her head off in an apartment worth millions?