We Only Have The Night (Completed)

Shivers in a Night From Hell

Hi my name is Ana, I'm portuguese, I'm writing my first book in english but the main scenes are lived by the characters in Portugal, my country, in a real place called Gondar in the city of Amarante. Cool isn't it? I know the village very well because I have family there. I hope you like to read "We only Have The Night" story. I will try to update asap. Feel free to comment, add and vote if you wish. Thank you so much! :D

P.S.: Some parts has portuguese dialogues but I added the respective translations in the end of the chapter, or between () below the portuguese dialogues, so you don't lose the story. I like to mix a bit the two languages, adding a bit of my roots in my stories, so I hope you don't mind :)

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Night... My mother thought I should follow the roots of the family since birth... She called me Night, Night Dantas. She ran away from London six months after she got me at 00h01 of May 30, twenty three years ago and came back three months later, so I've been raised in London since I was very young. Apparently in those three months in Portugal, family and friends were not very thrilled about my name and couldn't respect the order of it, I only am Night Dantas for a couple of people and my friend Lili. For the rest of the family and neighbors in the small village of Gondar, I allways was Naíta (Na-hee-tah). That pissed off my mother a lot and she couldn't stand one minute more in Portugal.

I used to go to Portugal 15 days per year, but I only traded London permanently for the calm lands of Amarante in Portugal one year ago. Me and my mother, we never had an easy relationship, but I can understand the curse running in the family now.

Her name is Dores Dantas, Dores as "Pains" in her mother language. My grandmother was Perpétua, like a heavy and spooky way to say "Eternal", so my grandmother was unconsciously the first responsible to start a lineage of eternal pain and night, literally in my existence. But I'm the only one to blame, now that I decided to live my misery forever completely alone.

About my father, he didn't actually lived to know I was coming. He suffered a car accident, when even my mother was oblivious of her own pregnancy. My father was a portuguese emigrant too like my mother. But unlike her, he didn't have any family alive... At least that was my mother always told me... But she and my father, Carlos, only hang out for four months before he died...

She gave me his surname, but actually she didn't even know his parents names, let alone where they lived, because one day I caught her switch my grandmother's name. She first said my father's mother was Natércia, and a week later she called her Natalina. Too very common names in Portugal between old people as I ended up learning with my time here. But they are very similar as well, so my mother as any bad liar, tend to switch easily between the two. I try not to be too hard on her, but she always was too much full of secrets for my taste, but I gave up trying to understand her side eventually.

I'm in the woods again. Every night I come here to see my supplier. He hates to come to this dark place in the middle of nowhere at night, but the only way for him to have his payment is to follow me to my night's home, when I finally wake up and come out to see the sunless sky.

I came to this small village, Gondar, where my mother born in her parent's home and where she almost didn't resist the three days of labor. My grandmother had so much pain to have my mother, that there's not other better name to apply to a child so difficult to bring to the world.