Firearms

Hell's Gate

A/N: I definitely have a habit of writing forbidden romances....

Red and Death is a spin on Romeo and Juliet, but much of it will be different than the original play so don't be surprised if you see scenes such as the one below.

Enjoy~ and don't forget to comment.

Comments = faster updates (or updates at all).

Prologue

    Red and death, red and death, red and death. The streets of the Gate are dyed red with death.

    The haunting nursery rhyme seemed to float heavily around the street of Hell’s Gate, an ironic name for the place considering that when the city officials named it they hadn’t know what it would become in its later years. If they could have seen it now, they would have been dismayed at how much it had fallen throughout the years.

    The Gate had never been much more than an oversized alleyway made of an uneven cobble stone street that dipped down where the street grew wider in the center. The wider section of the road was circular in shape and was the opening where three other alleys spilled out. The names of such alleys weren’t known and didn’t deserve mentioning, the ring itself however had earned a nickname as well as a reputation throughout the years.

    Ring of Fire.

    The name was deceptive if not carefully noted. It surely was a ring, but it housed a different sort of fire than the blue flames licking up at the damned souls in the underworld. This fire was human and deadly in its own manner, controlled by the trigger.

    Too many people had lost their lives to this fire. Too many people dead due to the feud. It had no beginning and seemingly no ending. For all time the warring between the two houses waged on, killing and destroying as they went.

    For everyone except one, this was a depressing time in New Verona. The city’s undertaker however, was an odd sort of man who found a sick joy in the steady flow of business made from the fighting. With plenty of unclaimed bodies, he could make a fortune selling them to medical study groups, and even those claimed didn’t go without their profits. Funerals were an often event and there was only one person who was willing to stitch the mangled bodies together for them.

    Nightly the man traveled down to Hell’s Gate with his aged and stained wagon pushed in front of him. He was drawn to the place for his nightly collections, picking up the freshly dead who had been left littering the street. For such a somber occasion, he hummed loudly into the silence of the street way.

    “Red and death, red and death, red and death. The streets of the Gate are dyed red with death.”

    The song echoed with an eery cheerful manner through the Gate on that particular misty night. It would be a night that changed fate as it so happened, though neither the man nor the girl would know this yet. If he had known he might have been over zealous with glee at the beginnings of a grandly tragic story before him.

    However he did not know the often strange ways of fate, nor did he realize what he’d stumbled across when he found her. At the time she was a gangly girl of only ten, her skin and clothes drenched through with crimson from the blood soaking the ground. She didn’t cry or wail as many did when they stumbled across the bodies of those they loved in the Gate. She merely used the toe of her boot to prod the bodies laying beneath her as one might treat a stranger’s.

    She was silent.

    She was detached.

    She was emotionless.

    She was Juliette.