The red-haired child frowned at me. "That's a terrible bedtime story, godmother. Why are you so obsessed with snakes, anyways? Snakes are gross. Even the teachers at school know that, and they don't know anything."
If the boy's opinion mattered a whit to me, I would have needed to count ten breaths to calm down. Given my current state of affairs, that could take quite a while. Fortunately, his ideas were childish, and slid off of me like water from an oiled pan.
In any case, the boy was hard to hate: it was something in his large, dark eyes, which still danced with life instead of teeming with awful secrets. It was when I looked at them that I could be reminded that he wasn't her, that the crimson hair and alabaster skin that even now filled me with blood-frenzy and frenzy of a different sort was but a memory. It was a slender thing, but it was only thing that kept him alive after nights of suppressed rage and years of lingering blood frenzy.
A subtle difference. But important to me. And whose opinion could possibly matter more?
"Stupid boy. Can't even see he lives only on the whim of a dragon, who seeks to avenge a little snake. I wouldn't critique the dragon's stories if I were you. It might end badly for a foolish little boy."
He sat for a moment all curled up in his bed, wrapped in a large pink comforter that beat away the winter chill that seeped through the cracks of my dingy little house. He didn't look nine years old to my eyes— perhaps I had spent too much time around giants, and his slight stature seemed young and sickly even as impish energy pervaded his every movement. His nose wrinkled, and he folded his arms in a startlingly familiar expression of stubbornness.
"But you're doing the story all wrong!" He informed me with the certainty that can only come from the truly young. "It needs to have a villain, and the villain needs to be defeated, and then you need a happy ending. Otherwise, it's not a proper fairy tale. Everybody knows that."
I roared my defiance as I stormed through the city, tossing pedestrians aside like paper before a hurricane. Gareth was running from me, and in my frenzy I needed nothing less than his life's blood to sate my fury. A police car followed me for countless minutes, the officers within firing bullets that were beneath my notice. Almost.
The next morning, I would drain every man, woman, and child in the precinct. That, I think, is when the Years of the Vanishings truly began.
"You can be certain there was a villain, boy. But there was no happy ending. Do you want a different story, then?"
"Yes. You need to practice your stories, godmother. I only want to help, especially when you get into your moods when you call me 'boy' instead of my name."
I leaned forward in my chair and considered. "Your name is foolish because you are foolish. But one must be accommodating towards fools, especially the well-meaning ones. Very well. I will give you a story with a happy ending."
His face brightened considerably. The bed squeaked as he wriggled deeper under the covers and watched me with eyes dark as a summer evening. A smile twitched at the corners of my mouth, too quickly for his merely human sight to glimpse.
"Once upon a time," I told him, "There was a little snake who was afraid to die. But she was a different snake, and she was wiser than the other who lived far away under the night."
I killed Jane first. She had been one of the few that didn't fear me towards the end, so it only seemed right.
It began as an accident, really. I was still reeling from my night in the tender company of the sluagh, and blood-frenzy filled my veins and throat until I choked. Gareth said that I was a danger to myself and the others in the clan, and I was sent away so they could scrub the ruined hall free of any trace of blood that might throw me into a relapse. I was still full and giggling from the high of the last frenzy, so I obeyed him without putting up a fuss.
