Born of Blood

Chapter 24

The child was gone.

Scarlet stood in front of the bathroom mirror, with tears flooding her eyes. They welled, hot and poisonous against her waterline, before leaping to their death against the cold, white, tile floor. Scarlet could see her lip curled over her teeth, in a snarl, was it disgust? Rage? Or sadness? All pooled in her stomach, spewing through her veins like a volcano announcing its terror to the world. It was her face, her face, that really caught her off guard to begin.

The right half with stippling scars, walking their way just above her eyebrow through the hair covering her scalp. If you looked closely, you could see the imprint of Apollo's boot in the pattern. It was obvious he had stomped in her head, she could remember flashes of it, terror welling like warning smoke through her body as the scream ripped from her throat- the feeling of his shoe tearing through her skin, crunching the bones of her head. Her hand trembled as she brought it to her hair, running her sensitive finger pads over the valleys of her scar. The skin bunched, stiff and rubbery in some spots, yet sunken and thin in others. She could feel her hair thinned in certain areas, where she was sure the damage had peeled away any chance of her thick locks regrowing in those spots.

The left side of her face was no better, the long scar so angry across the tissues of her face. That whip, that whip that sliced so easily through her flesh. He had called her name, it was so simple, him demanding her attention though she was hanging there moments from death. She was too terrified to not give it to him, she was scared to her soul of the repercussions of not lifting her head to meet his enraged snarls. She should have expected the damage, she should have known that in his rampage he would do all he could to remove anything in her life that could keep others from hating her. An inviting face, a sweet smile, those things didn't exist anymore. Instead, she had a forehead torn vertically, an eyebrow with a break between the hair filled by ropey purple scar tissue. Her upper eyelid was left un-damaged, though her lower eyelid was separated by her scar that marathoned through her cheek, so close to her nose, and down to her mouth. Scarlets lips were once rosy and plump, she used to notice some of the younger males staring at them when she worked. Now, the left side of her mouth had been cut in two, separated and sewn back together by her cells working to heal the damage. Her fingers ran over her tragic lips, and as she reached the left side, she noticed she had no feeling.

Her fingers danced to the end of her scar, thinning to the bottom of her chin, she could feel the skin around the tissue, though as her fingertips repeatedly brushed over the prominent umbilical scar, she felt more tears leap to their death. No feeling, she had no feeling in the flesh of her face where her purple, ragged tissue lay. She pressed her lips together, she could feel the chapped, flaking skin touch on the right side, though as the skin closed closer together through the left, there was nothing. No sensation, no tingling, no aware numbness, just nothing. She abandoned her gaze in the mirror, dropping her hands to grip the sink as she inhaled and exhaled deeply. Her breaths were ragged as her body forced her sobs from her stomach, deep and shaking sobs as her body trembled from their ferocity. She cried freely for a moment, the cool sink startling against her heated palms, then startling against her forehead as she allowed her head to fall to the edge of the sink.

Her chest burned so terribly, her stomach alive with fire as disgust grew a pit in her belly. Taking fast breaths, Scarlet lifted her beet red face from the sinks edge and stared through blurry eyes back at the mirror. She blinked away her tears and sniffled as she slowly gazed at her newly clean hair; it would have been pretty if she didn't have disgusting purple tissue covering her face. Her fingers trembled as she took several quick deep breaths, building the courage to do what needed to be done. She needed to see herself.