Shadows of the Night

this is a nasty little bunny that bit me and wouldn\'t let go until i jotted it down. naturally, once i started, i couldn\'t stop. so here it is.

this will be dark in some places. some might call it sick and twisted. that\'s generally what a trip into my mind is like. please let me know what you think. but let\'s be polite about it, hmmm? no one likes to be flamed, and this is alot of hard work here. thanks ever so.

WARNING: i will warn you all now that this will contain mentions of rape and all kinds of abuse. torture, vampirism and sexual encounters. please, if you do not think you can stomach reading this, do not even start the prologue. it is not pleasant and i\'ve been told its a very dark bit of fiction. you have all been properly warned.

Prologue
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The child sat near her parents, her back to them as her mother and father discussed topics too lofty for a mere five year old to be involved in. She cared nothing for their talk, at any rate. Her concern was given solely to the plaything in her hands. Her nanny, a tired old woman who disliked her charge as much as her charge disliked her, was sleeping heavily in a chair a few feet away. The grayed head rested on the woman\'s chest, a faint snore rumbling up out of the nanny\'s nose. Had the woman been awake, perhaps she could have prevented the events that transpired.

The girl held something in her hands, and it would have taken anyone looking no time at all to see that she clutched a small, soft, furry mouse in the space between her palms. The rodent was a juvenile itself, not too terribly many days old. The girl had lured it to her side with several large crumbs from the sweet she\'d been eating. Since the mouse was still so young, it had no fear of humans yet, and had willingly climbed into the girl\'s open palms. A mistake the furry little beast would not live to regret.

The giggling child held the creature, stroking her little fingers gently over it\'s back for a few moments before the hand the animal stood upon slowly curled shut about it. Panicked, high pitched squeaks errupted from the unfortunate mouse as it too late realized the danger it was in and struggled uselessly to break free of it\'s imprisonment.

The child laughed outright at her helpless victim, ignoring the sharp stab of pain as the mouse sunk it\'s teeth into her palm in a final attempt to get loose. The child refused to let go, her pudgy little fingers closing more firmly about the squirming body. The worm-like tail, hanging out over the edge of the child\'s hand, thrashed wildly for several moments before it first slowed, then ceased altogether. The body clutched between her fingers went still.

The girl opened her hand to stare down at the lifeless being. The beady little black eyes stared sightlessly while the little animal simply lay there. Her laughter moved from girlish giggling to something that might be better suited for one of the padded rooms in a ward of the local lunatic asylum. The child dropped the now dead mouse to the carpeting before her, merely watching it lay there.

\"Nicolette, darling. Come along. Time for your bath, dearest,\" her mother\'s voice drew her attention to the woman. Smiling, the child got to her feet, forgetting instantly about the tiny life she had extinguished.

\"Yes, Mama,\" the girl replied, skipping over to her mother\'s side.

The maid that later found the deceased rodent soon came to wish frequently that she had never taken the position she had in the household. She would have been better off, she believed, had she given herself over to selling her body on the street for a crown or two. Anything would have been better than the nightmare that unfolded before their very eyes.

Four days after discovering the dead mouse, she stumbled across a bird that had gotten entangled in some cording. The poor thing had been dead for some time, as the flies were feasting upon it\'s lifeless carcass. The discovery had been slightly alarming, but not frightening. The following week, a neighborhood cat was found in the backyard, a long length of rope tied about the poor animal\'s neck. Two weeks after that, it was a stray dog.

In the coming weeks and months, a veritable zoo of animals, both wild and domestic, were dicovered slaughtered in some fashion. Rabbits, goats, sheep, chickens, handfuls of dogs and cats. Anything was fair game to the sick person who took relish in acting out these grisly deaths. Some of the animals were happened over accidentally. Others still were placed in strategic places for one and all to see. People openly feared for their pets\' safety. Silently, they feared for their own.

Whispers circulated through out the child\'s household about evil spirits. There was talk of a possible possession. No one said a thing, but they silently acknowledged to one another that the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl with the cherub\'s cheeks was actually a devil in disguise. The staff took to eating their meals away from the house, even going so far as to prepare an entirely different meal for themselves than the one made for the family.

As the child grew, so did the size of her victims. A beggar child was found once on the street, her throat cut. The blonde girl was nearly fifteen years of age at the time and hadn\'t seemed properly concerned upon the discovery of the poor child\'s mutilated body so close to her home. There was never anyone caught and charged with the beggar girl\'s death. When a grown man was found with his chest cut open, his trousers bunched up about his ankles, the staff one by one quit their positions within the household and moved on. By the time the pretty little blonde child had reached her seventeenth year, every member of the staff had tendered their resignations and moved on to different positions in other households. Or other cities.

The family of the house, well to do and always in the eye of the public as upstanding citizens, couldn\'t understand why their domestic help refused to stay. Even more concerning to them was the fact that they could find almost no one to take the abandoned positions in their home. Everyone seemed to be otherwise gainfully employed, or they replied with a wide-eyed stare that they wouldn\'t work in that house for all the money on earth. Only their daughter, whom they doted upon, knew the reasons to these dilemas. And, when she was alone in her room at night, she laughed at their foolishness. At their simple-minded views. She was no devil. She was a god, and as such, she had the power of life and death.

When it was finally suggested to the parents that their own flesh and blood child was responsible for not only driving their staff away, but for all the ghastly murders that had taken place, the couple balked at the idea. They tried to push it from their minds. But the kernal of doubt was planted now, and they couldn\'t help but wonder if the stories they\'d been told were true. Could their sweet angel be the one who had done all those horrible things? They wondered about it until it consumed their minds and filled their every thoughts. When they finally began to cast accusing eyes on their beloved child, she knew that the moment had come.

And so it was that, eventually, the girl\'s parents were discovered dead, slaughtered in their beds while they\'d slept. A gore encrusted axe lay on the floor. Bloodied footprints circled the bed while bloodied handprints were found on the axe handle and the door. Less clear prints were smeared across the lamps and furniture, walls and windows. Many of the police on duty that fateful day got sick mroe than once from the gruesome site, and it took more than a week to find all the missing body parts. The sweet-faced daughter was never found. The police finally deduced that whatever madman had broken into the house and systematically chopped the kind, doting parents into so many pieces of stew meat was also responsible for the daughter\'s disappearance. She was never heard from again, though some swore they heard mad laughter echo across the cemetery where the parents had been laid to rest every year on the anniversary of their deaths.

Perhaps it all could have been avoided, had the child\'s nanny not slept on that life altering day so many years ago. Then again, perhaps it wouldn\'t have changed a thing....

~~~~~~~

i have every intention of making this a multi-chaptered fic. i hope to make the characters complex and believable. i want to try to build my own world and expand it. create something real and imaginable, even though it really isn\'t. i would love to know what you readers think of this. if you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know.