001. the Omen of the Carrion Bird

( APRIL '09 )

The world outside of Colette Donahue's bedroom was eerily void of life.

A silent humming took the place of the normally-strong winds that blew through the tree leaves and up through the gap where her window was routinely left open, just a little. The whistling of the night air and the shrill screeching of alley cats were Colette's comfort noises, grounding her when her thoughts caused her head to disappear into the clouds, and their absence caused her hyperactive mind to delve into ever deeper and darker territory.

The world inside of Colette Donahue's bedroom was completely still. The table-top fan on her dark-stained oak desk wasn't spinning, the air within the navy-wallpapered room stale and stagnant. Without the air circulation, the papers scattered across the desk's surface remained in their fixed positions, important documents like the Swim Club practice schedule for next semester and her receipts from the convenience store down the street highlighted by the incoming moonlight.

The silence was unsettling and caused a stinging sensation to reverberate through Colette's bones, the feeling akin to being stabbed over and over again by daggers made of ice. Their cold was so profound it left marks on the solidified calcium and froze the sensation off from her nerves. On any normal night, Colette would simply plug her headphones into the mp3 player left on her nightstand to interrupt the quiet and drift off to sleep to the sound of some band from the nineties, but that night wasn't any normal night.

This night couldn't be classified as anything close to normal because despite it being of the early morning hours, Colette was wide awake and yet paralyzed in her bed. From the tips of her toes to the very ends of her fluffy raven locks, Colette couldn't move a muscle, her entire being feeling like she had suddenly teleported to Jupiter because the force weighing down her body was just much too great to be from Earth's gravitational pull. Each of the two hundred and six bones in her skeleton felt like they had been replaced by concrete replicas, the foam mattress underneath her beginning to swallow her whole as she sunk into its comfortable depths.

Sweat dripped from her skin like rainwater, her heart pattering so fast and adrenaline pumping through her veins so quickly that she was overheating in the below-freezing temperatures of her bedroom. The panic that engulfed her chest at not being able to move caused Colette's breathing to fall out of rhythm, her breaths shallow and gasping because she couldn't expand her lungs far enough to inhale a full gulp of oxygen. Not being able to move in the middle of the night was cause enough for concern, but Colette's spine-curling fear stemmed from something much more horrifying on that hauntingly abnormal April night.

The chocolate hues of the teenager's irises were glued to the farthest corner of her small room. Colette couldn't blink, the muscles in her eyes seemed to have fallen under the same spell as the rest of her body━ the strain had begun to cause a pounding headache that echoed through her skull. The migraine paled in comparison to the figure that watched Colette from the showed-encased crevice beside her closet.

The silhouette held Colette in a stare-off, the towering figure encased in a shield of darkness that made his blood-red irises stand out evermore. With his blacked-out sclera, Colette may have believed the blonde-haired silhouette wasn't able to see her, but that train of thought cut off abruptly when the monster tilted its head to the left, mouth spreading wide to reveal a set of glistening, pearly white fangs. The crimson rouge of the vampire's eyes followed down the rest of Its body, splatters of the color resembling a bloody murder scene in some old eighties Thrasher flick. Besides the teeth and eyes, the vampire appeared like any other normal teenager, a more attractive version of the boys who went to Colette's high school. Large muscles strained behind the casual shirt and jeans the monster wore, like a predator waiting to pounce upon its prey.

Then It did the one thing Colette couldn't at that moment━ THE MONSTER MOVED.

In what seemed like a fraction of a second, It had changed position, no longer content with standing in the corner like some typical horror movie creature. The movement of the vampire allowed Colette's eyes to start moving again, her terrified gaze immediately snapping to the creature's new position: ON TOP OF HER. The humming noise that filled the room before had magnified times a thousand, the sound transforming into a vibrating buzz that cut off the rest of the world from Colette's senses. The weight restricting the girl's fragile body had doubled, an entire concrete skyscraper feeling like it was pushing down on her chest instead of just a medium-sized car.

The mind-numbing sound was coming from the Vampire, apparently, because when he gaped his mouth open wider the buzzing turned into a hundred different voices all screaming at once, the Donahue girl's eardrums chanting their protest at the deafening wavelengths. Drool the color of sangria had started to drip from his fangs, sliding down a prominent masculine chin to land on Colette's sweat-drenched forehead. Heart-stopping fear clawed at the walls of the girl's stomachribcagethroat, choking her from the inside-out.

An animalistic hiss emerged from the creature's throat, like that of the fighting alley cats Colette sometimes heard at midnight, the vampire's fangs appearing to become sharper in preparation for its snack. The urge to vomit was overpowering, the feeling of being drowned in stomach acid creeping up on Colette's subconscious. The screaming had grown louder if that was even possible, Colette's ears going numb trying to listen to the godawful death screeches.

IT WAS GOING TO BITE HER, Colette agonized as she peered into the vampire's endless pit of a mouth, snarls and growls leaving his mouth that indicated the extreme hunger that tore through his soul. HE WAS GOING TO DRAIN HER DRY.

In that moment she felt as if she was both alive and dead. Colette shut her eyes to somehow escape what was to be her horrible end, her last thoughts being of her oblivious family still left in the house that the monster could sate his hunger with━

An abrupt beeping caused Colette's heart to jump-start her awake, layers of blankets flailing around her small frame as she shot up from the mattress below her. Air seemed to become trapped in her throat as Colette huffed and puffed, struggling to force oxygen through to her starving lungs. Her mocha irises flicked around every nook and cranny of her bedroom as she searched for any evidence of the nightmarish vampire's presence, the shadows caused by the limited moonlight trickling in through her open window causing her heart to seize up when they looked too much like a human figure.

Once Colette was sure the object of her night terrors wasn't hiding in the shadows, she collapsed back into the comfort of her worn-in sheets. Her lithe hand rose to clutch at the space above her heart, begging it to slow down now that she knew there was no monster out to devour her tonight.

Fuck, she thought, these nightmares better stop soon, my life is stressful enough without them.

۩      ۩      ۩

Home was the first grave Colette had to bury.

She couldn't allow that wound to fester on the bruised parts of her heart, couldn't allow the laceration to continue oozing oxidized crimson with every beat of her most tortured muscle. So when disaster struck and her home came crumbling down around her, Colette did not shed a single tear. She superglued a mask of pretty fake smiles and a million assurances of being okay on top of her sunken cheeks and the vacant look in her eyes. She stayed quiet and respectful when the social workers handed her ill-fitting new clothes and a garbage bag to put them in, said thank you when they moved her across the country and away from everything she'd ever known, covered her blue and purple painted skin with long sleeves in the summer and chunky sweaters in the winter.

Colette did everything she was supposed to do in order to move on after the tragedy, to try and convince herself that happiness was possible again after such horrific events. But new cracks in her porcelain mask continued to form every time her mind drifted back to the twenty-third of April 2003.

She didn't remember what the cause of the explosion was, whether it was faulty wiring or whether she'd forgotten to unplug her hair straightener from the bathroom outlet before leaving the house. All Colette can seem to remember from that night is the smell of scorched linen and burning flesh, the feeling of heat seeping into her skin, and the saltwater clouding her vision as she forced her way into the house enveloped by flames, having returned early from a sleepover due to unexpected nausea. Colette can still recall scratching her friend's mother's arm down to the bone when she cradled her away from the fire, screaming that there was no hope, that her parents are dead and gone. Gone. Gone.

Just like that.

Everything from Colette's perfect little life was stolen from her in that fateful accident: her parents, the crack in the kitchen counter from an overheated pot during her first introduction to cooking, the scrapbooks from her childhood, the too-big winter coats in the hall closet that promised happy times on the coldest of days; everything that made her house a home. All lost to the bright red and orange flames that licked, licked, and ate away at her life.

Flickers of her parents' faces, skin and tissue melting off charred bone as they were consumed by flames, crossfaded across her mind's eye with images of them alive, the way Colette remembered them. Her mother with her cute button nose twitching like a newborn rabbit's as she laughed, the glistening of her chocolate eyes bringing out the warm undertones of her dark brown skin. Her father and the multitude of little constellations dancing across his cheeks, his long-locked hair swaying with each of his hearty chuckles. Colette had adored that the pair of them were always sharing a laugh or a secretive smile like the sun was trapped beneath her parents' skin and could only escape through their mouths.

To survive such a tragic loss, Colette did the only thing she could do. At the heartbreaking age of just eleven years old, she dug a trench thirty-feet deep in her mind, the rust of the shovel permanently stuck on her tongue and the dirt still embedded under her fingernails. She made a time capsule of the life she had before the flames, labelled it To Be Opened: NEVER, threw it in that trench and buried it under layer after layer of hard soil, even paved it over and turned it into a parking lot. Her life of shared ice-cream sundaes and Disney movie-nights was over, and she had to accept that.

Or she would inevitably drown in her own grief.

The jarring sound of pencil lead violently ripping through a sheet of loose-leaf paper acted as the scissors that cut Colette out of her less-than-jovial thoughts. A sharp gasp tumbled from her lips as she looked around at the classroom she was in, getting her bearings before she turned her gaze to the annoyed stare of her English teacher.

"Is there something you'd like to add, Ms. Donahue?" Mrs. Reynolds asked, her right eyebrow arched disapprovingly.

"Uh, n-no Ma'am." Tripping through her sentences seemed to be the only way Colette could ever communicate effectively with authority figures.

With a humph from deep in her throat, the haughty English teacher resumed her lesson on literary symbolism. Letting out a reserved sigh, the Donahue girl flicked her cocoa-colored irises back to her notebook paper, realizing there was no point in saving the torn and scribbled-on slice of a dead tree. She tucked the useless sheet indiscriminately into one of the many folders on her desk and reached behind her into the open pocket of the backpack that hung on her navy plastic chair.

Thin fingers gripped onto a composition notebook covered in stickers, some from the different states across the U.S., others displaying logos from one-hit-wonder bands or pictorial representations of puns she found funny when nothing else could make her laugh.

Colette flipped the journal open to the next empty page, the heavy scent of colored markers and dried coffee stains drifting up to her strong nose. With the sound of her peers scratching their own pencils across paper to copy Mrs. Reynolds' notes on mental health in the nineteenth century, Colette flicked a defined curl out of her face and began to jot down her troubles.

             Dear Diary,

             Can I be horribly cliché for a moment? Life isn't fair. Now that probably sounds incredibly privileged and bratty coming from an American teenager, but I know it to be true.

             I know it's true because I'm currently sitting in the worst English class I have ever taken, with a teacher who's got it out for me, idly listening to her drone on about the symbolism of the color yellow in The Yellow Wallpaper without a wink of caffeine in my system. Sometimes when an author says the walls are yellow they're just yellow, no deeper meaning required, you know?

             Back to the point. I know life isn't fair because I'm required to stay in school all day when I should be strolling through yet another cemetery where my parents aren't buried on the sixth anniversary of their deaths. I should be digging through the town florist's catalog for the perfect bouquet of flowers that mean "I'm sorry I can't make it home again this year, Mom and Dad, I live with someone else's family now that mine's gone." I should be locked in my thirteenth bedroom in six years, crying my eyes out and getting snot all over a blanket (they're softer than tissues so I don't care that it makes more laundry for me). But I can't do any of that typical mourning stuff because I'm forced to remain within this concrete box for another thirty minutes.

             But I'm not bitter about it, I swear.

             At least there's band practice to look forward to this afternoon, I guess. Sidney says she's got a new combination for the bridge she wants to incorporate into the song we're working on and if it's anything like the last one she came up with, I'm sure it will be awesome and just what the song needed.

             We've been practicing nonstop in between studying for finals and Morgan's demanding job (apparently, Mystic Falls' one department store gets busy enough to warrant her manager breaking the law and putting her down for extra hours) hoping to put together a setlist worthy enough of being played in front of an audience. Speaking of jobs, the owner of The Grill says he'll make time to hear our set soon enough, so maybe The Cherry Knots will be taking my workplace by storm. . .

The shrill sound of the end-of-the-school-day bell threw Colette out of the reverie she always found herself drowning in when she hid within the pages of her journal or a lengthy biology textbook. Quickly stuffing her pencil inside to mark her page, Colette pulled the elastic strap she glued on over the composition book before dumping it and her other class supplies in her backpack.

Trying to avoid the disapproving dagger eyes of Mrs. Reynolds, she swung the bag onto her back and made her way out of the stifling dry air of the classroom. Thank god the weekend started that day. Thank god the school year ended in six short weeks. Thank god Mrs. Reynolds only taught English to the underclassmen of Mystic Falls High.

۩      ۩      ۩

Blood pooled beneath the fragile loops and whorls of Colette's fingertips, the repetitive pressure of the guitar strings against her skin burned and sliced over years of healed scar tissue. The pain signals firing through her brain were the only thing keeping her awake on that dreary Thursday afternoon. Pieces of melodies and choruses played over and over again, her eardrums ringing with the phantom sounds they made when deconstructed on the very same electric guitar her father had gifted her for her tenth birthday.

Colette's head continued to lethargically bounce along with the music that reverberated off the walls of Sidney's parents' garage as The Cherry Knots officially moved into their third hour of band practice. The first hour had Colette practically bouncing off the walls with the overdose of coffee she'd stolen from Sidney's kitchen, having paid no mind to her friends and made herself the biggest cup of joe she could after Morgan had parked the car in the driveway. At the turn of the second hour, the Donahue girl had welcomed the clear mind from the almighty crash the caffeine had left behind and while her hands shook like she'd been electrocuted, Colette was able to appear relatively normal to her two best friends.

Okay, maybe that was a stretch.

In the real world, down on earth and away from the clouds Colette's head were perpetually stuck in, Morgan Kobayashi and Sidney Fell were trying everything they could think of to tear Colette out of the daze she seemed to be consumed by. The two girls called out for Colette, played obnoxiously loud on their instruments, Morgan had even clapped in front of her friend's face a few times and nothing. It appeared that Colette was simply lost in her idle strumming, a slow and morose litany of notes pouring out as she swayed from side to side.

The girlfriends shared a look of disbelief, not comprehending just how Colette was able to ignore all of their attempts to shake her from her funk. Sidney puffed out a loud sigh, disturbing the curtain bangs that graced each side of her face before she reached down and grabbed onto a drumstick.

"Heads up!"

The wooden stick went flying across the room and smacked! right in the middle of Colette's forehead, hitting the paint-splattered concrete floor with a clatter.

"Ow, what the hell?!" Six guitar strings followed with a screech in protest.

Colette rubbed harshly against the acute pain that echoed through the space between her eyebrows, warm brown skin scrunched in distaste. Obsidian irises tinged with irritation turned to look at the two guilty parties, the sheepish expression on Sidney's face and the gracile hands that covered Morgan's no-doubt agape mouth lessening Colette's annoyance with her friends.

"I drifted off into the deep end of the pool again, didn't I?" she sighed remorsefully.

"We've been trying to get your attention for almost twenty minutes, Cole," Morgan broke the news gently, the concern heavy in her voice.

A large puff of air rushed out of Colette's lungs, her eyes downcast. Lifting the strap of her most prized possession over her head, the Donahue girl placed the Fender Mustang in its stand and took a seat on one of the unused amplifiers that littered their practice space. With an overexaggerated and frustrated groan, Colette hid behind a shield constructed of her own hands.

A-one, and a-two and. . . A single look was shared between the other members of The Cherry Knots before the two girls were moving to comfort their mutual friend and bandmate. Sidney rode over to Colette on the leather wheeled stool she'd stolen from her father's barbershop, Morgan rolling her eyes fondly at her girlfriend's immaturity.

With a smothering side-hug from both girls that definitely shifted some of Colette's internal organs closer together, the Kobayashi teenager cuddled onto the amplifier with the down-trodden guitarist. Sidney gripped Colette's hand in support and asked, "Where's your head taking you, Cole? Just how deep of a pool are we talking here?"

"I've been having these... nightmares, for coming up on two weeks straight," Colette revealed to her friends, "I-I can't sleep and even The Morgan Special hasn't been helping..." Fear had lodged itself high up in her throat.

The Morgan Special, as her two best friends so ardently labeled the concoction, was developed by an older Kobayashi sibling before they went off to college and had originally consisted of just two espresso shots mixed with a dose of NyQuil. The idea behind the disgusting beverage was that the espresso would force the guzzler to stay awake by increasing their heartrate, exhausting their body to the point where when the NyQuil kicked in, they'd succumb to unconsciousness quickly. When Morgan moved into high school, she'd taken her sibling's dangerous recipe and added a 5 Hour Energy into the drink. Needless to say, if that wasn't helping Colette catch some shut-eye, something was seriously wrong.

"If you don't mind us asking, why haven't you gone to the Fosters with this? Mr. Herrera is literally a psychiatrist-slash-teacher, maybe he could tell you what the dreams mean," Morgan brought up the obvious solution to Colette's problem and if it was that easy, Colette would have gone to her pseudofather in a heartbeat. 

"I-I can't. I only got placed with the Herreras at the end of September last year, it hasn't even been a full eight months, I don't want to give them an excuse to ship me off already... and they just had a baby, so I can't add to that stress, I-I just..." The saltwater collecting on the outskirts of Colette's eyes dissuaded Sidney and Morgan from questioning her about the dreams further, the duo instead rubbing their friend's shoulders and back to prove to her they supported her decision.

Hazel irises met chocolate over Colette's head, the other two-thirds of the band recognizing that the Donahue girl's reluctance to share her problems with her foster family stemmed from her fear they would throw her out on the street like her last so-called "family" did.

Bumping her shoulder with Colette's, Sidney let a quiet laugh fall from her lips. "Well, if you decide you need a bodyguard in your sleep, send those dreams my way," she then lifted her left arm and flexed, showing off her well-toned biceps from years of drumming.

The sleep-deprived girl released a quiet giggle. The Fell teen smirked, knowing her distraction tactic had worked.

Morgan scoffed at her girlfriend, "And who are you gonna beat up with those miniscule things? The Easter bunny?"

"If they're so miniscule, as you say, then why do you like staring at them so much?" Sidney dropped her right eye down into a wink.

Colette coughed and then burst into a loud round of cackling laughs, her best friends following suit. 

۩      ۩      ۩

Strawberry rouge collided with a searing crimson as the sun bid her farewell for the evening. A haze of fog had settled over the humble and unassuming street known as Aberdeen Crescent, greeting Colette Donahue as she hugged her bandmates and called out a goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Fell who were no doubt rejoicing in her departure from their home. 

Several of the Founding Families of Mystic Falls had been hostile towards Colette since she'd arrived in their town an outsider in a rusting Toyota Lexus LS400 eight months ago, the Proud and Nobel Fells the ringleaders of the campaign to sneer and glare at the girl whenever she was near. The guitarist had no idea how Sidney could withstand having such snobbish and disapproving parents, especially when she had to hide such a large part of herself from them.

(Colette supposed it was debatable whether having homophobic parents was better than having dead parents, but she digressed.)

Knocking the slightly-morbid thoughts from her head, the Donahue girl shrugged her backpack higher on her shoulder as she fumbled with the keys to her baby Francine. The moss-colored 2000 Volkswagen Beetle did not stand out amongst the vehicles parked on Aberdeen Crescent, despite its abnormal coloring, not with all of the rust slowing consuming the edges of its wheel wells and the duct tape desperately holding one of the headlights in place. After finally locating the right key, Colette opened the driver's door with one hand and tossed her stuff into the passenger seat with the other. However, a scene straight from an Alfred Hitchcock movie prevented her from entering the car. 

A black mass swooped down in front of Colette's vision, ruffling the wind through her semi-tight curls and letting out a mighty "caw." The teenager's sympathetic nervous system kicked into hyperdrive, causing her to duck low and cover her vulnerable face with widespread hands. She waited to see if the midnight incarnate would strike again, and just when Colette began to relax the animal plummeted towards her and slashed into the palm of her left hand with its talons. 

"Shit." Colette hissed through the skin of her teeth at the searing pain that rippled outwards from the laceration up her forearm, inspecting the wound and watching the blood pool and drip off the ball of her wrist. Luckily for the Donahue girl, the cut was small and shallow, probably wouldn't even need stitches.

Black feathers, thick neck, rounded wings, and wing-tips spread like fingers. . . had to be a Corvus brachyrhynchos.

When it became clear the corvid would not visit her again that evening, the startled guitarist hopped into her vehicle and started up the engine, knowing the mechanical noise would keep the crow away from her. Her already overstressed heart pattered away in her chest as Colette  sped out of the Fell's driveway, taking a detour onto the winding highway roads that branched off of Mystic Falls proper. 

Ready to enjoy a drive through the backroads surrounded by the vast Virginian forest, she flipped on the radio, sighing pleasantly when the first notes of You Found Me by The Fray sounded through the mediocre speakers. As fading white road-stripes blurred passed the corner of her vision, Colette found herself becoming drowsy. 

Eyelids drooping, almost two weeks without adequate sleep had left Colette in a constant, fragile state between REM sleep and wakefulness.  She'd drifted off in the oddest of places since her terrifying dreams had started: while leaning on a mop during her shift at The Grill, on a school picnic table outside during lunch hour, and now it appeared while driving on the highway was about to be added to that list. . .

A single moment of realization had Colette jolting in her seat, desperately trying to keep herself awake by slapping the side of her face, hard. Her new sensation of rejuvenation allowed Colette to see the human-shaped obstacle that lied stretched out in the middle of the road that her car was rapidly hurtling towards. Gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles faded in their normal brown color and with mocha eyes blown wide, Colette slammed her foot on the break pedal. Francine squealed in protest before coming to a jarring stop a few feet from the absolutely insane person laying out in the middle of the road.

"Dude, what the fuck are you doing!? I almost gave you, like, the worst version of a punchbuggy imaginable!" 

Those were the first words Stefan Salvatore had heard since making the trip out to his hometown of Mystic Falls and they reinforced his belief that it had been a mistake. His best friend of the last one hundred and forty-five years had told him he'd live to regret the decision when he talked to her about it over Christmas, but he truthfully hadn't wanted to listen to her well-meaning concerns. Living in small fishing villages in Alaska, gorging on bears and marmots could only distract him from his curiosity and nearly overbearing homesickness for so long.

He missed the smell of nutrient-rich water tumbling over the falls of Steven's Quarry in the spring, freshly melted from the cold snaps of winter. He missed the kaleidoscope of colors in the fall when the trees would drop their leaves before beginning their long nap. And, while he was loathe to admit it, he missed having that feeling of familial belonging he found he could only experience within the town's limits, even though he would prefer to keep his brother far, far away from his life after what happened the last time he let his guard down. 

That was another reason altogether why it was a mistake to return to Mystic Falls. Was fifteen years really long enough for the community to forget the tragedy that had occurred? Not much had changed since then. While it was true a new mayor had been elected (naturally, another Lockwood had followed in the footsteps of every Lockwood before them) and the police force had seen a high turnover in staff, surely there were people who still remembered? 

"I really hope you're not looking to the stars for guidance, or whatever, because astrology is a sham and the biggest mockery to human intelligence since the whole aliens-made-the-pyramids conspiracy." 

The words formed by a voice tinged with sass tore Stefan away from his existential brooding, causing him to turn his head on the asphalt and discover that a girl had joined him on the road. Her dark chocolate curls splayed out around her head like a crown of holiness in Medieval paintings, her soft but striking features pointed towards the sky as she ignored his gaze. The smirk on her plump rosewood lips proved that she wasn't ignorant to his attention, however. 

An amused cough escaped Stefan's throat as he returned to looking at the constellations above them. "No, no, I'm just thinking about whether coming back to this town was a good idea." 

"It wasn't."

The conflicted boy's green eyes shot over to look at the girl once again, this time meeting swirling pools of chestnut and withheld laughter. A set of bushy eyebrows rose in question and a snort echoed from the unknown girl. She pulled the sleeve of her navy flannel shirt over her hand to cover her mouth, preventing any further signs of lightheartedness taking over her features. 

"I'm sorry, it's just that Mystic Falls has a habit of sucking the proverbial soul out of people. Everybody here lives their lives going through the motions, with not even the occasional teen pregnancy to stir shit up, and eventually they die being the same person they've been since adolescence. It's sick." Colette scoffed in annoyance at the events in her life that had landed her in this complete wasteland of potential. 

"Do you think you'll end up like that one day? Stuck in one place forever." The boy with golden hair asked the mysterious teenager who laid adjacent to him, feeling like they were infinitely close and incredibly far apart somehow in that moment in time.  

"If my plans of running off to university don't end up working out, perhaps. You know, maybe you should stay for a while, might make the next two and a half years tolerable," Colette smiled cheekily at the boy she didn't know the name of, showing off a set of sparkling teeth. 

"Oh, Yeah? Maybe. . ." Before Stefan could continue his equally teasing sentence, the fragrance of delicious copper tinged with saltwater floated its way to his senses, his good mood crashing down around him like a skyscraper in a demolition site. 

Taste her. . . The beast within hissed inside his head. Taste her. . . 

"A-are you bleeding?" The struggled boy choked out. It was with a stroke of luck that Colette had resumed looking at the stars and forest surrounding her, for if she had tilted her eyes back to her acquaintance, she surely would've screamed in fright. The sclera of Stefan's eyes resembled the night sky above them, his irises flooding with crimson. Lightning blue veins broke out on his cheeks and the space under his eyes, Stefan could feel the ache of his canines sharpening ringing throughout his maxilla. 

She's yours for the taking, the little bird. . .  The monster let out a dark chuckle. She's all yours.

No!

Colette brought her injured palm up to check on her wound and sure enough, the cut had reopened and was slowly oozing her lifeblood down the skin of her wrist and forearm. 

"Shit! Yeah, I should probably get going and clean this. . ." Looking to the space on the road that had once held the crazy stranger, the Donahue girl found it to be vacant. Her earthy eyes scanned the area of the highway around her, finding not a single trace of the boy she'd spent a good while speaking with. Doubt crept into her mind. Had she imagined him? She knew she was sleep-deprived, but to hallucinate an entire conversation with someone she's never met before?

I should get back. 

Colette pushed the eerie incident behind her, climbed back into her beloved Francine and drove the remaining thirty minutes to her living situation. The Herrera household was a decently sized home that dated back to the Edwardian Period, complete with ornate details lining the eaves of the roof.  In the overwhelming fog of that spring night, the cracks in the brickwork arches above the windows of the ochre-yellow house looked like small ghosts leaching from inside, crying out for help. Desperate to crawl into bed and hopefully achieve a state of true restfulness, Colette made quick work of parking her baby and forcing her way into the residence, barely bothering to lock the front door behind her before dashing up the narrow staircase. 

The brunette knew that her foster-father Dominic was staying late that night out at Whitmore College, conducting some trials for the research paper he'd been working on for months. He was a bit of a workaholic, but he hadn't done anything detrimental to her so far, so Colette believed his fatal flaw could be overlooked in favor of his shy but humorous personality. Her siblings Corey and Simon were both staying over at friends' houses tonight, meaning it would be just her and the postpartum-recovering-Iphigenia for the evening, who was probably already snuggled up in. . . 

There was blood on the hallway carpet. Bright maroon blotches leading to larger pools of the viscous liquid, looking like a demented Rorschach painting that made a shiver of fear tingle down Colette's spine.

 Please, please, not again. 

Almost paralyzed in her fear of finding another parental figure dead, Colette chanted her feeble hope into the universe as she followed the blood trail three doors down from her own bedroom and into the master suite that looked out over the front yard. The thick walnut door appeared to have been blasted off its hinges, hanging precariously in the doorway. The inside of her foster-parents room provided further evidence that something nefarious had occurred that night in the Herrera home.  

Ripped pieces of clothing littered the floor, long slashes tearing the fabric asunder. The bedsheets were strewn across the bed, the pillows smeared with what looked to be vomit. The worst part of the picture painted by the scene laid out before Colette's eyes was the amount of blood everywhere. On the bed, darkening the emerald sheets into an inky black color. On the walls, staining the family pictures the Herreras had forced Colette to pose for when she first arrived in Mystic Falls. On the ceiling, in the remnants of what must of been high-velocity spurts reaching heights of over eight feet. Blood was everywhere.

A wailing cry echoed from the Herrera's nursery.

Not again. 

AUTHOR SPEAKS. . . the first chapter of Colette's is here!! i'm disappointed in myself that it took so long to be written + published but first chapters are my nemesis so what could i expect lmao. Please leave your comments/predictions for the story because i love reading them and they make my day!! ily <3