Daisy Halwood

1853

There was something about the chill of the night air that curled around her wedding like a tight fist. She hung off the balcony, her raven hair twirling in turmoil as the ground beneath her feet fell.

A serrated metallic dagger dangled in her corset.

Who knew a little domestic carnage could be a catalyst? Daisy certainly did not until her new husband used the wall decor to furnish her chest dishelving and uprooting her future as a wife.

Daisy rolled her eyes, she felt a sharp pain wrapping her torso in flames. He could have just halted the marital proceedings instead of painting her organs on the rocky ground beneath the Manor. Perhaps that was too simple of a solution, why not give the rain a body to wash away?

Blood soldered her cream silk wedding dress. Daisy's fingers mutilated Johnson Murray's midnight blue frock and she let the mangled cotton pieces polish her wound. She had breathlessly thought that salvation was out of the question.

Her heart stopped in her chest and she waited for heaven or hell to pluck her soul down or up like feathers of a decaying bird.

But the deeper the pain inked her dress a crimson ice shade, the deeper the shadows crawled.

And with one last shallow tear, a pang filled her chest that she assumed to be death, but with a clench of her fist, her soul fought the punitive charges of her new husband's fireplace display dagger. She swallowed the slow chalk winter air, rose and torched her brows square.

The dead pain in her torso was her fuel, she thudded her crass and brutalized satin slippers up the imperial staircase where the rest of the wedding party was continuing their lavish traipse of money, greed and hidden calculated agendas.

Johnson had not noticed her scowling appearance.

Instead the bastard had worriedly clanked at his glass to alert the party of her disappearance. With tears blinking slowly out of his cotton blue eyes, that docile boy she had known for years had succumbed to the greed that her dowry and estate was all his, not to be shared with her.

That she was some kind of fish that the boy had caught in the creek and then killed, bringing it home to him and his father for supper.

Daisy thought to herself damn I traded my dowry for his dimples.

Just thirty minutes ago they were having their first dance and her smile gleaned like the diamond on her finger. The sheen of happiness played across her marble gray-blue eyes and her hands wound around his. He grinned in return but there was something turning in his mind.

His solid frame existed as her safety, never did she worry that he was a dowry-sucking vampire of a man.

He could never hurt her. It was in his nature to protect her... she had confused this nature of his deeply. And when she had finally found the puzzle fragments to complete Johnson Murray, she discovered his only nature was to protect himself.

Johnson called her away from the party, the hope was still naively cratering her rosy cheeks .

With no words he wailed that dagger that apparently he had concealed in his frock's pocket. Her heart shaped face slid into a landside of emotion as shock and a stupefying amount of betrayal tumbled through her bones.

And with that dagger plunged into her something new was created.

She surpassed death.

And what she should have taken as triumph to live on beyond dying, she took in fury.

The lights of the party's eyes had still thrown Johnson into the spotlight.

Daisy lifted her muddy satin dress and exited from the ballroom court to the drawing room. Her mind spilling anger and frustration on autopilot, her fingertips loomed where her late father had exhibited his hunting rifle. It was meticulously cleaned and laid strewn up ready for battle.

She clenched her fists over the stock of the weapon. She too was ready for war.

Teeth chattering but cold murder and vengeance heavy on her breath, she headed back to the ballroom. If Johnson wanted her dowry so badly he could not only get it over her dead overturned body, but also his own.

She would liquidate the barren estate of his soul.

Her blood curdled satin wedding dress carried her to the ballroom. Harp music thumbed between the pale stricken panicked expression Johnson carried when they caught each other's eyeline. His hershey eyes boiled a bitter dark descent into manipulation. He clanked at his glass again.

"My noble wife has found her way back. I was worried to death of what could have happened to her out there ..." He started spouting some excuse she'd wandered off during a walk, Daisy shook her head.

Lies galloped from his mouth and her mutual acquaintances smiled in compliance to her return.

Venom crawled back up to Daisy's face. The panic in Johnson's face shifted when he saw her raise the weapon to him in the crowd. One of his sturdy brows lifted and that was a rarity. Well good, at least I have piqued the devil's interest.

"Darling," he demanded. "Why have you come to show Lord Halwood's armaments. They are meant to be locked up and admired."

The crowd stepped closer with their mouths agape as well, awaiting the scintillating end to the most interesting and querying event to happen in their small insignificant town. Not one to leave a crowd unsatiated Daisy pulled the trigger and watched a goddamn liar thud to the ground.

The crowd gathered around Johnson.

Daisy clicked her tongue in disapproval. Vultures circling around one of their own. The taste of fresh gunpowder littered the air. Constables who had attended the wedding detained her arms and relinquished her father's rifle from her hands. She folded and accepted her actions in full.

She absolutely knew what paper would print her to be.

Daisy was no heroine. She would be inked as a villainous bride. But she knew where she would end up. As the horses drug her body along and lurched to a halt to the sanatorium, the things of the world that could not so easily be filed away were slammed into strapped beds and endless tormented halls.

Her body plied to her circumstances but her mind gutted the consequences for what had to be done. And she learned something very valuable in those walls, a pretty smile can fetch things that hands could not often. Doctors were immediately keen on her and her lively spirit.

She used this on Doctor Benson, some seven years older than her, he looked after her.

Using the excuse, "I would not let a polished woman such as yourself fall to the rust and disdain of the others here. Your only crime was having an abusive husband and dispelling justice at the most crucial of moments."

Daisy grinned. "A maiden does not quickly know a man is to hurt her...she learns...she grows and bends away from the things that might kill her. Occasionally having to cut the weeds that dare to harm her."

Benson's only eligible concern that plighted him was her insistence that she was undead.

"But I see you," he would solidify with an abhorred expression. "You are as alive and well as any patient here. This is but a symptom of the trauma your body and mind has been through since the death of your husband."

Daisy glanced quickly away and a stray orchestrated tear mused at her eyes. " I felt myself die. It wasn't that I saw some celestial light. I just saw minutes of darkness and then a ping of pain that brought me back to life." She spoke the truth but made it sound like hysteria.

After all Benson wouldn't trust her if he knew her sanity wasn't a muddled eclipse.

He stroked her cheek as a sign of sensitivity, and this was how Daisy knew she could strike him. She used the steak knives she obtained from the Doctor's dining halls against his throat. Daisy could have split it like a violin letting the music of his corrupt nature spill out of his neck.

The truth she had learned about Benson early on was that he had killed many of the children of the sanatorium who had mental disabilities. Benson examined them and raped them in their sleep. When he had used them through they would end up in the mortuary.

Not that she had needed a reason to kill him but to have one was especially convenient.

Benson struggled against her tight death grip around him. Daisy gritted her teeth, "Tell me Doctor, how do I get out of this place? You are in such a precarious position that you may have to just walk me right out the front door. I know your secrets Doctor, please test me on them."

Benson's charcoal eyes split wide open. " How...how do you..."

"I was the quiet one you did not notice when you began, cleaning the mortuary because I could not mind my mouth. But I'm sure you are well aware that well water and suds cannot clean those mortuary floors in earnest can they Doctor?" She raised a knowing eyebrow at him.

"But I..." He wormed his way forward towards their exit. The closer they got to the door the more he pleaded for her to understand him. "Please Ms. Halwood...I'm not the problem."

"The problem, Doctor, is not that I fully understand your facetious reasoning. No, I understand you all too well. I've dispelled justice to your kind before. No, Doctor, the problem is that I snuck into your office to declare myself dead and I need some assets to relocate myself."

The Doctor's brows furrowed intensely. "But Ms. Halwood...when you let me go I will go to authorities and this time you won't be able to secure yourself a safe respite in a sanatorium."

Daisy and Benson reached the door and the crevasse of fate faltered around them.

Her dark gray-blue eyes sank as she narrowed herself to him. "Perhaps safety should be more of something you should concern yourself with, Doctor."

Daisy began to singe his ivory skin with a scarlet rouge crescent at the nape of his neck.

Just as Daisy trembled to sink the blade deeper, a pin prick needle drummed through her skin as a cold fluid breezed into her icy veins.

This embarrassing scuttle by the Doctor was humorous, Daisy laughed at this attempt.

"Symptom of the trauma you say, Doctor?" She huffed at him as she thrust the steak knife scalpel against his carotid artery. Benson didn't know the meaning of trauma. He was a cause of it, not a compass showing others the destination of it.

She delved deep into his pockets and extracted the assets she needed to restart her life. She felt her heart stop again betting that the syringe was some death exacting chemical that malfunctioned at whatever Daisy Halwood was now.

Daisy did not enjoy this aspect of justice, the aftermath. The blood that had been poured to get her here. Her feet just flung her body forward for her future had only now had a possibility. That day she had awoken and donned a wedding dress was truly the beginning of anew.

She gulped and looked down at the diamond she had now gotten blood on. Wiping away a real tear once she got to the woods just beyond the sanatorium, she felt everything stop more than when she had died. An echo of their first dance cried at the uneven flooring of the forest.

The reverberations of her wedding night spilled something that could not be cleaned. Not by washcloth, not by rag, but maybe blood would clean this arena. Make it sparkle something different. Something less damnably broken than she found the world to be now.