Hanging By a Thread [ Jezebel ]

[Tigra]

Rain was coming down hard, each drop like a bullet against her back as Tigra knelt over the tatters of what was left of her front driver’s side tire, the road behind her for a hundred yards a long stretch of burned rubber, black marks criss-crossing the entire street until they ended where the car sat now in idle. Grinding her teeth, she glared at the shredded tire and could feel rage creeping through her every nerve, threatening to spill from her in a cry of fury. Instead, she stood and moved to her trunk, resting a hip on the car as she pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “Can’t believe this ****...” she snapped to herself as she tapped at the screen before pushing it up against her ear.

This would happen when she was out on her own. The line rang once before a tone told her the lines were busy. She growled, and turned to throw her phone into the darkness. “It’s just a little bit of rain, you assholes! It’s not going to kill you!” She shouted into the night, but nothing answered her aside from the sharp patter of the heavy rain against the asphalt. She stopped herself from firing a punch into the car’s door, deciding the body work wasn’t worth the tiny bit of relief that she would feel from striking her baby. Instead, she clenched her fist tightly, the knuckles bone white as she turned away from the car, flipping the keys in her unclenched fist and shoving them roughly into her pocket. She was going to have to walk, it appeared, and hoped she could find a tow company before the cops found her car.

The heat of her anger in her cheeks made the rain feel like a hot steam against her skin, and suddenly she was thankful for the rain. It felt good to feel its cool touch against her flesh, and she paused and placed her hand on the railing of the bridge she’d stopped in front of, tipping her head back to face the sky. Eyes closed, she basked in the moment as she took a slow breath for her nerves, her fingers clutching the steel rail so hard she could feel it bend beneath her grasp. The entire thing was absolutely ridiculous.

She was put out of action by something as asinine as a flat tire. She was Tigra motherfucking LeChànce, and this was twice now that something completely foolish had happened to her car in Harper Rock, and she was starting to suspect that there was something more to the whole thing than it seemed. First she was slipping on ice when the road was completely clear, and now she was sporting a blown out tire just days after she’d replaced the whole set. Something about the whole thing didn’t set well with her, and it made her furious. As she turned to the bridge, grinding her teeth viciously in a black fury, she didn’t even notice the woman standing in the center of the bridge’s pedestrian walk, even as she stormed towards the unwitting lady standing in the middle of the raging midnight storm.

[Jezebel]

The rain had been cascading down in a torrential downpour for hours now, each drop threatening to be one that flooded the river. Already, the water washed over her bare feet as she stumbled to the barrier, trembling fingers curling over the soaked metal as agony ripped through her stomach. Through the slanting waterfall, she could barely make out the lake below as it churned like an angered God, the sound of crashing water against the stone pillars battling the thunder that crashed violently overhead. The violent, roaring wind whipped her crimson hair across her face, causing the loosened strands to knit together as the rain attempted to wash away the tears that fell with as much tenacity as the storm.

Bile rose up her throat, the acidic burn clawing its way through her esophagus until she doubled over, spewing a mouthful of whiskey and phlegm onto the soaked pavement. Wiping the back of her hand across her bruised lip, Jezebel finally lifted her gaze to the sky, allowing the cooling rain to wash across her heated skin. Her head felt as if it had been filled with cotton, and the hand that gripped the metal was beginning to numb. Just let go, a voice whispered in her mind, louder than the thunder, but quieter than the frantic beat of her heart. You’re just like your mother. You belong together.

Clutching the rail until her knuckles began to ache; she parted her lips on a desperate shout, her voice becoming hoarse as she screamed into the night. The sound was eaten by the wind, and she slammed her fists against the stone, her skin tearing beneath the violent abuse. It had been simple! Her life had been laid out in front of her, the path carefully selected and paved just for her. She had her education, she had her career, and she had her fiancé. Though she was far from her home in Ireland, she hadn’t felt alone. Her friends had been with her every step of the way, and that dark, quiet voice that had haunted her since childhood had been quiet. Everything had been going according to schedule until she had woken Monday morning to find that ******* note taped haphazardly to her door.

In that second that she had held the paper clutched in her fist, everything had fallen apart. Her world had opened, its gaping maw threatening to swallow her whole. He hadn’t made it any easier. Instead of allowing her to handle her heartbreak in the only way she knew how – with ice cream and whiskey – he had ended up at her door. Day after day, he stopped by the apartment, each day shredding her heart even more until there had been nothing left but a few scraps – and he took those, too. He had been the one thing that held everything together, the glue that kept her broken pieces in place, and he had left. Without him, everything that had seemed so simple had begun to weigh her down. Her classes became too much, the stress of the upcoming musical crowding her mind until she couldn’t breathe.

The bills began to pile up, each one more daunting than the last, and she had taken to using them for kindle to the fire pit that consisted of his clothing. The flames had been enough to calm her for a while, and then she had walked into work, to see him with a blonde wrapped around his waist. It was the sparkle of her engagement ring on her slender finger that had caused the crack to rupture. Another woman might have walked up to them, someone else might have smiled, but she had turned away.

The only sure way for her to escape the heartache behind her was to go out into the raging storm.

With her chest feeling as though a thousand bricks now rested upon it, she turned to face the water, her fingers gripping the railing tighter as she began to hoist herself up. Heels long since abandoned somewhere in the middle of the bridge, her bare feet replaced her hands as she stood to her full five foot two frame and balanced on the edge of life and death. She could hear her mother in her head, the screams of agony as her soul was ripped apart by an unknown illness, the madness in her gray eyes when her father had turned his back on her and shuffled a young Jezebel off to safety. She remembered the whispers of her teachers as they bowed their heads, worried about any move that she made.

She looks just like her mother! God, I hope that’s where the similarities end.
We can’t have another scandal on our hands.

She had only been a child, but those words had embedded deep into her soul. Her mother hadn’t asked for her mind to betray her – nor had she asked for her husband to abandon her. All she had asked for was someone to love her, to understand the madness that darkened her heart, but no one had. Even Jezebel, who had once clung to her tattered Institute gown, had grown to detest her. It was because of her that the doctors had chosen to keep her medicated, just in case. She had often wondered what that just in case had meant, but now, as she watched the water twist violently beneath her, she knew. She had thought she was safe – she had thought she had escaped the Ellendale curse, but she had been so ******* wrong. With that demonic, sinful voice lovingly caressing her mind, she took a breath…

… and finally, let go.

[Tigra]

Taking a deep breath, the tall LeChànce matron shoved a hand back through her long chocolate hair, the soaked strands a thick curtain that draped across her shoulders, feeling like it weighed a ton against her scalp. As nights went on, she realized, her emotions were becoming more and more of a problem; particularly rage. She had to remind herself that letting herself go like that wasn’t who she was. More accurately, it wasn’t who she had always been, but she was still changing, still settling into life as one of the undead. She did her best to learn what she could from those around her, by watching and listening to conversations and events that weren’t hers to be a part of in the absence of anyone she’d ever known in this part of her world. Some nights were harder than others, reconciling her life as a vampire with her life as a person, and those nights always weighed on her heavily.

Tonight was one of the worst she’d had in a long time, and she could tell by the way that something as simple as a flat tire had sent her into a blind rage. She sighed, annoyed with herself as she looked down at herself, feeling the anger recede only slightly as she mused on all of the changes she had overcome. Becoming a vampire had been hard, knowing that so many things that she loved were gone to her, but she had asked for this. She had looked Judas in the eye, and without so much as a word, she had begged him for this nightmare.

Blood had become a real problem. The smallest drop made her throat feel dry and cracked, like she hadn't had water in a week, like she was dying of a thirst so intense that she was desperate enough to rip a living thing apart to get at the very last dregs of what remained in the shredded veins. That alone had been so hard to control that she had left a trail of bodies in her wake that she was not proud of. Eventually, though, she had learned to cope and found an outlet that allowed her to escape killing everyone she had ever known. Instead, she found those much more deserving of the death that she dealt, and sought them out in the instances of her uncontrollable rage.

She had grown, as well, and she had grown a lot. That in itself was a chore. Clothes had been a pain in the ***, and were still a problem, though not as often as they had been at the first. She couldn't wear anything that had come to Harper Rock with her, and she had been forced to give away her entire wardrobe to one daughter or another, among any number of her crew for the things she deemed less... appropriate for those she considered her children. She was thirty seven this year, so gaining almost an entire foot in height was very hard to explain. Impossible, almost, and it had almost seen the end of her connection with her loved ones... her mortal loved ones, and the only thing still holding her to anything in this whole world anymore after the note she'd found only a few weeks ago. She had been fortunate, after nearly beating Dr. Black to death the week after she had been turned, that she had come to the idea of her explanation that had allowed her to remain among her family.

Instead of getting angry again, she smiled as she walked, her eyes turning away from her musculature and glancing ahead again to where she had seen the lone woman standing in the rain. She came up short when she saw that the woman had climbed over the barrier and stood on the outer edge of the bridge, leaning over the gaping mouth of darkness that was lost in a sheet of rain. Had it not been for the street lamp the small redhead had stood under, Tigra would likely have missed her entirely in this gale. Squinting her eyes against the rain, she could see the woman lean out, her head moving like she was searching the darkness for something. Answers, something inside of her whispered, and she felt a pang of sympathy for the woman.

She knew what she was seeing; knew a lost soul when she saw it. She knew, too, that what was going through that young woman’s mind was not the answer she was looking for.

The anger bled from the tall Canadian as she approached, replaced with an emptiness that kept the pain of her own problems from surfacing. Even still, her throat felt tight, like she was about to choke on her own tongue. She cleared her throat, and stepped into the ring of light that the crisp street lamp made in that thick darkness, taking a breath to open a dialogue with the poor thing, when, without so much as a glance to her, the woman’s hand just... opened.

Delicate fingers brushed along the stone of the support, leaving four trails in the sheet of water that poured down its face as her hand passed along, until it found emptiness, the small woman’s frame simply tumbling out into the darkness, the storm snapping its teeth around her with a crack of thunder that caused the bridge to tremble beneath her feet, the bright flash of lightning a brief flicker of light before the entire world was swallowed in darkness, the bulb of the lamp above her head exploding from being struck.

That poor woman was swallowed whole by the fury of the storm, the wailing of nature all around all of them, and the maelstrom inside of herself. Tigra knew that pain, knew what it was like to want that release... and she knew what it was like to wake up the next morning and weep in relief that she hadn’t sought it.

She bit her lip with enough ferocity that she could taste her own blood before she felt the pain. The shock of what she’d seen left her numb. She couldn’t feel the rain pelting her skin, or the way the sharp gusts of wind sliced through her with an icy cold that was completely irregular for this time of year. She had only an instant to decide on what she would do; if she would turn her back on what she had seen and keep walking, looking for a phone, or if she would dive after that young woman, that strange, tortured soul, and do what she could do to take that poor thing in her arms and put her best into making her whole again.

It was a mother’s instinct to protect, to want to mend the damaged.

That was the only explanation she could give later, for what happened.

She couldn’t recall climbing the barrier, or looking over the edge into the darkness for the woman that she dove after. The only thing she would be able to recall was that, one instant she was standing in the dark, staring at the place in that black void where the woman had stood an instant before, and the next she felt the wind rip at her face as she fell through the air and into the icy black water below.

[Jezebel]

She didn’t remember falling.

She only remembered the darkness that rose to greet her, the water that wrapped around her slender form and threatened to rip it to pieces as the waves crashed into her. When the current pulled her under, she didn’t fight. There was no need to. She hadn’t escaped the curse, and she hadn’t escaped the darkness that had taken over her mind. It had seeped into her soul with each thing that dared to go wrong, until she had been consumed by the taunting laughter demanding she end it all. The alcohol had only numbed the pain, but there hadn’t been enough booze in the world to dull her senses completely.

With her arms held out to her sides, the current spinning her in circles, she let it pull her further in. When she parted her lips, the water swarmed and filled her lungs, and still, she didn’t fight. She didn’t have the energy to – and it wouldn’t have mattered. Within seconds she was pulled deeper – and then there was pain. She didn’t understand the agony that suddenly claimed her, and it wasn’t until the dark water around her turned red that she realized she had been struck. At first, her mind couldn’t decipher what she had witnessed – and then there was another explosion of pain. The current had pulled her beneath the bridge, and in her despair, she hadn’t calculated just how she would die.

It wouldn’t be the water that filled her lungs that killed her, but the way the waves slammed her into the stone pillars. When another gust of wind caused the water to move, she was forced back against the stone, her skull hitting it with a sickening thud that was drowned beneath the crash of the waves. The darkness surrounded her, and she watched the red dance through the water, until her lashes fluttered closed. The pain was now a distant memory as her body became victim to the enraged waters, and as she succumbed to the abyss, the soft whisper of her mother’s haunting lullaby filled her mind.

Soon, she would be free.

[Tigra]

Hitting the water was like hitting solid granite, the shock of the impact jarring every bone in her body in her headlong rush to catch up to the young red-haired woman she had seen disappear into the dark.

She had been so young, with so much of her life left ahead of her. To see so much potential just thrown away in a moment of fitful, adolescent passion… it was too much for the older woman to bear. She couldn’t shoulder the weight of that guilt, of knowing that she had been there to see it happen, to see that young life thrown to the wind, into the waiting arms of mist, and to be couched at the bosom of Death. It was just too much to ask of a mother, of a decent soul with the power to do something.

She tasted the blood in the water long before she could see her. She could smell her out, like wounded prey, well before she could see the crimson that flowed away from her trapped figure. She could see into that darkness, the way her limp body was pinned against the support of the bridge, the unmoving concrete pillar an engineered monument to her final moments. Above the din of the storm, she could hear the young woman’s heart flutter, the blood that pumped into the river, and the trauma to her head as she was dashed against the bridge, were quickly overpowering her fragile body. She had only moments left, unless Tigra did something rash; something irresponsible and dangerous.

She was on the woman in an instant, her lithe figure only offering a small bit of shelter from the buffeting waves, though her tremendous strength kept her braced against the concrete column and away from the poor, dying girl. The woman’s eyes were rolled back into her head, as if she were trying to take a peek into her own skull, curious about what the scrambled brains within the cracked egg that had been her head might look like. There was no time for procedure. Not a moment to pause and thing, or to consider. Not a second for calculation. Tigra’s legs straddled the woman, her knees braced against the concrete pillar as she pulled her knife from her belt. She thanked the empty dark that the knife was still there, and not lost in her hasty dive into the icy water. With a quick twist of the blade across her wrist, her own blood gushed into the water to meet the young human’s own life force as it was quickly drained from her.

Without ceremony or question, the tall brunette shoved her wrist against the dying woman’s lips. She could feel her tongue weakly lashing at the wound, trying to push her away in confusion. The Killer didn’t have time for her body’s repulsion, and kept her wrist pressed against her mouth until she could feel her swallow back the blood that had quickly filled her mouth. That was the moment she had been waiting for.

Had anyone been around to ask, not that it would have made any difference to Tigra what anyone else might have thought on the subject, but she would have told them that she believed that the poor girl had suffered enough. She had seen the terror in her eyes at being pinned to that concrete slab, at being cracked open like a piñata. The sight of that fear, of that regret, had made Tigra’s stomach sick. Without flourish, the vampire pulled her knife between the two of them and gingerly placed the tip just beneath the redhead’s left breast. She looked into the girl’s quivering, pain-filled eyes as she took a slow breath, and shoved the blade into her heart.

The girl tensed, her damaged and dying body spasming once, before Tigra gave the blade a sharp twist, shredding her heart.

She died there in her arms.

Quickly, the Killer took hold of the dead girl’s waist, and with one free arm, pushed them away from the bridge’s support, swimming along the rushing river and reaching the bank, where they were shoved from the raging water and into a rock-strewn mudbank. Dirty and cold, at least they were on somewhat solid ground again. The brunette woman gave a sigh of relief and moved to give the corpse space for her return. As she moved, she took hold of the handle of her knife and yanked it from her chest, wiping the blood on her own thigh as she finally fell back against the soft bank of wet clay, waiting for the girl to wake to her new life.