Death Comes in Red
"That boy is no good," Ceallach could remember her father, Padraig, saying when she mentioned that she was going to meet Darragh Ó Conaill that fateful night. (The night she died and did not die.)
"His father is your best friend," she had argued with a fond smile. For the same comment was always made when she made mention of the elder of the Ó Conaill boys. "And Darragh isn't that bad."
Her mother, Eiléanóir, just cast her father a soft smile while touching his arm gently. "Neither of those boys have been right since their mother disappeared, the poor dear. And poor Uilliam, for losing her and the baby."
Her father had sighed at the reminder of what the Ó Conaills had lost and nodded at her, giving her clear permission to do what she wanted. So Ceallach had smiled brightly, swooped in to kiss his cheek, and then ducked out the door into the slowly darkening sky of the evening.
If Darragh had been a decent boy, he would have been officially courting her but Ceallach knew that there were other girls who had been bedded by him. Yet he looked at her with soft eyes more times than not and her parents allowed her very much anything she wanted, including the brutish boy who lived on the farm just down the road from them. And while her family had more money than the Ó Conaills, they were nowhere near wealthy enough to have some kind of arranged marriage.
So she had slipped out into the evening to meet Darragh in her parents barn...only to be left wanting. Until she had heard the scuffle outside and gone to investigate, taking one of the lanterns from inside with her. That was where she saw the foreign woman with her dark skin and darker eyes, her teeth buried in her lover's neck. Ceallach had had a moment of realization for what was happening and then strong arms had closed around her own neck, puling her backwards into the dark. The lantern had fallen from her hands, it's light snuffed out as the candle inside dashed itself to pieces against the glass.
She had remembered struggling. Fighting. Trying to scream but no sound coming out as he covered her mouth with a broad hand.
He had pressed his lips to her cheek in a rough kiss and whispered, "Shhh. It will all be over soon, little girl." Then, pain. Daggers in her throat.
And in desperation, Ceallach had bitten down on the hand covering her mouth, a surge of lukewarm blood filling her mouth. In a fit of madness, she swallowed it instead of spitting and heard the man huff a mumbled cursed into the thin skin of her neck. Then she had gotten dizzy - terribly dizzy and lightheaded - and then found her face cupped between his dark-skinned hands.
"All you had to do was die, little girl," he hissed in the darkness, his forehead pressing against hers. "Now you're a potential complication."
Ceallach remembered grinning with blood still cloying and tacky on her teeth before the lightheaded feeling pulled her under. And then she woke up in a shallow grave. Alone.
Or...not alone.
A young woman - beautiful and foreign - sat demurely nearby, her hands folded in her lap. She smiled gently when Ceallach clawed her way out from underneath the loose dirt. Introduced herself as Xiang and that she was her sister in blood, made by the same sire except that Ceallach was...different. Not wholly cursed to death but only half cursed.
"Did he leave you here?" she had asked. "For me?"
"I stayed for other reasons," her new sister had replied with a small smile. "But thought I should see if you came back. Not all who are fully turned even come back, let alone a half-cursed. You are blessed with the luck that only the gods could give if they existed, sister."
Ceallach didn't feel lucky. (Still doesn't.)
She felt cold. (She's still cold.)
Xiang had told her that Darragh was gone, bustled away onto a ship leaving their home for England, his fate torn from her own. That he didn't even remember her. Not her, not his brother, not anything of his life except the simply living of it. Part of her had mourned the loss and still did, an aching, gaping wound of potential that had been snuffed out of existence in a single night.
Ceallach had not gone home.
She had learned the basics of her existence from her sister - avoid drawing the eyes of hunters, beware their blades, drink carefully from the veins of others - and let her feet take her elsewhere. There was a world beyond the green shores of Eire and it was hers for the taking now.
A hundred years. Two. Three.
Ceallach is half-cursed, torn between mortal and vampire, supposedly weak but she is anything but that. There is something ancient in her, something angry, something full of rage that was never meant to be awoken. Never meant to live this long or sup so deeply from the blood of the living.
She is a red-haired beacon of oncoming death. A thing only spoken of in hushed whispers by the few who have seen her and lived. Fear embodied into the slight body of a small Irishwoman, once only nineteen years old. Only now there are three hundred years stuffed inside of her like the stuffing in the mattress she once slept on. There is too much of her and too little and she barely remembers who that girl was now beyond those moments just before her death and not death. Before she lost all hope for a future that wasn't soaked in blood.
The girl that was Ceallach lives only in those fractured memories. In the last whisper of breath between living and death. In the chance decision to gulp down a mouthful of lukewarm blood after her teeth dug into skin in a bid to survive.
The thing that lives in her skin now feels too big to be contained most days.
It isn't Ceallach.
It isn't even Kelly, the name taken when the one her parents gave her stops sliding so easily off of tongues. (She tries to forget that she only remembers their names now and not how they sounded or even how they looked.)
Her name is that fearful whisper in the night that so many feel when alone in the dark and she smiles cruelly as she stands across the street from the dogtrot house in the humid Southern night. Mosquitoes and other bugs swirl around her in the heated air that carresses her skin but only the other bugs alight upon her skin or clothes. The mosquitoes know better than to steal blood from one that is so akin to them.
There are lights on on the porch and inside, glinting and glowing out from behind curtains and the screen door that securely locks the long hallway at the center of the house away from the outside world. Through the curtains, she can see his shadow - her Darragh, now Darien, so different and yet the same.
She knows his history, of course she does. It is the same as hers and isn't.
They are a mirror to each other.
He lost himself against his will and spent years being a monster, only to pull away from it and become something else. Something more mortal. More human.
She had tried to cling to her mortality, her humanity, and it had spilled out of her hands one drop at a time until she had nothing left. Now she is just empty death walking.
And she hates that he survives where she drowns. That he flies, soaring, while she falls, tailspinning.
That he - the one who damned her, who made her a complication, just collateral damage because Ebio wanted him above all else - is some semblance of happy makes her see red. And she wants to take her nails, her claws, her teeth to everything in his life and tear it asunder. Destroy him as he destroyed her.
Ceallach smiles and stills her trembling hands that want to gut him, whispering, "Wait, wait, wait. Not yet."
There is a perfect moment waiting, dangling before the both of them. When she can strike and it will be perfect and sweet and it will finally - finally - quench the aching, hungry roil in her gut. The ancient thing bored into her bones tells her to wait. Wait, wait, wait until revenge is sweet, like a peach plucked fresh from its tree - all supple skin breaking under the force of biting teeth and sweet flesh and juice spilling over the chin. Perfect.
So, Ceallach steps back, away from the house. Seeing him glance up at she moves, knowing his own senses prickled with the tremor of something. Predator sensing predator. But he won't know it's her.
Not until she has her teeth in his throat.
Timeframe: 2016
Location: Bigby Fork, Mississippi
Event: Ceallach Mac Uallacháin, once the lover of Darragh Ó Conaill, recounts how she became to be the half-cursed child of Malloy...as well as the madness that has slowly consumed her over the years that she has lived.
Consquences: Eventually Ceallach will take some kind of revenge on her once lover, intending to destroy him as she feels that he destroyed her. That destruction may very well include everything and everyone he holds dear.
Comments