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Esperanza 'Peri' Cole
The mercedes pulled up to the curb with a squeal of tyres, and a one-sided argument spilled out into the morning air as the passenger door was flung open. A petite teenage girl unfolded herself from the car, silent as she had been for the entire trip. She closed the door behind her without once looking back or saying farewell, and the young blond pouted in frustration before roaring away. The girl did not care...soon her father would grow tired of his new wife and cut and sew himself another perfect pretty doll.
Those who had turned around at the sudden noise saw an androgynous frame dressed in black boots, ragged blue jeans and a black sweater with hood pulled up over her face. Her head was down, her eyes completely hidden, strands of black hair escaping from the shadow beneath the hood. For a while, she just stood there, shoulders hunched, feet planted. Then slowly her head lifted as her eyes followed the path from the road to the school, along grassy verges and up paved walkways scattered with quaint benches and complaining children. Her eyes too were black, twin pools of darkness ringed with deep shadows. Her face was pale and gaunt, and beneath the slightly baggy clothes, she was just a little too thin to be healthy. She tugged the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands, in a surprisingly vulnerable motion. What people could not...would never...see were the tracings of scars on wrists, arms, chest and stomach. Her body was a network of fine white lines, an etched map to a world of misery and pain. The two deepest scars lay along the inside of her forearms, angry red welts sliced through old healings. These were the reason she was here...forced to attend this prison of a school for people that were nothing like her. All because her father thought she had tried to kill herself. She suppressed a shudder at the vast expanse of misunderstanding that lay between them, that he displayed by assuming that she could take her life. The thought of dying scared her more than the thought of pain ... and she had often reflected that this might be why she gained such intense pleasure and relief from draining her heart through the holes in her flesh. The little cuts took her through most days, but when things got bad she had to sluice the pain, taking herself closer and closer to the invisible line each time. She was not sure how long it would be before she would be forced to stop ... one way or another.
And now, because she had been caught once, she was standing outside her new school in the crisp autumn air, with the sense of a change coming. Ignoring the probing, questing eyes of her fellow schoolgoers, she rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck, and stalked up the path towards the entrance.
change indeed...
Peri sat on the rooftop of the apartment block in San Francisco, back to a wall, knees hugged to her chest. The hood was pulled up over her face, but the eyes that stared out from beneath it were older, wiser than her years.
Her arms stung a little where her shins pressed against the new wounds, and she shifted position. The nightmares were worse, far worse than they'd ever been, but still not more than she could handle with the help of cold steel. But the urge to cut deep had lessened in the last few months.
Peri knew that the destruction of self was being replaced with a destruction of much more, the bloodlust turning outward. Since meeting the others and dealing with a demon, she had come into power that excited and frightened her. She had summoned and tamed a tornado, brought lightning down from a cloudless sky, stripped raw essence from supernatural beings with bolts of blue fire. She knew that if she had to - with the aid of the amulet of her own blood she wore around her neck - she could crush another witch's spell while the words still tumbled from his mouth.
And now, after all that, she felt still more power rising within her. Something was awakened by all this magic, something old and deep that had lain dormant since she first entered this world. Now it stirred, and she knew that she could summon it, bend it to her will.
The small, pale girl rose to her feet, shook out the pins and needles, and walked over to the roof access. The sun was setting behind her. She reached the the stairwell and walked down to her room, where she flopped onto the bed and set about her homework.
On the roof, all was still as the sun dropped into the sea. Not a breath of wind disturbed the summer evening. Only one thing about this picture disturbed the silent watcher on the other roof:
The door to the stairwell had opened and shut without the girl ever touching it.
