Excerpt: Queen of Mist and Shadows

This first memory I have is of blood. The pungent sweetness of tart wine playing a soft delicato in my nose. The taste an odd mixture of salt and belly-heaving sweet. The flavor played over my tongue tempured by a then unfamiliar accompaniment of charcoal and bitter roots. The gleam of the moon lit blade in the dark puddle beside me facinated me. The shimmer and sheen were an unspoken music just beyond the ability of my ears to hear. It was a soft sobbing that distracted me and refocused my eyes on the two small shapes in the packed dirt corner of the alley. Clinging to each other in their rags, their eyes were large and liquid as they looked up up up at a towering figure of a man. One hand stroking betwixt his thighs, he reached dripping fingers of his other hand towards the children.
Blood. Blood dripping in the moonlight- on a monster that hunts the dark.
I remember the anger. The full fury of the raging sea in full storm. I reached for the discarded blade and stood. I was barely reached his waist, but flew. The depths and waves of my anger washed clean the hows and I flew. The blade slid into his neck easily, as though a welcome homecoming. I cut, I stabbed, I slashed. The knife sang in my hand and danced happily through his flesh as his blood sprayed the air in a happy ballet.
I do not know when the others left or where they went. I only remember that when the flush of rage cooled, the slow falling snow began to lick my skin the blue of death. I was all alone. I was freezing. My knees began to shake with the cold and I looked down at my own small rag dress. Threadbare and slick with blood, it would be my death shroud. I looked at the man – the hunter of the small now fallen forever in the cesspool of dirt and sewage. I tugged at his rough shirt and found it as thin as my own.
My teeth clicked a chatter – snow turning to sleet as the moon turned her face away.
The knife, still gripped in my little hand whispered to me.
A slice, a stab, a cut.
Pulling, tugging, ripping. I kicked the pile of entrails aside and looked at my work. With a smile, I tucked myself inside—I survived and slept warm in a monster coat.