The Metaphorical Key Book I- Call of the Raven

Chapter V

Some twenty-five years ago...

All the windows in the house were slammed shut to protect from the cold December air outside. Ada Carr made her way across the floor, the soles of her ruby red flats clicking on the panels. She was expecting company that night, as a small group of her friends were going to see some pitch-black comedy/drama at the cinema. They hadn't told her the name of the film, only promising that she'd love it.

There was a knock at the door. Ada smoothed out her dress - a knee-length black one decorated with cherries and a single red bow in the centre. A friend of her's who she was rather blatantly into would be there that night, and she hoped to tell him if she got a moment alone with him.

That was fast.

But when she opened the door, it wasn't anybody she recognised.

She was about Ada's age, somewhere in her early twenties, with round, dark eyes and dark hair falling down to her shoulders in thick mats. Her skin was nearly the colour of alabaster - and the reason for that made Ada's stomach turn.

Blood was soaking through the woman's dress from a horribly deep wound in her abdomen, turning the blue fabric a horrible shade of red and purple. Her lips and even nails had turned a sickly blue-ish shade and she was hyperventilating in a feeble attempt to pull in the oxygen she desperately needed. She was kneeling, with one hand on the stone of the front step and one hand holding a bundle to her chest, but she was shaking even with that simple position.

She pried the bundle away from her chest and rearranged herself into a full kneeling position, almost as though she were about to pray. She passed the bundle to Ada.

Ada's heart leapt into her throat when she realised what the bundle was - a child.

The woman smiled up at Ada. Her teeth were pink, her full lips bitten raw and dripping blood down her chin.

"Juliana," she whispered and then swayed.

Ada took the child and held them to her chest. The child was screaming now, swinging tiny fists in the air, clearly upset at being taken from their mother.

Heart in her throat, Ada dashed to the couch and set the child down, whispering a sit tight as though the child - the infant - was old enough to get very far or even understand what she was saying.

Ada raced back to the woman bleeding out on her doorstep and pulled her inside. She was enrolled in medical school, she had an idea of what she was doing, but there was so much panic coursing through her veins that she could hardly remember what she was supposed to do.

The first thing she elected to do was stop the already massive blood loss. She raced to the bathroom and grabbed as many towels as she could, rolling up the dress so she could access the wound and pressing the towel to it, running through everything she could do.

But not five seconds later, the woman's chest fell and didn't rise again.

The death of the young single mother who'd picked Ada's doorstep as her deathbed went down in history as one of the heinous acts committed by the Catago that marked the slow rise from an easily-ignored gang to a full-blown organization of people willing to kill and worse for their hazy and extremely secretive motives.

Ada adopted the little girl and raised her as her own. When she was five, Ada said that she'd adopted her and that her mother was unable to care for her. When she was ten, she told her that her mother had been killed by another person, and when she was fifteen, she told her the full details of her mother's senseless murder. She held her as she cried.