Winter (Book one in The Dark Angels Series)

 WINTER

By Raven Taylor

© 2012, Raven Taylor

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Titles in the Dark Angels Series:

Winter

Cane

Lilly

The Gospel According to Mercy and Saint

What is it I am waiting for sat here alone in the blind dark with only my fears and my misfortune? Is this how they feel? If so then why do they fight so hard to cling to life when the cool embrace of death is so soothing? So long I have been in ignorance and through ignorance have arrogantly stood up to a force I never really understood. Now I understand that force at last, what it is to be one of my kind, now that I am left only with this darkness that shrouds my wilting body.

   There is warm rivers trickling slowly across my palms. Small drips growing pregnant until the weight becomes too much and they fall heavily from my finger tips to be swallowed by the silence. My level of consciousness changes, I can feel it shifting in my head like the sands in an hour glass. Yes, the grains are slipping away from me, a landslide inside my very mind, and the feeling is pleasant, giddy, like floating or being high. 

The initial stab of pain throbbed and then slowly disappeared a long time ago down that narrow hole with the first of the sand. I feel the greater part of my being now following it into the abyss. It is good to let go and be consumed willingly by depths of blackness. To drift in a new sea. To rest as the drum slows. The clock ticks but once an hour. I now see each individual grain as it falls. I watch as each memory leaves...Caroline! My eyes snap open. Caroline...I am going to give you something most people never get...if I get through this and come out on the other side I will come back to you and explain it all. I promise.Then you can decide... There is no sense of time anymore. I do not try to stop it go. One heart beat. One gentle tick. One last lulling breath. One last twitch of my hand...this is for you Caroline...

 PROLOGUE

It was as though all at once the world had fallen still, spell bound by some unseen force that held it captive in a state of suspended animation. Nothing moved; not the bare, skeletal branches of the trees, nor the birds who seemed to have deserted this place, not even the cold biting air. It seemed that it had been this way for weeks now, as though everything under the perpetually grey sky held its collective breath and waited in anticipation. Waiting perhaps for the liberation of spring to come and set it free. 

Winter had descended swiftly and without warning this year and had swept across the land turning the earth to iron before blanketing it in a clean white shroud that temporarily hid all that was ugly and made it seem that for once the world was pure and innocent. 

Then there she was; cheeks flushed red from the cold, eyes shining, a stray red curl falling across her white cheek, smiling at me as she looked back over her shoulder and beckoned me into the clearing. But she isn’t really there of course. Only in my mind. 

I am the only one here. I hear a bird utter some sad strangled cry and I see beautiful red roses recently laid in the snow that have been turned so wonderfully fragile by the frost. Delicate tributes to someone’s memory, a tiny gesture to say they haven’t been forgotten and never will be. My boots crunch in the snow and as I come to stop in the clearing I find myself inexplicably offended when I realise that so much snow has fallen I can’t even see what it is I came here for. It seems such a blatant show of disrespect and, angrily, I crouch down so that I can brush away the powder from the marble surface. Ah now this is what I came for; the gold leaf lettering that is her final eulogy.