Hollow: A Fallen Angel Novel

CHAPTER I

Hell is a four letter word that lives somewhere between love and hate.

Nowhere feels more hellish than the cold confines of Saint Michael's Orphanage for the Destitute. Here we can't decide whether to hold on to love for the parents that abandoned us or to hate them for what they did. You can see the hollow look of despair on everyone's face. We walk around each day trying to smile and laugh and forget, but it's only a thin veil. Underneath the mask, we're all crying.

This institute is a sad place. You can feel it in the air. It has a kind of aura about it. You know when you walk into a place and you can just feel a heavy melancholy permeating from the walls? Well, that sadness has been building up here for over three hundred years. They built it back at the end of the war of independence. When our forefathers were dying for a national identity, they actually left behind a legacy of personal loss for their children. That is what Saint Michael's is, a detention centre for lost kids who have forgotten what love is.

But I am getting ahead of myself. My name is Alexandra Nicolson. My parents dropped me and my baby sister here six years ago when I was ten. She was only a baby then. I remember cradling her in my arms waiting out the front of the black iron gates with the heavy, autumn rain soaking us to our skin. I will never forget my Mum telling me she'd be back. I believed her for years. Every day I would sit up by the cold window in my room watching those front gates. Every damn day. Marie grew up so fast.

"When is Mama coming?" She'd plead.

And every time I gave the same stupid answer that I believed myself, maybe tomorrow... but tomorrow never came. Not for us. We lived in these hollow rooms and roamed the cold corridors and watched as all our friends slowly disappeared to other families and new lives. I actually believed that maybe tomorrow she would be back for us.

I don't know when I stopped believing. I guess a thing like that just happens over time. You don't even see it coming, you just slowly stop thinking about it. I started looking after Marie more and more. I made sure we shared the same room, that she always had enough to eat at dinner, and that she always did her homework on time. I became the mother she never knew.

It was the coldest of the years so far and it wasn't even mid-winter. The thick walls of our prison did little to stop the icy drafts that rushed along the blank corridors. We were owned by the state, and the state never remembered us lost souls when it came time to doing their budgets. We were relegated with whatever spare dollars were left over and forced to survive on the thinnest of clothes and the cheapest of everything. As a consequence, we all froze to death come winter and were always left with hungry stomachs come bedtime.

"Alex!" A warm voice cried from behind me.

It was Jane my long lost soulmate. Sometimes it was only Ben and her that kept me going when I had nothing else to hold on to. When you think about it, in a place like this, if you don't have friends, you don't survive. There is literally nothing to get you out of bed each day. What do we even live for? I guess for Jane, she would be counting the days down until her release. In a little under a year, she would be deemed a lawful adult and free to leave. Actually, she would be forced to leave. After a lifetime of imprisonment and being forced to rely on our wardens, they would cast her out on her birthday to face the world alone. All her friends, like me and Ben, would be left inside and she would be alone. Free... but alone. What kind of freedom is that anyway?

She came running up to me with a stupid grin on her face. I always thought she was beautiful. She had mousy blonde hair that was a little too thin, but it matched her skinny body. You can't blame us for looking this way, in here we're all too thin, we can't help it.