Chapter 2-Odd One Out

~*Chapter 2-Odd One Out*~



         “I can see America already!” Abigail Rosehaven exclaimed, as she and her husband, Charles, waved farewell to their families. The ship began to move, jostling her slightly. Charles grabbed her arm to keep her steady, and she looked up at him in gratitude. Abigail watched the dock as they pulled away, her heart breaking a little bit as she watched her parents shrink until they were nothing larger than one of the flies on a rotten banana. She would miss them, yes, but this was the start of a new chapter of her life. She would face it fearlessly, or so she continued to tell herself.

         Charles had gone to see their cabin, and he now appeared around the corner, calling Abigail’s name softly. She turned and took his hand, allowing him to lead her. She had never in her life wanted to be led more; she felt lost in a strange new world as soon as she turned her back on Britain, her native land, to face her husband. She had only been married for two and a half weeks. What had driven her to leave Britain with him, she did not know, but she felt as though she was being torn in half. Of course, she would never, ever show it on the outside. She would never let on.

         “I took the liberty of having our trunks moved down,” he said, proceeding down the stairs to the cabin that he had rented for the trip. It was of a high caliber; it was just beneath the captain’s cabin, and it was the came size with similar furnishings. Abigail had not seen it yet.

         As Charles pushed the door open, Abigail moved across the threshold, her eyes widening at the luxury facing her. The bed was a large canopy with red velvet curtains and sheets to match. The wood was all mahogany, and the candles were all brand new, as if the wax had just finished drying. She reached up and touched one of the golden tassels hanging from the top of the canopy. Silk, just as she had thought. The mirror on the vanity was new, set in a gold frame that was polished to perfection, not a smudge or scratch on it. She looked at herself, noticing that a brown curl was slipping out of place from beneath her hat. She tried to tuck it in, but ended up just removing the silken bonnet. She smoothed her hair into place and smiled into the mirror. Maybe, she thought, this will not have to be so hard.

         Her husband’s face appeared beside hers in the mirror as he came up from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder. She glanced at him, questions in her eyes, and he answered with a steady grey gaze. She had always been comforted by those eyes. They were her cornerstone, and she knew she could always rely on the smile flashing behind the grey to make her feel better.

         “Are you nervous?” he asked softly.

         She hesitated slightly. “No.”

         “Yes you are. Anyone would be at least a bit nervous about leaving behind everything that they love only to head toward bitter unknown.” He looked her directly in the eyes, and she turned fully to face him. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I myself am nervous as well.”

         “Are you?”

         “Yes.”

~*~

         Days passed. Weeks passed. Abigail slowly became more and more at ease with her decision. It seemed as though the more distance put between her and her home, the more comfortable she was with her decision to leave. By the time the captain announced that they were going to be arriving in America within twenty-four hours, she was almost beside herself with excitement.

         “Oh, how exciting!” she’d say, gripping Charles’ hand as she did all she could to prevent hopping up and down with enthusiasm. He would just smile with his eyes, drinking her in, trusting her happiness to fuel his own. He feared that his true exhilaration would be too much for her, so he only showed it as much as she did, and only when she did.

         They were both in their room when she said, “I am glad that America is so near. Soon, we can start our own life; just the two of us.”

         “We already have,” he said. “Or have you not realized that we are miles away from our previous home?”

         They both laughed, and the ship jerked. The captain called down to them that they were approaching the dock, and that they should come up onto the deck. Husband and wife grabbed each others’ hands and rushed up the wooden stairs, clacks of shoes and rustling of fabrics reverberating throughout the hall as they did.

         The sunlight graced their eyes as they looked to the West; there was the port in Georgia, bustling with people waiting to welcome the incoming ship. Women in long, lacy dresses and sun hats bustled about with baskets of flower petals to toss in salutation to the newcomers on the ship. They were all tan and beautiful from living in the south. The men helped to move things from the dock, making room for the onslaught of people now standing on the deck of the ship, waving and calling in anticipation.

         “Welcome home, Abigail,” Charles whispered into her ear as the crew tied the boat into the slip and set down the ramp, allowing people to disembark into the crowd of people waiting to invite them into Georgia. The year was 1845.

~*~

         Time passed. The couple was perfectly happy on their large southern plantation. They had lots of land, plenty of livestock, and many slaves. They did not abuse their slaves, like some people of their generation did, but they treated them rather well, employing many of them as servants. The world was at peace for the time being.

         In 1846, the young woman had her first child. It was a son, and she named him Silas, a popular, almost trendy name in the Deep South. He was a perfectly normal child; he grew at an impressive rate, learned quickly, and slept through the nights after about six months. The parents could not have been more proud of him. He was a beautiful child; his father’s blonde hair with his mother’s brown eyes. He had the sweetest smile, even before he began to cut teeth. His parents valued him beyond all other things.

         In late October, 1847, Abigail came to Charles in his study one night. He was always happy to set aside whatever work he was doing for his lovely wife and darling son, so he stood as she entered the room, only sitting after she had settled herself into the chair opposite him. He hoisted Silas onto his lap and smiled at Abigail, who had been suppressing a grin ever since she had entered the office.

         “What is it?” he asked.

         Abigail’s grin broke loose, and she said, “I’m going to have another baby.”

         Charles looked at her for a second, processing what she had said. Then, he picked Silas up, rose from his chair, and sat Silas back where he had just been. Abigail did not move. He offered his hand to her, and she took it, allowing herself to be guided from her chair, around the desk, and into his arms. He kissed her and held her tight for a moment, then he whispered, “Are you happy?”

         “Yes,” she said.

         “Good. I am very happy for you.” He pulled away from her and looked into her eyes, excitement shining from behind his grey irises. “It will be wonderful, having another child. Silas and his brother or sister will be able to play and grow up together. We will be like the Herrington family; no, no, better! Their children can play with ours! It will be brilliant!”

         She laughed, he laughed, and Silas laughed, just because his parents were laughing. Abigail had only seen her husband this happy twice before; the first time was on their wedding day, and the second was when she had told him that she was pregnant with Silas. She had known since she was a little girl that she would want a family when she grew up, and she wanted to marry a family man. Now, gazing at her husband, who was radiating joy from his every pore, she realized that she had made a perfect choice in men. Her life was going to pan out perfectly, and she knew it. It would be sublime; she was certain.

~*~

         The baby arrived on the third of July of 1848. It was a daughter, born with a full head of dark chocolate hair and bright grey eyes. From the moment she was born, she would smile, laugh, and crawl. After about a week, she could roll across the house, laughing and rolling all over, like it was the most fun she had ever had in her week-long life. By the second week, she was saying a choice few words, such as “mother,” “father,” and “congenial.”

         Abigail and Charles had been watching this rapid development of their daughter, Constance, and they were beginning to worry. She was extremely bright and oddly precocious, but it was becoming frightening.

         At a month old, the little girl was sprinting about like a crazed banshee, frightening the servants with her strange progression in intellect and physical ability. Her brother, two years older than she, was sometimes disregarded as her parents focused on trying to make Constance behave normally. She just would smile and laugh, showing off her full set of sharp, sparkly white teeth. She was strange, and her parents knew it; nobody worried more than Abigail, though.

         Abigail had so looked forward to having a proper family, with two proper children; a daughter and a son. This had been her lifelong dream. Constance had been such a beautiful child; she still was. But, she was not normal. There was something terribly wrong with that girl.

         At two years old, Constance had hair long and thick enough to braid back, and she spoke with a better vocabulary than her parents. She had a distinct British accent, just like her mother and father, but it was obscene to hear such an accent and such words emanating from a two year old child.

         One day, Constance was watching some butterflies flit about outside the window on the first floor of the house. She was laughing, and she reached out her tiny arm in an attempt to catch a fluttering creature. Instead of her hand merely hitting the glass and bouncing back off, her small fist plunged straight through, shattering the glass into a million pieces. Shards rained down upon her pale, delicate skin, but did not cut it. She still laughed as she swiped at a butterfly, catching it with a lightning-fast reflex, her arm shoved through the window up to her shoulder. She drew her closed hand back into the house, and opened it to see a squished butterfly smeared across her palm. Suddenly, she started to cry.

         Her pretty face twisted up into a sob, sounds of sorrow slipping from between her lips. It was a sight that would have made the angels bend and cry with her. All except for the fact that she shed no tears. This was not one of those tearless, shrieking fits that children were sometimes prone to; in a normal child, tears would have swelled over her eyelids, falling down her face like rain. But nothing like this happened with Constance. She sat there by the broken window, staring down at the dead butterfly in her palm, sobbing as though someone near and dear to her was the one splattered across her hand. All of this happened without a trace of tears.

         At the sound of Constance’s crying, Charles came running from his study, kneeling down beside her. As he did so, he noticed glass shards beneath his knees breaking and scratching his knees through his pants. He stared at Constance for a moment, then whisked the girl up into his arms, carrying her hurriedly to the study. There, he sat her down on top of his desk and proceeded to frantically inspect her for wounds. He himself had cuts on his knees from the shattered glass; when he found not a single scratch on his daughter, however, his brow furrowed in confusion. She was crying, but why? If she wasn’t hurt, then why was she sobbing so hard?

         “Whatever is the matter, darling?” he asked, not expecting the two year old girl to understand. But, she looked up at him, making eye contact through the squint caused by her tears. Then, she held out her little fist and opened it in front of her father’s eyes, showing him the dead butterfly. This action brought on a renewed round of dry tears, and her hand fell into her lap.

         Charles had never seen anything quite as odd as this; so many tears over a crushed butterfly? Children cried over silly things sometimes, but this was ridiculous. He picked her up and rocked her back and forth in his arms, murmuring soothing words to her until she calmed down enough to speak.

         “What happened, Constance?”

         The little girl looked up into his face with sad eyes, and said, “I tried to catch a butterfly, but I broke the window. I did not mean to, father! I just wanted a butterfly to play with, since nobody else will play with me. But I broke the window, and I killed the butterfly. That was a bad thing for me to do.”

         “Yes, Constance, it was. We can talk about that in a minute. Are you hurt at all?”

         She shook her head, glancing into her hand at the remains of her only friend.

         “Good. Constance, how did you break the window?” He was actually curious about this. What she would say, he did not know, but he could not wait to hear.

         “I reached out to grab a butterfly, and the window just broke. I did not even feel it, father! I’ve no idea how it happened! It was like poking a quill through parchment.”

         She had her father’s eyes. Right now, grey gazed into grey as Charles tried to understand how something like this could have happened. He doubted that he could have broken the glass even if he had punched it with all of his strength. How could his little two year old daughter have done this?

         “Go find your mum. I am going into town to see about a replacement pane for the window. I would like for you to stay with your mother and brother, all right?” he asked gently. However strange his daughter was, he still loved her with all of his heart, and he hated to hurt her feelings or make her feel guilty for something that she most likely could not have helped. He had no clue as to how she could have done this without realizing it, but he had come to the conclusion that she had not been aware of her actions when it had happened.

         She nodded to indicate that she had understood; Charles stood from his desk and headed toward the front door. He buttoned the top button of his shirt and slipped into his jacket, nodding goodbye to Constance, who stood in the foyer watching him shut the door behind him.

         After her father had left, she went to the kitchen and washed the butterfly from her hand in her own little wash basin. Then, she trudged up the stairs to Silas’ room, where she was sure to find her mother. It was always a struggle for a girl as small as two year old Constance to get up the stairs, but she managed to essentially drag herself up, using her arms to pull and her feet to push. Once at the top, she turned left down the hallway, stopping at the second door. The knob was higher than she could reach, so she jumped and caught it, turning it on the way down.

         Her mother was not at all surprised that she had been able to figure out a way into the room; she turned around and said, “Oh, hello Constance,” as soon as she saw her daughter.

         “Hello, mum.”

         “Come in, then.”

         Abigail was cleaning Silas’ room, and she bent down and scooped Constance into her arms, sitting down on Silas’ bed and placing Constance beside her.

         “Where is Silas?” Constance asked, holding her hands in her lap, swinging her tiny legs from the edge of the mattress.

         “I sent him outside to play in the fields with his friends. What are you doing inside, darling?” Abigail inquired kindly.

         “You will not allow me to go outside, remember? You said something last time about how it would frighten people if they saw me walking and talking the way I do.” Constance’s tiny brow furrowed. “Mother, why can they not bear to see me walking and talking when they all do the same things every day? It does not frighten me to see them, so why are they frightened to see me?”

         Abigail sighed, taking her daughter’s hands in her own. It hurt her heart to see her little girl using logic like she was and having emotions like this. Abigail pitied her more than anything else.

         “Sweetheart, most children your age can not walk or talk as well as you. It is not normal for a child of two years to be so brilliant.”

         “You mean that I am not normal?”

         Abigail took a deep breath, wishing that she had not said what she had. “No,” she muttered, “you are not.”

~*~

         Constance loved her mother very much. She never intended to disobey her. But, all the same, the little girl needed to go outside. It was not just a mere desire, but a powerful urge; a need. Almost like how a person’s eyes grow heavier and heavier with sleep until they cannot be held open at all any more, Constance had longed and longed to go outside. Her longing had grown with each passing day until she did not even realize that she had gone out until she was walking through the cool grass.

She had not meant in any way to disobey her mother. She just could not deny the fact that she could only get what she needed if she was outside. It was as necessary as a person having water to drink when they were parched. She needed space. Fresh air. Peace.

Constance stood up and ran on her little pudgy legs. She gained speed until she was moving faster than the best sprinter in the world could have done. The slaves were watching her. Even the overseers stopped working to get a glimpse at the phenomenon running past. They could all agree that it was strange – scary even – to see the girl behaving this way, yet not one of them moved. If they did, they would tell Constance’s family what was going on; Constance knew that. But she would be long gone before they could get out the door. So, it was just as well that they stayed put.

~*~

“Ma’am?” One of the overseers was standing in the doorway to Silas’ nursery, hat in hand, politely addressing Mrs. Rosehaven.

“Yes, Blackiston?” She replied.

“Ma’am, we’ve found something in the fields that we thought you might want to see.”

“What is it?”

Blackiston hesitated a moment, his eyes flickering down to the ground and back again. His hands tightened on the brim of his straw hat. “It’s a dead rabbit, ma’am.”

Abigail looked at him quizzically, saying, “I suppose you and your lot could handle the animal perfectly fine without my assistance.”

“Yes ma’am, but I still think you should see it.”

Abigail sighed. She could not see why such a trivial thing required her to drop everything and go out to the fields to observe as the workers remedied the situation. It seemed rather superfluous. “Why?” she asked.

Blackiston hesitated again. He refused to meet her eyes this time and started turning his hat around and around in his hands. “You need to see it, ma’am.”

With another irritated sigh, Abigail rose from Silas’ bed and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Blackiston led Abigail out of the house and along the path that wound between the fields, separating the cotton fields from the wheat fields and the indigo fields from the vegetable fields. There was another path that led off to the right. This path fed down through the orchards, past the horse stables. The path to the left led to the kitchen and the slaughterhouse. On the edge of the cotton field, Abigail saw a throng of workers and slaves gathered around something on the ground. She was still too far away to see what the object of interest was, however. It could not have been the dead rabbit; dead animals were not uncommon on the plantation. It would never cause such a gathering.

Still, Blackiston turned off the path and began to weave through the cotton, toward the clump of people. Abigail followed, wondering. When Blackiston stopped in front of whatever was on the ground, everyone backed up a few steps, clearing the area for Abigail. She stepped forward, looking around at the group of people.

Suddenly, she was not so sure that she wanted to look down. Whatever they had been staring at had been frightening; the shock on their faces still lingered. But, Abigail was the lady of the house, and since her husband was not in, it fell upon her to maintain order on the plantation. Whatever was on the ground was certainly a distraction that had to be dealt with. So, she looked down.

For a second, Abigail could not even believe that it was a rabbit. It looked more like a half-dissected human infant with leprosy. The fur was mostly peeled off, and the skin had odd spots all over it. Some were black, others were pinkish, but most of the skin was the pastiest white that Abigail had ever seen. The colour sent chills to the back of her neck. The rabbit’s eyes were opened, and they were glazed over with a milky haze. Its head was jacked around at an abnormal angle that indicated a broken neck. One of the rabbit’s ears had been torn off and laid a couple of feet to the side, discarded. The animal’s ribs had been shattered into powder, and its skin had been torn off in certain places. Its bodily organs were leaking from its abdomen, but there was very little blood. Instead of being pinkish, the organs were all a disgusting shade of tan.

That was probably the most frightening thing about this animal – the almost total lack of blood. There were a few splashes of red on the grass and the fur, and trace amounts of it remained within the body cavity, but that aside, there was none to speak of. It was disturbing. Abigail wanted to either faint or scream, but neither happened. She just stood, staring, at the mutilated remains of this rabbit.

“Hello mother.”

Abigail whirled around and saw her daughter standing in the shadows of the crops that grew tall all around. “Hello, Constance,” she said.

“Mother, look!” The little girl held out her arms, fully coated in rich, red blood. “The rabbit and I were playing!”

As Constance approached Abigail, she smiled a smile that would have been adorable in any other situation but that. Abigail looked her daughter up and down. Constance had blood all over her yellow dress. Her hair had fallen out of her perfect braid and now hung loosely around her face, shadowing it. Her eyes were innocent as always, but Abigail could have sworn that she saw demons in them. Her daughter looked like a sight from hell itself.

An ear-splitting shriek pierced the air. It took Abigail a moment to realize that it had emanated from her own lips. She raised her right hand a bit and looked at it; it was shaking violently. Her mind, however, didn’t seem to be processing anything around her. Her body showed all the signs of shock and utter fear, but in her mind, she could not have been more surprised to see the tremor in her hand. Her brow knit together as she stared at her hand as though it were someone else’s.

“Mum? You do not look well.”

Abigail raised her confused gaze to Constance, and she suddenly began to register the absurdity of the statement she, Constance, had just made. Abigail did not look well? Constance was standing there, hair matted, petticoats blood-stained, eyes devilishly innocent, and despite all this, Abigail was the one who did not look well? Abigail began to laugh. It was not a shaky, tentative laugh, nor a hearty laugh caused by something that was genuinely funny. It was an insane laugh. The sound of it ringing in the air was enough to frighten a person. She sounded indisputably mad.

Constance smiled again and asked, “What is so funny, mother?”

“You, dear.”

Constance looked down at herself, confused. Then she gazed up at her mother, the creases between her eyebrows deepening. Abigail’s laughter was becoming louder and more maniacal. Servants were backing away, and slave children ran into their mothers’ arms for safety. However, the mothers were just as startled.

Abigail stared at Constance’s serious face, and the laughing abruptly stopped. The sensation was like being in a car that was going nearly one hundred miles per hour, but then the brakes were suddenly smashed until the car came to a jerking halt. The immediate ceasing of laughter was quite possibly more disturbing than the laughter itself had been.

“Constance . . .” Abigail said in a misty, far-away tone. She was surely losing her mind. That much was obvious.

Before Abigail could blink, Constance was by her side. There was a muttered cry from the watching servants; it seemed as though Constance had literally just vanished from one place and appeared in another. She had moved that fast. The girl took her mother’s hand in her own miniature ones.

“Yes mother?”

“You said that you . . . were playing with the . . . the . . .” Abigail indicated the savagely murdered rabbit.

“Yes mother,” Constance replied, cocking her head to the side in confusion. She clearly saw nothing wrong with the situation.

There was a pause. One of the slave girls, about fifteen years old, was sobbing quietly from the sheer terror of the situation. Her stuttered breathing filled the silence. Nobody turned to look at her, though. They could not afford to take their eyes from Constance and Abigail for a single moment.

“Why?”  Abigail asked.

“You never let me out of the house. I wanted to play.”

“Why?”

“Because Silas does it almost every day, but I am never allowed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You never allow me to go outside to play.”

“No, I mean why do you play like this?” Abigail gestured down at the rabbit, the obvious victim of Constance’s unnatural strength.

“Silas plays like this with his friends,” Constance said simply. “They chase each other all over. I was chasing the rabbit, and then I caught him. He didn’t want to play though, because he kept trying to jump away from me. So I made sure he wouldn’t get away again.”

Constance’s face was hard as stone. She was fully aware that, when she had grabbed the rabbit, she had crushed him with her arms and dug through his skin with her fingernails.

The rabbit didn’t have much blood in it because it was all smeared onto the little girl who had just been trying to have fun and be a child. She had killed it on purpose, because it wouldn’t play with her.

The very air seemed to come to a halt. The humidity grew thick around them, suffocating each and every person in the throng except for Constance, who just stood and stared at her mother. The spectators did not dare make the mistake of thinking that Constance had forgotten all about them; they knew that she recognized their presence. Constance never missed a single detail, much less a whole mob of onlookers.

The mass of servants had seen her out and about on the property many times, and, though she was small and young, they knew that she could do to any one of them what she had done to the rabbit. Just because she was discriminating between people and animals for the time being did not in any way mean that she would always have such discretion. She could be a right demon when she wanted to be. Nothing could stand in her way, and Constance was slowly becoming aware of that fact. By the time she turned five, she could be ruling the world, the entire human race on its knees begging for a small scrap of mercy from this pretty little monster who didn’t even know her own strength. Their efforts would be lost on Constance. The girl knew no sympathy.

Her eyes were slate grey and yielded no emotion. “He made me angry,” Constance said quietly, her voice sending shivers down the spines of every onlooker who heard.

“How?” was all that Abigail could say in response.

“Because he didn’t want to play with me” Constance nodded toward the mutilated rabbit at her feet.

“But why kill him?” Abigail persisted, her voice edging up an octave, her eyes becoming insane again. “He was not hurting you at all.”

“His hurt my feelings.”

“Don’t tell me you have feelings,” Abigail whispered, her eyes growing and staring off into the distance over Constance’s head. She had not torn her gaze from her daughter since the girl had appeared, but now, Abigail could not bear to look at her.

“I do have . . .”

“No, Constance!” Abigail shouted, suddenly coming to life as if out of a trance. She leapt back from her daughter, her eyes penetrating the girl’s skull as hard as she could make them go. “If you had feelings, you would not have done this.” She wrenched her hand from Constance’s grasp; she had half a mind to draw back and slap the child dead across the face right then, but for some reason, Abigail didn’t. She let her hand fall to her side in a jerky motion. Constance turned her back on her mother.

“But mum, I do . . .”

“Constance, I’m warning you . . .”

“I have feelings, mother!” Constance cried loudly, rage flaring up in her small, round face; it looked absolutely demented on a two-year-old child. It faded just as quickly as it had come, though, and soon, the girl’s face looked simply impassive.

“Constance, I swear to you that you will never be welcome inside my house again if you continue telling me such blatant lies!” Abigail growled.

When Constance didn’t respond in the least, Abigail lurched forward and grabbed her daughter by the hair and yanked her around to face her. She gave the chestnut brown hair that so closely resembled her own a rough tug in the opposite direction, forcing Constance’s head back. The two-year old girl just stood there, face turned to the sky. Her expression was unreadable.

“Do you hear what I am telling you, girl?” Abigail hissed into her ear.

“Yes,” Constance said inertly, “and you are very wrong, you know.”

“How dare you tell me what is wrong and what is not!”

Abigail wrenched Constance around some more, and then knelt down, wrestling the girl to the ground in front of her. Constance did not fight it; she allowed herself to be dragged into a kneeling position, her knees touching her mother’s. Abigail used her free hand to shove Constance away from her violently. Constance toppled over, then was pulled upright onto her knees as Abigail pinned the girl’s hands behind her. Her back was to Abigail, who hissed all sorts of profanities into the child’s ear while aiming a couple of furious slaps to the side of her head. She then resigned herself to yelling again, her fury mounting with each blasé response from her daughter.

“You are the only one who is wrong! You are a demon! A punishment sent to me from hell! I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you!”

“I am not a demon,” Constance said, seemingly unfazed by the sudden brutality of her mother. It was as if Constance could not feel any pain at all.

“Not a demon, are you? Well then, damn you! Damn you to hell!” Abigail punctuated each word with a fierce blow to various parts of her daughter’s petite body, a vicious yank of the hair, or a cruel shove down into the dust.

Then, Constance lost it.

She had been patiently controlling herself as her mother let all of her rage out in one big torrent, but as soon as Abigail had used such obscene language toward her, Constance’s patience suddenly ran out.

Constance tore away from the elder woman’s grasp and stood, staring her in the eyes. Abigail’s brown eyes were on fire, blazing with condemnation. Constance’s grey eyes had frozen like liquid nitrogen and were prepared to eliminate anything that dared to stand up to such a gaze.

In the blink of an eye, Constance lunged.

There was a snarl, followed closely by a tearing noise and a shriek. Then it was over.

Abigail staggered away from the two-year old girl, bleeding in many different places. She held up her arms. The fabric of her dress hung like ribbons trailing toward the ground. There was a giant gash in her sternum, where Constance had gone for her throat. Abigail was lucky to be alive; if Constance had wanted her to die, she would have hit her mark. Her aim was perfect. The cuts on Abigail’s arms were trickling blood, the droplets falling into the dust and congealing there into red mud. The gash in her chest began to spew blood. It was as if someone had turned on a faucet, and blood began to flow instead of water. Her dress was becoming splotchy, just like Constance’s, as the blood seeped into her cleavage and ran down the front of her corset. There were several cuts on her face as well. Her nose was broken, and her eye was already starting to blacken. Abigail cried out in sudden realization of pain.

The servants all scattered. Some were yelling about grabbing a horse and galloping into town for the doctor. Others were calling for their families to get as far away from Constance as possible. Still others were merely screaming from the terror and shock value of the whole scenario.

None of them understood that if Constance had wanted any of them dead, she would have killed them. There would be no time for deliberation. No time for running. No time to beg or reason. It would just end. Right then and there, in a puddle of blood. They all knew that Constance was a good assassin. But she was better than good. She was perfect. She never messed up once she determined to kill someone. There was nothing to do to avoid her wrath except staying off her blacklist in general.

Abigail fell to her knees. Blood was dripping into her mouth, and she spat it out half-heartedly. She could barely see out of the blackening left eye, but blood ran over the lid, then ran down her cheek like tears. Clutching her chest, she looked up at Constance.

“What kind of monster are you?” she asked, breathing the words out like air.

Constance just glared coldly down at her mother. “I believe the word you used was ‘demon,’” she whispered.

Then the little girl was gone.

~*~

The doctor got to Abigail in time. She was saved from death by blood loss. She never told anyone the true reason for her injuries. Instead, she blamed it on a “fox attack” that occurred while she was on a walk in the woods. She also made each of the servants and slaves take an oath that they would never speak of what they witnessed that summer afternoon. If she found out that they spoke of it, they would simply vanish in the dead of night without a trace.

If they were lucky, Constance wouldn’t get to them first.