Prologue: Come Here Girl

People liked to think that rain washed away everything.

But the truth?

It did the opposite—it loosened unseen things, dredging up decay and ruin, leaving the air with a thin, biting sting.

I stood in the torrent and pulled my long, sharp, steely hand out of the guts of the last of the attackers. Piles of their dead—a testament to my violence—lay all around.

The downpour beat against my pale grey skin and plastered my long white hair to my head.

The hammering water seemed unending. Yet it could not cleanse me of the blood staining my body.

I was my alter, Malvic, and I waited.

She was out there, and she was coming.

No one sees her.

No one can ever hear her.

She lived on the edge of the blackness, closing in to finish the dark hunt we started.

“Let me see your eyes,” I shouted into the abyss.

Bloodlust pushed at the demand, but I never commanded her against her will.

Never.

Had I?

Hopelessness bled from my core, and I delivered my words in a whisper.

“Show them to me.”

I thought if I could see them, I would know.

Then, with a low, guttural growl, she softly melted from the shadows, her black-and-purple-tinted fur ablaze.

Although wild strands of my hair covered my eyes, I could see perfectly. She was fantastically ferocious. My solar plexus tightened unbearably—wrenching, collapsing inward. I felt what all the others before me had.

My beautiful hellhound was there to kill me.

Her approach was slow, deliberate, and I saw what I needed to see.

I had lost her.

And I felt the rain again.

The rhythmic thumps goaded me into thinking of my life as Billy.

The drumming against my black cloak flushed it all to the surface. I tried to grasp the wisp-like faces of my friends, but they fell into bleakness.

My heart sank into despair, embracing the weight of the moment—the finality.

At the end, your past rises.

The rain coaxed the reckoning.

In that moment, I wholly accepted my true nature.

And I remembered the time before, when my choices had led me down this dark path of destruction.