The Whirlwind, Part Two - Return of
the Native (prologue)
By Mistress Ace (rosewood@inreach.com) & Prophecy (prophecy_gurl@yahoo.com)
RATING: Strong NC-17
CONTENT: Language, violence, sex - consensual and non, incest, torture
DISTRIBUTION: Finnatics, Angelus/Darla list. All others please ask.
DISCLAIMER: This story is not in any way intended to infringe on copyrights held by Joss
Whedon, David Greenwalt, Mutant Enemy or AOL Time Warner.
AUTHORS' NOTES: This is a sequel to 'Ave Maria' - which you can read at
http://www.geocities.com/prophecy_gurl/fic/maria.html
SUMMARY: After dispatching the slayer in Italy, Darla and Angelus discover the new girl is
a little closer to home...
FEEDBACK: Send to both authors, please! We're dying to know what you guys make of this
one!
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Whirlwind - Return of the Native
Galway 1760
In the dead of the Irish night, a young woman woke screaming, unearthly power rushing through her entire frame. One shaking hand gripped the headboard of her narrow bed and that solid oak beam crumbled under the incredible force engendered by her panic and fear.
The last slayer had died and the next had been chosen.
She sat bolt upright in her bed, her usually mild green eyes wide and staring into the darkness. Tendrils of deep auburn hair had escaped from her nightcap as the vision of her predecessor's death had come to her in her dreams. Little Maria Delgrazio had died in such agony and the fashion of her death was shocking in the extreme. How could she have allowed one of the undead so close to her?
Colleen O'Shea shook her head, trying to calm the tremors in her body. This could not be happening to her. The council had deemed her too old. She was three and twenty, no girl over the age of eighteen had ever been chosen.
The Watcher's council retired her on her twenty-first birthday, two days after her Watcher had caught a chill on the moors and died of lung fever. No one had been sent to replace him, Colleen had been finally free of her unwanted destiny. She was free to have a life so long denied to her….
The pain and degradation of Maria's final moments still hummed in her veins as Colleen lowered her face into her hands to weep. She had been chosen, her life was now forfeit to the demons and the darkness. There would be no wedding next month to her beloved Connor, there would be no babies to help rebuild her family. There would be nothing but monster and demons to fight for the rest of her life.
Simon, her watcher, always told her she would be chosen. The two of them waited ten lonely years together from the day that her family placed her in the care of the Watcher's Council. Simon trained her, tutored her, and had been mother and father to her ever since that fateful morning. And he never gave up the hope that his girl would be the one to save the world, he kept that hope alive within him even to his dying breath.
But the call never came, not until this very night.
After Simon's death, she had returned to Galway, to her home village. Her home which had been the site of the worst vampire attack in recorded history. Her entire family, right down to the very last infant, had been killed. As had everyone else in the entire village. Not one soul had been left alive to tell the tale.
A wandering tinker had found his way into town seven years ago and the horrors he found there drove the man mad. The streets were littered with bodies, unholy curses written in blood on the walls of people's homes. Young women violated, young men skinned alive, their bodies broken and left wherever they fell. No one had been spared the wrath of what must have been an entire clan of the undead.
The Council had sent several Watchers to investigate once word trickled down to them that all the bodies had been found drained of their blood. Those grim men had walked the streets, read the writings, burned the bodies and spread the ashes to the four winds to keep any of the dead from rising again but they never discovered who had committed this abomination.
No culprit had ever been found. Colleen had never been given the chance to avenge her family, not until today. Her fiancée and former life now forgotten, she rose from her chaste bed and dressed swiftly.
There were monsters out there in the cold Irish night that needed killing. And she was just the girl to do it.
The new slayer had arisen from the ashes of
Galway and the creatures of the night had much to fear. With a stake clenched firmly in
one hand and an axe in the other, Colleen O'Shea slipped into the darkness. There was one
single thought burning brightly in her mind that night.
Vengeance is mine this night. For my mother, my father, my brothers and sister, for my
childhood friends and for my dearest cousin….. Liam.