Who Wants To Read My NaNo Prologue?

So it’s the start of week two for NaNoWriMo and I have been busy writing away. Having the outline is really helpful and Scrivener is wonderful too.

Anyway, to share a sample, here’s my rough-and-definitely-unedited prologue.

Liverpool, England. 1927.

I died in a pool of blood on my bedroom floor. My throat had been torn open and the boy I thought I loved – that I thought loved me – was responsible for it.

My mind should have been nothing but thoughts of betrayal, of mental cries of anger, but while those things were there it was another thought that held sway over my dying mind. As my killer swallowed down the life that bled out with each slowing heartbeat, my thoughts were of my mother.

More specifically, how angry she would be when she saw the mess.

As is understandable, I was not the most coherent person at that time.

I had fought him the entire time, and the signs of the battle were everywhere. Books had been knocked off shelves and the collection of figurines my grandmother had given me – eighteen in all, one for each birthday – lay cracked and broken where they had fallen.

Around me lay the shards of the full-length mirror that had shattered when he had thrown me into it, all its pieces like the countless flakes of a twisted snow angel created by my death throes.

Even as more of my life seeped out of me, pushed out by each slowing heartbeat, I struggled. Pathetically, it was true, but it was enough for Thomas to lift his head from my throat and laugh. I tried to answer him but he was sitting on my chest, making it even harder to form my dying breaths.

More hot tears leaked from my eyes as he lowered his mouth back down to my neck and continued to feed. Both my hands scrambled about, trying to find something, anything, to get him off me, to let me die without anymore of his violations – or even better, save my life. Finally my right found purchase, fingers and palm bleeding as they curled around the sharp edges of a large shard of glass.

I made one desperate slashing movement above me and Thomas howled in pain; I slashed again, harder, emboldened by the sounds he made. He lifted his head so I could see my handiwork: one thick gash on his neck, and another along the cheek I had often touched, along the high cheekbone I had often thought was a mark of his perfection.

“You… you little…” Thomas began but did not finish. Above me, his eyes focused on the blood that was dripping from his face and onto mine. The blood that fell into my mouth and that I, with disgust and effort, automatically swallowed.

“Bastard,” I spat out, my first word in some time. “I hate you.”

“And I love you!” he replied excitedly. The words that had once thrilled me now terrified me. How could he say that to someone he was killing and enjoying killing so much? “You have given me the most fantastic idea!”

What idea could he have had? I suddenly felt even colder than I already was.

Unfortunately, the terrifying idea that came to my dying mind was nothing compared to the horrors that would await me with his actual idea.

He raised his left wrist to his mouth and bit into it, just like he had done to my neck earlier. Then he forced the bleeding limb against my mouth, holding my nose to force me to swallow.

As his blood – it tasted so strange, not like any blood I had accidentally swallowed while alive, or drunk since my death – trickled down my throat he explained his plan. “I love the way you fought me, not like all the rest. It was such a shame that your defiance was not going to last. But then you, in all your cleverness, had to show me how to continue our wonderful little game. I knew you would be special and you proved me right.” He smiled down at me although his eyes did not focus, clearly too lost was he in his little fantasy world. “Do you understand, my sweet Viola? We’re going to play this game forever. You are going to be just like me. Forever.”

My scream of horror was muffled by his wrist and the blood that had already started to transform me.