Prologue: Working Title Forthcoming.

(This is something I've been turning in my head for a bit now...not sure exactly where I'm going with it past the first two chapters and this prologue. I guess we shall see. © Melissa Melton 2008 like every other random thing on this blog...)

She sits so perfectly still in the frozen grass, snow swirling around her almost in slow motion, somehow never actually finding purchase on her pale skin. It could be midday…it could be much later.

The sun provides light from somewhere entirely hidden, tucked away securely behind a gray wall of clouds, forcing dim rays down at odd angles that wash everything else out against its will. The gray, now almost brooding, threatens to take the scene over if not for the two spots of color too powerful for it to engulf: the lush red velvet of the girl's flowing cape draped like a curtain over the ground around her and the tiny specks of a much darker red dripping from her ashen lips. Her shoulders pitch forward and seem to heave against the wind every now and then, but her sobs make no sound. Only the wind calls, trying to pull the frail bodies of trees along with it as it blows over her small frame, raking through her silver hair, leaving nothing but more misguided snowflakes and urgent silence burning in its wake.

"Why can't I find him?" she suddenly asks aloud, accusing the retreating wind. "What have I done?" Her purring voice trails off into a barely audible whisper.

The wind does not reply; it simply grates over her numb skin again. Her frame trembles slightly as she is met with more disparaging silence between gusts.

Suddenly, I feel it. The fear. It comes on fast, shooting a sick, hot tingle up my spine that explodes at the nape of my neck.

In the trees at the edge of this clearing before us, something watched her. Something waited. Something hungry.

Go! I want to yell at her. Run! I want so badly to scream, to grab her shoulders and snatch her up from the ground if she won't get up on her own, to warn her of the deadly threat stalking her from the dark tree bank less than twenty feet away, but I can't. I'm frozen like the grass, silent like the snow, helpless against the cold wind. Thick sadness clings to the air around her body like an aura. She mumbles something once more about the man she cannot find.

Please, oh please, run, RUN! But she doesn't hear the begging trapped inside my head, caught deep in the prison of my throat.

A sound claws at me, the cavernous low rumble of a growl from somewhere in those trees. I hear a forceful snap, a dead branch breaking under heavy weight…

RunrunrunRUNRUNRUN!!

But she doesn't move an inch. Only the wind and the tiny snowflakes and the waning light in its haphazard descent seem to realize the danger.

And now it's too late.

My screams rake their way up my throat and catch in my mouth as it rips through the trees, coming for her.