¹ DEATHLESS ─ the originals

PROLOGUE: blood and blood and replay

TEN YEARS AGO: 2001

THERE ARE STARS IN THE SKY TONIGHT. A million little dots of white like someone had spilled the shaker and scattered salt over a black tablecloth. There is a girl lying on the tarmac in the middle of the road, wishbone legged and waiting.

Alessia Lin can almost feel the ghosts of the dead girls inside the house lingering in the air, a musk like spiderwebs on her skin. Last she'd checked the time, it was ten minutes to midnight. Ten minutes to the first day of August. Hungry Ghost month, as her mother would say, an edge of warning in her tone. The Gates of Hell were open for the entirety of the month, and the ghosts of the dead come pouring out. Back home, the air would've been filled with the sting of smoke as people burned paper offerings and set out food for their wandering dead. There was always an air of caution during this time, and though Alessia wasn't superstitious the way her parents were, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something lurking in the dark, a tangible presence hanging in the air, stalling the wind.

No one else in her sorority—which was, interestingly, predominantly white—seemed to share this sentiment, and it seemed silly to say out loud to herself. That was alright, Alessia had thought, just as long as she wasn't the one who got possessed by dead people. This entire time, she hadn't once glanced in the direction of the Tri-Delta sorority house, hadn't dared to look into its dark maw. Instead, she turned her gaze to the sky.

There is a buck moon tonight, bright and gibbous as a fish eye, ringed with a gelatinous corona that sets the sky aglow in a veil of silver.

Eyes watering, she breathes in slowly, like she's trying to inhale the dark, and her lungs inflate with dust and the sticky miasma of gasoline. All she can do is keep waiting. Waiting for what, exactly, she's not sure, but the puddle next to her head ripples every once in awhile whenever a truck thunders past on the highway and she's thinking: wouldn't it be funny that she'd survived all that just to become roadkill? Then again, there's the sucking wound in her side, that, if she wanted, if she could muster the strength to, she could stick her hands in and pull out an organ from.

At that thought, Alessia grins for the first time in a long time. The insane irony of the situation strikes her then, and a manic laugh bubbles from her chest.

All of her friends are dead, and here she is, ten, twenty feet away from the crime scene, laughing like a madman. Laughing like she wasn't just hunted through the old sorority house like a deer, the menacing hiss of a blade dragged against the wallpaper following her through every doorway and corridor. Like she hadn't just witnessed her sorority sisters slaughtered one by one, their broken and maimed bodies littering the floor like the mangled barbie dolls she used to leave in her wake when she was a little girl. They'd all just moved into the house, and now they were all dead.

First went Dina. Alessia had found her in the bathroom, slumped over by the sink, blood soaking the tiles, blood pouring from the open wound in her neck, blood everywhere. Only after they'd realised all the power lines had been cut, and there was no way to contact the police, did they find the next body.

There was Sarah M., a girl on the cheer team, her mouth slack-open in a silenced scream. For a brief moment, as Alessia stared at Sarah's limp body, a small, vicious part of her rejoiced now that Sarah's flyer position in the routine was hers for the taking. Almost immediately, the shame washed over her like a wave, and she stuffed that thought into the back of her mind. There was Marissa Macmillan, whom Alessia had thought about pushing down the stairs one too many times, yet held a hand over her gushing chest wound and applied pressure just like in the first-aid training manuals and told her to breathe until her eyes went cold.

Bodies after bodies of Tri-Delta girls started to pile up after that. Slashed to death in the hallways, hacked at the bottom of the stairs, spines severed in their bedrooms. It looked like something torn straight from the heart of a slasher horror flick. He'd locked and bolted all the doors, covered all the exits. There was no way out. They were boxed in. And the wolf was coming, slowly rounding up and tearing through the scattered flock. Alessia had been hiding with two other girls in the broom closet the moment they'd realised they were never going to win. They'd heard everything from behind the door.