Pray For The Wicked : Kol Mikaelson [2]

104: The Prestige

1985

To say that Ana was in a bit of a bad situation would be understating it.

She'd made her first kill on her seventeenth birthday, waited for the self-hatred to kick in...but it never had.

Her entire life, she'd been told to be peaceful, that murder and offensive magic would ruin her. Still, when her human grandfather had been used as a passenger host, she'd killed the Traveller he'd brought into their home, and she'd enjoyed it, as awful as that was to say.

The only regret came when the passenger had used her grandfather to kill her grandmother in retaliation.

Ana didn't hate herself for taking a life; she hated herself for the consequence of it.

Maybe that was what the elders had always been yabbering on about – 'The Ripple Effect.'

Ana called BS on that too, though.

Knowing that after years of pain, after the loss of her parents, she'd finally fought back?

Yes, she hated losing her grandmother, but she loved that she'd taken one of them down too.

In reality, the biggest problem she was now dealing with wasn't guilt, it was the fact she'd been marked.

The Travellers had some ancient branding instrument she'd managed to get caught on while escaping, meaning they had a way to track her if she wasn't careful.

Ana had been running for a year, and she was pretty sure they weren't actively following her anymore, but not actively pursuing her didn't mean she could get sloppy. She'd made a paste to counter it, but it wasn't enough to give her peace of mind, so she'd trained herself to make an escape plan the moment she entered a room, and she'd avoided Floare Society to try and keep herself as invisible as possible.

If there were tracking her, she didn't want to be the reason a troupe got killed.

That was the plan until the annual Essí-Aonso Celebration.

She couldn't miss it.

It had been her parent's favourite event of the year, and Ana needed to be there for them. To honour them, her grandmother and her possessed-grandfather.

She shouldn't have gone.

Everyone was smiling and laughing – playing music like everything was okay, and Ana was using all of her self-control not to yell.

It had been a year and a half since her parents had died, and just under five hundred other Floare had been killed since. The Travellers had gotten their hands on three of the stupid stones she didn't even fully understand the importance of, and five hundred people had died in the process.

According to the Floare line of communication, their population had been halved in five years, and people were finally starting to call it a war.

Ana was calling it genocide.