Tiptoe

[Rook Boswell]

Prompt List

• Rain
  
• Drink
  
• Deep
  
• Blood
  
• Insanity
  
• Balloons
  
• Hazard
  
• Secret
  
• Zombie
  
• Christmas

[Rook Boswell]

keep it  s e c r e t

Her mother was dead.  That was all she'd been able to think about while Raven and those other hunters took her from Hole in the Wall and locked her up in the guildhouse for safe-keeping, and she didn't fight with them.  Why should she?  They had bigger problems, more important concerns, and she'd just distract them.  So, she'd sat in Raven's room with her cards, and she'd just read them.  Layout after layout, sometimes even just pulling cards at random, she went on for hours with this psychic self-mutilation that she'd committed herself to, because she wasn't just reading Tarot.  No, she was putting sincere, intense focus into it, and when she did that, she saw, felt, heard and endured so much more.  It was something she'd kept herself from doing in her readings, stopping after she got so far as a 'gut feeling' that would lend a bit of credibility without mentally wrecking her.  Here and now, she didn't care.  She deliberately set out to learn everything.

Some things were not meant to be known, especially by a bright young gypsy such as herself.

Grief provided the perfect explanation for what was basically shellshock from the trauma she'd put herself through (with the grief of losing her mother just piled on top), and if there was nobody on hand who could see that she'd done the psychic equivalent of digging at yourself until your fingernails cracked and broke away, that was hardly her fault.  When the Midnight thing blew over, Rook expressed a desire to go back home, which to her meant back to her mother's house, and though Raven seemed to want to argue, how could she?

They'd cleaned everything up, those talented Onyx members, but Rook wasn't looking for a physical mess when she went back in there.  She'd explored the house first thing, searching for the not-so-obvious imprints of violence and death on the place, and she'd found them.  Then, she'd worked at them until all she could do was lay in a heap on the floor and cry, working herself around the same torturous scenes over and over again.  When she finally got up, she made herself a pot of tea and took it into the workshop that she'd shared with her mother for so many years, then settled in to work.  She poured her own hurt and anger, her mother's fear and pain, into the curses she wrought, and some of the bits and pieces she needed required going into the tools they kept for maintaining the house, but she didn't mind.

There had been a team of four dispatched to torture and kill herself and her mother, which she'd escaped because she'd gotten caught up at Hole in the Wall.  Of those four, all of them had survived the evening, and none were particularly important to Midnight's hierarchy, but that hardly mattered to her.  For Scotty, the raven and youngest of the group, she went fairly simple - he crossed the street and was paying so little attention that he stepped out in front of a buss and got splattered.  He was the one who'd failed to notice that Rook wasn't home yet, said she was, and prompted the attack to begin too early for the hunters to have a chance at saving her mother.  For Jerome, a vampire of less than a year and the one who'd beaten her mother, no less than a beating of his own would do.  He picked a fight with a man who wasn't only a Frost hunter, but a trainer, and the man didn't balk at taking him apart piece by piece after being taunted about a few of the people he'd killed that night.  The other raven in the group, Mike, had 'tasted' the older Boswell woman, so Rook didn't think twice about his punishment - the next meal he sat down to was like swallowing razorblades, complete with the deadly lacerations to his insides; if he survived that one, each one afterwards would continue in that fashion until he wasted away.  The final one, a vampire of closer to twenty years and therefore a little more difficult, got a bit more personal touch.  She had to catch a few mice to do it, which was harder than it sounded, and then got a bucket and her mother's iron.  You can guess how the mice felt inside, and it translated wonderfully to the sensation of panicked claws and teeth within his torso scrambling to escape until either the 'trapped animals' tore his insides (and especially his heart) up, or he did it himself trying to get them out. 

When she was finished for the evening, she went to bed, slept a good, solid night's sleep, and then woke up the next day to work on wards for herself and the house.  She had this power, and she was going to use it to survive where her mother and sister hadn't and weren't.  Once her safety was assured, she would study and build her magic until it was second nature.  It could be a weapon.