Marauder.
A name that represented blood.
Blood.
Death.
The kind of monster I'd tried so hard to bury.
"Kill her family," Marcus repeated, as if saying it again would somehow make it easier to process.
I stood there, frozen, while the council members watched me with expressions that ranged from expectant to amused.
They wanted to see the Marauder again.
They wanted to see me become the thing that had earned me that name in the first place.
The thing I'd spent decades trying to forget.
But forgetting was impossible when the memories lived in your bones, when they were etched into every fiber of your being like scars that would never heal.
Marauder.
The first time I'd earned that name, it wasn't because I'd wanted to kill anyone.
It was because I'd tried so hard not to.
~
Coloralan Territory, 2005
I'd been hiding for three weeks.
Three weeks of pure, agonizing hell as I fought against the hunger that clawed at my insides like a living thing.
