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 Gemstone Ivora was completely alone. Her mother had abandoned her half sister and her as young children. Gem was forced to adapt, to learn to care for herself, for her half sister, and for the dozens of useless orphan girls that mysteriously found their way to her house. After a fire that results in the deaths of all of the orphans, Gem and her sister descend into a nightmarish world, where they find themselves on opposite sides in ’the ultimate’ war. The Cycle of Blood has begun.
Prologue
Her white fingers tightened around the wooden hilt of a silver knife, her coal black eyes glowing with anticipation as she approached her prey. Her intentions scrawled clearly across her pale face, she moved to the side of his bed. She pressed a single claw laced with her poison against his throat, increasing the pressure until the tip of her claw broke the thin skin of his throat. As the venom pulsed through his veins and spread through his body, a look of surprise crossed his pale, sweaty face. Paralysis seized his body, and Ares saw Death standing there in front of him for the first time.
She brought her knife into plain sight and whispered. Her words were foreign to him, but the snake’s hiss of her voice betrayed the threat of impending death. She looked straight into his blue-green eyes, delighting in the thrill of the fear that radiated from him, and shoved the knife downward to his heart. There was a dull crunch, and the cool metal sank smoothly through his warm flesh, his hot blood spurting erratically from the wound. Her cruelly curved talons retracted into her fingertips, leaving the bloodstained weapon within Ares’ heaving chest. Her lips, blood red against the ivory of her face, parted in a smile that revealed perfect white fangs.
Charisma delicately pulled the blade from the gushing wound, licked the blood from it, and slipped it into the folds of her black robe. Unseen to all but the dying victim, the creature fed from the boy, pulling blood hungrily from the puncture. The last mist of fine crimson drops clinging like fire-hued dewdrops to her soft red mouth, she stood straight and turned to leave, wispy raven tendrils of hair drifting like shadows across her stoic face. She unfolded her leathery reptilian wings; they rustled in the still air of the hospital room.
Her victim cried out, his voice swelling into an unearthly wail that exploded outward to fill the room as the last remnants of youthful life were torn from his dying body, and Death hissed proudly. She closed her claws around his arm, pulling him toward her. She swept her wings downward and flew from the room, passing through the wall and into the blue skies beyond. A doctor nodded, pulling a sheet over the lifeless form, before turning to the girl standing anxiously at the bedside.
"He died of heart failure. There was nothing more that we could do to prevent his death."
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