Emelia Dalca looked at herself in the mirror thoughtfully. She ran her finger softly down the taut pink scar against her pale cheek, her eyes expressing the confusion that swirled in her head like a whirlwind, and steadily she began to sweat. She knew what words people she knew would use to describe her; brutal, merciless, sadistic, bloody. But...had she always been this way? She didn't know, she really didn't. She looked around, feeling unsure of herself.
She closed her grey eyes, trying to concentrate on the child that she had once been. Before she met Cristi, Sian, Ileana,Luca or anyone else. That bitterly cold December day that the tips of her fingers were trying so hard to grasp at. She needed to know, because she didn't know why she couldn't remember anything at all before secondary school, before the Aces. Before she started getting told off for throwing throwing knives down the corridor at school.
Who was she? Why was she a lost 14 year old girl in Chicago? She'd gotten expelled from her school in Romania, she knew that, and had got out of there because of family bitterness. It had been clear that they didn't want her there, how unwelcome she was, so she'd packed up and left with Lila, a good friend who had just graduated, when the escape route had been offered to her.
She hadn't told anyone, and trusted Lila not to. Emelia had been looking for work and had got a job as a cleaner at a fast food chain. If the Aces could see how Emelia had fallen from her prime, she would be so humiliated. Getting barely enough to survive, living in a bed sit. Oh how they would laugh at how the great had fallen. Maybe even Cristi would laugh.
She couldn't quite get it, so she decided to look at the view. It was early evening, cars roaring noisily as they sped down the tarmac, spewing filth. She'd fantasized of driving a Maserati, but that was another thing that seemed impossible to her. She sighed, turning her back on the urban landscape. Life wasn't fair, at all.
She turned back to the mirror. Her previously luscious and shining jet black hair now lay blank and unkempt around her thin shoulders. Her eyes were dead, dark and depressing against gaunt and scarred skin. She was the shell of a girl that she had always wanted to be. But once you've gotten to your peak you can only fall, and right now she appeared to be falling from the top of Mount Everest.
That's when it came, like a flash of blinding light. Emelia staggered back, lying on the bed stiffly as the world around her swirled into a mess of luminous colours. Orange, blue, green, red, purple, pink, grey, white...black.