Beneath The Cold Moon
Written for the Second Halloween event at the Imperial Palace
Prompt - blood
A/N: This story is dedicated to all my friends on Caesar's Palace.
It began innocently enough, a simple game of ring toss played with a Christmas wreath and pink, plastic flamingo. The children laughed, thinking it was fun to take this faded lawn ornament and spend Christmas Eve tossing a wreath around its neck. They recycle everything nowadays, don't they? But none of them ever imagined that this innocent looking object carried a curse, or that souls could also be recycled when the body they inhabitanted ceased to exist.
And then they saw it, a faint twitch, a sign, and whispers filled the air. It didn't just move, did it? No, of course not.
"That's not possible," said Poke. "You're probably just imagining things."
"Go home, April," the bee fairy buzzed. "You're drunk."
"I am not!" slurred the Spam Queen as she smacked the poor bee with a fly swatter.
Later that night when everyone in the palace had gone to sleep, a lone shadow crept across the snow covered earth, moving swiftly through the night as it escaped into the village.
It was the perfect disguise; the harmless lawn ornament, with a wreath around its neck and tinsel dangling from the cedar branches. And although he looked a little silly stalking his victims with an ornate wreath around his neck, he preferred it this way, because the strong scent of cedar helped mask the smell of death.
In the morning when the sun rose over the village, pieces of the wreath could be found scattered across the snow, the delicate ice crystals merging with flecks of green and spots of red. Such pristine beauty, shattered by the scarlet stains that soaked into the ground. And there in the snow was a trail of footprints leading away from the mutilated corpse they found rotting in the bleak winter sunshine, footprints that resembled those of a bird.
Was this someone's idea of a joke? Who in their right might would go through the trouble of pinning a murder on a plastic lawn ornament? Because that thing was always there, drenched in blood and lying on its side in the snow. If they looked closer they might have seen the smile on his face, or noticed the mad glint in his eyes that said, "You're next."
