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Meg Masters. My name is Meg Masters.
Sometimes she couldn't even remember that; most of the time, she had no idea why those simple words mattered to her so much. She knew they had meaning, a lot of meaning, or else she probably wouldn't be so frustrated about them. She even knew the meanings assigned to most of the individual words - she just couldn't form a cohesive understanding out of that.
I am Meg Masters.
She had no idea who Meg Masters was. Did she have a brother, a sister... did she even have parents? Was she an orphan? Was she rich, was she poor, was she kind, was she cruel? No matter how hard she struggled to remember something, anything... nothing changed. When she focused so hard that her eyes ached and her head throbbed, sometimes she could remember smoke - dark black smoke, pooling in front of her eyes. She didn't remember what it came from, or what it meant, and she couldn't ever remember anything else.
Who am I?
There was someone in front of her, someone she should recognize. It was a girl - a young girl, twelve years old at the most, with bright green eyes and strawberry-blond hair. She was standing in front of Meg with her arms out to the sides, blocking a doorway.
Meg was standing with a large backpack slug over her shoulders - the kind that you take on a long outdoor backpacking trip once in your life, and then it gets left in the back of the closet to gather dust and moths. The room around her was in complete disarray, with drawers and cabinets thrown open seemingly at random, and clothes strewn all across the floor. "Get out of my way, Sarah."
Sarah. Sarah Masters; my sister.
Sarah's eyes were red, and her eyelashes and cheeks were wet. "Meg, please! You can't leave now; we need you. Just... wait until after the surgery. Just-"
Meg wanted to reach out, to help her sister. She opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, to understand, but found herself saying. "I already know how this is going to end, Sarah. No one in our family has ever survived this. Why should I stick around just to find out that I was right all along?" Meg shrugged the backpack into a more comfortable position on her shoulders. "It's about time you accepted that sometimes people die, and you can't get them back. Give it up." Sarah was speechless, broken. Neither of them understood how she could speak so casually about whatever had hurt her so much. It was a surgery; someone was getting surgery... and no one in their family had survived.
Meg pushed past her sister without looking at her eyes, and this time no one tried to stop her.
She was only vaguely aware of herself as she neared the sign, walking along the side of a highway she didn't recognize. As she neared the sign, though, the words forced themselves into her semi-conscious mind. Leaving Massachusetts.
She didn't understand where she was leaving from, or where she was going. She didn't even understand the words that she repeated to herself over and over, her personal mantra. My name is Meg Masters.
But soon enough, the sign was behind her and she forgot the words written on it. Slowly, she forgot why it had been so unsettling to her, and eventually she even forgot that it had ever mattered.
There was a cool, refreshing sensation that washed across her normally burning eyes as she smiled at the small child, though the smile never reached those eyes.
The little girl stepped back slowly as terror spread across her face. Her lips opened in a silent scream even as Meg - Meg Masters- raised her hand, palm out with tensed fingers. Blood bloomed beneath her shirt in a dozen places at once, though Meg hadn't actually touched her and she hadn't been injured a second before.
The girl bled out quickly, falling limply to her knees almost immediately, and falling lifeless to the floor a few seconds later.
Meg smiled widely, though the feeling of new energy coursing through her was sickening. She had felt the depth, the power, of the girl's pain and terror. She still felt them.
After a long moment Meg reached into her pocket and pulled out a small brown leather pouch, tied at the top with a draw string. After scanning the room for a moment, she tucked it into the underside of the small coffee table. It was hidden well enough that it would be plausible for a newcomer to assume that the girl had never seen it unless she'd hidden it there herself. It was also in plain enough sight that any investigators - hunters or otherwise - would have no trouble finding it.
Meg didn't know what was happening. She didn't know why she was doing it. She vaguely remembered looking on the Internet, searching through old leather-bound books and musty tomes, and reading something about hex-bags - something similar to what she'd just put beneath the table. Hex-bags and witches. She remembered reading about many other things like that; werewolves and vampires and ghosts and pagan gods and something called djinn. She especially remembered reading about each of the ways they supposedly killed.
It was insane; she was insane, but in some ways that was a comfort. Maybe if she was really insane then none of this was actually happening. Maybe she would come to herself in an asylum someday, where she'd gone after she been driven mad by... by what?
By a death... the death of a family member. One that surgery couldn't prevent. Meg couldn't even remember who was dying; who had already died.
She wasn't often very aware of what was going on around her; there were only flashes of images, feelings, memories of brief moments in time. The man in front of her... he was shouting something at her, first angry and then desperate, but none of it made any sense.
There were bones shattering beneath her fingers, and her hands were dipped in blood. Her eyes were aching, and there was a painful tightening in her chest as the man started to speak strange, foreign words. As he was speaking, his voice hoarse with pain, she reached down. Her whole body was trembling as she put her hand on his chest, over his heart, and his eyes widened as she hesitated.
He started speaking faster.
She dug her fingers into his flesh with an inhuman strength. He screamed, cutting off the incantation, and a slow smile spread across her lips as the tight pain in her chest was released. She felt sick, nauseated. She tried to pull back, but her fingers clawed deeper into his chest, wrapping around his heart and pulling it towards her - ripping it out of him with an inhuman strength and ferocity. He screamed one last time, and she smiled even wider.
