Six Months later
September 2013

New York City

It had been six months since my parents were murdered and I had killed for the first time in my life.

The whole time had gone by in a haze of activity; I remembered only certain events, the rest were forgotten.

I had spent the first three days with a foster family. I was in a state of shock and for some reason I had not been able to tell anybody that I had an Aunt and Uncle living in New York City. It was only when the Miami-Dade Police Department had contacted them as next of kin for my Mom, did they find out.

As soon as my Aunt and Uncle had found out what had happened, they both appeared in Miami within hours. I had never been so happy to see anybody in my life. Other than my parents, they were the only family that I had left and I loved them both very much. Aunt Emily was my Mom's sister. My Uncle John was her husband and both were NYPD Cops.

..._...

My Uncle had arranged for the entire house to be packed up and for everything to be shipped to New York City. I was never intending to live there again; I never even wanted to set foot inside the place ever again. I was moving to a large house in Brooklyn and I already had a room there from my frequent visits to see them. Yes, I was traumatised by my experience, who would not be! Only, I never realised how traumatised I was, until six months after the attack.

Two months after moving to New York, I received a visit from some lawyer guy who told me that my parents had a life insurance policy each and that the company had just paid out into a trust fund for me – apparently the pay-out was large; several million dollars in fact. I was a very rich thirteen-year-old!

Yes, my thirteenth birthday had been less than a month after my parent's death. What should have been one of many happy days in my life, in this case becoming a teenager; instead, it was full of sorrow without my parents being there.

Aunt Emily and Uncle John did everything that they could, to help me put the attack behind me. I had seen several psychologists, but I kept having recurring nightmares and I would wake up screaming almost every night for the first four months. I had also had to endure the NCIS investigation into the attack and relive it several times.

I had killed a man; but it had been self-defence, so no further action was being taken against me by the local Police. I had punched and crushed the man's larynx and he had spent many minutes suffocating to death. Strangely, I had enjoyed every minute of watching him die, especially after having watched what the man had down to my Mom. The man's struggle for life had given me a chance to hit a hidden panic button, which had sent the remaining three men running. The Cops had arrived within minutes and found me on the floor beside my parents' bed, naked and partially covered in their blood.

I could still see the knife standing vertically from my father's back. I remembered every second of the attack that I had been forced to witness and after reliving the attack for three months, I needed revenge. By the end of the sixth month, I suddenly awoke one night. I had remembered something critical, the tattoo. The man's sleeve had slipped up his arm and I could vividly recall the entire tattoo.

It was a bird, a black bird. I dived out of bed, ignoring the clock that said it was only a few minutes after five in the morning. My laptop was still on from the night before, so I started searching through pictures of black birds.

Finally, after almost an hours searching, I found a match to what I had seen.

It was a Raven. From that moment on, I was obsessed by that Raven.

I would find that Raven and I would kill it.


New York City was a strange place.

It had taken me a while to get used to living there, permanently. I was used to the tropical warmth of Miami, not the cold of fall in New York. Even so, I was entranced by the happenings over the previous month or so.

There had been some weird happenings involving people dressed up in strange costumes and calling themselves superheroes! People had also been killed – ten Cops on one street, alone! Then there was the mass hysteria for arresting costumed vigilantes. When I was eleven, I had been shown a video of the famous vigilante, Hit Girl. She had killed a dozen men and then shot out the camera with those immortal words: 'Shows over motherfuckers!'

Daddy had caught me watching it and I had found myself in a lot of trouble – he did not approve of vigilante justice. I was also a big fan of the other vigilante, Kick-Ass – while his first outing seemed to have sucked, his heart was in the right place. I actually started wearing purple for a while, as did some others, but eventually gave up on the idea of trying to become another Hit Girl. Then, with the most recent events starting up again, well...

I decided that I would have to get fit, if I was going to hit the streets and not get myself badly hurt, or worse!

Daddy had taught me how to defend myself, using Taekwondo and other Martial Arts. He had also touched on some of the more offensive elements, too. I was very good at gymnastics and could flex and move as fluidly as required. I had been taught to shoot when I was eight, so that was not a problem and I always hit my target. However, I had not practiced any of my Martial Arts in several months, so I would need to get started again.

The other problem would be my Aunt and Uncle; they were Cops, so hiding something so big from them would be difficult, but they would never agree to what I wanted to do.

I had met their direct Supervisor, soon after moving to New York. His name was Sergeant Marcus Williams; a very nice man, who I understood had a daughter of his own who was a few years older than me. It turned out that we actually went to the same school; not that we had ever met. Although, I did witness an incident in the hallways that I think involved his daughter, Mindy. Apparently, she was getting up to something with some boy, a couple of grades above her. Saw some guy getting slapped by another girl, though, which was cool!

..._...

Then things changed when Uncle John came home one afternoon a little banged up. Apparently there had been an attack at a cemetery, an explosion of sorts. Interestingly, that seemed to fit in with something, which I had witnessed earlier that afternoon, not far from the same cemetery.

Aunt Emily and I were on the way home when we saw a van driving fast, overtaking us. Perfectly normal you might think, only there was a young girl hanging on one side! As I watched, the girl swung herself up onto the roof of the van and started shooting down through the roof, with a pistol.

'Awesome!' I thought.

The van began to swerve from side to side, presumably in an effort to shake off the girl; they almost succeeded too. Then the rear doors opened and a man tried to grab the girl's legs. A man looked onto the roof, checking for the girl when he was ambushed.

I actually yelled out then, rooting for the girl. A man fell off the van and was crushed by an SUV – hamburger! Damn, that girl could move – I watched her flip along the roof of the van and down into the passenger side window.

I missed a bit as Aunt Emily swerved to the left, but then I saw a body fly through the air and crash to the black top, just feet from us – there was a big bump too, so I think we may have put him out of his misery.

The van then pulled off the road and vanished.

..._...

That evening I found out that the girl I had seen was in fact the daughter of Sergeant Williams, Mindy Macready. There was a warrant out for her arrest. I could not see why, as all she had done was kill some men that obviously deserved it...

It highlighted the fact that vigilantes operated outside the law and without the protection of the law.

Something to be thought about!