This chapter is for my dearest Emma.
He coughed and spluttered as he was roughly escorted out of the huge mansion. He gazed up at her window once more, a soft smile creeping across his face. He had a name for her, a beautiful name to place with a beautiful face.
Belladonna.
It was more beautiful than he could have ever imagined.
It was then that he elt a presence, eyes on the back of his head. He quickly spun around, only to see a young girl standing before him. Like his beautiful Bella - Bella was beautiful in Italian, and Belladonna was most definitely beautiful - she could not have been more than fifteen years of age. She had short brown hair, slighty messy, kept in place with a small rose-pink headbannd. He noticed a rucksack slung over her back, a black one with pink butterflies and bleeding red hearts on it. Who was she?
"You're wasting your time, you know," her voice was soft and gentle, but it had a rough edge. "Victor wont let you near her."
"Who are you?" curiosity got the better of him, and he couldn't help asking.
"Emma. Emma Pennington. You new around here?"
Andrew nodded shakily. "An explorer, just off the Bountiful of Plymoth."
"The ship that sunk last month?"
He nodded solemnly. "I'm one of the only survivors.
"Wow! Cool!" this seemed to excite the young girl. "I wish my life was that exciting."
A dry chuckle escaped his cracked lips. "I'd hardly call it eciting. What do you do all day?"
"School."
"Oh..."
"Today should be interesting though! There's this new teacher, apparently, and he''s meant to be really strange."
"what's his name?"
"My name is Todd. Stephen Todd."
His pale hand glided gracefully through the air, the chalk dancing between his fingers as his name was written upon the dusty old blackboard. St. Mariana's was a very old-fashioned school: no interactive whiteboards, no red pens, no markers. Thise were the rules.
Emma sat in the second row from the back, her usual seat. Not completely in the back - the back row meant trouble, and was always watched - but just far enough away from the front to stay uder the radar. She'd pciked up little tricks like that as she went along. As suspected, Stephen did not notice her.
But she noticd him.
There was somethong odd about him, not quite right. A strange familiarity. She had seen him before, she just could not work out where. Had he taught here before? No, she would remember a name as distinctive as Stephen Todd. Stephen Todd definitely had not taught here before, she had to have known him fro somewhere else, she decided.
The class was actually rather interesting. He gave a lecture on 'the master of Horror', Edgar Allan Poe, who was in his and Emma's mind a genius known bst or being an expert at creating the intense atmosphere of poetic dread. She woshipped Poe with a passion, and it seemed as though Stephen did, too. There was something she liked about him, there was something different and refreshing about this teacher. But he seemed so dark, so sullen, so far away. There was something about him, something...odd...