Chapter One

For nearly a whole minute , Jillian just lay on the bed and watched rivulets of blood run down her fingers like small streams until they collected on her finger tips where they would turn into fat droplets of blood before eventually their own weight pulled them free of her fingers and they fell down like some macabre version of a spring shower. For those few seconds she was riding the high of her adrenalin rush and was happy to just stare at the almost hypnotic dripping of her attacker's blood ,but the adrenalin high didn't last for much longer.

It started with a light tremble of her hand which disrupted the hypnotic rhythm of the dripping blood. Jillian tried to steady her hand but for some reason her hand just wouldn't comply. Then she noticed that her feet were also twitching lightly, almost imperceptibly. She looked back at her hand and saw that the light tremble had transformed from a light tremble to an all out shaking. She felt stinging in the corner of her eyes and her vision blurred slightly as tears began to flow freely from her eyes. Jillian was perplexed by her body's strange behavior and was wondering what was going on when her delayed emotional reaction hit her like a runaway train.

When Jillian had been assaulted and brutally beaten up, her body had reacted to the emergency by flooding her system with adrenaline and putting her in a fight-or-flight mentality. Even as her heart had started to race and her body labored to supply her with as much energy as possible, her subconscious had suppressed all her emotions and numbed her from feeling pain, both physical and psychological.

Once the emergency had passed, the adrenalin and other endorphins had slowly started to fade from her system and like a dam bursting under the pressure of a great river , all the emotions that were suppressed a moment ago, the weight of all the pent up fear and horror crashed down on her until she could do nothing but curl up and start crying.

Jillian wasn't a very violent person, in fact quite the opposite was true. She was a very caring and gentle person who didn't have a violent bone in her body, so when she finally realized that she had reduced the head of a living breathing human being into a lump of misshapen meat, something within her snapped. She just couldn't comprehend let alone accept the horrible thing she had done. Even as she tried to rationalize her actions as self defense, guilt started to tear her up from the inside like a spinning razor blade.

But beneath all the anguish and guilt that she was feeling something dark and sinister festered, a seed that had been planted as she reveled in the defeat of her enemy when she had been free of the guilt and riding her adrenalin high. And with her mind in disarray and her soul crying out in pain, this seed of darkness found the perfect place to plant itself, to germinate, and even to thrive. It fed on her pain and anger, it fed on her guilt and doubt , it fed on her anguish and suffering until it could feed no more. The flower of darkness blossomed and like a parasitic vine it wrapped around Jillian's soul and sent spikes of hate and spite deep into the core of her pure and noble heart.

Jillian didn't cry anymore. No, her expression was serene and a small smile graced her bloody and swollen lips as she calmly untied herself from the bed. She didn't even bat an eyelash as she roughly turned over the mangled corpse of her attacker so she could reach into his pocket and fish out his cellphone. She felt perfectly fine as she wiped her hand on his jeans so that she wouldn't get any blood on the fancy touchscreen phone.

No, Jillian wasn't crying anymore because Jillian wasn't in control anymore.

In the dark confines of that decrepit and derelict house, something dark and sinister was born. Something that would change the city of Andromeda forever, something that would cause untold pain and destruction on a scale that the city had never seen before.

Something that wore the face of Prosecutor Jillian Reed.