Prologue: Fortuitously Unfortunate

It was a dark street, made especially dangerous because it was hardly the safest neighborhood of the city. In hindsight, she realized that she had no business wandering down such suspect roads at midnight, but she really needed to be home and this was a shortcut. Besides, this neighborhood was familiar ground. The ghostly shadows on the identical, dilapidated brick walls didn't faze her even the slightest.

She reached the middle of a block with dimly visible, cracked cement and weeds along the crevices. Complacent in her safety, she could hardly see what would happen next. One minute, she was walking home in the dark; the next, there was a flash of pain that bled into a wrenching agony, searing her torso. She tried to keep her mind clear, tried to keep her eyes open. Her mind flashed with warnings and a desperate need to figure out what the hell was going on.

Disguising her turning around as the staggering of a wounded animal, she discerned a man with a deranged smirk, wiping the blood from a knife onto his pants. "Oh, some fight in you!" the man exclaimed with delight.

Her heart nearly thrashed out of her chest in fear. This man—she knew him only in the news reports. She couldn't believe her rotten luck. "Y-you're… the Beautician…"

"Come here, sweetie, let me get a lock of that beautiful hair," he crooned, making his way towards her. He walked towards her like she was helpless—and she was.

She knew she was dead. She was bleeding out and what hope did she have of fighting off a grown man, let alone a grown, psychotic man?

But there had to be something she could do—

She let herself bleed out like a pathetic, moribund deer. The man sauntered close and when he twirled his knife, she thanked the Deities that he was a braggart and mustered all her focus to deftly swipe the weapon. The man did not expect her to move with such agency. She swung swiftly at his throat, but the man threw up his hands in surprise and hissed when the knife bit into his wrists. He stepped back but tripped over a crevice, landing on his bottom.

It didn't occur to her to escape or call for help. Her mind screamed to neutralize the threat. She seized her opportunity and leapt like a feral cat upon the man, sharp fist driving towards his gut. The man shielded himself with his shoulder and while his back was turned, her armed hand slammed the knife fiercely into his back, tearing the flesh and catching bone. She twisted and wrenched it out as the man clawed and punched her, not feeling nor caring about further injuries on her person.

She stabbed at his face and managed to cut deep into his left eye and this time, she left the knife there. He howled and kicked harder, catching her in the stomach. She flew a foot away and knew the last of her strength was escaping her but oddly enough, she didn't mind.

She weakly yelled an expletive to the vapid audience that was the night. Then to the crescendo of the psychotic man's struggles, she faded from the world with a purple glow surrounding the buildings.

"—my fucking God, all this blood—"

"—someone call the police!"

"—been a while since the Beautician's last victim; that poor woman—"

"—excuse me; police on the scene! Ma'am, I need to step away—"

"—but where is the body? Or bodies?"

The harsh daylight displayed every last drop of evidence of defiance and struggle from the night before. Only the corpses of the girl and the man were the missing pieces of the puzzle—the pools of dried blood made morbidly detailed outlines that mocked the police and spectators…

Where were the bodies?