Sweet Sorrow Ashbaby (part 7 of the Afterlife Chronicles) Sweet Sorrow Ashbaby… Don’t you die on me… Please don’t go… I need you here… I’ll hold you forever… Even if I fade away… Stay… I didn’t want him to go. I tried to reach out, to make him stay, but he just walked out, dressed in those filthy clothes. I couldn’t help it, something in me broke when the door closed, and I cried at the thought of never seeing his cool blue-gray eyes or feeling his quietly sad presence again. Mother tried to sooth me, saying it was best, that he’d only bring them trouble, but I wouldn’t hear it. For the first time in my eight years, I pushed my mom away and ran to my room. I didn’t throw a fit, but it hurt so much, I couldn’t understand why… I didn’t hear the knock at the door that came twenty minutes later, for if I had, I would have run straight into the living room and died. Mom answered the door and let the man in. He must have taken out his weapon cause mom screamed. I sat up on my bed, eyes all wide, for all of three seconds, then I dashed out into the hall, only to see the man sweep the axe. Time slowed, fear shocked my heart, as the shiny head bit into and lopped off my mother’s head. My limps felt heavy, I couldn’t think, I just stared as her head fell and thunked against the ground before her body sunk to its knees. “Vampire filth,” he spat in a voice full of venom, his face contorted in anger and sick pleasure. He raised the axe and drove it down, splitting her body from base of neck to halfway down her chest before pulling the axe out and tossing it aside, unknowingly to my feet. He had eyes only for mother. When her body fell back, he knelt and started taking off her pants, struggling a little in his ‘excitement’. “Filthy vampire. Don’t deserve my cock. No. Don’t deserve nothing. But you’ll get it. You’ll get it good. Ehehehe,” his voice was twisted and high pitched, or maybe my hearing was distorting it. That didn’t matter. When he started undoing his pants, I knew somehow that he was going to defile my mother. Anger so deep, hatred so fierce, burned up from somewhere inside me and I grabbed the axe. How dare he kill my mother? How dare he then try to defile her? How dare he! The axe was lighter than I expected and the hall moved passed me faster than I would have thought but the thing I didn’t expect at all, was how easy it was to kill him. He looked when I screamed with anger, but I don’t think he really saw me, or it didn’t register before I swung. The fire axe cut through his hat and greasy long hair, slicing through bone and brain and the squishy flesh of his right eye before stopping. He jerked away from me from the force of the swing, vile blood splashing on my face, then he fell onto his side away from mom. My anger died, just like that, just as he did, without warning, leaving me cold and empty inside. I stared at him as I stood by mom’s mutilated body. He wore a cowboy hat and a brown leather duster. Maybe he fancied himself a vampire hunter, or some nonsense like that. All I knew is that he’d killed mother, and now he was dead too. The emptiness filled when I looked over at mom’s body, vomit finding its way out of me. It amazed me how much liquid came out of me. The tears came as I wiped my mouth then I staggered over to mom’s head and knelt by it, lifting it into my arms. That’s when I received the second shock of my life. As I stared down at her face, her eyes blinked and her mouth opened, working. In any normal situation, I would have screamed and thrown it aside, but mom had taught me how to lip read a few weeks ago. “Blood,” her lips begged. I reached up and took some of the blood from my face and smeared it on her lips, watching as her eyes closed and she licked it away. Something in me told me to put her back together, and I turned, going over to her body with her head in hands. My tiny hands had the hardest time pushing the split top of her body back together, but when I did, it reattached, the skin sowing itself together as I watched. Horrible hope filled me and I went over, tearing open the man’s stomach, gathering as much blood as my hands could hold, and brought it over smearing it around the base of mom’s neck before putting the two severed half’s of her neck together. They sowed together and she opened her eyes, tears streaming down. “M-mommy!” I cried out in joy. She looked strange though, her eyes were dull and her hair not as shiny. She raised her hand and coughed before touching my cheek. “Don’t be sad, Ashbaby,” she whispered, and then I knew. She was going to die anyway. Sure enough, her fingertips started to crumble to dust. I cried out, terror smashing the hope inside me into nothingness. Every fiber of me filled with pain as the most important person in my whole wide world slowly crumbled away, her eyes watching me, her lips pulled into a soft motherly smile. I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at the ashes on the floor, hoping with all my heart that this was some kind of dream and that I had just fallen asleep and that everything was going to be okay when I woke up… but nothing changed and soon, when my tears had dried, I stood then ran out of the apartment that had been my home. I had to find him, had to find that strange blue-gray eyed man named Derek. Everything else meant nothing.