Azure Crescent

The town centre’s clock had just chimed midnight, twelve long dongs echoed through the silence of the sleeping town. Twelve shadows crept out of the darkness, their movements were like moving water, fast and graceful into the light of the full moon. Hovering over the pavement they entered the small town fear and death following them, like a bad odour.

Long leather coats danced in the night breeze exposing sleek metallic guns, weapons that made the people of Diyeth cower and shrivel with fear, but the twelve shadows wore them with as if they were a friend.
These twelve had been travelling between towns, across borders, and everywhere they went deaths followed.

Massacres.

Their features were sharp and showed that they didn’t fear death, no, death was a friend, someone who walked beside them, who laughed as he watched lives end at the bang of a gun-shot. Crooked smiles tainted their moonlit features and the fantasy of bloodshed spurred them on, a demonic glint in their eyes signalled no mercy was found in bottom of their black hearts.

“Alright boys…” a man spoke, his voice hoarse from the many years of tobacco smoking, “Split up and circle in.”

There were scattered chuckles and sadistic mumbles as the black clad group dispersed. The ring leader flicked the cylinder of his revolver feasting his eyes on six silver bullets winking in approval.

A curtain drew across his face briefly, in those seconds he saw her, his wife, parts of her strewn across a dirt track, one of her arms bitten off at the elbow a leg ripped from its socket and thrown over by a tree a meter away, her upper body intact but her glimmering green eyes were cold and lifeless like her blood soaked body. The small bump where a new life was growing was prominent underneath the stained and tattered gown.

The scene played out in his mind taking a hold of him, a sick, heartless hold, one that he skilfully pulled out of and continued on as if seeing hadn’t affected him.

“This ends tonight…” his voice was harsh, “tonight and every other night we kill the beasts that stalk the night… preying on the innocent!” an uproar of cheers were heard from various places of the wood.
Now it was his time, his time for revenge, to return the favour that he had longed to do for many months. He was going to kill the animal that killed his beloved wife all those years ago.