Matilda Wren

WHEN RAVENS FALLS

GOOD • EVIL • FREE WILL • DESTINY

Essex isn’t just about the glamour. Away from the ditzy charm, fake tan and false eyelashes, lays a hidden world of drugs, carnage and violence run by the bad boys and hardened men.

Is love fully understood at seventeen? Rachel didn’t think so. The fixation and infatuation that two people can have for one another scared her so much she didn’t just run away from it. She bolted straight into a teenage pregnancy and numerous failed relationships in a bid to forget Sean Fergus.

She never really understood why she ran, a little voice in her head told her to and she had listened. So why had she spent the last ten years trying to replace him?

Sean however understood it fully. He knew she had to run because he knew what he was, even if she didn’t.

He was a monster. There was a dark, vile evil that lived inside him. It made him do wicked things and what made it worse was that the evil force that consumed him, made him enjoy it. Women weren’t safe with him.

When Sean meets Rachel again, unexpectedly he sees a tiny glimmer of hope that redemption is possible. If they could just find their way through the maze of infatuation and fixation, then they just might finally stand a chance of a normal happy relationship. But can a person change?

Can good overcome evil?

Whilst Sean is forced to confront the violence of his past and take on what he sees as the demons that threaten his future, Rachel finally realises why she I ran. She knows she has to run again but this time it is for her life not her heart.

But will
he
let
her
go so easily this time?

WHEN RAVENS FALL By Matilda Wren

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©2012 Matilda Wren. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 7/18/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8577-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8576-6 (e)

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I

The Initiation 

The Beginning of the End

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of

the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Sir Winston Churchill 1942 

Chapter 1 

December 1997

Peeing on a stick is not as easy as it sounds. Women cannot aim, so it requires skill and one cannot rely on the fact that the body will release a gentle stream. In fact, when the act of peeing on a stick is required, inevitably, your body will let you down and the gentle stream becomes a gushing waterfall.

Not only do you completely miss the object you are trying to pee on, but also you manage to pee on everything else but. Without doubt, your hand will get drenched along with the toilet seat, the floor and anything else in the immediate vicinity.

You then need to start the process all over again, after of course, consuming large amounts of liquid so you can pee again.

If by miraculous chance (
and most of it will be by sheer 
luck
) you do actually manage to hit the target so to speak, the three minutes it takes to get the result will be the longest three minutes of your life. It will feel more like three hours than the hundred and eighty seconds it actually takes.

Waiting for that blue line to appear was probably one of the most terrifying three minutes of Rachel Marsden’s life.

This was not something she had expected to undertake four months after her eighteenth birthday.

Three days previously, she did not have a care in the world; her main concern being she had enough weed to smoke that week and she had obtained enough amphetamines to take with her to whatever rave she would be attending with her boyfriend, James Porter.

Pregnancy, babies and responsibility had not been at the forefront of her mind, but here she was seventy-two hours later sitting in her boyfriend’s parent’s bathroom, with her knickers round her knees, on the toilet, peeing on a stick and silently praying to god that the blue line that was going to appear was a vertical one and not a horizontal one.

Even then, she was striking. Dark flaxen corkscrew curls fell around her face; the mismatched lengths framing her curved profile, finally resting in a bouncy mound on her shoulders, home-coloured highlights dazzling under the spectacular lighting of the bathroom.

A parted fringe plunged like disused springs over her teardrop shaped eyes that were the deepest darkest brown, swirling like melted chocolate and encased with long black eyelashes that only required the bare minimum of make-up to accentuate their natural beauty.

Her creamy, light complexion exposed the youth she bore, presenting a false innocence, but it was those huge gemstone eyes that told anyone that looked into them that they held a veil of concealed secrets.

The same unconscious defences were portrayed through her style as well, preferring to mask her hour-glass figure in baggy jeans and sweatshirts, giving her a curvier outline than that which she really possessed.

The bathroom was one of three, which had always amazed her. Having three bathrooms in one house was just ridiculous. James’ house presented a huge four bedroom, double garage, detached property in Blackmore.

The Porter’s believed they were a middle class nuclear family; living in an idealic world where their son didn’t take drugs, talked to them about what was going on in his life and their only major concern was where they would holiday that summer or winter.

If they knew what was happening at this very second in their plush bathroom they would have died of absolute pure shame. Rachel, not particularly welcomed by either Mr or Mrs Porter, smirked slightly at the metal image of them slowly melting into the floor, much like the wicked witch in the film The Wizard of Oz, as the disgrace and disrepute engulfed them.

James’ parents had money; lots of it. She had never really been friends with anybody that had money before. They were a different sort of people. They had atypical thought processes and carried a persona about them that would make Rachel feel inadequate and not up to standard.

It’s not that they had ever said anything out right as such; it was little things like his mother prompting her to use a coaster with her drink or suggesting she may like to get changed for dinner. That and the fact they were both religious nut jobs who were devoted followers of the Evangelical Church.

Being in the lavish bathroom with its large, oval, roll top bath that had old fashioned gold taps with the heads of cherubs as knobs; which took pride of place in the middle of the floor, made her feel paltry and incompetent. The separate shower that stood over in one corner had no surround but a plug hole in the black tiled floor. She stared at it, almost wishing herself to be sucked down it. Anything to prevent her from having to deal with what was happening.