Pet Shop Of Horrors Fan Fiction ❯ Die By the Sword ❯ Prologue

Die By the Sword - Prologue
By: Missfortune
Disclaimer: Anything that you recognize off the bat, probably doesn't belong to me.
Warnings: Erm...not nice stuff, like demon cats and blood, beware.
Notes: If you watch all those horror shows, you're gonna recognize this from....I think it was a Tales from the Darkside movie or something. At any rate, obviously I borrowed it and therefore it's not mine. Please do enjoy and remember that feedback is good ^_^

Francesca Borelli had led a very good life. Her weight had been carried on the backs and blood of others, as her once poor family grew large and prosperous. Behind closed doors deals went down that put mink on her shoulders while small children were deprived of their fathers. Yes it was a good life for the matriarch of a large crime family, but she was nearing the end of her life and training her sons to take over. There would be no internal struggles that would make or break a family. No, she had raised her boys to work together, to be stronger as a whole. As a united front they would be unstoppable. Her only regret was that she had no daughter. Her only female child had been a miscarriage and she mourned not being able to bring a girl into the world. So when she found a small scraggly black cat huddled under her daughter's gravestone on one of her monthly visits, it seemed like fate and she took the pitiful creature home.

Her eldest son, Jim, took an immediate dislike to the jet-black demon, as he called it. All his life he'd had a strong dislike for cats after one had scratched his face while he tortured it as a child. He still bore four claw mark scars down the left half of his face and was lucky to still have two eyes. The scar started right above his forehead and ran over his eyebrow and eyelid and down his cheek to his jaw. He had tried to convince his mother to get rid of the cat, but in her old age she grew somewhat soft and superstitious. She insisted that the cat was her Julia come back to be with her in the end. Despite her son's protests, the cat stayed.

Julia, as Francesca called the cat, was unfriendly. She didn't like anyone in the house, didn't come when she was called, and was known to attack people when least expected. She would leap down from shelves and onto shoulders, hissing and spitting. Sometimes she would pop out from underneath chairs and claw at ankles, often drawing blood and curses from her victims. Despite this behavior Francesca would not allow them to get rid of the cat, she insisted that if they were attacked, it was their own faults.

Not long after the cat's appearance, Francesca Borelli passed away in her sleep. The official cause of death was simple old age. She simply stopped breathing as she slept. Jim insisted otherwise. When he had walked in to get his mother, he had found the cat sitting on her chest staring at him with its strange orange eyes. He was positive that the cat has smothered his mother in her sleep, sitting on her face until she died from lack of oxygen. His two brother's thought him crazy and prevented him from killing the cat, instead they took to taking turns hiding it within their rooms, making sure the last little memory of their mother stayed alive in her cat.

A mere week after their mother's funeral, another death occurred within the family. Jim's middle brother fell down the stairs and broke his neck. When the household had rushed to the sound of his fall, they saw the cat standing at the top of the stairway, staring down at them all. Once again Jim was insistent on killing the cat, but once again his brother prevented him. His youngest brother, Tommy, the baby of the family began taking the cat around with him. He wouldn't let the cat out of his site, afraid that his brother would kill it, thus killing the lingering spirit of his mother and brother.

It was sudden and tragic how he went. He was being driven to a meeting. The driver lost control of the car and they died in a spectacular ball of fire in the bottom of a small canyon. They couldn't be sure due to the condition of the bodies, but one of the coroners was almost certain that the wounds across the drivers face were animal scratches and not wounds from the crash. The cat was not found in the wreckage.

Three days after the crash, the cat showed up on the doorstep and one of the servants let the creature in. Jim was blissfully unaware of the creature's presence for the first day. On the second day the fact that the cat was in the house was unavoidable. He awoke to a strangely silent house. A quick look into the servant's quarters explained the total lack of human noise. All of the servants were dead. Gruesome claw marks marred their terrified faces and gory necks. Jim fled, making a barely decipherable phone call to the police before hiding from the demon cat and praying to any god that would listen that it didn't get him.

To be Continued, and of course there will be Petshop characters then. Oh and...did I mention that I like feedback? *hopeful smile*

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