The executioner’s breath was heavy and short, like that of a horse. His footsteps were slow and heavy on the rotted wooden planks. The girl did not need to look at his face to know what he looked like; she had seen the plump, sweaty face with its greedy, egotistical smirk often enough in her nightmares. Her tears cut through the dirt on her cheeks as she was led up on to the platform. The guards held her up for all to see—for every dirty face in the crowd to judge. Their eyes seemed to pierce her, to tell her that they knew who she was and what she’d done.

She barely heard the guard to her left announce her crimes for the blood whooshing in her ears. Witchcraft and heresy, on top of four accounts of murder. Witch craft and heresy, no. The murders of four innocent souls in a blood-hungry frenzy, yes. Her punishment: she was to be beheaded at the chopping block of the most feared executioner in all of the Marshlands.

At least, she thought, this will kill me and not just paralyze me as a stake would. She glanced up at the queen, who stared imperiously down at her from her balcony. She could kill them all, right now. She could extend her fangs and drain them of their blood, make her escape. But that would only add to her guilt.

She whimpered, laying her neck against the stone block, unwilling to end the afterlife so soon. A bell tolled in the distance, deep and foreboding. The executioner raised his axe high above his head, where it hung frozen for what seemed like forever. The whole world seemed to stand still around her, and for a split second she thought the executioner might have had a change of heart. But then the axe sliced through the air, and the girl screamed. There was a sharp pain at her neck before everything went white.