She came late to her discovery, to the time when she woke up alone in the forest twenty miles from the little town she'd grown up in, blood on her hands, all over her face, the taste of someone else's blood coating her mouth and her clothing and making her gasp for breath. She gagged, nothing but dry heaves, and tried desperately to figure out what had happened. Stumbling slowly to the small lake she could smell close by, she struggled to remember what went on last night, why she was out here, alone, covered in what she was pretty sure wasn't her own blood.

It took several hours longer than she'd expected to get to the lake, and long before she'd reached it, it felt to her senses as if it was right in front of her, the scent of it, the feel of the air changing, cooling, the little noises of the creatures that lived in the trees overlooking the water, all of that came pouring in to the point where she expected every footstep to be in ankle-deep water.

She washed herself off, stripped down and scrubbed her clothing, used it to wash off her face, her arms, her hair. Once she was fairly certain that the blood was gone, she spread out each piece on one of the large, sunbaked rocks along the bank to dry. She didn't quite feel ready to get out of the water yet herself; it had taken a surprising struggle with herself to get IN the water at all, but now that she was there, it was cool and comforting, a place to lay back and float and think.

She had a lot of thinking to do.

There'd been the dance... it was silly, it wasn't even for her graduating year, but someone had asked her to go and, curious, she'd gone. There was music... the music had seemed so loud. When she told her date she wanted to go outside, he seemed sympathetic, he even promised to bring out something for her to drink in a minute.

...drink...

A flash of something, a momentary glimpse of a broken bottle of vodka lying in a puddle that was half clear fluid, half thick, dark red liquid, the two opposites swirling hypnotically in the refracted light from the broken glass. Booze, and blood, and...

She coughed, flailing for a moment, spitting the lakewater out with disgust. The taste of that, of blood and vodka lapped up from pavement, had been so thick in her mouth...