Chapter One: Blood is Blood

Blurb
Set in the years between Season One and Season Two, Blood is Blood is the first chapter of a new trilogy to be released on the hallowed days of the year. Nadine Rigg was born to a life of privilege and comfort. What happens though, when an inheritance brings its own dark gifts to your door?

Plot Synopsis
Nadine Rigg approaches the bar where she is to meet someone. The person has expressed interest in her mother’s jewelry, which she is attempting to sell in order to get out of Roanoke, Virginia. Nadine is not used to travel, hardship, and grime.

Her father Benjamin was one of the richest men in Virginia, making his money by selling land to the Locke Railroad. The town had exploded, and Nadine grew up comfortable and loved.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, a strange wasting illness takes Nadine’s mother Inez from her. Her aunt Verna Sergeant, a reminder of Mama’s past in the mountains, comes to the funeral. When sorting through Mama’s things, Verna attempts to take a small, carved bone ring from Nadine, sure she won’t want an old “trashy hill folk trinket.” Mama called it her “Thinking Ring” and told Nadine it was handed down through the women in the family. Nadine elects to keep the ring and gives Verna some of the more valuable jewelry.

Her father buries himself in work and often spends the week sleeping at the office. One week, he doesn’t come home. She finds him feverish and delusional, convinced Mama is at the train station. She calls the Locke home, and asks for Nathaniel Locke III, her fiance. Nathaniel helps Nadine take her father home and calls for the family doctor.

Unable to sleep, she tries on her Mama’s ring. She immediately notices that she can see and sense the details of the world around her with perfect sharpness and clarity. She senses how many people are on the floor of the house and who they are. She notices she’s turning her mother’s ring around her finger, and stops. The clarity fades away, and she removes the ring, frightened.

Her father’s health improves the next day and she urges him to rest at home for several days. Nathaniel calls on Nadine, and they resolve to resume planning their wedding after the grieving period for Mama is over. Nadine forgets about the ring.

For two weeks, her father’s heath goes back and forth. One afternoon she finds staff discussing a recent fit wherein her father tries to go to the train station to collect Mama. Worried, Nadine pulls out the ring again. This time, Nadine takes a walk through the house, turning the ring and concentrating on the various parts of the house. She senses the staff in their beds and elsewhere, and slowly checks to see that her senses are correct. Back in her room, she wonders how the ring works, and if it was the source of her mother’s ability to anticipate people’s needs.

Nadine begins to wear the ring whenever she is home. The longer she wears it, the less effort it takes to know what’s going on in the house. She thinks often of her fiance, her wedding, and her future children. One night, she goes to have supper with Nathaniel, and her father slips out of the house and wanders onto the train tracks, where he’s struck by a coal train.

In shock and racked with guilt, she decides never to take her ring off in order to fulfill her duties as her father’s only heir.

On the night of the funeral, while getting ready for bed, she senses danger through the ring. She senses someone coming up the hallway to her room, and an unfamiliar voice full of malice and rage speaks to itself about needing a “vessel.” The images she sees make Nadine blush and shake in fear. Terrified, she grabs her letter opener, convinced the man intends to hurt her, opens the door, and stabs the intruder, only to discover it’s Nathaniel. She is convinced she’s killed him.

One month later, she’s fled her home with her mother’s jewelry and a stash of money. Wearing the ring out in the world gives her glimpses of darkness and cruelty. She hears nothing of Nathaniel’s murder.

At the table in the bar, she meets the buyer. The woman is pale, older, and dressed entirely in black. The woman knows who she is. She says Nadine will be donating her jewelry to her organization. Not finding the bone ring in the jewelry box, she grabs Nadine’s arm and takes the ring from her, telling her it has never truly belonged to anyone in her family.

She urges Nadine to go home and marry her fiance, telling her it takes more than a letter opener to kill a Locke. If Nadine doesn’t choose to marry Nathaniel, the woman suggests she runs away. Nadine decides to go to the mountains, where her mother is from.