Chapter Text
Raven remembered everything.
She remembered everything about her dream as if it happened only yesterday. Most people didn’t remember their dreams, and Raven knew it wasn’t normal to have such vivid and dark dreams. At least, they weren’t normal, according to her father. He’d given her medication to keep the dangerous dreams away.
In her dream, Raven was barely seventeen, several years older than she had been when she had the dream. That had never been the problem with her dream. The problem was what she did when she was barely seventeen.
She killed a boy with a Fender guitar.
One detail Raven didn’t remember was whether the guitar was a Telecaster or a Stratocaster. But it had a heart of chrome and a voice of a horny angel. Sounding so pure as it hit the boy until his heart stopped and his body stilled.
She didn’t remember if it was a Telecaster or a Stratocaster, but she remembered that it wasn’t at all easy. Killing people was never easy. It required the perfect combination of the right power chords to lure the boy in. It required figuring out the precise angle from which to strike, the angle that would cause the most damage before he’d yell.
In her dream, Raven had done it. She’d swung the guitar into the boy, and he crumpled to the floor. Raven kept swinging, and the guitar screamed that it wanted more. But she couldn’t.
The guitar had bled for a week afterwards. The blood it oozed was dark and rich, the same colour as wild berries. For some reason, Raven thought of Chuck Berry when she’d seen him on TV, with his crimson guitar that looked a little like hers did now the blood coated it.
Even though the guitar bled for a week afterwards, Raven plugged it into the amp, letting the blood drip to the floor and cover her clothes as she lifted it and struck down on the strings. It rang out beautifully, playing better than ever before. She had never even heard the notes it played before, but she loved every one of them.
But the guitar wanted more, and she wanted to play so brilliantly again. So she’d smashed it against the wall, smashed it against the floor. But it was no good. The walls and floors weren’t alive. They didn’t bleed like the boy had. They weren’t warm or full of life.
So Raven searched for something with heat rushing through it. She found a varsity cheerleader, screaming as she smashed her with the guitar. Blood splattered and stained the cheerleader’s uniform, but it still wasn’t enough.
Why wasn’t it enough?
Out of anger, she smashed the hood of a car, leaving a dent where it struck. She smashed it against a 1981 Harley Davidson. The Harley howled with pain. It didn’t bleed, but the Harley groaned and roared as the guitar howled in heat. It lusted for more. Something more precious, something more important, and something alive. But there wasn’t anything else nearby that would satiate it.
So Raven ran back home and up the stairs of Falco Tower until she reached her parents’ bedroom. She peeked inside at Mommy and Daddy while they were sleeping in the moonlight that streamed through their window. The usually smokey sky was clear, and the moon was full. Raven pushed the door open further, holding the guitar behind her back in case they were awake. They weren’t. She crept through the shadows until she was at the foot of their bed. She raised the guitar high above her head, ready to swing, ready to bring it crashing down on her father’s sleeping form. He was so annoying, so controlling, why not him?
Then he woke up screaming: “Stop!”
Raven froze, the guitar still hovering over him. He scrambled to sit up as Raven stood in her parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night.
“Wait a minute! Stop it, girl! What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “That’’s no way to treat a musical instrument?”
Raven remembered exactly what she had said to her father before she awoke from her dream. Before she told her mother at breakfast the following morning, her father had walked in without them noticing and had overheard. Suddenly, he was so concerned, and then she’d had to take dream suppressants to stop her from having any dreams like that again. Raven had lifted her guitar above her head and spoke.
“God dammit, Daddy! You know I love you, but you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll!”