LILLITH BLOODROSE

 

INSANE | UNSTABLE

The first of the trio known variously around the Waterfront scene as The Brides of Dracula, The Harem or The Three Furies. Part eye candy who accompany Jeung and Charlotte around the clubs, part bodyguards for the pair of them, and part hit squad to be unleashed upon those who have earned the Blood Roses' enmity. There are also other rumours about them - mostly concerning the various possible sexual equations and how-many-bodies-in-a-bed entanglements that can occur along the combined Jeung/Charlotte/Harem axis - that it's best not to mention in front of any of them, even if the stories form part of the Blood Roses' glamorous mystique. 

Lilith is the poor little rich girl gone totally off the rails. Respectable Virginia Gardens family, father something big in Havalynd, mother who collects worthy charity cases and up-and-coming young modern artists for a hobby. In an infamous crime case over a decade ago, both parents were hacked up one night in their duplex apartment, while little Amanda Kurtz -then only nine years old - slept in her bedroom just along the hall. The crime rocked San Paro moneyed society, and everyone still remembers that front page photograph on the cover of the San Paro Standard, showing a young child, still dressed in her pyjamas, looking wide-eyed in bewilderment as a policewoman tenderly escorts her out of the apartment building. San Paro moneyed society immediately demanded the murderer be found, and the blame was quickly pinned on a young Montebank artist who had briefly been one of Mrs Kurtz's favourites (and, some of the gossip pages hinted, her lover) before being dropped for the latest season's new hot young prospect. The guy had a drug habit, a motive - he said Mrs Kurtz never made good on promises to fund his work - and had been in the apartment on various occasions; it wasn't difficult for the SPPD to build a case against him.

A junior hotshot detective called Inehower, thought otherwise. There was no forensic evidence to suggest the guy was the killer, and there were various uncomfortable anomalies in the evidence that Forensics had collected so far that his superiors were trying hard to overlook in their rush to clear the case. Starting a reputation for uncompromising awkwardness, Inehower starts asking the questions a lot of people don't want answered. An off-the-record conversation with the Department's chief CSI tech and a visit to the house of the Kurtz family now looking after poor little orphaned Amanda, where he talks with the girl for the first time, are enough to start the process.

The same process that ends, a few months later, with Amanda Kurtz being found guilty of her parents' double murder. Daddy spent all his time at the office, and didn't bring her nice enough presents when he came home from business trips. Mummy ignored her in favour of the smelly, badly-dressed artist people she brought home. The press had a field day. Child psychologists got rich off the media exposure they received commenting on the case. Inehower cemented his reputation as a first-class detective and major Departmental pain-in-the-ass, but he's still haunted by what that blank-eyed little girl told him that day, and the gleeful way she used the dolls she was playing with to show him what had happened that night in that apartment.

And little Amanda? Too young to be prosecuted, she was made a ward old court and confined to a private mental hospital, to be held there until she came into her majority and efforts could be made to determine what to do with her as an adult. Privately, the doctors agreed that the safest thing would be if she was never to leave the place. Inehower, who visited her once over the years, could only agree. At sixteen, the dark hungry thing he had glimpsed behind the eyes of that little girl was now starting to fully emerge.

Two years later, the facility was destroyed in a devastating fire, killing thirty nine patients and staff. Amanda Kurtz was among them, just one of almost a dozen victims whose remains were never found among the ashes.

And then, two years later, Lilith Bloodrose starts turning up at the Banshee club, and quickly earns her Blood Rose name and scar tattoo by using a nail-file to carve up the face of a guy who fed Byron some faulty backdoor passwords into the Port Authority computer systems. No-one really knows who she is, and no-one really cares. Who can tell what she really looks like, underneath all that wild dyed hair and crazy high-fashion tribal makeup? Who even remembers that Charlotte Bloodrose was once the neighbour and school-friend of little Amanda Kurtz?

Lieutenant Inehower always swore he'd never forget the look in that kid's eyes, a look that was always there, but then San Paro's a big place, and he and Lilith Bloodrose have yet to cross paths.