The Elixir Girls

Prologue

What is the point of living if we are going to die? We all die eventually, but yet most of us fear this inevitable fate. What makes us fight so hard to sustain our existent, even though we harbor the knowledge that we’ll be betrayed by our own aging bodies? We are so desperate to maintain our lives that we are prepared to go to the point of taking someone else’s. Or at least we were, and we did, many times over.
You may call us monsters, but it was survival for us. We neither had nor knew no other life; there was only constant deprivation and deals that went terribly wrong. So before you take to judging, imagine yourself in our position… what would you have done? Our life is one so complex and profound; it’s full of struggles and hardships, some of which are so extraordinary that you may find them difficult to believe.
We are the bringers of death bought by blackmail or gold.
We are… the Elixir girls.

Chapter 1-Cassandra

There are mainly three types of people in my world; the people who are so evil that they have no care about what they do which means that they always stay on top, the people who always do good, yet bad things happen to them and the people who are the messengers, the bringers of fate and bearers of news. Of course this is in my life that the people appear, there are other types of people, but unfortunately I have not met many.
I was born in a slave house but because my mother died during childbirth, I was sent to live with her sister, called Sarah, who lived as a servant. Sarah had recently given birth to her own daughter Amelia so she treated us as if we were her twins instead of one daughter and a niece. Amelia and I did every thing together.
When we were five hears old, Amelia and I were beaten up by a gang of boys because we had tried to help a stallholder whose stall they had upturned. This was taken as an attempt to undermine their authority and we were severely punished. The only reason that we didn’t get beaten to death was because the neighboring street gang had spotted them and chased them off. Their leader took an immediate shine to us and once he had heard our story he decided to let us join his gang. At that moment we become the youngest gang members as well as the only girls in the gang. Surprisingly the vote for us to join was unanimous.

If we had not joined the gang, our lives would never have been as they were.
We would have been servants to a wealthy family and nothing more. I guess we owe our lives to our childhood in the gang, and what it taught us.
At the age of nine, Amelia and I could move so quietly through the streets at such a pace that the boys teased us that we had wings hidden under our dresses. At the age of twelve, we could defend ourselves tag-team style from group attacks of large boys aged up to seventeen. Being trained in the gang from such an early age we also had nimble fingers and could steal almost anything from anyone at anytime. All of these talents were discovered, trained and refined by the gang.
Despite all of our talents, we never used them unless there was no other way to turn. Another thing that you should know, no-one except the gang knew of our talents. That is how protective the gang were of us. If anybody had found out about what we were capable of and what we had done, they could have blackmailed us into doing just about anything.
There was such a danger of people finding us out that the fact that we belonged to a gang was totally unknown except for (of course) amongst the gang. Most of the town’s folk believed that we just hung round with the gang as their little pets or, as most of the other street gangs thought; we were the gang’s general pleasure girls. Both of these speculations were incorrect, but we did encourage the first one in order to explain why we were always with the gang.