The Crow: Avenging Angel
Khamrin (pronounced "Cameron") "Kami" or Evangeline "Angel" de Ravin
age at time of death: 25
cause of death: shot, presumed dead; bled to death painfully, screaming for help that wouldn't come
Kami grew up in East L.A., but moved to Queens to pursue a career on Broadway. She lived in a run-down studio apartment reminiscent of the one Roger and Mark live in in RENT.
Her longtime boyfriend Jake left her when she came up pregnant and would not get an abortion. Lost, she decided to put the baby up for adoption, and that's where all her troubles began.
She got unknowingly caught up in a black market baby-selling ring; she was told that the two thousand dollars she would recieve was for medical bills and her own welfare until the baby came. When twenty thousand dollars was placed in her bank account, she was curious, but chalked it up to clerical error. Without any questions, she spent some of it on her own debts.
Then came the day that she gave birth: it was a girl, and she named her Evelynn. When the men (calling themselves Nathan and Jenk) she'd been in contact with came to collect the baby, she insisted on meeting the adoptive parents. She was adamant; they could not take her baby unless she met them. They reminded her--with a backhand across the face--of the money she'd "stolen" from them. It turned out that the other eighteen thousand was supposed to come back out of her account after the baby; it was a form of money laundering.
Kami panicked; this was not in her plan. She waited until the men left with the baby and then, against the insistence of her doctors, she left the hospital to get her back.
When she arrived at the house her contacts had met her at for weeks, it looked deserted save one car in the driveway. She entered the house, and what she saw horrified her.
Dozens of babies, all races and sexes, were heaped together in a large plastic container with a dingy comforter in the bottom. None of them cried; it seemed they were sedated. Seated on a delapidated couch was a man in a very nice suit with a checkbook on his knee and--Kami was aghast--*her* daughter on the couch next to him, in a fancy new carrier. Without thinking, she grabbed it and ran, but was shot multiple times, killing the baby and and her being left for dead, calling for help in English and French, until finally all she could do was stare at her baby daughter's lifeless body and die in misery.
Kami awakened one year to the day after the day of her death. She had been listed as a Jane Doe and kept in the city morgue--with her burial scheduled for that day. She was dressed in a simple black turtleneck dress without sleeves, her makeup half-done as if the undertaker had gone for a break.
The crow told her that the men who had taken her baby were still at it, and were becoming more and more ruthless in their ways. Her revenge would come, and the benefit would be the lives of the innocent babies they stole.
Kami went to the room where the personal effects of the deceased were kept. There she found a black trenchcoat whose sleeves had been cut off during the aftermath of the automobile accident that killed its owner. She also found a pair of fishnet stockings, a heavy studded belt, and a fishnet shirt that had belonged to the girl whose car the man had hit going 70 miles an hour. She donned all of these and put on the heavy boots she had worn the day she died.
She saw herself in the mirror then. Her face had been powdered white, conceivably so the makeup would stay on. Her left eye had heavy eyeliner around it, while her right had none. She picked up an eyeliner pencil and filled in her right eye and drew a line from the top of each eye up past her eyebrows, then drew another from the bottom to her cheekbone. She lined her lips with the same pencil, adding a line at each corner that curled up in a spiral.
First she went to the contact house. It was condemned, the roof sagging in places--but there was a car in the driveway. Inside she found Jenk with a vial of animal tranquilizer, about to inject a screaming infant. When he saw her, he froze in fear, being a highly religious man. She picked up the baby and soothed it, crooning softly to it. Then, cradling the infant in one arm, she snatched the needle from his hand and jammed it through his forehead. His cappilaries began to burst, and he fell to the ground as the shape of the crow formed on his forehead. She searched the house and found the bodies of four infants in the bathtub. "Are they..." she asked the crow, who sat on her shoulder looking down at the sleeping infant in her arms. "No," he said, "Their souls have not gone to the land of the Dead. For you see, infant souls are universal; they will be reborn in another baby somewhere in the world."
Kami left the baby at the local fire station, with a note that indicated that they should look for the baby's parents.
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