Father Paul arrived at our home that night, tearful and gaunt-looking. He told us his brother wouldn’t assist in our escape. It wasn’t an issue of money. He was furious that Father Paul had been having a relationship with my mother. He said he took the laws of the Elders seriously and the fact that mixing of Vampyrus and Lycanthrope was forbidden by them. He had been horrified at Father Paul’s confession. To hear this made me feel inferior in some way – like the Lycanthrope were animals that couldn’t be mixed with. Father Paul’s brother said that he should break all ties with my mother and the rest of us. It was like we were some sub-species.

“My brother said I would be severely punished if the Elders were to ever find out,”

Father Paul said, fear and hurt in his eyes. He explained that without his brother’s help, our secret move to Wales wouldn’t go ahead.

My mother pushed her chair back from the table and shot up. “If you loved me, you would find another way!”

However much I sensed he didn’t want to, he persisted with his brother’s view of things.

“Where would we go? Where would we all sleep?

I have no money of my own.”

“We’ll find a way,” she pleaded with him.

As I looked at her from across the room, I could see the fear in her eyes. She feared my father.

Father Paul continued to be firm, however much I suspected he wanted to give in. “We’ll just have to sit tight and think of something else.

Perhaps Joshua won’t come. Maybe clearing his name was all he wanted. Perhaps he’ll go back to the caves and make a new life for himself.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Mother snarled at him. “He’ll come for me. He’ll come for all of us.”

“He hasn’t yet,” Father Paul said back.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Mother said with fear. She ran from the room and disappeared to her bedroom. Father Paul followed her and I listened from downstairs as he pleaded with her from the other side of her bedroom door. I could hear him desperately declaring his love for her.

She remained silent. Father Paul was outside her door for hours. At one point, I heard him sobbing and I found this very difficult. When I heard his footfalls descending the stairs, I turned away as I didn’t want to see his face. As he left, he said, “Sorry.”

I didn’t see my mother again that evening.

She stayed barricaded in her room. Before I went to sleep that night, I tacked the pictures I had painted back onto my bedroom wall. I put the water colour paints and the brushes away, and my toy bear got into bed with me. I fell asleep sniffing his ear.

Chapter Twenty

Kiera

Jack had this way of making me feel empathy for him. Was that his plan? I wondered.

Maybe not. He was telling me his story and how he became what I now knew him to be. It was hard for me to reconcile the fact that he had once been a child – but with each passing minute of him telling me his story – those lines became ever more blurred. If not for a better set of circumstances, might he have been able to beat the curse – be something – someone different. He spoke of his eldest sister, Lorre. She had managed to create a life for herself in the human world.

Jack had said she had become a nurse. That was a caring profession, right? Not the sort of job a murdering Lycanthrope would take on. Perhaps my perceptions of the Lycanthrope had been misjudged? Perhaps some could beat the curse that the Elders had cast upon them. Why Lorre and not Jack? Perhaps because she had escaped the unhealthy situation Jack suffered at home with his mother?

Jack had told me how his mother had deliberately sabotaged the relationship with Lorre and the boy she had fallen in love with. Lorre had left soon after that and never returned. She had done the right thing. What of his real father, why hadn’t he come to save Jack now that his name had been cleared?

I slowly opened my mouth to speak and large flakes of grey ash-like skin fell away from the corners of my mouth. I knew that it wouldn’t be long now before I was unable to move at all.

My arms were so stiff and taut that it had slowed how fast I was able to grind my stone wrists against the chains which held me.

“You don’t look so good,” Jack said, peering at me through the gloom.

Again I saw that flash of concern I believed I had seen before. Then it was gone, the bright, fiery yellow taking its place. It was like the boy – before he had turned bad – was still inside him somewhere, and every so often he dared to peek out.

Sensing this, I forced open my mouth as far as I could and said, “I don’t feel so good, Jack.

Why don’t you just stop this? I’m not sure that you really want to make anyone suffer. I think you are better than that.”

Jack stood up and looked at me as if giving what I had said some serious consideration.

Then slowly, a smile formed across his bloodless lips and he said, “If you are trying to connect with that little boy, he doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I don’t believe that,” I breathed, trying to draw breath into my stiffening lungs. “I still believe that he is still in you – he’s just lost. You just need to find him again, Jack.”

“He’s dead,” Jack said turning his back to me.

“You only look away from me because you know what I say is true,” I mumbled, finding it so hard to speak now. My tongue felt like a dry piece of stone in my mouth. I knew the moment would come soon when I would kill him. Jack couldn’t win this. He just didn’t know that. If I didn’t have to kill him, I wouldn’t. I’d much rather save him, and there was a small part of me which was starting to believe that perhaps I could. If there was a way – I would find it. Despite what he had done to me, my father, and friends, he had been cursed – he had become addicted to the taste of killing, just like I had to the red stuff.

Were we both not addicts? Giving into those cravings that drove us forward…

Kiera! I screamed at myself inside. What are you doing? I was justifying this monster’s cruelty, viciousness, and murderous ways. I closed my eyes and saw Murphy’s heart being ripped from his chest because of Jack Seth’s betrayal. I opened them again, and looked across the room at my father tied to the chair. Any man who could do that to another was surely beyond redemption.

Was Jack telling me his story to soften me – to weaken me – to pity him? Was this how he was going to get me to make my choice?

Jack went to my father, and sliding his fingers into that open wound again, he grinned at me and said, “That boy is truly dead to me.”

I watched as his fingers slid into my father’s stomach like a fork into jelly. My father rocked back in his chair again, his arms taut against his restraints. His eyes spun wetly in their sockets as he screamed out in pain.

“Stop,” I mumbled, and worked my wrists faster and harder behind me.

“This doesn’t stop, Kiera Hudson,” Jack snapped, pulling his fingers from the wound with a plop. With blood trailing from his hand, he came towards me. Leaning over me, he ran the tips of his bloody fingers over my cracked and broken lips. Slowly I turned my head away. Jack chuckled. “No?” he said, teasing me with his bloody fingers again.

My stomach ached and my throat felt like I had swallowed a bucket full of acid. I wanted that blood – I needed it. Would just a few drops really matter if it helped me save my father and Potter? Neither would want me to degrade myself to save them – I wasn’t going to become a monster. I was better than that. Jack had given into cravings for every reason – but I wouldn’t give into mine.

I’m Kiera Hudson! I’m Kiera Hudson!

I’m Kiera Hudson! I kept saying over and over in my head. But what did that mean? Did it make me special in some way? No, but to keep saying my name over and over again reminded me of who and what I was. Jack could torture me, my father and my friends, but as long as I held onto what and who I was, he could never break me. That’s why he was the man he had become – because he had forgotten that little boy. Jack Seth had forgotten who he truly was.

“You surprise me,” he said, as he licked the last of my father’s blood from between his fingers. “You have resisted longer than I thought you would.”

“Then you don’t know me,” I mumbled, turning to look at him through my hair, which was growing stiff over my face.

“I know you better than you think,” he smiled back at me. “I understand your pain, Kiera Hudson. We share more than you would like to know or think.”

“We share nothing,” I whispered, my words coming out slow and labored.

“We’ll see,” he said, taking his bandana and wiping the blood from his lips. “We both understand loss.”

“I haven’t lost myself,” I breathed. “Not like you, Jack.”

“Perhaps not,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “But we have both lost people that we love.

We have both been lied to and been betrayed by them.”

“That hasn’t made me a monster like you,” I said, each word coming out sounding thick and slow, like I was trying to speak with a pillow held over my face.

“We’ll see,” he said again, looking at me.

Then, leaning forward in his seat and starting to tell his story again, he said, “I didn’t see or speak to Father Paul for several weeks after that incident…

Chapter Twenty-One

Jack

… My mother became almost a recluse, shutting herself in her room. The only person to spend any real time with her was Kara. They spent hours together, locked in my mother’s bedroom. Mother stopped going to the church with the twisted spire and I was forbidden to attend as well.

Eventually, Father Paul started coming back to our house but was refused entry by our mother. He would stand outside, endlessly whispering her name through the letterbox, trying to get her attention. On these occasions, she would creep from her room, and putting her finger to her lips, she would motion to us to stay quiet and we would have to sit in silence, like statues.