I headed towards the trees, feeling sick with jealousy and hurt. I felt stupid and used. How could I have been so naive? If Sophie had been in those caves with him instead of me, it would have been her he would have made love to. It would have been an act of love – not out of fear and desperation at the thought of dying. That one final act bringing us together before we died – or so we believed back then.

I tried to push the thoughts of paranoia from my mind, but as I neared the trees, those voices of doubt just wouldn’t keep quiet. I tried to tell myself that Potter did love me, that there had been other times when we had been together – made love and it had been intense – it had been real. I tried to conjure all the times Potter told me how much he loved me while making love. There was the time in the summerhouse just before leaving Hallowed Manor. We had made love on the floor, and over and over again, he had told me how much he loved me. He had let me drink his blood, and he had drunk mine too. Then stopping up short, my skin turned cold and my stomach lurched.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed aloud.

Moments before making love on the floor of the summerhouse, Potter had returned from her – from being with Sophie. He had led me away from the statue I had been looking at in the rain.

Potter had taken me into the summerhouse, and as he had peeled my wet clothes from me and laid me down on the floor, he had been thinking of her.

All the time he must have been thinking of Sophie.

Potter had come straight back and tried to bury his own guilt and shame by having sex with me. I screwed my eyes shut as those images of us together taunted me.

I could remember Potter had been unusually gentle, covering my face, neck, shoulders, breasts, and stomach with soft kisses. I could hear the sound of the rain drumming against the summerhouse roof, and the gentle rise and fall of our breathing.

“I love you, Kiera,” he had whispered against my cheek as he lowered himself onto me.

“I love you, too,” I smiled, running my hands through his untidy hair. Then those images changed, and it wasn’t me I could see beneath him, it was Sophie, and I was nothing more than the statue outside in the rain, peering in through the window.

With my stomach cramping, and feeling sick at the images of them together, I leant forward and gagged. A thin stream of vomit swung from my chin, and tears rolled down the length of my face. I armed the vomit away and sucked in two large mouthfuls of air. I staggered off from the path which entered the crop of trees.

With my legs feeling like jelly beneath me, I fell against a tree and slid down the length of its trunk.

I pulled my knees up against my chest, and covering my face with my hands, I cried. How could Potter hurt me like this? What had I done to deserve it?

I rocked backwards and forwards slowly beneath the canopy of trees and I couldn’t care if I never saw Potter again. There was only one man that I wanted to be held and comforted by right now, and that was my father. Wiping snot from my upper lip and the tears from my cheeks, I stood up. I wouldn’t waste another tear on Potter – he didn’t deserve one of them. With the trees offering me a place to hide, I loosened my coat and released my wings. I trampled slowly over the mush of fallen leaves until I found a hole in the branches above me. The morning sky looked white, like a bed of snow. Spreading my wings, I tilted my head back, pressed my arms flat against my sides, and shot up into the sky, hiding myself and the pain amongst the clouds.

Chapter Ten

Potter

Murphy drove the police van to the rear of a rundown-looking cottage. The outside was weather-beaten white, but most of this was hidden by blotches of yellowy-green moss and ivy. The roof slated downwards and was covered in thick rows of grey slate. There was a chimney which leant to one side and looked as if it might just collapse into a pile of brick and dust at any moment.

“It’s nice to see that you’ve kept up your high standards of living,” I said, peering through the mud-splashed windscreen.

“The rent’s cheap and it’s remote,”

Murphy said, steering the van into an equally rundown-looking ramshackle of a barn. He killed the engine and climbed out, a trail of pipe smoke drifting out behind him. Once out of the police van, I followed Murphy, Kayla, and Sam out of the barn. Murphy swung the heavy-looking doors closed and headed towards the cottage. He took a key from his trouser pocket and opened the back door.

The kitchen was poky, but snug-looking.

There was a cooker and stove, a sink, and a small, round table with chairs. Tatty-looking curtains hung over grimy windows, and Murphy pulled them shut, even though it was still morning. The kitchen was thrown into semi darkness. There was a lamp on the table and Murphy switched it on, but it did little to lighten the gloom. Murphy kicked off his mud-stained slippers and stood before us in a pair of threadbare socks. The big toe of his right foot stuck out through a hole in them. He left the kitchen and we followed him into a small living room. There was a dusty-looking two-seater sofa and a couple of mismatched armchairs. A staircase on my right disappeared up into darkness. Part of the stone floor was covered with a faded rug. Murphy knelt down before a stone fireplace set into the wall. The grate was piled with logs. We watched as he took some sheets of newspaper from a pile next to the fireplace. He rolled them up, twisting their ends into points. Then, taking his lighter from his shirt pocket, he lit the pieces of newspaper, and then stuffed them between the gaps in the logs.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, once the logs started to smoulder.

Plumes of thick, grey smoke started to billow up the chimney and the room began to warm. Kayla and Sam sat next to one another on the sofa, a cloud of dust flying up from the cushions. Kayla placed a hand over her mouth and coughed. I sat in one of the armchairs.

“Soup anyone?” Murphy asked, looking at us, brushing soot from his hands.

“That would be great,” Kayla said with a half-smile. By looking at her face, I guessed like me, she saw little point in eating anything other than the red stuff. Food had lost its taste since coming back from the dead.

“I’ll have some,” Sam said.

Murphy looked at me and I shook my head.

“Suit yourself,” he grunted and went to the kitchen.

There was the sound of pots and pans clattering together. We sat in silence, watching the growing flames, until Murphy returned a short time later. He carried a pot by its handle and three mugs. Murphy hung the pot over the fire and placed the mugs on the small table next to his chair.

“This is all very cosy,” I said, “but what next? We just sit and wait?”

“I said I would give Kiera twenty-four hours and I’m keeping my word,” Murphy said, the soup now bubbling away over the fire.

The smell of it made my stomach lurch, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat anything.

“What if she doesn’t come back by this time tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t know,” Murphy shrugged. “We need to keep moving.”

“We go and look for her, that’s what we do,” I said.

“She might not want you to,” Kayla said, looking at me.

“You heard everything, didn’t you?” I asked her. I could tell she was pissed at me.

“Of course,” she said. “How could you lie to Kiera? I thought you two were, you know, in love?”

“Kayla, do me a favour and mind your own business,” I said, looking away into the fire.

“It is my business,” Kayla came straight back at me. “Kiera is like a sister to me. I’ve already lost my brother thanks to you.”

Unable to believe what I was hearing, I looked back at her and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You killed Isidor,” she said, staring back at me, her face a white mask of frustration and anger. “If you hadn’t had always been at him – making him look stupid and calling him names – he would have come with us. He wouldn’t have wanted to stay at that railway station.”

“Listen, he didn’t stay because of anything I did or said,” I snapped at her. “He stayed because he was all loved-up with some tattooed tart.”

“See, that’s just what I’m talking about!”

Kayla hissed, jumping up from the sofa. “You just can’t stop being cruel to people. You think it’s funny, but it’s not. What you say hurts people. Just like you hurt Isidor, and now you’ve gone and hurt Kiera. How many more people are you going to drive away?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I barked back at her.

“What makes you so special that you can go around taking the piss out of people?” she snapped back at me, her face livid and drawn-looking. Suddenly she did look older than her sixteen years. “You’re far from perfect, with your stinking tobacco breath, big nose, and smart mouth. Fuck knows what Kiera ever saw in you!”

“My ready wit and charm, I guess,” I smirked at her.

“See, you never take anything seriously,”

Kayla snapped, and she looked close to tears.

“Why can’t you just stop being cruel to people?

You used to really hurt Isidor with some of the stuff you said. You couldn’t even remember his name half of the time. You were always calling him Shaggy-Doo and a whole load of other shit.

Isidor might not have been as clever as you think you are, but he was a good person, a kind person, and you took advantage of that. It was because of you he stayed behind in that station – not because of Melody Rose. He was hurting and couldn’t put up with you bullying him anymore, and now you’ve gone and driven Kiera away.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking...”

but before I’d had the chance to finish, Kayla had fled the room, racing up the stairs. The sound of a door slamming closed echoed from above.

I looked across the room at Murphy. He stared back at me from beneath his bushy white eyebrows, pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth. “Well done, Potter. You’ve gone and upset her now,” he grunted at me.