“Why did he hand himself in?” I asked, my heart racing at hearing this news.
“He has spent the last few years gathering evidence to prove his innocence,” Father Paul explained. “The Elders didn’t believe the accusations your mother made about Joshua. He denied it all.” Father Paul looked ashen and his voice sounded scared as he continued, “The Elders have set Joshua free.”
My mother continued to sit and sob as she left Father Paul the difficult task of revealing the court’s decision to us.
“What evidence did my father have?” I asked, standing up and looking down at my mother. “You told me that he beat you. That he beat my sisters. That he was a murderer. Why didn’t the Elders believe you?” I needed the answer to this question. She had managed to convince me of my father’s murderous behaviour, why hadn’t the Elders believed her?
Without looking at me she said, “Your father is very clever. He managed to twist everything.” Through her continued sobs, she explained.
It became clear that my mother and Father Paul had both been in The Hollows giving evidence to the Elders over the last seven days.
Evidence for whatever reason, the Elders hadn’t believed.
Overhearing the conversation as Nik played on the rug, he looked at my mother and said, “Can I see my dad now?”
I doubted if Nik would even have recognised him if he had passed him in the street, as he had been only four the night we had fled the caves.
Hearing this, my mother fled from the room, Father Paul close behind her. Neither me nor Nik got an answer to our questions. Not just yet, anyhow. We ate in silence that night, as the news of what had transpired at Elders’ court slowly sank in. I felt a little guilty, as deep inside me, down in the basement, I felt the slightest tingling of excitement at the prospect of seeing my father again. The smallest shoots of curiosity sprung up in the shadows of that basement and they grew evermore wild as they searched desperately for the light.
After Father Paul left that night, in a somewhat sombre and thoughtful mood, I lay in bed with that feeling of excitement. I couldn’t quite explain it, but it began to slowly consume me.
I felt guilty for feeling it, but however hard I tried, it just wouldn’t go away. I thought of all the hideous stories my mother had told me about my father, but the feelings of excitement and curiosity just wouldn’t go.
Over the next few days, the thought of seeing my father obsessed me. I pictured myself going back to the caves we had left some years ago. In my head it hadn’t changed, everything was exactly as we had left it. I tried to picture my father; I hadn’t seen him in all that time. I could remember what he looked like, his fair hair, hazel-yellow eyes and small build, but whenever I closed my eyes to picture him, his image became distorted around the edges. However much I fantasized about meeting him again, I suspected if my mother had anything to do with it, I never would.
A few nights later my suspicions were proved right, as she said to Kara, Nik, and me, “We’re going to have to run away again.”
Jack
The plan was this: Father Paul was going to leave the Blackcoats and run away. We were then going to move into his brother’s holiday home in Wales.
“We’ll be able to start a new life together,” he assured us.
“Nobody will ever find us,” Mother added excitedly. I knew she was talking about my father.
I asked my mother about Lorre and whether she would be coming with us. She then explained, although we hadn’t seen Lorre in months, she had received letters from my sister.
Apparently Lorre had managed to make herself a life amongst the humans and was training to be a nurse in the city.
As Father Paul had little money of his own, and he didn’t own the house up on the hill from the church, he was going to go and confess to his brother that he had fallen in love with my mother, a Lycanthrope, and ask if they could live in his remote little cottage in Wales, as he intended to leave the priesthood.
The icy hand that had taken hold of my tummy all those years began to squeeze again.
This time around, I had a greater understanding of what was going on and what we were being asked to do. However much Father Paul protested his love for my mother, I knew she just wanted to put yet more distance between us and our father.
Over the next couple of weeks, the situation at home continued as normal. Kara stayed at home with my mother. Nik and I continued to attend school, Father Paul still visited most evenings, and the planned escape wasn‘t discussed. Even though I was fourteen now, and had a better grasp of the situation, I still felt disjointed and insecure. Each time I went to bed, I wondered if it would be my last night in my home.
Would we leave in the middle of the night again?
Would it be as frenzied and as hectic as before? If so, how much notice would I be given? Would I be expected to leave everything behind again? As I lay in bed at night, I would look around my room and make a mental list of the items I would snatch up and grab if it came to us fleeing in a matter of moments again. As days rolled into weeks, I slowly began to take my most treasured possessions and place them in a small pile by my bedroom door. There wasn’t much, just my paintings, along with the water colour paints and brushes that Father Paul had bought me. On top of these I sat my toy bear, which I had bought from the caves with me. I was prepared.
Mother started to fill my head with her stories about my father again. Her voice would be cold, yet her eyes would blaze as if on fire. I had seen this look too many times before and I knew it was a sign that another tale about my father was coming.
I wished she would stop these stories, they made me feel sick. She could probably see the look of despair in my eyes and would add, “I’m just telling you for your own good. I think you have a right to know what your father is really like before you go deciding whether you want to see him or not.”
From the years of stories she had bombarded me with about my father, I had a pretty good idea of what he had been like. So the days slipped by, and I became ever more apprehensive. Were we staying? Were we going?
If so, when?
Then, when I least expected it, the news came – and with it a change in my mother that would affect me more than I could ever have imagined.
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.
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.