His crystal blue eyes suddenly turned dead black.
“Do I make myself clear, wolf?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said.
Then, with his hand still locked about my throat, he dragged me from the room and down the stairs. At the front door, he yanked it open, and then threw me like an animal out into the dark and the cold.
“Don’t you ever let me see your mutt face around here again. Fuck off back to the caves where you belong,” he growled, then slammed the door shut in my face.
With my soul feeling as if it had been crushed, I staggered down the hill to the church. I felt lost; bewildered and full of hate. I slipped and tripped in the mud and dirt. I pulled myself up again, howling out loud, for my heart felt as if it had been torn apart. I had lost both of my fathers.
Who did I have now? Who was left for me?
Where would I go? I stumbled into the graveyard, blind with grief, and collapsed behind a gravestone. I curled up into a ball and cradled myself. With my eyes closed, and shivering uncontrollably with the cold, I believed it had been Father Paul’s brother who had killed my father by the lake. My father had been murdered before he’d had the chance to tell me Father Paul’s dark secret. His brother had killed my dad to protect Father Paul’s memory. As I lay there in the dark, I made myself a promise that one day I would kill Father Paul’s brother. I would rip his fucking heart out.
I woke to the sound of voices nearby. It was morning. There was a fine layer of crisp frost covering the ground and me. I peered over the gravestone and could see a gathering of people around the entrance to the church. Some of them I recognised to be other Lycanthrope that Father Paul helped to relocate within the human world.
They spoke in hushed and reverent-like voices.
Then one of them pointed up the hill and an eerie silence fell over the ground. I looked up to see a coffin being carried down the hill, and I knew that Father Paul lay inside. His brother carried the coffin on his shoulder along with five others; all of them were dressed in finely pressed police tunics.
They carried the coffin through the graveyard and into the church. With my heart aching, I crept from my hiding place and snuck into the church. I found an alcove and disappeared into the shadows.
The tiny church was packed with Lycanthrope and others I didn’t recognise. I guessed they must have been Vampyrus who had come to pay their last respects. His brother stood at the very front of the church, one of his huge hands placed on top of Father Paul’s coffin. It was resting on a silver trestle in front of the altar, and it looked too small and narrow for him. I couldn’t picture him lying in there, his eyes closed, wrists bloody and torn. I could only picture him as I remembered him, with that kind smile and twinkle that would so often dance in his eyes.
From my hiding place, I looked around at the other people gathered in the church, and realised I was now just another member of his congregation.
Nobody here knew how much I loved him. No one understood what he had meant to me. Not one of them knew we had been as father and son.
I felt I should have been seated just like everyone, not shoved into the shadows at the back of the church. This really hurt, this was my dad’s funeral and I couldn’t mourn him like a son. I felt as if my grief and hurt was being crushed, suppressed inside of me. I felt like standing up and shouting at the top of my voice and unveiling the truth, telling them everything. What would it matter now? It no longer had to be a secret.
Instead, I hid in the dark and sobbed, trying desperately not to bring any attention to myself.
I thought of all the times he had been kind to me, like the day he bought me those paints. Like all the times he had encouraged me. Remembering what he had meant to me, I just couldn’t stop myself from crying. I placed my hand inside my mouth in an attempt to silence myself. I felt as if I were physically in pain, I felt as if my chest were being crushed. I couldn’t accept the one person I had truly loved, the one person who had always given me so much love, encouragement, and hope was gone. What was I going to do? Where was I going to go? Who was going to show me the way?
In that one instant, I felt as if I had lost everything.
During the service, his brother gave an account of Father Paul's life and a portrayal of what he had been like. The person he described was unrecognisable as the man I loved.
I remained hidden at the back of the church and continued to stifle my heartbreak. As the service came to an end, I got up and quietly slipped out. I crossed the small graveyard in front of the church and stood silently by the trees in the distance. I watched as he was carried out and placed gently into a hole that had been dug into the ground. Several pairs of pale claws reached up out of the hole and carried his coffin down into The Hollows. As the wooden box disappeared from view, I stood by myself, unnoticed by the others, and sobbed beneath the trees.
Jack
I waited for Father Paul’s brother and the others to walk somberly away from the graveyard.
I turned my back on that little church and everything that had gone on there. Where was I to go now? But I knew where I had to go. I had to go home and confront my mother. As I made my way there, the anger and frustration grew ever more focused inside of me. My anger and hatred wavered from Father Paul, his brother, to my own father, then back to my mother again. They were the adults in all of this and the choices they had all made had changed my life forever.
As I reached the outskirts of town, it started to snow. My feet crunched over the soft, white carpet that had fallen before me. It wasn’t the only sound I could hear. The sound of my dad’s dying words seemed to travel on the wind, which had started to blow harder.
Tell your mother that the Vampyrus
have found the baby’s grave. If she played no
part in that baby boy’s death, she wouldn’t
know…
What? I wondered, as I neared the house.
Then it hit me. I remembered the day my mother had told me and Kara that awful story. She had said my father had gone off alone to bury the baby’s body. Mother had said she had no idea where he had buried the remains. That’s what Dad had been trying to tell me. Only she would know where that poor baby lay, because she was the one who buried him there.
Wiping the tears from my face, I didn’t want her to see that I had been crying or know what had happened to Father Paul or my dad. I knocked on the front door and waited. I could hear footsteps approaching from inside, and my stomach knotted. The door swung open.
“What do you want?” she snarled at me.
“I’ve got a message from Father Paul, and as you have stopped having anything to do with him, he asked me to deliver it.”
“I’m not interested in anything he has to say,” she sneered, closing the front door.
I quickly shot my arm out, stopping her from shutting it. “I think it’s important,” I insisted.
She knocked her dark fringe from her eyes and stared at me. “I’m not interested.”
“But he says I must tell you,” I said, staring at her, my heart racing.
“Be quick,” she said, not inviting me in and keeping me out in the cold.
“Father Paul said that the Vampyrus had come across that grave where Dad buried that baby,” I lied, and kept looking straight into her eyes.
At once, they flashed orange, but she tried to hide it by breaking my stare.
“Father Paul said you should know because it might be the evidence they need to finally bring Joshua to justice,” I said. “Apparently the Vampyrus cops are going to start digging tomorrow to look for evidence – anything which might prove who killed that baby.”
“Your father killed the baby,” she snapped at me.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Just passing on the message,” I said and walked away. I listened for the sound of the front door shutting, and when it came, I darted across the street and hid behind a row of snow-covered bushes.
I didn’t have to wait for very long before my mother appeared from inside the house.
“Kara, keep an eye on Nik for me. I have to go out for a while.” Then she closed the front door behind her and set off in the snow, in the direction of the forest.
With the snow now ankle-deep, I knew I could follow her at a distance; her footprints would lead the way. With the collar of my coat pulled up around my throat, and my senses feeling numb, I followed her tracks at a safe distance. I made my way up the hill where the forest lay. Just once I saw her figure in the distance, just barely visible through the falling snow. I reached the tree line and saw her tracks disappear between the trees.
There wasn’t as much snow on the ground in the forest, and I guessed the deeper she went, the less snow there would be. I quickened my step and went after her. With every passing minute, I followed my mother deep into the forest, until at last she stepped into a small clearing ahead of me.
She glanced back, and I ducked behind a fallen tree trunk. My mouth felt dry and the hairs at the base of my neck stood on end. I waited several moments, then dared to peek around the tree. I could see my mother in the clearing. She was on her knees, digging away the snow and earth with her claws. With my heart racing in my chest, and a lump in my throat, I stepped away from my hiding place and into the clearing.
“It was you who killed that baby, not my father,” I said.
Startled, my mother jumped to her feet, clumps of black earth covering her fingers up to the knuckles. “Jack,” she gasped, trying to hide her shock at seeing me there.
“You killed that baby,” I said again, walking slowly through the falling snow towards her.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, trying to smile at me, but I could see the sudden fear in her eyes.
“It was you who murdered that landlord, not my father,” I said.
“Jack, you are mistaken. Who has filled your head with such lies?” she said, wiping the mud from her fingers.
“Only you would know where that baby was hidden,” I whispered, now just feet from her, my heart thumping.
“Your father…” she started.
“You told me that only my father knew where the baby was buried,” I reminded her.
“Oh, Jack,” she sighed, as if trying to make out that I was confused in some way.
“You’re mistaken. You haven’t remembered what I told you…”
“I could never forget what you told me and Kara that day,” I whispered. “It’s like it was only yesterday. I don’t stop dreaming – having nightmares – about what you told me. You killed the baby.”
“Jack,” she said, and although her lips were smiling, her eyes weren’t. They looked cunning and bright.
“Carry on digging,” I told her, pointing at the ground where she had already started to claw away the earth.
“No, Jack…” she started.
“Dig!”
I suddenly screamed at her, the anger and hate I had been suppressing finally starting to take hold of me. “I want to know the truth. I want you to face the truth of what
you’ve
done!”
“No,” she said, looking suddenly startled by the anger and rage in my voice.
“Fuck you then!”
I screeched at her.
“I’ll dig and make you see what you have
done!”
With one swipe of my arm, I knocked her to the ground. I dropped to my knees and began to claw away at the earth with my fingers. I hadn’t dug very deep when the smell of rotting meat wafted beneath my nose. I gaged, arming away the spit which swung from my chin. How did the body smell so bad after all this time? Shouldn’t it be just a bunch of bones?
“Please, Jack!” my mother suddenly screeched.
“Stop!”
Deaf to her pleas and just wanting to know the truth once and for all, I clawed and dug away the earth with my fingers. They felt cold and raw in the wet ground. The stench became stronger with every handful of mud that I clawed away. I saw the bones of that baby, then, I felt something, soft and spongy. I forced the earth to one side and then howled in disbelief and revulsion. What was left of the face staring out of the ground at me was almost black with rot and swollen with maggots, but I knew it was Lorre. I fell backwards in horror and sprayed vomit from the back of my throat.
I crawled on all fours away from the shallow grave, my vomit melting the snow around me. How much more could I take? I felt as if I were going fucking insane.
“What have you done?”
I screeched at my mother. “
What have you fucking done, you
bitch! You killed my sister!
” Then the final words my father had uttered rang in my ears.
Your sister…
he had said.
Your sister is
dead
was what he had been trying to tell me.
“I don’t know what you’re getting so upset about,” I heard my mother say. “She was a human. Big fucking deal. So what? Who gives a shit?”
“I give a shit!”
I roared and sprang through the air at her. I wanted to rip her eyes out.
It was only as I clattered into her, throwing her several feet back through the air, I realised what I had just done. How had I managed to jump so far through the air? And why did my body feel as if it were burning up from inside out?
“So there is some wolf in you after all,” I heard my mother say as she leapt to her feet. Her eyes were now a bright orange and her claws seemed longer – sharper looking somehow.
“Why did you have to kill Lorre?” I panted, trying to rein in my anger – fearful of what might happen to me if I just let go of it.
“She finally realised she was human,”
mother said with a wry smile. “That’s why I had to break up that silly little fling she had going with the posh wolf-boy. If Lorre hadn’t have figured out she was a human, he certainly would have.”
Then sticking out her tongue, she seductively licked her lips. She flicked her tongue upwards and I was shocked to see that the underside was covered in a fine, black fur.
“Oh please, Jack,” don’t look so disgusted. There’ll be a day when you’ll come to understand what pleasures the female Lycanthrope tongue can give.”