The Quarter Moon (Afterlife saga)

The Quarter Moon

Afterlife Saga

Book 4

  By

   Stephanie Hudson

Copyright

This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the author, as allowed under terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Copyright © 2013 Stephanie Hudson

All rights reserved.

This book is a work or fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by: ©
thePaperface

www.thepaperface.co.uk

[email protected]

Other books by Stephanie Hudson

Afterlife Saga

Book 1 Afterlife

Book 2 The Two Kings

Book 3 The Triple Goddess

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to the 52 people who lost their lives in the 7 July 2005 London bombing and the families, friends and rescuers this terrible day affected.

I will never forget the emotional feelings on my birthday to hear that so many innocent people had lost their lives and would never again celebrate their own birthday. I am happy that I finally get to dedicate a book to you all and your everlasting memory.

We all

For once you hope the train will never come,

Standing, waiting shocked at the world and all its done,

Creating monsters that think to change with tools of death,

But the only tool needed is blind madness with each breath,

You want revenge for the wrongs not yet made right,

To strip yourself of your working armour and join in the fight,

Hunting those long dead that remain responsible,

Our feelings are raging, furious and unstoppable.

They thought to change the world by killing innocent people,

Hiding behind actions not condoned in any Mosque, temple or steeple,

But still 52 people were unjustly taken from us,

Bringing Hell to London by underground Train and bus.

We did not engage you in battle or wage your war,

We were not soldiers holding our weapons at your door,

We were but living out our peaceful lives,

On the way to work or meeting our wives,

We were parents, students and more,

Not battleships invading your shore,

We were not the fighters in the sky,

We weren’t the ones invading your homes shouting ‘die’.

You lived among us and gained our trust,

Then you used and buried us into dust,

But we will be the ones to live on,

As greater people in name although were gone,

We say learn this lesson world and not fight,

For things better than ourselves we do right,

Holding on to the memories we love,

We send you this important message from above,

All humans are equal no matter your faith,

So put an end to the destruction and do so with haste,

Say goodbye to the hate and revenge in your sorrow,

For the sun will rise on a happier tomorrow.

Prologue

“He’s dead
, Keira.”

“NOOOOOO!” I screamed out at the impossible words as my knees impacted the ground and the next thing I knew darkness surrounded my soul.

After that, time didn’t make any sense to me. It was as if it was lost… pieces of a cosmic puzzle breaking away and leaving massive black holes in its wake. I could see my body freefalling down into a pit of space, where ink coloured arms would stretch out and try to rip pieces of my soul from my body as I fell. I screamed…at least I think I screamed, as I felt my mouth open but heard no sounds escaping.

Then I heard it…was that what my name was?

Was that what it sounded like?

“Keira
!” A voice was trying to pull me back and whoever it belonged to was putting the fear of God into the Beings that were trying to drag my soul down into their underworld.

Who was that?

“Keira! Come on girl! Bring yourself back!” I closed my eyes and tried to control my weightless arms to wrap around myself. I was letting go, despite the voice I heard and the urgency I felt in my name being called out didn’t make me want to hold on any longer.

It wasn’t the
right voice I needed to pull me back, so what was the point? These Beings could take my soul. Hell, they could tear it to shreds and scatter it like confetti if they wanted, as there was only one man that would ever own it and his was the one voice I would never hear again.

“KE
IRA!” The voice boomed and the shockwaves hit the edges of the tunnel to Hell I travelled. Then, I felt the thunder crack before I heard it…pain. Pain erupted across a face and when my eyes flashed open, I was looking into the piercing eyes of a scarred bear. I had to blink a few times before the image disappeared and what was left was the tear stained face of Leivic.

I looked around and saw the familiar
clear sky I had woken up to that morning. The hard gravel floor started to dig into my back where I lay and I turned my head to the side to see the creaky front steps leading up to a door that someone I loved would never walk through again. It was only then that I realised my body was shaking uncontrollably and my vision was like opening your eyes underwater.

“I am so sorry Keira…so, so sorry
.” He spoke to me in hushed tones that had blurred into meaningless words of a truth that I would never be able to understand.

I would never want to understand.

I was being held by strong arms that would never be strong enough and being softly spoken to by a voice that would never be soft enough. The wrong breath in my ear, wrong fingers curled round my arm and the wrong heart pounded wildly in the wrong chest.

It was all wrong.

And Draven was really gone from this world and had left behind a shell of a girl, who was now not only missing half her soul, but also…

The whole of her heart.

Chapter 1

Hearts of t
he Abyss

I woke to the sound of my alarm going off and it might as well
have been screaming “no life, no life, no life”, instead of its annoying beeping sequence. I hit it with a little too much force and the pain was welcomed. These days it was the only feeling that let me know I was still alive.

The week that followed the worst day of my life was like walking in the dark and having to feel my way around blindly with my hands. To say that I felt numb was not exactly true. Oh
, don’t get me wrong, I felt plenty numb, but only when I had to be around other people. But it was times like now, the times I was alone and the only emotion and physical feeling was the same and that was pure, unfiltered pain. A pain which cut so deep, that with every movement my body made, I felt like screaming in agony.

Some days I found I couldn’t actually get out of bed. I was too exhausted and mentally drained
, yet at night I couldn’t even close my eyes for fear of dreaming. See, it wasn’t nightmares that haunted my nights but wonderful dreams of Draven, that were like ripping open an old wound every morning I woke. So, I tried the technique of not sleeping. It was like a blissful torture, one that would break the little left of my soul. I would cry for hours, until that was all my body knew what to do. It was a complete lie when people said that your tears ran dry, that you could cry so much that you had nothing left, because a week later and it was still all my body knew what to do.

I would love to have said that
, after that day, things got easier, but I would be lying. The only changes were the different responses I took to the news. The first day my body seemed to shut down. Even after Leivic had carried me through the empty house and carefully placed me on the bed, my eyes wouldn’t focus, my lips refused to form words and my body began to sink further into the hole it was being sucked into. It was as though my mind had no say in the fact that my body had given up and was ready to die along with the other half of me.

I think
, if Leivic hadn’t stayed there with me that day, to keep pulling me back, I would have died. It was only after a full twenty odd hours that it was finally safe enough to leave me. That’s when the tears and screaming started.

Libby had come back to find me in such a state that she could get little from me but from the way I kept repeating,

“He left me, he left me…” She made her own conclusion that Draven had broken up with me. And still, to this day, I had not found it in me to correct her. Because she was right in a sense, Draven had left me, but unlike living with even the smallest possibility that he would come back, no, I was living in the shadows of what his body left behind.

The second day had me waking to even more tears as my cruel brain had spent the night replaying every touch, smell and loving word he had bestowed on me. Li
bby had tried to talk to me again that day but still couldn’t get anything from me. I couldn’t eat. I could barely keep down liquids before having to run to the toilet to exercise my stomach muscles.

The third day however
, my mind took on another approach. It was the day that my brain finally kicked into living gear and started to try and form a plan. It was only then that I started to realise that no-one and I mean no-one had been in contact with me! I mean, not even a phone call or a message from either Vincent or Sophia. It was only then that I realised even Ragnar, my bodyguard, had disappeared. It was as if time had been rewritten and I had gone back in time to when I first arrived.

I had grabbed my phone and started ringing every number on there to try and get answers
, but every number came back with a dead dial tone as if that phone was no longer in use. I had even driven to Afterlife, just to sit in my car for three hours, to stare out at a lifeless club that had been my second home. It had been shut up tight and even when I finally got my cramped legs out of the car, I found there was little point.

All I found was a notice on the door,

Afterlife will be closed until further notice,

Thank you.

This had started a whole load more crying, but added to this was also a whole load of fist banging that ended with a couple of bruised hands and cut up knuckles. I walked away with some sick hope that my blood on the notice would be seen by those who had caused my pain. Because it wasn’t just Draven that had caused my heartache, it was also those that I had considered family, the ones who had abandoned me. A brother and a sister, a Viking bodyguard whose life I had saved, a Vampire king who I had taken a knife in my heart for and an Imp who I had let into that heart. But no-one was there, no-one had come and I was very much alone.

This wa
s what led me into day four, which I would rightly call ‘Anger Day’. This was the first day that I cried not tears of pain and heartbreak, but pure rage. I had walked back to the cabin which was still in pieces in the forest clearing and it was the first time I had been back to the scene that changed my past forever. The night that had killed my demons once and for all and at that moment I was so angry that I wished Morgan had been there waiting for me.

I wasn’t the same person I was back then and the shaking in my arms from clenching my fists so hard was the proof.
I wanted to see him. I wanted to smash his face into my ready bones and watch him crumble at my feet. I wanted him to suffer as I had done, like I was doing now. I wanted someone who deserved to feel my pain and when I punched my fist through one of the only pieces of wood left standing, I knew I had lost it.

Anger Day ended with a trip to the hospital and a fracture at the neck of
the fourth metacarpal bone, or so the doctor informed me. He asked me what I had hit and I told him not to worry and not to expect to see someone coming in with a broken face…not surprisingly, he didn’t respond.

I left the hospital with
a splint that extended from my mid-forearm to the fingers, leaving my fingertips exposed and a shit load of Ibuprofen. He told me to put ice on it to help with the swelling and take the pain killers as needed. At the price of an X ray, two thoughts entered my mind in the back of the taxi, one I was glad I had taken out health insurance and two, how I missed the National Health Service in England.

I
had gotten home and managed to form enough words to lie to Libby by saying I had fallen on my hand awkwardly when out walking. I knew I wasn’t being fair to my sister, but it was hard to explain things I didn’t even yet understand myself. For one, I couldn’t tell her that Draven had died because where was his funeral? Where was his goodbye to the world and where did his body rest? These were the soul destroying questions my ‘supposed’ family could have answered for me but no, they had left me, just like Draven had, as though he hadn’t been the only one to die that day.

It all added to the
reasons that were best to just let Libby and Frank believe he’d finished things with me. I hated that they thought badly of Draven and hearing Frank one night saying how he would kick his ass if ever he saw him again, had me crying once more. I loved my sister and Frank but the very last thing I wanted, during her last weeks of pregnancy, was to add any stress, which was why things changed on the fifth day.

Day five
brought back an old friend of mine and I woke up to see the fake Keira back in business. I got up, decided to finally use the bathroom for more than the toilet and endless rolls of tissue paper to dry tears, to have a much needed shower. I dressed in something other than pyjamas and pulled a pair of gloves on over my splint. It kind of looked like I had stuffed a tennis ball on the top of my hand but the pain of it I welcomed. It was like a sick release on my overwhelming emotions and it helped in finally talking to Libby. Every time Draven’s named was mentioned I would flex my hand and the shooting pain had me biting my lip at the sweet agony. Every time I would think, well at least there is one pain in my life that I could control!

The conversation with Libby was just as hard
as doing anything else in the day. Getting up, washing, eating… Christ, even breathing was a chore, but one that I would no doubt continue doing. I think at one stage of my first week, I even tried pretending he wasn’t dead and that any day now he would be coming back to me and knocking on my door. This ended in me sat in the corner of my room, fisting my necklace, holding myself into a protective ball, saying over and over,

“It’s a mistake, it’s a mistake
,” until my voice didn’t feel like working any longer. Holding on to the necklace that Draven had given me was another coping mechanism I used, one that only brought me slight comfort, as without Draven around, it felt colder against my skin, as though some part of it was lost as well.

My week pretty much continued the same way, only with the added no sleepi
ng rule. I would get up…or force myself up on most days, and start the day with a new depressing thought to drag me down into a pit of misery that I would walk through like a bloody zombie. A zombie that even having Stephen Hawking’s big brain to suck on wouldn’t satisfy!

I was lucky tho
se days if I made it downstairs without pathetic tears emerging or squeezing my broken hand for my pain rush. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw the kitchen empty and a quick call out told me I was in the house alone. I treasured those moments and would find myself sat at the table, with an abandoned cup of tea waiting for me to take notice, just staring at the window. I think in the cruel subconscious of my mind, I was just waiting, or more like praying, to see one of Draven’s lavish and ultra-expensive cars pull up on my driveway. I think by the end of an hour I was imagining things as a car’s engine was the only thing I would hear. Of course, it would never be a car and I could not even blame my craziness on Libby or Frank coming home.

But no
one ever came at these times.

I got up and discarded the cold tan coloured liquid down the sink and grabbed a bag of crisps from the cupboard
, as it was the only thing I could even think to eat right then. I thought at some point I would reach the tubs of ice cream and my body weight in chocolate phase but until then I was reduced to putting little effort, or care for that matter, as to what I fuelled my body with.

I had the bag open and was stuffing four
crisps in my mouth at once when I walked out of the kitchen. I crunched down as I turned after something caught my eye. It was a single envelope, which was odd for two reasons. One being that these days whenever the mail came it was always full of baby related leaflets as I think Libby had joined every bloody baby group in the state! Oh and big reason number two, there had definitely been no mail when I came down earlier and after looking through the window for the entire time, I was pretty damn positive I had not seen any mail man!

I walked to the door
, but as I got closer the bag of crisps dropped from my hand and rained salty snacks to the hardwood floor. I gasped and my shaking hands flew to my mouth. Because there, on the crisp white envelope, was a red wax seal that was glued to the paper like large drops of my own blood.

I don’t know how long I stood dumbstruck like a daft blonde character out of
the movies we all mock, but I finally came out of it and literally scrambled for the door and ended up on my knees to grab the small rectangle to my chest like it was ‘My Precious’. I gripped it to the heart of me, as though it would be the very thing to save my life, the very cure to all my pain and the very thing that could bring Draven back to me.

By the time I
ran up the stairs, I had orchestrated this whole scenario that Draven had come back and was sending me instructions on where to find him… maybe he needed my help or maybe it was from Vincent who knew a way for us to get him back. It pretty much went on like this until I reached the secret lair that had become a messy version of my room.

I jumped on the bed and placed the letter in my lap
, all the while shaking, which was no doubt going to hurt my hand later but right then, no other sensation could penetrate my small bubble of hope. I turned it round and saw that it must have been delivered by hand as it had no stamp or postal mark. I traced my finger around the wax seal and over the indents of the Draven family crest. It was the same crest that was carved into the doors of Afterlife and that of the chair in which he sat in the VIP. That thought tore through me like a jagged piece of metal that made up some of the art work in the club.

The last time I had seen that chair
, Draven’s body had filled it. I bit down on my lip, remembering how sometimes he would reach out and pluck me from my own chair to rest me on his lap, like a pet he could stroke. Most of the time that happened he would simply ignore everyone around him and spend the night just focused on smoothing his hand down my hair and whispering endearments in my ear that had me blushing like a nun in a BDSM club!

I swallowed down a sob and finally took a big enough breath to
enable me to rip into the letter and somehow breaking the seal felt wrong. But I ignored the pang of pain and pulled out the thick paper that had been folded neatly twice. I opened it up and gasped as I automatically saw who it was from…

It was a letter from the grave, a letter from…