by Tim O'Rourke
Dead Seth (Kiera Hudson Series Two)
Book Four
BY
Tim O’Rourke
Copyright 2012 by Tim O’Rourke This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Story Editor (Hacker) Lynda O’Rourke
Book cover designed by:
Suzi Midnight
Copyright: Suzi Midnight 2012
Copyedited by: Carolyn M. Pinard www.thesupernaturalbookeditor.com This book is dedicated to Val and Dave Cooper Thanks to:
Jennifer at readitreviewit.wordpress.com Michelle at novelsontherun.blogspot.com Shana at bookvacations.wordpress.com Darkfallen & Greta at Paranormalwastelands.blogspot.com Angie at www.booksJackorrow.blogspot.com Braine & Cimmaron @ Talkingsupe.com Tammy @ Girl(Heart)Books Who all took the time to review my books – Thank you!
More books by Tim O’Rourke Vampire Shift (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 1
Vampire Wake (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 2
Vampire Hunt (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 3
Vampire Breed (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 4
Wolf House (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 4.5
Vampire Hollows (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 5
Dead Flesh (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1
Dead Night (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1.5
Dead Angels (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 2
Dead Statues (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 3
Black Hill Farm (Book 1) Black Hill Farm: Andy’s Diary (Book 2) Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 1) The League of Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 2)
Moonlight (Moon Trilogy) Book 1
Cowgirls & Vampires (Samantha Carter Series)
Book 1
You can contact Tim O’Rourke at www.Ravenwoodgreys.com Or by email at [email protected]
Chapter One
Kiera
Jack Seth looked across the room as if I had somehow managed to break free of my chains and had slapped him across his emaciated face.
His eyes burnt fiercely in their sunken sockets.
His face looked skull-like, glaring back at me in the fading light which spilt through the window.
My father sat forward in his chair, opposite me, and he groaned in pain. Blood seeped from the gashes Jack had opened in his belly. A black patch of congealed blood covered the front of my father’s boxer shorts.
The mere sight and smell of the blood made my stomach leap and the back of my throat burn. I wanted some of it – needed some of it. I couldn’t touch a drop, though, however bad things got for me. However intense the pain, however much Jack would surely taunt me with my father’s flesh, I wouldn’t have the slightest taste of it. Not just because the strips of flesh had been sliced from my father, but because I knew if I were going to save him and Potter, I would have to become a statue. I would have to turn to stone.
“What did you say?” Jack asked, coming towards me, blood dripping from his fingers.
“Who are you to make me choose between my father and Potter?” I said. “You don’t have the right to make me choose between them! Who are you, anyway? Some perverted serial killer?”
Seth stood before me, wiping my father’s blood from his fingers and onto the front of his jeans. I watched the sticky trails form on his thighs and my stomach knotted. Then, dragging one hooked finger down the length of my cheek, he whispered, “We’re more alike than you think, Kiera Hudson.”
Turning my head away, I said, “You disgust me, I am nothing like you,” but it was myself I was disgusted with. I could smell the blood on his fingers and I just wanted to lick them clean. I twisted my stiffening wrists against the chains that held me.
“You are a monster, just like me,” Jack breathed into my face, his breath hot and smelling of my father’s flesh. His eyes flashed in their sockets like a torch, and I looked away. I didn’t want to look into his eyes. I feared what I might see in them. Instead I looked down at the floor. I looked for what I had seen – what it was which told me I could save Potter and my father.
“I’m not a monster,” I whispered, letting my hair fall over my face, so he couldn’t see what it was I looking at, just in case he figured it out, too.
“We are both monsters – freaks – the stuff of nightmares,” he whispered, his wrinkled cheek now brushing against my face. “Did you choose to be a half-breed, Kiera?” he continued.
“No,” I whispered back, as my father stirred on the other side of the room, fading in and out of consciousness.
“Did you fight the changes in you when they came?” he said, brushing my hair aside so I had to look into his eyes.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Did you feel repulsed when you realised there was something inside of you?” he said softly, now almost caring. “Something inside of you that wasn’t natural?”
I thought of how I felt when I first saw those x-ray images Doctor Ravenwood had shown me at Hallowed Manor. I couldn’t forget how sick I felt at the sight of those wings wrapped around my ribcage. I shuddered against Jack as I remembered.
“Terrifying to discover a monster lives inside of you, isn’t it?” Jack said, looking into my eyes. “Enough to drive you insane?”
“Yes,” I murmured, remembering how repulsed I was at the sight of those little black claws at the tips of each of my wings. How just the sight of them had once made me want to gag and vomit.
“But you’re not sickened by that monster anymore, are you, Kiera?” he whispered in my ear. “You’ve accepted it. You like it.”
“I tried to fight it,” I whispered back. “I really did.”
“So did I,” Jack said back. “But I had a choice, just like you did. But both of us gave into the monster living inside of us.”
“I’m not a killer,” I hissed into his ear.
“Oh but you are,” he said softly. “You’re not the Kiera Hudson who walked into that police station back in the Ragged Cove. You weren’t a killer then. But the monster was lurking within you, just waiting to be let out.”
“But you’ve always been a monster,” I said, my skin slowly turning cooler as it started to stiffen and crack.
“Have I always been a monster, Kiera?”
he said, leaning back from me now, so he could look at me. “No I haven’t.” His face was drawn and pale in the last of the daylight drifting in through the dirty window. Seth stood up straight, towering over me. He went to the corner of the room and dragged a chair from the shadows. Its back legs dragged across the rough wooden floorboards, sounding like canon fire. He placed the chair before me and sat down.
“Both of us have monsters living inside of us, Kiera,” he said. “But what matters is what or who released them.”
With the wind and the snow battering against the window, Jack placed his long, bony hands on his knees. The light in his eyes faded like the last of the daylight from outside, throwing the room into a shadowy gloom. He didn’t speak, a long silence stretching out before us. Then as if he had at last gathered his thoughts, he started to speak in a low, soft sounding voice.
“My father left for work that night as usual. He couldn’t have known that when he returned, we’d all be gone…
Jack
…My mother closed the shutter behind him, came into the main chamber of our cave, and buzzed with a nervousness I hadn’t seen before.
Her behaviour created an excitable current around us. We were all wearing our nightclothes and were ready for bed. Both my sisters were older than me. Lorre was fourteen years old, Kara eleven, my brother Rik just four, and I was eight.
Something was wrong.
I felt as if a pair of ice-cold hands had taken hold of my intestines and begun to strangle them. Looking to Lorre for any clue as to what was going on, I noticed Rik sitting beside me and prodding at a hole which had appeared in the neck of his toy badger. Kara sat opposite me, her knees drawn up beneath her nightdress. Lorre perched on the edge of her rocking chair and tipped back and forth, the tips of her toes brushing the cold stone floor. She hadn’t taken her eyes off our mother. She seemed to be anxiously waiting for some sort of a sign, a signal, which would mean something only to them.
The fire hissed and spat in the grate, sending up thick tendrils of smoke into the vents.
Mother went to the front shutter again and peered out down the narrow stone pathway set between the hundreds of caves, spread like a vast shanty town behind the Fountain of Souls. She snapped the shutter closed. Turning on her heels and clapping her hands together, she stared at us, her dark brown eyes now suddenly flashing yellow.
Speaking to my sisters, she said, “You don’t have long! Work fast!”
Lorre and Kara sprang out of their stupor and shot into action, the sound of their feet rumbling like fretful horses as they charged through the corridors which connected the rooms within our cave. I got the feeling this had all been planned, rehearsed, and was now being executed like some military exercise. From the other end of the passageways, I could hear the sounds of drawers and cupboards being dragged open.
Mother clapped her hands together again and my brother looked up, dark eyes wide and his mouth open. “Come on, hurry up! You’ve got to be quick!” she told us. “We’re going on an adventure!”
I remember not having a fucking clue as to what was going on.
My sisters appeared, dragging sacks behind them. For the next twenty minutes or so, the cave became a hive of frenetic activity as my mother and sisters darted from room to room, pulling out clothes, coats, shoes, and other personal belongings, throwing them into rough, woven sacks and bags. A ball of clothes landed at my feet.
“Put on as many clothes as possible,”
Mother ordered.
I managed to pull three pairs of trousers over my skinny legs and about four knitted jumpers over my head. Turning, I helped my younger brother drag T-shirts and tops over his sandy hair, screwing up his eyes and nose as I tugged them over his face.
There was a knock on the shutter and the cave fell into silence. We all froze and turned to look at our mother. I felt as if I was going to puke.
That icy hand had left my stomach and its fingers were now clawing at the back of my throat. I didn’t even know why I felt so fucking scared.
But I knew something out of the ordinary was unfolding around me.
Mother tiptoed across the room to a hole in the wall which served as a window. Peeling back the edge of the cloth that covered it, she peered through the gap she had created. I studied my mother’s face, which was framed with a mop of black hair. The look of relief followed by excitement crept across her face. She came away from the window and went to the shutter. I could hear muffled voices in the passageway. A woman I had not seen before followed my mother into the room. This stranger smiled at my sisters and said, “Hello again, girls.”
“Hi,” replied Lorre. I guessed that they had met before. She then turned her attention to Rik and me.
“How you doing?” she said. The woman was tall, had very pale skin, and blood-red lips.
She was very beautiful.
“Hello,” I replied, feeling uncomfortable. I was always unsure of myself around strangers, never too confident. We lived on the outskirts of an impoverished settlement and visitors didn’t come too often to our home, if ever. Rik waved and smiled.
“This is Ronnie,” my mother informed us.
“We are going to be staying with her for a while.”
I believe this explanation was given purely for my brother and me, as I guessed my sisters already understood the plot. “We won’t be coming back here, so you better grab some of your toys and be quick about it.”
Yes, I had toys, not many. My father would bring some home on rare occasions from the human world on the other side of the forest or he would make them. I had been to that world a few times before. We had schools like them, places to buy food, and medicine men that we saw when we were sick. Just like humans, we celebrated birthdays, we’d heard of Christmas, but we had our own winter festival which was named Candlemas. The caves would be lit with candles for as far as you could see in each direction, making the world behind the fountain look as if it were ablaze. On the night the candles were lit, we would exchange gifts. With Candlemas only just over, there were some new toys I had been given.
Asking me to pick just a couple was impossible.
How do you expect an eight-year-old kid to choose between his toys, for fuck’s sake? It would be like asking a mother to choose between her children.
“C’mon, hurry up!” My mother’s command dragged me from my daze and I stared at her.
“If you don’t hurry up, then I will choose for you!” Her impatience filled the cave.
I scrambled around, grabbing a handful of toy cars and tiny soldiers, which I clutched to my chest. Throwing them into a bag that Lorre had handed to me, I dashed for my toy bear that sat grinning at me from the chair. I held the soft toy close and sniffed his ear. It was a familiar smell in a world that was changing fast.
Ronnie and my mother scooped up the sacks and carried them from the cave. I didn’t really understand the severity of what was happening. The thought of never seeing my toys again, my bedroom, my home and everything else that seemed familiar, was too unreal for me to comprehend. It was a game, a scary game that made me feel sick with tension. Of course I was going to see all of this again, I had to, my Dad lived here, and this was home.
The last of the bags were dragged from the stone hallway and our mother ushered us into the passageways running between the other caves. The caves were cold in the winter and even with all the added layers of clothes, I still shivered and pulled my coat tight around me.
Huddled together, and the bags trailing in the dirt behind us, we followed my mother and the woman named Ronnie through the stone passageways, passing the closed shutters of the caves on either side of us, until we reached the path that led up to the mouth of the fountain. As we drew near, the sound of the blood-red water racing upwards sounded like thunder. Reaching the waterfall, my mother huddled us together into a small group, and ushered us around the edge of the water and out into the night.
There was a boat moored next to a small wooden jetty which stuck out from the side of the lake and into the crimson waters. Ronnie and my mother raced down the jetty and started to throw the bags containing our belongings onto the boat.
The black night was clear and star-shot, and the vast forest which surrounded the lake looked dark and menacing. My mother cast off the boat and Ronnie beckoned us towards her with a long, slender set of pale fingers. I climbed aboard and sat crammed between my brother and two sisters as the boat crept silently out across the water and into the night.
Chapter Three
Jack
On the other side of the vast red lake, we climbed from the boat and made our way through the forests, guided by the light of a pale moon.
Clear of the trees, we found a car, which had been left waiting for us. Just like they had before, my mother and Ronnie hurriedly stashed the bags into the boot. We climbed inside and continued our journey.
As the car drew to a standstill outside a large black iron gate, I realis
ed I had been here before. During the build-up to Candlemas, my mother had brought us from our home in the caves to this very same place. Rik and I had been left in the grounds, which surrounded the big Victorian house, while my mother and sisters had gone inside. Afterwards, Mother had stressed to us the importance of keeping this trip a secret from my father.
“I will be really angry if you breathe so much as a word about this to him!” she informed us, her eyes bright, that yellow tinge creeping around her black pupils.
So here we were again, standing outside this big house which was hidden from the rest of the world behind high brick walls and a gate; only on this occasion, Rik and I were going inside.
Ronnie escorted us down a hallway, past a bare wooden staircase that vanished up into the dark. Further along the passage, we were led into a room at the rear of the house. I peered around and could see mattresses and bedding on the floor, and a set of bunk beds along one wall. We just stood there, our cheeks flushed scarlet from the cold, and looked at one another for what seemed the longest time. Ronnie and my mother disappeared from the room and returned with our belongings. On seeing my bag of toys, I snatched them up and held them tight. Ronnie looked down at me and winked.
“All right?” she asked.
Ronnie was about thirty years old I guessed. She had long, straight black hair which hung about her shoulders. Her face was so very pale, that I wondered if she wasn’t ill. She didn’t seem ill, but I had never seen such pale skin before.
I felt that ice-cold hand in the back of my throat again, but this time its fingers flicked hot bile into my mouth. I suddenly puked and Ronnie dashed from the room and reappeared with a bowl that she thrust into my hands. Clutching the bowl to my chest, I heaved. After a short time, mother handed me a tissue and asked if I was okay. I nodded slowly and Mother explained to Ronnie that it was all the upset that had caused me to be sick. Ronnie looked as if she understood and moved towards the door. As she was about to leave, my mother spoke, thanking her for all the help that she had given. Ronnie looked back at her as she slipped out of the room.
