by Tim O'Rourke
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.
Chapter Twenty
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. J
ack 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.
“You surprise me,” he said, as he licked the last of my father’s blood from between his fingers. “You have resisted longer than I thought you would.”
“Then you don’t know me,” I mumbled, turning to look at him through my hair, which was growing stiff over my face.
“I know you better than you think,” he smiled back at me. “I understand your pain, Kiera Hudson. We share more than you would like to know or think.”
“We share nothing,” I whispered, my words coming out slow and labored.
“We’ll see,” he said, taking his bandana and wiping the blood from his lips. “We both understand loss.”
“I haven’t lost myself,” I breathed. “Not like you, Jack.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “But we have both lost people that we love.
We have both been lied to and been betrayed by them.”
“That hasn’t made me a monster like you,” I said, each word coming out sounding thick and slow, like I was trying to speak with a pillow held over my face.
“We’ll see,” he said again, looking at me.
Then, leaning forward in his seat and starting to tell his story again, he said, “I didn’t see or speak to Father Paul for several weeks after that incident…
Chapter Twenty-One
Jack
… My mother became almost a recluse, shutting herself in her room. The only person to spend any real time with her was Kara. They spent hours together, locked in my mother’s bedroom. Mother stopped going to the church with the twisted spire and I was forbidden to attend as well.
Eventually, Father Paul started coming back to our house but was refused entry by our mother. He would stand outside, endlessly whispering her name through the letterbox, trying to get her attention. On these occasions, she would creep from her room, and putting her finger to her lips, she would motion to us to stay quiet and we would have to sit in silence, like statues.
Eventually, he gave up and went away. This was an incredibly uncomfortable time for me. I had truly come to love Father Paul, he had always been really nice to me, and for the last few years or more, I had come to think of him as my father.
To hear him begging my mother through the letterbox made me feel ill. I couldn’t understand my mother. I thought of her as being cold, almost ruthless, and I resented her for this. I missed Father Paul and wished she would relent and let him in again.
When he realised that he wasn’t going to get the opportunity to speak to my mother, he began writing letters and posting them through the letterbox. Mother would then read them to us around the table. They were love letters and very personal, intended solely for her. Nevertheless, she would sit and read them to us in a mocking tone. In these letters, Father Paul described his love for my mother and the love that he had for us children. He wrote how he loved Kara, Nik, and me. He professed his love for my mother and stated how he couldn’t understand why she would no longer acknowledge him.
Mother seemed to take some kind of wicked pleasure in reading these letters to us. She would pick out particular sentences he had written and then read them over and over again, each time adding more and more ridicule to the tone of her voice. I couldn’t bear it, so as she sat one evening and ridiculed Father Paul, I got up from the table and fled to my room. I just didn’t want to hear her any more. I cried and when I had stopped, I took the watercolours he had bought me, and started to paint, escaping to an imaginary world inside my head. Anywhere had to be better than home.
Because I was banned from seeing Father Paul, my paintings went unnoticed. It had only been him who had ever taken an interest in them.
I really missed him, not because he wasn’t around to praise my artwork, but because we had developed a relationship, a father and son relationship, and I desperately needed a father in my life. I’d heard nothing at all about my real father, not since my mother had returned with the news that he had been found innocent by the Elders.
To rid my feelings of loss, I hatched a plan. I stowed my paintings away in my rucksack and slipped out the door. I made my way to the remote little church and passed through the graveyard, up the hill to his secluded house.
Knowing that his brother had warned him to keep away from my mother and me, I sneaked round to the back door and rapped softly against it. Within a matter of moments he pulled open the door, and looking surprised but happy to see me again, he pulled me close.
His first question was, “Does your mother know you are here?”
I explained to him that she didn’t, and I would have to try and keep it a secret.
“How is she? Has she mentioned me at all?” he asked.
“She’s okay, I s’pose,” I said, stepping inside. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how she had read his letters to us and had ridiculed them.
“Why wouldn’t she answer the door to me?” he asked, taking me to sit by the fire where I had once spent hours cleaning the candlesticks, then drawing and painting.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “She forbids us from letting you in. I hated hearing you outside, I felt so uncomfortable.”
“I think she’s acting like this because I let her down,” he said, looking into the fire.
“How do you mean?” I asked him.
“You know, not running away with her.
But I couldn’t, Jack. It would have been impossible. It would have been dangerous.” He justified to me again his reasons why, although he didn’t have to.
“How’s Kara and Nik doing? I miss you all so much,” he said with a sad-looking smile.
“They’re okay. We still haven’t heard anything from Lorre,” I told him. “You don’t know where she is living, do you?”
“No, sorry, Jack, I don’t,” he said.
We sat quietly before the fire, the thought of telling him how my mother had often treated me kept screaming across the front of my mind.
However much she confused and hurt me, I felt unable to speak to him about this. I felt I would be betraying her in some way. So for the rest of that day and into the early evening we talked, I showed him the new pictures I had painted. As the evening began to close in, I packed them away again and made my way home. For years, our family had shared many secrets, but now I had one of my own, and it excited me.
So every Saturday for the next few weeks, I would make my secret visits to Father Paul's, and once again spend most of the morning cleaning the candlesticks. Then we would sit together before the fire, him reading, and me painting my pictures.
I managed to keep my secret for about a month. On returning one Saturday evening, my mother was waiting for me. She was furious, standing before me with her hands on her hips, and eyes shining brightly. I knew at once I was in the shit. I had become skilled at deciphering her moods. I put my bag down and she immediately asked me where I had been.
Before I’d even opened my mouth, she screamed at me, “Don’t you dare lie to me!”
“I’m not lying…” I started.
“You’ve been with him, haven’t you?”
she snar
led.
“Who?” I asked.
“The Blackcoat!” she roared. This was the first time I’d ever heard my mother refer to him in this way.
I hadn’t been expecting to have been discovered so soon and I was momentarily lost for words. I didn’t see the point in lying anymore, so I said, “Yes, I’ve been to see Father Paul. I’ve been going there every weekend for a while now.” I felt relieved that she knew my secret.
Deep inside, I was proud that I had maintained my relationship with him.
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing! How could you? Where is your loyalty?” she fumed.
I just couldn't grasp what she was fucking saying to me and I spoke up in my own defense. I wasn’t a kid anymore. “What do you mean loyalty? He’s been like a father to me. As far as I’m concerned, he is my father. I just can’t stop those feelings. It’s like we have a connection somehow.”
“You’ve got to forget him!” she barked at me.
I felt stunned and confused by what she was demanding of me. “For years you’ve encouraged me, all of us, to see Father Paul as our dad,” I reminded her. “Now you’re asking me just to forget him? I don’t understand what has changed.”
Immediately, mother got that look, the look she always had when she was about to tell me some hideous revelation. “Your beloved Father Paul, the person you’ve been so happily sneaking off to see, is a coward.”
“He couldn’t run away with you,” I barked back. “He has no money, where would we have lived? The Elders forbid Vampyrus and our kind mixing! They would punish him if they ever found out. Is that what you want?”
“I wasn’t talking about that!” she roared, slapping me hard across the face with the back of her hand. My head rocked backwards with a crack and the left side of my face felt as if it were on fire.
