Kiera Hudson & The Man Who Loved Snow

by Tim O'Rourke

  As Kiera made the tea, Annora sat perched on the edge of the chair and watched Potter take off his coat. Underneath, he wore a black T-shirt that was sculpted to his muscular chest and upper arms. Seeing this, Annora suddenly hoped that Karl was like his father after all. Potter shook rain from his coat before setting it down in front of the electric fire.

  “Take your kit off,” Potter said, glancing across the cavern at Annora.

  “I beg your pardon?” Annora said, not relishing the idea of stripping off her clothes in front of these strangers.

  “Don’t go getting all excited.” Potter grinned at her. “I just meant take your coat off so I can dry it by the fire.”

  “My coat is fine,” Annora said, pulling it tight about her. “The umbrella sheltered me from most of the rain.”

  “Suit yourself.” Potter shrugged before lighting up another cigarette.

  “Why do you smoke so much?” Annora asked him.

  “What’s it to you?” Potter shot back. Then, narrowing his eyes at her, he added as if somewhat suspicious, “You’re not one of those quitters, are you? You know, the type who packs up the ciggies and now hates anybody else enjoying a smoke?”

  Looking at Potter with something close to disdain, Annora said, “I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky one, miss goody two shoes.” Potter grinned.

  Still looking at him, she repeated her original question. “So why do you smoke so much?”

  Potter drew deeply on the cigarette as he stared at her darkly through the rising smoke. “It helps my cravings… and I’m not talking about nicotine.”

  “Cravings for what then?” Annora was interested to know.

  “The red stuff,” Potter said, enjoying teasing her.

  Annora frowned. “Red stuff? What red stuff?”

  Within an instant, Potter closed the gap between them. One moment he was standing on the other side of the cavern, the next he was right in front of her. “The red stuff that is pouring through your veins.” He smiled.

  Annora flinched back in her chair, waving the umbrella once more before her.

  “Give her a break,” Kiera said, setting down a cup of tea and saucer on the arm of the chair.

  “I’m just messing about with her. Can’t anyone have a laugh anymore these days?” Potter groaned, before snatching the umbrella from Annora’s hands.

  “Give that back, it’s my mine!” Annora said, springing to her feet. The cup of tea Kiera had set down on the arm of the chair clattered to the floor.

  Kiera rolled her eyes at Potter. “Now look what you’ve gone and done.” She bent at the knees and began to pick up the broken pieces of china from off the stone floor.

  “It wasn’t me, it was her,” Potter said, too busy inspecting the umbrella to cast an eye at Kiera.

  “Give it back!” Annora hissed, snatching for the umbrella again.

  Potter was quick to keep it out of her reach. He stepped back. “Where did you get this?”

  Before Annora had a chance to explain that she had taken it from the cloakroom of a bar named the Night Diner back in 1973, someone spoke up from the opposite side of the room.

  “I was told to leave it for her,” the man said, who was now standing in the entrance of the passageway that led into the room.

  “Who are you?” Annora gasped, surprised to see the man standing there. He was as tall as Potter, but with the battered and pointed leather hat he wore on his head, it made him look taller somehow. He wore a long black leather coat with trousers and sturdy boots.

  The man stepped out of the shadows and into the glow of one of the lanterns. He took the pointed and battered hat from his head and rolled it up before stuffing it into one of his coat pockets. Annora could see that he was in his early to mid-twenties. He had scruffy black hair that had been swept back, a square jaw, and blue eyes. He looked at Annora and with a smile, said, “At last. I get to meet Annora Snow. The girl Noah once told me would travel backwards.”

  Annora frowned. “Sorry, but do I know you?”

  He took another step closer, looking Annora up and down as if assessing her somehow. Then meeting her stare, he said, “I’m pleased to meet you at last, Annora Snow. My name is Jake Stranger.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The year 2067

  Selina dropped into the driver’s seat of the marked police vehicle. She flipped several switches on the dashboard, lighting up the blue and red strobes attached to the roof of the car. Karl climbed into the passenger seat. Rain splashed down from the starless sky and sprayed the windscreen. The car hummed as Selina pulled back on the joystick between her knees. With lights illuminating the night and the nearby buildings in fluorescent flashes of light, the car rose at speed out of the parking bay. With his helmet on, but visor up, Karl glanced out the window and watched the roof of the Temporal Station disappear beneath him. His stomach lurched as Selina banked the patrol vehicle to the right and sped away in the direction of the towering shipping crates that doubled as apartment blocks in Outpost 71.

  Karl shot Selina a sideways glance. In the pulsating blue and red lights from above, he suddenly thought that she looked vaguely familiar. But why? He had no idea. With her helmet on and only her pale profile visible, he thought that she looked…no that would be impossible. Just a trick of the light.

  Without glancing at him, but knowing he was watching, Selina said, “What are you staring at?”

  Karl ignored her question and asked one of his own. “Where’s Sergeant Shaw and Lisa?”

  “How should I know?” she said, easing the joystick to the left, then down. The nose of the car tilted toward the ground way below as she raced the car toward the mountain of shipping crates that loomed in the distance.

  “Have they gone ahead?”

  “I don’t know where they are. The last time I saw them was in the office before the guided tour,” Selina remarked, applying the airbrakes and bringing the vehicle to a halt.

  Karl looked through the windscreen and could see that Selina had brought the car to a stop alongside the rickety scaffolding that supported the crates and kept them stacked on top of each other.

  “You get out and I’ll turn the vehicle around,” Selina said. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  “Okay.” Karl sighed, pushing the door open and looking down at the crates that fell away hundreds of feet beneath him.

  Sensing his hesitation, Selina said, “What are you waiting for?”

  “Nothing,” Karl muttered under his breath. He didn’t want to confess to Selina that he wasn’t a lover of heights. As he gingerly leant out of the car and toward the scaffolding, a blast of cold and wet night air blew into his face. The car tilted beneath him as he stepped from it. His legs formed a ‘Y’ shape as he straddled the gap between the vehicle and ledge that ran alongside the crates. He looked down and could see the lights of the slow-moving traffic way below.

  He looked back over his shoulder and into the car at Selina. “Why don’t you just park this thing in the street below and we can use the elevator?”

  “The ledge is right there,” Selina urged. “It’s just a step away. C’mon, Potter, we don’t have time to waste. We have a crime to investigate.”

  “I thought you said this was going to be an overdose,” he reminded her.

  “Why don’t you just grow a pair and get out of the freaking car?” she shot back at him.

  He wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but he didn’t. Facing front again, he gritted his teeth before stepping out of the rocking vehicle and onto the gangway outside the shipping crates. He gripped the scaffolding so tightly that he feared that his knuckles might just tear through the pale flesh covering his fingers.

  The wind gusted all about him and whistled along the narrow gangway. Still gripping the rail that supported both the crates and the ledge he now stood on, he glanced back to see Selina swoop away from the apartment block as she turned the vehicle mid-air.

&
nbsp; “Hello again,” he heard someone say over the cry of the wind and the spatter of rain.

  Instinctively reaching for his sidearm that was holstered to his thigh, Karl turned around.

  He recognised the dishevelled man at once. The old man who owned the apartment blocks shuffled out from the nearby shadows of one of the shipping crates. His long white hair blew limply about his sunken and drawn face. The coattails of his long dark coat whipped about in the wind, revealing his spindly legs and the heavy-looking boots he wore.

  “Officer Potter, isn’t it?” the man said, inching closer.

  “That’s right,” Karl said, relaxing his hand that hovered close to his gun.

  “Well, we’ve got another one,” he said.

  “Another what?” Karl asked him.

  “Overdose? Suicide? I’ll let you be the judge of that,” the man said, turning away and heading back into the shadows he had appeared from.

  “Hang on a minute.” Karl reached for him, placing one hand on his shoulder. He grimaced and pulled his hand away almost at once. Despite the old man wearing a heavy coat, Karl had been able to feel his shoulder blade beneath it. It felt too bony, as if the man beneath the coat was little more than a skeleton.

  The man glanced back. “Is there a problem, officer?”

  Trying to hide his grimace, he said, “What do you mean ‘another’? The first time I met you, you told me that Lucy May had been murdered. Are you now trying to imply that her death was a suicide? An overdose of some kind?”

  “That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” The old man’s pale eyes twinkled in the dark.

  “Lucy May had her throat slit. Her head had almost come off. You said so yourself,” Karl reminded him.

  “Did I?” The man frowned as if he was struggling to remember. “Oh well,” he shrugged. “I can only go on what Temporal Officers like you tell me. Sergeant Shaw told me that young Lucy May committed suicide.”

  “And you believe that after what you saw?” Karl asked in disbelief.

  The old man narrowed his eyes, a smile twisting up the corners of his bloodless lips. “Sergeant Shaw wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would she?”

  Karl didn’t know whether Shaw was a liar or just a fucking idiot, but he knew for sure that Lucy May hadn’t killed herself. He didn’t want to besmirch his sergeant in front of the ancient landlord. It would have been unprofessional of him to do so. “So what have you got for me this time?”

  “Follow me,” the old man said, turning away and heading back into the shadows. “But I’ll warn you, he don’t look pretty.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The year 1985

  Jack and Araghney stepped through the mirror. Araghney yanked on the chain wrapped around her fist, pulling Roc through the mirror behind them. Jack looked back over his shoulder to see the mirror hovering in the air. He couldn’t see his reflection in it, but the bedroom he had just stepped from. Raising one gnarled hand, he reached for the mirror. Before his fingertips had a chance to brush against its rippling and wavering surface, it shattered into thousands of tiny shards. They sprinkled over the ground like glitter, before disappearing.

  Jack turned around to face Araghney and Roc. The painfully thin man continued to cower behind the witch. He stood, stooped forward, hands clasped in his lap. His shoulder blades jutted through his stretched skin. His wide eyes were dark and fearful. Jack could see they had stepped out of the mirror into a cobblestone courtyard. A gaslamp stood nearby, illuminating the night with a warm orange halo. Nearby stood what looked like stables of some kind. Straw lay scattered across the cobblestones at his feet. Beyond the stables, Jack could see grey stone turrets stretching up into the night. Their black slate roofs were pointed like spikes. The place looked like some kind of medieval castle.

  Jack glanced at Araghney. “I thought you said you were bringing me into the year 1985? This looks more like 1885.”

  Araghney smiled at him. “It is 1985, but the witches and wizards who live in this layer refuse to accept any kind of modern day technology. There is a veil that surrounds this layer and separates the human world of 1985 from the world that the witches and wizards inhabit. They lead completely separate lives, although I know some of the witches and wizards sneak through the veil and enjoy what the human world of 1985 has to offer them.”

  Again, Jack studied his surroundings and as he looked at the towers surrounding him on all sides, he said, “So what is this place?”

  “This is the Talisman Training Institute,” Araghney said. Her long black hair twitched about her shoulders. The hem of her long flowing scarlet dress shifted all around her in the cool night breeze.

  “And what’s that?” Jack asked, pushing the baseball cap to the back of his head, revealing more of his skull-like features.

  “It’s where the witches and wizards train the Talisman,” Araghney began to explain. “Talisman in this where and when are like cops from the layer you come from. They keep the peace. And it’s also where the witches and wizards keep their prisoners—those who have fallen foul of their laws.”

  Jack now understood why Araghney had led him here. She had said they needed to release a prisoner. However, there was something he didn’t understand.

  “If we’ve come here to release a prisoner, and if you are so powerful, couldn’t you have made the mirror simply appear in her cell? Wouldn’t that have made breaking in and out of this place a whole lot easier?”

  Araghney began to chuckle. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Jack Seth? Breaking in from the outside is so much more fun. And besides, these witches and wizards aren’t like me. Most of them are Wicce, an ancient race. They don’t practice the kind of magic I do. They believe in healing and nurturing, and other such nonsense. They are a peaceful race, trying to shun war at every opportunity. And because they don’t use their powers to their full potential, they have grown weak. They have forgotten how to wield their magic to fight and defend themselves and their people. It’s because of witches and wizards like the Wicce, that I lost my standing and position of power in the Mirror Realm. If they had joined my brother and me in the fight against those who opposed our magic, I wouldn’t have lost my kingdom. But the Wicce were too keen to help Noah. There were two Wicce in particular who pushed through the layers with him. They have long since been murdered.”

  “Who killed them?” Jack asked.

  “The prisoner we have come to release,” Araghney said. “Annora Snow’s real mother killed them.”

  As Araghney spoke, Jack couldn’t help but notice how her ample breasts heaved behind the red lace fabric that covered them. Araghney caught him staring at her breasts.

  With a smile twitching at the corners of her perfect mouth, Araghney said, “All in good time, Jack,”

  Was she teasing him? Had she just subtly told him that perhaps they could be more than allies in their mission to hunt down Noah? Could they one day soon be lovers? Was she willing to let him rip apart her dress with his claws and set free her soft, white breasts?

  Do it now, Jacky boy, the wolf whispered deep inside of him. Take her! Rip her fucking dress off then rip her fucking throat out. We don’t need this witchy-bitch. We were doing just fine on our own. Fuck her, then kill her...

  Jack turned away from the wolf coming forward inside of him. He screwed his eyes shut to tune out the wolf. He didn’t want to kill Araghney —not just yet. He thought that perhaps she would make a good ally in tracking Noah down. She certainly seemed very powerful. Perhaps when they finally killed Noah, he would then kill her.

  “Hey, who are you?” Jack heard someone say. He snapped open his eyes and looked across the courtyard in the direction of the stables. The sight of the old man now standing by the stable doors helped him push thoughts of murdering Araghney to the back of his mind.

  And even though such thoughts were no longer clear in Jack’s mind, they were in Araghney’s. She was powerful enough to sense—get an impression—of what Jack had just been thinking. She s
ensed the wolf inside him. She had done her homework, she knew how dangerous Jack Seth and his brother, Nik, truly were. But she had once fought a far more dangerous man than either of them could ever dream to be, and had won. She had been blind to that man’s cunning, but she saw through his lies and deceit in the end and killed him for it. If she could murder her brother, then she could kill the likes of Jack and Nik Seth in a heartbeat. She didn’t trust Jack Seth nor his brother. Araghney had only ever known one true companion, and that was Roc.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Jack asked, nodding in the direction of the old stableman who was now coming across the courtyard toward them. He carried a broom in one hand.

  “Does it matter who he is?” Araghney said.

  “What are you doing here?” the old man asked as he came closer still. The bristly end of his brush scraped against the cobblestones as he dragged it behind him. He stopped just out of reach of Araghney and Jack. Then, glancing past the witch, he spied Roc attached to the chain that swung about his throat, which led to Araghney’s fist. “Is he some kind of prisoner? Because if you brought a prisoner, the cells aren’t this way. But I can go and get one of the Talismen for you.”

  In answer to his question, Araghney said, “Are you hungry, old man?”

  He frowned back at her before coughing up a wad of phlegm and spitting it down onto the cobblestones. It landed with a loud splat.

  Wondering whether he had misheard the witch, he said, “What did you say, lady?”

  “I asked whether you were hungry.” Araghney smiled back at him. She then glanced at Jack and added, “He looks hungry to me, don’t you think?”

  If the old stableman was confused, Jack was, too. He had no idea what Araghney was talking about. But, going along with her, Jack said, “I guess he looks kinda hungry.”

  “What do you think, Roc?” Araghney asked the feeble-looking man behind her. She didn’t bother to look back at him. “Do you think the old man could do with something to eat?”