Dead Lost (Kiera Hudson Series Two (Book 8))

by O'Rourke, Tim

  “What you talking about?” I asked him.

  “This!” he scowled, waving the toe-tag in the air at me. “It says my name’s Jane-fucking-Doe! Piss-taking bastards!”

  “Who are?” I said, desperately trying to fight off the giggles.

  “Whoever it was who wrote that on my toe-tag. They could see perfectly well that I’m a bloke,” he snarled, gesturing down at himself. “It’s freaking big enough!”

  I opened my mouth to speak. But before I’d had the chance to say anything, he jabbed one finger in my direction and said, “Don’t you dare say a word, Kayla Hunt!”

  I turned my back on him so he couldn’t see the grin breaking out across my face. I so loved to watch Potter getting wound up.

  “And I’ll tell you something else, when I find the bastard who stole my clothes, I’m going to rip his fucking spleen out,” he continued to moan under his breath.

  Still grinning to myself, I raised the camera that still hung about my neck. I turned around and snapped off a shot of Potter. The flash lit up the morgue like a bolt of lightning. The camera whirred in my hand as it chucked out an instant photograph.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Potter gasped in disbelief. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, c’mon,” I giggled, holding up the picture. “This shot is priceless. Murphy would love to see it.”

  “Murphy!” Potter barked. “Look, we ain’t on our freaking holidays here. This is serious.”

  “Really?” I said, looking up and down as he stood semi-naked before me. “You could’ve fooled me.”

  Potter came toward me as if to snatch the photograph from my hand, but before he’d had a chance to take hold of it, I raised one finger and said “Shhh!”

  He stopped in his tracks. “What?”

  “I can hear footsteps,” I warned him.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he said.

  I glanced about the room, fearing that one of the dead had started to rise. But all of the corpses were lying still and staring blankly up at the white ceiling. The noise came again. I turned my head in the direction of the sound and knew it was coming from an adjacent room.

  “There is someone on the other side of that door,” I whispered.

  Glancing at me, Potter said, “You’re just saying that so I don’t take the photograph from you…”

  The door suddenly opened. A young woman dressed in a long, white coat and green scrubs appeared in the open doorway.

  “Sophie,” I heard Potter whisper.

  Chapter Twenty

  Isidor

  We lay in each other’s arms, our chests rising up and down as we struggled to catch our breath. Melody’s body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, as was mine. It made the roses covering her body from head to toe glimmer as if I could reach out and feel their delicate petals. Melody’s skin had felt so soft as we’d made love. I had treasured every moment our bodies had been entwined together. I wanted to cherish every kiss, every touch and second we were joined as one.

  We rolled onto our backs, our hands locked tight together. I didn’t ever want to let go for fear of losing Melody all over again. We turned our heads so we could look into each other’s eyes.

  “I love you, Isidor,” she whispered with a dreamy look on her beautiful face.

  “I love you more,” I smiled back at her.

  “I sometimes hear music – a song playing inside my head,” she said softly. “But I can’t ever quite remember the words.”

  “Heroes,” I whispered.

  “Heroes?”

  “That was a song we used to listen to together as kids,” I tried to remind her.

  “As we sat by the lake?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. I guess you could say it was our song.”

  “I wish I could remember it,” she said.

  Then, throwing back the sheet, I sprang naked from the bed.

  “Isidor?” I heard her call after me.

  I raced down the stairs and into the sitting room. Tearing open my rucksack, I reached inside and pulled out the ancient-looking transistor radio I had brought with me from the railway station. I headed back into the bedroom, sliding back into bed next to Melody. She looked at the radio.

  “What are you doing with that?” she asked, propping herself up on one elbow and blowing her pink fringe from her eyes.

  “You’ll see,” I said, turning it on. “I hope it works.”

  “The radio looks too old to work,” she smiled.

  I turned the dial left then right, but all I could hear was the sound of static hissing and crackling from the speaker in the front. It had worked in the waiting room as Jack Seth had pushed on that lever. Why not now? Then, spying an aerial on the back, I extended it out as far as it could go. The static cleared a little but not enough. I thought of Jack standing before those levers at the station again and how he flickered in and out as if passing through some kind of crack that only he could see…

  The cracks!

  Leaping from the bed again, I crossed Melody’s snug little bedroom to the window. Easing the window open just an inch, knocking a shower of snow from the ledge, I angled the aerial up at the cracks in the sky. At once I could hear music – it was faint – but it was there. I turned the dial again left, then right until the music grew louder and clearer. Then, just as I hoped it would, the song ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie started to seep out of the speakers.

  “Is this the song that you could hear inside you head?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at Melody on the bed. She pulled the sheet up under her chin as a chill breeze blew in through the open window.

  “That’s it!” she said. “That’s the song.” She started to hum along as if truly remembering it.

  I perched the radio on the window ledge and snuck back beneath the sheet. With Heroes playing in the background, I slipped my arms around Melody, and wrapping my wings about her, I pulled her close again.

  “I remember you flying up to my window,” she said. “I always saw that moment in my dreams. I asked you if you were an angel, but you said you had come from beneath ground, so I asked you if you were a Dead Angel and you said yes. Can’t you see now how those dreams of you almost drove me mad – almost convinced me I had lost my mind?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, letting my fingers trace the length of her back as I held her close.

  “The wolves had feared the coming of these Dead Angels. And in my heart I knew that at some time and place, whether in my past or future, I had been in love with the enemy.”

  “Enemy?” I asked. “I’m not your enemy.”

  “You’re the wolves’ enemy and I’m a wolf.” She sounded sad about this.

  I eased her slightly away so I could look into her eyes. “But we love each other,” I breathed.

  “And I think that’s what scared me, and still does,” she explained. “Even in that other life I’m starting to remember, I think I was a wolf. I didn’t know it but my mother did. It wasn’t the devil inside me she feared, it was the wolf. That’s why my nightmares were full of terrifying images of her taking off my head with that spade. She knew that was one sure way of killing a wolf.”

  “But you said you’re still scared now,” I reminded her.

  “I fear what the wolves will do if they discover that I’m in love with you,” she said. “My race wants you dead. They fear you and your friend Kiera Hudson. They fear that you will destroy them.”

  “We don’t want to destroy anyone or any wolves,” I tried to convince her. “We just want to push the world back. The world shouldn’t be run by wolves or the Vampyrus. The world belongs to the humans. We are both a part of that world, but a small part. Each of us has our place. Neither the wolves nor the Vampyrus can destroy the humans. You say you are a wolf, but do you think it is right that human children are taken and matched by some species of wolf, so they can masquerade themselves as humans – try to lead human lives? Can’t we all just respect each species’ differences and live together? That’s a
ll I want – that’s all Kiera Hudson wants.”

  “That’s all I want too – that’s what a lot of wolves want,” she said. “But these other wolves – the Skin-walkers which are ruled by the Wolf Man, they want something different altogether. I don’t want us to be enemies, Isidor.”

  “And we won’t be,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?” she asked, staring into my face.

  “I think this world is slowly breaking apart,” I said. “I think that’s what the cracks are up in the sky – I think that’s why so many people are beginning to remember their other selves, just like you are starting to remember. The more people that remember, the more cracks appear.”

  “And what will happen if too many cracks appear?” she asked. “Will the world go back to the way it was before?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  Melody fell quiet, a look of utter sadness falling over her face.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” I whispered.

  “I’m not so sure I want the world to go back to how it was before,” she whispered. “I don’t think we will be together back there.”

  “Why not?” I asked her, the sudden thought scaring me.

  “Because in that where and when as you call it, I’m dead,” she said. “My mother murdered me, remember?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kayla

  “Get down!” Potter hissed, grabbing my arm and pulling me down beneath one of the mortuary slabs.

  I rolled onto my stomach and peered out from our hiding place. “We can’t let Sophie see us,” Potter breathed in my ear.

  I watched Sophie come into the mortuary, and even though she was dressed like some kind of doctor, I guessed she was a pathologist. She wore latex gloves on her hands and they were smeared with blood. Sophie stood motionless by the open door and peered about the room, as if coming to investigate a noise she had heard. Probably Potter’s moaning I suspected. As I lay and spied on her, it didn’t take much to figure out why Potter had once been so in love with this woman. She was beautiful with her long blonde hair, impish face, full red lips and clear blue eyes. I guessed most men would want her.

  She’s still no Kiera Hudson, I thought to myself, as Sophie spied something on the floor. I felt Potter move beside me, as we watched Sophie bend down and pick something up from off the floor. It was the toe-tag Potter had had tied about his toe. Sophie picked it up, read the name, then looked around the room again. I feared her suspicions might be raised by the two bare mortuary slabs, but instead of investigating further, Sophie looked at the toe-tag once more, simply shrugged, then placed it into the pocket of her long white coat. Turning, she flicked out the light and left the room, letting the door swing shut behind her.

  “That was close,” Potter sighed, rolling onto his back.

  “Why did you leave that I.D. tag on the freaking floor?” I hissed at him, still trying to keep my voice low.

  “How was I s’posed to know Sophie was going to come in?” he said.

  “What is she doing here?” I asked, crawling out from beneath the mortuary slab. The room was now in darkness, apart from the thin strip of light that shone beneath the door from the adjacent room.

  “She works here,” Potter said, surfacing from beneath the slab and standing up. “I’m guessing this is the morgue we recused Kiera from.

  “This just keeps getting weirder,” I groaned. “She’s still in there.”

  “I know, I can hear,” I said.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be getting anywhere real soon,” he said, and in the light seeping from beneath the door, he came back toward me, the sheet he wore whispering about his feet. Potter climbed back onto the mortuary slab. He lay down, lacing his fingers behind his head and crossing his legs at the ankles. “Might as well make ourselves comfortable.”

  I sat on the edge of the slab I’d woken up on.

  “So, you never told me how you got out of the field that night and what happened next,” Potter whispered.

  I thought back to that night, and how Sam’s mum had explained to us about the cracks. Not being a wolf herself, she was unable to see exactly where the crack was the precise point in which she had come through. I explained this to Potter as he lay silently in the gloom and listened to me talk.

  “Sam’s mother had come through, via a train, just like we have done, but she wanted to go back via one of the cracks,” I said.

  “Why?” Potter whispered.

  “Knowing that Sam was now part wolf, she wanted to find out if he could see the crack by using his peripheral vision,” I said. “She told him to face the gap between the two trees. Sam focused on it. But that’s what he was doing wrong. He was to look straight ahead but concentrate on what he could see at the furthest points of his peripheral vision. I saw a mask of concentration cover his face as he looked into the distance, but stared to the sides.”

  ‘“I see something,’ he had gasped.

  “His mother seemed to get very excited, and I remember watching her wring her hands together,” I told Potter. “She wanted to know exactly what he could see.”

  “And what was that?” Potter asked me.

  “Sam said he could see what looked like a crack, but it was shimmering and vibrating. White light was seeping through it in a shower of rays. Sam suddenly jerked his head to the right and pointed just to the left of one of the trees.

  ‘“There,’ he said.

  “I stood next to his mother, and we watched Sam walk toward the place he had been pointing at. He started to shimmer – like he was blinking in and out of existence. Then he was gone,” I said.

  “Gone?” Potter asked, now staring at me through the darkness.

  “Vanished,” I said. “Without saying anything, Sam’s mum took my hand in hers and led me toward the spot between the trees where Sam had disappeared. Then, all of a sudden, I was no longer standing in the snow in the middle of the woods.”

  “Where were you?” Potter said.

  “I was walking hand in hand out of a tunnel and up onto an underground platform,” I said. “Sam was standing there waiting for us.”

  “Was there anyone else?” he asked, still keeping his voice low.

  “No, just the three of us,” I said. “No sooner had we left the tunnel, then a tube train came racing out of it. The train stopped in the station. The doors opened, but each carriage was eerily empty. There was no one waiting to get on or off. The doors slid shut again, and the tube train left the station. The platform looked like any other Tube Station you might see in London. The walls were curved and tiled. There were posters on the walls advertising upcoming books and movies. There was a wooden bench set against the wall, and Sam’s mother guided us toward it. I went to sit down, but there was a newspaper. The headline read: Catastrophic Thunderstorms To Hit Ungland. I folded the newspaper in half, tucking it beneath the bench so I could sit down. It was here that Sam’s mum explained how she wanted us to go back through the cracks and stir things up a little with Kiera and her Dead Angels.”

  “But why you and Sam?” Potter asked me.

  “Sam asked his mother the same question,” I explained. “His mother told us that they needed a wolf to see the cracks, and he was the only wolf they could trust.”

  “I told you they were using the kid,” Potter cut in.

  Ignoring him, I continued. “And they needed me, because I could get close to you all. They could trust me not to give away their plan to the wolves. Why would I want to betray my friends?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Teen Wolf sure had it all figured out,” Potter said.

  “Sam’s last name is Brooke,” I told him, but he already knew that, Potter was just being an arsehole again. “Sam was to go and take a picture of you in that barn before you got the kicking from those Skin-walkers and then he was to go and take that picture of Isidor and Melody Rose together. He was then to go through another crack and leave the picture for Isidor to find in that grate. I was unhappy about this, as I knew
what my brother’s fate was to be. But Sam’s mother told me that however hard it was to understand, Isidor had to go and find Melody Rose again. He had to get her to remember him. If Isidor and Melody weren’t pushed back together, then the world would stay as it was where the wolves ruled and treated humans as slaves. Sam looked at me as if seeking my approval to go and photograph Isidor and Melody. I reluctantly agreed. It was then I was instructed to go and take the photograph of Kiera and her father and leave it at her flat to find, and then deliver your old love letters to Sophie.”

  “I would love to know where they got those fucking letters,” Potter cut in.

  “Sam’s mum wanted Sophie to remember you, just like she wanted Melody Rose to remember Isidor, and for Kiera to remember the deep love for her father and go seek him out,” I said.

  “Just so more of these cracks would appear,” Potter said thoughtfully.

  “It’s what your friend Lilly and Noah asked you to do, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I guess,” he replied, but I couldn’t help but feel he wasn’t so sure.

  “What I don’t get is, that picture Sam took of me…” Potter started.

  “Shhh!” I cut in, snapping my head to the right. “I can hear Sophie locking up. She’s leaving.”

  Potter sprang from the slab, the long white sheet flowing out behind him looking like some kinda ghost. He followed me to the door, I leant against it. I could hear Sophie locking up on the other side of the wall, the sound of her footfalls walking away.

  “She’s gone,” I said, looking at Potter, my eyes wide.

  He slowly eased open the door and peered into the gap. Potter glanced left then right. Seeing that Sophie truly had left, he snuck through the gap in the door and I followed. There was another slab in the middle of the room, but this was unoccupied. The room smelt of bleach. The walls were covered with pristine white tiles. The floor sparkled where it looked as if it had recently been mopped. On the other side of the room, there was an office. Potter crossed the room and went inside.