by Tim O'Rourke
Ravenwood made a spluttering sound. I looked down at the bubbles of blood that had formed about his lips. I felt one of his hands close over mine. His lips opened and shut, as his eyes rolled to look at the trees blowing back and forth in the wind overhead. Blood ran from each corner of his mouth. He moved his lips again. It was as if he were trying to say something – tell me something. I lowered my head, turning my ear to his blood-speckled lips.
“It’s okay, Kiera…” he gasped. “…I can hear the wind in the willows…”
“You remember me, don’t you?” I whispered.
With a faint smile on his lips, Ravenwood closed his eyes and took his last rattling breath. His grip on my hand loosened and fell away, leaving me holding a small silver key that he must have placed there.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I closed my fist around the key. I didn’t want Sophie to see it. My instincts told me that it was something that Ravenwood had only wanted me to know about. What the key opened, I had no idea, but it must have some importance or Ravenwood would have never secretly passed it to me before he died. I looked down into his upturned face. And although his neck was a red mess from where Sophie had slit his throat with her claws, he somehow looked strangely at peace – as if he now knew that everything would turn out okay somehow. Had he hoped that it would be me that would fix things? But what was there to fix? Back in the study before he had fled, Ravenwood had spoken of them. Had he been referring to The Creeping Men? But they were my friends. Ravenwood had almost seemed to sneer at the thought of Potter and Sophie mixing – or having a child. Was he so disgusted at the thought of half-breeds being born that that had been his motive for trying to kill Sophie? What other reason could there be?
Slowly, I took his glasses off and placed them next to him on the ground. The willows whispered overhead. To hear the sound of the trees bristling in the breeze I couldn’t forget how Ravenwood had smiled faintly before dying and had said that he could hear the wind in the willows. Had he been trying to tell me somehow that suddenly at the very end of his life he remembered me? Had he remembered leaving a copy of the book The Wind in the Willows for me to find in his cottage on the outskirts of Wasp Water? That seemed like so many lifetimes ago now. But had he remembered it? Did the key Ravenwood had secretly passed to me lead to another clue just like the letter he had once written in the pages of that book?
“What the fuck happened here?” I heard someone gasp.
I looked up to see Potter run into the clearing. His wings were out, as were his claws and fangs.
“You killed him, Kiera?” Potter asked.
“Not me. Sophie killed him,” I said, glaring at her.
“Sophie?” Potter said, as if seeing her standing in the clearing for the first time. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to wait in the summerhouse…”
“And I thought I told you not to leave her,” I snapped at him.
“I heard a commotion – like fighting,” Potter said. “I thought you were in danger so I came looking for you. Sophie was quite safe in the summerhouse.”
“I heard the sound of fighting, too,” Sophie said, stepping forward, her wings still shimmering about her, hair glowing in the golden sunlight. Why did she have to be so goddamn beautiful? She looked like a doll – like she couldn’t ever hurt anyone. But the gaping wound in Ravenwood’s neck reminded me that Sophie could now be as dangerous as any one of us. Turning her attention from Potter and back to me, she said in voice so soft, “I owed you, Kiera. You saved my life and I will never forget that. If it wasn’t for you, I would be dead now. You gave me a second chance. I only killed Ravenwood because I thought he was going to kill you – he did try to kill me, after all.”
“Ravenwood?” Potter said as if realising for the first time that it had been he who had poisoned Sophie.
“Yes, it was Ravenwood,” I told Potter.
“But why?” he asked, looking more hurt by this news than I’d ever expected.
“I didn’t get a chance to find out,” I said, shooting Sophie a quick glance. “He must have had a motive.”
“Perhaps he didn’t approve of the idea of humans being turned…” Sophie said, shimmering across the clearing and standing next to Potter.
“I don’t think that’s the reason why he tried to kill you,” I said. “After all, it was Ravenwood who had worked with Hunt on Lot 12, the cure that would help you change from human to vampire.”
“Kiera’s right,” Potter said. “There must be another reason… the baby, perhaps?”
“You told her?” Sophie gasped, looking straight at Potter. “How could you?”
“Kiera’s my friend,” Potter said, puffing out his chest. “And besides, if she was going to help catch the person who tried to kill you, then she had to know everything.”
“But…” Sophie pouted.
“But Kiera discovered the identity of the man who tried to kill you,” Potter said, looking down at Ravenwood’s corpse. “All we need to do now is find out why.”
With a gentle cry, Sophie suddenly placed one hand to her forehead and dropped in a dead faint into Potter’s arms.
“Maybe we should get her back to the manor house,” Potter said, scooping her up into his arms. “I think she is still very weak. I’ll get Hunt to take a look at her.”
“Okay,” I said, watching him go.
“Aren’t you coming?” he asked, glancing back over his shoulder at me.
“I’m going to stay and bury Doctor Ravenwood beneath this willow tree. I think he would’ve liked that,” I said, turning my back on Potter.
I stood and listened as Potter’s footfalls faded away amongst the trees as he carried Sophie back to Hallowed Manor. Knowing that I would need something to dig Ravenwood’s grave with, I set off in the direction of the Summerhouse in search of a spade. As I approached, I could see that the door was open where Potter had rushed out, then Sophie, as both of them had come looking for me. Climbing the front steps and crossing the small porch, I peered inside. There were no tools that I could see. Turning, I went back down the steps and around the side of the building. There was a wheelbarrow, and in it were several gardening tools. One of these was a spade. Picking it up and resting it over my shoulder, I made my way back to the willow tree where Ravenwood lay dead.
Crossing the clearing, I made my toward the tree, then stopped. Had I lost my bearings? Had I made a mistake? Was I heading toward the wrong tree? I spun around and looked beneath the weeping willow trees. I couldn’t see Ravenwood’s dead body lying beneath any of them. It was as if his corpse had vanished. Dropping the spade, I ran toward the tree where I believed Ravenwood lay dead and dropped to the ground. I could clearly see the bent over blades of grass covering the area where he had been lying. There were splashes of his blood, too, which had stained the grass black. I passed my fingertips over the ground. The blood was still tacky and fresh. Springing to my feet, I searched for any signs of footprints leading to and from the area where Ravenwood had died. But there were none. How then had someone come and carried his body away? The leaves rustled overhead and I glanced up. The branches over the spot where I’d believed Ravenwood had died were broken and bent out of shape. Had someone swooped in and stolen Ravenwood’s body while I’d gone in search of a spade…? Or had Ravenwood simply played dead, and once I’d gone, he had taken his chance and simply flown away?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I can’t believe it!” Hunt said, rushing down the front steps of Hallowed Manor as soon as he saw me step from the treeline.
He ran across the lawn toward me. He looked pale and gaunt. He was visibly upset.
“I can’t believe my best friend tried to poison Sophie,” he said. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry he’s dead,” I told him, even though I was no longer sure that Ravenwood was.
My intention wasn’t to lie to Hunt and drag out his grief and agony. But I couldn’t be sure of anything.
If I told him that Ravenwood wasn’t dead when he was, I was just giving him false hope. For all I knew Ravenwood could still be dead and his body had been recovered – stolen away – for some reason I didn’t yet know. But if he was alive, I didn’t yet want my friends to know. Why? They would just hunt him down – make him pay for what he did to Sophie. But if Ravenwood was still alive then I wanted to find him before my friends did. I wanted the chance to ask him why he had wanted Sophie dead. I couldn’t say that I knew the Ravenwood in this where and when well – so perhaps he was a cold-hearted killer – but I truly doubted that. If he was anything at all like the man I had once known, he was a good man.
“Where have you buried him?” Hunt asked, his eyes bloodshot as if he had been recently crying.
“Beneath a large willow tree,” I said, thinking of the hole I had dug, then refilled with nothing but earth. I had wanted to give the impression that Ravenwood had been buried. It would give me time to find out what had truly happened to him. “I made a cross with some branches, so you should be able to find it,” I said, taking one of his hands in mine to offer him some kind of comfort.
“I will go later and pay my respects to my friend,” he said, turning and walking slowly back toward the manor house.
I walked at his side. “Why do you think Ravenwood wanted to kill Sophie?”
“I can’t even begin to imagine why he would do such a thing,” Hunt said, looking and sounding baffled. “He was such a good man.”
“Did he not agree with human and Vampyrus mixing?” I asked. “Did he not like the half-breeds?”
“Not like them?” Hunt gasped, rounding on me. “He loved them. He loved my two children as if they were his own.”
“You have half-breed children?” I asked, pretending I knew nothing of his life.
“Kayla and Isidor,” he said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper, his eyes darting furtively left, right then back at me. “Ravenwood helped save my children.”
“Where are they now?” I asked. “Are Kayla and Isidor here?”
“No,” Hunt said with a shake of his head.
“Where are they?” I asked, fearing that I was going to get the same simple answer that I’d gotten from Potter and Murphy. And I was right.
“They’ve gone away,” he said, heading back toward the house.
“Gone where, exactly? “I called after him.
“I can’t talk now,” he blustered. “I’ve got patients to attend to. Murphy and Sophie have both been moved up into the attic.”
Following Hunt up the front steps, he strode back into Hallowed Manor and up the stairs to the attic. He walked briskly, so fast that I struggled to match his pace. It was like he didn’t want to engage me with any further conversation – as if he didn’t want me to probe deeper about his children, Kayla and Isidor. Why was everyone being so evasive about their whereabouts?
At the top of the winding staircase, Hunt pushed open the door to the makeshift hospital and I followed him onto the ward. Two small electric lamps burnt at either end of the narrow room. As there were no windows, the light cast long, drawn-out shadows across the walls.
“You got the lights working again?” I said, to Hunt.
“Uri fixed them up before he and Phebe headed back to the inn,” Hunt said, heading to a bed nearest to him.
Murphy lay stretched out on it, a patch of gauze fixed with bandages about his stomach. “Hey, Murphy,” I smiled, pleased to see my friend.
“Hey, Kiera,” he smiled back, although it looked more like a grimace as he was in pain.
“You don’t seem to heal so quickly these days,” I said, sitting on the edge of his bed, remembering how in the past he had shrugged off worse injuries in a matter of moments.
“These days?” he frowned.
Realising the mistake I’d made, I quickly added, “What I meant was you seemed to take a good kicking the other day when we fought the Leshy…”
“The Leshy didn’t give me a good kick-in,” Murphy grunted.
“He’s getting too old for all of this.” I heard Potter’s voice come from the other end of the ward. I looked back to see him standing in the shadows that surrounded the bed where Sophie lay. Getting up from Murphy’s side, I headed down the ward, stopping at the foot of Sophie’s bed. She was asleep.
“How is she?” I whispered.
“She’ll survive, thanks to you,” Hunt said, joining Potter and me at Sophie’s bedside. “What was it you gave her?”
“This,” I said, taking the remainder of the Lot 13 from my coat pocket and handing it to him. “I’m guessing you’ll need to make some more of it. Sophie might need a lot more over the coming weeks and months.”
“What is it?” Hunt asked, holding up the bottle in the dim light from the nearby lamp.
“I’m not sure,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I think it’s another Lot. But you’ll need to run some tests on it. Find out what’s exactly in it and then make some more.” I knew that he could as it had been him who had created it in another where and when not too dissimilar from this one.
“I will,” he said, studying the bottle. “I think I’ll call it Lot 13.”
He turned, walking slowly away down the ward. At the door, he stopped and looked back at me. “Kiera, you never said where you got this from?”
“I found it,” I shrugged, turning my back on him.
I heard Hunt leave the ward, the door creaking closed behind him.
“You know more than you’re letting on,” Potter said, eyeing me.
“I’m not the only one who could be accused of that around here,” I said back.
“What’s that meant to mean?” he said.
“Nothing,” I shrugged.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, gently taking my arm, steering me away from the foot of Sophie’s bed.
“What about Sophie?” I asked him. “Don’t you think you should stay?”
“She’s going to be out of it for a while. Hunt has given her a sedative so she can rest and give her body a chance to deal with the changes it will now be going under,” he said.
“Where are you two creeping off to?” Murphy asked as we passed the end of his bed.
“To get some air,” Potter said.
“Hang on, I’ll come with you, I could do with a smoke.” He groaned in pain as he tried to shift himself up on his bed.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Mrs. Payne said, pushing open the door and stepping onto the ward. She carried a bowl of steaming hot water and a towel in her hands. “It’s time for your bed bath.”
Looking more scared than I had ever seen him, Murphy pulled the sheets from the bed up under his chin. “Fuck off,” he barked at her.
With a grin spreading across his face, Potter said, “Now don’t be such a big baby, Murphy. Be a brave boy and take your medicine. You look as if you’re gonna be in a safe pair of hands.”
“Don’t leave me!” Murphy cried out as Potter led me out of the attic.
“Now where are my rubber gloves?” I heard Mrs. Payne say as the door to the makeshift hospital closed behind us.
In the vast hall, Potter and I found ourselves alone again. We stood facing each other. The silence was unbearable. I didn’t know what to say. I knew what I needed to say. I needed to simply say ‘goodbye’ and walk away. Walk away without looking back. But my feet felt like they had been hammered into the ground. Potter was staring at me again with his near black eyes.
“What?” I eventually asked.
“I just wanted to thank you for saving Sophie’s life,” he said.
“Is that what you wanted?” I asked back.
“I didn’t want her to die, if that’s what you mean.”
“What is it you do want?”
“You,” he whispered.
Then searching inside for all the strength I could muster, I took a deep breath and said, “But I don’t want you…”
“Yes you do,” he said, gripping my hand in his.
&nb
sp; “I don’t want to share you,” I said, and even though I loved the touch of his hand against mine, I pulled it free of his grip.
With tears threatening in my eyes, I turned and left Hallowed Manor. And however much I wanted to, I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. To do so would’ve broken my heart. With my wings tearing from my back, I shot up into the sky, leaving what sounded like a thunderclap booming behind me.
Chapter Thirty
From high above, I could see my tatty old Mini parked where I had left it outside the Light House. The car park was empty now, the restaurant closed until later that evening. I thought of Nev and how I had walked out on him. He deserved to be treated better than that. I’d let him down, but more than that I had let myself down for acting so badly. Could I blame him if he never wanted to speak to me again? And would I be bothered if he didn’t want to? Yes. I would be bothered.
Dropping out of the sky, I landed beside my car, my legs bending at the knees and dust spraying up from beneath my boots. With my wings withdrawing into me, I yanked open the door of my car and climbed inside. The car started first time and I lovingly patted the dashboard.
“Good girl,” I whispered, heading out of the car park and leaving what had happened at Hallowed Manor behind me. For now at least.
As I navigated my way back along the coastal roads that snaked their way along the very edge of the cliff tops, I knew that if I stood any chance of finding happiness in this where and when, I was going to have to find a way of shaking off the feelings I harboured for Potter. I was beginning to realise that those feelings belonged in another place. A place where Potter and I were together – that wasn’t here. But that other place no longer existed. I had pushed us out of it.
But Jack had told me there was a where and when where Potter and I were together. We had a child of our own – a daughter. And that might be true, but none of it wasn’t going to happen in the layer I now found myself in. In this layer, it was Potter and Sophie who were together and who were going to have a daughter named Abbie. I couldn’t come between them. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone. And I’d had my chance to stop any of it from happening. I’d had Sophie’s life in my hands. But I’d chosen not to let her die. I’d chosen to do the right thing. I was sure of that.
