Blood Entwines
Page 21
‘But what . . . what about me?’
Kara looked at her friend. ‘I don’t know.’
She stood up, brushing her palms on her thighs. She kicked Jack’s body with the toe of her boot. She was linked with him in a way that could not be reversed. She and Jack were bound by blood. But that didn’t mean that she had to like him.
‘He’ll come back. It’s only a matter of time,’ whispered Hannah quietly.
What were they going to do? Kara had no idea. But she knew one thing for sure. The thing, the faceless man had killed her father. She was going to do everything in her power to find him. And when she did, she was going to set him alight.
‘What about Jack?’ asked Hannah as they turned to leave the room, heading down the hallway towards the front door.
‘He’s not going anywhere. It’s going to take him a while to sleep this one off.’ Regenerate, that’s what he said to her before falling unconscious. ‘We can figure out what to do with him later.’ Jack Kennedy wouldn’t be waking up for some time. But when he did he had a lot of explaining to do.
As they walked down the driveway, towards the street, Kara kept her eyes lowered, her pace even. She was trying to make sense of all the things that had happened in the last few hours. Several thoughts crowded for attention at once.
Would the faceless man return?
Could Jack be used as a tool against them in the future?
How was she going to avenge her father’s death?
The sound of his name, repeated over and over again in her head, matched the rhythm of her footsteps as she walked.
Jack.
Kennedy.
Jack.
Kennedy.
Jack.
Kennedy.
One foot in front of the other.
Could she kill him if and when the time came, or was their blood too interwoven, too entwined? It was a question she didn’t know the answer to.
For now, they had won the battle but a war was coming.
Epilogue
Power flowed through him. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the connection with his servile creations. All accounted for, except one, the one that had recently defied him. He would not stand for it. Retribution would be quick. He would destroy them both.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for supporting this project. With special thanks to Damian Smyth for his constant encouragement.
To family, in all its guises.
About the author
Caroline Healy lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She writes young adult fiction, literary fiction and short stories. Her work has won several awards and is showcased in journals, literary magazines and short-story collections around the globe. She won the Doire Press International Short Story Award for her collection A Stitch in Time. Her fiction appears in Wordlegs, Five Stop Story, Irish Short Story and Prole Magazine.
When she’s not writing, she’s drinking tea, eating chocolate and reading. Her harshest critics are her two cats, Lady Emma and Treble. If they don’t like what she has written, they fall asleep across her keyboard.
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Healy
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First published in August 2014
by Bloomsbury Spark, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 6191 2
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