by R K Dreaming
No wonder I had trusted him.
My throat tightened, and I had to swallow hard to get rid of the lump in it. I reached out to take hold of Oberon’s hand. I put mine on top of his.
“Thank you, Oberon,” I said quietly.
He didn’t reply. He turned back around and continued to stare at the sea. He looked so sad. It hurt me to see him that way.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked him.
“It’s none of my business,” he said.
Tears were threatening again. I was so emotional these days. I had to swallow hard and gulp them down before I could speak again.
“How long have you known?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe from when I first met you.”
I felt a little chilled at this. My mouth went dry.
“How?” I asked huskily.
He looked at me with concern. “You don’t need to worry,” he said. “I don’t think anyone else would have guessed. Not even a vampire. I think I knew because… Sometimes I have this instinct. I think it’s because I’m a damphire. We’re supposed to have special powers, not that I’ve ever been able to figure out what mine are supposed to be.”
“Did you tell anyone?” I asked in a small voice.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. It’s nobody’s business but yours.”
And then he looked at me sharply. “You can’t tell anyone, you know. Nobody at all.”
I nodded, and gave him a weak smile. “Tell me about it.”
I had meant it as a joke, but his brow was furrowed in seriousness.
“You don’t understand,” he said in a low and intense voice. “If they find out what you are, they’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth. They won’t ask questions about whether it’s right or wrong. They’ll kill you right away.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“You don’t know,” he said. “Even if you manage to escape to the Magicwild, they’d hunt you down there. Or the native Magicwilders would. I’m pretty sure they’ve heard the prophecy of Nosferatu as well. Even we vampires are scared of it.”
“What?” I asked in shock.
He nodded his head. “It’s true. Even vampires. You can’t tell anyone. Not even my kind. Our kind”
He had kept his voice very low as he said all this, intent on protecting my secret even now.
“It’s okay,” I said to him. “There’s no one around to hear us. I took a look as I walked down.”
He looked around us. “The cats,” he said.
I looked around too, surprised that he had remarked on this.
The cats were all around us, but they weren’t paying us much attention. My eyes landed on a completely black one.
I glared at him. It was Captain Villain, spread out atop a sand dune not too far away, his ears pricked up listening to us. I knew he was awake because one eye was slightly open, revealing a flash of green.
“You cheeky git,” I said to him. “Where have you been all day?”
Doing what cats do best, he purred into my mind. He lifted his face towards the sun. Making the most of the good life. And anyway, I can’t hold your hand through everything, can I?
“That’s Captain Villain,” I told Oberon. “I think we don’t need to worry about eavesdropping cats. He would have warned us if we did.”
Oberon looked curiously at Captain Villain, and to my surprise he nodded at the cat as if in greeting.
A smug look came onto Captain Villain’s face.
Oh I like him, he said. He’s a keeper.
I turned back to Oberon. “What do you think about the whole Nosferatu thing?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s scary. It’s like the Chaos and the Scourge. Nosferatu is one of the few evil powers prophesised to be capable of destroying the world. Anyone would find that scary wouldn’t they?”
“Do all vampires find it scary?” I asked.
This idea astonished me. I had always thought that vampires wanted the prophecy to come true. After all, it would mean one of their own kind taking over the world.
“Not all,” said Oberon. “Some vampires are exactly like you’d think. They want it to come true.” He snorted. “The idiots. As if a witch or wizard that powerful would care about them. But most fear the idea of Nosferatu. It’s why they kill baby dhampires.”
“What?” I said astonished. “But… But I thought vampires cherished their own bloodkin. It makes for a more loyal brood or whatever!”
He laughed. “It’s complicated. Because dhampires are supposed to have special powers, most vampires worry that they might be born with wand-magic. So they kill baby dhampires to guard against the legend coming true. Why do you think there are so few of us dhampires around? We’re rare, but there should still be more of us.”
I let out a low whistle. “I can’t believe it,” I said.
It was weird to think that vampires had their own legends and myths and prophesies to worry about.
“What about your dad?” I asked. “He let you live.”
Oberon shrugged. “My dad is an enigma, even to me. I think he hoped I’d be more special than I turned out to be.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You can’t even tell your family about what happened to you,” he warned me quietly.
“Not all of them,” I said.
He looked at me sharply. “Not any of them.”
I was grateful to him for looking out for me. It was such a strange thing. He was a stranger in so many ways.
I nodded. “I know about the stigma against vampires. I used to have it myself.” I grimaced. “Sorry,” I added.
“You have no idea. I’ve spent my whole life as a vampire. You haven’t. You think you understand from the outside how prejudiced people are against vampires, but you don’t know until you’re on the inside. Until they look at you and they know what you are and you see it in their eyes. It never goes away. No matter how long you’ve known them. No matter how much trust you think you’ve built, it never goes away.”
I wanted to hug him. He sounded so sad.
“Maybe they were right all along,” he said quietly.
He stood up abruptly.
I looked up at him in surprise. “Where are you going?”
“It’s time to hand myself in, don’t you think?” he said wryly.
“What are you talking about?” I asked in confusion.
“It wasn’t my dad who did it,” he said. “I know that the other guys want to protect me, so they put the blame on my dad, but I can’t let that happen. No matter how awful he is. If Chief Hardwick and his people go charging into the nest to get him, people are going to die. I can’t let that happen.”
“They didn’t say it was your dad,” I told him gently. “They said it was… You.”
A hurt look came onto his face, but he nodded as if this too was something he had to accept — the betrayal by his friends.
“Good,” he said. “We were stupid to try and hide it in the first place.”
“But Oberon,” I protested. “They were lying, weren’t they? It wasn’t you! It couldn’t have been you!”
He gave a short laugh. “You’re a good friend, Esme. I don’t even know you really, but you are.”
“You didn’t do it,” I said to him.
“I did,” he said. “It was me. I was a coward or I would have handed myself in that first night. I don’t even remember putting her in your garden. I’m so sorry about that. I must have been out of my mind. I’ve been meaning to come forward if Agent Constantine started looking at you. I should have come forward anyway. It’s just that… I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t even remember it. It didn’t feel real, and so I just couldn’t make myself walk into the police station. I guess it’s taken me this long to come to terms with it.”
“What are you talking about?” I said to him. “What do you mean that you don’t remember it?”
He sighed deeply, looking tortured. “It
doesn’t matter anymore.”
I put my arm out to stop him from walking away.
“It does matter. Tell me what you remember,” I said.
He shook his head. “That security guard Willie was using his Allure on Lily. I got really angry. It was disgusting! How dare he? And Lily’s wand was broken. She couldn’t stop him. So I hit him. And then it got out of hand so fast. He was using his Hunger on me and he was going to kill me. I knew it. He’s an ex-con. He’s killed before like that. My dad should never have let someone like that work at the club. Anyway, I panicked, and I… I don’t remember the rest.”
“They said that you killed him,” I said quietly.
He nodded. “That’s what they said to me too. That I hit him so hard that he died. Only I don’t remember it.”
“That was self-defence,” I said. “He was going to kill you. You only did that to stop him.”
“But not the rest,” he ground out angrily. “They said I went mad. They said I attacked Lily. That she was scared about what I’d done and she didn’t want to cover it up. But I wanted to cover it up. I buried Willie in the cement. And I must have lost it. And I killed her.” His voice broke. “I killed her,” he choked out.
Tears were pouring down his cheeks now. He hadn’t cried in all that time, but now it was like a dam had broken loose. He looked horrified at this, and wiped them away angrily with his forearm.
“You didn’t kill her,” I said firmly, so sure now, and hoping desperately that it was true. “You can’t have. And I can prove it.”
* * *
When we got to the police station, Allegra was waiting there for us at the front desk. She looked immensely relieved to see me, and hurried over. She looked at Oberon questioningly.
I gave her the tiniest of shrugs, to let her know I still did not know what had happened.
I went to the officer at the reception desk and told him that we were here to see Agent Constantine.
The officer already knew. He was already on the phone, calling Agent Constantine.
Two uniformed watch wizards hurriedly closed in on us, looking at Oberon slightly nervously as if worried what he would do. They had their wands clenched tightly in their hands.
“Chill!” I said. “He came in willingly, didn’t he?”
“You need to come with us,” one of them said to him.
“I’m coming too,” I said firmly. “We have statements to make to Agent Constantine. And since Oberon is cooperating, you can put those wands away!”
The watch wizards looked at me defiantly. They lowered their wands but didn’t put them away.
They did let me and Allegra go with Oberon into the back area of the police station to an interview room.
Agent Constantine came in just moments later, letting Lorcan and Petra and Paolo and Jasper into the room ahead of him.
When he saw me he sighed. “I should have known,” he muttered under his breath.
“You have no idea,” I said to him.
Jasper gave me a quizzical look.
I reached into the large bag that I was carrying, and carefully extracted a large clear plastic ziplock bag. Inside it was the clawed murder weapon that had Lily’s blood on it.
I put it onto the table in the middle of the room.
Petra looked at it and she gasped. So did Paolo.
“What… What is that?” Lorcan said in a panicked voice.
“Good question,” said Agent Constantine, raising his eyebrows at me. “If I’m not mistaken, we already have one identical to that in evidence.”
“This is the real one,” I told him.
“But it’s not,” snapped Lorcan. “It can’t be.”
“Did you really think I was going to let you all into the same room as the real murder weapon?” I said to him. “I asked Allegra to create an identical copy of it before you even arrived. And we stained it with a tiny bit of Lily’s blood so that Oberon wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Petra looked on the verge of tears. “It’s not the real one. You’re playing a trick. It can’t be.”
“It is the real one,” I said. “So you pulled your stunt of falling over pretend-accidentally onto it and wiping off all the fingerprints for no reason. This one still has the fingerprints on it.”
Oberon and Agent Constantine both stared at it.
Agent Constantine looked furious at our deception. The look on his face told me that he was realising that everything that Petra and Lorcan and Paolo had just said in their statements to him could no longer be trusted.
A look of hope came on Oberon’s face. It lit up my heart. I hoped that what I suspected was true. Desperately.
“I’m pretty sure that it won’t have your fingerprints on it, Oberon,” I told him. “I think it will have Petra’s.”
Lorcan had also been looking at the murder weapon in horror.
Now he nodded. “It was Petra,” he said quickly. “It was her. She did it. She killed Lily.”
“Shut up,” Petra shrieked. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t!”
“It wasn’t you alone, you mean,” I said. “It was all three of you. You, Lorcan, and Paolo. You did it together.”
“Why would we do that?” demanded Paolo.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me. All I know is that I’m pretty certain that this murder weapon has all three of your fingerprints on it, so how are you going to explain that?”
My heart was pounding. I knew that they could point at my wand and say that I had planted their prints there.
But they didn’t. Petra collapsed down onto a chair and buried her face in her hands. She took a deep shuddering angry breath and when she looked up her face was furious. She was glowering at Lorcan.
“You stupid idiot,” she snarled. “This is all your fault! You were supposed to get rid of the murder weapon but you dropped it in the stupid garden next to Lily’s body.”
Allegra gasped. Agent Constantine crossed his arms over his chest looking stony faced. Jasper looked stunned, and so did Oberon. He had been standing, but now he dropped shakily into a chair opposite Petra.
“It was you?” Oberon asked in stunned disbelief.
She looked at him almost pleadingly. “What did you expect?” she said half bitterly, half tearfully. This time the tears were real.
“Why?” he said in an agonised voice.
“Why?” she shrieked. “For you, you idiot! You knew how I felt about you, but you went with Lily anyway. Even though you knew that she was going with your dad, you still wanted her. It was pathetic!”
“I loved her,” he said.
“No you didn’t,” she shrieked. “You’d only known her a few months. You’ve known me our whole lives! And she didn’t care about you.”
She looked like she was begging him to understand.
“Lily did care about me,” said Oberon, quietly insistent.
“Oh yeah? So how come after you killed that creep Willie for her, to protect her from him, how come she turned on you like that? You were unconscious. He had nearly killed you and you were lying there passed out. And we, your friends,” — she pointed at Lorcan and Paolo and herself — “we wanted to protect you. So we threw his body into the wet concrete because we knew it would set by morning. No one would know he was lying there at the bottom of that pool and you would be safe. Nobody cared about Willie The Shank. Nobody would care that he’d gone missing.”
“Shut up, Petra,” said her brother urgently.
She angrily swiped her tears. “I will not shut up!” she shouted.
She turned back to Oberon. “We did it for you. We threw his body into the cement to protect you. But she went crazy. She said, ‘What are you doing? We’ve got to go to the police!’ She didn’t care that it would ruin your life. You killed him in self-defence to protect yourself and to protect her, but she didn’t care that you were a vampire and that the cops wouldn’t believe you. And then she ran off, and left you lying there passed out on the ground. Your precious Lily le
ft you lying there.”
Oberon looked stunned. He was shaking his head.
This seemed to make her angry.
“We chased her,” she said. “We chased her all the way to protect you! Out of the club, on to Brimstone Bay Beach … She nearly got away. But we caught her. And then…. Then we all did it together.” She dropped her eyes, unable to meet his gaze now.
“You made them do it,” I said. “That’s the thing they never realised about you, Petra, isn’t it? You’ve always had Lorcan and Paolo wrapped around your little finger. You’ve always been able to make them do what you wanted, haven’t you? You wanted Lily dead and gone. But you wouldn’t kill her alone. You had to make them do it too, so that they would be equally as guilty as you.”
“So what?” she spat. “We’ve always been in on everything together. Why should I have to kill her alone? Why should all the blame come to me?”
“Shut up, Petra,” Lorcan begged.
“It’s too late for that, you idiot,” she snapped.
“We should never have listened to you,” he moaned. “I should never have listened.” He buried his face in his hands, full of shame.
Petra looked at him in disgust. “You’re pathetic!”
“It’s called remorse,” I said.
She threw me a furious look. “Weak is what he is. I knew he and Paolo would never keep their mouths shut unless they did it to Lily too. Lorcan wouldn’t do it with his wand, so I made him fashion that weapon instead. And then I made us all take turns. It was supposed to look like a werewolf did it. Everyone would think that her ex-boyfriend James did it to her. After all, he’d been fighting with her earlier on in the café. We all saw it. Even you were a witness.”
“Then why did you put Lily’s body in my garden?” I asked her stonily.
She looked at me defiantly. “Because I suddenly realised after we’d done it that we didn’t even know where James was. What if he had already left town? What if he had dozens of alibis? Then the police would come and find us. People would have remembered that Lily had gone running through the club and that we’d gone running after her. And it would’ve been obvious that we had done it. And then I remembered that you had been arguing with her too, and you’re new in town. And you’re such a pathetic loser, stuck up in that castle all alone. And you wouldn’t have an alibi. And so I said to Lorcan that we should etherhop to your garden and just leave her there and no one would ever know.”