by Tim O'Rourke
Dead Wolf (Kiera Hudson Series Two)
Book Five
BY
Tim O’Rourke
Copyright 2012 by Tim O’Rourke This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Story Editor (Hacker) Lynda O’Rourke
Book cover designed by:
Tom O’Rourke
Copyright: Tom O’Rourke 2012
Copyedited by: Carolyn M. Pinard www.thesupernaturalbookeditor.com This book is dedicated to Patrick & Richard Don’t leave the station without me!
Thanks to:
Jennifer at readitreviewit.wordpress.com Michelle at novelsontherun.blogspot.com Shana at bookvacations.wordpress.com Angie at www.booksJackorrow.blogspot.com Braine & Cimmaron @ Talkingsupe.com Tammy @ Girl(Heart)Books Who all took the time to review my books – Thank you!
More books by Tim O’Rourke Vampire Shift (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 1
Vampire Wake (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 2
Vampire Hunt (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 3
Vampire Breed (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 4
Wolf House (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 4.5
Vampire Hollows (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 5
Dead Flesh (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1
Dead Night (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1.5
Dead Angels (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 2
Dead Statues (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 3
Dead Seth (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 4
Black Hill Farm (Book 1) Black Hill Farm: Andy’s Diary (Book 2) Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 1) The League of Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 2)
Moonlight (Moon Trilogy) Book 1
Vampire Seeker (Samantha Carter Series) Book 1
You can contact Tim O’Rourke at www.Ravenwoodgreys.com Or by email at [email protected] Author’s Note This book was going to be called ‘Dead Water’
Kiera Hudson Series Two (Book 5). ‘Dead Water’ was going to be split between both Kiera’s and Murphy’s POV. Just like Isidor in ‘Dead Angels’ and Jack in ‘Dead Seth’, Murphy has an important back story, which is woven into the series. While writing ‘Dead Water’ it became clear I wouldn’t be able to tell Murphy’s story in just a few chapters like I had originally believed.
Murphy’s story has turned out to be a novel in its own right with lots of twists, turns and action. Like Isidor’s and Jack’s , Murphy’s story is important to the overall series and he holds important clues and links to what has gone before in Kiera’s world and what is still to come. Therefore, I didn’t want to cut the story back as we find out why Murphy deceived Jack Seth as a boy, why he was so opposed to Kathy Seth’s and his brother Paul’s secret relationship, and more importantly how he came by his slippers!! We also find out what happened to Potter and whether he makes peace with Kiera. So, instead of mixing the two books, I’ve published this book, ‘Dead Wolf’ Kiera Hudson Series Two (Book 5) first and will publish ‘Dead Water’ Kiera Hudson Series Two (Book 6) early next year.
I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year
Take care
Tim
Chapter One
Kiera
It wasn’t true! I refused to believe that Jack Seth was my brother. How could I be related to him in any way shape or form? I knew who my mother was. She was the police officer who went to the Ragged Cove to investigate the disappearances of those people who had once lived there. She had that kind smile, pretty eyes, and just like me, she had jet-black hair. She had been the one who had whispered in my ear, ‘See you later, alligator’ as I had set off for school each day as a girl. My mother had been hooked on the red stuff by Phillips and Rom – she had in turn been seduced and betrayed by Luke – Elias Munn. Jessica Hudson had been a Vampyrus – not a wolf. She had been my mother and I refused to believe anything different.
“You lie!” I hissed into Jack’s face.
The windows rattled in their wooden frames, like old teeth in loose gums. Jack looked back at me, a cruel smile pulling the corners of his mouth up into the shape of a crescent moon. “You know I speak the truth,” he said, fixing me with his crazy stare.
I slapped his face with the flat of my hand, the sound of it like a gunshot in the dim light of the room. Jack’s head rocked to the left. A thin line of blood trickled from his right nostril and onto his upper lip. The urge to lean in close and lick that blood away was unbearable. He saw me watching the blood, and he slowly licked it away with the tip of his tongue.
“I hate you,” I spat, leaning away from him.
“Hate?” he smiled. “A feeling so passionate it borders on love. Don’t you think?”
The chains which fastened him to the chair clinked together in the darkness. “Don’t you love your brother?”
“You’re not my brother,” I breathed, shaking my head.
“You know it’s true,” he said, this time his smile faded. “Look into my eyes, Kiera, and you will see for yourself. See how your father betrayed me and you. Watch your friend, Murphy snatch you as a baby from the dead waters and...”
“Stop it!” I screamed at him, screwing my hands into fists by my sides.
“You can’t look because you know what I say is true!” he suddenly roared back, leaning forward in the chair I had chained him to. “We are brother and sister – you know it! I think we’ve always known it. I felt a connection between us the day I first saw you, and you felt it, too. At first I thought it was just lust – but it was more than that – it went deeper than that. It wasn’t lust – it was love that I felt for you.”
“That’s why you killed me?” I spat at him.
“That’s why you...”
“Oh, please,” Jack hissed back at me.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I never so much as touched your skinny little butt. When you threw yourself at me in The Hollows, I looked into your eyes and I was overcome with lust; that is true.
But not for you – but for the simple act of killing.
Yeah, I ripped your throat open, tore your liver and heart out, but I never did anything else – there was something which stopped me. At the time I didn’t know what. Only when I came here to this house and saw you in the photographs with Father Paul, that I truly began to understand the connection I had – we had – for one another.”
“So why have you had me believing that you...” I started in disbelief.
“Would it have mattered what I’d said?”
he shot back. “You had me all figured out, didn’t you? The vicious rapist and killer. That’s how you’ve had me tagged from the start. Why bother telling you any different? Besides, I wanted you to hate me as much as I hated you for betraying me in The Hollows.”
“Do you still hate me?” I asked him.
“More than you will ever know,” he said, his eyes fixed on mine.
“But why, if it’s true that we are brother and sister?”
“Because you had what I always wanted,” he spat, unable to take his eyes from mine. “I just wanted a family. Father Paul took my dad from me, then left me for you. For years he treated me like a son, but as soon as you came along, he left. He chose you over me.”
“None of this – this hate you have for me – is because of what happened in The Hollows,” I breathed. “You hate me because you believe I stole the man you loved as a father from you. You believe if I hadn’t have been born, you and Father Paul would have carried on pretending to be father and son.”
“He chose you over me!” Seth barked.
“While you were growing up, blissfully unaware of what your father was really like, while you sat on his knee and he told you stories, I was left to raise Nik as my son, to find him food, shelter – to survive. Not once did he think about that. Not once did he think of me. I was just a boy when Father Paul and his brother, Murphy played that cruel trick on me. Do you have any idea how I felt when I saw Father Paul’s coffin taken beneath ground? I spent my life believing he had taken his own life because of the misery my mother – I had caused him. When all the while, he was playing happy families with you and the woman you believed was your mother.”
“She was my mother,” I barked back at him.
“Kathy Seth was your mother,” he shot back. “She was my mother, too.”
A thick silence fell between us like a heavy set of curtains. I could hear the snow pelting against the windowpane behind me, and the wind howling around the eaves. I looked at Jack tied to the chair and desperately fought the nagging feelings of doubt which now tried to consume me.
“You didn’t turn evil because of anything Father Paul – my father – did,” I whispered. “You didn’t let the curse consume you because I was born, you didn’t know about me at the time. You chose to turn bad because you were weak.”
“Weak?” he roared. “I let the curse take me because I had to survive. You have no idea what it was like for me trying to survive each day.
You were the lucky one. You grew up in the nice house with mummy and daddy. What chance did I have?”
“You didn’t have a chance, Jack,” I shot back. “You had a choice. There is a difference.”
“It’s easy for you to say,” Jack sneered back at me. “Little miss goody-two-shoes. You’ve never known suffering. Perhaps if you’d gone through what I’ve been through. You’ve had it so goddamn easy.”
“Easy?” I cried. “You call this easy! I lost my mother and father only to discover that I’m some kinda freaking half-breed from the underworld. I’ve got wings, claws, and a set of teeth a rabid dog would be proud of. In the last year, I’ve been chased, imprisoned, beaten, attacked, and hooked on the red stuff. Not only have I been murdered, I’ve seen all of my friends murdered, only for all of us to come back from the dead to this fucked up world that has been pushed. I’m being stalked by a bunch of creepy statues, berserkers, Skin-walkers, and any other hideous creature you might want to add. Not only that, I have the added bonus of turning to stone unless I drink blood, my lover is a no good, lying cheat, and I’ve just discovered that I have a long-lost brother who is a freaking serial killer. And to top it off – the cherry on the cake – I’ve just discovered that I’m part-freaking-werewolf! So don’t you dare tell me that I haven’t had my fair share of pain and hurt. I’ve had enough to last me two lifetimes.”
“Okay, so you’ve had a few difficulties, too,” Seth said. “But don’t you see? That just makes us the same.”
“I’m nothing like you,” I shot at him.
“We’ll see,” he half-smiled at me.
“And what’s that s’posed to mean?” I demanded.
“Your choice,” he said.
“I’m not making any choice,” I told him.
“It looks like you’ve already chosen me over your father,” he said, his eyes shining like two pale yellow discs.
“What are you talking about?”
“Instead of finding your father some help for his wounds,” Jack smiled, “you chose to chat shit with me, while he bled to death...”
Wheeling round and remembering my father, I raced across the bare floorboards towards him. How could I have forgotten that he was lying bleeding on the floor? I glanced up at Jack to see his eyes shining back at me from the darkness. One of them slowly closed as he winked slyly back at me. He had tricked me. Jack had sucked me into the conversation – taking my mind from the room and my dying father. He had caught me with his stare.
I placed my hand against my father’s face, and his skin felt cold and stiff, like taut cloth.
His eyes were open, as was his mouth. A pool of sticky, black blood covered the front of his shorts, where it had pumped from the openings Jack had made in him. I lifted my father’s lifeless body into my arms, and the gap in his belly opened like a huge, grinning mouth. Twice now in my life I had cradled my father in my arms as he lay dead. The first had been in a white, sterile hospital room, this second time, in a room with bare walls and no carpets, and a serial killer laughing at me from the shadows in the corner.
Chapter Two
Murphy
The snow drove horizontally across the windscreen in thick flurries. The wipers fought to keep the screen clear. Violent gusts of wind crashed into the side of the police van, and I bit down on the end of my pipe as I tried to steer around the narrow, winding roads. It was dark now, and the two thin cones of light shining from the headlamps reflected back off the falling snow, making each flake glisten like glitter.
“I thought you said we were going to the Fountain of Souls?” Kayla shouted over the howl of the wind.
She was right, I had said that. I had lied, though.
“And we are, but not just yet,” I said, glancing in the rear-view mirror at her.
“Where are we going then, if not to the Fountain of Souls?” Sam asked, sitting next to Kayla in the back of the police van as it lurched from side to side over the uneven roads. “Isn’t Potter going to meet us there with Kiera?”
I had lied to Potter, too. Not because I’d wanted to deceive him in any way, but I knew there was every chance that he might be intercepted by those Skin-walkers. Potter had shown little resistance in the past to their mind trickery. My intention was to go to Kiera’s father’s house and hold back – just in case. Half of me had wanted to go with Potter, for us all to go together, but making peace with Kiera was something I knew Potter had to do alone. That didn’t mean I couldn’t be close by, though, to help save his arrogant butt if he needed me to.
I slowed the police van, changed gear, and guided the van around a tight bend in the road.
With my pipe dangling from the corner of my mouth, I spoke around it and said, “I told Potter that we were heading for the Fountain. There is every chance he might run into some of those wolves.” Then glancing in the rear-view mirror again, I glanced at Sam and said, “No offence, kid, but those wolves are not to be trusted. They’ve pulled that mind-bending shit on Potter before. He falls for it time and time again. He’s either as thick as fuck, or he has a secret hard-on for them. But should Potter come across any of the wolves, and they trick him into telling them where we are heading, then he will tell them the Fountain of Souls.”
“So where are we really heading?” Kayla asked, peering at me via the rear-view mirror.
“Kiera’s father’s house,” I grunted, keeping one eye on the road.
“But I thought Potter wanted some time on his own with her?” she said back.
“What Potter wants and what he gets are often two very different things,” I said, blowing pipe smoke from the corner of my mouth. “We’re just going to hold back, should they be walking into a trap.”
“Do you think they are?” Sam asked.
I didn’t answer him straight away. I thought of Jack Seth, Kiera’s father, Kiera...
“Perhaps?” was all I eventually said in response to Sam’s question. I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
Then, in the distance, something blue and white reflected back in the headlights of the van. I switched them off and slowed the vehicle to a crawl. The thick, black tyres crunched over the carpet of snow which covered the road and the rocky stone walls on either side of it.
“What’s up?” Kayla whispered, getting up and leaning over the front seats so she could stare through the windscreen. “What have you seen?”
“Over there,” I said, pointing into the field that stretched away on the right-hand side of the vehicle.
Sam appeared beside Kayla, and both of them screwed up their faces as they tried to see through the wall of falling snow outside. “I see it,”
Sam whispered, his breath hot against the side of my face.
“See what?” Kayla breathed.
“There’s another police van in that field.
There are wolves, too,” Sam explained, sniffing the air, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Isidor.
“What else can you...” Kayla started.
“Shhh!” Sam silenced her with a wave of his hand. “Open the window.”
I slowly wound down the window, and immediately leaned backwards as a gust of freezing cold wind blew a flurry of snow into my lap. Sam leaned over my shoulder, and thrusting his nose through the opening, he sniffed at the air.
“Potter,” he whispered. “I smell Potter.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, not really doubting him, but hoping that perhaps he was wrong. Potter should have reached Kiera’s father’s house by now.
“Nicotine,” Sam whispered, his eyes closed as he twitched his nose left and right.
“That’s just my pipe you can smell,” I said, blowing smoke over him.
“It’s different,” Sam said, his eyes still closed. “The two smells are completely different.”
“But...” I started.
“Wait!” Kayla cut in. “Sam is right. I can hear Potter...he is crying out in pain...he’s hurting...”
I didn’t need to hear any more, and shoving Sam out of the way, I pushed the van door open and sprung out into the cold snow. Within seconds, both Kayla and Sam were beside me.
Then, in the distance, I could hear the faint sound of wolves howling excitedly. Over this, I heard something else – the sound of someone crying out in agony.
Potter!