by Tim O'Rourke
Kiera Hudson
&
The Lethal Infected
(Kiera Hudson Series Three)
Book 2
BY
Tim O’Rourke
First Edition Published by Ravenwoodgreys
Copyright 2014 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
Lynda O’Rourke
Book cover designed by:
Cares Barrios
Copyedited by:
Carolyn M. Pinard
www.cjpinard.com
Merry Christmas to all the Kiera Hudson fans!
Thanks to:
Shana at abookvacation.com
bookwormbetties.blogspot.com
Caroline Barker at Areadersreviewblog.wordpress.com
claricesbooknook.blogspot.co.uk
Melly at the Vampire Forum
Who all took the time to review my books – Thank you!
You can contact Tim O’Rourke at
www.kierahudson.com
Or by email at [email protected]
More books by Tim O’Rourke
Kiera Hudson Series One
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 5
Vampire Hollows (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 6
Kiera Hudson Series Two
Dead Flesh (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1
Dead Night (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 2
Dead Angels (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 3
Dead Statues (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 4
Dead Seth (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 5
Dead Wolf (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 6
Dead Water (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 7
Dead Push (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 8
Dead Lost (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 9
Dead End (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 10
Kiera Hudson Series Three
The Creeping Men (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 1
The Lethal Infected (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 2
The Jack Seth Novellas
Hollow Pit (Book One)
Seeking Cara (Book Two) Coming Soon!
Black Hill Farm (Books 1 & 2)
Black Hill Farm (Book 1)
Black Hill Farm: Andy’s Diary (Book 2)
Sydney Hart Novels
Witch (A Sydney Hart Novel) Book 1
Yellow (A Sydney Hart Novel) Book 2
Raven (A Sydney Hart Novel) Book 3 Coming Soon!
The Doorways Trilogy
Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 1)
The League of Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 2)
The Queen of Doorways (Doorways Trilogy Book 3) Coming Soon!
Moon Trilogy
Moonlight (Moon Trilogy) Book 1
Moonbeam (Moon Trilogy) Book 2
Moonshine (Moon Trilogy) Book 3
Samantha Carter – Vampire Seeker Series
Vampire Seeker (Samantha Carter Series) Book 1
Vampire Flappers (Samantha Carter Series) Novella
The Vampire Watchmen (Samantha Carter) Book 2
The Tessa Dark Trilogy
Stilts (Book 1)
Zip (Book 2)
The Mechanic
The Mechanic
Unscathed
Written by Tim O’Rourke & C.J. Pinard
Flashes
Flashes
You can contact Tim O’Rourke at
www.kierahudson.com or by email at [email protected]
The Lethal Infected
Chapter One
“What are you staring at?” I asked.
“Is that blue colouring or is it just the way the sun is shining off your hair that makes it look like…” Nev started.
“I don’t dye my hair,” I told him, taking a sip of tea from the china cup I held in my hand.
“It must be the light then,” he said as if inspecting me somehow.
I had noticed how since arriving at the small café at the end of the pier, Nev hadn’t stopped looking at me. It wasn’t always obvious, but even as the pretty waitress had stood at our table and taken our order, he had been checking me out from the corner of his eye. I didn’t know why. The waitress, whose strawberry blonde curls that sat heavy on her shoulders, was far prettier than I. In fact I didn’t feel pretty at all – if I ever truly had. Perhaps once I had. But that seemed like another lifetime ago. In a life where Potter held me close to him. He had made me feel beautiful – despite the creature living deep inside of me. He had loved me because he had a monster living inside him, too. All of my friends had.
“What are you thinking?” I heard Nev ask. “You look miles away.”
“I’m just tired,” I shrugged, looking back across the table at him.
“Perhaps you should eat some more of your breakfast,” he said, watching me push the remains of the scrambled eggs and toast idly about my plate with a fork.
“No wonder you look so pale,” he smiled.
“So I’m pale and my hair shines blue,” I said, perhaps more angrily than I intended. It wasn’t his fault that Potter had deserted me for Sophie Harrison. But had he deserted me at all? No, not really. The Potter in this where and when wasn’t mine. He belonged to someone else. But do we ever truly belong to anyone? The Potter from this when had kissed me – held me in his arms… that connection we had once shared was there. I’d felt it as we kissed in the darkened corridor back at the offices of The Creeping Men. I might have been pushed into another layer – but my feelings were just the same and deep inside of me. I believed that Potter felt those feelings too. He said we fit together. Like Starsky and Hutch, he had said. Not the most romantic of things I know, but that was Potter. Romance was like a foreign language to him, but I liked the language Potter spoke. I couldn’t help that. I couldn’t help the way I felt. But I would have to learn to if I were to make a life for myself in this new where and when I’d been pushed into. The where and when hadn’t been my choice, but the decision to leave my friends had been. The decision to trick them onto that train so they could escape to safety had been my choice alone. After killing the Leshy in the woods, Potter had said that he didn’t believe in giving people second chances. That they should live with the bad decisions and the mistakes they make. Had he been talking about me – about the decision I had made on that underground platform as I’d let the man I was in love with and my friends slip into the darkness of that tunnel and out of my life? But if he was, then wouldn’t that suggest that he did remember? Was he now punishing me for making that decision?
“I don’t mean to offend you,” Nev said, cutting into my thoughts again.
“Huh?” I said, glancing up from the scrambled eggs that I was still mindlessly pushing around the edges of the plate.
“When I said about the colour of your hair and the paleness of your skin,” Nev re
minded me. “I was trying to pay you a compliment.”
“Why compliment me?” I sighed.
There was a pause as the waitress appeared beside us and gathered up my half-eaten breakfast. She placed a fresh pot of tea onto the table. Nev watched her go from the corner of his eye, then looked back across the table at me. The morning sun that sparkled on the waves as they rolled beneath the stubby pier made his blue eyes shine, and gave his messy dark hair a halo effect as the light streamed in through the café window.
“Can I ask you something?” he suddenly said, rolling up the sleeves of his denim shirt to his elbows.
“If it’s about me posing for that painting, I still haven’t made up my mind,” I half-smiled back at him.
“It’s not about the painting,” he said.
“What then?” I asked, pouring fresh tea for the both of us. I was in no rush to go anywhere. Where did I have to go to?
“Why do you look so sad, Kiera?” he asked.
“Do I look sad?” I asked, breaking his stare and looking back out of the window.
“Yeah, you look sad,” he said, voice soft. “I could tell that you had been crying when I came across you this morning. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to…”
“It’s complicated,” I said, still gazing out of the window, watching the waves race up the beach.
“Is it a guy…?”
He didn’t have to finish before I slowly nodded my head in answer to his question.
“He must be mad,” Nev said.
“Why?” I asked, looking back at him.
In his usual confident way, Nev said, “You’re stunning, Kiera. I mean, you’re really beautiful, and I should know. I’m an artist, remember?” Then smiling his boyish grin, he added, “I have an eye for what’s hot and what’s not.”
“He loves someone else and it’s my fault, I guess,” I said. “He was once mine, but not any longer…” I trailed off.
“What happened?” Nev asked.
He sounded like he actually cared. But I wasn’t ready to talk about Potter and me. I wasn’t ready to talk about any of it. How could I? What would I say? No man, however much kindness I could see in his eyes, would ever understand. I was a monster, and Nev would run just like Sophie had run out on Potter. But she hadn’t run out on him in this where and when. They were going to be married soon. Had the Sophie in this layer accepted Potter for what he really was?
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I said, putting down my half empty cup of tea and standing up.
Before I could step away, Nev had reached out and taken my hand in his. “Don’t go,” he said. “Stay a while longer.”
“I don’t think I should,” I said, sliding my fingers free of his, and placing my hand into my coat pocket. It wasn’t that I didn’t like his touch. There seemed no point in even becoming friends with Nev. Even if my heart didn’t long for another, I was a monster and despite how pretty Nev believed me to be, he had no idea of the creature that lurked just beneath my skin. Why let a human into my life? I kept a different kind of company now. I was one of The Creeping Men. I was part of an organisation – agency – that investigated everything unhuman. How could I invite a human into such a world? I couldn’t. Nev was a good guy and he deserved better – he deserved better than me.
Nev stood up, and taking a crinkled five pound note from his pocket, he dropped it onto the table. I headed out of the café, head down, and Nev followed. With the warm morning breeze tugging at my long, black hair, I hurried back along the pier toward the shore. I hadn’t gone far when I felt Nev’s fingers curl around my arm. He spun me around to face him.
“Kiera, how old are you?” he asked.
“Why? Are you trying to say I’m childish for racing away?” I asked, gently shaking his hand free.
“No,” Nev said, looking a little startled. “Why do you think behind everything I say is hidden some kind of insult?”
“So why ask my age?” I asked.
“Because you look as if you have the weight of the world dragging you down,” he said. Taking my free hand in his again, he said, “When I look into your eyes, it’s like there is an old soul looking back at me.”
“Perhaps there is,” I said, thinking of everything I had seen, learnt, and been through since I had driven into the Ragged Cove for the very first time. How long ago had that been? It felt like several lifetimes ago. I was no longer that young, naïve police recruit who had come looking for adventure. But the adventure I had uncovered hadn’t been like anything I could have ever imagined. I was not that girl anymore. And I did feel old. Like I had seen and done too much. Meeting Nev’s stare, I said, “I’m just so tired, that’s all.”
“So how old are you?” he asked again.
How old was I? Age was a concept I’d long since forgotten. It kind of lost its relevance when dead. But I was alive now. The red waters beneath the Fountain of Souls had brought me back to life – healed the cracks in me that had threatened to tear me apart. How did I tell Nev that I had lost count of the years I had lived and died?
As if sensing that I was struggling, Nev frowned and said, “Okay, so what is your date of birth?”
What year was I in now? I’d been pushed, but into what year? If I gave my true date of birth, but had been pushed back, then my date of birth might only make me thirteen years old in this where and when, and I certainly looked a lot older than that. But what if I’d been pushed forward some years? That might make me the youngest looking seventy-year-old ever. My fingertips brushed gently over my iPhone in my pocket. Having such a device suggested that I had been pushed back into a year close in time to the one I’d left. My last birthday had been my twentieth, before setting off to the Ragged Cove for the very first time. I looked at Nev and said, “I’m twenty.”
“See? You’re only twenty,” Nev said. “Four years younger than me and you’re wandering around as if your world is going to fall apart. So when is your birthday?” Nev asked.
“The sixth of June,” I said.
“Why, that’s tomorrow,” Nev said, combing his unruly fringe from eyes.
“Tomorrow?” I whispered.
“Yeah, it’s your twenty-first birthday,” Nev beamed, looking suddenly elated at the thought. “How could you not know that?”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I said, slowly turning away and heading back along the pier.
Nev caught up with me as I stepped onto the shore. My boots left prints behind in the sand as I cut across it toward the road where my car was parked. “So what have you got planned?”
“Planned?” I shot him a sideways glance. “I don’t have anything planned.”
“It’s your twenty-first birthday, Kiera, you’ve got to have some plans,” Nev said. Then pausing, he stopped short and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be tactless.”
“Tactless?” I asked.
“That’s what this whole thing has been about, hasn’t it? Why you were crying? How could I have been so dumb?” Nev said. “I bet you did have plans but now that you’ve… well, now that your single… I bet those plans…”
I thought of how I would be spending my birthday alone now that Potter had taken Sophie away for a few days. If the thought of them together hadn’t hurt before, it was now a crushing pain in my chest. “I’d rather spend it alone,” I lied, looking at Nev. But he knew it was a lie, just like I did.
“What about family?” Nev said, following me to my car.
“Don’t have any,” I said.
“Friends then?”
“Don’t have any of them either,” I said, which wasn’t a lie – not in this world. Apart from Murphy, I didn’t know where any of my friends were or if they even existed here. I thought of Kayla and how I’d seen her in the grounds of Bastille Hall. But that hadn’t really been my friend. That had been the Leshy trying to deceive me.
“You have one friend at least,” I heard Nev say over my shoulder as I fished the keys to my car from my
pocket.
“Oh yeah, who?” I asked, looking back at him.
“Me,” he said. Nev didn’t smile or grin. He looked dead straight at me. “I’ll be your friend, Kiera, if you let me.”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” I said, turning away and swinging open the door to my car.
“Why not?” Nev asked.
“You don’t know me,” I said, climbing into my beat up old car and closing the door.
“I’d like to if you give me the chance,” he said, just before I pulled away, leaving him standing alone at the kerb.
Chapter Two
Glancing up into the rear-view mirror, I watched Nev standing alone beside the road, hands thrust into the pockets of his grubby denims, hair blowing about his unshaven face. Why was I treating him so mean? The pain I felt wasn’t his fault. It hadn’t been caused by him. All Nev had wanted to do was be my friend. He also wanted me to pose for him, but I doubted very much that I would ever find the confidence in myself or our friendship to let that happen. But for now, he was the only friend – or the only person that wanted to be my friend in this new world. Could I really risk throwing that away? However much I feared the consequences of me befriending a human, it didn’t mean I had to marry him. What would be the harm in sharing the odd cup of tea with him? Taking a walk every so often along the beach? Could there ever be a problem in doing such things? What if I were never to be pushed again? What if I were to stay in this new where and when for the rest of my life? Could I bear not to have a friend? Could I really spend it alone? There had been a time when I’d happily sit for hours in my chair and stare out of the window, but I had changed. That girl didn’t exist anymore. I had found adventure – I had found love – and going back to sitting by the window and watching the world go by was no longer enough for me. I doubted Potter was sitting by some window and staring out of it. No, he was with Sophie and they were probably… I didn’t even want to start thinking about what they might be doing together. I pushed thoughts of them from my mind. I might not be that naïve, young girl anymore sitting alone in her flat surrounded by paper clippings of the missing, but I was still Kiera Hudson. And I’d learnt how precious friendship was. I had died because of it, but friendship had also saved me. In my dream, Jack had told me that if I were true to myself, then I would be okay – I would get through this. It wasn’t in my nature to turn down the hand of friendship. I couldn’t be ungrateful and I definitely couldn’t ever be unkind or cruel.