by Tim O'Rourke
Murphy glanced at me and then looked away again. Could he see how pissed off I was? I wanted to ask him why. If I did, Kiera would hear me – they all would, and now wasn’t the time. Not in the van. I needed to get my thoughts together, figure out exactly what I was going to tell Kiera.
How much was I going to tell her? It wasn’t only the secrets I had kept from her about Murphy and her father – there was my secret meeting with Sophie, too. It wasn’t just the fact that I had meet Sophie; it was what I had learnt from her. I knew more about being pushed than I had let on. Just like Isidor – I knew more. Just like the photograph had been left for Isidor, those letters – my love letters – had been sent to Sophie. Each one of them had been mysteriously pushed through her letterbox. Those letters of mine had ruined her relationship with her lover in this world. More than that, they had led her to me again. They had brought us back together, and I wondered now if Isidor’s photograph hadn’t brought him and Melody back together in some other when. One thing I did know for sure, just like the photograph which had been left for Isidor to find, the letters had ultimately led to Sophie’s death. Just like the photograph had led to Isidor’s death.
Now Kiera had a photograph of her and her father – the word PUSH scribbled across the back. Would that picture lead to her death just like it had for the others? Someone was seriously fucking with us all and I wondered if Murphy knew that. Is that why he had suddenly broken cover and come back? Still, I wish he had given me some warning. I didn’t like being caught with my trousers down. I looked at him again, and although I was glad to see my friend, I was so pissed at him that before I knew what I was doing, I had whispered, “Thanks for the warning, friend.”
“What are you talking about?” he whispered back from the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah, what are you talking about?”
Kayla asked from the back of the van.
Suddenly remembering that there wasn’t much she didn’t hear, I glanced back at her. Kayla sat on one side of Kiera, and Sam on the other. All three were staring at me. I looked at Kiera and could see the distrust in her eyes for me. There was something more than that, though; she looked hurt.
“Potter’s known for some time that Murphy, just like us, came back from the dead,”
Kiera breathed, not taking her eyes off me for one second.
“Why would you keep something like that from your friends?” Kayla gasped, throwing me an accusing stare.
I looked back at Murphy and hissed, “Any time you want to jump in and help out here will be fine with me.”
“How much do they know?” he whispered from the corner of his mouth again.
“Did you tell her about her father?”
“Yes,” I nodded, feeling three sets of eyes boring into me from the shadows at the back of the van.
“Sophie?” he hushed.
“Who’s Sophie?” Kayla piped up. “I’ve never heard of anyone called Sophie before.”
“I have,” Kiera whispered.
I cringed at the sound of the hurt in her voice. “Now why did you go and say something like that?” I barked at Murphy.
“Sorry,” he glanced at me. “Shit, I thought perhaps you’d told her everything.”
“No,” I hissed.
“No?” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“You told me not to!” I roared at him.
“I told you not to say anything about me or her dad,” Murphy snapped back. “What you say and don’t say about one of your ex-girlfriends is up to you.”
“A girlfriend?” Sam smirked.
“Hey, listen up, wolf-boy this has nothing to do with you!” I snapped back at him.
“Sorry,” he smirked back, enjoying my obvious discomfort.
“I think I preferred you in the coma,” I said.
“It’s a shame the same can’t be said about you,” Kiera remarked, springing out of her seat. “Stop the van, Murphy. I’m getting out!”
Chapter Seven
Kiera
“I said stop the van!” I yelled, screwing my hands into fists at my sides.
The police van lurched to the side as Murphy steered it off road and into a nearby field.
He applied the brakes, coming to a juddering halt.
Just wanting to be away from Potter – wanting to be on my own – I kicked open the back doors and leapt into the grass. The ground felt mushy beneath my boots from the heavy rainfall of the last twenty-four hours. It was cold and I wrapped my coat about me, heading away from the van and across the bleak-looking field.
“Hey, Kiera!” Potter called after me.
Before I’d had the chance to tell him to go screw himself, he was beside me and grabbing my arm.
“Let go of me!” I shouted, tugging my arm free. His grip was tight and he held me firm.
“Listen to me, tiger!” he said, trying to keep his voice calm – steady. “It’s not what you think.”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” I shouted, just inches from his face. “I’m not your tiger – sweet-cheeks – or anything else. Why don’t you just fuck off?”
“I know I’ve been keeping secrets from you, but I’ve had my reasons,” Potter tried to explain.
“He’s right,” Murphy called climbing from the van and landing in the mud. His feet made a squelching sound. He looked down at his slippers which were now covered in mud. “Oh sweet Jesus,” he groaned.
“Is that all you’re worried about?” I snapped at him as he stood looking down at his feet in the pale morning light.
“I’ve had these for years,” he grumbled at me.
Looking in disbelief at both Murphy and Potter, I said, “You two really are just a couple of freaking jokers. You two just don’t give a shit about anyone other than yourselves.”
“Not true,” Potter cut in.
“No?” I hissed. “So why didn’t you tell me about the secrets the pair of you have been keeping?”
“To protect you,” Potter said.
“Bullshit!”
“Potter is telling you the truth,” Murphy said, slipping and sliding in the mud as he came towards me.
“So keeping secrets about Sophie is protecting me, right?” I snapped, tiny plumes of breath escaping from my mouth and disappearing upwards.
Murphy glanced at Potter, and lighting his pipe, he said, “Yeah, what was it with the whole Sophie thing?”
“Look, will you stop keep going on about fucking Sophie!” Potter barked at him. “Can’t you see you’ve dropped me in enough shit already?”
“I didn’t tell you to go and see Sophie,”
Murphy snapped back, shoving his pipe into the corner of his mouth. “That was your bright idea, not mine.”
“But you were the one who told me not to tell Kiera I had seen you and that her father was still alive!” Potter said, desperate to shove some of the blame back in Murphy’s direction.
Staring at them opened-mouthed as they bickered like a couple of schoolboys before me, I said, “I don’t care whose idea it was. Neither of you should have lied to me. I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends,” Murphy came back at me.
I looked at him and could see that he didn’t have the faintest idea how their secrets had made me feel. “Do you know how it felt to watch you – my so-called friend – get ripped to pieces beneath the Fountain of Souls? Do you?”
Murphy stared back at me, his eyes crystal blue, and pipe smoke curling up from the end of his pipe.
“It broke my fucking heart!” I yelled at him. “You became more than just a friend to me, you became like a father. I wanted you to be like a father to me, because I had to sit and watch mine be eaten away by cancer, until he was nothing more than a bunch of bones screaming out in pain like a wild animal. Then when I had to stand and watch you get your heart ripped out, then set upon by those wolves, I realised I knew how it must have felt to have your heart ripped out, because that’s how I felt when I saw my own father screeching in agony, as he
begged the nurses for more morphine to take away the pain. I never thought I would feel like that again – but thanks to you two arseholes, I feel that pain again.
You’ve both known that my father is still alive, and yet neither of you could tell me.”
“He’s not your father,” Murphy said, his voice now soft, his usual gruff tone gone, like the plumes of breath which disappeared above me.
“Potter said he had seen him!” I snapped.
“I saw someone who looks like your father, Kiera,” he said. “But he isn’t the father you describe, screaming out in pain with cancer.”
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” I shot back at him. “At least there is some redeeming feature in this world which has been pushed.”
“But he isn’t the man you remember,”
Murphy said. “He doesn’t know you. He knows another Kiera. That’s the Kiera he loves. The Kiera he fetched up as his own.”
“There are two of me here?” I breathed, feeling as if my head had just been plunged into a bucket of ice-cold water.
“The Kiera from this world is dead,”
Murphy explained. “Just like you, she was a cop, but she got shot dead in the line of duty.”
“What about my mother?” I gasped, wondering if in this pushed world, she was a Vampyrus.
“She died giving birth to you,” Murphy said. “So as you can see, there are similarities between the world – the when – we knew, and this one. Both here and there your mother is dead, and so are you, Kiera.”
“But things aren’t the same,” I breathed, my mind working overtime as I tried to make sense of what I was being told.
“What do you mean?” Potter asked me.
“My father is still very much alive here,” I said, staring straight at him. “And I want to see him.”
“And that’s why we didn’t tell you,”
Murphy said, taking the pipe from his mouth. “I knew you would want to see him, it would only be natural. But you can’t.”
“Why not?” I snapped. “I have a right to, he’s my father.”
“You have no rights here, Kiera,” Murphy said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Says who?”
“The Kiera from this when is dead,”
Potter said. “She’s buried in a cemetery. Her father visits the grave each morning on his way to work.”
“But I’m not dead,” I insisted. “Maybe that’s why I’m here – to be reunited with my father again.”
“That’s not the reason why you are here,”
Potter said, taking my arm again. “We’re here because someone is jerking us off. They’re yanking our chain – taking the piss – messing with our heads. Whatever way you look at it, someone is seriously fucking with us and we need to find out who.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, my eyes narrowing as I stared at him. What else hadn’t he told me?
“Because of what happened when I found Sophie again,” Potter said, looking away.
“So what did happen?” I said, unable to hide the resentment and bitterness in my voice.
“Why did you go and look her up? I thought you told me she broke your heart once?”
“She did,” Potter said, still unable to look at me.
“So why go in search of her?” I sneered.
“Wanted one last fling?”
“No,” Potter said, now turning to face me.
“I needed to know what was going on in this new world we had been brought back to. Other than you, I knew no one here. Murphy was dead – or so I thought at the time. I didn’t know anyone else other than Sophie. So when I left Hallowed Manor that day, I went in search of her. I met her father and he spoke of Skin-walkers who had come looking for her. There were other things, too, which were different. She hadn’t studied music like she had in the world we had come from. So I decided not to pursue her and I went to your flat.
It was my intention to get some of your belongings and come straight back to the manor and you.”
“So what kept you?” I asked, the sound of suspicion in my voice barely hidden. “You were gone more than twenty-four hours. Enough time to pick me out some clean clothes.”
“I broke into your flat but I wasn’t the only one there,” Potter explained, taking a cigarette and lighting it. “Sophie had got there before me.”
“What was she doing in my flat?” I demanded, unable to bear the thought of the both of them together, especially there. That was my private place – that was my home.
“She was looking for you, Kiera,” he said, thin jets of blue smoke pouring from his nostrils.
“Looking for me?” I frowned. “Why?”
“Because you sat bolt upright on her mortuary slab and fled the hospital,” he said, looking straight at me.
“What?” I gasped, my brain feeling as if it had been wrung dry like a dirty dishcloth.
“Like I’ve tried to explain,” Potter said.
“Things in this world aren’t the same and I’m not just talking about a few rock bands and story books. Sophie wasn’t a musician in this when, she was a pathologist and you found your way onto her mortuary slab. Now what are the chances of that happening, I wonder?”
“But why?” I gasped, unable to think of anything else to say.
“I know it’s a bit of a mind-fuck,” Potter breathed out smoke. “But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
I was quiet for a moment, as I tried to comprehend everything I had been told. Then looking straight at Potter, I said, “Did she remember you? Did she remember what you had once shared together?”
“Eventually,” Potter said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away.
“What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“When we were chained together in the caves beneath the Fountain of Souls, do you remember me telling you that I once wrote letters to Sophie? He asked me.
“Yes,” I said, nodding my head. “You told me they were love letters.”
“Even though my letters were written before the world had been pushed,” Potter started, “they found their way into this when.
Someone managed to get hold of those letters and deliver them to her – as if trying to evoke old memories in her. Eventually they did, and she remembered me.”
“Where is she now?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” Potter said. “I took her to this farmhouse where she had been hiding from the Skin-walkers who were searching for her. But they tracked us there. She ran out into the road in fear and was run down by a car.” Then looking away in shame, he whispered, “I left her there on the road.”
“So why were the Skin-walkers hunting her?” I asked.
“Because of you,” Murphy said.
I looked at him. “Because of me?”
“She snuck a vial of your blood from the mortuary,” Murphy explained. “Sophie knew you were different – I mean, what sort of human wakes up on the slab and heads straight for the door? But word got back to the Skin-walkers about what had happened to you.”
“Why was I so important to them?”
“For hundreds of years the Skin-walkers have been waiting for an angel to come,” Murphy said, staring at me. “They knew that she would be dead. She would have wings like a dead angel and be made of dead flesh. They believe that she would come and destroy the treaty between man and wolf. They fear that her coming will bring the end to the wolves.”
“And they believe that I am this messiah – this dead angel who will destroy the wolves?” I asked him.
“You are the dead angel the wolves fear,”
Murphy said.
“But who knew that I would come?” I quizzed him. “Who told the wolves of this prophecy?”
“The one who calls himself the wolfman,”
Murphy said.
“Who is this wolfman?” I pushed, wondering once again if he were keeping more secrets from me.
“I don’t know,” Murphy said. “I’ve been trying to find ou
t. That’s why I asked Potter not to mention my return. The fewer people who knew, the better chance I had of working undetected by the wolves.”
“So you don’t trust me then?” I asked.
“Do you really think I would betray you?”
“Not willingly,” Murphy grunted. “But who knows what a wolf might seduce from you.
A wolf like Jack Seth.”
“Do you think he is this wolfman?” I asked him.
“No,” Murphy said with a shake of his head.
“How can you be so sure?” Now it was Potter’s turn to question his friend.
“Seth is being punished by the Elders just like the rest of us,” Murphy said. “He hasn’t the brains to put something like this in place. No, there is someone more powerful than Seth with all the strands in their hands.”
“He tucked us up good and proper over the death of McCain,” Potter said. “He deceived us all because Kiera failed to choose between the humans and the Vampyrus in The Hollows. He’s been working with this wolf called Elizabeth Clarke and an Oompa Loompa named Dorsey.”
“Never heard of no wolf by that name,”
Murphy said thoughtfully. Then looking at Potter again, he said, “What the fuck is an Oompa Loompa?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I cut in with a shake of my head. I wasn’t in the mood to stand and listen to Potter talk about the cast of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
“Let’s just say Seth has a pretty big grudge against Kiera and let’s be honest, he isn’t too tightly wrapped. It’s because of him and the trap he set back at Ravenwood School that the Treaty of Wasp Water has collapsed, and the Skin-walkers are taking over.”
“Seth is just a fly in the ointment,” Murphy tried to assure us. “There is someone far more dangerous than him.”
“This wolfman?” I asked him.
“Yes – whoever that might be,” Murphy said. “I’ve tried to get close to him, but every line of investigation leads to just a small link in a far longer chain. A chain which will lead us to him – but a chain that seems to have no end. Someone is playing a very dark game with us. It’s like we’re on a chess board. Just like statues which are being moved around in some sick game.”