“No, why?” Isidor said staring blankly back at Potter.
“That’s Michael Jackson for crying out loud,” Potter snapped, his cigarette almost falling from the corner of his mouth. “That’s him dressed up in the Thriller video.”
“Is it?” Isidor asked, squinting at the screen. “It says he is the Wolf Man.”
“Do you think this Wolf Man would run around in a red and yellow jacket, blue jeans, and white socks while he grips his crotch and moonwalks?” Potter asked in disbelief. “This Wolf Man is stealing children’s souls, not running around the place in a sequined glove for Christ’s sake!”
“He looks pretty scary to me,” Isidor said studying the picture that he had found on the web.
Then, looking at Kayla and me, Potter gasped, “Is it just me or is the kid taking the piss?”
“Okay, keep your wings on, Gabby,” Isidor shot back. “So I made a mistake, how was I s’posed to know that wasn’t the Wolf Man…”
“And stop calling me Gabby,” Potter barked at him. “My name’s not Gabriela, Gabriel or anything else, it’s Potter…”
“But the Elder said your new name was…” Isidor started.
“I couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what the Elders said!” Potter barked, the veins on his neck bulging through his skin.
“Can we just stop this bickering?” I snapped at the both of them. “This isn’t helping.”
“Well, he winds me up,” Potter shot back. “Here we are trying to figure out what the fuck has happened since coming back from the dead and you’ve got numb-nuts over here Googling the greatest hits of Michael Jackson…”
“It’s called Toogling now,” Kayla cut in.
“Whatever,” Potter hissed.
“Look,” I said, taking a deep breath. “So Isidor made a mistake, it’s no big deal. He found out a whole bunch of other stuff. But what we really need to know is, who is this Wolf Man?”
“That’s the problem, Kiera, no one knows,” Kayla said back. “He is believed to be a human. He negotiated the treaty on behalf of the Skin-walkers and in return, they cast a spell that has given him unnaturally long life. He has been around for over two hundred years. The treaty says that if his identity is ever revealed then the uneasy truce is over and the humans win. The Skin-walkers have to return to their caves beneath the Fountain of Souls and leave the humans and their children in peace.”
“So I guess we try and find this Wolf Man,” Potter said. “Let’s be honest, it shouldn’t be that hard, we’ll spot his sparkling glove a mile off.”
Ignoring him, I looked at Isidor and Kayla and said, “So do we know where the children of Wood Hill are being held?”
“In a remote boarding school on the outskirts of the town,” Isidor said, bringing up another page on the screen before him. “But I bet you’ll never guess what this school is called?”
Then, with a sense of dread falling over me as I remembered my dream of the girl falling from the sky and being chased to that big building, I looked at Isidor and whispered, “Ravenwood.”
“How did you know that?” Kayla asked me in shock.
“I had a dream about it,” I told her.
“Ravenwood?” Potter cut in. “What’s that old fart got to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” I said back, wondering if Doctor Ravenwood were still alive in this reality.
“What sort of a screwed up world have we come back to?” Potter said, lighting another cigarette. “And I thought things were bad when the Lycanthrope were out on their killing sprees.”
“Why do the authorities stand by and do nothing?” I said, feeling numb at what Kayla and Isidor had discovered.
“Like Potter said,” Kayla almost seemed to whisper to herself, “we’ve come back to a different world than the one we knew. And somehow, I think by coming back, we are to blame.”
But I knew in my heart that it was my fault. “I’m to blame,” I told them.
“How do you figure that?” Isidor asked me.
“If I’d made my choice back in The Hollows like I was meant to, then none of this would have happened,” I said, lowering my head in shame.
“You don’t know that,” Kayla said, placing a hand gently on my shoulder.
“She’s right,” Isidor said. “Who knows what changes would have happened if you had chosen the Vampyrus over the humans or the other way around. However, had you chosen there would have still been changes to the world. You were in an impossible situation.”
“The Elders said that I would be cursed for failing to make a choice,” I told them, unable to look in their eyes. “They weren’t kidding, were they?”
“It’s the Elders who have done this, not you, Kiera,” Potter said.
“But it’s me who has to put it right,” I said, still unable to look at them.
“Not just you,” Kayla said, gently squeezing my shoulder. “We’re all a part of this. We’ve all come back. Like you said, Kiera, we’ve come back for a reason.”
“We just need to find out what that reason is,” Isidor said softly.
“I think that’s obvious, don’t you?” Potter snapped at him.
“Okay, keep your halo on,” Isidor bit back. “So what is the reason?”
“Like the guy in the shop said,” Potter hissed. “We push back. And we push hard.”
“But where do we start?” Kayla asked him.
“How about with that email?” he said, pointing at the laptop screen.
The three of us turned our heads to see that an email had appeared in my inbox. The subject line read:
I’ve been pushed!
Chapter Fifteen
Within an hour of receiving the email, the sender was sitting across from me in the consulting room that I had prepared earlier that day. Elizabeth Clarke was in her early twenties and very pretty, something that Isidor had obviously noticed. He sat to the side of me, his mouth open. Elizabeth had blond hair that she had piled on top of her head in a loose-fitting bun. Little wisps of hair lay against her perfectly formed cheekbones. Her green eyes twinkled and her full lips glowed with a faint shade of pink lipstick. She was smartly dressed in a white blouse and light blue pencil skirt and jacket.
“Are you any good?” she asked me.
“At what?” I smiled back, but I knew what she meant. I had advertised my services as a private investigator and she wanted to know if she was going to be wasting her money or not.
She glanced at Potter who slouched against the wall in the corner, lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke, then at Isidor and Kayla who sat on either side of me. “Perhaps I’ve wasted my time,” she said, getting up from her seat.
“You’re not married, Miss Clarke,” I started, and winked at Kayla. God, this was so easy but it felt so damn good to be back at doing what I enjoyed the most. “However, you are dating someone and he hasn’t shaved for at least two days. You’re a school teacher by profession. You were raised in the town of Wood Hill but left some years ago and haven’t been back for some time. You live in a city that is some distance away. Your journey today was long enough for you to need to stop at a petrol station and refill your car. You’ve come about a family matter. Not a friend. A member of your family…”
“Okay, you’ve made your point,” Elizabeth said, sitting back down. “How did you know all that stuff about me — have you researched me in some way?”
“All I knew was from what you said in your email, that you had been pushed and that your name was Elizabeth,” I assured her.
“So how do you know then?” she asked me. “Are you psychic?”
