Chapter One
…I sat up in bed. I rubbed my eyes, covering the backs of my hands in the blood that dripped from them. The last broken fragments of my nightmare jabbed into my brain like broken pieces of glass. I’d dreamt the same dream for over a week now. It always started and ended in the same place. I didn’t know the girl’s name or what she had been running from. We were connected, though. The fingers, the shift of her facial features knocked out of place — but that wasn’t all that had been knocked off balance. But the more I thought about her after waking, the foggier the dream became, and faded away like an early morning mist.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The room was in semi-darkness, the first rays of morning light creeping around the edges of the heavy curtains. Wrapping my blanket about me like a shroud, I crossed my room to the adjoining bathroom. After leaving the mortuary, Potter had raced us through the night. We only had one place to go, and that was back to Hallowed Manor. The manor had belonged to Doctor Hunt, it had been where Kayla had grown up, it was her home and she had wanted to return.
Hallowed Manor was ideal. It was remote, laying miles from the nearest town on the Welsh Moors. Surrounded by a moat, walls, and a gate house, it was somewhere we could hide in safety — be apart from the rest of the world, the rest of the living. At first, being together had been wonderful. To have my friends back had seemed like the Elders had blessed me, but now I wasn’t so sure. Now I wondered if their blessing wasn’t in fact a curse, like they said it would be. We were all dead. Yes, we still inhabited the Earth, but not really. Not like the living. We were freaks and not just because we were dead. The Elders had called Potter, Isidor, and Kayla angels — but what sort of angels were they? Potter was a chain-smoking Vampyrus with attitude, and the rest of us were half-breeds — half and half’s as the Elders had called us — half Human and half Vampyrus. Not only didn’t we belong amongst the living, we were a completely different species. And I was cracking up — not mentally, although I had questioned my sanity since waking up in that mortuary six weeks ago. I was physically cracking up.
I turned on the taps and splashed cold water across my cheeks, washing away the blood-red tears that had dried on them. Once they had gone, I began to fill the bath with cold water. Not hot and no bubbles like I’d enjoyed so much before…before dying…but the colder, the better. I liked the water to be ice cold now. To feel it lap against my pale skin made it tingle, it made my flesh feel alive and it numbed my cravings for the red stuff. Death hadn’t silenced them — it had made them worse — added another layer to my torment. There were supplies of Lot 13 left behind by Doctor Ravenwood in the makeshift hospital hidden in the attic. But there wasn’t much. I knew that Kayla, more than Potter and Isidor, had been drinking it. I couldn’t stop her and part of me didn’t want to. She had been through enough — she had been murdered, her life taken away from her — so at night, I lay awake and listened to her sob herself to sleep from down the hall. How could I add to her suffering?
With the bathroom in near darkness, I brought my face close to the mirror fixed to the wall above the sink and stared into it. My face now looked just as it had before dying, not deformed and misshapen like it had when waking in the mortuary. To look at me, I appeared normal, my bright hazel eyes losing none of their sparkle, my skin pale as always, but without blemish. I dropped the blanket from around my shoulders, letting it flutter to the tiled floor. I rolled back my shoulders and my wings unfolded from my back. They were as black as ever, those bony fingers folded into fists at the tip of each wing. I looked at my fingers and my claws appeared like a set of knives, and my mouth filled with blood as my fangs drew down from my gums. I looked at my naked reflection, at the
I had gently eased myself away, not wanting to wake him. Once in the bathroom, I had looked at myself in the mirror. I’d wanted to know if being dead had changed me. Did I still have my wings, my claws, my fangs? And yes I did, but there was something else. When in my true half-breed form, there were now cracks. With my fingertips, I touched the skin covering my left cheekbone. The cracks were very faint, barely visible, but they were there. Like the tiny cracks you get at the bottom of a very old china teacup. There were others, too. A network of cracks like a very faint spider’s web, covered my neck, shoulders, and down between my breasts, over the flat of my stomach and down across my thighs. I rubbed at them, then snapped my hand away. I looked at the dust-like powder that now covered my fingers. I rubbed my fingertips together in a circular motion and it felt as if they were covered in ash.
Potter had stirred in the other room, and I swung the bathroom door closed. I didn’t want him to see me like this. What was happening to me? Like I said, it was as if I were cracking up.
That had been six weeks ago, and now as I looked in the mirror, the cracks were still there, more visible, as if deeper somehow, giving me an ancient-looking appearance. From a distance they looked like wrinkles, the kind that I shouldn’t be finding until my late fifties — but I was never going to reach my late fifties, right? Now that I was dead, was I going to age? Was I going to stay at the age of twenty for the rest of eternity? Every young girl’s dream — but not mine. I knew deep inside of me I wouldn’t last another fifty years alive or dead. Whatever curse or blessing the Elders had cast upon me wasn’t for eternity — it was for now. How long was now? Weeks, months, years, before I cracked up totally and turned into a pile of ash — just like the palace where I had died?
I just had this feeling, like a knot in my stomach, that I was back from the dead for a limited period of time. But why bring me back at all? Why bring any of us back? Couldn’t we have been left to rest in peace? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of dying — that we finally find peace? Was bringing me back just a punishment for failing to make my choice? No. I didn’t believe that. Why punish Potter, Isidor, and Kayla too? I had been brought back for a reason — we all had.
I turned off the taps and changing back, I took my iPod from the shelf and slipped into the water. Turning it on, I thumbed through the tracks, and closing my eyes, I lay back and listened to Leona Lewis sing
Chapter Two
Lot 13 tasted bitter, as usual, but I screwed up my nose as it slowly rolled down the back of my throat. It was disgusting and nothing like real blood. The real stuff —
I could hear Kiera going to her bathroom, even from my room all the way down the hall. The sound of the water rushing from the taps and filling the bath was almost deafening and I wanted to scream at her to turn them off. But there had been a lot that I had wanted to scream about lately, so taking one of my pillows, I buried my head beneath it. With the pillow smothering my face and ears, I could still hear the sound of Kiera’s blanket flutter to the floor. She stopped and I knew that she was looking at herself in the mirror again. Not out of vanity — Kiera wasn’t like that — she was looking at something else. I didn’t know what, but I knew that she was staring at herself again. I could see it in her eyes. Kiera hadn’t been the same since coming back — but then again, I don’t
