Dead Flesh

think any of us had been the same.

I heard Kiera climb into the bath and at last, the sound of running water stopped. My hearing wasn’t usually this intense — but whenever I got upset — angry or frightened, the sounds around me became louder — oh yeah — loud wasn’t the word. Sometimes I felt like stuffing my fingers into my ears and screaming. There had always been a soundtrack, as I had called it, since the age of six — a faint background noise, like someone whispering at me from behind a wall. But sometimes it intensified and was worse than deafening. And it was like that today and had been since I’d come back from The Hollows — the dead.

Listening to music helped and I was forever swiping Kiera’s iPod — the music helped to drown out the soundtrack. But Kiera had it now — she was listening to it in the bath. I could hear the music hissing from beneath my pillow. I had my own but it was busted. Dropped it throwing a hissy-fit at my mum and cracked the screen — the thing was screwed after that.

And I knew it was because of my mother, my father and…I didn’t want to think of the other one’s name, that the soundtrack had been cranked up to full. Since being back from The Hollows, I’d had time to think — reflect about everything that had happened there. I’d wanted to come back here, it had been my idea, it was my home. But to walk the quiet corridors and passageways, to sit alone in the vast kitchen, and walk the grounds had made me think of the ones I had loved and lost…because of him.

I was angry — no — I was fucking raging inside. Even though I was dead I could still feel things — pain. I still hurt. But even though he humiliated me, cut my ears off and then murdered me, I knew that I was angrier at myself than him. How had I been so dumb? Why had I been so flattered by the words that he had whispered? And I knew the answer to those questions — I had been desperate. I had been desperate for the red stuff that he had supplied me. But even more desperate to be loved. I had lost my mother and father but I had found a brother — Isidor. Why hadn’t I turned to him? Even when he tried to warn me, I didn’t listen. For someone who can sometimes hear too much — I had failed to hear my brother’s warnings and that’s why I was freaking angry with myself.

But hey, Kayla, you’re alive, girl — you came back from the dead — you got another shot. But not really. I’m still dead, right? The Elders told me I was a Dark Angel — a dead angel more like. And what exactly was a dark angel? What was I brought back for? To help protect Kiera, they had told me. Protect her from what? I mean, Kiera didn’t need looking after — I’d seen her kick more Vampyrus butt than I cared to remember; she looked after Kiera and I wished that I could be more like her. Kiera was my protector — she was my friend, my sister.

Maybe Kiera didn’t need that kind of protection — the fang-ripping and clawing, tearing kind. Maybe she just needed a friend? Someone to be there for her — to be there for each other. Like I said, I knew she was troubled by something — the walls of her room were covered from floor to ceiling in those newspaper cuttings. It was like she was looking for something. I knew she didn’t know what, exactly, but I knew that she would see it eventually.

The soundtrack had started to fade a little, so pulling the pillow from over my head, I climbed from my bed and padded across my bedroom to the large bay windows leading to the balcony. I pulled back the curtains a fraction and peered outside. The day looked miserable again and I had forgotten how bleak this place could be in the winter…spring…oh, who was I trying to kid? The place was freaking bleak all year round.

From my window, I spied Isidor coming back through the woods carrying an armful of branches. His dark hair was swept off his brow and his Shaggy-Doo beard jutted from his chin. He hated it when I called it that. That’s what Potter called it and was always taking the piss. And that was another thing — being dead hadn’t stopped those two from bitching at one another. They were constantly at each other’s throats. But Isidor hit back just as hard as Potter now, or should I say Gabriel! I couldn’t help but snigger aloud every time Isidor taunted him. Seeing Potter get wound up had been my happiest moments since coming back.

I watched Isidor drop the pile of branches onto the drive at the foot of the steps that led to the front door. He took a flick-knife from the pocket of his jeans and sat down where he began to sharpen them. Pulling on a pair of jogging bottoms, trainers, and a sweatshirt, I left my room to join him.

“What are you doing, Isidor?” I asked, sitting beside him on the step.

“Making stakes,” he said back, as he carved away at the tips of the branches.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why not?” he smiled at me, then went back to the sharpening. “What else is there to do around here?”

“Don’t tell me you’re missing The Hollows and what happened there?” I half-smiled, placing my arm about his shoulder.

“It’s because of what happened there that I’m making these stakes,” Isidor said, not looking at me.

“I don’t understand?” I said. “That’s all finished with now, we’re safe here. Besides, we’re dead already — how can we die twice?”

Then, stopping what he was doing, Isidor turned to face me. “You’ve noticed the changes, right?”

“I guess,” I said, looking straight at him.

“Then I don’t think we’re safe — dead or alive,” and he went back to his cutting.

Chapter Three

Kiera

Isidor had said something bad had happened. I remembered him saying those words to me as we raced from the mortuary. And something bad had happened — people had gone missing. Not just one or two, but thousands. I had come back to find that in an instant, people had just disappeared. And as I looked at the hundreds of newspaper cuttings that covered the walls of my room at Hallowed Manor, I knew that they had been the Vampyrus, snatched back by the Elders as The Hollows had been sealed. But the Elders had said that the humans wouldn’t remember and they didn’t — it was as if the Vampyrus hadn’t ever existed. And that wasn’t the only bad thing to have happened. It seemed that the Elders had either failed to understand the consequences of their actions, or they knew exactly what would happen and this was just another part of their curse, because the world had changed. Not drastically. But it was different, as if it had been nudged off-kilter, shoved to the left a bit. There were subtle changes and as I trawled through the Internet during the hours that I sat awake unable to sleep — I noticed these changes. And it was as if by taking the Vampyrus back, the Elders had erased any subtle influence that the Vampyrus had had on human civilisation. It was my iPod that first drew my attention to these differences. Although it was still called an iPod, the Apple logo had been replaced with the shape of a crescent moon. And when I thumbed through the tracks, I noticed that some of the songs had changed slightly — sung by someone else. For example all of the Rihanna songs had been replaced by a singer named Robyn, the U2 tracks had been replaced by a group called Feedback. The band looked vaguely familiar and the songs similar in tone and music style to U2 — but like I said, just different — as if knocked off-kilter. When I tried to search for U2 on the Internet, there was no trace of them on any search engine — not even the biggest, Toogle, which seemed to have replaced Google. But other songs had stayed just the same. Bruno Mars, Leona Lewis, and many others were as they were before. But it wasn’t just the tracks on my iPod which had altered; the car manufacturer Ford didn’t exist — but there was Nord. The number one fast-food chain was McDonnell’s started back in the 1940’s by the McDonnell brothers.

As I sat alone in the darkness of my room, the only light coming from my Moon laptop, the one that had the same crescent-shaped moon logo as my iPod, I tried to make sense of these little differences to what I had known before. Where had the company Apple gone? Ford? McDonalds? The singers and songs that had disappeared from my iPod?

And what about the newspaper cuttings that covered my walls, which told the stories of people waking up six weeks ago to feel that everything wasn’t quite right? I knew that humans, on a subconscious level, knew that something was wrong — that something was missing — something had been knocked slightly off balance.

I read and reread the stories of how men had woken to find their closets were full of women’s clothes, shoes, and hats. Where had these things come from? Who did they belong to? After all, they hadn’t girlfriends or wives, but