Chapter One

Kiera

Jack Seth looked across the room as if I had somehow managed to break free of my chains and had slapped him across his emaciated face.

His eyes burnt fiercely in their sunken sockets.

His face looked skull-like, glaring back at me in the fading light which spilt through the window.

My father sat forward in his chair, opposite me, and he groaned in pain. Blood seeped from the gashes Jack had opened in his belly. A black patch of congealed blood covered the front of my father’s boxer shorts.

The mere sight and smell of the blood made my stomach leap and the back of my throat burn. I wanted some of it – needed some of it. I couldn’t touch a drop, though, however bad things got for me. However intense the pain, however much Jack would surely taunt me with my father’s flesh, I wouldn’t have the slightest taste of it. Not just because the strips of flesh had been sliced from my father, but because I knew if I were going to save him and Potter, I would have to become a statue. I would have to turn to stone.

“What did you say?” Jack asked, coming towards me, blood dripping from his fingers.

“Who are you to make me choose between my father and Potter?” I said. “You don’t have the right to make me choose between them! Who are you, anyway? Some perverted serial killer?”

Seth stood before me, wiping my father’s blood from his fingers and onto the front of his jeans. I watched the sticky trails form on his thighs and my stomach knotted. Then, dragging one hooked finger down the length of my cheek, he whispered, “We’re more alike than you think, Kiera Hudson.”

Turning my head away, I said, “You disgust me, I am nothing like you,” but it was myself I was disgusted with. I could smell the blood on his fingers and I just wanted to lick them clean. I twisted my stiffening wrists against the chains that held me.

“You are a monster, just like me,” Jack breathed into my face, his breath hot and smelling of my father’s flesh. His eyes flashed in their sockets like a torch, and I looked away. I didn’t want to look into his eyes. I feared what I might see in them. Instead I looked down at the floor. I looked for what I had seen – what it was which told me I could save Potter and my father.

“I’m not a monster,” I whispered, letting my hair fall over my face, so he couldn’t see what it was I looking at, just in case he figured it out, too.

“We are both monsters – freaks – the stuff of nightmares,” he whispered, his wrinkled cheek now brushing against my face. “Did you choose to be a half-breed, Kiera?” he continued.

“No,” I whispered back, as my father stirred on the other side of the room, fading in and out of consciousness.

“Did you fight the changes in you when they came?” he said, brushing my hair aside so I had to look into his eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Did you feel repulsed when you realised there was something inside of you?” he said softly, now almost caring. “Something inside of you that wasn’t natural?”

I thought of how I felt when I first saw those x-ray images Doctor Ravenwood had shown me at Hallowed Manor. I couldn’t forget how sick I felt at the sight of those wings wrapped around my ribcage. I shuddered against Jack as I remembered.

“Terrifying to discover a monster lives inside of you, isn’t it?” Jack said, looking into my eyes. “Enough to drive you insane?”

“Yes,” I murmured, remembering how repulsed I was at the sight of those little black claws at the tips of each of my wings. How just the sight of them had once made me want to gag and vomit.

“But you’re not sickened by that monster anymore, are you, Kiera?” he whispered in my ear. “You’ve accepted it. You like it.”

“I tried to fight it,” I whispered back. “I really did.”

“So did I,” Jack said back. “But I had a choice, just like you did. But both of us gave into the monster living inside of us.”

“I’m not a killer,” I hissed into his ear.

“Oh but you are,” he said softly. “You’re not the Kiera Hudson who walked into that police station back in the Ragged Cove. You weren’t a killer then. But the monster was lurking within you, just waiting to be let out.”

“But you’ve always been a monster,” I said, my skin slowly turning cooler as it started to stiffen and crack.

“Have I always been a monster, Kiera?”

he said, leaning back from me now, so he could look at me. “No I haven’t.” His face was drawn and pale in the last of the daylight drifting in through the dirty window. Seth stood up straight, towering over me. He went to the corner of the room and dragged a chair from the shadows. Its back legs dragged across the rough wooden floorboards, sounding like canon fire. He placed the chair before me and sat down.

“Both of us have monsters living inside of us, Kiera,” he said. “But what matters is what or who released them.”

With the wind and the snow battering against the window, Jack placed his long, bony hands on his knees. The light in his eyes faded like the last of the daylight from outside, throwing the room into a shadowy gloom. He didn’t speak, a long silence stretching out before us. Then as if he had at last gathered his thoughts, he started to speak in a low, soft sounding voice.

“My father left for work that night as usual. He couldn’t have known that when he returned, we’d all be gone…

Chapter Two

Jack

…My mother closed the shutter behind him, came into the main chamber of our cave, and buzzed with a nervousness I hadn’t seen before.

Her behaviour created an excitable current around us. We were all wearing our nightclothes and were ready for bed. Both my sisters were older than me. Lorre was fourteen years old, Kara eleven, my brother Rik just four, and I was eight.

Something was wrong.

I felt as if a pair of ice-cold hands had taken hold of my intestines and begun to strangle them. Looking to Lorre for any clue as to what was going on, I noticed Rik sitting beside me and prodding at a hole which had appeared in the neck of his toy badger. Kara sat opposite me, her knees drawn up beneath her nightdress. Lorre perched on the edge of her rocking chair and tipped back and forth, the tips of her toes brushing the cold stone floor. She hadn’t taken her eyes off our mother. She seemed to be anxiously waiting for some sort of a sign, a signal, which would mean something only to them.

The fire hissed and spat in the grate, sending up thick tendrils of smoke into the vents.

Mother went to the front shutter again and peered out down the narrow stone pathway set between the hundreds of caves, spread like a vast shanty town behind the Fountain of Souls. She snapped the shutter closed. Turning on her heels and clapping her hands together, she stared at us, her dark brown eyes now suddenly flashing yellow.

Speaking to my sisters, she said, “You don’t have long! Work fast!”

Lorre and Kara sprang out of their stupor and shot into action, the sound of their feet rumbling like fretful horses as they charged through the corridors which connected the rooms within our cave. I got the feeling this had all been planned, rehearsed, and was now being executed like some military exercise. From the other end of the passageways, I could hear the sounds of drawers and cupboards being dragged open.

Mother clapped her hands together again and my brother looked up, dark eyes wide and his mouth open. “Come on, hurry up! You’ve got to be quick!” she told us. “We’re going on an adventure!”

I remember not having a fucking clue as to what was going on.

My sisters appeared, dragging sacks behind them. For the next twenty minutes or so, the cave became a hive of frenetic activity as my mother and sisters darted from room to room, pulling out clothes, coats, shoes, and other personal belongings, throwing them into rough, woven sacks and bags. A ball of clothes landed at my feet.

“Put on as many clothes as possible,”

Mother ordered.

I managed to pull three pairs of trousers over my skinny legs and about four knitted jumpers over my head. Turning, I helped my younger brother drag T-shirts and tops over his sandy hair, screwing up his eyes and nose as I tugged them over his face.

There was a knock on the shutter and the cave fell into silence. We all froze and turned to look at our mother. I felt as if I was going to puke.

That icy hand had left my stomach and its fingers were now clawing at the back of my throat. I didn’t even know why I felt so fucking scared.

But I knew something out of the ordinary was unfolding around me.

Mother tiptoed across the room to a hole in the wall which served as a window. Peeling back the edge of the cloth that covered it, she peered through the gap she had created. I studied my mother’s face, which was framed with a mop of black hair. The look of relief followed by excitement crept across her face. She came away from the window and went to the shutter. I could hear muffled voices in the passageway. A woman I had not seen before followed my mother into the room. This stranger smiled at my sisters and said, “Hello again, girls.”

“Hi,” replied Lorre. I guessed that they had met before. She then turned her attention to Rik and me.

“How you doing?” she said. The woman was tall, had very pale skin, and blood-red lips.

She was very beautiful.

“Hello,” I replied, feeling uncomfortable. I was always unsure of myself around strangers, never too confident. We lived on the outskirts of an impoverished settlement and visitors didn’t come too often to our home, if ever. Rik waved and smiled.

“This is Ronnie,” my mother informed us.

“We are going to be staying with her for a while.”

I believe this explanation was given purely for my brother and me, as I guessed my sisters already understood the plot. “We won’t be coming back here, so you better grab some of your toys and be quick about it.”

Yes, I had toys, not many. My father would bring some home on rare occasions from the human world on the other side of the forest or he would make them. I had been to that world a few times before. We had schools like them, places to buy food, and medicine men that we saw when we were sick. Just like humans, we celebrated birthdays, we’d heard of Christmas, but we had our own winter festival which was named Candlemas. The caves would be lit with candles for as far as you could see in each direction, making the world behind the fountain look as if it were ablaze. On the night the candles were lit, we would exchange gifts. With Candlemas only just over, there were some new toys I had been given.