Dead Statues (2 page)

I did feel it. The feelings I had for
Eloisa Madison were wrong. I shouldn’t be
feeling like this for anyone other than Kiera.

My head was telling me that it was okay. Eloisa
Madison was before I’d met Kiera. Eloisa had
happened after Sophie. So that was okay,
wasn’t it?

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” I lied as she looked into my eyes, her
lips hovering over mine.

“I’ve never met a man like you before,
Potter,” she whispered, “a man who has such
a dark side. You could take me away from all
of this.”

“From all of what?” I said, fighting the
desire to kiss her.

“All this death,” she whispered, then
pressed her lips against mine.

As if drowning, I felt smothered by a
wave of intense feelings and emotions, like
nothing I had felt before, and I was kissing her
back. Her tongue felt like velvet in my mouth
as she hungrily pulled at me. Then I was falling
backwards as she pushed me down onto the
ground. I fell onto the carpet of leaves and
pine needles that covered the floor of the
woods. She sprang on top of me, pulling open
my coat and nipping the skin of my neck with
her teeth. The trees seemed to close in all
around us, shielding us from view, like we
were in our own world.

Eloisa’s soft hair fell across my face,
and it felt so good. I ran my hands down her
back and scratched at her with my claws.

Leaning up, she threw aside her shirt, and the
chain with the cross shone just inches from my
face.

Murphy’s chain?

Kiera’s chain!

Eloisa Madison lowered herself onto
me and her skin felt warm and soft. I entwined
my fingers in her hair and stared up into her
eyes, but Madison had gone. It was Kiera I
was making love to. I rolled her over onto the
soft cushion of leaves and her breath felt hot
against my neck as she said, “I love you,
Potter.”

To hear her voice made my heart race
as it was filled with joy. I made love to her and
it felt like nothing I had experienced with her
before. Although my heart was telling me it was
Kiera, my head was telling me it was someone
else. As I opened my eyes and looked down
upon her face, it was Eloisa I could hear
moaning and sighing softly beneath me.

“No!” I murmured, trying to pull myself
free of her.

I arched my back and looked up. It was
somehow colder now. A thin wisp of fog
covered the ground. In it I could see a figure
staring back at me from between the trees.

“Kiera?” I called out. “Is that you?”

my heart raced, fearing that it was. Had she
seen me with Eloisa? Had she seen what we
had done?

I glanced back down, but Eloisa
Madison had gone. There was only me on my
knees, bent double in the damp autumn leaves.

“Potter,” someone whispered, and I
knew it was the person watching from between
the trees who had spoken.

I looked up to see Murphy, standing in
a swirl of fog like some unholy apparition.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he
barked from around his pipe which jutted from
the corner of his mouth. “Stop pricking about
in the dirt and get over here!”

I clambered to my feet, and without
saying another word and keeping close to the
trees, Murphy led me towards a small
graveyard. We hadn’t gone very far when he
flapped his hand at me, signalling me to get
down. I crouched behind a gravestone that
tilted slightly to the right and peered over the
top.

“What am I meant to be looking at?” I
whispered to Murphy, who was hiding behind
a gravestone to my left.

With the pipe hanging from the corner
of his mouth, Murphy pointed into the distance.

From my hiding place, I looked in the direction
he was pointing and saw a man standing alone
in the middle of the graveyard. He was staring
down at one of the headstones. It was as I
looked at his drawn and ashen face that I
recognised him, and my stomach knotted. The
man I was spying on was Kiera’s father.

Hadn’t he died of cancer a few years back? I
wondered.

I shot a look at Murphy, but it was if he
had melted away like a ghost. “Kiera’s father
is still very much alive here,” he whispered.

With his head cast down, Kiera’s father
turned and seemed to slowly float back across
the graveyard and disappear. When he had
gone, Murphy stood up and rubbed the small
of his back with his hands.

“C’mon,” he whispered, his voice
sounding as if it were coming from miles away.

I set off after him. Murphy stood before
a headstone, and not wanting to look at the
name carved into the face of it, I stared at the
flowers that Kiera’s father had left behind.

Some of the petals broke loose in the wind and
scattered over the grave like confetti.

“Look at the grave,” Murphy
whispered.

“I am,” I said.

“Look at the name.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to,” his voice changing from
a whisper to a scream.

Lowering my eyes, I looked down at the
headstone and read the name written across it:
Kiera Hudson. It made me feel sick to look at
her name, and although I knew Kiera was
dead here – she wasn’t to me; she was still very
much alive.

“Kiera will want to see her father – she
loves him – she made him a promise...” I
breathed, looking sideways through the fog at
my friend.

“No!” Murphy snapped. “She must
never find out that her father is still alive here.

If she does, then like you say, she will want to
see him, speak with him, it would only be
natural. But she can’t. Our Kiera is not his
Kiiiiiieeeeraaa,” his voice trailed away.

“They come from two different whens,”

I said, trying to make sense of everything, my
mind seeming to be filled with as much fog as
the graveyard.

“Exactly,” Murphy hushed, now
suddenly standing in front of me. “What if
Kiera were to meet her father? Would she then
want to push the world back and lose him all
over again?” He stared into my eyes, pipe
smoke smelling like rotten flesh.

“But I can’t keep a secret like that from
her,” I whispered back. “She has a right to
know that her father is still alive.”

“She has no rights!” Murphy grimaced,
his face contorting out of shape like a
nightmarish Halloween mask. “She doesn’t
have the right to be here – none of us do.

Kiera’s father believes his daughter is dead,
and she is as far as this world is concerned.

What would happen if he knew that she was
living again on the other side of the country?

It’s not her – it’s not the Kiera that you are in
love with; it’s the Kiera who was brought up in
a world where wolves live amongst humans.

It’s a world where she is dead.”

“I don’t know if I can keep something
like this from her,” I said.

“You must keep her away from her old
life, Potter,” Murphy said, his voice now
sounding like Isidor’s, as if he were somehow
warning me from beyond the grave. “If her
father should see her, then perhaps the world
will merge just a little bit more, then a little bit
more, and I fear that could be catastrophic for
all of us.”

“But I don’t want to keep secrets from
my friends, especially not from Kiera,” I
shuddered. “She would hate me if she found
out that her father was still alive and I hadn’t
told her.”

“Then you better make sure that she
never finds out about her father,” Murphy said
in his own voice again, with a grim smile on his
face. Then added, “Or about your friend,
Sophie.”

I looked away in shame, even though
nothing had happened between me and Sophie
– not in this when. She had tempted me, but I
had been true to Kiera. It was Kiera who I
loved. I could never hurt her.

“So?”

“So what?” I asked, looking back at
Murphy. But he had gone, and so had the fog
and the graveyard. I was standing in a
bedroom and Sophie appeared naked before
me. I half expected her to cover her breasts
with her arms and yell at me to get out, but she
didn’t, she just stood there, her head to one
side, looking at me. One side of her face
looked broken and battered as if she had been
hit by a car.

“What do you want?” she asked me.

“Do you want me to leave?” I said.

“No,” she whispered, and the room
suddenly flickered with candlelight. “Do you
want to leave?”

“No,” I said, closing the door behind
me.

Sophie came towards me, and as she
did, I felt a thumping sensation race through
my body. It was like a ghost of a heart, racing
inside of me. She stopped and her neck made a
sickening crunching sound as if snapping
back into place. We were so close that I could
see she was trembling. “I do remember you,”

she whispered. “I remember everything. I
remember how much I loved you and I know
how much I hurt you.”

“How do you know?” I whispered
back.

“The letters you sent me,” she said, her
eyes looking into mine. “They were full of
pain.”

“I’m not hurting anymore,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she asked as she
folded her arms about me. They felt stiff and
cold and her skin smelt as if she was
decomposing, in my arms.

“I’m sure,” I said, closing my eyes.

“I’m in love with another.”

Sophie seemed to flinch in my arms and
pull slightly away from me. “Kiera Hudson?”

she breathed and the bones in her broken neck
made that crunching sound again.

“Yes,” I told her. “I love her more than
anything.”

“But you loved me,” she frowned.

I opened my eyes to see that she was
staring into them again, and the hurt that I
could see there was almost unbearable. I had
loved Sophie once, and those feelings which I
thought had been snuffed out like a flame,
slowly rekindled themselves inside of me. She
had been my first love.

“That was a long time ago, in another
where and another when,” I whispered,
wanting to run from her.

“What about what we shared?” she
suddenly screamed, pulling me close again.

“What about us?”

Then instead of pushing her away like I
had done in the cottage, high on Black Hill, I
pulled her close. Her naked body now felt soft
and warm against mine. The touch of her hair
against my cheek made my phantom heart race.

My mind told me it raced not from lust or
desire, but out of fear. I wanted to push Sophie
away – she wasn’t Kiera. It was Kiera I wanted
to be holding naked against me. It was Kiera
who I wanted to be lowering onto the bed in
the glow of the warm candlelight. Sophie
smiled up at me, only the whites of her eyes
showing. She raised her arms, her breasts just
inches from my face. They looked wrinkled and
old, like two withered balloons. With my eyes
closed, and searching for Kiera in my mind, I
heard her voice. It was soft at first – like a
whisper.