Monster (25 page)

I stood up and went round the side of the ambulance.

The car was getting closer still, but it was so dark I couldn’t make out its colour or shape. Just the lights, getting brighter and coming down the drive faster and faster. It parked up hurriedly on the grass verge, just outside the turning circle. I kept on walking towards it. The closer I got, the more details I could make out. Big car. Square lights. Soon I could see the colour of it. Blue.

A blue Volvo Estate.

My dad’s car.

‘Miss, come back here, miss,’ came the Scottish voice, but I kept running towards it. No way was I going to look
back. No way was anyone going to stop me from running towards that car.

My dad got out of the driver’s seat. My mum got out of the passenger seat, not even closing her door.

‘Mum! Dad!’

‘Nash!’ she screamed. It was her, it was Mum. Dad was running too. He was shouting for me too. I kept running and running towards them, running hard, as though I was being chased again, but this time the only thing chasing me was the need to hold my parents again and have them hold me and tell me everything was okay. Their faces were white and terrified.

‘Nashy! Baby, my baby, what’s happened?’ said Mum, as I ran into her arms and breathed in her familiar scent of Marc Jacobs Daisy and coconut shampoo. Dad grabbed both of us in his wide embrace and squeezed us.

‘It’s all right, she’s all right. We’ve got her, it’s all right.’

‘Ow,’ I said.

Mum pulled back and cupped my face in her hands, her cheeks streaming with tears. ‘What the hell’s happened here? Look at you, you’re …’ She saw my neck. She looked into my eyes. It was like she didn’t recognise me for a moment. ‘Oh my God, what’s he done to you? We heard it on the news coming down …’

‘I’ll tell you everything—just don’t touch my neck, okay?’

They hugged me again, but this time I didn’t feel a thing. Because a voice was calling me from somewhere else.

The car. I swallowed, painfully.

‘Nash?’

It wasn’t in my dreams and it wasn’t in my nightmares. He was there. He was real.

Getting out of the back of the car, his foot in plaster,
shaking off the chequered blanket we always slept under. My brother. My Seb.

‘Oh my God.’

I barely heard my dad, saying how he’d got lost in some Colombian village, which didn’t have a phone signal. How he’d broken his ankle hundreds of miles from a hospital. How these nice villagers took him in and sent a scout to the nearest town to get help. I heard it, but I didn’t take it in. When I reached him, and felt him against me and held him in my arms and he held me back, I could feel everything. The pain in my head, my back, all around my neck, my hands, my knees. I cried like rain through the trees. Everything hurt and everything was wonderful, all in one mightily painful punch.

‘I kept hearing you in my head, the whole time,’ he whispered to me. ‘You kept me going.’

I didn’t ever want to let go of him.

‘You too,’ I squeaked.

‘What d’you do, burn the joint down?’ He laughed, pulling away from me, his eyes wide as he looked around at all the police cars and flashing lights. I looked at him, his face illuminated by the brightness. He was sunburned. He looked older. There were new lines under his eyes. And thinner. His jawline was more obvious. And stubbly like Dad’s.

‘I missed you so much,’ I said, clasping him in again for a hug and squeezing my eyes shut so tightly I saw stars.

When I opened them, I saw the woods beyond him and the rising sun ricocheting back at me from the tree trunks.

He hugged me again. ‘Did you get my letter? Did you get the pencil?’

‘Yeah.’ I sniffed. ‘I got the pencil.’ And I started crying all over again. And I tasted blood in my mouth again.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’

But though I was comforted by his presence, and though I’d always believed everything he said because he was Seb and Seb was my big brother and he was always right,
this
I didn’t believe. This didn’t feel all right. It didn’t feel like this, whatever it was, was over. It felt like he was too late to pull me back this time. Like I had changed. Like something new and dark and monstrous had just been let out of its cage.

‘Hey come on,’ he said, pulling back and holding my freezing face in his large warm hands and crying like no big brother should. ‘It’s over. It’s finished. We can have Christmas now.’

‘Yeah.’ I nodded, looking beyond him into the woods again where I just caught sight of it—a large black shadow, slinking slowly away, between the trees and out of sight.

* * * * *

ISBN: 978-1-474-03098-4

MONSTER

© 2015 C J Skuse

Published in Great Britain 2015
by MIRA Ink, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
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