Kiera Hudson & The Man Who Loved Snow Read online

  Kiera Hudson

  &

  The Man Who Loved Snow

  (Kiera Hudson Series Four)

  Book Two

  By

  Tim O’Rourke

  First Edition Published by Ravenwoodgreys

  Copyright 2018 by Tim O’Rourke

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Story Editor

  Lynda O’Rourke

  Copyedited by:

  Carolyn M. Pinard

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  For Lynda because she’s hot!

  More books by Tim O’Rourke

  Kiera Hudson Series One

  Vampire Shift (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 1

  Vampire Wake (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 2

  Vampire Hunt (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 3

  Vampire Breed (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 4

  Wolf House (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 5

  Vampire Hollows (Kiera Hudson Series 1) Book 6

  Kiera Hudson Series Two

  Dead Flesh (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 1

  Dead Night (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 2

  Dead Angels (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 3

  Dead Statues (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 4

  Dead Seth (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 5

  Dead Wolf (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 6

  Dead Water (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 7

  Dead Push (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 8

  Dead Lost (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 9

  Dead End (Kiera Hudson Series 2) Book 10

  Kiera Hudson Series Three

  The Creeping Men (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 1

  The Lethal Infected (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 2

  The Adoring Artist (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 3

  The Secret Identity (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 4

  The White Wolf (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 5

  The Origins of Cara (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 6

  The Final Push (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 7

  The Underground Switch (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 8

  The Last Elder (Kiera Hudson Series Three) Book 9

  Kiera Hudson Series Four

  The Girl Who Travelled Backward (Book 1)

  The Man Who Loved Sone (Book 2)

  The Kiera Hudson Prequels

  The Kiera Hudson Prequels (Book One)

  The Kiera Hudson Prequels (Book Two)

  Kiera Hudson & Sammy Carter

  Vampire Twin (Pushed Trilogy) Book 1

  Vampire Chronicle (Pushed Trilogy) Book 2

  The Alternate World of Kiera Hudson

  Wolf Shift

  The Beautiful Immortals

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book One)

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book Two)

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book Three)

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book Four)

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book Five)

  The Beautiful Immortals (Book Six)

  The Laura Pepper Trilogy

  Vampires of Fogmin Moor (Book One)

  Vampires of Fogmin Moor (Book Two)

  Vampires of Fogmin Moor (Book Three)

  The Mirror Realm (The Lacey Swift Series)

  The Mirror Realm (Book One)

  The Mirror Realm (Book Two)

  The Mirror Realm (Book Three)

  The Mirror Realm (Book Four)

  Moon Trilogy

  Moonlight (Moon Trilogy) Book 1

  Moonbeam (Moon Trilogy) Book 2

  Moonshine (Moon Trilogy) Book 3

  The Clockwork Immortals

  Stranger (Part One)

  Stranger (Part Two)

  Stranger (Part Three)

  The Jack Seth Novellas

  Hollow Pit (Book One)

  Black Hill Farm (Books 1 & 2)

  Black Hill Farm (Book 1)

  Black Hill Farm: Andy’s Diary (Book 2)

  Sidney Hart Novels

  Witch (A Sidney Hart Novel) Book 1

  Yellow (A Sidney Hart Novel) Book 2

  The Tessa Dark Trilogy

  Stilts (Book 1)

  Zip (Book 2)

  The Mechanic

  The Mechanic

  The Dark Side of Nightfall Trilogy

  The Dark Side of Nightfall (Book One)

  The Dark Side of Nightfall (Book Two)

  The Dark Side of Nightfall (Book Three)

  Samantha Carter Series

  Vampire Seeker (Book One)

  Vampire Flappers (Book Two)

  Vampire Watchmen (Book Three)

  Unscathed

  Written by Tim O’Rourke & C.J. Pinard

  You can contact Tim O’Rourke at

  www.facebook.com/timorourkeauthor/ or by email at [email protected]

  Kiera Hudson

  &

  The Man Who Loved Snow

  Chapter One

  The year 1973

  The two brothers, Jack and Nik Seth, approached the house under the cover of darkness. Jack towered over his younger brother. Although there was only a few years between them in age, Jack looked ancient, whereas Nik looked to be in his early twenties. But this wasn’t the only difference between them. Nik stood at approximately five-foot-ten in height, whereas Jack loomed over him at seven-foot tall. Jack’s emaciated and gaunt frame was covered in a loose-fitting denim shirt and jeans. Around his scrawny neck he wore a red bandanna, and a baseball cap was perched on top of his narrow skull. Although his eyes were sunken, they blazed as if they were on fire. The paper-thin flesh that covered his face was a crisscross patchwork of scars. The sleeves of the denim shirt he wore were rolled to his elbows. And just as his face was scarred, so too were his arms. But these scars looked different to the ones that covered much of his face. They were jagged and split open, revealing bristling black fur beneath. Jack was so freakishly tall that when he walked on his spindly legs, he appeared to be stooped forward, as if gravity was pulling him down.

  Nik Seth, on the other hand, wasn’t hideous in appearance. His hair was sandy blond and it rested about the collar of the black shirt he wore. Despite his complexion
being unnaturally pale, he was incredibly handsome. His skin was smooth and unblemished. And although his eyes shone a bright hazel, they weren’t two burning pits of fire like his older brother Jack’s eyes were.

  Infuriated that the young girl had escaped them at the Night Diner, the brothers had tracked her scent to a house that stood in a narrow street, leading off the town square in the centre of Rock Shore. It wasn’t the fact she had escaped them that they found so maddening, but the belief that she was in some way connected to the ancient railway man, Noah. If it hadn’t been for the umbrella the girl had used against them to make her escape, they might never have suspected that she was possibly connected to Noah in some way. Both brothers now believed it had been him who had left the umbrella in the cloakroom at the Night Diner for the girl to use against them.

  Had Noah sent her to assassinate them? Had it been one last failed attempt by the railway man to kill off the last of his enemies? Because that’s what Noah was to them. He was their enemy. The ancient railway man—the man who had the arrogance to refer to himself as the One of Many—had deceived them all. Noah had turned Jack and Nik’s half-sister, Kiera Hudson, against them. Just when Jack Seth had come to believe that he was overcoming the monster—the wolf—that lurked inside of him, Noah had set Kiera against him and Nik. That had been enough to undo all the hard work that Jack had done on himself. He was no longer able to bury the wolf deep inside of him. The betrayal of Noah, and then his sister, Kiera, had been too much to bear. In his anguish, the wolf had seized the opportunity to come forward once more, but this time, it had totally consumed him. Jack and the wolf had finally become one. The same could be said for his brother, Nik. Both now wanted nothing more than to destroy the man who had betrayed them. The man who had driven an agonising wedge between them and their half-sister, Kiera Hudson.

  The scent left by the girl with the umbrella wafted on the air before them like streams of bright light. It had been easy for them to follow, as their heightened sense of smell honed in on the fear that had leaked from her pores as she had made her escape from the Night Diner. The scent was just as strong as they stood outside the house just off the town square, as it had been when she had fled the bar.

  With his eyes blazing red, face twisted up into a tortured grimace of hate and loathing, Jack Seth pushed open the front gate and headed up the garden path. As he and his brother neared the front door, the girl’s scent became mixed with another. The two brothers glanced at each other. There was only one man who left such a musty odour on the air. It smelt like dust and cobwebs. But there was another smell, too—sweeter and sicklier. It was the scent of the black stuff that Noah so often liked to drink that wafted under their twitching noses.

  “You were right, Jack,” Nik whispered, his hazel eyes shining bright in the dark.

  “When have I ever steered you wrong, little brother?” Jack said, his thin and bloodless lips pulled down as if he was in agonising pain. “The railway man is here. At last, we have tracked him down. Finally, he will pay for the misery he has brought us and countless others.”

  Nik Seth began to chuckle. It sounded cruel and unkind.

  “What’s so funny?” Jack asked him.

  “I’m just thinking, that’s all,” Nik grinned back.

  “About what?”

  “About all the things I’m gonna do to the girl with the umbrella once we’ve killed Noah,” Nik beamed, the front of his black jeans beginning to bulge.

  “You know the rules,” Jack reminded his brother, “we don’t kill the girl until we’ve both had our fun with her. Brothers share, remember?”

  “Oh, I remember all right,” Nik said, thinking of the trail of countless corpses they had left behind in the layers they had pushed through in search of Noah.

  “But it’s our secret, right?” Jack said, pushing the baseball cap to the back of his head and pressing the side of his face against the front door. He listened for any sound of movement on the other side.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell. What we get up to—the fun that we have when no one else is around—is our secret,” Nik assured him. Nik knew that there was one person in particular that Jack didn’t want to find out about how depraved the two brothers really were.

  Jack raised one extremely long, twisted finger to his lips. “They’re in there,” he whispered. “I can hear them talking.”

  “Then let’s do this, brother,” Nik said, his hands twisting into claws.

  Side by side, the brothers turned to face the door. With claws raised, they began to tear it down. Their jagged fingernails raked through the wooden panels as if they were little more than sheets of tissue paper. Through the gaps in the door they had created, they peered into the hallway on the opposite side of it. Jack’s black and twisted heart jerked in his chest as he saw Noah and the young girl standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. Noah didn’t look like the ancient railway man he had come to hate and despise, but he knew it was him all the same. Noah might be able to change his face, but he couldn’t rid himself of the stench that he left in his wake.

  “We need to get out of here—and fast!” the brothers heard Noah shout at the young girl with the umbrella.

  Through the shower of flying splinters their claws created as they tore at the door, Jack and Nik saw Noah grab the young girl by the hand. Together they raced up the staircase. The brothers threw themselves at the front door. It splintered and shattered all around them like matchwood. Snarling like rabid dogs, Jack and Nik burst through what remained of the door and into the hallway.

  They heard Noah shout from above. “Faster!”

  Jack and Nik could hear the sound of Noah’s hurried footsteps on the landing above as he tried to make his escape with the young girl. Both of them knew—sensed—that Noah wouldn’t escape them this time. And when they had finished with him, they would play with the girl until they got bored, and then finish her, too.

  Jack raced up the staircase in wide strides, his long legs covering four stairs at a time. Nik bounded after him, Noah and the girl’s scent filling his nostrils and making his heart race with a murderous lust and desire.

  They sprang into the first room at the top of the stairs. It was empty, so they whirled around and headed along the landing.

  “Turn away now!” they heard Noah shout at the girl from behind a closed door a few feet from them.

  Cocking their heads in that direction, they raced toward the door. They heard the girl cry out from the other side of it.

  “Whatever it is you’re doing, please hurry.” She almost seemed to be begging Noah.

  Nik smelt her fear and the front of his trousers twitched with excitement. The two brothers glanced at each other, then back at the door. Raising their claws once more, they began to tear it down. The door suddenly flew inwards. Noah and the girl were standing near to an old wardrobe. They both looked back as Jack and Nik burst into the room. Noah now looked like the man that both brothers knew and hated. He stood with his back to the wardrobe door, wearing his tatty old railway man’s hat and dusty and cobweb infested blue tunic.

  With eyes fixed on Noah, the girl forgotten for the time being, Jack and Nik approached the railway man.

  Jack twisted his lips up into a cruel smile as he looked at Noah. “I might have known you were meddling in the background. Trying to fuck up our plans. But no more, railway man. You’ve made your last push.”

  Not wasting a moment more, both Jack and Nik shot forward. As they did, Noah threw his arms around the young woman who was still clutching the umbrella to her chest.

  “Goodbye, Jack Seth.” Noah smiled back at the brothers as he lifted the young girl up into his arms. Wheeling around, he leapt into the air, smashing through the bedroom window and out into the night.

  “No!” Jack screamed, spit and bile flying from his lips.

  He raced across the room to the window. Using his claws, he smashed away the jagged teeth of glass that jutted from the wooden frame. With eyes blazing like two ho
t coals, Jack peered up and into the night sky. In a furious rage, he watched Noah soar away with the young woman in his arms. Jack stood at the window, Nik behind him, and watched helplessly as Noah beat his large, black leathery wings, as he made his escape with the girl.

  Jack turned away from the window. He clawed at the air in a furious rage. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he screamed, his eyes blazing so bright, streams of red blood oozed from their sunken sockets.

  Nik brushed past his older brother and went to the window. He got there just in time to see the faint silhouette of the winged railway man swoop away and into the distant moonlight. His heart sank in his chest. Not only because Noah had escaped again, but because he had been so looking forward to killing the girl. He turned away from the window, but before he’d had a chance to assure his brother that they would catch up with Noah again, he heard a strange noise.

  Jack heard it too.

  The two brothers glanced at each other, then at the wardrobe where the sound of knocking was coming from. It was as if someone was trapped inside and was wanting to be let out.

  Chapter Two

  The year 1985

  Carol stood and watched the young man stagger backwards. He had a glass of whisky in his hand. He turned and scowled at the partygoer who had knocked into him. But the night club was busy and people were jostling against each other as Carol made her way toward the bar and dancefloor. Are Friends Electric by Gary Numan was blasting out of speakers that lined the walls of the bar. From where Carol stood at the edge of the dancefloor, she thought that the young man holding the glass of whisky looked somehow out of place. He was dressed all in black, which wasn’t so odd, as Carol’s clothes were all black, too. But what made him stand out from everyone else in the bar was the pointed and crumpled hat he wore on his head. It was this that set him apart. Intrigued by him, Carol eased her way among the crowds and toward the young man who wore the tall, pointed hat.

  The overhead flashing lights illuminated the faces of all those around her. Carol was knocked from behind. She stumbled forward and into the young man. Wearing a scowl, he turned to face her, staring out from beneath the brim of the pointed hat he wore on his head.