Vampire Breed (Kiera Hudson Series Book Four) Read online

  The only way to know for sure would be to get out of the cell and find out for myself.

  But how?

  I looked around my cell in the gloom of the dying light which spilt in through the square hole above me. Somewhere inside me, I knew that I used to be good at seeing things - like really seeing things, so I should be able to see a way out of my cell. Sitting back against the wall and taking a deep breath, I saw there were only three exits available to me.

  Firstly, there was the most obvious – the cell door, but that was always locked. Secondly, there was the hatch that my food and water was pushed through – but the big white paw lived on the other side of it. And finally there was the square hole in the ceiling, but that was covered with wire mesh and well out of reach.

  I sat and looked up at it and tried to work out if it were big enough for me to fit through. It was hard to tell from where I was sitting on the floor. It seemed so far away. But even if I could fit through it, there was all that wire mesh that would need to be removed, and I had no cutting tools, nor could I reach it. Even if I could, what would I find on the other side?

  My mind see-sawed with a million questions and doubts. The whole escape idea seemed impossible – but what other options did I have? Phillips and Sparky would be back in a few days and I feared that if my leg were not healed, I was going to be in serious trouble. But then again – even if my leg did heal, what was it they had planned for me?

  However impossible my escape seemed – I had to try something – I had to get out of my cell.

  But if I left my cell – escaped from wherever it was they kept me, what would I do about the…the blood? How would I get more? To think of it again made me want it. So picking up the bowl, I closed my eyes, and put some of the flesh inside my mouth.

  It was dark when the cell door creaked open and Nik came trotting in. He stood in the wedge of moonlight that illuminated the middle of the cell, and looked at me.

  “I’ve brought you something,” he purred and then quickly turned away and disappeared back into the shadows by the door.

  I could hear a scraping sound as he dragged something into my cell. Nik came walking slowly backwards towards me, pulling a chair between his wide jaws. He stepped into the pool of moonlight and let go. The chair tipped over onto its side and the sound of it hitting the stone floor echoed off the walls like cannon fire.

  “I thought you might like to sit on this, instead of being on the floor all of the time.”

  I was momentarily touched by his kindness but then wondered if it was not some sort of a trick.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It will be more comfortable,” he simply added.

  Sensing my unease, Nik backed away from the chair.

  I got up slowly and hobbled over to the middle of the room. I righted the chair and sat down on it. The chair wasn’t particularly comfortable with four straight aluminium legs, a green plastic seat and cushioned back – but Nik was right, it beat sitting on that hard stone floor.

  I looked at him, as he waited on the outskirts of the moonlight.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  There was an uneasy silence between us, as I sat on the cheap plastic chair and he stared at me. I eventually broke the silence.

  “You‘re Lycanthrope, right? A werewolf?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding a little confused.

  “So why did you struggle in here with that chair between your jaws when you could’ve simply done it in the form of a man?”

  “I’ve been captured,” he said.

  “So you’re a prisoner like me?” I asked him, shocked at the thought that perhaps there were Lycanthrope imprisoned here.

  “Not that kind of captured,” he started to explain. “I’ve been captured in the form of a wolf, like frozen – stuck like this.”

  “How come?” I asked, confused. “If I remember rightly – and to be honest I could be wrong, my memory seems a little fried at the moment - you can change form at will.”

  “Not me,” Nik said, dropping to the floor by my feet and resting his giant head on his paws. “My father is punishing me and until I make amends – I’m stuck as the big-bad-wolf.”

  “What did you do that was so bad?” I asked him.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he barked, his tail snaking back and forth across the ground. He licked one of his massive paws and then rubbed it softly over his face. Knowing that he didn’t want to talk about what it was he had done to be so cruelly punished, I changed the subject asking, “How did I come to be in this cell?”

  “You were brought here with the others,” Nik replied, as he licked his paw again and started to wash his huge ears.

  “Others?”

  “A boy and a girl,” Nik said, looking at me from the floor.

  “Isidor and Kayla!” I breathed, my heart starting to thump with excitement in my chest. “They’re here, you said?”

  “Yes,” Nik woofed.

  “You’ve got to let me see them!” I told him, getting up from my chair.

  “Impossible,” Nik said and licked his long black snout.

  “Why?” I pushed. “You have to let me see them.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “If I were caught in here with you, I’d be…well, I’ve been punished enough don’t you think?” he said, flicking his tail from side to side.

  “Are they okay?” I asked him, lowering myself carefully back onto my chair.

  “They’re very much like you,” he said, looking at me with his yellow eyes that glinted in the shaft of moonlight.

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?”

  “They’ve been operated on.”

  “Operated on!” I spat, getting up from my seat again and wincing at the pain in my leg and back.

  “They’ve been tested...perhaps operated was the wrong word,” Nik said.

  “But I’ve seen them in my dreams…nightmares,” I told him. “I saw Isidor and Kayla and they were in pain. They were screaming.”

  “Are you sure they were nightmares?” Nik asked fixing me with his brilliant stare.

  “Of course they were nightmares! I was in them. I was locked in a room that was similar to a hospital and I was wearing a hospital…” Then looking down at myself, I whispered, “…gown.”

  Nik just looked at me, his tail swishing back and forth across the stone floor of my cell.

  “Oh, my God!” I breathed deeply. “They’re not dreams or nightmares – they’re memories! All that stuff has really happened!” Then twisting around on the chair, I reached over my shoulder and touched the space between my shoulder blades. At once, pain exploded across my back and I snapped forward. I waited for the pain to ease but it never truly faded, so I touched my back again. With the tips of my grubby fingers, I could feel those little black bones sticking from my back as they twitched and wriggled like fingers.

  Snatching my hand away, I yanked the hospital gown from over my head. Folding my arms over my breasts, I showed my back to the wolf and said, “What have they done to me?”

  Nudging the metal bowl across the floor towards me with his snout, Nik said, “See for yourself.”

  I crouched down, and picked up the bowl with my trembling fingers. Holding it in the air and slightly behind my left shoulder, I turned my head and peered at the reflection of my back in the shiny surface of the bowl. At once I dropped it, and it clattered to the floor, spilling what was left of the meat.

  “No!” I whimpered at the sight of the cuts and gashes that covered my back. But it was the sight of those black bony fingers wriggling from the cuts that frightened me the most. They protruded from wounds that were bruised green and purple where they had been stitched together.

  Pulling the hospital gown back over my head, I slumped back onto the chair and wrapped my arms around myself, rocking back and forth.

  “Why are they doing this?” I whispered as tears fell onto my cheeks.

  Ignoring m
y question, Nik stood up on his four muscular legs, and said, “Oh, I nearly forgot, I brought you something else.” I heard the sound of his paws padding against the floor as he headed back towards the door. He returned moments later pushing a book along the floor with his snout.

  “I thought you might want to read this, you know, to relieve the boredom,” he said.

  Numbly, I glanced down at the floor and at the book he had bought for me. I didn’t say anything – I couldn’t.

  “I thought it might help you,” he said, stepping out of the moonlight and heading back towards the cell door.

  “Wait a minute…don’t go!” I called out to him.

  “What?” he woofed, from within the gloom.

  “Where am I?” I asked softly. “You can at least tell me that.”

  “You’re in a zoo,” his voice floated back out of the darkness.

  “A zoo?’ I whispered. “What do you mean, in a zoo?”

  “That’s where animals are kept, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said numbly, not really taking in what he had just told me.

  I don’t know how long I sat there for, dazed and confused. But when I peered around the cell some time later, the werewolf had gone and my cell door was closed again. My skin had started to itch again and my stomach had started to flip and I knew what I needed to make those feelings go away. Glancing down at my feet, I could see the upturned bowl and the dirty strips of bloodied meat that had fallen from it. I picked it up with my filthy fingers and brushed away the dirt that had stuck to it from the cell floor.

  Closing my eyes, I put the meat in my mouth and it tasted bitter and felt gritty against my tongue. Swallowing hard, I forced the raw meat down my throat. I sat on my chair, stinking and dirty with the taste of raw meat in my mouth, I shut my eyes and wondered if Nik hadn’t been right after all. Perhaps I was an animal and deserved to be kept in a zoo.

  Chapter Nine

  Doctor Hunt came into my room at the facility - zoo? Again I felt incredibly tired and struggled to keep my eyes open, let alone focus in on him. It was like I was coming around from anaesthesia.

  He came towards my bed, the lower half of his face covered with a blue surgical mask. There was something about him…perhaps it was his eyes and his jet-black hair that lay across his brow that made me think I had met him before.

  “Do I know you?” I babbled, my mind feeling groggy and my lips opened and closed as if out of sync with my voice.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied softly, picking up a book that he had brought into the room. He began to read.

  My eyes closed again and I could hear Doctor Hunt reading ‘The Wind In The Willows’. My father had read the book to me as I child, and for a moment I could see myself nestled on his lap, my head resting against his chest and listening to the soft beating of his heart. I’d been about six then and I’d loved to hear about the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mister Toad. But I was older now – twenty – so why was Doctor Hunt reading this children’s book to me?

  Hunt’s voice was soft and soothing, and I couldn’t help but let my eyes slide close again. I listened to the story but there was something not quite right. Why hadn’t he started reading the story from the beginning? Why had he started the story towards the end, where Mister Toad had been sent to prison and needed to escape?

  I struggled to open my eyes again, but I managed to look past the doctor who sat beside my bed. He had left the door to my room open, and like Mister Toad, I knew I needed to escape. I raised my arm off the bed and it felt heavy and sluggish as if held down by a thousand weights. Pointing towards the open door, I…

  …tipped forward and fell off the chair onto the hard stone floor. I wailed in pain as I landed awkwardly on my injured leg and back. I rolled onto my side and gripping my shin, I told myself never to fall asleep on the chair again. It was still night and pale blue light continued to slice my cell in two from above.

  Looking up at the square hole then at the chair, an idea came to me. So, with the tips of my fingers, I positioned the chair directly under the hole. Using it as a crutch, I hoisted myself up and climbed on. I held the back of the chair and pushed myself into a standing position, gingerly teetering on the foot of my good leg, being mindful not to put any weight on my bad leg.

  Balancing like a tightrope walker, I slowly raised one arm above my head and reached up towards the hole. To my amazement and delight, I could reach it. I pushed my fingers through the wire mesh and felt the cool night breeze dance over them. The chair wobbled beneath me and I gripped onto the wire mesh as tightly as I could until I had regained my balance. Hovering on a chair on one leg wasn’t easy, but at last I felt that perhaps there was a way out of my cell – some hope. I tugged on the mesh, but it was fixed firmly into the surface of the ceiling. Running my fingers around the inner edge of the hole, I could feel that the wire had been embedded into the plaster and concrete that went to make up the structure of the cell.

  I clenched my teeth tightly together and yanked several times on the mesh, hoping it would come away, but however hard I pulled on it, the wire didn’t budge. Unless I was mangled through a mincing machine, there was no way I was ever going to fit through the tiny holes that made up the mesh.

  With growing frustration, I tugged on the wire one last time but in doing so I lost my footing and cartwheeled through the air, landing on the floor. There was an explosion of pain in my calf and I bit my arm to drown out the sound of my screams.

  I lay on my side panting like a wounded animal.

  “Let me out of here!” I screamed, in frustration, but my cries just echoed harmlessly off the walls.

  I felt cheated and more frustrated than before. As I’d stood on that chair and poked my fingers through the holes, I felt for a moment that perhaps I could escape – perhaps I would be free. But the most infuriating thing about it all was that the only thing separating me from the outside world was a small square of wire mesh.

  I pounded my clenched fists onto the floor and screwed up my eyes until I could see white spots dancing around on the inside of my eyelids. I wouldn’t be beaten – not ever! I told myself. I was Kiera Hudson – I could see things. Wasn’t I meant to be good at figuring things out?

  “We’ve been sent a right little Miss Marple, this time around,” I heard Potter say inside my head, and it was almost as if he had whispered it in my ear. Hearing his voice like that just frustrated me even more. Where was he?

  When my hands became numb from the constant banging against the cold, hard floor, I opened my eyes and looked across my cell at the upturned chair. It was then that I saw something; I could see my way out. It gleamed at me in the moonlight and I wondered if there could still be yet a glimmer of hope.

  I crawled across the room to the upturned chair and inspected its legs. The base of each leg had been fitted with a silver-coloured cap – each one was the size of a £2 coin. I felt around the edge of the caps and found a small grove where each one had been fitted to the legs of the chair. I dug my fingernails into the groove and without too much effort, managed to prise one of the caps free. The inside of the chair leg was hollow.

  Holding the cap in the palm of my hand, I could see that one side of it was concaved like a tiny dish. I tossed it up and down in my hand like a coin and looked up at the hole, grinning to myself.

  Gritting my teeth against the burning sensation in my leg and the ache in my back, I pulled myself up onto the chair. Balancing again on one foot, I took hold of the wire mesh. With my free hand, I took the metal cap and began to chip away at the grey-coloured plaster that housed the wire.

  To my delight, the plaster began to break away in tiny pieces and fall to the floor below. I scratched the cap against the edge of the hole again and more of the plaster began to crumble. It only broke away in minute pieces at a time, but it was something. I wondered how deeply the wire mesh went into the ceiling. If it was only an inch or two then it wouldn’t take me too long – but if it went
further than that, it could take me days – perhaps weeks - and that was time that I didn’t have.

  I reasoned that I could probably do with releasing the wire mesh on two sides. Once I had them free, I could bend it to one side and this would give me a big enough gap to climb through.

  So without wasting any more time thinking about it, I put my plan of escape into action. For the rest of the night, I teetered to and fro on the chair as I hovered on one leg and chipped away at the ceiling. It took longer than I had originally thought, as I had to keep stopping to rest. It wasn’t my leg which caused the problems, it was my arms and back. With one hand, I gripped the wire mesh and with the other I furiously scratched away at the plaster. With both arms constantly held above my head, they began to ache with numbness and tingle with pins and needles. When the pain became too much to bear, I’d carefully climb down and shake my arms.

  As soon as I could feel them again, I climbed back onto the chair and started all over again. I worked through the night until I could see the first rays of sunlight fan across the morning sky above me.

  I can’t wait to be standing under that sun and feeling totally free! I thought to myself.

  The urge to continue was strong, but it was light now and I might be seen and if I were to be caught now, I may never escape. So reluctantly, I climbed down from the chair and looked up at my handy work.

  “Oh, shit!” I gasped.