Dead Statues Read online

  “The rent’s cheap and it’s remote,”

  Murphy said, steering the van into an equally rundown-looking ramshackle of a barn. He killed the engine and climbed out, a trail of pipe smoke drifting out behind him. Once out of the police van, I followed Murphy, Kayla, and Sam out of the barn. Murphy swung the heavy-looking doors closed and headed towards the cottage. He took a key from his trouser pocket and opened the back door.

  The kitchen was poky, but snug-looking.

  There was a cooker and stove, a sink, and a small, round table with chairs. Tatty-looking curtains hung over grimy windows, and Murphy pulled them shut, even though it was still morning. The kitchen was thrown into semi darkness. There was a lamp on the table and Murphy switched it on, but it did little to lighten the gloom. Murphy kicked off his mud-stained slippers and stood before us in a pair of threadbare socks. The big toe of his right foot stuck out through a hole in them. He left the kitchen and we followed him into a small living room. There was a dusty-looking two-seater sofa and a couple of mismatched armchairs. A staircase on my right disappeared up into darkness. Part of the stone floor was covered with a faded rug. Murphy knelt down before a stone fireplace set into the wall. The grate was piled with logs. We watched as he took some sheets of newspaper from a pile next to the fireplace. He rolled them up, twisting their ends into points. Then, taking his lighter from his shirt pocket, he lit the pieces of newspaper, and then stuffed them between the gaps in the logs.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said, once the logs started to smoulder.

  Plumes of thick, grey smoke started to billow up the chimney and the room began to warm. Kayla and Sam sat next to one another on the sofa, a cloud of dust flying up from the cushions. Kayla placed a hand over her mouth and coughed. I sat in one of the armchairs.

  “Soup anyone?” Murphy asked, looking at us, brushing soot from his hands.

  “That would be great,” Kayla said with a half-smile. By looking at her face, I guessed like me, she saw little point in eating anything other than the red stuff. Food had lost its taste since coming back from the dead.

  “I’ll have some,” Sam said.

  Murphy looked at me and I shook my head.

  “Suit yourself,” he grunted and went to the kitchen.

  There was the sound of pots and pans clattering together. We sat in silence, watching the growing flames, until Murphy returned a short time later. He carried a pot by its handle and three mugs. Murphy hung the pot over the fire and placed the mugs on the small table next to his chair.

  “This is all very cosy,” I said, “but what next? We just sit and wait?”

  “I said I would give Kiera twenty-four hours and I’m keeping my word,” Murphy said, the soup now bubbling away over the fire.

  The smell of it made my stomach lurch, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat anything.

  “What if she doesn’t come back by this time tomorrow morning?”

  “I don’t know,” Murphy shrugged. “We need to keep moving.”

  “We go and look for her, that’s what we do,” I said.

  “She might not want you to,” Kayla said, looking at me.

  “You heard everything, didn’t you?” I asked her. I could tell she was pissed at me.

  “Of course,” she said. “How could you lie to Kiera? I thought you two were, you know, in love?”

  “Kayla, do me a favour and mind your own business,” I said, looking away into the fire.

  “It is my business,” Kayla came straight back at me. “Kiera is like a sister to me. I’ve already lost my brother thanks to you.”

  Unable to believe what I was hearing, I looked back at her and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You killed Isidor,” she said, staring back at me, her face a white mask of frustration and anger. “If you hadn’t had always been at him – making him look stupid and calling him names – he would have come with us. He wouldn’t have wanted to stay at that railway station.”

  “Listen, he didn’t stay because of anything I did or said,” I snapped at her. “He stayed because he was all loved-up with some tattooed tart.”

  “See, that’s just what I’m talking about!”

  Kayla hissed, jumping up from the sofa. “You just can’t stop being cruel to people. You think it’s funny, but it’s not. What you say hurts people. Just like you hurt Isidor, and now you’ve gone and hurt Kiera. How many more people are you going to drive away?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I barked back at her.

  “What makes you so special that you can go around taking the piss out of people?” she snapped back at me, her face livid and drawn-looking. Suddenly she did look older than her sixteen years. “You’re far from perfect, with your stinking tobacco breath, big nose, and smart mouth. Fuck knows what Kiera ever saw in you!”

  “My ready wit and charm, I guess,” I smirked at her.

  “See, you never take anything seriously,”

  Kayla snapped, and she looked close to tears.

  “Why can’t you just stop being cruel to people?

  You used to really hurt Isidor with some of the stuff you said. You couldn’t even remember his name half of the time. You were always calling him Shaggy-Doo and a whole load of other shit.

  Isidor might not have been as clever as you think you are, but he was a good person, a kind person, and you took advantage of that. It was because of you he stayed behind in that station – not because of Melody Rose. He was hurting and couldn’t put up with you bullying him anymore, and now you’ve gone and driven Kiera away.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking...”

  but before I’d had the chance to finish, Kayla had fled the room, racing up the stairs. The sound of a door slamming closed echoed from above.

  I looked across the room at Murphy. He stared back at me from beneath his bushy white eyebrows, pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth. “Well done, Potter. You’ve gone and upset her now,” he grunted at me.

  Sam looked at me too, the fire reflecting back from within his bright yellow eyes.

  “What?” I snapped at him.

  “You did use to call Isidor Shaggy-Doo,”

  he said softly. “And you’ve already called me Teen-Wolf and Captain Caveman twice.”

  “Ah, for fuck’s sake! I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” I groaned, getting up from my chair.

  “I need some air.”

  Feeling like a piece of shit, I left the cottage and the sound of Kayla’s fit of hysterics behind me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kiera

  The address Murphy had given me for my father’s home wasn’t the same place where I had grown up with him in my other life. He lived close by, but not the same. I guess that was only to be expected in a world which had been pushed.

  There were slight differences everywhere. The clouds were bitterly cold, and before long, my face had begun to turn numb. The clouds were heavy with moisture and I knew that as the wind grew colder, they would soon be shedding snow onto the world below.

  As I raced back towards Havensfield, and the place near to where I grew up in the south west of England, my face, arms, and legs grew colder and colder until it was difficult for me to feel them at all. I dropped through the clouds, just low enough to see the lay of the ground below, to get my bearings and try to figure out how far I was from home. Home? That seemed a strange kind of word to use. It wasn’t my home – not the place where I had been raised. I wondered who now lived in that house I had shared with my father, snuggled up on his lap as he read books like the Brothers Grimm to me. I wonder who slept in my old bedroom. Was there another little girl living there, fearing that one day the wolves would come demanding to be matched with her? How would her parents let her go? Give her up? They had to, right? That was the law in this new world, where an uneasy peace had been found between the humans and the Skin-walkers. Hadn’t that treaty been dissolved now because of the trickery Jac
k Seth had played with me? The death of McCain had seen to that.

  With Truro racing past below, I knew I was about five miles away from where my father now lived. If I remembered rightly, it was a hamlet just on the outskirts of Havensfield. I didn’t know it well, but I would find it. Being so close to seeing my father again, I began to feel nervous. What would he say when he saw me? Would he be pleased?

  You’re not his, Kiera, Murphy’s warning rang in my ears. His Kiera is dead.

  I tried to push his voice away, let it mingle with the sound of the roaring wind that rushed all around me. However, it just wouldn’t go.

  Murphy’s voice wasn’t just in the wind. It was inside my head, too. As I flew ever closer, I knew deep down inside of me that Murphy was right.

  What would my father think if I suddenly appeared at his front door? He’d think I was a ghost come back from the dead. I couldn’t stay with him forever. I’d have to leave again, and that would break his heart twice over. Could I really do that to him? No, I couldn’t.

  Even though Murphy’s reasoning was clearing my thoughts and mind, that hunger to see my father again was just as strong. Like the need for blood, it just wouldn’t go away unless sated somehow. The only way I would ever rid myself of that feeling was to see my father again. To see him from a distance, perhaps? Just another picture of him to cherish other than the one I had of him begging for pain relief.

  With that numb feeling now spreading up my arms and legs and across my body, I brought my hands up in front of my face and gasped. My fingers and the palms of my hands were covered in tiny little cracks. How long had it been since I had last drank any blood? It had been in the bathroom at the station, when I had drunk some of Potter’s. Without the red stuff, I knew my body would start to crack, turn grey, just like a statue.

  In my haste to get away from Potter and go in search of my father, I had forgotten to take any of the Lot 13 that Kayla carried with her in her rucksack. I’d been getting by on the blood I sucked from Potter. I had been reluctant to get hooked on Lot 13, but without either, I would surely end up like one of those statues in the grounds of Hallowed Manor.

  Realising that it wasn’t the cold which was making my body feel numb, I looked sideways at my wings. Just like my flesh, cracks had started to appear in them. Even those little claws at the tip of each of my wings had started to change from black to a dark chalky-grey. As I raced through the clouds, my wings began to feel heavier and more difficult to beat up and down.

  Slowly I started to drop towards the ground, not because I wanted to, but because I was becoming too heavy to stay in the air.

  I was still some way off from my father’s house and I knew I needed somewhere secluded to land for fear of being seen. Below me, I could see a desolate-looking graveyard. The church spire stood high in the air, and I aimed as best as I could towards it. Swooping around in the air like a kite that was being dragged back towards the ground, I fell out of the sky. With my wings now feeling like two dead weights, I clattered into the church spire. The air was forced from my lungs and I cried out. The tips of my wings scraped against the rough stone of the church, throwing up a thick spray of brick dust. Below, I could see a row of ancient-looking gravestones rushing up towards me.

  I bounced off one of them and screamed out in pain as my head made a sickening thudding sound against the ground. The spire seemed to spin around in the sky above me as I lay on my back, feeling dazed and bruised. The corners of my vision started to turn black, like an old TV set with a damaged tube. I tried to keep my eyes open. Slowly, I twisted my head to the right and found myself looking up into the cracked face of a statue. Then everything went black.

  Chapter Twelve

  Potter

  With my back to the small cottage, I looked out across the fields in the direction Kiera had headed. I wanted to go after her. I knew now that I would never be able to talk her out of the idea of seeing her father, but I wanted to be with her when she did. Such a thing wouldn’t be easy for Kiera, and I wanted to be there to support her when it happened. Would she want me there? No.

  She had made that crystal clear.

  From behind me I could hear the sound of Kayla sobbing. I looked back over my shoulder and up at one of the bedroom windows where the sound of her crying came from. I had really fucked things up this time, but I couldn’t go and take any of it back. I placed a cigarette in the corner of my mouth and looked back across the fields. Kayla’s words seemed to float in the bitter wind that carried my cigarette smoke away. She had been right, I had taken the piss out of Isidor and I’d had no idea how much that had hurt him until the end. Didn’t Kayla think that if I could take back what I’d said to him I would? I’d never meant anything by it. I’d just been jerking around, that was all.

  Just like I could hear Kayla’s angry voice, I could see Isidor standing alone in that waiting room, the picture of him and Melody in his hand.

  He had the same look in his eyes that Sophie had had as she held tightly to the letters which had been pushed through her letterbox. It was a look of hope. A look that Isidor might see Melody again, and a look that Sophie and I could be lovers again. Both were now dead, along with their hope.

  I thought of the last few minutes Isidor and I had spent in that waiting room. I tried to warn him about that photograph. I could hear myself talking to him.

  “Isidor, believe it or not, I know what it feels like to have a broken heart. I loved a girl once but she’s gone now, and in a way, it was the best thing that could have happened to me, because I would’ve never met Kiera,” I had told him.

  “But I haven’t met anyone else, that’s my point,” Isidor tried to explain to me. “I don’t have anybody. Melody hasn’t gone, she is here somewhere, we will meet again – the picture proves that.”

  To remember hearing him say that he had no one made me swallow hard. It had been difficult to hear it back then, but even more difficult for me to remember.

  “I know about pictures and stuff that seem to have been pushed between the two worlds, and no good will come of it,” I had tried to warn him. “But believe me, Isidor, that picture of you and Melody, just like the letters that got pushed over to the girl I once loved, only led to suffering, and eventually, her death. Please come with us, Isidor, I don’t want to leave you behind.”

  Flicking my half-smoked cigarette away, I sniffed back the tears which were now leaking from the corners of my eyes as I remembered asking him to come with us. I really hadn’t wanted to leave him behind.

  “I’m staying, Potter, I know what I’m doing,” Isidor had said.

  Then with tears rolling off my chin, I heard myself say to Isidor, “I’m sorry. I never meant to put you down or hurt you. You are my friend – you’re my brother.”

  I was sorrier than anyone would ever know. If I could go back, I would have dragged Isidor from that waiting room. I wouldn’t have let him stay, even if I’d had to fight with him. Not because I was in the shit now, but because I missed him. He was my friend – he had been like a younger brother to me and I shouldn’t have left him behind. Teasing him with a few names hadn’t been my crime, leaving him behind had.

  Then, just like I had in that waiting room, I whispered aloud, “I’m sorry, Isidor.”

  How was I ever going to put things right with Kayla again? With Kiera again? Both of them thought I was a dick and they were probably both right about that. With the wind drying my tears, I looked back up at the window. The sound of Kayla’s sobs had stopped. Not wanting to go back into the house and face Murphy’s and Sam’s accusing stares, but needing to speak to Kayla, I opened my wings and flew the short distance up to her window. I hovered outside, cupping my hands against the glass, and peering inside. Kayla lay on a narrow bed in the far corner, her back to the window and me. Taking a deep breath, I tapped against the windowpane. Startled, she glanced back over her shoulder. Seeing it was me, she jabbed her middle finger in the air, and lay back down again.

  Nice! She was fee
ling better already, I thought. That was the Kayla I knew and loved.

  I tapped against the window again with my knuckles.

  “Fuck off!” I heard her muffled reply from behind the glass.

  I tapped again.

  “I said, Fuck off, Potter!” she shouted louder than the first time.

  I tapped against the window once more.

  Then through the glass, I watched as she sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed and came marching towards the window. Her hair was angry red, and her eyes were cold blue.

  “What part of fuck off don’t you understand?” she shouted, hands on her hips.

  “Let me in, Kayla, its freezing out here,” I said through the glass.

  “Good!” she snapped. “I hope you freeze to death.”

  “Don’t be like that,” I said softly. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “I can hear you just fine from in here,”

  she snapped back.

  “I can’t talk to you from out here,” I said.

  “Go on, let me in. Just give me five minutes, and if you’re still mad at me after that, I promise to fuck off and never come back.”

  With her eyes fixed on mine, and her face beginning to soften, she said, “Potter, have you been crying?”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing that if I were ever to win her trust I had to be honest. I’d had enough of lies and bullshit to last me a lifetime.

  “How come?” she asked me.

  “Because of what happened to Isidor,” I said, my nose almost touching the windowpane now. “But not just that. I feel bad for hurting you and Kiera. I never meant to. I promise.”

  Slowly, Kayla reached out and opened the window. “You’ve got five minutes,” she whispered and let me in.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kiera

  “Help me!” the voice called. It was little more than a whisper, but it was there all the same.

  “Help me!” the voice came again. It was the sound of a child. Boy or girl, I couldn’t be sure.