Vampire Wake (Kiera Hudson Series #2) (2 page)

I couldn’t help but notice Keats shift uncomfortably in her seat, pulling the hem of her skirt an inch or two over her knee. “Kiera, please could you stop….”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought this was some kind of test. I really think I should carry on.” Now it was my turn to smile.

“Kiera -” she started, but I cut over her.

“You spent your lunch hour today with your lover in a room in the Holiday Inn Motel, just two streets from here. Your sex was quick and rushed, but he had time to…let me see…yes restrain you…”

“Enough already!” Doctor Keats screamed, almost falling forward off her seat. Her face was flushed, and her hands trembled in her lap. “I think that’s all for today Kiera,” she said, sounding out of breath. “You should go.”

“As you wish,” I smiled to myself, gathering up my bag and standing.

“I think we’ve gone as far as we can go with our sessions,” she said, not looking at me. “I’m going to refer your case onto another colleague.”

“Whatever you think is best, Doc,” I said, pulling open the door to her office. Then just as I was about to step out into the corridor, she called after me.

“How did you know all that?” she asked. “It was some kind of trick, right?”

Shaking my head, I said, “No tricks, no magic.”

“But how then?”

“The picture of you and that man on your desk has got to be your husband. If you have a picture of your husband then you’d have pictures of your children, too. Seeing as there aren’t any pictures of sons and daughters tells me the chances are you don’t have any. Your bag is open on the floor beside you and on the top are your car keys, compact mirror and a key card with the words
Holiday Inn Havensfield
printed on it. Must have been used today or otherwise it would have been further down your bag. The fact that it’s there at all, says that you were in a rush to leave the motel and forgot to hand it back in at Reception. The top two buttons of your blouse have been fastened incorrectly, I can smell aftershave on you and you’re not wearing your wedding ring as usual. Again, all signs that you were in a rush getting back from lunch. It’s not the only time I’ve seen you not wearing your ring. You always have it on during my morning appointments, but this is the seventh time I’ve noticed it missing during my afternoon appointments, suggesting that you often remove it during your lunch break; and why would that be? You don’t wear bracelets, but today, like on four other occasions I’ve noticed red circular marks on your wrists. You forget, Doctor Keats, I’m a police officer, and I’d recognise the marks left behind by handcuffs anywhere.”

“Okay, okay,” she groaned at me. “You’ve made your point. But how did you know what he looks like?”

Smiling down at her, I said, “Why, Doctor, that was the easy part. Three weeks ago, I arrived early for my appointment with you, so I sat and ate a sandwich in the small gardens just across the road. I happened to look up and see you climbing from a taxi. But before you got out, you lent back inside and kissed a young blonde-haired man. He didn’t look like the picture of the man in the photo on your desk, and the kiss wasn’t like the kiss you give to a friend or a brother – your lips lingered just a little too long over his. He had to be your lover.”

Without looking back at her, I stepped out into the corridor, closing the door behind me. The thought of never having to sit opposite her again and face another of her interrogations felt wonderful – it felt like freedom. And as I left the building and stepped out into the grey afternoon sun, I guessed that she was glad that she would never have to see me again, too.

Chapter Two

Despite the overcast sky, I made my way on foot through Havensfield town centre. A cool breeze swirled litter along the gutter and I pulled the collar of my jacket up about my neck. The streets with their rows of Victorian-built shops were just beginning to close for the day, and most of the shoppers had started to head home for the evening. Being a coastal town, seagulls squawked overhead and the mouth-watering smell of fish and chips wafted on the air.

It was just short of five in the afternoon, and I was annoyed that I’d wasted yet another afternoon being analysed by Keats. I hadn’t meant to hurt her, and there was a small part of me that felt bad for saying what I had.
But hey, she asked for it right?
I told myself. She wanted to know what I could
see
about her – so I’d told her – but had I needed to be so smug about it? Whatever, it was done now and so were my weekly afternoon sessions with her, I hoped.

Quickening my pace, I made my way across town towards the newsagents. I wanted to buy a copy of each of the national newspapers before they closed up shop for the day. Since leaving The Ragged Cove and my suspension from work, I’d taken to buying as many newspapers I could each day. With the T.V. permanently tuned to the news channel, I would sit on the living room floor of my small rented room and search each of the papers for news stories involving any sudden disappearances of people. But what I was really looking for were any stories relating to murder where the victims had been found with injuries to their throats. I would spend hours shut away, my eyes scanning every page looking for anything that might suggest the return of vampires. If there were vampires, my belief was that the Vampyrus would be somewhere close by, and that meant Luke might be with them. Murphy had told me that they were going in search of Taylor and the other Vampyrus that were like him, unable to resist the taste of human blood. If I could find Luke, Murphy, or Potter again, then they would lead me to Taylor and perhaps my old trainer, Sergeant Phillips, if he were still alive.

I wasn’t interested in finding Taylor and Philips in order to seek any revenge, or help my old colleagues destroy them – I hoped to be able to convince Luke, Murphy, and Potter to keep them alive long enough, at least, for Taylor and Phillips to tell me what had truly happened to my mother. Ever since leaving The Ragged Cove, the thought of finding out what had happened to her and that image of Henry Blake’s grey, cold hand clutching a lock of her hair wouldn’t leave me. Nights had become almost unbearable, as I lay awake on the sofa, staring blankly at the news channel, my dreams and thoughts consumed by images of my mother and the nightmare that I’d lived at The Ragged Cove.

Night and day I thought about her and I wanted so much to keep the promise that I had made to my father. I knew that she was still alive and suspected that Taylor and Phillips held the answers. When I wasn’t thinking about my mother, I was thinking about Luke. I wondered if he were alright and if he had managed to survive the burns that he had received saving my life in the sky above St. Mary’s Church. On my many walks to see Doctor Keats, I would look down at the paving stones and wonder if Luke were somewhere beneath me in The Hollows. Then I would get to thinking that perhaps he wasn’t beneath me at all, that he had recovered and was already above ground tracking Taylor and Phillips like Murphy had said they would.

There was so much that I didn’t know, and that was what was driving me mad. Sometimes, after my sessions with Keats, I would question my own sanity. Had I really seen the things that I had in The Ragged Cove? Had I really been working the night shift with men that claimed to be a race of vampire bats? If I had been told such a thing by anyone, wouldn’t I have had the same reaction to them as Keats had towards me? I mean this was the stuff of fairytales, horror movies, and books. But I knew that it had all been real, I hadn’t imagined any of it. And in the darkness at night as I lay awake, the T.V. set flickering in the corner, I would think of Luke and the brief time that we had spent together. Those feelings that I had felt for him would come flooding back and they would feel as raw and intense as they had when he had held me close to him, when he’d kissed me and enclosed me in his wings.

Had I really felt love for him? Or had it just simply been my emotions freaking out due to the unimaginable situation that I had found myself in? Had it just been lust? The guy was a hottie. But when I thought of him, his jet-black hair, bright green eyes, and fit body, I knew it was more than those things that made my soul ache for him. Like everything else that had taken place it, was hard to explain to myself, so how would I ever get the likes of Keats to understand or believe me?

Within days, of leaving The Ragged Cove and returning to my room in Havensfield, the nightmares had started. It was strange, because although I could see more than I always wanted to when I was awake, my dreams were a blur; a mosaic of broken images, distant voices, violence and death. The result was always the same; I would wake in my bed, but more often than not on the couch, with my heart thumping in my chest and gasping for breath. Then one night, as I sat gasping in air, I noticed something warm and wet trickling down my cheek. Dabbing at it with the tips of my fingers, I was horrified to discover that I was bleeding from my left tear duct.

Leaping from the couch, I raced to the bathroom and looked in the mirror to find a crimson stream of tears running from my eye. Taking a piece of tissue, I wiped it away, leaving a red smear across my cheek. At first I didn’t do anything, telling myself that I must have unknowingly rubbed my eye in my sleep and scratched it with one of my fingernails. But it happened again the next night, and the night after that, a stream of blood-red tears flowing from my eye. For weeks I didn’t mention this to Keats, I kept it to myself.

Then the red tears came during the day, but it was more than that. I started seeing things. I mean more than
seeing.
Those flash-bulbs would go
pop
again inside my mind’s eye. Fleeting glimpses of crime scenes, bodies laying dead and bleeding, their eyes turned towards me. The images became more horrific – terrifying – like waking nightmares. I would get snapshots of catastrophes; buildings reduced to rubble; iron girders twisted out of shape; planes falling from the sky; trains crashing, piles of bodies stacked as high as mountains, limbs entwined like a grotesque puzzle; row upon row of open graves for as far as my eye could see. These images, however quick, came without warning and when I least expected them, they hit me like a blow to the head. They left me feeling confused, dazed, and nauseous. Then the tears would come, thick and red – almost black. It was as if holes the size of pinpricks had opened in my mind and was bleeding the anguish and suffering of those who I saw in those flashes.

In the end, I had to tell Keats – I had to tell someone. At first I didn’t tell her about the visions I saw, just about the tears. Immediately, she sent me for CAT and MRI scans, but they found nothing. Doctor Keats became suspicious and that tone crept into her voice again, whenever I mentioned the tears. So I told her about the pictures I saw in my head. How it was like being in the dark, then suddenly the blackness is lit-up with a flash of white light revealing the gruesome scenes hidden within.

Keats wanted more detail. “Kiera, who are these victims you see?”

“I don’t know,” I told her with a shake of my head.

“Where are these bodies that you see?” she pushed.

“I don’t know that, either,” I said.

“What about the planes? The ones you see falling from the sky?”

“What about them?” I asked.

“Why are they falling from the sky? Are these catastrophes that
have
happened or
yet
to take place?”

“I don’t know!” I insisted.

“What causes them to crash?” she pushed harder, the gap between her questions getting less, and reminding me of being cross-examined in court.

I felt I knew the answer to her last question, but I just couldn’t say it.

“Well? Who is responsible for these atrocities?” she came at me again.

All I wanted to scream was:
The vampires did it! The vampires made the planes fall out of the sky. It was the vampires that brought those buildings to the ground and it was the vampires that killed all of those people!
But I couldn’t say any of that to her – because I didn’t know if that were true myself.

With my world seeming to fall apart all around me, I knew that I needed to occupy my mind. It had to be kept busy. I needed a mental challenge – some stimulus, a puzzle to solve to take my mind off what was happening to me. I needed to be back at work where I belonged – but I didn’t know when or if ever that was going to happen. So I placed a small add in the local paper, which read:

Got a problem that needs investigating?

I’ll solve anything!

Email: [email protected]

I soon realised that I should have been more specific in my advert, as the first email I received was from a guy who thought he was paying too much for his electricity and wanted me to find out why. The second was from a woman who had lost her cat and the third was from an old gentleman who…well lets just say it was more of a medical matter. The fourth was not a great deal more interesting, it was from an old woman who had misplaced her wedding ring. Mrs. Lovelace was seventy-eight-years-old and had been married for sixty of them. Her husband had died in the last six months. She looked frail and vulnerable so I agreed to help. During one long Sunday afternoon and over several cups of watery tea, I got her to work backwards in her mind exactly what she had done and where she had been on the day that she had misplaced it. Eventually she remembered taking it off and placing it on the kitchen windowsill the previous Thursday morning.

“My fingers are thinner than they used to be,” she smiled. “I always take the ring off when I’m washing the dishes. Don’t want it to slip off and lose it down the plug-hole, you see. But I get so forgetful these days and don’t always remember to put it back on again. Frank was forever reminding me.”

“Frank?” I asked.

“My late husband – his memory was sharper than mine,” she said, a sadness overcoming her face as she thought of him.

“May I take a look in the kitchen?” I asked her, placing my teacup on the table that sat between us.

“Of course you can, my dear,” she said, struggling out of her chair.