The Dark Messenger (8 page)

Finally, after the phone had rung for quite
some time, Raffious picked up on the other end. With very little
small talk, Regina got straight to the point.

She explained in full about Jenny, Rex, the
Silver Sword, and the Priest. Raffious replied that he was
extremely shocked--‘a child, you say?’ were his exact words--but he
went on to say that, even concerning this horrific situation, he
couldn't interfere. To do so would most certainly change the future
in an unpredictable way.

‘But millions will die!’ Regina cried. ‘Rex
doesn’t deserve to win--he’s evil!’

‘I know, Regina that you do not agree with
me, but you know my beliefs. I am so sorry, but I just cannot help!
You may think that not telling the church about the priest will, in
the future, cause the release of werewolves and condemn millions of
humans to a certain death. But that is not necessarily true. Other
things will happen that may also impact on it too, I am sure!’

He sighed. ‘Regina you know I am very fond of
you and your husband, don't you? Please take my word for it, the
future will not be altered by this one action. Give my regards to
Kaine for me. Bye for now, then,’ and he hung up.

She stared at her phone, surprised. This
behavior was very strange. She wondered if maybe he had known more
than he was letting on somehow, as he had never done that before in
all the time she had known him.

Dropping her phone on to
the sheets, she turned to tell Kaine, but he wasn’t there. He had
just walked out of their bedroom to get dressed. She was about to
shout out something to let him know what Raffious had said, but
then found herself drifting into deep thought over the phone call
that she had just had.
Perhaps I might be
able to contact the priest myself
, she
considered.
Would Raffious be mad at me,
though?
She suddenly realized that she had
never seen him angry—and something inside told her strangely that
she never wanted to either.

A few minutes passed, and then the silence
was broken by the sound of a glass smashing violently against the
floor.

‘Are you okay?’ she shouted out, still
sitting upright in bed.

Kaine appeared in their doorway, ‘It was just
a glass,’ he said with a smile as he was scrolling through his
iPad, checking for messages.

The smile was replaced by a look of horror.
‘Look! This sounds like a vampire attack!’ he said in an shocked
voice. He could hardly believe that events were beginning to happen
so quickly.

The main headline read,

‘FOUR LOCAL MEN MURDERED BY MYSTERIOUS
BEAST’

Sitting down next to his wife on her side of
the bed, he held his iPad out in front of her so she could see
it.

It read, ‘Four local men
were savagely murdered in the center of Brighton in the early hours
last Sunday morning. Eyewitnesses have reported seeing a woman who
was covered in blood leaving the scene in a local taxi. The men,
believed to be a group of friends in their late thirties, were all
savagely torn to bits. Police refuse to give out any further
information at this stage. Police urge that until this attacker is
caught, people should not go out at night
.’

‘That woman who was seen covered in blood
might be our Jenny,’ Kaine said, glancing into Regina’s eyes.

She nodded. ‘Yes it sounds like it. How
terrible for those poor men who had tried to help her,’ she
added.

Kaine stood up leaving Regina holding the
iPad. ‘I must find this taxi company. Someone there might have a
clue to where she is now. She might have taken the taxi to her own
house,’ he said.

Regina interrupted him. ‘If so, aren’t the
police likely to be there? I think there might be a better
solution; I think we should check the local hospitals first to see
if she hasn’t been admitted into one of them.’

Kaine nodded in agreement. ‘Don't you know
someone in Maidstone Hospital, sweetheart? Maybe you could see if
they could check admissions from the Brighton areas for us without
raising too much attention.’

‘Yes I can, her name is Christine,’ she
replied as she reached down and picked up her mobile again. She
started to dial Christine’s number as Kaine walked across through
another doorway leading into their en-suite bathroom.

‘What should I say to her though, darling?
That we are looking for someone called Jenny? She must be
thirty-three, I guess, as you said the baby was given to the
orphanage in 1981,’ she said.

‘Is Christine, one of us?’ he asked, ‘us’
meaning ‘vampire’. He doubted it because Christine worked in a
hospital, unless she was scheduled exclusively on the night shift
that is.

‘She isn’t, darling,’ she replied--at the
same time as he asked the question, reading his mind before the
words came out of his mouth.

‘Tell your friend to look in her records for
someone who has two marks on her neck. She’s probably very shook up
too and…oh! By now, if she’s been turned of course, she might be
very violent. I remember when you were bitten; it lasted a
fortnight, the turning stage. You went through stages of being
really violent and very sick, with rapidly fluctuating blood
pressure, and you said you had very painful headaches. Maybe they
put h…’

He was just going to say maybe the hospital
had put her in a ward for crazy people, but Regina held up her hand
to silence him; Christine had just answered.

Kaine was stopped in
mid-sentence. He hated being cut short, but
thought
, oh well, I’ll just leave it to
her, as Christine was her friend, women talking to women and all
that.

He walked back into the bathroom and started
to wash and groom himself. When he had finished, he then wrapped
vampire super-flexible skin wraps around his lower arms before
rubbing super-UV-resistant oil into his face and neck. This
fantastic, life-saving oil somehow allowed vampires to be able to
walk out in the direct sunshine for a couple of hours before the
pain started.

Once he’d finished, Kaine
walked out of the bathroom carrying extra oil with him. He put it
inside the inner pocket of a jacket, which was hanging over the
back of a chair at the end of the bed. As he did though, he was
distracted by his wife’s mirror, which was on her dressing table.
He wrinkled his nose in disgust; he thought the thing was hideously
ugly.
Quite pointless actually, keeping
something which humans used to look at themselves in, especially
when vampires can’t see themselves in it
,
he thought.

Then he walked across to the other side of
the bedroom, into their walk-in changing room, and opened his
cupboard door. All the doors in this room were hand-carved from
oak, which he had constructed himself. He thoroughly enjoyed
woodwork, making things like coffee tables, doors, picture frames,
and staircases. Centuries before, he had been known to make
cartwheels too. The cupboards in this room were slightly too low
for him though, but he had been tied to the height he could work to
because of the low ceilings in the building when they had moved
in.

There in the cupboard, hanging lifeless but
ready for action, was his battle gear.

He took out the armored trousers and gave
them a once-over. To the naked eye, they looked as if they might
have been made from leather, but they weren’t. They were actually
created from a new material known only to but a few. It was called
Nanolymer, the results of years of top-secret testing which a
friend called Laouse Gerhad had been doing. He studied
Macromolecular Materials and Engineering in Austria, and worked
there in a secret lab, inventing super-strong fibers for battle
clothing.

‘The material will not stop a .50 caliber
bullet from a thousand yards, but werewolf claws? Maybe. Machine
gun bullets, yes, but for a limited time. Better not stand where
you can be shot,’ was Laouse's advice to him when he had gone there
personally to pick the clothes up.

After putting on his trousers, he took out
his vest and put that on too. It was made using the same fibers as
his trousers. Then he slipped on his Nanolymer imitation of a
pure-white silk shirt, which looked stunning on his well-sculpted
physique. It was so good, in fact that you couldn’t tell the
difference at all from real silk. It had long, sharp pointed
collars and a subtle soft shine throughout.

Next, he reached in and took out his jacket
before walking back into their bedroom, As he put it out flat on
the bed just below his pillow, he remembered that earlier he had
stupidly put his face oil in the wrong jacket. He cursed as he
walked over to the chair where his other jacket was.

‘Any news yet from your
friend?’ he asked, glancing across and seeing that Regina had put
her phone down.
Quite unusual for her; she
could natter for hours
, he
thought.

‘Not yet baby. And I don't natter!’ she said,
reading his thoughts.

Regina glanced over at him and smiled, liking
what she saw. ‘Be patient, darling. If Jenny is in a hospital,
Christine’s computer will show her,’ she said. Suddenly, seeing
Kaine standing there in his battle gear, she felt deep physical
stirrings.

‘Wow, darling,’ she purred. That shirt looks
ever so nice on you, by the way Come over here and let my fingers
slide up your back; they are dying for a little pleasure with their
loved one.’

Kaine smiled apologetically, but not without
longing in his eyes. ‘Sorry, I can’t. I must go downstairs and get
ready,’ he said, not letting on that really all he wanted to do was
rip his clothes off again and dive into bed with his gorgeous
redhead wife.

She frowned. ‘Its 9am, baby. Surely if Jenny
is in a Brighton hospital, it’s better for you to get there after
five when it’s dark,’ she said hoping to be able to persuade him to
come back to bed.

But it didn’t work.

‘Sorry, but we have to be ready in case the
phone rings. We don't know what will happen, and my biggest fear is
that those freaks in the government’s secret vampire testing
department will turn up before we do. If and when Jenny’s fangs
show, it’s sure to trigger their alarms. You must get up…’

Regina’s mobile started playing its melody
again in the middle of his sentence, and he sighed.

‘Hang on darling, it’s Christine,’ she said,
as she slid her legs out of the bed and sat up to take the
call.

She answered it and almost immediately looked
puzzled and shocked. At her husband’s silent request for more
information, she let Kaine join in by telepathic transfer through
her mind. She repeated what she had just heard from Christine to
bring him up to speed.

She spoke aloud to her friend. ‘So you say
that there’s a woman that fits our description and she has holes in
her neck, but her name is Becky, not Jenny?’

‘That’s right--but get this. Her friend who
was with her in the ambulance is called Jenny. What is all this
about anyway? This hasn’t got anything to do with those murders in
town last Saturday night, has it?’ she asked, deeply
inquisitive.

‘No, of course not. But what made you think
that anyway?’ Regina replied, gazing at Kaine with her eyebrows
raised.

‘Well, it says here on the screen that this
Becky woman is still travelling to the hospital in the ambulance.
Upon preliminary checks, she has very deep nasty lacerations on her
left hip and outside right bicep. The weird thing is though, there
are two deep holes that appear to be quite infected in her neck,
one above the other. The ambulance man who is with her put in his
notes that the best way to describe them is that they looked like
bite marks from a vampire movie,’ Christine said with a nervous
laugh in her voice.

‘
Ah. Weird. No, it was just
a fight in town, which I am doing a piece on for a local
newspaper,’ Regina replied.

‘Hmmm never knew you worked as a journalist,
how long have you been doing that for?’

‘Sorry to cut you short, Christine,’ Regina
interrupted. ‘I have just realized that I am going to be late for
the office!’ She felt bad about lying, and added, ‘Hey do you fancy
grabbing a coffee soon though? We can catch up on gossip.’

‘
Sure! When would you like
to?’ Christine asked.

As Kaine’s strong telepathic thoughts were
now booming in her brain:

‘
Ask her which hospital
they are going too, baby. We need the hospital’s name.’

She replied to him by hurling a pillow in his
direction, telling him that she was going to ask which hospital—it
was just that she was going to do it the woman’s way. She was
afraid that Christine might get a little suspicious otherwise.

‘I don't know exactly when we can meet for
coffee, but soon. I will call you, okay? Hey, what hospital are
they going to anyway?’ she asked.

‘They are on their way now to Brighton. I
don’t know where inside though, but will text you later when she’s
been allocated! Oops, gotta go, boss is coming. Call me!’ she said
hastily as she disconnected the call.