Where Loyalty Lies (2 page)

Behind him I saw a movement in the doorway and could tell by the white nightgown that it was Mary. I didn’t look at her because I didn’t want to give away that she was there. For a moment she stood and took in the scene and then she turned and headed towards the front door. I bit my trembling lip in despair. Some part of me had hoped that she’d try to help me, but she wasn’t going to. I couldn’t really blame her. If I couldn’t beat this guy then she didn’t stand a chance. No point in us both dying.

“Bastard!” I yelled, hoping that if I shouted loud enough it would cover any noise that Mary made as she left. “I hope you rot in hell.”

He opened his mouth to answer but then the front door creaked and in the blink of an eye he was gone. Without his fist around my neck to hold me up, I hit the floor and only just scrambled up in time to see him come back in with Mary. He flung her into the corner where her head hit the corner of the breakfast table with a sickening crack.

I screamed, grabbed the bread knife that I’d dropped and ran at him. I felt his vice-like hands grab me, but desperation drove me into wildness. I twisted and flailed and finally felt the blade make contact. I had no idea what I’d hit until he released me and stepped back. He was covered in blood and a gash stretched down one side of his face, tearing his top lip in half.

I turned to grab Mary in an attempt to pull her up and out of the kitchen but she screamed at me and her thrashing hands came out to scratch my face.

“Stop!” I shouted. “Mary stop, it’s me.”

She did stop but before I could be relieved she looked straight at me and screeched, “Demon!  Child of the devil!”

A chuckle sounded behind me and I spun to see that my attacker was just a foot away from me. There was still blood on his face but his cut had gone, even his severed lip was back to normal. I could do nothing but stare at the place where the grisly cut should have been.

“No, not the child of the devil, she’s the child of a vampire.”

He bared his teeth again to show his fangs and I froze. I wanted to believe he was joking but the fangs were a sure sign that he wasn’t. I had no idea about the qualities of vampires, but I knew he was super fast, super strong, healed in seconds and had fangs. I knew that, whatever he was, it made sense that I was the same because it explained my enhanced strength and speed. I desperately searched my mind to think of some logical reason for everything that was happening but there was none.

Something between a whimper and a sob came out of me and the adrenaline that I’d been running on vanished. He grabbed a fistful of my nightgown and slammed my back down on the wooden table. He kept one hand on my stomach, pinning me down with such force that my ribs felt like they’d snap; in his other hand he pulled out a dagger from under his cloak.

“This is silver,” he said “and, for vampires, that means it’s going to burn like hell so if you have any last words I would say them now because in about five seconds all you’re going to be doing is screaming in agony.”

I was trembling all over now. I turned my head to see Mary but she sat as still as a statue with her eyes closed. I looked back up at the man who was going to kill me. This was it, my life was about to end and I’d never done anything. I’d never achieved anything, never been abroad, never had a proper job, never had a serious boyfriend, never done anything other than pretend to be someone I wasn’t. What a complete waste of a life.

“Fuck you,” I hissed at him, determined to at least go out with courage. He just smiled and, in a blur, I saw his arm swing and heard the crack as the blade hit the table underneath me. There was no pain. He’d stabbed me hard enough for the blade to go right through me and into the table but there was no pain. I glanced down and saw why. The dagger was about an inch away from my side. He’d missed. I looked at him in shock. How the hell had he missed?

He lowered his face to mine, grabbed my chin and twisted my head to the side. I struggled, thinking he was going to bite my neck but then I realised he was making me look at Mary and the fight left my body. Her eyes were still closed but there was a strange look on her face. She didn’t look scared or upset, in fact she was almost smiling.

“Now, correct me if I’m wrong,” my attacker said, “but that looks an awful lot like relief to me.”

Mary’s eyes opened and she didn’t even have the civility to look guilty. She didn’t look ashamed that she was comforted by the thought of my imminent death. Somehow, out of the whole nightmare that was this evening, that hurt me the most. I felt my eyes well up with tears and I turned my head so that I didn’t have to look at her anymore. The monster smiled down at me.

“Just thought I’d make the last moments of your life a little more special. Now that’s enough playing.”

I didn’t even struggle as he yanked the dagger out the table and raised his hand again. I closed my eyes and didn’t pray.

There was a crashing and another roar and I was knocked off the table and onto the floor. I scrambled away from the blurring mess that had taken over the kitchen. The movement was so fast it looked like a tornado. Suddenly it stopped and I saw that there were two of them. The new one was wearing black trousers and a white shirt and he had my attacker pinned down on the floor. He looked up at me and I could see he had the same black eyes and fangs. The look he gave me wasn’t hostile though. There was dirt smudged on his face and he had bits of plant stuck in his choppy brown hair.

“Go!” he shouted. “Get out of here.”

I wanted to but my legs wouldn’t move. They’d stopped listening to what I was telling them to do.

“GO!” he yelled, and the sheer volume of his voice was enough to jump-start me. I grabbed Mary, ignoring her protests and attempts at pushing me away, and with one last look at the man who’d saved me, I ran.

                                   *  *  *

            “Faine.”

At the sound of my name I looked up. Simon Clark was sitting next to me on the front steps of one of the neighbour’s houses. It was where I’d collapsed when I’d finally got Mary into the safety of the neighbour’s house. After that I must have gone into shock because I had no recollection of what had happened between then and now. I hadn’t even seen Simon arrive. He was a police officer, well known in this town for his handsome young face and his fair attitude. He was giving me a patient look and I got the impression he’d been calling my name for some time. I blinked a few times and tried to focus my attention on him.

“Faine, can you hear me?” he said.

I nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

I thought I would burst into tears but there was nothing, just enveloping numbness that made me feel heavy. I fidgeted just to see if I was able to control my body and found that, at some point, someone had draped a blanket over me.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Simon said again.

“Yes.” My voice sounded croaky and my throat felt raw after so much screaming, but the seriousness of the situation came back to me and I cleared my throat and tried again. “He tried to kill us.”

Simon looked confused. “Who?”

“I don’t know. He was there in her room and he tried to kill us...” I trailed off, aware that I was repeating myself.
Get a grip Faine.
“I heard a noise and, when I went to see if Mary was okay, there was a man there. I tried to stop him and he chased me and then he tried to kill me but someone else came and stopped him.”

Simon frowned and cast a look around; there was nobody close to us but he lowered his voice anyway. “Are you sure that’s what happened, Faine? How did the fire start?”

I stared at him for a long time. “Fire? What fire?”

“The house was on fire. It was put out before it could spread, so it’s just the kitchen that’s been really damaged. There aren’t any bodies there.” He cast another look around and then spoke in a whisper. “Mary’s ranting about you being the devil and the blood on her fingernails looks pretty consistent with the scratches on your face.”

I raised a hand and felt a series of scratches down one side of my face. Realisation dawned on me and I knew what people were thinking. Simon tried a few more times to ask me questions but I shut down and, after a time, he seemed to realise it. I watched as he walked over to a small group of policemen. He didn’t tell them my story, just that I was in shock and needed time to calm down. I couldn’t blame him, after all who would believe my story? I’d even left out the crazy part about the fangs and the black eyes and he still didn’t believe me.

One of the policemen had left the flashing lights on his patrol car on, and the blue lights seemed to have drawn everyone in the street out of their homes.  

My attention was drawn to a group of gossiping women, all huddled together. I focused on them to find out how much they knew.

“I heard Mary found her trying to burn all the Bibles and the fire got out of control,” one woman said.

I scoffed. They lived for gossip and that was the best they could come up with? A Bible-burning sinner? But then another woman spoke and it made me freeze.

“No, I heard she flipped out and tried to burn the house down while Mary was sleeping. That’s how she got the scratches; she was trying to stop Mary from escaping.”

That was met with gasps and a few of them turned to look at me. I stared at the ground.

Of course. Murder was much more interesting than an accident and who better to blame than the slightly odd girl who’d been left on Mary’s doorstep as a baby? The girl who, despite having lived here for all of her eighteen years and despite her attempts to keep her head down, never did quite fit in.

I’d have dismissed it as the poisonous gossip it was, but I noticed that the police officers were all giving me similar looks. I tuned into their conversation and, to my disgust, found that it was along similar lines. They wanted to take me in for questioning. Only Simon didn’t join in with them. He was giving me an odd look and I realised that he knew I could hear them, despite the fact that they were fifty feet away.

I stared back at the ground beneath my feet. I had no idea what Mary would say but I knew that, whatever she did say, it wasn’t going to offer me any hope. She’d seen those men, she’d seen that they had the same strange abilities as me, she’d heard what they’d said I was. Did she believe them? Did I believe them?

Questions buzzed around my head. There was nobody I could talk to, nobody I could ask for help. I was on my own with nobody to stand up for me. My nightgown was covered in blood, some of it was from my own cuts but I knew that some of it would be that evil man’s. If the police sent it off to be tested, it would come back and prove me right and Mary wrong. But what was the point? I could give them the gown now and prove that someone else had been there, but I was certain that Mary wouldn’t be coming anywhere near me from now on, and definitely wouldn’t be allowing me to live with her again. In a village the size of this one, everyone would have heard the gossip within the next day or two, so there was no chance of anyone else letting me stay with them. And, even if I did stay until the test results came back, people would still choose to hate me.

There was nothing here for me anymore. No, that wasn’t true. There was a man here who’d tried to kill me. I didn’t know what had happened to him. Had he escaped or had he died? There was also the one who’d saved my life. In any other situation, I’d have thought he was my hero but the truth was that he was just as scary as the first guy. I had no idea why either of them had come here and I had no idea if they’d come back, but I wasn’t going to find out.

It was time for me to disappear.

I woke with a start, just like I always did when I overslept. I jumped out of bed scowling at my alarm clock for not having woken me up but, if I was honest, I did have a hazy memory of it going off at six and me beating it into silence.

The fact that I only ever wore jeans and tops made it easy for me to conjure up an outfit without too much fumbling. Then, in a fantastic show of multi-tasking, I brushed my teeth, pinned back my hair, applied minimal make-up and located both of my black boots which had somehow ended up on opposite sides of the room.

Eight minutes after my eyes had opened, I was out of my front door and pretty pleased with myself; I’d shaved a whole minute off my best time.

The weather was gloomy and threatening rain. It was the sort of weather that most people hated but I always found it promising. There was nothing better than a full-on thunder storm. Dark grey clouds filling up the sky was a sure sign that one was coming.

If I ran to work at full speed I’d get there twice as fast but it would attract too much attention, so instead I set off at a casual half-jog, half-run. I arrived only slightly out of breath and fifteen minutes late. Through the glass window at the front of the café, I could see Lisa behind the counter taking orders from the customers who wanted their fry-ups before starting their working days.

Lisa looked exactly like a cafe manager should look; slightly too large to be called “curvy” and with a worn-down attitude that made her civil but not overly friendly. Her mousy brown hair was, as always, pulled back in a ponytail and, despite it being only quarter past seven in the morning, her white apron already had black smudges on it.

A frown and slight puckering of her lips was the only acknowledgement she gave of my lateness. I put on my own white apron and set about filling plates and delivering them to tables. The smells of sausage, eggs and bacon filled my nose and made my stomach lurch. Any other time of day, I’d be longing to join the customers and dig in, but I could never eat before nine.