Your father snatched my clothes from me and forced me down onto the shore where he had sex with me. I turned my head away and cried until he was finished.”

I could feel the hatred for him rising out of my eleven-year-old soul and eating away at my very core like poison. How I wanted to cover my ears and scream so fucking loud.

“Why are you crying?” my mother asked, pulling me close.

“I hate him,” I sobbed. “I hate him for hurting you. I’m glad he’s dead.”

“Your father isn’t dead,” she said, with a frown.

“It’s that fat man – that landlord – who I hate, Mother,” I cried against her breast. “He hurt you.”

Chapter Twelve

Kiera

“I think it was your father she wanted you to hate,” I whispered.

Jack got up and went to the window. “I know,” he said with his back turned to me. “And I had grown to hate him, but not for killing that fat man. The fat man deserved to die, don’t you think?”

“For trying to get it on with your mum?” I said. “No, he didn’t. Not like that.”

“Haven’t you killed for less?” he said, now looking back at me over his shoulder.

“No,” I shot back.

“What have I ever done to you, Kiera?”

he said, looking back out of the window again.

“Okay, I’m a killer, and not a very nice one, but have I ever hurt you?”

“Apart from killing me in The Hollows, you mean?” I snapped, shuddering at what else he might have done to me.

“That was an act of suicide on your part,”

he said.

There was no reasoning with him, so I said nothing back.

“Why the silence?” he said, peering up at the snow which still fell outside. “You know what I say is true, but you killed me in The Hollows.

You gave me up, sold me out to the Elders. Is that not right?”

He turned to look at me again, his eyes now bright, like two headlamps shining out of his face. “So why did you do that?”

“Because you hurt my friends,” I breathed.

“And that man hurt my mother,” he smiled weakly. “So my father only did what you did to protect the person he loved.”

“I never cut you into tiny pieces…” I started.

“My pain was just as great, if not more!” he suddenly screeched at me. My father suddenly groaned in the chair behind him as if being woken from a deep sleep.

“At least the fat man’s pain was brief – mine has spanned two hundred-fucking-years thanks to you!” Jack screamed, leaping back across the room at me on his stick-like legs. “My father didn’t make that man suffer. He didn’t feel the pain that you have put me through!” he hissed into my face. Spit sprayed from his lips, and it felt hot against my stone-cold skin and I knew it wasn’t long before I totally became unmovable like a statue. I had an hour at the most to save my father and Potter.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my lips feeling cracked and broken. I felt dust fall onto my chin.

Was I sorry? I wasn’t sure anymore. Jack’s story – his life as a boy had been a troubled one – and although I could never condone or understand the despicable crimes he had committed, he had been a child once, just like I had. Were people born evil – or were they gradually made – molded into what he was now? If that were true, then I knew who it was who had molded him.

So looking at him, and slowly turning my wrists behind me, I said, “Why do you think your mother told you such horrific and graphic stories about your father?”

The question seemed to strike Jack like a slap across his face, and he took a step back from me. I needed to get him talking, take his mind off what was going on in the room. So I said, “Did she want you to hate your father?”

“Yes,” he said, the anger now seeping out of his voice again. He paced to and fro across the wooden floorboards. He seemed on edge and his mood unpredictable. However sad his story was, I had to remember I had been imprisoned by a killer.

“Why?” I whispered, trying to keep my voice even, soft, so as not to anger him again.

While he was deep in thought, he seemed to have forgotten about my father on the other side of the room. That was good, that’s what I wanted.

“I believed she was trying to scare me.

She didn’t want me giving into the curse,” he said, his pacing back and forth growing quicker. “If she told me about my father – made me scared of him – then I wouldn’t want to become him. Just like the pictures you see of diseased lungs on the backs of cigarette packets. You’re being scared into quitting.”

“So she was surprised then when you said it was the landlord’s actions that you hated and not your father’s?” I asked him softly, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of my sessions with Doctor Keats after returning from the Ragged Cove.

Would Jack see what I was up to, just like Doctor Keats tried to see through me?

“She was surprised, and I think angry at me,” he said, his gangly legs opening and closing like a pair of scissors as he continued to stride back and forth across the room.

“Angry?” I asked. “How?”

“It was like she wasn’t getting through to me somehow – that I wasn’t hating my father quickly enough,” he said.

“Why do you think you found it so hard to hate him, despite everything she had told you about him?” I asked, glancing down at the little pile of dust which was growing bigger. “Was it because you could sympathize with him in some way, could understand what he had done? Just like how you understood his motives for killing the landlord?”

“No!” Jack suddenly spat, shaking his head from side to side as if confused. He rubbed at his narrow temples with his fingers and looked at me. “I just couldn’t ever remember my father being like that. My memories of him were different to the pictures she was painting inside my head of him. So one day, I went to my mother and said…

Chapter Thirteen

Jack

“How did my father get away with behaving like he did?”

“Your father had two sides to him. He acted normal in front of others, but in our cave, when the shutter was down, his true self would come out and he would hurt me and your sisters.

Then there were those darker times when he would disappear for days beyond the fountain and the forests into the human world. I did try telling my mother once, but even she didn’t believe me.”

“How come?” I asked her.

“Well, your father was so plausible.

Whenever my mother came to the cave, she would see how nice it was, the tidy yard, and all of the toys he had given you. Joshua would be on his best behaviour and be very polite and courteous.

She fell for it.”

I accepted her explanation and used it in the future to try and reconcile the conflict I had when remembering him alongside the terrifying stories my mother continued to tell me about him. I believe she told me these stories to instill in me what a monster my father could be. I racked my memory but could not recall any incidents of my father acting in an aggressive way. I remembered him as a soft and quiet man. See, one of my clearest memories showed my father in a completely different light, and I just couldn’t get it from my head, however much my mother tried to hide it with her tales.

We weren’t the richest of Lycanthropes, but we weren’t poor, either. My father was a carpenter. I remember my father had just been paid, and we had congregated by the shutter to our cave. We were going to the marketplace to buy meat and vegetables to keep us fed for the week.

My father always kept his money rolled tightly together with a piece of string. He would free several paper notes and hand them to my mother to pay the market traders for the food. The rest of the money he would deposit with the bankers on the other side of the market. He would go ahead, deposit the money, and then meet us in the market in time to help my mother carry home the sacks of vegetables. So as usual, he set off minutes before us and disappeared between the maze of narrow passages. As we left our cave, mother spied something on the ground on the other side of the shutter, and picked it up. As she straightened, I saw the money, rolled together by that piece of string, in my mother’s hand. Lorre spoke up, stating that our father must have dropped it.

Mother turned and pulled us close, and whispered, “Don’t you dare tell your father that I have this money! I need it more than he does. It’s mine now.”

She didn’t say another word and led us down through the caves to the market, where other Lycanthrope hustled the market traders, seeking the best of the food which was displayed there. It wasn’t long before my father joined us.

He looked pale and panic-stricken. He approached my mother.

“Oh, Kathy, I can’t find the money. I’ve lost my wages!”

Hearing the worry in my father’s voice, my stomach somersaulted and I glanced at my sisters. My brother lay asleep in the sling across my mother’s back, blissfully unaware.

My mother spoke sharply to my father, “What do you mean you’ve lost your wages!”

“I got all the way to the banker’s, but when I got there, it was gone!” he said, rummaging through his trouser pockets. “I must have dropped it somewhere!”

Mother grew angry and spoke to him as if he were a disobedient schoolboy. “I just don’t believe you, Joshua! How are we going to buy food without any money?”

My father continued to rummage through his pockets, hoping he would find the roll of paper bank notes hidden in some recess of clothing his fingers hadn’t yet explored. He spoke again, “I’m sorry, Kathy. I just don’t know what could have happened to it... I just don’t...”

Wheeling around, she turned her back on my father and walked away. As she went, she spoke loud enough for him to hear. “Useless!

Absolutely useless!” She glanced back at my sisters, her eyes bright and fiery, and growled, “Come on!”