He was letting her know he was close. In a strange way, it scared me and filled me with excitement. I glanced over my shoulder. Was he watching me now? I wondered. He had outwitted the Vampyrus which had tracked him over the last four years. What had he been doing in that time?

Was he really trying to find some way of proving his innocence like my mother had suggested? I had so many questions going around in my head that it hurt. There was one thing I just couldn’t figure out: Why had my father left a basket filled with lumps of raw, bloody meat for my mother?

That just had to be a warning of some kind.

I think she knew that, too. My mother was on edge for weeks after that night. I didn’t believe she could run away again, although I suspected she may have considered the idea. So she returned to what she knew best, feeding our heads, mine in particular, with hideous stories of my father, in the hope I would never want to see him again. Perhaps even lie for her again.

A few weeks later, she invited Kara and me into her bedroom. As I have said, my mother rarely discussed our father at great length when we were all together, and I had always believed she had kept her frightening stories just for me.

On this occasion, I shared with my sister, Kara, the most horrific story I had ever heard. Mother explained, in her usual emotionless tone, that just after Lorre had been born, our father had returned from the human world with a baby. I wanted to ask where he had found the baby, but my mother soon filled in the blanks.

“Just like the Lycanthrope did before the Elders cursed our race,” she explained, “your father crept into a human home. Lycanthropes can’t just take a human baby. It has to be given away by the baby’s mother. So just like our ancestors, he transfixed the mother with his stare and she unknowingly handed her baby over to him.

He raced back to the caves with the baby in his arms. On seeing the baby, I knew at once why Joshua had taken it. I begged him to return the baby, knowing there would be no redemption for him once he had killed the baby. He couldn’t contain his murderous lust and the curse which now possessed him, so he killed the baby.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It felt as if the bedroom walls were closing in on me.

As if my head were being crushed in a vice.

Sickeningly, she continued, either oblivious to or simply not caring about the distress her account was causing me and my sister.

“He kept the remains for another week or so, hidden in a bucket at the back of the cave. I begged him to take the baby away, to bury it somewhere. If it should be discovered, I would be blamed just as much as he.”

I heard Kara begin to sob and I covered my ears with my hands. Mother insisted I remove them as she thought it was important I understood what my father was really like. She continued and I closed my eyes. If I had to hear her, I didn’t want to see her. Uncaringly, she persisted, “Your father was an artist just like you, Jack. Perhaps that’s where you get it from?”

I closed my eyes tighter still.

“He painted a picture of the bucket and its contents. He drew a picture of a clock without any hands. This he told me was meant to show the baby lost in time.”

With my eyes closed, I could picture this terrible scene and I snapped them open. Kara had turned away from my mother and was now sitting with her back to her. I could see her shoulders shaking as she continued to cry. Even though Kara and I were both visibly distressed, our mother continued, claiming eventually he smuggled the decomposed body back to the woods and buried it in a shallow grave. To hear this story made me truly understand how evil the Lycanthrope – my own race – and my own father could be. No wonder the Vampyrus hunted us down and killed us. Did we deserve any more than that?

Bewilderingly, my mother stated in her heart she knew that the baby was with the Elders now, and it blamed her as much as Joshua for its death. What she asked next I found really creepy – sick.

“That child is watching me because of what your father did,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Will you pray and ask the Elders and that child to forgive me?”

She pulled both of us close to her and embraced us. I sat there numbly as she apologised for upsetting us, but went on to add she thought we should know what our father was really like.

To be honest, I didn’t want to know.

Could I really have a father who was capable of doing such wicked and barbaric things?

Did he really murder that baby? Was it watching my mother with the Elders? All of these questions terrified me.

Chapter Seventeen

Jack

For my 13th birthday, Father Paul gave me a small bag of tools and a foldaway workbench. Apart from the drawing and painting, I had shown a flair for woodwork at school. My father had been a carpenter, so when Father Paul asked what I would like for my birthday, I asked for some carpentry tools.

My mother ignored me for the best part of a week after that, only speaking to me when Father Paul was at home. Once he had gone, the frost would reappear and I would be left alone. On occasions, I longed to tell Father Paul what she was like towards me when he wasn’t around. I could see how fond he was of my mother and she appeared to be fond of him. It worried me that if I told him, he might confront her about it. This in turn would leave me to face my mother’s wrath, or even worse, Father Paul might have distanced himself from her and I didn’t want to lose him from my life.

The next time Mother spent any real time with me, she took me out and bought a small rosebush. She got me to plant it in the backyard for her.

“Why the roses?” I asked her. She had never shown any interest in growing flowers before.

“It’s in remembrance to that poor child your father murdered,” she said.

“Oh?” I said, my flesh turning cold.

“From now on it’s your job to tend to it.

God forbid you let that plant die!” she warned me and went back into the house.

That summer we crammed ourselves into Father Paul’s beat-up old truck. Father Paul’s brother owned a cottage in Wales, so he took us there for a secret two-week break. His brother’s holiday cottage was a long way up a winding road, which became narrower and narrower until the bracken on either side scratched the side of the old truck.

The cottage sat back from a steep cliff edge and at night, as I lay silently in bed, I could hear the sounds of the waves booming against the rocks below. The house had three bedrooms, one of which I shared with my brother. My sisters shared another, and Father Paul and my mother shared the third. It was the first time I’d realised they had ever shared a room together. This didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me until one morning, I walked into their bedroom unannounced. Here I discovered them curled up in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms. I remember them looking up at me as I walked in. My mother pulled the sheets up beneath her chin, and Father Paul shooed me away with a flick of his hand. I left the room, shutting the door behind me, the warnings that it was forbidden by the Elders for a Vampyrus and Lycanthrope to mix screaming around inside my head. Neither my mother or Father Paul had said anything to me. Neither of them looked concerned that they were breaking the laws of the Elders. They had just been lying there together, holding each other as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

It shocked me at first to see my mother lying there with her face nestled against his bare chest. Not because he was a Blackcoat and a Vampyrus, but because the last person I had seen her sharing a bed with had been my father.

That was the last holiday I ever shared with Lorre. I believe she had reluctantly come on holiday with us that summer. She was seventeen now, and had her own friends within the small Lycanthrope community living away from the caves. I discovered she was fond of a young male named James, and he lived in the richer part of town. His father had done well to keep the curse at bay, and had successfully managed to find himself a senior position at the bank, working secretly alongside the humans. I believed Lorre had been embarrassed about bringing James back to our home. Although we had the basics, we still only had one room that was carpeted. All the rooms were still battleship grey in colour and hadn’t seen a coat of paint since we had moved in. The furniture was secondhand and shabby-looking. So whenever James came to collect Lorre, she would make sure she was ready well in advance, and would dash out of the house and whisk him away.

It was just before her eighteenth birthday when Lorre had plucked up the courage to bring James home. She had intended to spend the day with him, and then bring him home during the evening. I recall she had specifically taken the time to clean the house and tidy her bedroom so as to make a good impression. However, whilst she was out on her date, my mother had gone around the house and undid all the tidying she had done.

Mother then ransacked Lorre’s bedroom drawers and threw the contents around the room.

Lorre arrived home shortly after, and once she had introduced James to us, they disappeared upstairs to get away from the now untidy home.

Within minutes Lorre was dragging James back down the stairs, and without saying a word, they slipped out of the house.

A couple of weeks later I heard Lorre sobbing from behind her bedroom door. I asked my mother what had upset Lorre so much.

With a wry smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, she said, “James doesn’t want to see Lorre anymore. I don’t know why she’s so bothered, all Lycanthrope males are the same.

They can’t be trusted.”

I don’t know if my mother’s behaviour that night was to blame, but on her eighteenth birthday, Lorre left home and I didn’t know where she had gone, or if I would ever see her again.

Although as a child I was never really close to Lorre, I felt a great sense of loss.

Christmas arrived the same month Lorre left, and with it came another huge pile of presents – another warning I guessed – from our father.

Mother had smugly told us only a few days before we wouldn’t be getting anything from him that Christmas, as she had been assured by Father Paul’s brother, who was hunting my father, that he was close to being captured. So when my mother opened the door to find another bunch of present for us and another basket of raw, bloody meat for her, she howled and raked her long claws along the wall in the hallway. Again, the kids at the church got a free pile of presents, and much to my mother’s despair, I think she finally realised my father wasn’t ready to be captured by the Vampyrus just yet.