“I don’t believe you!” I barked, jumping to my feet. “They are my sisters.”

“I’m so sorry,” my father whispered, getting to his feet and looking at me. “Your mother stole Lorre and Kara from the human world. They are not like us.”

“But why?” I said, shaking from head to toe so violently that those toy cars fell from my fists and into the sand. “You should have sent them back to their homes – to their mothers.”

“Sent them back where?” my father said with a shake of his head. “I didn’t know from who or where she had taken them. What was I to do?

Take them and leave them in the forest? Take them back to the humans and just dump them somewhere? What if I had been caught by the Vampyrus?”

“You were a coward!” I roared at him.

“I know,” he said, looking back out across the black waters of the lake. “And that is my curse, Jack. I am a coward.”

“Do my sisters know?” I demanded, clenching my fists.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Why should they? They have no memory of being taken. They were raised with us – like a Lycanthrope. They’ll grow up believing that they have beaten the curse.”

“I think Lorre might know she is different somehow,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

“She left home on her eighteenth birthday and never came back,” I told him. “I haven’t seen her since.”

“Maybe she does know then,” my father said softly.

“What about my little brother – Nik?” I hissed. “Was he stolen, too?”

“No!” my father said. “And neither were you. Both of you are my sons. Both of you are Lycanthrope.”

“And what of the baby she murdered?” I asked, my stomach strangled into knots by that ice-cold hand.

“Your mother stole the baby just like she did Lorre and Kara,” he started to explain. His face looked as if the colour had been sapped from it. “In her haste to get away, your mother believed she had stolen a little girl. But when back in the safety of the caves, she removed the blankets the baby was wrapped in, and realised her mistake.

The child was male.”

“So?” I asked.

“Your mother didn’t like boys,” he said.

“Apparently as a child she was hurt quite badly by her older brother. She thought all boys were cruel creatures, so she killed…”

“She told me about her brother,” I cut in.

“She said he poured pepper in her eyes and tried to poison her with wild berries.”

“I think it was that which…” he started.

“That’s why she was cruel to me,” I breathed. “It was like she was getting her own back on her brother somehow.”

“Perhaps?” my father said thoughtfully.

There was another long silence between us as I tried to get to grips with everything he was telling me. Then looking at him, I said, “So did you get rid of that dead baby just like you disposed of that man?”

“No!” he said, with a grimace. “I wanted nothing to do with the murder of a child. Your mother took the baby and buried it. I don’t know where. I didn’t want to know. I had helped her once before and that had trapped me. I wasn’t going to incriminate myself any further in her crimes.”

“You could have gone to the Vampyrus!”

I insisted.

“I couldn’t! Your mother was carrying you at the time. I hoped that a child of her own would settle her. Besides, she got in with that Blackcoat and found the Elders’ religion. I thought that her curse would be sedated, if not cured, as she was in with the Blackcoat. How would she be able to carry on if she was amongst the very people who would kill her if they discovered what she was truly like? I wasn’t going to walk out on you or Lorre and Kara. I feared what she might do to you all if I were not around.”

“You could have taken us – run away!” I insisted.

“Run where?” he said back – not angrily.

He sounded more frustrated, as if he were desperate to try and prove his innocence to me.

“Do you know what it’s like being tracked by the Vampyrus? They are relentless. It’s been hard enough for me on my own since your mother made those accusations about me. I wouldn’t have gotten very far with three children. And what would your mother have said? I had stolen her three children, two of which she would say I had stolen from the humans. That’s what she would have said, Jack. I was trapped – you’ve got to believe me.”

“I do want to believe you,” I whispered, but my mind was so fucked up by now. I no longer knew what to believe.

My father took a step towards me, and placing one hand on my shoulder, he said, “If I were this monster your mother has told you I am, why didn’t I just run and run and run? Why did I risk coming each year and leaving you those presents? Do you know how dangerous that was for me?”

I looked at him, and he stared into my eyes. I thought of all those presents he had sent us. “Why did you leave that raw bloody meat for my mother?”

“It was meant as a warning,” he said. “I was trying to remind her of the blood she had spilt, the flesh she had torn apart,” he said. “I was hoping I could scare her – make her believe that if I was captured, I would tell the Vampyrus and the Elders everything – that I wouldn’t fall alone.”

“But you were caught in the end,” I said.

“There was a trial and the Elders believed you.”

My father took his hand from my shoulder, and with a look of confusion on his face, he said, “I was never captured. There was no trial before the Elders.”

“Yes there was,” I said, searching his clear blue eyes again. “Earlier this year, Mother and Father Paul disappeared for a week or more, and on their return, they said that they had been in The Hollows, that there had been a trial…”

“Is that what they told you?” he barked.

“There was no trial – I was never captured.”

“But…” I started, my brain beginning to squirm.

“On my return last Candlemas to leave those presents, I discovered a secret about your mother and that Blackcoat. A secret that would destroy both of them. A secret far darker than the lies your mother has spread about me. So I paid the Blackcoat a visit and told him what I knew. I threatened to tell the Elders if he didn’t get his brother and his team of Vampyrus that hunted me off my back. I told him your mother had to withdraw her accusations or I would give up their secret! They agreed, and I was free of the lies and the Vampyrus hunters at last.”

“I know their secret, too. They mixed and it is forbidden…” I started.

“Their secret was far darker than any mixing they might have got up to,” my father said.

“What is this secret?” I asked, feeling as if I were going to be sick.

Slowly, my father took a step closer to me, leaned close, and in a whisper he said, “Your mother and Father Paul…”

He suddenly stopped mid-sentence and my face was splashed with something hot and sticky. I flinched backwards, and touched my face. I looked at my fingers and could see that they were covered in blood – my father’s blood.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jack

My father made a gargling noise in the back of his throat, and staggered backwards, his hands to his chest. I looked at his hand as blood trickled between his fingers. There was something else sticking out of his chest – a claw! I looked past my father to see a spray of shadow, like huge, black wings beating incredibly fast. Then they were gone and so was the claw that had been sticking out from my father’s chest. My father slumped forward, then onto his knees. I ran towards him, taking him in my arms.

My heart was beating in my ears like a drum. “Dad!” I cried out.

He rolled back in my arms, his head resting in the crook of my elbow. His eyes flickered open then closed as a thick line of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Please, Dad,” I cried out. “Please don’t die. We’ve only just met again. I don’t want to lose you.”

His eyes slowly opened, just showing the whites. My father made a gargling noise in the back of his throat as if he were trying to say something.

With tears streaming from my eyes and onto his face, I leant close to him. With my ear just over his mouth, he whispered something.

“Dad, what are you saying?” I whispered.

He tried again, his words nothing more than deep, labored rasps. “You believe…me…

please say…”

“I do believe you,” I whispered back, cradling him in my arms, his blood staining my coat.

“Tell your…” he said, trying to gargle around a throat full of blood. “…mother that the Vampyrus have found…”

“Found what?” I begged, knowing that time was short for him.

“The baby’s…grave,” he said, eyes half-closed. “If she played…no part in that baby…

boy’s death…she wouldn’t know…”

He coughed a thick, black blood clot from the back of his throat, spattering my face and coat.

Trying to figure out what it was he was trying to tell me, I hugged him tight in my arms and whispered, “What was my mother’s and Father Paul’s secret?”

With his bloody lips pressed to my ear, he whispered, “Your sister…” Then he relaxed in my arms, his head rolling to one side as if wanting to look away from me.

“What about my sister?” I shouted, shaking his lifeless body. “Which sister?”

My father’s blank face stared back at me, his mouth and eyes open. I let him roll from my arms and fall face-first into the sand. I clambered to my feet. My heart was beating so fast now, and I could feel a well of anger coursing through my veins like seething lava. Throwing back my head, I howled and howled up at the moon. Tears of anger and frustration poured over my cheeks, and I howled until I thought my throat was red raw.