“What have you done?” I roared at him.

“I couldn’t help it,” he yelped, then started to lick his snout clean.

I leapt across the room, swiping him from the bed, but I knew he couldn’t help it any more than I could. What kind of father figure had I been to him after all? I had killed for lust ever since I had stolen him away into the night. He was only doing what I had done. I had changed him, like my mother had changed me.

Then in the distance, I heard the sound of police sirens. Taking hold of Nik by his snout, I raised his head and looked into his eyes. “Want to be a wolf, then you can spend the rest of your life captured like one. Now get out of here and never come back. You’re on your own.”

Nik looked up at me, and I could see the sadness in his eyes. He flicked his long tail left and right. “I’m sorry…” he started.

“Get away from me. I don’t know you anymore!” I shouted, the sound of a police car screeching to a halt outside. “You mean nothing to me.”

Nik looked back once more, woofed at me, then was gone, leaping through the open window and out into the night. I knew that captured in the form of a wolf, he would find it impossible to ever lure another woman away to her death. I didn’t want him to be like me. I didn’t want him to be like our mother.

With the sound of feet racing up the stairs, I climbed onto the bed and covered myself in the dead woman’s blood. When those cops came charging into the room, they saw me with my face in her torn-open stomach.

“Get off her, you filthy mutt!” one of them roared.

I looked up and my heart stopped. Father Paul’s brother was standing in the open doorway.

His hair was now white, and he looked a little older, but it was him, the man who had killed my father down by the lake. He looked at me in disgust, but he didn’t recognise me. I had changed so much. I wasn’t that kid he had thrown out into the snow. I was now a man, wrinkled and eaten up with hate.

“Don’t look so fucking surprised, wolf,”

the other said. “It was only a matter of time before we caught up with you.”

I glanced over to see a younger officer with him. It was Potter. I looked back at the other, and with my teeth and claws bared, I launched myself at him. Your friend Jim Murphy was just as quick, and slashed at me with his claws.

Both Murphy and Potter brought me down. I fought like an animal, just wanting to rip Murphy to pieces for what he had done to my father. Then they were joined in the room by a third, Luke, and I was out-matched. Potter stamped all over my face several times until I lost consciousness. I woke to find myself in The Hollows. The trial before the Elders was brief, as I had been discovered by Murphy and the others at the crime scene, my face buried in that young woman’s guts. As you know, I was given twelve life sentences for the twelve women Nik had butchered.

I spent those first few months crippled by rage and hate, just wanting to get my hands on Murphy, but locked beneath ground in The Hollows, I knew that day may never come. Then, just when I had given up hope that I could never get my revenge, Murphy appeared at my cell. He offered me my freedom in exchange for going back behind the Fountain of Souls to the caves, to try and discover the whereabouts of a friend of his called Kayla Hunt.

How could I have refused? I couldn’t. I took his offer, went back to the caves, and set the trap which would lead to his death. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t kill him myself, I had promised Eloisa I would not kill again as we both worked towards having our curse lifted.

The sight of seeing Murphy having his heart ripped from his chest then fed to the wolves was revenge enough for what he did to my father. The rest of the story you know. You betrayed me in The Hollows before the Elders, I killed you, and we’ve all ended up here – in this world that has been pushed!

Chapter Thirty-Two

Kiera

“So that’s why you betrayed Murphy?” I breathed in shock. “He was Father Paul’s brother - the cop who was hunting your father?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me, some of the colour coming back into his eyes.

“That’s why you had my friend killed?” I said, my head spinning from what I had just learnt about Murphy.

“Aren’t you about to kill me for what I’ve done to your father?” he spat at me, the anger coming back into his voice. “Don’t sit there giving me all that little-miss-innocent shit. You are no better than me.”

I looked down at my father, who lay bloody and unconscious on the floor beside me, and I knew Jack was right. I had been prepared to kill him for what he had done to my father and what he was planning to do to Potter. Then, lifting my head I looked at Jack. “You said you were going to tell me about this secret Murphy killed your father for. What was it?”

With a smile tugging at the corners of his lips, and blood covering his chin and shirt, Jack said, “I died in The Hollows not knowing what that secret was. But when I found myself in this pushed world, I realised I had another chance to find out. So I went back to the house on top of the hill, which sat above the church to see if my old friend Father Paul had been pushed too.”

“And had he?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Jack nodded. “He had been pushed right back. But he didn’t recognise me.

Perhaps it was because my appearance had changed so much, I first thought. He invited me into his home, and all those memories came flooding back of sitting before the fire, cleaning the candlesticks and painting pictures. There were slight differences, but that was to be expected, I guess, in a world which had been pushed.”

“What kind of differences?” I asked him, keeping my hand flat against my father’s stomach to stem the blood flow.

“There were pictures, lots of pictures,” he whispered now. “The pictures were of Father Paul and another I recognised. I thought that perhaps I was seeing things. It couldn’t be true.

So I took Father Paul gently by the shoulders and stared into his eyes. It was then that I saw everything.”

“What did you see?” I asked him.

Staring at me through the semi darkness, Jack said, “I saw my mother crying out in pain….

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jack

…There was so much blood. The baby had been born premature. Even though Lycanthrope and Vampyrus females only gestate for about six weeks, the baby had come too early and Father Paul looked petrified. It was dark and the trees of the forest towered above them.

“What should we do?” Father Paul said, looking up at his brother who had blood over his hands and down the front of his police shirt.

“You’re a fucking idiot, little brother!”

Murphy barked.

“Help me, pleeassee!” my mother screamed, lying on the forest floor, her dress hitched up her thighs. “Is my baby dead?”

“Yes, it’s dead,” Murphy barked at her.

“This is what happens when a Lycanthrope and Vampyrus mix. Why do you think the Elders have forbidden mixing between the two species?

Because it ends in death for everyone involved.”

“Please help us, Murphy,” Father Paul begged his brother.

“You should never have gotten me involved in this, Paul!” Murphy roared. “I’m as good as dead as you now if the Elders ever find out what has happened here tonight.”

“Please!” Father Paul pleaded, taking hold of his brother.

Murphy looked down at my mother, then back at Father Paul. Then bending down, he snatched up the lifeless baby in his arms. “This never happened. There was never any baby. We go back to our lives and never breathe a word of this again. And you, little brother, rid yourself of this Lycanthrope woman. She is nothing but trouble.”

Then, turning his back on them and leaving them cradling each other on the forest floor, Murphy raced away, deeper into the forest with the dead baby. He came upon the shore which surrounded the great lake. Then removing his blood-soaked shirt, he filled the pockets and sleeves with rocks. He wrapped this around the baby, and waded out into the lake. When the red waters were waist high, he placed the baby and his shirt into the water. He let go and watched the tiny bundle sink beneath the water. With his heart racing, and looking around to make sure he hadn’t been seen, he made his way back towards the shore. He hadn’t gone very far, when he heard what sounded like the cries of a baby.

Murphy turned around to see that the tiny little bundle had resurfaced and was now floating on top of the red, bloody waters. Carefully, he untied his shirt to find that the baby was very much alive. Panicked by this, and not knowing what he should do, he snatched the baby out of the water and cradled it against his chest. Murphy knew that his brother and my mother believed the baby to be dead and raced back through the forests. He took the child to a young Vampyrus cop who he trusted with his life. He didn’t tell her where the baby had come from, or who and what its parents were. He asked if she could keep the baby safe for just a few days until he had decided what to do next. Days rolled into weeks, and the young female Vampyrus cop fell in love with that baby and told Murphy that she would raise it as her own, never telling anyone how she had come by it.

With no better plan in mind, and both my mother and Father Paul believing the baby to be dead, he decided to let the baby stay with the young female Vampyrus, who was totally unaware that the baby was the result of the forbidden mixing between a Vampyrus and Lycanthrope. But what Murphy didn’t know, was that my father knew about the birth of that baby.

He had been hiding in the woods that night. When Murphy raced away with the dead baby in his arms, my father crept from his hiding place and confronted my mother and Father Paul.

“Get your brother off my back, Blackcoat, and withdraw the charges, Kathy, or I go to the Elders and tell them about what I have seen here tonight,” he threatened them.

Knowing that they had no other choice but to give in to his demands, Father Paul carried my mother back through the forest where she hid in his house for the next week, while she recovered and regained her strength. Despite everything that had happened, and Murphy’s warning to keep away from my mother, Father Paul couldn’t, he was hopelessly in love with her. So as you know, Father Paul went one last time to his older brother for help and was refused. When Murphy realised how deep his brother’s love was for my mother, he paid her a secret visit. He threatened that if she didn’t cut Father Paul out of her life, he would kill her himself.