Chapter One
Kiera
Potter had wanted to talk, but I had nothing to say. Well, that wasn’t entirely true – I had plenty I wanted to say to him. First, I wanted to get my thoughts straight. I needed to know each word that was going to trip off the end of my tongue; like placing one foot in front of the other. I didn’t want Potter to jump in – make his excuses – before I’d had the chance to say what I wanted to.
As I stood in the vacant bedroom, peering through the dirty window and down the hill, Potter paced the wooden floorboards behind me. I glanced to my right and spied the pool of black blood my father had left behind on the floor. In the colourless morning sun, I could see the blood had dried into the shape of a butterfly. It looked like one of those pictures kids did in year-one at school, where they folded over the sheet of paper, squashing the thick globules of paint and spreading it flat to make some abstract pattern. I looked back out of the window. Murphy was making his way back up the hill. He trudged through the snow, which covered his police trousers almost to the knee. I watched silently as he came towards the cottage, and his hands looked red as if covered in blood. I looked harder and could see that they weren’t covered in blood, but instead were red-raw with cold where he had dug his brother’s – my father’s – grave. Murphy’s silver hair flopped over his brow and sparkled in the morning light.
He looked tired. His face was drawn, thick, deep lines cut across it. The wrinkles gave the appearance that his face had cracked – turned to stone. I looked down and could see a mass of tiny cracks covering the backs of my hands. Potter must have caught me looking at them, as he came up beside me and took my hands in his.
I looked into his face. The bruises around his eyes, mouth, and jawline had started to fade.
They now looked like yellow and green shadows.
His nose looked bent out of shape, but then again, it had always looked broken; it’s what gave his face that rugged, thuggish look. Holding my hands in his, he stared at me with his jet-black eyes.
“Talk to me, Kiera,” he whispered.
“I have nothing to say to you,” I said, easing my hands free of his and looking back out of the window.
“You can’t ignore me forever,” Potter said.
“I’m not ignoring you,” I said, watching Murphy reach the police van which was parked outside. With his raw-looking hands, he clawed the snow from the windshield. “I’m angry with you.
You lied to me...”
“I know you’re angry with me,” Potter said, “But you still need me.”
“Need you?” I gasped, wheeling around on him. “I don’t need you for anything.”
Potter glanced down at my hands, then back at me. “Your flesh is starting to turn to stone again. You can feed on me if you want,” he said, loosening the collar of his dark coat and exposing his neck.
“I’d rather feed on a skinwalker,” I snapped, pushing past him.
“It might come to that if you’re not prepared to feed off me,” Potter said. “We’re right out of the red stuff – Lot-13.”
I shot a look at him, my innards starting to ache again. Slowly, I crossed the room, coming to rest inches from Potter. He looked at me, tilting his head back. I could see the thick veins running like wires beneath his pale skin. I wanted what flowed within them. I wanted Potter. I was in love with him, despite what he had done, and I hated myself for feeling like that. Taking a step closer, so our bodies brushed against each other’s, I reached out with my right hand and placed it gently on the nape of his neck. His skin felt ice-cold. Potter closed his eyes as my lips brushed against his neck. I placed my left hand into his coat pocket and reached for what I knew he had hidden there. I curled my fingers around one of the glass bottles.
“You lie,” I whispered in his ear, then pulled away.
Snapping his eyes open, Potter looked down at the glass tube of Lot-13 I held in my hand. “How did you know they were there?” he asked.
“The bulge in your coat pocket,” I said, taking no satisfaction from discovering that he had lied to me again. “I would’ve had to be blind not to have seen that.”
“It could have been anything,” he said, with a sideways smile, knowing that he had been caught out again.
“I heard them clinking in your pocket,” I explained.
“So you have super-duper hearing, as well as sight now?” Potter smirked. “Is that a wolf thing?”
“You bastard,” I breathed, rolling my free hand into a fist and smashing it into the bridge of his nose. Potter’s head rocked backwards as a fine spray of what looked like white dust seeped from between my clenched fingers.
Potter shook his head from side to side and looked at me. He said nothing.
“So you hate me now, is that it?” I snapped at him. “You hate me because you know I’m part Lycanthrope? We all know how much you hate the wolves.”
“I don’t hate you,” Potter said, his eyes fixed on mine. “I love you, Kiera.”
“You have a funny way of showing it,” I said, unscrewing the cap on the glass tube. My fingers trembled as it came free in my hand.
“You’ve lied to me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Potter said, his voice calm, just above a whisper.
I threw my head back and let the red stuff wash over my tongue. Its taste was bitter, a poor substitute for the real thing, but it would do. At once, those hunger pangs in my stomach eased.
As I re-screwed the cap, I glanced at my hands and watched those tiny cracks fade again. For how long, I didn’t know. I placed the empty tube into my pocket, and wiped the last of the Lot-13