Dead Flesh (11 page)

“She’s right,”
Isidor said. “Who knows what changes would have happened if you had
chosen the Vampyrus over the humans or the other way around.
However, had you chosen there would have still been changes to the
world. You were in an impossible situation.”

“The Elders
said that I would be cursed for failing to make a choice,” I told
them, unable to look in their eyes. “They weren’t kidding, were
they?”

“It’s the
Elders who have done this, not you, Kiera,” Potter said.

“But it’s me
who has to put it right,” I said, still unable to look at them.

“Not just you,”
Kayla said, gently squeezing my shoulder. “We’re all a part of
this. We’ve all come back. Like you said, Kiera, we’ve come back
for a reason.”

“We just need
to find out what that reason is,” Isidor said softly.

“I think that’s
obvious, don’t you?” Potter snapped at him.

“Okay, keep
your halo on,” Isidor bit back. “So what is the reason?”

“Like the guy
in the shop said,” Potter hissed. “We push back. And we push
hard.”

“But where do
we start?” Kayla asked him.

“How about with
that email?” he said, pointing at the laptop screen.

The three of us
turned our heads to see that an email had appeared in my inbox. The
subject line read:

I’ve been pushed!

Kiera

Within an hour
of receiving the email, the sender was sitting across from me in
the consulting room that I had prepared earlier that day. Elizabeth
Clarke was in her early twenties and very pretty, something that
Isidor had obviously noticed. He sat to the side of me, his mouth
open. Elizabeth had blond hair that she had piled on top of her
head in a loose-fitting bun. Little wisps of hair lay against her
perfectly formed cheekbones. Her green eyes twinkled and her full
lips glowed with a faint shade of pink lipstick. She was smartly
dressed in a white blouse and light blue pencil skirt and
jacket.

“Are you any
good?” she asked me.

“At what?” I
smiled back, but I knew what she meant. I had advertised my
services as a private investigator and she wanted to know if she
was going to be wasting her money or not.

She glanced at
Potter who slouched against the wall in the corner, lost in a cloud
of cigarette smoke, then at Isidor and Kayla who sat on either side
of me. “Perhaps I’ve wasted my time,” she said, getting up from her
seat.

“You’re not
married, Miss Clarke,” I started, and winked at Kayla. God, this
was so easy but it felt so damn good to be back at doing what I
enjoyed the most. “However, you are dating someone and he hasn’t
shaved for at least two days. You’re a school teacher by
profession. You were raised in the town of Wood Hill but left some
years ago and haven’t been back for some time. You live in a city
that is some distance away. Your journey today was long enough for
you to need to stop at a petrol station and refill your car. You’ve
come about a family matter. Not a friend. A member of your
family…”

“Okay, you’ve
made your point,” Elizabeth said, sitting back down. “How did you
know all that stuff about me – have you researched me in some
way?”

“All I knew was
from what you said in your email, that you had been pushed and that
your name was Elizabeth,” I assured her.

“So how do you
know then?” she asked me. “Are you psychic?”

“No,” I smiled,
shaking my head.

“She sees
things,” Isidor added.

“So you are a
psychic then,” Elizabeth said. “I have no need for one of
those.”

“You’re not
married because you don’t wear a wedding ring,” I smiled. “That was
the easy part. You haven’t removed one or forgotten to put it on as
there is no red mark left on your finger. You are, however, in a
relationship with a man who either hasn’t shaved for a few days or
has a very short beard. He has travelled with you and is probably
waiting for you back at your motel.”

“How can you be
so sure about that?” Elizabeth asked me, looking startled.

With my
fingertip, I tapped my cheek and said, “Miss Clarke, your cheeks
have a rather healthy glow, as does your chin. That might be due to
exceptionally good health, but the redness to the chin – no that
looks more like a rash of some kind – like you’ve been kissing a
man recently who hasn’t shaved. He has travelled with you today as
you’ve come a long distance and the rash would have faded by now.
The spattering of chalk dust on your right sleeve tells me that you
have been writing recently on a chalkboard, which suggests that you
are a teacher of some kind. The raised pimple of flesh on the
middle finger of your right hand tells me that you like to write a
lot – more than just the occasional note or two, so I’m guessing
your mark a lot of homework.”

“And how do you
know that I’ve travelled a long distance today…”

Before she had
the chance to finish her question, I said, “By the fact that you
needed to refill your car with petrol - you’ve splashed some on
your skirt. You would have only come such a long distance if it was
a matter of urgency. For instance, a problem with a family member.
I’m guessing by the fact that you are staying in a motel that it is
a brother or sister who is working in this area. If it had been a
parent, you would be staying with them.”

“How can you be
so sure that I’m staying at a motel?” Elizabeth asked.

“Because no one
would have left their own home on such a wet night dressed like you
are now,” I smiled at her. “When you set off today, you had no idea
that the weather would be so bad once you got here and you hadn’t
packed adequate clothing.”

“Very good,”
Elizabeth said staring at me.

“Good?” Kayla
gasped, “That was awesome!”

Not wanting to
waste any more time, I looked at Elizabeth. “You said in your email
that you’ve been pushed. Please explain what you mean by that?”

With the back
of her hand, Elizabeth knocked away one of the loose strands of
hair and said, “I saw your advert in the shop window and it
reminded me of something my sister used to say.”

“Your sister?”
I asked her. “And where is your sister now?”

“What makes you
think that she has gone somewhere?” Elizabeth shot back.

“You spoke of
her in the past tense,” I smiled. “What was her name?”

“Emily,”
Elizabeth said, taking a picture from her pocket and sliding it
across the table towards me.

I picked it up,
glanced at the photo and said, “An identical twin?”

“Yes,” she
nodded. “We were identical in more ways than just our looks. Emily,
like me, was a teacher. I’ve taught now for the past two years at a
school in Linden.”

“Don’t you mean
Lond…” Isidor started and I kicked him under the table.

“Please
continue, Miss Clarke,” I smiled at her.

“Emily decided
against a career in Linden and decided to teach closer to where we
were raised in the town of Wood Hill,” Elizabeth continued. “She
was so happy when she got herself a position at Ravenwood’s, a
nearby private school. The pay was good and she seemed very happy
for a time.”

“So what
changed all of that?” I asked her, my interest growing in the case
on hearing that Elizabeth’s sister had been working at Ravenwood
School.

“The wolves
came,” Elizabeth said. “As you well know, we all spend most of our
teenage years fearing that the wolves would come to our town to
match, but obviously like yourselves, we were lucky and the wolves
didn’t choose our home town while we grew up. So we escaped the
matching. Like everyone else, we heard the stories and the rumours
about the schools and the children where the wolves had chosen.
That’s one of the reasons that both Emily and I decided to be
teachers, we wanted to try and help those children should the
wolves ever arrive at the schools where we taught. I think
somewhere deep inside the both of us, we both prayed that would
never happen. As you know, it has been more than five years since
the wolves came to match and this time around they chose the school
where Emily taught. We have always been close even though we have
lived apart over the last few years,” Elizabeth continued, and I
could see tears standing in her eyes as she recalled her sister.
“Within days of the wolves arriving at Ravenwood School, the
teachers there started to leave.”

“Why?” I asked,
curious to know what had taken place there.

“The wolves
arrived, but you must understand that they don’t look like wolves,
they look just like us humans,” she explained. “They wear the skins
of the children that they matched with years ago. They erected
searchlights and towers and covered the tops of the walls with
razor wire. Emily called me one night and said that Ravenwood was
now more like a prison than a school. She told me that some of the
parents had tried to break into the school to free their children,
they wanted the treaty that had been agreed to hundreds of years
ago ripped up.”

“What happened
to these parents?” Potter asked, stepping from the corner of the
room.

“Emily didn’t
say,” she answered him. “I remember one night that she was very
upset and I could tell that she had been crying. A pack of juvenile
wolves had arrived wanting to be matched. Emily had been close to
all of her students but she had a couple of favourites. Both of
these had been chosen for matching and she said that they changed –
they were no longer the children that she had once taught. Within
days they had left and she never saw them again, nor did their
parents.”

“How had they
changed?” Kayla asked.

“Emily didn’t
say,” Elizabeth said, and I watched as a tear spilled from the
corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “But I knew she was,
at times, terrified of what was happening at Ravenwood. Then, she
started ringing me and saying that she had started to be plagued by
vivid dreams. In these dreams she saw a different world. At first I
thought it was just Emily wishing that things could be different,
but she became convinced that the world as we know it had
been…pushed…somehow. That’s how she described it, Miss Hudson, just
like you did in your advert. Emily started to believe that the
world had been pushed off course. She told me that the world had
once been different. Where there weren’t any wolves – Skin-walkers.
She described a world not too dissimilar to the one we know, but it
was a world where children weren’t matched.”

“Where is Emily
now?” I asked her, wishing that I could speak with her to discover
what else she knew.

“She’s
vanished,” Elizabeth said, trying to fight off a stream of tears
that were desperate to roll down the length of her face.

“Vanished how?”
Isidor gently asked her while handing her a piece of tissue.

“Thank you,”
she said, mopping away her tears. “I believe she has been
murdered.”

“What makes you
think that?” Potter cut in.

“Emily told me
that the Headmaster of the school just left or disappeared,”
Elizabeth explained. “A wolf by the name of McCain took his place.
He was a harsh man and he replaced the teachers with people who
wore hoods and gowns. Emily told me that you couldn’t see their
faces. These new teachers, if that’s what they were, were cruel to
the children. Emily said that on several occasions their cruelness
was something close to brutal. She went to McCain and objected at
what she had witnessed. McCain told her that if she didn’t like how
the school was being run, she was free to leave. But Emily couldn’t
– she wanted to stay and protect the children, and besides, like
most of the other teachers had, she lived on the school grounds, it
was her home.

“Then, one
night she called me to say that she had woken the night before to
find McCain standing in her room, staring down at her while she
slept. She asked him what he wanted and what he was doing in her
room in the middle of the night, but he left without giving an
explanation. Emily said she was now in fear for her own safety and
I begged her to leave. But she told me how she had bought herself
one of those tiny video cameras. She explained that she was going
to try and capture on film some of the cruelty that the children
endured at Ravenwood School and then send it to the press. She was
also going to hide the camera in her room at night to see what it
was that McCain was doing in there while she slept. Emily feared
that he had perhaps been into her room before but she hadn’t
woken.”

“And did she
capture anything on film?” I asked her, now gripped by the
story.

“I don’t know,”
Elizabeth said, that red rash on her cheeks now gone. “I haven’t
heard from Emily since that last phone call. I’ve tried ringing her
mobile, I’ve sent emails, but have heard nothing from my sister.
I’ve tried to contact McCain but he refuses to return my calls. So
today, unable to continue with my life until I find out what has
happened to my sister, my boyfriend, Harry and I drove the long
distance to Wood Hill to visit Ravenwood School. We didn’t get any
further than the main gates, which are locked with chains and
padlocks. Emily was not exaggerating when she said that Ravenwood
had become something close to a prison.

“Eventually,
McCain came down to the gates and told me to go away before he
called the police. But I could see in his eyes that he had murdered
Emily,” Elizabeth said.

“How can you be
so sure?” I asked her.

“Because when
he saw me standing at the gates, he looked as if he had seen a
ghost,” she said. “He hadn’t known that Emily had an identical
twin. For a moment, he thought I was her.”

“What did he
say?” I asked her.

“After
realising his mistake, McCain told us that Emily had left the
school some weeks ago, but I knew that was a lie because I’d only
spoken to her a few days before,” Elizabeth said. “Knowing that
McCain would never tell me the truth, Harry and I headed back into
town and paid a visit to the local police station. I spoke to an
officer there by the name of Banner, but he didn’t seem interested.
It took me over half an hour to get him to agree to file a missing
persons report. So, feeling as if I had wasted my time and was
still no nearer to the truth, we decided to stay in town, but we
soon realised that the place was like, really weird.”