B007XKEWAE EBOK (13 page)

He just wanted a brief look. After all he had been through, recently in particular, he needed some sort of touchstone back to reality. A reason for him to keep fighting.

If he could think that even with all he had done he was still himself, that he
was somebody’s son and not just a monster. If he could see the loving family that he had once been a part of, maybe that love could give him the strength to go on.

**********

Katy Hawke sat downstairs flicking through the channels on the T.V. There was nothing on that looked like it was worth watching. That seemed to be the norm nowadays, she thought. Her husband, Colin, was upstairs trying to put the twins to bed. Ordinarily they would have been in bed already for over an hour but  had been allowed to stay up to see their uncle Nick.

Besides it wasn't a school night. The twins had been going to the local nursery
school for a couple of months now and had got into a routine with regards bedtime accordingly.

Now that they were at nursery Katy could think about going back to work again. She knew that Colin thought she resented him because he kept his job when she had to leave hers in order to look after the twins.

That hadn't been the plan. With three adults in the house the plan had been for their son to help  with the twins during a couple of gap years so that she could continue to work part-time. Then Colin and Katy were going to pay for him to see the world.

She looked across the room at his picture that still hung there. Her son, Fulton, had gone missing  a couple of years before. The last time she had seen
him was New Years Eve nineteen ninety-nine. Then nothing.

For a long time Colin and Katy had tried to search for him but then other commitments got in the way. Colin had work and they both had to look after the twins. Every so often Katy would fall into a great pit of depression, but each time she hauled herself back out of it. The twins needed her  to be their mother still. Sometimes it felt harsh, but she couldn't neglect her remaining children because of the one she had lost.

She heard Colin coming back down the stairs and focused back on the television screen. She dried her eyes on her sleeve.

Lurking in the shadows outside his old home Fulton saw his father return to
the living room and sit beside his mother. Fulton had watched his Uncle Nick drive away twenty minutes earlier. There was no Aunt Maris but that hadn't looked likely since before Fulton was taken away from them.

Approaching carefully across the lawn, avoiding the light of the nearby street lamp and the illumination cast from the living room window, Fulton made it to the house. Silently he climbed the wall that separated their garden from the neighbour's. Reaching up to the window ledge of the bathroom window he pulled himself up. With catlike agility he walked the ledge and stepped across onto the ledge of the window that had once been his bedroom. The twins had been put to sleep in the larger room decorated for
them so Fulton guessed this would be empty.

Using skills that were almost instinctive to him now, he jimmied the window open and slipped inside. With his enhanced senses he needed no extra light to see around his room.

But it was not his room any more. There was no bed. None of his old posters were on the walls. None of his other stuff was anywhere to be seen. Instead his room was now basically two rooms.

Half the room was a study with a desk and a computer. A handful of text books were on a single shelf. Pieces of paper too deep in the gloom even for him to read covered a notice board on the wall where his stereo system had once sat on some white swivel-brackets.

The other half of the room looked like it was being used for storage for some of the twins’ clothes and toys. Brown boxes were stacked behind an old doorless wardrobe. Girls stuffed toys were jumbled on top. Fulton remembered how the first toy his parents had bought him, a scraggly  brown bear with one eye missing, had once had pride of place on top of his T.V set. He had tried to throw it out when he hit his teens, it was a macho thing, but his mother had kept it and presented it to him upon his eighteenth birthday.

Next to the wardrobe a pair of blue open-topped plastic tubs were overflowing with toys. Fulton had to be careful where he stepped on his way out of the room to negotiate them all without making noise.

He opened the door as quietly as he could and held his breath at the soft shush it made from brushing over the carpet. There was no indication that anyone had heard him. He padded out into the equally dark upstairs landing. He walked past the door to his parents’ bedroom. He glanced down the stairs at his side. A little bar of light showed under the door to the lounge and he could hear his parents breathing and smell their blood in their veins.

A stronger scent came from within his little sisters' room. He could hear the rhythmic sounds of      breathing that came with sleep so Fulton risked opening the door to their room to have a quick look, to see how they had grown. Fulton walked inside between their beds. On either side of him his identical twin
sisters, now over three years old, slept peacefully, beatific expressions on their faces. He just stood there watching them sleep. Listening to them breathe. Watching the shallow rise and fall of their chests under the thick sheets. Hearing the beat of their hearts as it pumped blood around their bodies.

His head was filled with the intoxicating scent of it. A voice from his dreams seemed to speak to him.

"Savour it. Family blood is the sweetest."

He felt the change wash over him as his vampire nature asserted itself. He gazed longingly at his little sisters. He could virtually see the blood coursing through them.

He bent down towards one of the girls. The name painted on the headboard indicated that this was Kelly.

As he reached his hands down to grasp her a gust of wind blew in through the window he had opened, it slammed the door to his old room shut.

Before his sisters could waken at the noise Fulton was out of their room. He opened the door to his old room and was climbing out of the window even as the door to the living room was opened.

By the sounds of the footsteps it was his father who was coming up the stairs. Fulton closed the window and dropped off the ledge. He landed on the path. Face to face with his mother. Only a pane of double glazed glass separated them.

A look of shock crossed her face and Fulton fled quickly, vanishing in the dark night.

This had been a bad idea. Even his parents seemed to have moved on without him. He had to do the same, accept what he was and do what he had to do.

Colin Hawke checked first on the girls. The noise didn't seem to have woken them. Although their door was ajar  he could have sworn that he had closed it earlier. A gust of frigid air came from the combined study and store room that had been his son’s room.

Colin went in and closed the window which had been opened a crack. He could also have sworn that that had been closed. Never mind.

He turned on the lights. He could never forget that this room should have been his son's. In the  back all his sons stuff was packed away in brown boxes waiting for him to return to claim it. On the wall behind his desk was a notice board with cut-outs of the reports of his son's disappearance or copies of the adverts he and Katy had placed  in that agonising time after he vanished. There next to the computer was . . .

Colin walked over. It had been blown from it's place by the wind and he bent to retrieve it from the floor. The scruffy little bear with an eye missing. The first toy his parents had bought for Fulton. He remembered Fulton's embarrassment when Katy presented it to him again in front of all his friends on
his eighteenth birthday. Colin cradled the old bear then set it back in its place.

"I saw him," Katy dashed into the room.

"Hush, you'll wake the girls. Who did you see?" Colin asked.

Katy rushed into his arms. "I was looking out of the window and he just appeared in front of me," she said in a hurry. "I saw Fulton. When I blinked he was gone, but I swear it was him."

Colin held her close and waited for the inevitable gush of tears when she realised that it was just another false hope.

He did not have to wait long.

Gabriella pulled the black knee-length boots on to her feet and zipped them up over her calves. She was pulling them on over a pair of skin-tight painted-on trousers. On top she was already dressed in a burgundy red halter top. A delicate silver chain circled her neck and
plunged down across the top of her chest. With her boots in place she checked herself out in the only full length mirror they owned. It was an antique Francesca had picked up somewhere or other.

Gabriella gave herself an appraising look. She looked hot even if she did say so herself. She had cut her hair to shoulder length and had bleached it to a bone white. Francesca preferred her natural colour but she felt like she needed a change. She had black makeup around her eyes and black lipstick accentuated her mouth. Not that anyone outside the nest would get a look at it any time soon, she thought bitterly. She could always sneak out again, she supposed, but given what happened last time she would rather just wait here for
Francesca to return. She wasn't really feeling up to witnessing a repeat performance.

Gabriella left their private chambers and sauntered down the metal steps to the main floor. A handful of regular vampires hung around down there. The others were out hunting. Xavier had  placed the new group of vampires on sentry duty as a symbol of their pledge of loyalty to Francesca and the nest.  Gabriella had argued that it made no sense to put them in charge of the nest's security if there were doubts about if they could be trusted. But Francesca had taken Xavier's side. So Gabriella capitulated and again she was left behind while Francesca got up to who knew what.

To the edge of the main chamber, near to the area of the steel works that hadn't been refurbished before the project was relocated, Xavier stood beside one of the new joiners who had been very close to Xavier since they rejoined the nest. The pair of them were as thick as thieves. Often she would spy them conspiring quietly together. Jacques, another vampire who Gabriella judged to be more loyal to Xavier than Francesca, had just left them, wandering over to another small group of stay-behinds.

It was no secret to Francesca that Gabriella was distrustful of Xavier. She doubted that Xavier thought she trusted him either. Nor did he try to hide the fact that he disliked her mutually. Gabriella got the impression that Francesca gained
a perverse, as well as sexual, pleasure from having both Gabriella and Xavier sleep with her. She enjoyed that they had to put aside their personal feelings to be with her. It was all very well for her to treat him that way, but Gabriella was supposed to mean more to her than that.

Xavier scanned the nest with wary eyes. When his gaze fell on her he held up a hand to silence his companion. The smile he sent in her direction was unashamedly false. As was the one she offered in reply.

He continued to stare at her obviously waiting for her to turn away and leave before he continued. Instead, just to see if she could provoke a reaction from him, she walked over to join him. He seemed surprised to see her
approaching him. With a single word he dismissed the other vampire.

"Can I help you with something?" he asked her.

She said nothing. She just stared at him with a smile on her face. He turned around on the spot to follow her as she circled him. He had no idea how to react to this behaviour.

"What?" he asked his jaw clenching involuntarily.

She gave her head a subtle shake. "Nothing."

Leaving him bewildered in her wake she moved off to look for some other fun.

Why did that girl keep trying to change herself? Francesca wondered. Why the continual determination to try and improve on perfection? This time her
hair had gone bone-white. Francesca was grateful that Gabriella had managed to resist the urge to have herself pierced all over. At least she agreed that looking like a pincushion wouldn't be an improvement. Although they had discussed the possibility of having a couple done each in certain places. To see if it enhanced their enjoyment any.

Gabriella had also asked how Francesca felt about tattoos. Again neither of them had followed up on the discussion but something small and discreet would be all right as far as Francesca was concerned. She hated those people who thought having pictures over every available space of skin looked attractive. Tattoos were also a problem once the owner got all old and
saggy, but in their cases that would never prove to be a problem.

Francesca guessed that the reason Gabriella had never pushed to follow up on the tattoo idea was it's permanency. Gabriella went in fads about how she liked to look. Changing the colour and style of her hair or how she wore makeup, if she did, was quick and gave her instant gratification. A tattoo was less easy to have done on a whim, well when you were a vampire and not a drunk human at least.