Dead Night (13 page)

Potter had been in love with me once, but I had been special to him, too. I closed my eyes and I could see him making love to me and I tried to push those images from my mind. To see them over and over again was torturing me. To know that he was now making love to Kiera like he once made love to me was enough to drive me insane.

Why had this happened to me? Why couldn’t I have been left to my life, the one with Marty? We had been happy until those letters had shown up on the doormat. I only had feelings for Marty back then, now I felt nothing for him and even though this sounds nasty, I felt it difficult to feel anguish at his death. Did that make me a complete and utter bitch? I didn’t want to be. But somehow, my feelings had changed. I no longer felt like the Sophie I had known all my life, I felt like the Sophie that Potter described from his world – the one before it had been pushed.

With the blankets pulled up under my chin and the sound of the icy wind screaming around the eaves, I wondered if there was anyone else out there who was falling asleep tonight next to their husband or wife, suddenly releasing it wasn’t them they loved but someone else, a shadowy figure from another
where
and another
when
.

Then, as sleep began to take me, I heard the sound of the bedroom door creak open. I didn’t move, not an inch. Had Potter changed his mind?

Had he been unable to mask his true feelings for me and decided to spend the night with me after all? Just one night. Us together how we used to be, making love until dawn broke, when we would collapse into each other’s arms and drift into a peaceful and deep sleep. All I wanted was one night, before he went back to his life with Kiera Hudson.

I heard his feet on the wooden floorboards as he came towards the bed. I kept my eyes closed. My heart began to race as I felt his strong hand fall against my shoulder.

“Sophie,” he whispered in my ear.

“Sophie, wake up.”

Opening my eyes, I rolled over and looked into his dark eyes.

I opened my mouth to speak, but he placed one of his hands against my lips.

“Shhh!” he whispered. “I can hear someone snooping around outside.”

At first my heart sank on realising that he hadn’t come back to my room for the night, then it sped up when I realised what he had just told me.

“Who...” I started.

“Shhh!” he warned me again, his eyes wide. “Put your clothes on and be quick about it.”

Trying to be as quiet as possible, I climbed off the bed and put on my clothes. Potter went to the window and spied through a gap in the curtains.

Once dressed, I went over to him and tried to peek over his shoulder. “Keep back,” he hushed.

“Who’s out there?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had a good view of him yet.”

“It might be the wind,” I said.

“It’s not the wind,” he hissed. “I saw his shadow, a big shadow.”

“A Skin-walker?” I gasped.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Potter said, snuffing out the candle so that we were in total darkness. I felt his hand slip around mine as he led me from the room and down the stairs.

There was a banging sound, and I could see the pale light of the moonlight spilling into the living room from the front door, as it swung open on its hinges.

“Someone’s in here,” I whispered.

“Shhh!” Potter said again, as I felt his wings unravel from his back and brush against me.

At the bottom of the stairs, Potter let go of my hand and I saw his claws and fangs glisten in the moonlight. The fire had died down a little, but the wind that now howled across the living room sent sparks flying up the chimney.

I could hear my heart beating in my ears as Potter led me from the bottom of the stairs and towards the door. The fire cast long, eerie shadows up the walls. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw one of the shadows move with such speed that before I’d the chance to scream, Potter was flying backwards across the room. Someone or something was on Potter. In the glow of the fire, I watched Potter stagger to his feet. Then, the shadow that had attacked him appeared from behind the upturned armchair. But it wasn’t a shadow, it was a man and I recognised him.

“Potter!” I screamed. “That’s the copper who made me shoot him on the road!”

Potter

Although I was dead, to look at him made me wonder if I wasn’t seeing a ghost.

“Don’t just stand there with that stupid look on your face, Potter. We’re in serious fucking trouble here!” he said.

“Do you two know each other?” Sophie breathed in disbelief.

I glanced at Sophie, then back at the figure who had appeared from behind the chair. “I don’t believe it,” I said, struggling to form the words in my mouth.

“What don’t you believe, Potter? That you look like a fucking retard standing there with your mouth wide open, or we’re in the shit again?” he growled, going to the window and peering out into the dark as if looking for someone.

“But...” I stammered.

“No buts, Potter,” he snapped raising his forefinger at me. “Stop standing there with your thumb up your arse and help me block up the doors and windows.”

“Who is he?” Sophie whispered at me, watching him pick up the armchair and place it in front of the window.

Ignoring her, I looked back at him and said, “But Murphy, you’re dead.”

“Yeah and so are you,” he shouted. “Now give me a hand here!”

“But...” I started again.

“But what?” he growled.

“You’re still wearing those shitty old carpet slippers,” I said in wonder, as he stood before me in a crisp-looking police uniform.

“I might be dead,” he half-smiled, “but those police boots still play havoc with my corns.

Just can’t wear the damn things – they hurt like a bitch.”

Then, as he hurried across the room towards the other armchair, I noticed for the first time that he was limping again. “You still have the limp,” I gasped, remembering how he had been shot by that shithead, Harker all those years ago.

“I didn’t until she shot me in the leg,” he grunted, eyeing Sophie who stood at the foot of the stairs staring at us.

“You forced me to shoot you!” Sophie snapped at him.

“I was hoping for a small flesh wound,”

he barked at her. “I wasn’t planning on you blowing half my fucking leg off!”

Ignoring him, Sophie shook her head as if waking from a dream, looked at me, and said, “Who is this guy?”

“He’s my old sergeant,” I told her, still unable to comprehend that he was back.

“Not so much of the old,” Murphy grunted as he carried the chair towards the other window.

“I’m forty. Might have gone grey early, but that was your fault.”

“My fault?” I said, going to help him as he limped across the room with the chair.

“What, with all your moaning and bitching the whole time, Potter,” he huffed as he wedged the chair into the window frame, “no wonder I went grey – I’m surprised it didn’t all bloody fall out!”

“I never used to moan...” I started.

“You’re moaning now,” he sighed at me.

Then, standing back as if to get a good look at me, he said, “My God, death hasn’t changed you, has it? You’re still a scruffy-looking arsehole.”

“I’m not scruffy-looking,” I said.

“Don’t argue with your sergeant, Potter,”

he barked. “Now help me secure this place before they get here.”

“Before who gets here?”

“The wolves,” he said with a grim look on his face.

“So where’s our backup?” I shot back.

“You’re looking at it,” he half-smiled.

“Things don’t change, do they?” I smiled back at him.

Then, from across the room, Sophie shouted, “Can someone
please
tell me what is going on here!”

Wheeling around, Murphy limped towards her, and jabbing his finger in the air, he barked, “I’ll tell you what’s going on here, pretty lady. You used your freaking credit card, that’s what’s going on!”

“I needed some -” she started, but Murphy didn’t give her a chance to finish.

“I killed that filthy Skin-walker for you, took a bullet for you, and all you had to do was disappear for a while and keep your head down,”

he said, pulling his pipe from his trouser pocket.

“But oh no, you had to go on a shopping spree and use your credit card, telling the whole goddamn world where you were!”

“You took a bullet for me?” Sophie gasped. “You set me up to make it look like I’d escaped from you, killed that wolf-thing with the zapper, then I shot you. I’m not surprised the whole world is looking for me.”

“I did it to save your life,” he shouted gruffly at her, plumes of thick, grey smoke spilling out of his pipe, which dangled from the corner of his mouth.

“Save my life?” Sophie said, sounding as if she were choking. “Well you have a funny way of showing it.”

“You signed your own death warrant the night you stole that blood from the morgue,”

Murphy told her. “Didn’t you think it would look just the slightest bit suspicious that a bottle of blood goes missing from a corpse that has just sat up in your morgue? And giving that cop the slip was another stupid idea. Then, you get your ex-boyfriend to carryout tests on that blood – well that was just ridiculous!”

“Who are you calling ridiculous?” Sophie spat. “Look at you - standing there with your bushy silver hair and eyebrows, police uniform, pipe, and carpet slippers – you look like somebody’s grandfather who hasn’t grown out of playing cops and robbers.”

“I’m not a granddad!” Murphy barked.

“I’m only forty!”

“You could’ve fooled me,” Sophie yelled back.

“Listen here,” Murphy said, pointing the tip of his pipe at her, “I had everything under control until you poked your nose in. I’ve been back from the dead only months, and in that time I’ve managed to work my way back into the police – into a position where I could find out what the hell is going on around here – into a position where I would be able to help my friends when they came back.”

“Help us with what?” I cut in.

“Push the world back to how it was,”

Murphy said, staring at me through a thick cloud of pipe smoke.

“Can we do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure it out. But your friend over here has gone and messed things up.”

“I messed things up?” Sophie gasped.

“What about you? You smashed that cop’s head in!”

“I had to get the blood back. If he had found that on you – then the Skin-walkers might have figured out what Kiera truly is and that would have led them back to us.”

“And what’s so bad about that?” she sneered. Then, looking at me she added, “It’s not as if you’re going around trying not to draw attention to yourselves. Ripping the heads off Walkers every five minutes isn’t going to go unnoticed, you know.”

“I was trying to save you,” I told her.

“Yeah, well maybe I don’t want to be saved by you and your friend anymore,” she said, glancing at me, then at Murphy. “Maybe I should tell the Skin-walkers what you really did out on the road, tell them about the blood...”

“Tell them what you like,” Murphy shouted. “They won’t believe you. I’ve destroyed Kiera’s blood sample – it doesn’t exist anymore, but the gun with your prints all over it does.”

“You bastard,” she hissed at him.

“Not a bastard, a friend,” he said. “But you just don’t see it. That animal was going to hurt you real bad if I hadn’t have killed him on that road. I had to make it look like you’d escaped so my position wasn’t compromised. I did what I did because I didn’t have a choice. If you hadn’t have taken that blood, then you would never have been involved in this. In fact, I was on the verge of convincing them that you must be dead. I told them that you were very badly injured in the car crash. As it had been some weeks and you hadn’t been sighted, I’d almost got them to believe that you were lying injured in a ditch somewhere and that you must have frozen to death in the cold.

Then you go and use your credit card, and they start hunting for you all over again.”

“But why?” Sophie said. “I stole some blood – big deal.”

“The wolves have been waiting for hundreds of years for an angel to come,” Murphy explained, as he sucked on his pipe. “All they know is that this angel will be female and will be aided by four others. They believe that she will come and destroy the Treaty that exists between them and the humans and will eventually destroy the wolves. They don’t know her name or when she will come. All they know is that this angel will be dead already. So, when they heard that a female corpse had come back to life in your morgue, they...well, let’s just say they were just a tiny bit curious. There was that cop with the broken legs and the lab assistant who both kept babbling on about the young woman who came back to life. I didn’t know how much they knew or what they had seen, but before I’d managed to speak with them, they had both died.”

“Yeah, one died of having broken legs and the other one killed himself,” Sophie said sarcastically.

“That’s what that cop wanted you to believe,” Murphy said. “But both died with crusty black scorch marks around their eyes.”

“Just like Marty,” Sophie breathed.

“Your friend had been visited by the wolves,” Murphy grunted.

“Impossible, I was with him just before he died,” Sophie explained. “I would have remembered.”

“You told me that you had fallen asleep and woken to find him staggering into the road,” I reminded her. “He could have been visited by a wolf while you slept.”

“But why burn out Marty’s eyes and not mine?” she pondered. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Does anything make sense anymore?” I said, glancing at Murphy in his carpet slippers.

“Perhaps they wanted your friend Marty to tell them about the blood,” Murphy said. “Tell them what he had discovered.”

“I guess,” Sophie said thoughtfully, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. It was like something was troubling her – something she couldn’t quite remember.

Then, from not too far away came the sound of howling, and we all turned to look at each other. At first I wondered if it was just the wind screaming up the hill. But as it got closer, I recognised the sound to be that of wolves.