Hidden (Marchwood Vampire Series #1) (28 page)

‘
Victoria, wake up. Victoria, you must wake up! We must leave
and get you to a doctor.’ As he spoke the words, he realised it was
futile. ‘My love, my beautiful Victoria ... No ... no. How can this
be?’

He laid her
down and gathered the bodies of his children to his chest.
Leonora’s hair was matted with blood, her neck broken. He kissed
her hair and then kissed all of their unyielding lifeless
faces.

Refet stood in
the doorway, taking in the scene, unable to speak. He saw Agha
Kaya’s vacant eyes, his limp, lifeless form. Then he noticed two
other uniformed bodies - his comrades. Dead. He walked woodenly
over to Harold and shook his shoulder.

‘
We must go,’ he whispered. ‘It is not safe here. We go now.
They killed by bad creature … or murdered ... a wolf? I don’t know.
Maybe the killer … the killer here still.’ He had other thoughts
which he didn’t give voice to. Thoughts fuelled by rumours he had
heard around the camp.

‘
What animal could have done such a thing? Surely no person
would do this?’ Harold choked out the words.’

‘
I not know. We leave now,’ Refet insisted, trying to pull
Harold to his feet. The young guard sensed lingering danger in the
room. He could not identify it, but he knew it was
present.

‘
You go,’ Harold said. ‘I will not leave my
family.’

Refet gripped
his pistol and tried to keep his rising terror in check. He knew
they should not remain here, but he felt strong sympathy for this
man who had lost his family and friends.

‘
You wait. Hold gun. I come back,’ he said, leaving Harold
hunched over the broken forms of his wife and children.

A minute
later, Refet returned. The young guard walked over to the lifeless
body of Isobel, picked her up and carried her out. He had found a
small room, that could be closed from the inside with a millstone
and he planned to carry all the bodies there for safekeeping. He
worked tirelessly.

‘
Come,’ he said to Harold who was now sitting vacantly with
his dead family around him. ‘We will bring you wife, you
children.’

Harold did not
heed him, so Refet bent down to pick up Victoria’s body.

‘
Do not touch her!’ Harold shouted. He stood up. ‘Please,’ he
said more gently. ‘I will carry her. You bring my boy.’

Refet inclined
his head and carefully picked up Freddie’s flaccid body.

‘
I will wait with them until you return,’ Harold said
lifelessly. ‘Then we will take Victoria and Leonora
together.’

Finally, the
bodies had all been transferred to the small room.

‘
They will be safe here,’ Refet said. ‘We go now. We come back
tomorrow with help.’

‘
I am not leaving my family.’

‘
It not good to stay. Please to come back with me. We return
in the morning.’

‘
No. You go. I want to stay with my family. I will seal myself
inside. No one will get in.’

‘
I not want to leave you, but if I stay, they send more guards
look for us. Not good for people to come here tonight. Too
dangerous.’

Harold did not
even look as though he was listening to Refet. He stared at the
wall, his face contorted in shock and grief.

‘
I take one light but leave you all others, you use only one
at a time, yes? You have food and water. I return tomorrow. I very
sorry for you and you family. I sorry.’

Harold did not
reply and reluctantly Refet left the grieving man with his
slaughtered family.

‘
You push stone to close door,’ he said. But Harold was not
listening so he gently shook his shoulder. ‘I cannot go until you
close door. Come.’ He helped Harold to his feet and guided him over
to the millstone. ‘I go, after you close door.’

Harold somehow
found the strength to wheel the circular stone into place and then
he sank down next to it. The light from the lantern flickered and
danced over the bodies, which Refet had laid out neatly in a row
along the back wall of the room.

Harold
squeezed his eyes tightly closed. He did not feel as if he belonged
to himself, he felt as though his real self had left his body and
he had been transferred into hell. He crawled across to his wife’s
body and wrapped his arms around her. His tears dripped onto her
lifeless face and he lay with his cheek next to hers. He could not
process his thoughts and soon fell into a half-sleep breathing in
the scent of her hair.

*

Harold awoke
some time later. He did not know how long he had slept. The lantern
still burned, but the flame was low and the underground chamber had
almost succumbed to the darkness. Harold did not care that his body
was cold and thirsty; all he felt was the slice of pain as the
memories rushed into his mind.

‘
Dead,’ he whispered. ‘All dead.’ He gave a half-strangled
cry, ‘No! No, no, no. My beautiful wife. My children. How can this
be? What evil has befallen us? God, why did you not take me
also?’

He took his
wife’s cold hand and kneaded it in his own. As he knelt there,
sobbing into her chest, he heard a gasp in the darkness.

‘
Who is there?’ he asked looking around at the shadows. He
felt a moment of acute fear and then he found he did not care. ‘Do
you mean to kill me too? Take me then. I am not afraid. I should
like to die. You would be doing me a service.’ He heard another
gasp and a hissing sigh.

‘
Father.’ It was a voice that sounded like his daughter, but
with a strange rasping quality to it.

‘
Leonora?’ Harold sat up and his heart began to hammer with
hope and joy. ‘Are you alive, child?’ He crawled towards her. ‘But
you were dead ... Your body was …’

He scrambled
to where she lay and felt her cold cheek. In the dim light, he saw
her eyes snap open. He could not deny she really was alive. He had
been right not to leave them alone. Imagine if she had woken and
found nothing but a sealed chamber filled with the dead? She would
have been traumatised beyond imagining.

‘
Father,’ she gasped again. ‘I am so thirsty.’

‘
Wait child,’ he said. ‘I have water.’ He unscrewed the lid to
his canteen and held it up to her mouth, tipping the liquid onto
her lips. She gasped again, spitting out the liquid. Then her hand
shot up and swatted the canteen away with such force it flew across
the small chamber and crashed against the rock wall, clanging and
clattering to the ground.

She reached
out both of her hands and clutched her father’s face. She pulled
him towards her in an embrace and sank her teeth into his neck.
Harold opened his eyes wide in shock as he realised what was
happening. The legend of the blood-drinking demons flew into his
mind, but then he relaxed, sinking into a trance-like ecstasy,
flattening out his thoughts until they melted into nothingness.

Leonora took
only a few draughts of his blood before she began choking. She
twisted away from him, clutching at her throat.

‘
I want it, but it burns, Father,’ she cried.

Harold emerged
from his trance-like state, as the shock of what had just happened
hit him.

‘
Child, what have you done to me? What have they done
to
you
?’ He
touched his fingers to his neck and squinted in the gloom. He saw a
small smear of blood on his fingertips and saw blood at the corner
of her lips.

‘
Leonora, my daughter. What is it you have done?’

He stared into
her glassy eyes as she entered delirium.

‘
Thirsty. I am so thirsty.’

Harold spun
around and saw his son and Jacques had also woken up from death.
They tried to reach him and now he knew what they wanted from him.
What was he to do? His thoughts were a jumbled mess. His children
and his friends’ children were turned into blood-demons and they
needed his own life-blood to survive. And what of his wife and his
friends? Were they too transformed into creatures?

Harold Swinton
reached a sudden moment of clarity and he made the decision to
willingly give his blood if it meant he could save his family and
friends. But he feared he was only one man and there may not be
enough of him to go around. In any case it had not hurt him when he
had yielded to his daughter’s embrace. It had been a sublime
feeling, like being free and floating into nothingness and it was
infinitely better than the searing pain of loss.

Aah, here it was again
. Freddie had
found him and was sending him back into his trance. But again,
after a short time, his son too began to choke and gasp.

‘
Fire in my throat,’ he cried. ‘A burning fire! Help
me!’

Harold stroked
his icy cold forehead, trying to soothe him in his distress.

All of the
young ones were now awake and all craved Harold’s blood, but none
could stomach it – Leonora, Freddie, Jacques, Isobel and Alexandre.
 

Next to him lay the body of his beloved Victoria. Was she
still dead? Was her neck still snapped? He moved his
children.
Please let her be healed.
Please.
But she was unchanged. Still dead
and broken on the ground.

They all soon
drifted back into unconsciousness. Harold’s beloved Victoria and
the other adults remained as they were, dead and cold. Harold too
sank into unconsciousness and the dim cave went quiet save for the
sound of his uneven breathing. Soon the lantern burnt out and all
fell to darkness, cold and silence.

*

Alexandre felt
the drumming of the earth, the heartbeat of all humankind in his
bones and blood and skin. In his soul. It sang a song to him that
he had known forever and in that instant everything became clear.
He knew the reason for it all; the key to life and it was so
obvious. How could he have not known this simple truth before now?
He was becoming one with the earth, his body turning to dust.

And then, as
suddenly as it had come, it left. His beating heart slowed, the
song faded and the knowledge slipped away like an elusive memory
refusing to come to mind. He shook his head as if trying to
dislodge something, but he was not trying to dislodge anything, he
was desperately trying to regain what he had forgotten. He felt a
devastating loss, worse than if his dearest love had died.

A heavy
melancholy descended, so profound he felt like he could sleep for a
thousand years. In the cold darkness, tears rolled down his face
and they stung his cheeks like acid. He closed his eyes and tried
not to think. It hurt to think.

It hurt.

God, it
hurt.

The acid tears
on his cheeks spread throughout his body and he felt as though the
skin was being stripped from his body. He could not breathe and his
eyes burned white hot with a searing pain.

He tried to speak but his throat constricted, closed shut.
Was he in hell? Was this the fate he deserved?
Please, God, no! Help me!
he
silently screamed.
Save me! I promise … I
promise anything. I will do anything. Just please … make … it …
STOP.

Chapter
Seventeen

*

‘
Mads, I’ve got loads to do. Why are we going down here? Old
clothes and pictures aren’t really my thing.’

‘
It’s not old clothes and pictures. It’s something much better
than that.’

‘
Okay then.’

She dragged
the boxes away from the opening and switched on the halogen light,
beckoning to her brother. Maddy walked over to the crate at the far
end. She prised open the lid and slid it off, standing back to let
her brother see. Ben peered into the crate. His eyes widened and he
stood back in shock, glancing at Maddy.

‘
A person!’

‘
No, look closer. It’s a statue.’ Maddy smiled and put her
face next to Ben’s so they were looking together. She took his hand
and guided it down to the hard sculpted face of the dark-haired
female figure.

‘
Oh,’ he breathed out. ‘Yeah. For a minute ... I thought ...
well ...’

‘
You thought it was a spooky girl in a coffin,’ Maddy laughed.
‘Yeah, they do look real, but they’re statues. There are five and
they’re all amazing. Really old. I think they might even be our
ancestors. Imagine that. They could be what our actual family
looked like. It’s pretty incredible.’

‘
She looks just like you,’ Ben said, glancing from Madison to
the statue.

‘
Do you think so?’

‘
Yeah, it’s weird, but she really does.’

‘
It’s just the dark hair, probably,’ Maddy said, trying to see
if she could catch any resemblance.

‘
The hair and the shape of her face,’ Ben said. ‘It’s a pity
her eyes are closed, I bet they’d have been the same colour as
yours.’

‘
Do you wanna see another one?’

‘
Yeah go on then.’

‘
Help me prise this next one off.’ Maddy beckoned him to
another box and soon they had all the lids off. Ben went from one
to the other, studying them carefully.

‘
They’re a bit spooky, Mads.’

‘
No they’re not, they’re gorgeous.’ Maddy thought Ben didn’t
know the half of it. If he thought a bunch of statues was spooky,
imagine what he’d have made of a sleeping corpse, tucked up in
bed.

‘
I might go and start my homework now, if that’s
okay.’