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constantly at each other’s
throats. But Isidor hit back just as hard as Potter now, or should
I say Gabriel! I couldn’t help but snigger aloud every time Isidor
taunted him. Seeing Potter get wound up had been my happiest
moments since coming back.
    I watched
Isidor drop the pile of branches onto the drive at the foot of the
steps that led to the front door. He took a flick-knife from the
pocket of his jeans and sat down where he began to sharpen them.
Pulling on a pair of jogging bottoms, trainers, and a sweatshirt, I
left my room to join him.
    “What are you
doing, Isidor?” I asked, sitting beside him on the step.
    “Making
stakes,” he said back, as he carved away at the tips of the
branches.
    “Why?” I
asked.
    “Why not?” he
smiled at me, then went back to the sharpening. “What else is there
to do around here?”
    “Don’t tell me
you’re missing The Hollows and what happened there?” I half-smiled,
placing my arm about his shoulder.
    “It’s because
of what happened there that I’m making these stakes,” Isidor said,
not looking at me.
    “I don’t
understand?” I said. “That’s all finished with now, we’re safe
here. Besides, we’re dead already - how can we die twice?”
    Then, stopping
what he was doing, Isidor turned to face me. “You’ve noticed the
changes, right?”
    “I guess,” I
said, looking straight at him.
    “Then I don’t
think we’re safe - dead or alive,” and he went back to his
cutting.
     

Chapter Three
     
    Kiera
     
    Isidor had said
something bad had happened. I remembered him saying those words to
me as we raced from the mortuary. And something bad had happened – people had gone missing. Not just one
or two, but thousands. I had come back to find that in an instant,
people had just disappeared. And as I looked at the hundreds of
newspaper cuttings that covered the walls of my room at Hallowed
Manor, I knew that they had been the Vampyrus, snatched back by the
Elders as The Hollows had been sealed. But the Elders had said that
the humans wouldn’t remember and they didn’t – it was as if the
Vampyrus hadn’t ever existed. And that wasn’t the only bad thing to
have happened. It seemed that the Elders had either failed to
understand the consequences of their actions, or they knew exactly
what would happen and this was just another part of their curse,
because the world had changed. Not drastically. But it was
different, as if it had been nudged off-kilter, shoved to the left
a bit. There were subtle changes and as I trawled through the
Internet during the hours that I sat awake unable to sleep – I
noticed these changes. And it was as if by taking the Vampyrus
back, the Elders had erased any subtle influence that the Vampyrus
had had on human civilisation. It was my iPod that first drew my
attention to these differences. Although it was still called an
iPod, the Apple logo had been replaced with the shape of a crescent
moon. And when I thumbed through the tracks, I noticed that some of
the songs had changed slightly – sung by someone else. For example
all of the Rihanna songs had been replaced
by a singer named Robyn , the U2 tracks had been replaced by a group called Feedback. The band looked vaguely familiar
and the songs similar in tone and music style to U2 – but like I said, just different – as if knocked
off-kilter. When I tried to search for U2 on the Internet, there was no trace of them on any search engine –
not even the biggest, Toogle, which seemed to have replaced Google.
But other songs had stayed just the same. Bruno Mars, Leona Lewis,
and many others were as they were before. But it wasn’t just the
tracks on my iPod which had altered; the car manufacturer Ford didn’t exist – but there was Nord.
The number one fast-food chain was McDonnell’s started back in the 1940’s by the
McDonnell brothers.
    As I sat alone
in the darkness of my room, the only light coming from my Moon laptop, the one that had the same
crescent-shaped