Kiera Hudson & The Creeping Men Read Free

over it. It’s been with me for what seems like years. It’s the only thing I’ve truly come to rely on.”
    “Christ, your love life sounds as fucked up as mine,” he remarked, taking another long drag on his cigarette then flicking the butt out of the window.
    “Who says I was talking about my love life?” I said, starting the engine and steering away from the kerb.
    “Weren’t you?” he said, throwing me one of his cocky smiles.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “So what was this guy like?” Potter pushed.
    “Very much like you, I guess,” I said, looking straight ahead.
    “You don’t know me.”
    “I see a lot,” I said. Then changing the subject, I added, “So, where are we heading?”
    “Just follow the coastal road to the outskirts of town,” he said. “There’s a remote little place.”
    “And what’s there?” I asked him.
    “Someone’s been infected,” he said, a grim look falling over his face like a shadow.
    “Infected by what?” I asked, glancing sideways at him, that sense of excitement at the chance of another mystery to be solved.
    “You’ll see,” he said, as if not quite ready to share the dark secret that only he knew about.
    Marry You by Bruno Mars started to play on the radio. “I love this song,” Potter smiled, messing with the dial, cranking the volume up.
    “That’s more like it,” he smiled to himself, sitting back in the seat.
    With my hands gripping the steering wheel, I followed Potter’s directions as we headed into the darkening night. And was I happy? I was heading off into the dark and the unknown with Potter once again. So what was there to be unhappy about?
    “You never told me your name,” Potter suddenly said.
    I looked at him in the darkness and with a smile, I said, “My name is Kiera Hudson.”

     

Chapter One
    Potter gave me directions through the darkness as I drove us out to the furthest reaches of the Ragged Cove. We must have been at least six miles or more from the main part of town, when Potter hooked his thumb to the right and said, “Down there. Down there.”
    I steered the car onto the road that he had pointed to. He drew deeply on the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth, filling the car with a murky smoke. I inched down the window so some of it could escape. He didn’t apologise or flick the cigarette away. I hadn’t really expected him to. That was Potter. If he were the same Potter I’d left behind on that train in the world that had been pushed , or a different Potter in a different where and when , I’d never know, as they both looked and acted the same. He was the man I loved and I knew it wouldn’t matter how many times I got pushed and pulled, or how many wheres and whens I visited, my feelings for him would never change. But the one difference – the difference I knew I would struggle the most with in this new where and when – was the knowledge that Potter didn’t seem to know me. I was nothing but a stranger to him. He was in love – engaged to another, Sophie Harrison. Sophie, in the where and when I had come from, had rejected Potter, broken his heart, because he was a Vampyrus. A creature that had crept from a secret world beneath the ground called The Hollows. A world that I had been in some strange way connected to. But I wasn’t a true Vampyrus like a Potter. I was a half-and-half. Half Vampyrus and half Lycanthrope. Two species that hated each other. Two species battling away deep inside of me. But was I still a Vampyrus in this new world? Did I have those black wings with those little claws inside me, wrapped tight about my ribcage as if holding me together?
    I glanced sideways at Potter in the darkness of my small car. We sat so close that when I shifted down a gear, my arm would brush against his. I liked that feeling. It was maddening. Maddening that I couldn’t really touch him, to reach out, put my arm around his broad shoulders. Pull him close. Kiss his mouth. Tell him that I loved him.