Where Loyalty Lies Read Free Page A

could come up with? A Bible-burning sinner? But then another woman spoke and it made me freeze.
    “No, I heard she flipped out and tried to burn the house down while Mary was sleeping. That’s how she got the scratches; she was trying to stop Mary from escaping.”
    That was met with gasps and a few of them turned to look at me. I stared at the ground.
    Of course. Murder was much more interesting than an accident and who better to blame than the slightly odd girl who’d been left on Mary’s doorstep as a baby? The girl who, despite having lived here for all of her eighteen years and despite her attempts to keep her head down, never did quite fit in.
    I’d have dismissed it as the poisonous gossip it was, but I noticed that the police officers were all giving me similar looks. I tuned into their conversation and, to my disgust, found that it was along similar lines. They wanted to take me in for questioning. Only Simon didn’t join in with them. He was giving me an odd look and I realised that he knew I could hear them, despite the fact that they were fifty feet away.
    I stared back at the ground beneath my feet. I had no idea what Mary would say but I knew that, whatever she did say, it wasn’t going to offer me any hope. She’d seen those men, she’d seen that they had the same strange abilities as me, she’d heard what they’d said I was. Did she believe them? Did I believe them?
    Questions buzzed around my head. There was nobody I could talk to, nobody I could ask for help. I was on my own with nobody to stand up for me. My nightgown was covered in blood, some of it was from my own cuts but I knew that some of it would be that evil man’s. If the police sent it off to be tested, it would come back and prove me right and Mary wrong. But what was the point? I could give them the gown now and prove that someone else had been there, but I was certain that Mary wouldn’t be coming anywhere near me from now on, and definitely wouldn’t be allowing me to live with her again. In a village the size of this one, everyone would have heard the gossip within the next day or two, so there was no chance of anyone else letting me stay with them. And, even if I did stay until the test results came back, people would still choose to hate me.
    There was nothing here for me anymore. No, that wasn’t true. There was a man here who’d tried to kill me. I didn’t know what had happened to him. Had he escaped or had he died? There was also the one who’d saved my life. In any other situation, I’d have thought he was my hero but the truth was that he was just as scary as the first guy. I had no idea why either of them had come here and I had no idea if they’d come back, but I wasn’t going to find out.
    It was time for me to disappear.

Three Years Later

Chapter 1
    I woke with a start, just like I always did when I overslept. I jumped out of bed scowling at my alarm clock for not having woken me up but, if I was honest, I did have a hazy memory of it going off at six and me beating it into silence.
    The fact that I only ever wore jeans and tops made it easy for me to conjure up an outfit without too much fumbling. Then, in a fantastic show of multi-tasking, I brushed my teeth, pinned back my hair, applied minimal make-up and located both of my black boots which had somehow ended up on opposite sides of the room.
    Eight minutes after my eyes had opened, I was out of my front door and pretty pleased with myself; I’d shaved a whole minute off my best time.
    The weather was gloomy and threatening rain. It was the sort of weather that most people hated but I always found it promising. There was nothing better than a full-on thunder storm. Dark grey clouds filling up the sky was a sure sign that one was coming.
    If I ran to work at full speed I’d get there twice as fast but it would attract too much attention, so instead I set off at a casual half-jog, half-run. I arrived only slightly out of breath and fifteen minutes late.