The Eye of the Moon Read online

  The man in the white robe who had handed the golden dagger to Olivia Jane stepped forward and peered around the door, watching the distraught young girl run down the hill and back towards the sea front. He took off his mask and crushed it in his hands. His craggy, middle-aged features were awash with frustration as he turned back to the twelve other members of the clan.

  ‘Right, you people had better clean up this mess,’ he said in a commanding voice. ‘I’m gonna have to go and arrest the girl.’

  Thirteen

  In the bloody, vomit-splattered kitchen, JD leant down to check on his mother, lying crumpled and broken on the floor. The copious amount of blood covering her was extremely unsettling, but he put it to the back of his mind. Crouching beside her, he propped her up into a seated position with her back against one of the lower cupboards. Then he brushed some of her long, dark, bloodstained hair out of her eyes, gently pulling away some strands that the drying blood had stuck to her face. She looked back at him, her eyes betraying the shock and pain she was feeling. He knew it was bad – the blood and the gaping hole in her neck made that plain enough – but confirmation was there in her dilated pupils and shallow, panting breaths. His mother would never normally show her pain, either physical or emotional, but this was a pain she couldn’t hide. The woman was dying and she knew it, and JD was slowly realizing it, and attempting to come to terms with it. Finding something meaningful or even comforting to say was all but impossibe. There wasn’t enough time to think of the right thing to say – this was a time for the stunned brain to disengage and the autopilot to take over.

  ‘Don’t die, Mom. Please don’t die. What should I do? What will Casper do?’ JD’s voice was cracking. This was the last time he would ever speak with his mother, the one and only consistent person in his life. Yet he knew he had to try not to think of himself. She was dying and needed comfort in these last moments.

  She looked up at him, still gasping for breath. It was clear that she could barely see or recognize him. It was his voice that was providing her with comfort in her final minutes.

  ‘Son,’ she panted. ‘Kill me.’

  ‘You’re in shock,’ JD mumbled, stroking her hair. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘It’s too late. Kill me.’

  ‘Mom, I’m not going to …’

  ‘KILL ME!’ Her voice suddenly took on a different tone. This wasn’t a request, this was an order. And it was the voice of a vampire. One of the undead. For that was what she was becoming. Her pupils shrank and she lurched forward at her trembling son, revealing a new set of bright white fangs protruding beyond her lips.

  Startled, JD jumped back and fell on to his ass. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘KILL ME!’ his mother hissed again. Her body and soul now belonged to the undead, but her heart still belonged to her son, for a short time at least.

  ‘I can’t kill you. Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘If – you – don’t – kill – me – now,’ she gasped, ‘I’ll become one of them.’ She pointed at the unconscious figure of Kione slumped at the other end of the kitchen. Her voice grew stronger. ‘A creature of evil. I’ll kill you – and your brother. Don’t make me do that. I can feel the bloodlust coming over me already. Please kill me. Quickly, before it’s too late.’

  JD climbed back to his feet and shook his head. ‘I can’t. It’s crazy. I can’t kill you. You’re my mother, for Chrissa–’

  With shocking speed, Maria suddenly sprang up from the floor and leapt on him, fangs searching for the soft flesh of his neck. His sharp reactions enabled him to fend her off without even realizing what he was doing. Then, using all his strength, he threw her against the cupboards above the sink behind him. Her head hit one of the doors and she slumped to the floor in a heap at his feet.

  ‘Oh God, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’ He crouched down and lifted her head from the floor. ‘Are you … ? Oh fuck. No. NO!’

  The realization that his mother was now dead hit him like a sledgehammer in the back. Her face was almost unrecognizable. Her skin was pale and clammy, blue veins had crept to the surface, her eyes blackened, her teeth pointed and razor sharp. He released his hold on her head as a cold chill ran through him. The feeling of sickness rushed over him again and he covered his mouth to stop himself vomiting again – not that his stomach seemed to have anything left in it to bring up anyway.

  After a few moments of staring down at the body of what had once been his mother, he allowed the autopilot side of him to take the controls again. Close your mind, he told himself. Don’t think about what you’re about to do. Just do it. You have to, and you know it.

  Moving as though in a trance, he left the kitchen and headed up the stairs to his mother’s bedroom. She kept a gun in a drawer of the cabinet beside her bed in case any of her clients ever decided to overstep the, admittedly rather liberal, boundaries of decency she insisted upon during their visits. There had been occasions when some of her less regular clients had been overly violent during sex or had demanded their money back after an unsatisfying session (invariably their own fault). She had pulled the gun on a few occasions, but it had never been fired.

  JD walked into the bedroom to be engulfed by a foul stench, and sickened by the sight of the bloodied covers on the bed in the centre of the room. Visions of his mother in agony in this room at the hands of Kione flashed through his mind, and he quickly looked away from the bed and walked over to the small wooden bedside cabinet. Pulling open the top drawer he pushed aside a few undergarments to reveal the shiny silver revolver that his mother owned. Since she had never had to fire it, it still looked bright and new. After a deep breath he picked it up and looked over it, breaking out the cylinder to check the loads. There were six, all unfired. This is the gun I’m going to use to kill my mother.

  The thought was a vile one. It made him retch, but once again no vomit came up. His stomach was empty, his guts shrinking. I can’t do this. Then for the first time he noticed what was standing on top of the cabinet.

  A bottle of bourbon.

  Snapping the cylinder back, he put the gun down on the bed beside a pool of drying blood and picked up the bottle. It was full, unopened. He stared hard at the smooth, translucent, golden-brown liquid inside. Would this stuff really take the edge off what he was about to do? It was just bourbon, after all. Just an alcoholic drink with a bit of a kick to it. Would it provide him with answers? Or strength? Only one way to find out.

  The cap was screwed on tight and he was shaking so much that he struggled to twist it off. Eventually, after he had summoned just enough strength from a body that seemed hollow, it came loose and fell to the floor.

  ‘God forgive me for all I am about to do,’ he whispered aloud, holding the bottle aloft as if talking to the Lord. Then he put the neck to his lips and took his first sip.

  It tasted foul.

  So he took another sip. His stomach was still in knots and it was hard to keep the stuff from coming back up again. There’s but one way to keep it down, he thought. Pour more down after it. So he drank more. Each sip tasted a little less foul than the one before, but no matter how many sips he took, he still wasn’t ready to pick up the pistol and head back downstairs.

  So he kept drinking.

  The feeling of sickness soon began to pass, and adrenalin started to take over his body. Gradually the alcohol calmed his nerves. He felt it filling the hollowness inside him. A new sensation in his stomach began to take over, a burning rage as the realization of what had happened began to sink in, and the reality of what had to be done became more apparent. The autopilot was no longer in control, but nor was JD. Something else was taking over. The thirst for blood. Not the same thirst that a vampire has, this was an urge to kill not for food, not for sport. This was an urge to kill in order to feel alive.

  Before he knew it there was suddenly just one last mouthful of bourbon left in the bottle. He took a long look at it, then sucked in one more deep breath and poured it down his throat. The t
hirst for blood took over completely. His shoulders arched back and his lips curled up into a sneer. His chest puffed out and he looked down at the gun he had placed on the bed. Staring down at it brought another momentary flash of the vileness that had gone before in this room, tempering his adrenalin rush a little. Suddenly the room was looking fuzzy and the gun was becoming blurred. Better get this over with before it’s too late, he thought.

  With all his might he threw the empty bourbon bottle against the wall, where it shattered noisily, shards of glass spraying everywhere. The sound it made seemed loud enough to wake the dead, and in this case it woke the undead. He heard one of the two vampires stir in the kitchen below. Taking a last deep breath, he picked up the revolver and headed out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.

  When he reached the bottom he saw the still-unconscious body of Kione slumped in one corner of the kitchen. It was lying against the cupboards near the sink, the two gaping holes where its eyes had been staring blankly back at JD, but it was still unconscious. Death had not come for the creature yet and small puffs of steam were still issuing from its lips as the air was expelled from its battered lungs.

  In the other corner of the kitchen, out of JD’s sight, was the vampire that had once been his mother. She had climbed to her feet and was looking for some flesh to feed on. JD hardly recognized the woman as she stepped slowly over Kione and appeared in his line of vision. Her face was still caked in blood and the blue veins within it were bulging. Maria needed her first taste of human blood. Seeing him only as a potential victim, she forged a huge bloodthirsty grin at JD and charged towards him, her eyes mad with the lusting for his blood.

  Standing at the foot of the stairs, JD was now struggling to maintain control over his drunkenness even with the burning rage inside him. Slowly he raised the gun in his right hand and pointed it towards the onrushing vampire. His hand had begun trembling almost uncontrollably, and the legs that had carried him down the stairs were now turning to jelly. Even to take aim was a struggle, but just as his final chance to fire came, he took it. At the last possible moment before the monster was on him, he closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  BANG!

  The noise reverberated around the house. It was far louder than he could possibly have imagined, and it was followed by an echoing that seemed as if it would never end. Several seconds later, as the sound seemed to quieten a little, to become a mere ringing in his ears, the boy opened his eyes again. His mother’s body was lying flat on its back in the kitchen doorway, smoke pouring out and upwards from a gaping hole in her chest where the bullet had entered. Her heart had been blown apart. As the smoke departed her body it floated away into nothingness, her soul passing with it.

  JD’s hand was no longer shaking, his grip on the gun had steadied, and for the first time he felt the wet sensation on his face where his mother’s blood had sprayed over him as the bullet punched into her flesh. She lay there dead before him. Her soul had been taken, and his had been lost in the process. A window in the kitchen had somehow blown open and both their spirits had slipped out through it and vanished into the night sky.

  He took two steps towards her corpse and looked down on it for a moment. The blackened eyes were unrecognizable in the bloodied face. This was not his mother any more, and he was no longer JD, the fun-loving innocent who had so recently fallen in love with Beth. He pointed the shiny silver revolver at the lifeless corpse and with a hand as steady as a rock fired the remaining bullets into its face and chest, hitting his target with great precision for a young man who had drunk so much.

  When the chambers of the pistol were empty he tucked it into the back of his trousers and pulled the hood of his robe up over his head. Thanks to Kione, he had learnt a valuable lesson. When you have the chance to kill someone, never pass it up, it might come back and bite you. Kill first, worry later.

  As he watched his mother’s decaying body burn away into ash on the floor his anger began to build. If the men in his mother’s life had not deserted her, then there was a good chance that this would not have happened. Now he was going to have to go to the house of one of those men and explain to his younger brother that he would never see his mother again. This wasn’t fair. Bad things happened to good people, and it just wasn’t right. He and Casper didn’t deserve this.

  The pain in JD’s heart was agonizing. The only thing that had tempered it so far was the rush of adrenalin brought on by inflicting suffering upon others.

  Fourteen

  Bull wasn’t best pleased. He had little tolerance for his younger half-brother at the best of times. Casper was dumb and offered nothing in the way of interesting conversation, only childish remarks. Sure, Bull understood that the kid was not quite right in the head. Deep down he felt bad for him, but at times like this he couldn’t help thinking that it served the little bastard right.

  Bull’s mother and father had split up for a while many years earlier, and when they did so his dad, Russo, had shacked up with a hooker for a short time. The hooker fell pregnant and Casper was the end result. A retarded son of a whore. Bull’s father had always suspected that the hooker, Maria, had tricked him into the pregnancy, and he had ditched her not long after the boy was born. Unfortunately for him, the law was on the side of Maria and, after a paternity test, he found himself paying her a weekly maintenance subsidy, and even occasionally having to babysit for the mistake known as Casper.

  And now was one of those times. Neither Russo nor his fifteen-year-old son Bull had the patience to cope with Casper, with his overexcitable nature and moments of hyperactivity. They had been sitting in their living room in front of a warm fire enjoying a game of chess. They wore matching pairs of blue pyjamas and crimson dressing gowns in readiness for retiring to bed for the night, so an interruption from anyone was unwelcome. Particularly an interruption from a tiresome individual like Casper.

  Yet here he was sitting with them in their own house, babbling on about having to stay with them until his older brother JD came to pick him up. He was making even less sense than usual, and both Russo and Bull were convinced this had something to do with JD, whom they both despised equally. He was a troublemaker, lacking in discipline, frequently breaking the law yet always getting away with it, and he was a tough little bastard, too. He’d beaten Bull at arm wrestling countless times, which really pissed Bull off because he was very strong for his age and never lost to anyone else. JD had a slight advantage as he was a year older, but one day that would begin to count for nothing, and when that day came Bull would triumph over him, whether it be at arm wrestling or something else. That day would come. Definitely.

  Casper had been drenched when he arrived. He had fought his way through the thunderstorm to their house and was now a trembling, shivering wreck, babbling on about vampires, red walls, Elvis and shotgun-toting priests. The usual crap from this little asshole.

  After about twenty minutes Russo and Bull had managed between them to calm the boy down and sit him on a rug in front of the log fire. He sat there in jeans and a green sweater soaked though from the rain. His arms were wrapped tightly around his knees, hugging them in towards his chest. He was either shivering from the cold, or trembling with fear at something. Maybe even both.

  Russo looked over at Bull, who had flatly refused to join JD at maria’s house. His son was a handsome younger version of himself, only with more hair and whiter teeth. ‘Wadda ya reckon?’ he asked.

  ‘Kid’s a fruitcake. Reckon JD’s s’posed to be lookin’ after him and has decided to get the fuck out somewhere else and send him here. Prick.’

  ‘Reckon you’re prob’ly right. That bitch Maria. She’s mos’ likely on her back earnin’ cash while JD’s out stealin’ cars. And we’re stuck here with the fuckin’ dimwit.’ Russo was so irritated that he made no effort to hide the fact that he felt absolutely nothing for Casper.

  Bull was in agreement. ‘I dunno why you don’t just kick him out. She says he’s yours but, come on – he could be anyon
e’s. I mean, look at the little prick. He don’t look nothin’ like you. He’s too wimpy to be one of us.’

  At that moment there came a loud knock at the back door. Bull gestured to his father to stay in his armchair. ‘I’ll get it,’ he sighed.

  He walked out of the room and into the kitchen, pulling the cloth of his pyjama bottoms out of his ass as he went. The back door was at the far end of the kitchen, and through the glass panel in the door he could see a dark, hooded figure outside.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted through the door.

  ‘Is Russo home?’ a husky voice filtered in from outside.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Just let me in.’

  ‘JD? That you?’

  ‘Open the fuckin’ door, will ya!’

  Bull vaguely recognized the voice as JD’s, though it sounded different. It had a gravelly tone to it that was unfamiliar, and not particularly friendly. He turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open.

  ‘Russo here?’ asked the voice from within the dark hood.

  ‘You come to pick up your brother? He’s drivin’ us fuckin’ nuts in there. Babblin’ away like a two-year-old.’ He paused and sniffed as JD brushed past him and in to the kitchen. ‘Jesus, man, you been drinkin’? You fuckin’ stink!’

  JD ignored him and strode through to the living room, where he saw his little brother sitting in front of the fireplace, drying off. For once, Casper ignored him, lost in his own thoughts. Russo was sitting in his armchair on the other side of Casper, and he looked seriously pissed. JD didn’t care.