Beautiful Freaks (33 page)

He turned to the bouquet of roses on the table and pulled one out to take home to Meg. He smiled weakly at his own sentimentality. A police constable had already gone on ahead and taken Elsie back to the house hours ago and all he wanted to do was to go home and check that his loved ones were unscathed.  He wanted to walk out of the door of No.7 and never return. Already Steptree could feel the ghost of Evangeline Valentine haunting its rooms. It would never be a happy house again. 

*

Steptree arrived home to find Meg sitting at the table, a police constable stood at the stove making tea. The baby was sat happily gurgling away on her lap. Meg had been crying and was clearly in shock. The cakes that had arrived in the grocery delivery that morning had been drugged with a powerful opiate and she’d woken from a drug induced stupor to find Elsie gone and the back door wide open. She’d gone almost crazy with worry and a neighbour had taken her in and called for a police officer. Despite being shaken, there was no worry of lasting damage – well not the physical kind. Steptree, ignoring the presence of the PC, wrapped his arms around his wife and held her tight. After tea and a brief, curtailed explanation of events, he dismissed the PC and took her by the hand up to bed.

*

A year to the day of the events at No.7, a messenger knocked on Steptree’s door. Meg answered it. The caller was a stranger. In his hands he held a large rectangular parcel wrapped in linen and tied with string. Carrying their baby boy in her arms and having Elsie running around her legs, it was impossible to take receipt of it, so she instructed him to wait on the step whilst she put the baby down.

When she returned, the caller had gone, leaving the parcel on the step. It had a luggage label attached on which was scrawled the message ‘For the Attention of Inspector William Steptree.’

She carried it through to the study and left it on her husband’s desk for when he returned.

Later that evening Steptree returned from his investigation of a jewel theft to see the parcel waiting ominously on his desk. He pulled at the strings and let the linen fall open to reveal the book written by Doctor Valentine that had once belonged to Professor Heartlock. The old man had died within days of hearing of Kaspian’s death.

Steptree flicked it open. The papers that had originally been missing had been found and replaced. It took him hours to read the detailed work and explore the rich array of wood engravings and sketches. At last he turned to the folded bits of paper and read of Valentine’s daughter, Evangeline. It was well into the midnight hour when he finally closed the pages of the book. When he had finished, he carried the book to the fire and placed it on top of the hungry flames. He stood and watched it burn until there was nothing left of her story.

The End

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katie M John lives in the London suburbs with a handsome giant, a
five
year old
Mud-Puddle Fairy and a 6 month old pixie.

She likes to write whilst listening to her iPod, eating Jaffa Cakes and drinking tea.

She is an Amazon No.1 Best selling author in the Fairy Tale category and her debut trilogy ‘The Knight Trilogy’ has been praised for its alternative YA style.

Sample chapters of Book One, ‘The Forest of Adventures’ are attached to this copy of ‘Beautiful Freaks’
for your reading pleasure.

You can find out more about ‘The Knight Trilogy’ at
www.theknighttrilogy.com

You can follow Katie on Twitter @KnightTrilogy

THE FOREST OF ADVENTURES

Book
One of The Knight Trilogy
.

AVAILABLE NOW.

PREFACE

SLEEP IS FOR
the innocent. For the guilty, the night is a time when we are fearful prisoners locked tightly behind heavy eyelids. We look asleep but we’re not – we’re living in nightmares, and it leaves us exhausted and half crazy
. T
his is the punishment for our crimes. 

It always starts the same, with the thick scent of wildflowers and
sun warmed
earth lulling me into a false sense of peace
. I
t doesn’t last. Too soon it fades
,
replaced by the sinister iron-stench smell of blood blending with mud
,
and the sweeping sounds of sharpened metal striking at the sky. On hands and knees
,
I crawl forward. My palms slip on the grease of the rain-soaked earth and my dress is so heavy with rain
,
that I’m dragged even l
ower
;
sliding serpent like towards him.

He looks at me, his cheek half burie
d in the earth, his eyes stare
blankly
.
I can’t tell if he’s dead or still dying. I think I hear him whisper my name so I stretch out a hand but I can’t quite reach. Death breathes on my bones and flowers of red ice bloom over my heart. I wake, gasping for air as if I’ve been drowning.

The pain
is
exquisite
,
the pain
is
love
.

1. BEGINNING

Blake Beldevier came with the snow.
He arrived on the first day of the January term.
Perhaps looking back
,
this should have served
as an omen:
a warning
to
anybody foolish enough to fall in love with him
that they
ran the risk of having their heart turned to ice.

Nothing could have prepared me for the first time I saw him. He walked in to the common room, took a seat and started reading
The Times
. It wasn’t for this weirdness that I noticed him - although it would normally have been enough - but because of his breath-stealing
beauty. It was
the sort of beauty that snaps
a
secret part of you to attention and reduces you to the beast you are at heart. It was a rough and rugged beauty
;
a colouring of the skin, a face that had been hewn from a re
mote and wild cliff face;
a darkness of the
eyes
which
were
full of latent storms and solitude. He was more beautiful than any other boy I’d ever seen in my seventeen years.

All of this I saw in an instant but it was enough. A sickening current swelled in my stomach. I felt dizzy and stars erupted in front of my eyes as if
I’d been hit by a force of freezing ocean air
, knocking the breath from my lungs. The book I was holding, a thing of exquisite and private joy previous to this moment, flapped limp in my lap, revealing itself as the faded and battered thing that it was. Now, here in front of me, sat something more divine than anything an author could create.

By the time I’d tried to regain the appearance of
someone who was actually sane –
flicking
through
the pages of my book to give the impression I’d been reading and had hardly notice
d him – he’d
gone to his lesson.

Sam, who’d been sat at my side throughout all of this, was completely oblivious to these seismic shifts. He was too busy scribbling down the last two answers of his Math homework. As I got up to leave for my lesson
, he took hold of my right hand and kissed
the well of my palm. His love was a solid and reliable love
. I
t was for its purity and simplicity that I loved him
.
Sam was clear
waters
and instinctively I understood Blake Beldevier was the swirling waters of a deadly current.

The sense of treachery I felt as I walked to my literature class was as overwhelming as the force that had been the meeting of Blake. Suddenly
,
it felt as if I had an iron scarf wrapped around my throat
,
and where Sam’s love usually offered a warm contentment, for the first time in the two years we’d been together, his love felt like it was choking me.

The English block was at the
far side of the college grounds,
and for this I was unusually grateful. The biting wind and the ice-rain that spliced my skin seemed a fitting punishment for the torrent of fire Blake had caused in me. Perhaps it was a taste of the pain that all of us would come to feel.

The English classroom was on the third floor and almost empty when I arrived.
Condensation streamed down
the windows of the overly hot classroom
,
which melted the view into the flat dull grey of the winter sky. It was comforting to look at something bland and unexciting. The classroom filled without my notice, but this escape didn’t last for long. 

“May I sit here?” h
e asked in a hushed tone, clearly embarrassed
that
he’d arrived late to lesson.

My heart quickened. I reasoned with myself that this seat, one of several available, had been chosen because of its closeness to the door
,
and was in no way related to my existence. After several disappointing minutes, I realised
my reason was right – he
hadn’t even registered me. 

The English teacher, Mr Dwell, was a flamboyant creation
;
a relic of some previous age of leather volumes, cream teas and cigars. He reminded me very much of my own Uncle Josef
and
so whilst others took delight in mocking him, cruelly impersonating his slight lisp and his portly walk, I felt an affection for the old man and loved the time I spent in his slightly out of sync world.

Literature was my favourite subject and
the
lesson
s
normally held my entire attention
. B
ut unlike other, more ordinary days, today the close scent of Blake’s warm body caused my thoughts to bounce all over the place and the words on the page to blur.

“Miss Singer, is there a problem?” Dwell’s soft Scottish voice filtered through as if it
were
travelling through water.

By the time I’d resurfaced, the moment had passed and the class were searching through their copies of Hamlet to find where we’d
ended
last lesson. Whilst I had been dancing around in my own little daydream, Dwell had selected people
to read.
T
hankfully
I wasn’t one of them. T
he
‘To be or not to be?’
passage was now being read by an unfamiliar voice.

Hamlet’s words sat easy in Blake’s mouth, giving the impression he was reading from memory, or like an actor who had learnt his lines. And rather than murdering Shakespeare’s verse
,
like we normally did, his voice fitted the iambic pentameter with ease
. It created
an
intensity
to the language
which
, until this moment, I’d struggled to understand. I lost myself in the music of the reading, jolting back to the room when he suddenly faltered
and become
unsettled in his movements. He turned to me, his eyes flickering with something like recognition. I noticed with embarrassment that my arm was touching his. There was something terrifyingly captivating in the fact that I couldn’t feel him
;
as if he simply didn’t exist.

The creepy thought that maybe he didn’t jumped on me
.
I looked around the
classroom
,
desperate for somebody else to prove he wasn’t a figure of my overactive imagination. An ice-spider took a leisurely crawl across my spine
.
Blake’s eyes locked onto mine and looked right into the heart of me. Moving a finger to his lips, he motioned me to silence
,
as if I had just stumbled across an impossible secret. A smile flitted across his mouth. At that moment
,
the strongest impulse to kiss him grabbed me and if it hadn’t been for the sound of the bell
,
then maybe madness would have won out.

Before the bell even had a chance to finish ringing, I’d packed as speedily and clumsily as a frenzied criminal about to skip the country. I wondered how it was possible to lose your sanity in the space of an afternoon.
All my
instinct
s
screamed
at me to run, to get away
.
But s
omething else, something deeper, richer, sweeter
,
wanted me to stay and move closer.
And even though a siren was wailing through my head telling me
that
this boy was dangerous, all I could think about was kissing his lips.