Picking up the lantern, Luke led me from the room where he had been hiding for so long. In the passageway, he turned right, leading me away from the landing and further into the darkness. Even with the lamp held before him, the passageway was dark and suffocating. Being with Luke did nothing to ease the creepiness that I felt.
"Watch your step," Luke whispered over his shoulder as he led me up a narrow staircase. Reaching out with my hand, I brushed the wal for balance. Again, I could feel that sticky, tacky substance on the wals and its smel became almost overpowering as we climbed.
"What is that sticky stuff on the wals?" I asked him. "It stinks."
"Oh, that," he said over his shoulder. "I've gotten used to it. I don't even notice it now."
"Lucky you," I muttered. "But what is it?"
"It's a mixture of garlic and queets, which is a herb only found in The Holows. Lord Hunt discovered that when the two are mixed together it forms a powerful paste that sends vampires completely nuts. They hate the stuff - won't come anywhere near it."
"But why is it al over the wals?"
"Hunt had every wal, door, and window frame coated with the stuff," he explained. "Should vampires ever get past the moat and into the grounds, then it's a final layer of protection from them."
"What's so special about the moat?" I asked. "It doesn't even look that deep."
"The water's blessed - holy water if you like," he said, and his voiced echoed back down the staircase.
"It acts like a ring of steel around the entire manor. The vampires would never be able to cross it."
"Why did Lord Hunt fear an attack from vampires"
I asked. "What was he trying to protect?"
Reaching the top of the stairs, Luke stopped outside a door and looking at me from the darkness, he said, "This is what he was trying to protect." Pushing open the door, Luke stepped inside.
I folowed him into a vast room, which I guessed was somewhere hidden inside the roof of the giant manor. There were no windows that I could see and the room was lit by many tal candles that had been fixed into silver-coloured candlesticks. There were so many that the light filed the room with a dim orange glow. As I peered around the room, my stomach began to tighten as I saw what looked like several hospital beds running down each side of the room. Beside the beds stood machines that blinked on and off in the gloom. They buzzed and beeped and luminous green monitor screens cast eerie shadows up the wals.
"'What's -?" I started.
"Shhh," Luke whispered placing a finger against his lips.
Leading me down the aisle between the two rows of beds, I counted ten in al, and in each one, to my continuing dismay, I could see a child. Each of them was connected in some way to the machines that stood beside them. Tubes and wires coiled from their nostrils, arms, and fingertips which al fed back into the monitors and strange looking apparatus. Peering through the candlelight at them, I could see that there was a mixture of boys and girls and I guessed they were aged between thirteen years and sixteen years old.
I couldn't remain silent any longer; I had to know what these children were doing, hidden in this makeshift hospital, in the attic of the manor. "What's going on here?" I asked Luke. "Who are these children?"
Luke just looked back at me, and I could see sadness in his eyes. Then from the shadows in the far corner of the room, a voice said, "They are half-breeds, Kiera."
Peering into the gloom, I saw a figure walk from out of the darkness and towards us. As he stepped into the candlelight, I knew at once that he was the doctor who tried to remove the black bony fingers from Kayla.
He looked just how she'd described him. He did look like an owl. He wore blue scrubs and latex surgical gloves. His forearms were muscular and covered in so much white hair, that he would have made a polar bear envious.
"My name is Doctor Ravenwood," he smiled and pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. His voice was deep, but somehow gentle - caring. His tone of voice was like al doctors, who had bad news to break to you.
"Half-breeds?" I said, feeling a little startled at his sudden appearance.
"Yes, I'm afraid," he replied, looking at the children lying in their beds. "It's a problem that arises when Vampyrus and humans produce children together."
'Like Kayla?" I asked, reminding myself of how her father had been a Vampyrus and her mother human.
"Yes," he said, looking at Luke, then back at me.
"Kayla has told you then?"
"She showed me her wings," I told him. "Kayla told me how you tried to remove them - to stop them growing."
"That's right," Doctor Ravenwood said.
"And these others," I said looking at the children stretched out in their beds, "they are like Kayla?"
"Yes," he smiled weakly, "but with a difference."
"And what's that?" I asked, glancing at Luke, who was standing with his head bowed and looking at the floor.
"She is only one of the few who has managed to live past the age of sixteen," Ravenwood started to explain. "You see, for years - hundreds of years, the Vampyrus have been coming above ground and living in secrecy amongst -"
"She knows al this," Luke cut in, without looking up from the floor.
Ignoring him, the doctor continued. "Anyway, some of the Vampyrus fel into relationships with humans - most of these humans were totaly unaware of their lover's true identity. They were naive to the fact that they were in love with and sharing their lives with a breed of vampire bat. Some even married and they had lives that to the world seemed normal. But these relationships were far from normal. They were marriages between two entirely different species.
Fortunately, at first, it seemed that those Vampyrus and humans couldn't have produced children. But over the centuries, some females of the two species gave birth and children were born out of these unions. It was a terrible tragedy as these children were born hideously mutated and they lived very short, and tragic lives.
Relationships between Vampyrus and humans was therefore forbidden by the elders of our race, but like any forbidden fruit, some find its taste too hard to resist.
So over the years these relationships have continued in secrecy and more children... half-breeds, have been born."
"The graveyard," I whispered aloud over the doctor.
"I'm sorry?" he said, looking put out that I'd interrupted him. "What did you say?"
"I found a graveyard in the grounds of the manor,"
I told him. "They were al graves of children - they were the children born out of these relationships that you speak about."
"That's correct," Ravenwood said, very matter-of- factly.
"But some of them lived to the age of sixteen years," I gasped. "You said that they died at a very early age."
Then looking at the rows of beds in the makeshift hospital, Ravenwood said, "As you can see, Kiera, some live longer lives - but there have ever only been three that have grown past the age of sixteen. We do our best to make those who live longer comfortable."
"Comfortable?" I sighed, looking at the figures sleeping al around me. I went to the foot of one of the beds and stared down at the girl who lay on it. She was about fourteen years old and curled on her side. The girl had long blond hair that curled down the length of her back. But between her golden locks I could see a series of black bones sticky out like a rack of ribs. Turning away, I looked at the boy in the bed next to her. He was about sixteen and with his eyes closed, he looked so peaceful. Tubes ran from each of his nostrils and into some type of breathing apparatus beside the bed. The machine made a wheezing sound as it helped him to breathe. The boy's skin was as pale as chalk and had a translucent appearance, and as I stared harder through the candlelight at him, I could see his heart beating beneath his chest. I could see his veins and arteries, his bones and muscles. It was as if I were looking at a human-shaped jelyfish. The sight of him didn't scare or repulse me, it just made me feel incredibly sad for him - for al them.
"Wouldn't they be better off in The Holows?" I asked Doctor Ravenwood.
"Oh no," he said, coming to stand beside me at the foot of the boy's bed. "We can't take them home.
Remember the relationships that these children were born out of are forbidden. Oh no, that wouldn't do at al."
"So what?" I snapped, "You just sit and wait for them to die?"
Looking at me over the rims of his glasses, Ravenwood said, "We are not ruthless, uncaring creatures, Kiera. Even though these children aren't truly Vampyrus - we stil want to look after them - to cure them."
"Cure?" I said. "What, make them human again?"
Shaking his head at me, the doctor said, "They wil never be truly human or Vampyrus - they are what they are - half-breeds. But that doesn't mean they have to die young, to not live out their lives and realise their true potential - whatever that maybe."
"You said, we, who's we?" I asked him. "You and who else are trying to cure these children?"
"Lord Hunt, of course," he said.
"And how are you planning on achieving this cure?"
Puling the latex gloves from his hands and roling them into a bal, he looked across the room at Luke, then back at me. "We discovered it by chance. It was after I removed the piece of bone from Kayla's back.
We had been wondering why it was that Kayla had grown past the age of sixteen with very few physical problems. It wasn't until she reached that age that she started to show any physical changes at al. To the outside world, she looks just like any other sixteen- year-old human female."
I thought of how Kayla had been caled 'stickleback' by the other girls at her school and wondered if Ravenwood was just deluding himself.
Apart from the children lying in the hospital beds, I'd never seen another sixteen-year-old with wings. But then again wasn't that the point that Ravenwood was trying to make - no other half-breed had lived past the age of sixteen.
"We wondered whether the cure lie in Kayla's DNA." The doctor continued. "So after carefuly abstracting the marrow from the piece of bone from Kayla's back, Lord Hunt injected it into Alice over there," and he pointed to a girl lying in a bed at the furthest end of the ward. Ravenwood made his way to the foot of her bed and I folowed him, al the while, Luke remained silent.
"See her wings?" Ravenwood asked me, pointing at the girl on the bed. It was difficult to see exactly how old she was, as she was lying on her front, her face turned against the pilow. Out of her back hung two long black wings and just like Kayla's, they were jet- black and covered in a fine, sparkly substance which looked very much like glitter.
"They look okay to me," I told him.
Then taking hold of the tip of Alice's wing, it crumbled into a black ash between his fingers. Rubbing the dust from his hands, I watched as the wing reformed where it had only moments ago broken away beneath Ravenwood's touch. "Six months ago, every bone in her body reacted in the same way," he explained. "You only had to brush up against her and her arm would break, her leg would snap, or her ribcage splinter. But after Lord Hunt injected the DNA taken from the bone in Kayla's back into Alice, her bones began to harden - to solidify. They no longer break now when touched, but it's her wings. As you can see, they are stil brittle. If she were conscious, Alice would have been in unbearable pain as her wings had crumbled."
"So why doesn't it work?" I asked him.
Looking at me, his eyes almost seeming to shimmer behind his glasses, Ravenwood said, "Remember I said that only a few of these half-breeds had managed to live past the age of sixteen years?"
"Yes,'" I said, nodding.
"Wel, Lord Hunt was of the belief that the extracts of DNA from those three survivors would hold the key to a cure," the doctor said.
"Do you know who these three are?"
"Kayla is one, of course," he said. "Another is an eighteen-year-old boy named Isidor Smith."
"And where is he?" I asked.
"He has been very hard to find - but we have managed to locate him. We don't know if this Isidor Smith knows what he is," Ravenwood said.
"A half-breed, you mean?"
"Exactly," he continued. "But we should know soon enough - Lady Hunt has gone to...how can I put this? Persuade him to come home with her."
"Like she did to me?" I said, trying to hide the resentment that I felt about being tricked by Lady Hunt.
"So who is the third of these surviving half-breed?"
Taking his glasses from the tip of his nose and cleaning the lenses on the hem of his scrubs, he looked at me and said, "For someone who has the ability to see, Kiera, you don't see very much at al."
"See what?" I asked, the muscle in my stomach beginning to tighten.
"Can't you see the real reason that Lady Hunt got you to come and stay here?" he asked, pushing the glasses back onto his nose.
Feeling numb, I shook my head at him. "She brought me here so Luke and my friends could protect me from Taylor and Philips."
"And why do you think you would need their protection?" Ravenwood asked.
"Because...because..." I started, but my mind seemed frazzled - confused. Then I remembered what Taylor had said to me in St. Mary's graveyard back in The Ragged Cove. Taylor had told me that I was unique! "No!" I whispered backing away from Doctor Ravenwood.
"Yes, Kiera," he said coming towards me. "You are one of the three who can save these children. You are a half-breed."