The Key

38

The fear that had flooded Kathryn when the priest had been in her room was now curdling inside her.

‘You OK?’ the cop asked, stepping in from the corridor and closing the door behind him.

She nodded, forcing a smile that was lost in the darkness.

With the meagre light from the corridor now absent, the room was almost black. Since her hearing had suffered in the blast Kathryn had noticed how her other senses had expanded to fill the gap. She could smell the cop as his movement across the room displaced the air: coffee and fabric conditioner and some kind of disinfectant that had probably leached into the fabric of his uniform from sitting too long out there in the scrubbed corridor.

He appeared by the window, a silhouette against the night sky. A sliver of moon had risen over the rooftops, reminding her of the secret she carried. She felt the weight of it — as her father must have, carrying it alone for all those years. She sensed the air shift again as the cop stepped away from the window and came closer to her bed, bringing the smell of disinfectant with him.

‘I’m not sure about that priest,’ the cop said, almost to himself. ‘That’s why I came back — to make sure.’

A hand flew out of the darkness and clamped over Kathryn’s mouth and nose, cutting off her breathing and preventing her from making any sound. He was wearing surgical gloves — the source of the antiseptic smell.

She tried to twist away, but he was already on her, straddling her body and pinning her to the mattress with his knees. She tried thrashing her head from side to side, hoping to dislodge his hand so she might scream, but the latex glove gripped her skin and held it fast.

He brought his face closer to hers.

‘Shhhh,’ he said, ‘quiet now.’

He yanked her head sideways to expose her neck and she felt something sharp and cold on it. In a panic she threw every ounce of energy she had into arching her back and bucking against the hard hospital mattress, jolting him forward and making his hand slip from her mouth. She shrieked for half a second before the hand clamped down harder and the cop shifted position, grinding his whole weight painfully on to her arms to stop any further movement.

Her head was snapped round again, more violently this time, and she felt the pressure return, biting into her flesh. She had a sudden image of a vampire, feeding on her in the dark and she realized with certainty that she was going to die.

Kathryn thought of the secret she held in her head and wondered what would become of it. The cop — if he was a cop — would know the room would become a crime scene and anything in it would be scrutinized as evidence. The latex gloves showed he was being careful. If he found the book hidden in the bed, then she doubted anyone would ever discover its contents. Everything they had done, all the thousands of years of waiting for the prophecy to come to pass, would be for nothing.

Tears leaked out of her eyes at the injustice of it all. She cursed herself for being too weak to fight back, but destiny had always been stacked against them from the start. She regretted leaving Gabriel, but her father would be there on the other side, and so would John. She would see her husband again. She began to relax into her fate as she felt coldness spread through her neck as if death was already seeping into her.

Then the door to her room flew open and Gabriel surged through the darkness towards her.