Read Online Dead Night by Tim O'Rourke - Free Book Online Page A

away from him again.
    “Tell me her name!” he roared, taking hold of my shoulder with his free hand.
    With our noses almost touching, I looked beneath the peak of his police cap and could see that, unlike the other cop, his eyes were grey with flecks of radiant blue. His lips were bloodless and pressed tightly together, and after witnessing what he had just done to his colleague, I whispered, “She said her name was Kiera Hudson.”
    As soon as her name had passed over my lips, the cop froze, those blue flecks flashed like lightning in his eyes.
    “Who else was with her?” he demanded.
    “No -”
    “Who else?” he roared.
    “A teenage boy and girl,” I cried out, his grip now hurting my shoulder.
    “What were their names?”
    “I don’t know!” I shouted, just wanting him to let go of me.
    “What did they look like?” he hissed.
    “The girl was real pretty with bright red hair,” I murmured. “The boy was tall, had black tattoos up his neck and a little beard...”
    Before I’d finished telling him what they had looked like he said, “Was there another with them?”
    I shook my head.
    “Are you sure?” he snapped. “He’s in his early twenties, dark hair and black eyes. Smokes like it’s going out of fashion and is a real wise guy?”
    “There was no one else!” I shouted, trying to convince him.
    “Are you sure?” He pushed me. “He calls himself Potter.”
    Then, as if being slapped across the face, my mouth fell open. For a moment everything seemed to slow down. The sound of the wind rattling through the trees and the sound of crows squawking in the unploughed fields was deafening.
    Noticing the look of shock on my face, the cop shook me and said, “What is it? What do you know?”
    “Nothing,” I whispered, but that was a lie.
    I knew that the letters in the bag by the cop’s feet had been sent to me by a man who called himself Potter. The cop said that this Potter had smoked. I had hated Marty smoking – because when he did, he’d reminded me of someone else – someone I had been scared of. But there was something else; my feelings were changing, too. It was like there were feelings inside of me for whoever this Potter was or had been. But these feelings weren’t just of fear, they were of love, too. But how could I have feelings of love for someone I didn’t know – someone I had never met before?
    “What do you know of Potter?” the cop said, shaking me, and it felt as if I were waking from a dream.
    “I don’t know him,” I whispered. Was that a lie? I didn’t know anymore.
    “Why do you look so shocked?” he came back at me, his eyes searching mine.
    “You just killed a man in front of me,” I gasped.
    “He wasn’t a man,” the cop hissed, loosening his grip on me. “He was a Skin-walker – an animal, and he was going to hurt you.”
    “Why did you save me?” I asked him, rubbing my arm as I lay in the street. “I thought you were partners. Aren’t you just like him?”
    “I’m nothing like him,” the cop snapped, slipping the tube of blood into his shirt pocket out of sight.
    “What are you then?” I asked him.
    He stared down at me and said nothing.
    Then, when the silence became more deafening than any noise that I’d ever heard, the cop took his gun from his belt and pointed it at me.
    Inching myself away, I held my hands up and said, “Please don’t kill me. I won’t tell anyone about that woman called Kiera Hudson. I only told my friend, Marty, but he’s dead now.”
    Then, coming closer, the cop shoved the gun into my hand and said, “Shoot me.”
    “What?” I gasped, throwing the gun into the ditch. “I’m not shooting a cop. I’m in enough shit as it is.”
    The cop went to the ditch, picked up the gun and went to the car. He aimed the gun at what was left of the Skin-walker’s head and fired.
    There was a booming sound that echoed back off the fields which surrounded us on either side of the deserted road. Then, he came back