“How did you know that?” Kayla asked me in shock.

“I had a dream about it,” I told her.

“Ravenwood?” Potter cut in. “What’s that old fart got to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” I said back, wondering if Doctor Ravenwood were still alive in this reality.

“What sort of a screwed up world have we come back to?” Potter said, lighting another cigarette. “And I thought things were bad when the Lycanthrope were out on their killing sprees.”

“Why do the authorities stand by and do nothing?” I said, feeling numb at what Kayla and Isidor had discovered.

“Like Potter said,” Kayla almost seemed to whisper to herself, “we’ve come back to a different world than the one we knew. And somehow, I think by coming back, we are to blame.”

But I knew in my heart that it was my fault. “I’m to blame,” I told them.

“How do you figure that?” Isidor asked me.

“If I’d made my choice back in The Hollows like I was meant to, then none of this would have happened,” I said, lowering my head in shame.

“You don’t know that,” Kayla said, placing a hand gently on my shoulder.

“She’s right,” Isidor said. “Who knows what changes would have happened if you had chosen the Vampyrus over the humans or the other way around. However, had you chosen there would have still been changes to the world. You were in an impossible situation.”

“The Elders said that I would be cursed for failing to make a choice,” I told them, unable to look in their eyes. “They weren’t kidding, were they?”

“It’s the Elders who have done this, not you, Kiera,” Potter said.

“But it’s me who has to put it right,” I said, still unable to look at them.

“Not just you,” Kayla said, gently squeezing my shoulder. “We’re all a part of this. We’ve all come back. Like you said, Kiera, we’ve come back for a reason.”

“We just need to find out what that reason is,” Isidor said softly.

“I think that’s obvious, don’t you?” Potter snapped at him.

“Okay, keep your halo on,” Isidor bit back. “So what is the reason?”

“Like the guy in the shop said,” Potter hissed. “We push back. And we push hard.”

“But where do we start?” Kayla asked him.

“How about with that email?” he said, pointing at the laptop screen.

The three of us turned our heads to see that an email had appeared in my inbox. The subject line read:

I’ve been pushed!

Chapter Fifteen

Kiera

Within an hour of receiving the email, the sender was sitting across from me in the consulting room that I had prepared earlier that day. Elizabeth Clarke was in her early twenties and very pretty, something that Isidor had obviously noticed. He sat to the side of me, his mouth open. Elizabeth had blond hair that she had piled on top of her head in a loose-fitting bun. Little wisps of hair lay against her perfectly formed cheekbones. Her green eyes twinkled and her full lips glowed with a faint shade of pink lipstick. She was smartly dressed in a white blouse and light blue pencil skirt and jacket.

“Are you any good?” she asked me.

“At what?” I smiled back, but I knew what she meant. I had advertised my services as a private investigator and she wanted to know if she was going to be wasting her money or not.

She glanced at Potter who slouched against the wall in the corner, lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke, then at Isidor and Kayla who sat on either side of me. “Perhaps I’ve wasted my time,” she said, getting up from her seat.

“You’re not married, Miss Clarke,” I started, and winked at Kayla. God, this was so easy but it felt so damn good to be back at doing what I enjoyed the most. “However, you are dating someone and he hasn’t shaved for at least two days. You’re a school teacher by profession. You were raised in the town of Wood Hill but left some years ago and haven’t been back for some time. You live in a city that is some distance away. Your journey today was long enough for you to need to stop at a petrol station and refill your car. You’ve come about a family matter. Not a friend. A member of your family…”

“Okay, you’ve made your point,” Elizabeth said, sitting back down. “How did you know all that stuff about me – have you researched me in some way?”

“All I knew was from what you said in your email, that you had been pushed and that your name was Elizabeth,” I assured her.

“So how do you know then?” she asked me. “Are you psychic?”

“No,” I smiled, shaking my head.

“She sees things,” Isidor added.

“So you are a psychic then,” Elizabeth said. “I have no need for one of those.”

“You’re not married because you don’t wear a wedding ring,” I smiled. “That was the easy part. You haven’t removed one or forgotten to put it on as there is no red mark left on your finger. You are, however, in a relationship with a man who either hasn’t shaved for a few days or has a very short beard. He has travelled with you and is probably waiting for you back at your motel.”

“How can you be so sure about that?” Elizabeth asked me, looking startled.

With my fingertip, I tapped my cheek and said, “Miss Clarke, your cheeks have a rather healthy glow, as does your chin. That might be due to exceptionally good health, but the redness to the chin – no that looks more like a rash of some kind – like you’ve been kissing a man recently who hasn’t shaved. He has travelled with you today as you’ve come a long distance and the rash would have faded by now. The spattering of chalk dust on your right sleeve tells me that you have been writing recently on a chalkboard, which suggests that you are a teacher of some kind. The raised pimple of flesh on the middle finger of your right hand tells me that you like to write a lot – more than just the occasional note or two, so I’m guessing your mark a lot of homework.”

“And how do you know that I’ve travelled a long distance today…”

Before she had the chance to finish her question, I said, “By the fact that you needed to refill your car with petrol - you’ve splashed some on your skirt. You would have only come such a long distance if it was a matter of urgency. For instance, a problem with a family member. I’m guessing by the fact that you are staying in a motel that it is a brother or sister who is working in this area. If it had been a parent, you would be staying with them.”

“How can you be so sure that I’m staying at a motel?” Elizabeth asked.

“Because no one would have left their own home on such a wet night dressed like you are now,” I smiled at her. “When you set off today, you had no idea that the weather would be so bad once you got here and you hadn’t packed adequate clothing.”

“Very good,” Elizabeth said staring at me.

“Good?” Kayla gasped, “That was awesome!”

Not wanting to waste any more time, I looked at Elizabeth. “You said in your email that you’ve been pushed. Please explain what you mean by that?”

With the back of her hand, Elizabeth knocked away one of the loose strands of hair and said, “I saw your advert in the shop window and it reminded me of something my sister used to say.”

“Your sister?” I asked her. “And where is your sister now?”

“What makes you think that she has gone somewhere?” Elizabeth shot back.

“You spoke of her in the past tense,” I smiled. “What was her name?”

“Emily,” Elizabeth said, taking a picture from her pocket and sliding it across the table towards me.

I picked it up, glanced at the photo and said, “An identical twin?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “We were identical in more ways than just our looks. Emily, like me, was a teacher. I’ve taught now for the past two years at a school in Linden.”

“Don’t you mean Lond…” Isidor started and I kicked him under the table.

“Please continue, Miss Clarke,” I smiled at her.

“Emily decided against a career in Linden and decided to teach closer to where we were raised in the town of Wood Hill,” Elizabeth continued. “She was so happy when she got herself a position at Ravenwood’s, a nearby private school. The pay was good and she seemed very happy for a time.”

“So what changed all of that?” I asked her, my interest growing in the case on hearing that Elizabeth’s sister had been working at Ravenwood School.

“The wolves came,” Elizabeth said. “As you well know, we all spend most of our teenage years fearing that the wolves would come to our town to match, but obviously like yourselves, we were lucky and the wolves didn’t choose our home town while we grew up. So we escaped the matching. Like everyone else, we heard the stories and the rumours about the schools and the children where the wolves had chosen. That’s one of the reasons that both Emily and I decided to be teachers, we wanted to try and help those children should the wolves ever arrive at the schools where we taught. I think somewhere deep inside the both of us, we both prayed that would never happen. As you know, it has been more than five years since the wolves came to match and this time around they chose the school where Emily taught. We have always been close even though we have lived apart over the last few years,” Elizabeth continued, and I could see tears standing in her eyes as she recalled her sister. “Within days of the wolves arriving at Ravenwood School, the teachers there started to leave.”

“Why?” I asked, curious to know what had taken place there.

“The wolves arrived, but you must understand that they don’t look like wolves, they look just like us humans,” she explained. “They wear the skins of the children that they matched with years ago. They erected searchlights and towers and covered the tops of the walls with razor wire. Emily called me one night and said that Ravenwood was now more like a prison than a school. She told me that some of the parents had tried to break into the school to free their children, they wanted the treaty that had been agreed to hundreds of years ago ripped up.”