Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Feral

  By

  Victoria Thorne

  Feral

  Copyright ©2014 Victoria Thorne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Chapter One

  The foamy residue of waves licked my sand-encrusted toes as I stared into a black expanse of ocean. Panic crept through my veins.

  How did I get here? I did not belong here. I belonged... I couldn't remember where. But I should not have been here, in this bizarre world washed of color and choked by darkness. I felt as if my memories were being distorted, muffled – like they had been submerged underwater, while I had to make sense of them from above.

  The piercing laughter of a woman shattered the solitude. Startled, I turned and spotted the distant silhouettes of a man and woman, their skin glowing under the pale moonlight. They were the only evidence of life I had discovered.

  Whether it was due to the innate fear of being left alone or mere curiosity, I pursued the couple before I could lose them in the dense fog. But the instant I set foot after them, the beach morphed into the heart of a city. Sheets of fog became steam clouds rising from storm grates, and skyscrapers burst forth from the sand like trees. Although every lamp was lit and the unmistakable stench of refuse wafted through the air, the city was absolutely devoid of pedestrians, cars, sound – life. Where in the world was I?

  As the world turned itself inside-out, the couple surged forward, leaving me with no choice but to follow. A dancing shadow at the corner of my eye caught my attention, and for a second I thought I could faintly discern a figure behind me. Almost in response to what I had seen, the couple abruptly quickened their pace and changed direction. The further we traveled, the more our surroundings deteriorated, until eventually I found myself walking down a shady alley riddled with graffiti, dumpsters, and boarded-up backdoors. By now I was certain that someone was following us. It was evident in the man’s step, the way he pushed the woman when she began to slow, as if he were trying to escape some invisible pursuer. We turned a final corner, only to be met with a dead end.

  Not once had I seen their faces the entire time I was following them. They had always been obscured by darkness or facing the opposite direction. But now that I had caught up, I began to sense that there was something eerily familiar about them.

  The woman turned around. The moment I saw her face, my mind cleared as if a layer of haze had been lifted from my eyes.

  She was my mother.

  It felt like so long since I had last seen her. When had I last seen her? Yesterday? Last week? Last month? I couldn't remember.

  My father stood at her side with one of his hands entwined in hers. Stubborn tears pooled in my eyes as I digested the reality of their presence. Why did I feel so sad?

  My father kept taking furtive glances over my mother's shoulder. He looked at her intently and whispered something urgently into her hair. My mother tugged on the golden bauble she always wore around her neck while she nodded in nervous understanding. The entire time they never noticed me. As much as I wanted to run to my mother and ask her why she looked so hopeless, so miserable, I was rooted in the shadows. Although my parents stood only a few feet away, I felt as if I had no place in this part of their lives, that I fundamentally did not belong.

  I saw him before my parents did – a tall figure moving toward us in calm, graceful strides marked with malice. He struck unmistakable panic in my parents' faces. As he came closer, he remained shadowy and indistinct, his features blurred as if my eyes simply could not focus on them.

  Dread pooled in my stomach. I shouted at my parents to run, but no sound escaped my lips. Within seconds he had forced them up against the dead end. What were my parents doing? They were not fighting back. They were not outnumbered. They were voluntarily submitting. I had never seen my parents frightened before, but here they stood, pinned against a wall, their eyes glistening with terror. Why weren't they trying to run or defend themselves? Why hadn't they at least offered their wallets in desperation, instead of resigning their fates to the whim of a single stranger?

  Only when I noticed the thin, shard-like blade glittering in the figure's hand did I fully comprehend what their fates would be.

  My parents were going to die.

  I shrieked in a frantic attempt to divert their pursuer’s attention, yet still no sound escaped my throat, and I remained infuriatingly unnoticed. I whimpered internally. I did not want to witness the murders of my parents, but I could not bring myself to look away. My mind felt as if it were falling to pieces.

  The figure dug his hand into my mother’s scalp and pushed her head to the ground without mercy. Her long silver hair fell around her like a curtain, hiding the pain I knew she had to have felt. My father made no movement to help her. He was frozen, whether in fear or cowardice I could not tell.

  For a split second, my mother's pleading gray eyes found mine, and recognition seemed to glow within them. Her colorless lips curved slightly upwards. Before I could even process what had happened, her head snapped back as one of the figures made an abrupt, fluid movement. Her bloodcurdling screams cut through the very fabric of my mind, searing themselves into my memory. I closed my burning eyes and shouted into the darkness until my voice returned to me in broken sobs. My mother was dying.

  Without a doubt, my mother’s murderer had heard my whimpering and would soon be coming for me. I didn’t care.

  I felt foreign hands on my shoulders shake me viciously. This was it. I would resign myself to my fate, just as my mother had. I braced myself for the fatal blow and savored my final moments of existence....

  And I woke up

  Chapter Two

  "Amber! AMBER!" Matt bellowed into my face with complete disregard for my eardrums.

  I sat up with a gasp, my head nearly smashing into his. I touched my swollen eyes and my fingertips came away wet. Great. Crying in dreams carried over to real life.

  "What do you want?" I mumbled hoarsely. Apparently I had been screaming too.

  "Good, you're not having a seizure," Matt huffed in relief. "Mom and Dad again, wasn't it?" he asked with concern.

  "What do you think?" I replied, as if the answer were obvious. "I guess I'm not over it yet." I tried to feign indifference as I mopped my face with my sleeve.

  I had been having the same dream for the last three months. Every night, I would watch my parents' murders and then wake up in a puddle of my own tears. Some nights were worse than others, but the dreams always seemed so real.

  I reclined onto the lawn and combed my fingers through the individual threads of grass. We were waiting for a locksmith in front of the gates of our new house. Evidently he hadn't come yet.

  I sighed exasperatedly. In the last four days, we had traveled over one thousand miles in a stuffy, poorly air-conditioned minivan. So, of course, nothing frustrated me more than waiting two extra hours for a much-needed bath.

  "You can't even see the house from here!" Heather, my younger sister, complained as she returned from her little expedition around the front of our property. "The gate is too high, and there are too many trees." Heather peered in through the immaculate iron bars. "For all we know, there may not even be a house in there."

  "Oh, please, Heather," I responded before Matt could indulge her wildly imaginative delusions the way he always did. "If Matt was able to get the water and electricity turned on again, there has to be a house. Right, Matt?" />
  My brother shifted uneasily as he played with a few pieces of grass he had ripped from the ground.

  "Right, Matt?"

  "Yeah, yeah. You're right. I mean, I paid the bills..." Matt glanced at us worriedly. "I spent the last six years getting a creative writing degree, not taking home economics."

  "Matt!" I gasped in disbelief. I placed my exhausted head in my hands and massaged my aching temples. "You know what? It's okay. If there's nothing in there, we'll just book a hotel for the night."

  "Mom and Dad did leave us with enough money to buy a new place..." Heather added thoughtfully as she twirled her fingers through her long fair hair. It was true. As prominent journalists with significant life insurance policies, our parents had left more than enough inheritance for us to survive on for a while. The only reason we were moving into this house was because Matt had discovered it when he was going through our mother's assets. We assumed that it had been bequeathed unto her by our deceased aunt she had mentioned a grand total of once. Since our parents had never imparted any information concerning their journalism careers with us, we weren't very surprised that they had failed to mention owning property in another state.

  At the mention of my mother, I habitually clutched the golden bauble around my neck. Matt had given it to me after our parents died, and now I never took it off. Cloudy, golden liquid floated in a glass orb adorned with intricate silver claws at its top and bottom. To any other person, the piece of jewelry may have looked highly unusual, but to me it was one of my last connections to my mother.

  "I still think there's no house in there," Heather muttered, as a loud mechanical sputtering interrupted the serenity of our surroundings. A noisy pickup truck with an obnoxious neon key printed on its side slid into the driveway beside us.

  "That must be the locksmith," Matt said with relief.

  The person who stepped out of the truck was nothing like what we were expecting. With her carefully curled hair, perfect makeup, and tall stiletto boots, the woman looked ready for a night on the town, not a humid afternoon of lock picking. If she hadn't been dressed in a faded –albeit fashionable – blue jumpsuit and had a toolbox at her hip, I would have assumed that she had stopped at the wrong house.

  "Oh, dear! You haven't been waitin’ out here too long have you?" Her chipper voice bounced with a slight Southern twang.

  "Not long," Matt replied quickly before Heather could contemptuously voice the truth.

  "Well then, my name's Jessica, but ya'll can call me Jess. And ya'll must be the Tates," Jess smiled at us excitedly.

  Heather rolled her eyes in disdain.

  "Tesses, actually," Matt corrected politely. "I'm Matt, and this is Heather and Amber." Jess nodded at each of us and shook hands with Matt. But the glances she tossed Heather and me were nothing compared to the long look she had given Matt.

  Everyone knew that Matt had been blessed with the innocent face and charisma that girls do a double take for. His gray eyes, inky black hair, and infectious cheerfulness could make him the center of attention even amongst strangers. Unfortunately, my sister and I resembled nothing of our brother. We both had inherited pale complexions, slightly tall statures, and muddy brown eyes that seemed to clash with our hair. None of us really looked much like siblings to begin with, especially with our varying hair colors and facial features.

  But, out of all of us, I felt I had drawn the shortest stick, genetically-speaking. I had always envied my sister's uncut golden hair, the way it rippled down her back in a single sleek wave. That coupled with her bright child-like face made her look almost angelic, like she had been cut out of a Christmas card. When I was younger, I would have traded my plain features and limp chestnut hair for hers in a heartbeat.

  Heather cleared her throat impatiently. "We need this gate opened, as well as all the locks changed on the house,” she reminded Jess.

  “Right, gotcha. I'll be done in a flash." Jess wobbled slightly in her high heels as the weight of the toolbox momentarily got the best of her. Seriously, what kind of locksmith wore three-inch heels? "So, how long are you planning on staying?"

  "Staying?" Heather reiterated with slight offense. My sister could be so sensitive. "Well the house is ours, so we plan on living here for a couple years."

  "Gosh, I guess that makes us neighbors then – almost. I mean, I live just down the street from here. You see that gate five houses down?" Jess made ostentatious arm gestures in a vague direction toward the horizon. "Lived there twelve years. I've seen so many people come in and out of this house here; it's so nice to hear a family will finally be settling in it."

  "Excuse me," I broke in. "People have moved in and out of this house? How many?"

  "My, it's so hard to recall." Jess scratched her head with a screwdriver-like apparatus. "Must have been at least four families since I moved here. To be honest, most of the time the people only stay for a few weeks, and then the house goes largely uninhabited. Why, the last family that was here only stayed about two weeks last year."

  I shot Matt an apprehensive glance. That couldn't have been right. Matt had said that our parents must have owned the property for at least five years. Could our parents have been renting out the house? But even then, why would they rent it out for only a few weeks out of the year?

  "What kind of people stayed here?" I asked.

  "I can't really say... They weren't the social kinda folk." Jess frowned and her forehead creased in recollection. "Mostly kept to themselves. House next door has a history kind of similar to this one." Jess made another showy arm movement to a massive house next to ours. The gate had collapsed from disrepair, exposing the heavily dilapidated residence. "New group of people moved in just last week – saw the trash on the sidewalk. Haven't had the chance to meet them, though."

  "How strange..." I couldn't help whispering under my breath.

  "So, how old are you two girls anyway?" Jess changed the topic, probably because over the course of the last twelve years she had gossiped the last one to death.

  "Fifteen and seventeen, although my sister's still in middle school," I answered.

  "Why then, Amber, you'll be going to Pierce High with my son, Spencer. I’ll be sure to tell him." Jess' expression turned thoughtful while she dexterously clicked her tools against the metal. "You two should get to know each other."

  As much as I wanted to object to her plans for an arranged friendship between her son and me, I managed to mumble something along the lines of "cool."

  "Ah ha!" Jess cried in success as I heard a bar crash down with a resounding clang. That must have meant that the gate was unlocked. "Got it!"

  With a loud groan and a push from Matt, the gate swung open. The four of us made our way down the winding cement drive, battling untamed tree branches until we found our way into a clearing. The sight that greeted us made us all gasp harshly in shock.

  Before us stood the most stunning monster of a house I had ever seen with my own two eyes. Between columns of floor-length windows, pearly stone balconies appeared to have been sculpted from the walls. Below the portico were the parched remains of a once elegant mermaid-themed fountain, now strangled by a mass of vines that held an uncanny resemblance to a sea monster. Although the house was clearly several decades old, it bore the mark of time well.

  Despite the grandeur of the house, I couldn't help but feel as if something were unusual about it. Something slightly off, something unnatural… I probably felt disturbed because this house was so unlike the one we had left behind in California. Yes, that must have been it.

  “Holy horseshoes," Jess breathed in awe. "Never in all my life did I know this was back here."

  "Neither did we." Matt was just as shocked as she was. Jess looked at Matt peculiarly.

  "Oh, that's right, you don't know how the house came into our possession," Matt remembered.

  "We inherited it," I finished curtly, afraid that Matt would go too far back into our family history. We didn't need the entire neighborhood privy to our f
amily's most recent tragedy. "Unfortunately, it didn't come with keys."

  "You Tesses must be in line with some pretty important people," Jess said. "Well, I guess I better get started on that door so we can see the rest."

  The door took much longer than the gate, which Jess claimed was due to an “absurd little metal doohickey" that was getting in her way. When I prompted her to explain what exactly the "absurd little metal doohickey" was, Jess explained that it seemed to be a second locking device, although she had never seen anything like it in her life. A smaller, similar device had been built into the front gate, despite the fact that it was hardly necessary; opening the traditional lock would just unlock the second one anyway. To me, the second lock just looked like a little metal cavity.

  After chipping a nail and nursing it back to satisfactory appearance, Jess proudly announced that she had unlocked the front doors.

  Matt wasted no time ushering all of us inside, where we found that the interior was just as extravagant as the exterior. But the strangest element of the house was that it was fully furnished. Landscape paintings hung on the walls beside ticking Victorian grandfather clocks, all encased in a thin film of dust. Otherwise, the furniture bore no traces of time, and was completely free of fading, water damage, even the smell of moth balls. It was all very peculiar.

  "Are you sure no one still lives here...?" Heather asked Jess suspiciously as she inspected a nearby piano.

  "Yes, I'm fairly sure," Jess confirmed. "I haven't seen anyone come in or out. No one could possibly still be here."

  "It's all very odd, isn't it?" I said, voicing what everyone must have been thinking.

  "Or just very fortunate," Matt suggested.

  Torn between discovering the rest of the house and doing her job, Jess reluctantly announced that she would be working on the rest of the doors on the first floor. After she left, Heather, Matt, and I split up to explore the opulent interior in silence. We had always been inclined to act independently.