Helping Kate
Chapter One
Kate
I was pressed up against my bedroom wall. My mother's body pushing me back as she stood between me and our attacker.
"Don't touch her. It's me you're angry at." She yelled at the tall man stalking towards us.
My head was ringing. How had it all managed to go wrong so quickly? I looked over Mum's shoulder to see the man stop in front of us. He laughed.
"You keeping my own daughter from me, Natalie?" He asked my mum.
"I am when I know what you've become." She spat back.
He snarled and lunged at her. I screamed and dived under my desk. Shaking I watched as my parents rolled on the floor and yelled at each other. He was mad. He always had been. I didn't understand. Meeting your soulfinder was supposed to make you good, nicer. He hadn't. I didn't understand how anyone could be so jealous all the time. My mother had never even looked at another man but she still paid for it every day. Knowing why she stayed was easy, they were soulfinders. But now, after twelve years, she'd had enough. Because my father had started to take his unnecessary anger out on me. I only realised how bad it was when my maths teacher had called my mum in after school. We both got beaten for that one.
But he was still mad, why would he fight my mother? She was stronger than him. It was her Savant power. She could sap the energy out of anyone if she wanted to. She had only ever used it on me when I was younger and refused to sleep. But she was sending waves of it to him now. He was still beating her though. Again and again his fist came down around her head. The same way he did to me last week. I knew she would win. Then he would leave and my mother and I could move away and live happily together for the rest of our lives.
That was before I saw the knife. My mother screamed as he waved it and I instinctively hugged my right shoulder. A long scar was left from when I was ten, a year ago. The first time he had used a weapon. When he realised that I could be more powerful than him. I started breathing faster. The fight was more vicious now. There were both snarling and I could see he was wearing her down. She let her guard down once and he leapt with his unnatural speed and landed a long slash across her beautiful face. She screamed and I could feel lights turn on all down the street as the neighbours woke up.
"Kate! Run! Just go!" She screamed as he pressed the knife against her throat.
"Mummy!" I screamed back.
"Just go baby, I'll be fine. Run!" She cried out as the knife slashed and her head fell back.
I froze. I didn't understand. How could I? I was only eleven. I still lived in Disneyland. I couldn't react to the fact that my father, who used to sit me on his knee and buy me Toxic Waste sweets, had just murdered my mother.
He turned to face me. He smiled.
I ran.
Out of my bedroom and down the stairs as fast as my eleven year old legs would take me. I could hear the monster that was my dad laughing behind me. I burst through the front door and ran down the street. Some one grabbed me from behind and I screamed as my father's voice whispered at me.
"Think about this Little Kate. I'm gonna let you go, just this once. But only cos I'm gonna have a great time hunting you down. You just wait for me. I'll see you one day." He turned and walked away back down the street, laughing manically.
I turned away and saw my neighbour, Mrs Lane, standing at her door in her nightie. She was holding a mobile phone in her hand and as beckoned me over I could hear the police sirens getting nearer and I watched as they pulled up and bundled the struggling figure of my dad into the back of the car.