Silas slowly nursed Nico back to health over the next few weeks. Nico was devastated when she saw her reflection in a mirror one day. The fire had burned her so severely that it had stripped away a lot of her beauty. Nico had never taken too much pride in her appearance but she had considered herself rather pretty until she saw what the fire had done to her.
"I look horrible," she whimpered as she stared at her ruined body. Her hair was growing back but the fire had left nasty burns, which looked like they might never heal completely. Silas looked at her with more sympathy than Nico would expect from a man who went around strangling women.
"Fire is destructive," he said, "Some scars never truly heal. But really, I'm not concerned with what you look like, my dear. I see great potential in you."
Nico looked at him. Over the last few weeks, she'd started to think of Silas as being like a grandfather. She'd never interacted with another serial killer before so it always made her feel better to talk to him about what she had done. Silas wasn't how she'd expected him to be. She'd thought that he was the kind of man who approved of any murder, whether people deserved to be killed or not, but it turned out that the old man wasn't the senseless killer she'd envisioned him as. In fact, he was so gentle with her that sometimes Nico forgot that he had killed dozens of women throughout his life. He wasn't an animal and there was method to his madness. Nico wanted to be more like him. If she was going to spend the rest of her life being considered a monster by society, she at least wanted to be an artistic one, not the animalistic one she had been in the past.
"Maybe I could try killing Pete," she suggested, "It's not like the authorities would recognize me when I look like this."
"But they would wonder why a scorched teenager would want to visit a convicted paedophile," Silas pointed out, "Even the police aren't complete imbeciles. If you want to kill Pete, you'll need to bide your time. He'll be in prison for years. I can only hope I'm still alive when he's released."
Silas thought about the time when he'd met Pete. He'd had a perfect opportunity to rid the world of him right then and there but because he was so used to only killing women, the idea of killing a man had thrown him off and he hadn't been sure how to react to it. That was another sin he was going to have to try and make up for.
"Well, if I can't go after Pete, maybe I should go after my slapper of a mother," Nico muttered but spoke with less venom than she used to when talking about Sienna.
"Perhaps," Silas agreed.
Sienna stared at a picture of her and Nico. Nico looked like a happy young girl, not the deranged monster Sienna had finally admitted she was. The police had no interest in helping her find her daughter. Neither did Ben, who had been released from prison but now wanted nothing to do with her. Only Warren stood by her and despite the disapproval from the rest of the village, he still followed every lead he could find, hoping to discover Nico's whereabouts.
Sienna was praying they would find Nico before she turned seventeen, but her birthday was only a week away.
"Damn it," Warren grunted. Surprisingly, he was getting more frustrated by the search than Sienna was. While she was just getting depressed, Warren was getting angry. Sienna saw him on a laptop on a Find Nico website they had set up together. Unsurprisingly, very few people visited it.
"Still no word?" Sienna said as she put down the photograph and crossed over to him. Warren turned to her.
"Nothing," he said, "It's like she's disappeared off the face of the Earth."
"Well, we just need to keep looking," Sienna said.
"Yes, but a search like this normally needs more than two people," Warren muttered.
"Checkmate," Silas said. Nico pouted and Silas smiled, remembering how Heidi and later Jasmine, before she had her sex-change, had done the same whenever he beat them at chess.
"I need to go outside," Nico said, standing up gingerly. Her leg was still weak and she could only walk short distances but she was no longer disabled, "I've been cooped up for too long."
"Very well," Silas said, standing up. Despite his age, he moved with the grace of a snake. It made Nico feel clumsy by comparison.
Silas took her outside his little bungalow, which was in a little village that Nico was fairly, sure she had stumbled into at some point in the past, before she found Sienna in Hollyoaks. Back then, she had been desperate to find her mother.
Silas watched Nico out of the corner of his eye as she limped alongside him. She reminded him a bit of Lindsey Roscoe but there was one very important difference. Lindsey had been a slut. Nico wasn't. To Silas, that made her the perfect candidate to carry on his life's work after he died. He just had to make sure she remained pure. If she ever lost her virginity, it had to be to someone she was truly committed to.
Silas had grown rather fond of Nico whilst she was with him and hated the thought of her becoming like so many other girls and women these days. The teenager was angry, dark and hated the world but she could still be childish and youthful. Whenever Silas beat her at chess, she would grumble about it, she often complained about her mother, her friend Peri and pretty much anyone else whom she felt had wronged her but she also listened to his advice and teachings like an attentive student listening to her teacher. Silas hadn't had anyone look up to him in a very long time and he rather enjoyed the feeling. Lindsey, for all her faults, had behaved like his equal and even taken charge on occasion, but Nico was still unsure of what she wanted to do with her life so she looked to him for guidance. She wasn't even sure if she wanted to go after Sienna anymore, or just forget about her and move on with her life.
Silas had never met Sienna but from what Nico had told him, she was another slut. However, Silas had decided to let Nico decide whether to go after her mother or not. He didn't have the energy that he used to and was getting too old to go after every single whore he knew about.
Nico tired quickly and Silas noticed that her leg was trembling slightly. She didn't complain but she did slow down enough to silently tell Silas that she wanted to go back. Silas turned around and raised his eyebrows at her.
"You need only ask," he said. Nico rolled her eyes.
"I want to go home," she said.
"Very well," Silas said and they headed back to his bungalow.
Sienna took a cake out of the oven and stuck a candle in it. She picked up the picture of her and Nico looking happy, like a mother and daughter should. She lit the candle and sat down, looking at her daughter's smiling face.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," Sienna murmured, then blew out the candle, silently wishing that Nico would return to her.
Did anyone notice the way Silas moved when he advanced on Lindsey in their last episode? The way he walked resembled the slithering of a snake. They really should have given Jeff Rawle more time as his return was far too short.