WARNING: Suggestive domestic abuse here
Chapter 4
Shattered
"What are we going to do?" Gemma could hear the Kings as they spoke in the room opposite the kitchen where they had taken Aires. Both of them thought the locked door would stop her from listening in. But Gemma wasn't going to leave without some answers.
"What else can we do?" Mr King's voice was simple and matter of fact, he might have been responding to a comment on the weather. His wife's voice held more emotion.
"We can't." A small sob punctuated her speech. "He's our son!"
"To them he isn't anything. And they won't ask for him they'll take him." Gemma heard a rattling gasp from inside the room.
"Your just going to let him go? He's your son!"
"No he isn't, he's a job." There was a long silence, broken only by a twin moan from Aires as he lay unconscious and his mother.
"Your heartless. You will see him thrown in a cage!" There was a stifled scream and the sound of something being thrown to one side.
"Listen to me." Derrick's voice had become an evil hiss. "If we don't give him to them they will take him and kill us. And I won't see you kill yourself for this half breed!"
"He's my son!" She sobbed.
The snap of a palm striking flesh rang out like a gunshot. Then there was another.
"HE IS A FREAK! A HALF BREED AND A MISTAKE! AND IF YOU WON'T SAVE YOURSELF I WILL HAVE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH YOU!" The final strike made Gemma shudder. Derrick King stormed from the room, his palm red and his shirt bloody from the blood of his now rejected son. He spared nothing a glance as he left, he simply walked away to his coat and slammed the door behind him, abandoning his family.
Gemma stood and went into the living room, gently pushing the oak door open which had splinted at the lock with the force of Mr King's exit. Angela lay on the floor next to the sofa which bore a pale and sickly Aires, great sobs wracking her body. Gemma knelt down and helped Angela into a sitting position propped up against the sofa. Her face was red and her front was bloody but her fists were held tight at her sides.
"I'm alright." She murmered
"We need to call the police, he hurt you." Angela shook her head and a sharp laugh escaped a bloody mouth.
"No, there's not police force on earth that would dare arrest anyone working for Itex." She stood and dabbed at her lips with the sleeve of her jumper. "Go home Gemma, don't tell anyone what you saw and lead a normal life." She turned her back on the girl and lent over Aires and adjusted the bandages she had criss crossed over the open wounds in his back.
"Hang on a minute. I'm not leaving here without some answers. What the hell happened to Aires, and why aren't you at a hospital? He could die here!" Angela didn't pay her any attention. "Look at me! Or I'll call the police!" The woman turned and looked the girl in the face, Gemma quailed at the fierceness in her eyes which left her wondering how she could have let her husband strike her.
"I won't tell you again to leave. Because in about twenty minutes a retrieval team will turn up and kill everything in this house, so go home Gemma, and don't try and find us. Now get out, I have work to do." The girl opened her mouth to speak but a flattened palm struck her in the side of the head, she crumpled instantly. "I'm sorry."
Angela left the house in under three minutes, bundling some essentials into the car and placing a timed charge beneath the cooker. When the retrieval teams van arrived the house was surrounded by firemen and police as they doused the last of the flames which had destroyed the house. They watched and waited for a while before moving off, trying to track the two rogues.
Angela left Gemma Proudmore on the steps of her home and shot her full of Sodium Penithol, the last 12 hours would be a blur and when she went to school the next day she was bewildered by the absence of Aires along with everyone else. She didn't remembered Aires' transformation that night and led a perfectly normal life. Apart from a strange snippet of memory which she would dream about for months later, seeing two bright yellow eyes looking at her and someone whispering a name which escaped her. She now lives with her husband Alex and son Aires.