Changeling (23 page)

Lucien continued down the dark corridor, moving cautiously forward until he came to the door that the sound of his daughter’s scream had emanated from. He paused, listening intently, before pushing it open and stepping quickly into the room. It was a large open space that had once been used as some kind of workshop, the remains of workbenches arranged in two rows down the centre like giant coffins, the machinery that had once stood on top of them long since gone. He scanned the room, peering into the gloom before moving forward again.

‘Daddy, please help me!’ Alexa’s voice came from behind a door on the far side of the room. The pain woven through her pleas for help caused Lucien to forget his caution. He ran towards the sound, throwing open the door and bursting through to the other side.

He had no sooner placed a foot over the threshold when the globule hit him in the face.

It expanded instantly to engulf his features, making it impossible for him to breathe or see. He instinctively raised his hands to try to tear it off, but his fingers became stuck in the mass, drawn further into it and swallowed up as he struggled to pull them free.

He considered misting, but realized that it would be fruitless, as he had no idea how big the room was or where the walls were. To reappear in the middle of a wall, or on the outside of an external one at this height, could be fatal. Besides, there was no point in misting if he couldn’t get this damn stuff off his face. And he couldn’t get it off.

‘Oh, look,’ Hopper said, his snide voice getting louder as he approached from the other side of the room. ‘Mr high-and-mighty Lucien Charron seems to be in a bit of a fix!’ His laughter was joined by another’s that was deeper and more sinister.

‘Having a bit of trouble there, are we?’ Hopper continued, now to Lucien’s right, but maintaining a cautious distance. ‘Must be getting quite uncomfortable in there now. Lungs emptying, no oxygen. Even for a vampire, that must be quite a big problem, I’d have thought. What do you reckon, Glebb?’

‘Can’t see it ranking up there on a vampire’s top ten somehow.’ Alexa’s voice seemed to say these words, but now Lucien knew that his daughter was not in the room, and he knew what the other creature with Hopper was. It was a succubus: a demon capable of perfectly mimicking the voice and appearance of any female in order to lure its male victims to their death. He had been lured into this trap by something as simple as the mimicry of his daughter’s cries for help.

‘Of course,’ the succubus continued in Alexa’s voice, ‘him being a nether-creature, even if he dies – if the
undead
can actually be said to die – he’ll just rejuve at some point.’ The voice was mocking, sounding even harsher when vocalized in Alexa’s tones, the two demons enjoying the chance to toy with him as he suffocated within the darkness of the mask.

‘Oh, Glebb,’ Hopper said, ‘have you forgotten? Nether-creatures can be killed by their
own kind
, using nothing more than tooth and claw – or, in this case, spit and cunning.’

The two cackled again as they watched Lucien continue to struggle to free himself from the glue-like globe. He began to weaken, and they laughed wildly as his thrashings caused him to fall to the floor. Lying there, writhing on the floor, his struggles becoming less and less frantic, until finally they stopped, and he lay motionless in the dust.

The creature called Glebb moved out of the corner it had been hiding in throughout and approached Lucien’s prone body. Both demons were in their true form – a temporary bridge had been opened between this world and the Netherworld, incorporating the entire building that they were now in, so they had no need to adopt the cumbersome human
skins
that they normally wore when entering the human plane. The succubus was a tall milky-white creature, devoid of any hair. Its skin didn’t appear to fit it properly and hung in great folds at various points on its body. It shuffled as it walked cautiously forward. Looking down at the vampire, it snapped its jaws together twice quickly, the sharp little teeth making an ugly clicking sound as it did so. ‘Is he dead?’ it asked.

‘Yeah, I reckon. Best make sure though, eh?’ the sputum djinn said with an ugly grin.

Hopper stepped forward and raised the wooden stake high above his head. Bringing it down with all his force, he drove it through the vampire’s chest.

‘We should have stuck together,’ Tom said quietly, walking ahead of Trey into the gloom. ‘No good can come of us splitting up like this. We’re playing right into Caliban’s hands.’

Trey followed Tom as they carefully approached a door at the end of the short passage. Standing in front of the door, Tom readied the gun in his hands, turning on the torch mounted just beneath the weapon’s muzzle.

Tom nodded up at Trey, his face a mask of concentration. ‘We don’t know what we might be up against here. Caliban knows we are coming, and there’s no saying what he might have managed to bring over from the Netherworld with him. Could be anything. Just keep close to me and do exactly as I say, OK?’

The werewolf looked down at him and slowly nodded its head.

Tom looked at the door, took a deep breath and glanced back at Trey. ‘How do you want to do this?’ he asked with a gesture of his head towards the entrance.

Trey raised his foot and kicked the centre of the door. It ripped off both sets of hinges and flew into the centre of the empty room on the other side, the tumultuous noise bludgeoning the oppressive silence of the building.

‘Oh, the subtle approach,’ Tom shouted, charging into the room and scanning the corners with the light. Trey ran in after him, ducking under the door frame to stand by his friend’s side in the empty room.

‘How’d you like that? They invite us to a party and there’s nobody here to welcome us.’

Something wasn’t right. Trey scanned the room again, but there was nothing in any of the dark corners and recesses. There was a pervading stench that filled the room, making him bristle with fear. Tom looked back to him with a wry smile, and then motioned for them to move forward to the double doors in the wall to their left. He hadn’t gone more than two steps when the first one fell on him.

‘Spiders of Nrgal! Their venom is lethal, Trey. Run!’ shouted Tom, twisting his head to the left to avoid the creature’s fangs. The giant spider-like creature was the size of a large dog and entirely black, with clusters of onyx-black eyes set into a baleful face. Coarse hairs sprouted from its bulbous body and powerful chitin-covered legs, which it used to grab at Tom from every angle, wrestling him closer towards it in an effort to pierce his flesh with its venomous barbed teeth.

Tom tried to lift the muzzle of the gun to shoot upwards into the face of his attacker, but the creature gathered his arm in tightly with one of its legs, making it impossible for him to fire without injuring himself. Having a good purchase on him now, the creature squeezed its prey close and reared its ugly head to deliver the killer bite.

Trey leaped at the beast, his clawed hands closing around the fused head and thorax. He wrenched at the creature’s body, but it would not give up its grip on the quarry that it had waited so patiently for. He held on to the head section of the segmented body, struggling to force it back away from Tom and stop those fangs from injecting their deadly poison.

There were others now, scuttling across the ceiling to drop down into the mêlée, their hungry eyes reflecting back the scene below them as they hastened to join the attack.

Trey couldn’t pull the thing free of Tom. It took all his effort to simply stop the creature from biting down into his friend – so powerful a grip did it have upon him. He roared his anger and frustration and bit down into the creature’s head, hoping that the pain might distract it enough to let go of Tom. There was a sickening pop as one of the giant spider-creature’s eyes burst, followed by a keening screech. The creature writhed in agony, all of its legs moving at once, and it let go of Tom and turned on Trey with incredible speed.

As it turned, lifting its longer front legs to grab at him, Trey briefly glimpsed the soft underside of its abdomen. He hooked his fingers and raked them down into the leathery flesh, sinking his claws deep into the tissue beneath and opening up a cavernous wound. The contents of the creature’s body sagged to the floor and hung beneath it like some gruesome pendulum. Trey wrenched his hand free and watched as the creature fell to the floor, a black tar-like substance quickly surrounding its dead corpse.

‘Too many of them, Trey. Quick, run,’ Tom shouted, indicating the approaching figures overhead. He pushed Trey towards the double doors, spraying the ceiling with bullets – the percussion of the machine-gun in the enclosed room a roaring cacophony of noise that caused Trey to wince in pain as the sound assaulted his ears.

They ran to the doors, stopping long enough for Tom to tear loose one of the grenades from his jerkin. He ripped the pin free and rolled it towards the creatures that were now advancing at them across the floor. As soon as the grenade left his hand he grabbed Trey by the arm and pushed him through the doors, closing them and taking refuge behind the wall that they were set into. The power of the explosion within the confines of the room was enormous – a wall of noise and smoke smashed through the doors as the explosive shock wave ripped through everything in its destructive path. Tom, who had been crouched over the hulking figure of Trey, was up in a fraction of a second, firing round after round into the smoke until the magazine was empty.

He ducked back down against Trey and changed the clip. The two of them eventually got to their feet and cautiously peered into the clearing smoke to see pieces of the Spider demons scattered everywhere.

The sound of hands clapping behind them made them whirl around to face the source of the noise. A tall, luminously pale creature stood facing them, regarding them through glowing eyes that promised nothing but death. The twin pools of hatred never stopped gazing at Trey for a second, and the teenager knew without a doubt that he was looking at the creature that wanted him destroyed: Caliban.

‘My, we do like to make an entrance, don’t we?’

Hopper looked down at Lucien’s dead body and shook his head in disgust.

‘Vampires. Jumped-up ponces, the lot of them,’ he said. ‘Supposed to be the “dark lords of the night” – pah! Taken out by nothing more than a woman’s voice and a bit of demon cunning.’

‘I’d be careful what you say about his kind with Caliban in the same building, Hopper. He has a way of hearing these things, you know,’ Glebb said in his own voice now, sidling over to him.

‘I’d have preferred it if that human scum, Tom, had been the one to come this way,’ Hopper said. ‘I’d have enjoyed ripping him apart piece by bloody piece. I can taste him now. But I’ll have him, you mark my words. As a reward for dealing with
this
,’ he said, nodding towards the dead figure on the floor in front of him, ‘Caliban will let me have him, you see if he don’t. I’ll drink his blood, I will.’ He clicked his teeth together and smiled at the thought.

‘Talking of blood, there’s not much coming out of him really, is there?’ Glebb said, pointing at the prone figure of the vampire.

Hopper looked down again, screwing up his hobgoblin features. ‘No, not really. I reckon the stake must be keeping it from coming out too much.’

‘What do we do with him now?’ Glebb said, tentatively prodding at the body with a clawed foot while maintaining his distance.

‘Caliban said that we’ve got to burn him. But he wants to see the body first, so we’ll have to drag him through from here. Come on, grab a leg.’ Hopper started to reach down to pull the body by the feet, but stopped, realizing that it wasn’t going to go anywhere while it was pinioned to the floor by the wooden stake sticking out of the torso.

‘Take that thing out, will you?’ Hopper said to the succubus.

‘I’m not touching it. You staked him. You clear up your own mess.’

Hopper glared at the other demon. ‘You know why you succubi are despised and derided by other demons, don’t you? Because you don’t have any balls – like the women you imitate!’ He cackled at his own joke and crabbed his way around the body to remove the stake.

Hopper stepped forward and placed his foot on the vampire’s chest. He wrapped his hands around the heavy wooden pole and pulled up as hard as he could.

It was the last thing he ever did.

As soon as Hopper’s foot came into contact with Lucien, the gluey mass on the vampire’s face changed form. Lucien, who had been battling so hard not to slip over the edge of consciousness into death’s dark abyss, seized upon the only chance that he knew he might get. He tore the suffocating glob from his face and drew a huge ragged breath, his mouth and eyes open impossibly wide as he sucked in the air. He shook the remainder of the substance from his hand and in the same movement grabbed Hopper’s leg by the ankle, locking his muscles to ensure that there would be no escape from his grip. The foul nether-creature’s pupils constricted to black pinpricks as he looked down and witnessed the reanimation of his nemesis.

With his free hand, Lucien wrenched the stake from his chest, the pain a deafening wall of white noise that consumed everything else and forced a roar of agony from him. He looked up at the sharp wooden tool and wondered at how he had survived being skewered by such a horrendous instrument.

When the stake had been driven into his chest, narrowly missing his heart, he had had to close down huge areas of his consciousness to escape the raging avalanche of pain that had threatened to crush him. He had retreated from it, finding a small refuge in his mind from which he could look out on to the bedlam that ensued, and he hid there, waiting and trying to stay alive long enough to escape should an opportunity arise. But now, forced out of his refuge, the tortuous pain was back again, eating through him like a forest fire gobbling up everything in its path.

Struggling to his feet, he held Hopper aloft in one hand, dangling the demon upside down above the floor. The sputum djinn had regained its wits now, and spat globule after globule at Lucien, twisting this way and that to get the shots in. But it was pointless. As long as Lucien was in contact with him, the balls of gunk simply failed to stick, sliding off harmlessly instead.