Changeling (9 page)

‘Quick!’ shouted Lucien. ‘He is going to transform, we need to get him somewhere safe.’

Lucian and Tom moved swiftly to the boy’s side to see if they might be able to get him to his feet, but Trey was writhing on the floor, his arms and legs lashing out in all directions.

Without thinking of the danger, Lucien bent over and picked the boy up as though he were a child’s toy, ignoring the deluge of kicks and punches that landed upon his face and body, one opening up a large gash under his left eye.

He placed Trey carefully on to one of the chairs and turned to look at his daughter. ‘He needs help, Alexa. He is not ready, not yet anyway, and to change into a werewolf now, under these circumstances, could be disastrous – he’s simply too volatile. Please, try to help him.’

Trey’s face was a pinched mask of agony. It had taken on a livid red hue, and a film of sweat covered every inch of him as he bucked and writhed in the chair. They could feel the heat pouring off him, and Tom exchanged a worried look with Lucien as he stood helplessly by the boy’s side.

As they watched, Trey’s lips peeled back and he sucked in a ragged breath through clenched teeth. His hands – fingers rigidly set into hooks as if he were grasping an invisible tennis ball – were the same angry red colour as his face, and, as they watched, the tips of black claws like the ends of a crab’s hooked pincers started to erupt from the flesh of his fingertips. A multitude of coarse hairs appeared to push through his skin from invisible pores.

Trey screamed again and threw himself against the back of the chair, the wooden supports behind the padding cracking and splintering under the force of the attack. His fists were now balled tightly, and small droplets of blood escaped them as the emerging talons bit deep into the fleshy palms beneath.

Alexa knelt down in front of him, her hands pressing down on his legs in an attempt to hold them still.

‘Trey . . . Trey, listen to me; it’s Alexa.’

Trey could hear her calm voice speaking directly into his mind and a silvery-pink wedge of colour cut through the black swirling pain. That gentle but persistent nudging feeling in his brain was back again.

‘You need to take control, Trey. You are stronger than the forces that are flooding though you now, and you can make this stop. But you must take control. If you become the werewolf now, with the anger and pain that you are feeling – heaven knows what the consequences might be. You could kill us all. Please, Trey, fight it and take control.’

Lucien and Tom could only look on as the boy’s body continued to spasm in agony. His face was beginning to distort, the flesh around his nose and mouth becoming tight and waxy as it started to distend outwards.

Another strangled scream escaped him and his lips curled back over his teeth, which were thickening and extending out of his gums.

‘Trey, breathe deeply and try to follow my voice out of the blackness. Breathe, Trey. That’s it, follow my voice . . .’

The silvery-pink colour was more vibrant now, and was interspersed with golds and oranges. The colours that he began to associate with Alexa’s voice seemed to push against the angry blacks and reds that had filled his head, and the pain started to abate, his jerking body slowly relaxing until, finally he was still again.

Alexa stood up again and watched Trey as he sank back into the wrecked chair, trying to control his breathing, which came and went in a series of harsh, half-broken judders. Finally he opened his eyes and looked up at them.

Lucien took a small step forward and leaned towards him, puffing out his cheeks. He smiled a sad smile and placed his hand on top of the boy’s. ‘You scared the living daylights out of us for a while there, Trey. But the control that you showed proves to me that you can master the powers that lie within you. Your father would have been very proud of you.’

‘I’ll get that tea,’ said Tom, hurrying hastily in the direction of the kitchen.

Trey opened his hands and looked at the oozing cuts. They had already stopped bleeding and they seemed to fizz. He lifted a hand closer to him and thought that he could actually make out the edges of the wounds starting to knit together. When he inspected them again an hour later the only evidence that they had ever been damaged was the dried blood that remained smeared across his skin.

‘The care home,’ Trey whispered. ‘They’re all dead, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, Trey. It would appear that there were no survivors,’ Lucien answered in a quiet voice. ‘I’m truly sorry.’

‘And it was me that they were after, wasn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so. The other adults and children would have been considered nothing more than collateral damage, but it was you that they would have wanted dead, and fire is one of the methods that are actually effective in dispatching one of your kind.’

A sad smile flashed across Trey’s face, quickly disappearing as soon as it had appeared.

‘One of my kind,’ he repeated.

He looked up at Lucien, who was still looking down at him with genuine concern. ‘Do you know who did this, Lucien?’

‘Yes, I do. But I think it best that you rest now and—’

‘No. I want to know who is responsible for this. I want to know who could do such a thing.’

‘Please trust me. You need to rest. Tomorrow I will tell you absolutely everything that I know. But you must rest now.’ Lucien held out a hand to Trey and, when the boy took it, helped him gently to his feet.

Trey stood and held up his hand to wave away any further help. He swallowed and fought back the tears that threatened to take him over. ‘OK. I’ll do as you say.’ He stood facing him, a determined look on his face. ‘Before I do, though, I want you at least to tell me his name. Then tomorrow you can tell me all that you know.’

Lucien nodded and met the boy’s eyes. ‘He’s an extraordinarily powerful vampire who is responsible for much pain and suffering in this world. His name is Caliban.’ He paused, looking at Trey in a way that the teenager found particularly uncomfortable, before adding, ‘He’s my brother.’

Trey lay on his bed and flicked through the book that Lucien had given him the night before, glancing again at the ancient drawings and depictions of werewolves. Much of the book was taken up with legend and folklore regarding werewolves throughout the world, and he tossed it aside again – as he had done on countless occasions throughout the night and early morning. He hadn’t slept much more than an hour or so all night, and when he did close his eyes terrible visions of his friends screaming in their burning beds filled the void behind his eyelids. Once, during the early hours of the morning, he’d got up to vomit as the nightmarish scenes looped over and over in his imagination.

Nothing was normal any more. All his life he had dreamed of adventure. He’d wanted nothing more than to escape and seek out a new life that was not full of stupid house rules and obsequious kids who thought that obedience would win them a family that loved them and cared for them.

Be careful what you wish for, he thought, and smiled sadly up at the ceiling.

He felt empty. Completely and utterly alone in a way that he had never thought was possible. He had always kept himself pretty much to himself in the care home and school. He’d come to accept this, gradually coming to terms with a life of solitude and loneliness. But now he felt different. It was as though fate, not content with taking his parents and grandmother away from him, wanted him to know that he would always be truly alone. Hell, it turned out that
he wasn’t even human
, and now to be told that he was the last of his kind was the final straw.

He reached for the book again but abandoned the idea, taking instead a sheet of paper from the bedside table that he had placed there earlier. In an effort to try to exorcise the visions of the fire, he had set about making notes from the book, trying to clarify the things that he had found out about werewolves, and producing a list of questions that he wanted to ask Lucien and Alexa. He looked at his handwritten notes.

He was about to get up and have a shower – possibly go into the living room and tune in for the latest news – when there was the quietest of knocks upon his door.

He paused for a second, not sure that he had actually heard the sound, but sensing someone outside his room, he quietly answered.

‘Come in.’

Lucien opened the door and entered. He was dressed in grey flannel trousers and a black V-neck jumper. He carried a steaming mug in his hand.

‘My, what keen ears you have, Grandma,’ he said, with a little smile. ‘I’ve brought you some tea. I was sure that you would be awake, but didn’t know whether you wanted to be alone.’

‘No, it’s fine. I need to talk to someone, Lucien, and it would appear that my options in that department are somewhat limited and diminishing rapidly.’

He looked at the vampire standing in his doorway holding the cup in his hands. He wanted to beg him to stop all this; to turn it all back and give him back his boring little life again. He wanted to blame him for everything that had happened, but a part of him knew that it was not Lucien’s fault – in fact, it occurred to him that this tea-drinking vampire was now his only hope of ever knowing how to live anything approaching a normal life.

Lucien held his look and nodded sadly as if reading the boy’s thoughts. He placed the cup on the chest of drawers by the door and pushed the door open wider with his foot.

‘Please come with me, Trey. You might want to put your dressing gown on.’ Lucien held the door open for him and motioned Trey towards the kitchen. Once inside, he slid back one of the giant windows and stepped out on to a balcony that hung outside the building.

The two of them leaned against the metal ledge that surrounded the balcony and looked down at the river Thames below. The moon was still out, and its quicksilver reflection danced back at them from the broken waves of the great river like a thousand shattered mirrors. The city was slumbering, and while a huge metropolis like London never truly sleeps, very few things moved around in the streets on either side of the waterway’s banks.

‘Lucien,’ Trey finally broke the silence, ‘why does Caliban want me dead?’

The vampire paused, considering his answer before replying.

‘Fear, I suppose. If it is possible for a creature like Caliban to feel fear. You see, there are very few things that can actually take on a vampire, Trey, and you are the last in a bloodline of those that have done, and done so successfully. That is why he has dedicated so much effort to eradicating your kind. You were a rare breed before, but he has hunted down and killed almost all of the true-blood werewolves.’ He turned his eyes on the boy and it seemed to Trey that for a moment they blazed with some unseen light. ‘Almost . . . but not quite all.’

‘But—’

‘Did you read the section in the book about Theiss?’

‘The part that somebody has underlined? Yes.’

‘“Both I and my brothers are the Hounds of God,”’ Lucien said, quoting the passage as he stared out at the river again. ‘“We are the warriors who go to do battle with demons, and through our efforts we will ensure that the Devil and his minions will not carry off the abundance of the earth down to the Netherworld.” Those were the words that he said to the court as he stood accused of witchcraft.’ He turned to look back at Trey. ‘They burned him at the stake.’

‘I’m sorry, Lucien, what has this got to do with—’

‘The legend that surrounds Theiss is one that you may or may not choose to believe. He foresaw that a nether-creature would rise to such power in the Netherworld that it would be capable of launching a series of attacks on humankind to eventually bring it to its knees, leaving the humans as little more than cattle for the forces of the Netherworld to feed upon at will. Theiss also said that it would be a werewolf – a true-blood werewolf – that would stop this nether-creature. My brother believes the legend. Moreover, he believes that he is the creature in the legend, and that you are the werewolf in his way.’

Even above the wind, Trey could hear the roaring sound of his blood as it sped through his body. ‘I’m just a kid,’ he said.

‘So you keep saying. And I keep telling you that you are no longer “just a kid”. You have a great power within you, and it is up to you to realize that.’

A silence followed as Trey tried to take in what he had just been told. If it was true, he was in real risk of losing his life to some psychopathic bloodsucker because of a legend that some madman had contrived hundreds of years ago.