Changeling: Zombie Dawn (2 page)

Trey slowly put out a hand, and the old man thrust the device into it and nodded again, before moving over to stand next to an elderly Japanese woman who was waiting patiently by the wall with the ancient castle behind her.

‘
Arigatou gozaimasu
,’ the man said with one last quick bow.

Trey took their picture, handed the camera back and hurried off, suddenly feeling rather foolish but unable to shake the feeling of vulnerability. Perhaps heading out hadn’t been such a great idea.

As he walked he mused over what had just happened. He couldn’t go on like this, seeing everything and everyone around him as a potential threat. He wasn’t even able to go out for a walk in the sunshine without believing he might be attacked. How was he supposed to live like this? How was he ever supposed to enjoy himself and behave in a way any normal teenager might? He let out a long sigh. That was the problem. Trey couldn’t live like a normal fifteen-year-old because he wasn’t one. And he never would be.

He was sick of it all. Almost everything he’d once considered normal was now totally screwed up. Even time was out of whack. When he’d left the human realm to go and find Alexa and Philippa in the Netherworld nobody had thought to explain to him that the two realms were temporally misaligned and that upon returning, months, not days, had elapsed. He’d missed his favourite band in concert, and he’d paid a fortune for those tickets. No wonder Philippa had opted to go and live in Lucien’s luxury villa in the Seychelles for a year – she’d had enough of the madness too.

Back at the apartment everyone was discussing Caliban and his plans. Lucien’s frustration at not being able to locate his brother had diffused through the place, and it seemed to Trey as if everyone was running around in a state of frantic disorder, trying to second-guess the vampire’s next move. It used to be that the apartment was a sanctuary away from the day-to-day business of the downstairs offices, which policed the movement of nether-creatures between the two realms. But that had all gone out of the window since their return from the Netherworld, and now there was precious little time for anything else. Trey had come outside hoping to escape it all for a while, to relax a little, but his encounter with the Japanese tourist simply underlined how keyed up he was.

It wasn’t just the activities back at the apartment that had Trey wound up, it was the reason behind them. The vampire Caliban was at large again, and if Lucien was right, he was somewhere in the human realm.

Trey squinted up at the sun once more. At least he was safe from attack by the psychopathic bloodsucker in the daylight. Of course, his minions were a different matter.

The teenager crossed the busy road, dodging the onrushing cars that blared their horns at him. He headed for the red, white and blue sign of Tower Hill station, thinking that he might take a tube train to Oxford Street. But at the last minute he veered away; the thought of pushing his way through the multitude of shoppers that would fill the busy streets there was the last thing he needed right now. Instead he turned towards the City, knowing that it would be quiet outside the working week.

His leg ached a little as he took a flight of stone steps down into a passage separating an ancient-looking church and a vast steel-and-glass office block. The wound he’d received at the Demon Games in the Netherworld was still a little tender, but it had healed exceptionally well and he knew that it was almost as good as new, despite the ugly scar that marked him now. He’d suffered a facial injury at the Games too, but if he were honest he rather liked the pink line of scar tissue that ran through his right eyebrow. It gave him a rough, tough look. The scars were permanent. Unlike the wounds he suffered at the hands of humans, the wounds inflicted on him by other nether-creatures did not heal in the same way.

He had no idea where he was going. He walked, turning left or right whenever it took his fancy, and pretty soon he was lost among the tall buildings and near-empty streets. He didn’t mind. He kept his eyes fixed on the section of pavement immediately before him, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his face to block out the outside world.

He stopped at a kerb and glanced up to check for cars despite the almost complete lack of traffic in this part of the city. A shop on the corner caught his eye. It was shut, the interior dark and uninviting, but the window packed full of comics and graphic novels looked interesting, so he approached it to take a look.

The lack of lighting inside the shop, coupled with the bright sunshine outside, made it difficult to see the display properly, and Trey was forced to make a visor out of his hands, curling them round his eyes and pressing them against the glass to get a proper look inside. He spotted a compilation book of one of his favourite Marvel characters, and he strained to see if it was one he already had or not. As he did so he got the uneasy feeling that he was being watched – a strange sixth sense that made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle and a cold shiver run through him. He turned round, looking to see if he could locate the source of the uneasiness.

There was nobody in sight.

Get a grip, Trey, he told himself, remembering his earlier overreaction to the tourist. But the uneasy sense of being watched would not leave him, and lately Trey had learned not to ignore his gut feelings.

He quickly walked off to his right, pulling his hood back from his head now, not wanting his peripheral vision restricted. He sped up, turning left, then right, and entering a narrow street with rows of garages on one side and ugly, squat business premises on the other. At the end of the road he could see an arch in a brick wall that looked as if it led into a children’s playground; brightly painted swings and slides were just visible through the gap. In the background beyond this appeared to be a high-rise block of flats. That feeling of being followed was stronger than ever. Trey started running in the direction of the park, quickly lengthening his stride until he was sprinting. Doing his best to ignore the pain in his knee, he ate up the ground in front of him. He burst through the narrow brick archway, skidding to a halt as he did so and taking up position to one side of the opening. He quickly glanced about him, relieved to find that the playground was empty and that a line of tall trees at the far end obscured the view of most of the windows in the flats. At the last second he decided to remove his trousers and sweatshirt, kicking off his trainers too so that he stood there in nothing but his underwear, socks and a T-shirt.

Please God, don’t let anyone look out now and see me standing in a children’s play area in nothing but my pants!

It occurred to him that this could all be yet another episode of paranoia. He was losing it. He was imagining—

He stopped, holding his breath. Sure enough, Trey heard the sound of running footsteps approaching. That uneasy feeling he’d experienced at the bookshop was back, setting his nerves jangling and his heart thumping against his chest. He closed his eyes, praying that what he was about to do was the right thing.

He Changed.

The huge barrel-chested seven-foot werewolf that he now was crouched, and as his pursuer emerged through the bricked archway Trey threw himself forward, knocking whoever it was down to the ground. There was a loud ‘Unfgh!’ as they hit the small grassy mound on the other side of the opening. Trey was quickly on top of his quarry, pinning it down with his weight. He reached forward and pulled the hood back off its head.

But it was no demon beneath the hood. A pair of piercingly blue eyes stared out at him from behind a tangle of blonde hair.

Ella blew the hair away from her face, her annoyed expression quickly turning to amusement as she took in the astonished look on the werewolf’s face.

‘Hello, Trey,’ she said.

When Trey had got over his shock at seeing Ella again, he pulled her back on to her feet. Growling an apology, he turned his back, returned to his human form and put his clothes back on. The ripped and ruined mess of his underwear and T-shirt were picked up and placed in a bin. Eventually he turned to look at Ella again and offered her an awkward smile.

‘We should go somewhere and have a chat,’ he suggested.

They found a little cafe where they could sit outside in the sunshine. He sat across the table from her, studying her as they waited for the waitress to fetch them their drinks. She was tall and attractive, with high cheekbones that made those penetrating blue eyes all the more startling. He remembered how, when they’d met for the first time in his Uncle Frank’s house in Canada, he’d incorrectly suspected she wore coloured lenses. She had the same coloured eyes when she morphed into her white-furred werewolf form, which was unusual: most wolves lost their blue eyes as they grew from cubs to adults.

‘What are you doing in London?’ Trey asked.

Ella explained how her parents had refused to have anything more to do with her following her return from Canada. They reasoned that as she’d been stupid enough to run away with her playboy boyfriend there was no place for her back with them now that it had all gone wrong. She hadn’t told them how she’d been lured there and deliberately bitten by a werewolf pack’s alpha leader, turning her into a lycanthrope too so that she had no choice but to stay there with him. How could she? She paused in her story with a sad smile and a shrug.

‘But you know all about the Pack, and how it ended.’ She gave him a strange look, pushing a strand of hair away from her eyes. When she continued it was in a lighter tone. ‘So I decided to travel around Europe a bit and take in the sights. I found myself in London, remembered that you lived here, and made up my mind to track you down.’

There was something about her story that didn’t quite ring true with Trey, but he dismissed the thought. He was glad to see her again, regardless of the truth behind why she was really here.

‘So how did you find me?’ he asked.

‘I sensed you,’ she said. She snorted a little and looked back at him with a puzzled expression. ‘We’re
werewolves,
Trey. Don’t you
feel
it when there are others like us around?’

He frowned. ‘No, I don’t think I do. At least, not in the way you’re suggesting. I think I sort of knew that you were around once you were close to me on the streets, but that’s about it.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess I’m not your typical werewolf.’

There was a silence between them then. He realized she was staring at his sweatshirt, at the place where the talisman hung on a chain round his neck.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ Ella said eventually.

‘What?’

‘The Pack. Don’t you miss the feeling of . . .
togetherness
? Of belonging?’

Trey thought back to his time in Canada with the werewolf pack known as the LG78. He’d gone there to find his uncle, to try and come to terms with what he was and learn about his werewolf heritage. But instead his experiences had simply underlined the differences between him and other lycanthropes. He didn’t fit in with the Pack. Because of the amulet he wore and because he was a true-blood werewolf – born of two, not one, lycanthrope parents – he would never be like them. He was different, and that difference had almost got him killed at the hands of the Pack leader, Jurgen. He looked at the girl sitting opposite him and smiled at her, remembering how she’d saved his life that day.

‘I guess my experience of the Pack is slightly different from yours, Ella.’

She gave him that strange look again. ‘Determined to be the lone wolf, is that it, Trey?’

She reached out for her coffee, and he caught a glimpse of the terrible scar on her arm that had resulted from her boyfriend’s attack. The sight of it reminded him that she too was different. She hadn’t been born a werewolf, and she’d also had to struggle to come to terms with what she’d become when she was deliberately bitten. He frowned, remembering that although his return from Canada still felt fairly recent, her own return had been some time ago and that at least three full moons must have come and gone for her. She had no amulet round her neck to control her transformations when the moon was at its fullest. And there was no Pack to look out for her now during the Change to make sure she didn’t go off on some murderous rampage.

‘How have you coped with your full moons since you’ve been back?’ Trey asked.

She let the question hang in the air between them. Eventually she shook her head, smiled and changed the subject. ‘Look, I’ve got some time in London, and I thought that maybe you and I could hang out?’

Trey frowned. He was about to tell her that he was a little busy right now, when he stopped. Hadn’t he just that morning bemoaned the fact that he never got the chance to act like a normal teenager? Hadn’t he wondered if he would ever be able to hang around with friends in the very way Ella was suggesting now?

‘OK. Yeah, that’d be nice,’ he said.

‘Do you live near here?’

‘Not far.’

‘Great! Maybe you could show me your place?’

Trey thought about the apartment, and how it was teeming with nether-creatures right now. Not to mention Lucien, Tom – Lucien’s right-hand man, Hag the witch and Alexa. His heart did a little bump when he thought of Alexa: he hadn’t told her about Ella, and he wasn’t sure how she’d react to him turning up with her. He glanced back at Ella, who was still smiling. He returned the smile.

‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’

She stood up. ‘Great. Let’s go, shall we?’

‘Now? You want to go right now?’

‘Sure.’ She caught the worried look on his face. ‘Is now a bad time?’

Trey thought for a second before making up his mind. ‘No, not really. I suppose now is as good a time as any.’

The drained, dead body of the woman remained on the floor where Caliban had dropped it earlier, and despite the cold, the ripe smell of death filled the room. He had considered simply pitching the corpse out of the window to let it fall and rot at the foot of the tower, but then another idea came to him, and using the simple spell she had taught him, he’d summoned the sorceress. They were alone in the huge tower, and he knew that she would be somewhere deep in its bowels. He had no intention of traipsing down there to find her, and he could imagine the way in which she would be cursing him right now as she made the long journey up to his rooms near the top. He’d once asked her why she didn’t simply move about the place by magic, but she’d rolled her eyes and proceeded to lecture him on how needlessly difficult and draining that would be.