Changeling: Zombie Dawn (7 page)

‘Tom tells me that you were considering leaving us.’

‘That’s not quite what I said.’ Trey couldn’t shake the mental image of Lucien’s evil brother out of his head.

As if reading the young man’s thoughts, his guardian nodded. ‘You are more formidable than you think, and soon you will have a chance to unleash your powers and fulfil your destiny, Trey.’

There was a pause and Trey looked into Lucien’s eyes, something that was never easy to do. ‘You’re talking about the legend again, aren’t you?’

‘I’m merely suggesting that
not
going to Leroth will do nothing to remove the threat against you. You can choose not to go, but sooner or later Caliban will catch up with you, maybe in Leroth and maybe not. Your destinies are linked, like the twisted strands of your own DNA, and you can either meet that destiny head-on or wait for it to find you.’

Trey considered this. ‘I can run but I can’t hide, is that it?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘I want you to know that I will not allow anything to happen to you, Trey. I will protect you like my own son. You must believe that.’

Trey studied the creature before him. He nodded his head. ‘I do believe that, Lucien.’

The teenager stood up and turned to go, stopping at the door to face his guardian one more time. ‘Thanks,’ he said. A grin slowly crept on to his face. ‘Oh, and by the way, the suntan thing,’ he said, pointing. ‘It suits you. Makes you look less . . . dead.’

‘I shall bear that in mind.’ Lucien looked down at the papers on his desk, but Trey caught the amused expression on his face as he did so.

He stepped out, closing the door behind him.

Now all he needed to do was straighten things out with Alexa.

The communication console next to the door beeped three times, and Alexa tapped the touch screen to answer it, noting that it was the front desk calling. She glanced across at the grill where the ham and cheese sandwich she was making for her breakfast was cooking.

‘Hello?’

One of the guards on duty that morning spoke. ‘Excuse me, Miss Charron, but there’s a young lady in reception asking to see Mr Laporte. She says she’s a friend of his.’

Alexa felt her insides clench. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Blonde? Tall? Scarily blue eyes with a slight “desperate” look to them?’

There was a pause at the other end, and when the guard spoke again his embarrassment was evident in his voice. ‘Er, well, she is blonde, yes. She says her name is Ella.’

Alexa was about to tell him that she had no idea if Trey was in, when she heard his bedroom door open and close, followed by the sound of his tuneless whistling as he crossed the living room in her direction. ‘Tell her to wait downstairs, please. I’ll let him know.’ She tapped the screen again to sever the connection.

Trey walked in, the whistle dying on his lips when he saw her.

‘Hi,’he said after a moment.

‘Hi.’

There was an uncomfortable silence between them, neither of them knowing what to say next. It was Trey who finally spoke. ‘Look, Lex. I’ve been meaning to talk to you since our last little . . . chat, and I really wanted to tell you that—’

‘Your friend is downstairs,’ she said, interrupting.

He gave her a puzzled look, and she sighed theatrically.

‘Blondie? Your werewolf friend? The girl who saved your life? You know, the one you forgot to tell me about?’

‘Don’t be like that, please,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘I didn’t invite her here. She just turned up—’

‘Well, she’s
just turned up
again. She’s downstairs in the lobby, waiting for you.’

He frowned. ‘I’m not expecting her.’

‘It’d be rude to leave her down there waiting,’ she said. ‘You’d better go and see what she wants.’

He nodded, considering this. ‘Why don’t you come down with me? We could all go out somewhere together. You two could get to know each other a bit.’

Alexa raised an eyebrow at him and was about to say something when she sniffed the air. She looked behind her to see wisps of smoke coming from the grill. ‘Shit!’ she said, and hurried over to remove the blackened sandwich. ‘I think I’ll give your little idea a miss, thanks, Trey. I wouldn’t want to be a gooseberry or anything like that, but be sure to give my regards to Blondie, won’t you?’

‘Ella,’ Trey said in a tight voice. ‘Her name is Ella.’ He waited for Alexa to say something. By now, he was completely confused and frustrated by her hot and cold behaviour and he almost regretted coming in to try and patch things up between the two of them. Yesterday evening, after talking to Lucien, he’d gone down to the gym for a workout and used the time alone to think things through properly. He’d decided to be honest with her and tell her how he’d been struggling with things, but that even if she didn’t feel the same way about him, he
did
have feelings for her.

Now all that had gone out of the window and it was as much as he could do to stop himself from telling her what a pain in the butt she was being.

Alexa swore again as she burned her finger on the grill pan. She glanced over her shoulder at him and tutted. ‘Are you still here?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’ He turned and left the apartment, heading for the lobby.

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Trey said to Ella as they left the building together.

‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ she said.

It was a bright, sunny day again, and Trey wished he’d brought his sunglasses with him as he squinted against the light.

There was a taxi waiting for them, and Ella headed straight for it, holding the door open for him and beckoning for him to get inside.

‘Where are we going?’ he said as he climbed in.

‘Like I said, it’s a surprise.’

The taxi pulled away, the driver clearly knowing their destination even if Trey didn’t. Ella sat close to him on the back seat, pointing out landmarks along the route, and asking him to tell her what they were. She laughed at his sketchy knowledge of the city he lived in, and when he shrugged and smiled back at her their eyes met, and her look became more serious. He could feel his face reddening, and she turned away to stare out of the window. They drove over Tower Bridge and were soon in an area of London that Trey had never visited before. The cab took a number of turns through a built-up residential area, navigating lefts and rights through mazy rat runs until it came out into a road ending in a scruffy-looking industrial estate. The place, and the houses that led up to it, had an abandoned and disused appearance. The cab headed for some old workshops on the estate, and Trey was about to suggest that the driver must have brought them to the wrong place when the vehicle pulled up outside what appeared to be a rundown car repairs garage. Ella took out her purse and paid the driver.

‘Is this where you wanted to bring me?’ Trey said, looking out at the derelict old building, the walls of which were made of corroded corrugated steel. It sat in a weed-strewn yard, and it was clear just from looking at it that the place had not been used for a number of years. The two main doors through which the cars must once have been driven were padlocked shut with a rusty chain and the windows were grimy with dust and dirt.

He gave Ella a puzzled look, but she only smiled enigmatically as she climbed out of the cab, which pulled away and left them. She headed for the small door to one side of the building, taking out a key from her bag and unlocking it. She nodded for him to go in ahead of her.

Trey walked into the place, which was surprisingly cool despite the hot sun outside. It was a small reception area – little more than a dilapidated old counter behind which a door led into the main body of the building. He half turned to look at Ella with a frown, but she nodded encouragingly for him to go round and through. He did so, pushing against the door which groaned in protest.

His eyes had already begun to adapt to the darkness inside the building, and as he stepped through he took in the large space. In the centre of the garage were two hydraulic platforms, both of which were raised up over the sunken bays beneath them. On one of these an old car still stood, the original paintwork obscured by the dust and grime that had accumulated on it over the years. Tools lay here and there, so that the general impression was of a place that had simply been abandoned by its former owners mid-use. But it was the strange array of manacles and chains on the floor between the two hydraulic platforms that caught Trey’s eye. Two chains were secured to metal rings bolted into the ground. Trey thought it strange that, although the rings were clearly as old as the rest of the place, the chains threaded through them appeared to be brand new, the clean galvanized metal looking completely out of place against the forsaken, rusting equipment on display elsewhere in the workshop. He was about to comment on this when he noticed the small table to his left. Lying alone in the centre of the table was a hypodermic syringe filled with a clear liquid. Something about those chains and the syringe set every alarm bell ringing inside Trey, and he’d half turned to look at what Ella was doing behind him when he felt a sharp stabbing pain between his shoulders. He gasped, his hand flying back to seek out the source of the pain. He was too late.

Ella depressed the trigger of the Taser and watched as Trey flew forward on to the ground. The long wires leading to the barbed metal darts she’d fired into him snaked out from the front of the weapon, bouncing and twitching in response to the boy’s convulsions as the electric current passed through him. She reached out with her other hand, calmly taking the syringe from the table. She’d practised this moment many times in her head, going over it again and again to ensure that she’d be able to react when it came to it. She released the trigger, stopping Trey’s paroxysmal seizures long enough for her to step forward and jab the needle into his leg while depressing the plunger. The whole thing, from firing the Taser at him to injecting the drugs, was done in a matter of seconds.

Trey swore at her. He groaned and tried to get up, only to be floored again when Ella momentarily depressed the trigger for a second time.

‘Stay there and behave,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m assured by the man I bought them from that the drugs won’t take long to work.’ Then she added in a softer voice, ‘Please, Trey, this is for your own good.’

‘Let me ub, you bitsh,’ Trey said, his lips and tongue not syncing with his brain. He tried to get to his knees again, but his vision swam, and he collapsed to the cold, hard floor.

Ella looked down at the figure. She puffed out her cheeks and nodded to herself, pleased with her work. She still had a number of things to do, but the hard part was over. Now it was just a matter of making Trey see sense.

Trey Laporte was trapped with the disembodied head of a demon floating in the air before him. Each and every time he tried to move – his arms and legs felt as if they were pinned to his sides – he sank deeper into the stuff all about him. The creature’s face was a mass of ugly scars, which criss-crossed and overlapped each other in every direction as if they had been inflicted time and again over a long period – scars on top of scars on top of scars. One eye was milky and unseeing, but the other leered at the teenager as the creature opened its mouth and roared into the boy’s face. As it did so, the demon transformed before Trey’s eyes, morphing, twisting and compressing until it was Alexa’s visage that loomed over him, her eyes rolling wildly with fear as she screamed over and over. Trey tried to call out to her, but found he could make no sound of his own in this place. Then, just as the nether-creature’s face had melted away, so too did Alexa’s, this time to be replaced with that of the vampire Caliban, who laughed at Trey’s attempts to struggle free from whatever was holding him down. A huge throng of nether-creatures appeared behind the vampire, their bodies merging and coalescing into one great beast with hundreds of heads, which nodded and leered in unison as they stared down at him. Trey struggled again and felt himself sucked further down into the bubbling quicksand-like stuff all about him, his inevitable consumption by the mire eliciting a chorus of delighted shrieks from the crowd.

None of this is real.

Even in his terrified state, Trey was aware that he was hallucinating and that whatever Ella had injected into him was responsible for these terrible visions. On another level he knew that in reality he was chained and lying on the floor of the garage Ella had taken him to. But knowing that the nightmarish images weren’t really there, and controlling the terror that resulted from them, were two different things.

He was up to his chin in the quicksand now, the ghastly smell that came from the stuff filling his head. ‘You’re not real!’ he tried to shout, but again no sound came. He wanted to close his eyes, but this too proved impossible, and he was caught between the fear of the phantasmagoria before him and the even greater dread of slipping beneath the surface of the mire. The floating countenance of the vampire suddenly shot forward, lips peeled back over deadly fangs, ready to tear the boy’s throat out. Instinctively, Trey threw himself backwards out of harm’s way, the sudden movement submerging him for the last time beneath the sucking morass.

And then there was nothing but blackness, a complete lack of any light or sound. Trey willingly gave in to the dark, embracing the peace and calm that it provided, content to float in the womb-like void of unconsciousness.

When his eyes flickered open, the acrid stench of vomit filled Trey’s nose and made his stomach clench in response. Even this tiny, involuntary movement elicited a low groan from the teenager whose head was pounding and whose tongue felt way too large for his mouth. He was lying on his side and could see the source of the stink on the floor in front of his face. He tried to get up but found that he could not. His legs were secured together at the ankles with some kind of manacles, and a band of metal, like a waist belt, was fastened around his abdomen, and it was to this that his wrists were handcuffed. Bound in this way, he was forced to shuffle on his side away from the pool of filth, every movement resulting in a knifing pain in his head that caused him to groan and whimper. Trey wished he were back in that black void. He wanted nothing more than to curl up into a small, tight ball and allow the darkness to return, but he resisted the urge, taking a deep breath and tipping his head backwards instead, straining to see what he could. The workshop was dark, but Trey thought he could sense somebody in the shadows watching him. He shifted his weight, throwing his hips up and over – the terrible, harsh racket of the chains crashing into each other and the floor filled the place for a moment – so he was lying face down. The concrete floor beneath him was black with car oil that had been spilt over it through the years, and the smell of it filled his nostrils. At least it was better than the puke. He bucked his body and somehow succeeded in getting his knees beneath him. The metal girdle about his waist had two chains snaking out from either side of it, and these were fixed on short chains to the hoops in the floor he’d seen when he first entered this place. The set-up meant there was no way that he could get fully to his feet, and he was forced to kneel with his arms by his sides.