The Hybrid Series | Book 1 | Hybrid

by Stead, Nick

  “Why does no one believe me when it comes to coursework?” I said.

  “Well, have you done it?”

  “No, but that isn’t the point.”

  She rolled her eyes but didn’t reply. The bell would soon be ringing, forcing her to leave for her own classroom as well. I caught her glancing back at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. She knew something wasn’t right.

  Back home, I opened the fridge to find it packed full of beer for the latest football match Dad had on.

  “Hey, Mum, can I have some beer?”

  “Please,” Dad said automatically. If his attention hadn’t been on the match he would probably have said more.

  “Not on a school night.” There was a warning in Mum’s eyes.

  “Aw, come on, Mum, just one?”

  She shook her head. “When you’re eighteen you can have as much as you want but until then it’s the odd one for a special occasion, you know that. Anyway, you don’t need any beer, you just have to look at the stuff and it sends you giddy.”

  I looked at the bottles with longing. “Someone told me you sing better after a few beers.”

  “No, what really happens is you think you’re singing better but really you sound worse.” She came over to close the fridge door. “It’s the same as when you see yourself in the mirror and think you look amazing, then the alcohol wears off and you realise you’re a mess.”

  “Oh, well I don’t need beer to make me feel good about my reflection. I do look amazing.”

  Mum laughed. “You daft apeth, go and find something else to do and leave me and your father in peace.”

  She was proved right though. Later on we were sat watching TV and I was giddy for no reason. Something made me laugh just as I took a swig of juice and I was forced to spit it back out. Amy looked disgusted, but that was nothing. When I calmed down again, I drank the rest of the glass, spit an’ all.

  “Err, you dirty gyppo,” Amy said.

  “It adds to the flavour.” Her expression had me laughing even more.

  It couldn’t last though. Happiness and laughter are alien concepts to the damned.

  The moon called me back to the hunt and I jumped out of my room, landing on the grass outside to the sound of some sort of animal fleeing. A quick sniff of the air told me it was nothing more than a cat, hardly worth the effort of chasing. A decision I would soon be regretting.

  I started in search of my next prey and was met with more frustration. The town seemed to have died over the last month, early winter bringing harsh, cold winds, and rain that chilled to the bone. Few humans were willing to brave the weather, and there were none to be found on the quieter streets where hunting was safest.

  Desperation forced me towards the centre of the town again, the only place where humans never failed to be, only to find them all hidden away in the buildings blaring out that unnatural noise they called music. There were none I could take without being seen, not even any homeless people. I knew if I waited long enough the drunks would come staggering out, and then they would be mine for the taking. But the hunger wouldn’t wait.

  I was resigned to scavenging from more bins, when I heard human voices. And they were heading towards me! I thanked fate for the meal being brought my way and slunk into an alley, preparing for an ambush.

  “Come on, we’re nearly there!” one of them was saying. “I’m dying for a drink now.”

  “Yeah, sorry we had to walk. I’ll get the first round.”

  A third voice sounded mortified. “It’s your birthday; you can’t be buying rounds! I’ll get the first one.”

  Two more voices joined in the debate. I breathed in their scents to confirm it – five of them, all female. It would be risky to attack the group but hunger was overriding my sense of caution. Besides, there was nothing to suggest any of them were Slayers. They were much younger than any in the group who’d attacked me, and it seemed unlikely they’d be caught up in the war. How could I say no to this banquet?

  I hadn’t completely forgotten the need to be careful. Greed could get me killed, but it wouldn’t do to leave witnesses for the Slayers to question. I only really needed to take one to make the hunger bearable, but how to do it without being seen by the others?

  “Shit, my phone must be in my other bag,” the first voice said. “I’m going to have to go back.”

  “Can’t you do without it for one night?”

  “Are you mad? You know I’m expecting a call from Matt later. Go on without me – I’ll see you in there.”

  I listened with glee as she left the safety of the group, waiting for them to pass before creeping after her. Fate remained on my side then. She made the mistake of cutting down another alley and I struck, knocking her to the ground and ripping open her neck in a shower of blood. She died almost instantly.

  I dragged the carcass deeper into shadow and began to feast when I heard another female nearby, but I was in the grip of the bloodlust now. The world had narrowed to the warm flesh of my kill, and nothing else mattered.

  So I continued to feed, ignoring the sound of her footsteps coming closer as I buried my muzzle deep into my victim’s abdomen, surfacing with a kidney between my jaws. The organ slid down my gullet and I plunged back into the hole to hunt for the other, too lost in my meal to notice the girl enter the alley.

  Only once I’d had my fill of the organs did I rise from the hollowed torso to attack another part of the corpse. And it was then the new girl’s scent danced through the bloody veil clouding my senses, and in that instant we saw each other.

  The quickest to react, I snarled instinctively, ears flattened against my skull and teeth bared, hackles raising. I must have been an impressive sight, a demon in the darkness, all the larger for the shadows I hid in. She did what any sane person would have done, turning and running for safety as fast as her legs would carry her.

  My eyes locked on to her retreating back, the bloodlust roaring for another kill and my predator’s instincts urging me to hunt down the running prey. There was no fighting those instincts. I gave chase.

  About an hour later, I stood in a small, shallow stream, allowing the icy water, numbing, yet refreshing, to wash over my paws and rinse away the blood. The liquid’s surface looked so clear and pure as I lowered my snout to lap at it, but not for long.

  A dark red streak slithered from my jaws and twisted in the current. I raised my head and began to lick the blood from my matted fur, something about that night making me feel the need to cleanse myself of the last remnants of the lives I had taken, as if it were impure, staining my soul. But these were human thoughts. The human was beginning to affect me, and I didn’t like it.

  I stared down at my reflection in the water, confused and uncertain. What was I? Not human. Not wolf. A monster? That was what humans believed. But did monsters have a conscience?

  There was no denying I was a killer, yet I only killed for survival – one of nature’s oldest laws, to which all living creatures are bound, predator and prey. But what sort of a predator feels… What? Remorse? No, it wasn’t remorse. The human may have felt remorse when it killed the rabbit, but not I. What then? I didn’t understand this. But there was something different after this kill, and if these feelings grew they would get in the way. What kind of a predator feels for its prey? Whatever I was, be it monster or some poor confused creature that was never meant to be, I was flawed and it made me weak. These were the human’s problems affecting me, and it had to learn to accept its fate. Our survival depended upon it.

  Once I’d washed away the blood as best I could, I splashed back through the water, my pads gripping the smooth pebbles on the stream’s bed as surely as any human footwear. A trail of paw prints marked my progress as I loped up the bank, and from there I began to make my way back to the human’s home.

  I had plenty of time left before dawn so I slowed to a leisurely prowl, enjoying the natural surroundings the night had taken me to. This patch of woodland was only small, yet still it felt like
home. Especially with the onset of winter, when the trees were bare, devoid of the lush greens of summer and all that life they had been home to. The dead belonged here.

  An owl hunting overhead saw me coming and darted away. Bats avoided me. Rodents fled before me. I even inspired fear in the ants and other insects; they surged across the forest floor, swarming around my paws and running for safer soils. I ruled the night. None dared challenge me, except for man. But there, in the natural world, I was top of the food chain, and is that not the ideal situation for any creature? So why did I feel so alone?

  I paused to howl, confident the Slayers would not be able to pinpoint my location until I had moved on and the trail had gone cold. Like a prayer, I sent it up into the night, mournful and haunting. But the sound must have meant little to other creatures. Only my brethren would have truly understood, and they were all gone.

  Did the vampires stop to listen? Perhaps. Yet even they would not have grasped the meaning. They were too old to remember these feelings, and they were naturally solitary. I still longed for my pack, my blood brothers and sisters, and the bonds of our family group. More than that, the human was beginning to feel alone, realising it was no longer like the others that surrounded it, and that loneliness only added to my own.

  Of all this the howl told and more. I gave voice to my confusion, and the eternity I faced of misery and isolation, a creature separate from every other living thing, born of two races but belonging to neither. An unnatural creature, cursed and wretched, one of the damned. Was it to Satan I truly belonged? Lady Sarah had said not to the human, I had been listening, but she did not know the origins of her own kind, so how sure could any of us be that the story of Lycaon was the true beginning of werewolf kind? We knew only the myths and legends that had survived through the generations in both the living and the undead. Were we Satan’s children after all? Outcasts from Hell, thrown out perhaps when we refused to obey him, and in our place the demons were created. It was as good an explanation as any. Whatever we were, wherever we came from, we were not God’s creation. Born of evil, our souls were stained, our blood tainted, and we were damned.

  All this I conveyed in the howl, and up it went into the night, to the moon and the stars. If there was a God, he did nothing, whether he was listening or not. He did not even reach out to receive it. The howl died in my throat and the wind carried it off before it ever reached its destination.

  I looked down at the woodland floor, no longer teeming with life fleeing from my monstrous nature but still and dead, like the bodies I left behind each full moon. The skeletal trees were empty and lifeless around me, the last of the autumn leaves rotting away, and I imagined I could feel the heat of the fires of Hell beneath my paws. Had the Devil heard the howl? Did he laugh at this lost, unnatural thing? Lost somewhere along the road to death, never to find its destination unless someone sent it there, but never to return to its beginning, at the end of life. Perhaps I was not undead in the true sense of the word like the vampires, but I certainly wasn’t mortal. I was not a natural creature, and to this world I did not belong, yet here I was.

  With a sigh, I continued on, back into the town and to my home, then up to my empty room. Back to my family. Were they still my family? I was no longer one of them. What were they to this thing I had become? Prey, and I would kill them without a thought if the human didn’t intervene. But not that night. I had fed well and I was content.

  Settling on the hard wooden floor, I awaited the return of the sun in a tight ball, curled against the cold and the dangers and the pain, and all these alien emotions.

  My senses dulled, the pain came and went, but the wolf had left its imprint on my mind this time, my thoughts confused and my limbs restless as a result. I needed to walk and clear my head.

  It was a struggle to convince myself to stand on two legs, my brain insistent I should still be on all fours. Dressing also felt unnatural, and I thanked God it wasn’t a school day. I made myself as presentable as I could, then scribbled a quick note for my parents to explain my disappearance when they rose for the day, making up some lie about going to meet a friend.

  There was no blood staining my mouth that morning and my skin was cleaner, which was odd. The hunger was pounding away inside my belly; surely the wolf had felt it too. It must have killed and eaten something. Wait, yes, there were the tell-tale pieces of flesh caught between my teeth.

  I stopped by the fridge for more meat, sliced ham that time, and then I took to the streets, not caring where I went – I just needed to be on the move. I couldn’t have kept still, not even for one of my favourite movies.

  There were a few people about and I avoided them where I could. Ultimately, it was to the remoter outskirts of the town my feet were taking me, where the streets gave way to fields. There I wandered aimlessly, tramping along twisting footpaths and weaving through vegetation, until my sensitive ears caught the sounds of whimpering, somewhere out towards the woods.

  I broke into a run. There was something about that voice, something familiar. But I couldn’t place it.

  Drawing closer, I could see someone lying on blood soaked grass, her body twitching and her skin turning paler by the minute. Shock brought me to a stop. Maybe the pain-filled cries should have hinted at what I was about to find, but nothing could have truly prepared me for that horrific sight.

  Her right calf was a grisly ruin of pale bone and shiny muscle, glistening in the early morning light. Most of the skin was gone, flaps of what little remained hanging loosely from the limb. Severed blood vessels spilled out their precious liquid, and she had already lost a lot of it. With a jolt, I realised she was dying. And I knew her all right. It broke my heart to see her like this.

  Fear drove me to my knees. She was dying and there was nothing I could do about it. There was just so much blood. How was I meant to stop it when the damage was so great?

  No, I couldn’t accept that. There had to be something I could do to help her. I thought about my mobile, lying uselessly on my desk. Could I reach the nearest payphone in time to call an ambulance? But that would mean leaving her out here, and what if her attacker was still lurking nearby, waiting for me to leave so they could finish her off?

  “Fiona,” I said, my voice shaking.

  She didn’t seem to hear, muttering to herself and still whimpering, terrified of something but I couldn’t make out what. It might have been kinder if she’d passed out or at least if she’d been completely delusional – she wasn’t far off, seemingly unaware of what was happening or where she was. I didn’t even know if she’d realised I was there beside her, and if she did whether she recognised me. But one fact couldn’t escape her: she couldn’t feel one of her legs, and that realisation was terrifying.

  And then I noticed the other wound, just above her waist.

  Like her leg, most of the skin had been torn away and the flesh beneath showed red raw. There were clear bite marks, as if whatever had attacked her had been eating her alive. The damage itself wasn’t as extensive as her ruined limb, but that wasn’t what brought the bile to my throat. No, it was the way her flesh had turned a horrible dark colour and gained a coating of pus. I felt helpless.

  “Fiona,” I said again, more urgently this time. Her eyes rolled up towards my face, and was that a flicker of recognition? Yes, she realised it was me.

  “Nick,” she whispered, a weak smile flitting across her lips.

  “Fiona, it’s gonna be okay. You just wait here and I’ll go get help. We’ll get you to a hospital.” I stood to go find a phone but her hand gripped me with surprising strength for the state she was in.

  “No! Don’t leave me here alone,” she pleaded. Her hand slipped back down to the ground as though the effort had drained the last of her energy. Then the panic took hold again, and the next thing she said would have been a scream if she’d had enough life left in her. “My leg. I can’t feel my leg!”

  “It’s okay, just broken,” I lied, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
I blinked them away, not wanting her to see. “What happened to you?”

  She coughed up a lot of blood and I thought she would die before she could tell me anything, and then she was trying to scream again. I had to cradle her in my arms like Mum had for me through the nightmares, calming her as best I could. It was the only way I was getting any answers.

  “Nick, you have to get away from here! Take me with you; we have to get away! It could come back at any minute. We’re not safe! None of us are safe,” she sobbed.

  “What could come back? What did this to you?” I pressed. I had to know.

  “Hard to remember, all confused.” I struggled to make sense of what she said next as she muttered incoherently between the details, and even the details themselves were not that clear. “Something in the shadows, chased me, big amber eyes, cold, so cold, merciless. And its jaws, a mouthful of teeth chasing me, blood everywhere, not my blood, then it had hold of my leg and there was more blood. Mine.”

  “But what was it?”

  She shuddered and struggled to answer, but finally managed to gasp “I only saw it clearly once in the moonlight, the wolf. That’s what it was. A wolf.”

  I was stunned. There was only one wolf left in our town. And she’d been attacked by this wolf that was not really a wolf at all. A werewolf. Me! I was sickened. Guilt and horror washed away the fear and I couldn’t look at her anymore. All this time I’d believed the wolf had been killing animals, and for all I knew it had fed on humans every time. Fiona might be the first, or she might be one of many. Either way, it didn’t make it any better. And the pieces of flesh caught between my teeth, her flesh! My stomach heaved again and it was all I could do to fight it, for her sake.

  “Nick, promise me you’ll kill the wolf if you see it,” she said with her dying breath.

  But before I could give her any sort of reply, her eyes rolled up into her skull so that only the whites showed and she twitched more violently as I screamed her name, and then the eyes came back down, empty, lifeless. Dead. She was gone and I was alone once more.