The Hybrid Series | Book 1 | Hybrid

by Stead, Nick

  A couple of the ghouls had also been shot and a few heads had been severed. Perhaps we didn’t need to risk raising any zombies after all. I was about to tear off my clothes and embrace the power of my lupine side, but Lady Sarah placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Do not be so quick to count on our victory,” she said. “Look.”

  I watched with dismay as the vampire facing the first of the spellcasters raised his sword to strike, only for the blade to fall from his hand. The warlock had started a new incantation, one of his hands outstretched with the palm face up, and the vampire was on his knees in agony, clutching at his head. Blood leaked from the orifices in his skull.

  “Then why are we just standing here? We have to help him!” I yelled.

  “No, it is already too late for him.” Her voice was full of sadness, her features heavy with resignation. The battle was going exactly as she’d expected.

  The warlock finished his chant and closed his outstretched hand into a fist, and as he did so the vampire’s head exploded. Gore splattered the nearest humans and a couple of ghouls, and the headless corpse fell to the ground. The ghouls lost control then, attacking the corpse in a feeding frenzy. They made for easy targets, their bodies falling on top of the vampire’s, a bullet in each of their frenzied brains.

  “Damn it, all that combined supernatural power and it’s still not enough,” I growled. “We have to raise the dead or lose.”

  “I fear you are right but I know not if I have the strength to raise the whole cemetery. I have yet to feed tonight,” Lady Sarah said. “And not every corpse is capable of becoming a zombie. It depends what happened to the soul. Some face oblivion. Most move on to whatever the afterlife holds for them, but some vengeful spirits become wraiths, while others are trapped on Earth, some able to manifest as ghosts, some too weak to do that. They are the ones the spell binds to their earthly remains, though I have heard stories of some being drawn back from the afterlife, when the call has been powerful enough. I will do what I can but I fear we will not have the numbers we need.”

  “Yeah, we have to try. I should help the others while we wait for you to bring reinforcements.”

  Again she held me back and I gave an irritable growl. The smell of blood was calling to my own hunger.

  “Come,” she said. “I need you with me.”

  I was loath to leave the battlefield but time was of the essence so I followed her without argument, trusting she had good reason to take me with her. Together we slipped away and ran for the cemetery. I paused only to transform so I could better keep up, but as if she read my mind, she slowed and bid me to wait.

  The streets were deserted of human life. I wondered if the Slayers had managed to impose some kind of curfew to keep innocent bystanders away, no doubt using the threat of the rogue wolf as an excuse. Or perhaps people sensed the danger of so many predators nearby and were hiding behind locked doors of their own accord. It meant we had to feed on a large stray dog, the flesh dry and chewy once Lady Sarah drained the animal of most of its blood, but I forced it down, even though it was far from palatable. I knew I’d need the energy.

  We entered the cemetery and Lady Sarah deigned to explain why she needed me.

  “Necromancy demands a blood offering. It must be human blood, which is where you come in. My own blood is too far from human, but yours is closer than mine in your human form. It should be sufficient.”

  “How much blood?”

  “Worry not – I have no intention of bleeding you dry.” She walked between the graves and motioned for me to follow. “Now, give me your wrist.”

  I did as instructed, unable to help feeling a little nervous as she grabbed hold and drew her nail across the skin. One vampire had already betrayed me – how did I know she wouldn’t do the same? But if I wanted to free our town of Slayers it seemed I had little choice.

  She raised my wrist to her lips and licked the wound, the same anticoagulant bats have in their saliva preventing it from clotting. When the blood started dripping into the soil she began to speak the words of some long forgotten language. Then she fell quiet.

  “That’s it?” I asked. Nothing was happening as far as I could see.

  “Yes. Now you may transform and heal your wound.”

  “Finally!”

  I ripped off my clothes and enjoyed the feeling of new strength coursing through my veins, eager to feel the might of my lupine form once more. But I only took it halfway, becoming the wolf-man again.

  The wound closed on my wrist, and as my senses grew sharper I realised there was something happening in the graves after all.

  A pair of eyes snapped open in the darkness. The darkness – all-consuming and smothering in its intensity. Panic took hold.

  Hands clawed at the soft lining sealing them in, lungs breathing in the stale air and gasping for oxygen. Panic turned to terror. The need to get out, the urgent need to breathe – it was overpowering. Those hands grew more desperate, tearing apart fabric and splintering wood until they succeeded in breaking open the lid.

  Dirt fell in, but they did not give up the fight to be free, whole body thrashing now with the need to return to the light of the world above.

  I could see the earth moving over one of the graves. A hand broke free and reached upwards, as if trying to grasp the sky. Then came the other hand, and then a head. The corpse pulled itself out of its grave and stood, breathing in the air as though to mock life itself.

  All around me the dirt writhed as the dead pulled themselves to the surface, more than I had dared hope for after Lady Sarah’s talk of souls. My victims were among them, my worst nightmares come true. Dead eyes fixed me with their hate-filled stares, bound only by the dark magic which had brought them back, the only thing keeping them from vengeance. I glanced at Lady Sarah with fresh nerves. Vengeance is a powerful thing. She controlled them but for how long?

  If Lady Sarah felt any nervousness she didn’t show it, standing tall and strong at the head of her zombie horde. Her voice was full of her usual confidence when she spoke, and more commanding than I’d heard from her before.

  “Come, my fallen angels. Follow me, and slake your thirst on the blood of our enemies. To battle we march!”

  They had no choice but to obey.

  Bodies littered the ground, casualties from both sides now. Our force was reduced to six vampires and around half of the ghouls, while the most deadly of our enemies – the spellcasters – were still among the living. They continued to keep the wraiths at bay, while their allies hacked and shot at the rest of the undead, dozens of them, wearing our army down and steadily gaining ground. But the tides were about to be turned.

  The zombies surged onto the field in a cascade of maggots, each in various stages of decay. The new dead walked almost like humans. Older ones limped, their muscles stiff and almost useless. Some were reduced to skeletons, Lady Sarah’s power the only thing binding the bones together. Some had died in the last world war, their legs long since blown off. They dragged themselves along with their hands. Some groaned. Others were silent, their vocal cords rotted away years ago. Few of them were whole, but they didn’t need much to kill. One of them even had a head missing, but it seemed to be doing well enough without it.

  The first of the Slayers to notice just had chance to shout a warning, then they were on her, pulling her apart with fingers and teeth.

  More of our enemies began to turn to face this new threat. A few well aimed bullets tore through rotting skulls, but the reanimated corpses kept on going. Lady Sarah later told me the only way to stop zombies was to either kill the necromancer they were bound to, or vaporise them. They were virtually unstoppable.

  But the necromancy didn’t stop there. As we stepped between the bodies, Lady Sarah spoke more of the strange language she’d used in the graveyard, and the dead humans began to twitch. Unseeing eyes fixed on the living, and bodies started to rise and join our ranks. But only the humans. The fallen undead remained in a permanent state of death.


  Panic spread among the Slayers. One weapon they lacked was fire, and even if witchcraft was capable of producing flames, the spellcasters were too focused on repelling the wraiths. The best they could do was to hack the reanimated corpses to bits, until the bodies were split into too many pieces to do any harm. Then a Slayer came at me and I was forced to take my eyes off the zombies, joining the fight at last.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Death

  The human swung at my head, so slow, so clumsy. I dodged it with ease and drove a hand into his gut, pulling out his entrails and leaving him dying on the floor.

  A man was about to blow a vampire’s brains out. I sent him crashing to the ground before he could squeeze off the shot, crushing his skull with a single bite.

  Another man charged me and I rose to catch his arm, stopping the sword short of completing its downward swing and forcing him to drop it with the sharp crack of broken bone. He fell to his knees, screaming, and I lunged for another, killing any who got in my way.

  The boy I had been would have loved to have taken up one of the blades of the fallen, but my bestial nature had no need for tools. My own teeth and claws were the only weapons I required, tearing flesh and breaking bones as I raged through the battle.

  But it was Aughtie’s blood I really wanted. I knew she would be there somewhere, and her scent kept taunting me, wafting across the battlefield for the briefest of moments, then vanishing again in the overpowering smell of blood and death. I was losing control of the wolf. The bloodlust was upon us and it was taking over.

  Someone else ran at me and I pounced on him without even thinking. He didn’t seem to have any weapons – was he a Slayer or was it possible he was no more than an unfortunate bystander caught up in something in which he didn’t belong?

  His car waited on the distant road. It looked like he’d stopped for a break on the way to wherever he was going, but was it the sound of the fighting that had drawn him over or was it something more than that? The anger in his eyes offered no answers, only more questions.

  I’d like to think it wasn’t until after I killed him that I realised who he was, but I know to tell you that would be a lie. In truth, human rage merged with the bloodlust of the wolf and we savaged him. And God help me, I enjoyed it.

  A scream tore through him as I dug my claws into his stomach.

  “You ungrateful sod, after everything I’ve done for our family!”

  Were there really words to it or has my imagination added them over the years? I’m not sure. But that’s the way I remember it now. Regardless, his screams fell on deaf ears. I was too intent on killing him to process anything more than the blood blossoming over his shirt and the guts in my hands.

  A leg kicked out at my muzzle and I grabbed it in my jaws, ripping it clean out of the socket with a wet sucking noise. His arms flailed against me, weak and ineffective. I ignored them.

  Dropping the leg, I grabbed hold of his head and felt my teeth slice into his features, shredding his face until it was nothing but bloody tatters. Then a zombie lurched forward and pulled him away from me.

  “No!” I roared. I fought to drag him back, but his body couldn’t withstand the pull of two supernatural creatures. The other leg came free of its socket, as did his arms. What was left of his mouth formed a scream, quickly cut off by death itself. And then he was gone, and the zombie ate what was left.

  My eyes took in the remains of what had been my dad, but there was no grief, only the rage. I’d killed him just like I’d sworn to and in my anger I felt he’d deserved it. All he’d ever done was make my life a misery. I wouldn’t miss him.

  What had he been doing out here anyway? Had he known what I was all along? Is that why he’d always made me feel like such a disappointment to him? Maybe he had been a Slayer. Who knew what he’d got up to on all those work trips away from home? He could have been on his way to some big mission, but the temptation to end his monstrous son had clearly been too great for him to simply pass up. But then there was the lack of the weapons… Had it split his loyalties once I’d been bitten? Had he suffered a sudden attack of conscience and come to spirit me away before one of his comrades landed a killing shot? Or had his presence been nothing more than a coincidence?

  I turned away, back in control for the time being. There was only one thought on my mind then. Aughtie. I wanted her dead for what she’d put me and Lizzy through, and I needed to keep a clear head if I was going to find her. So I let go of my lupine weapons and continued my search as a human. But someone else found me first.

  Vince stepped out of the shadows once more, fangs bared and a gun in his hands. He had the same bat-like face as when we’d first met.

  I snarled. “Why, Vince?”

  “Why? I never asked to be this way! The vampire created Lady Sarah out of lust. I was a mistake. He just wanted my blood, my fucking life. But I wasn’t ready to die so I stabbed him, and his cursed blood made me into this!”

  “I thought you said you’d learnt to live with it?”

  He gave a bitter laugh, and that same darkness I’d kept spying in his eyes took over again. But where before it had been fleeting, now it seemed here to stay. “I told you what you wanted to hear to gain your trust. There was no living with being a monster, not after the hunger took the woman I loved.”

  So that was what he hadn’t wanted to talk about. He had lost control in his first nights as a vampire, and he’d killed someone close to him, just as I had with Fiona.

  The ache of those old wounds bled into the bat-like features. “I wanted to die, to put an end to the pain of existing in a world without her, but then I was gripped by the need for revenge. Everything became clear to me then. The bastard who turned me into a monster – it was his fault Edith was dead. So I swore to kill him for what he’d done to us, and I didn’t care how many others died along the way. I hate us all! Centuries I’ve searched for him with no luck. Then Aughtie found me, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She hates us as much as I do.”

  “I hate what the curse has made me do as well but I never turned on our own. How could you?”

  “Quite easily, as it turns out. You would not believe how many I killed and tortured for her, or how much pleasure I found in it. I helped her invent new methods of torment and more effective ways to kill us. And it was I who brought your kind to an end. It was I who was hunting the werewolf that night he bit you. I didn’t realise my mistake until later, but thanks to Lady Sarah I was able to correct it. I delivered you to Aughtie in the end.”

  “So why not set a trap for me sooner?”

  He shrugged. “You’re just the right age to want to fight the Slayers. I knew you were the one as soon as I laid eyes on you at Halloween. We’ve been waiting for you for years; the one who would bring the last of our kind out of hiding and lead them into destruction. Once you had served your purpose, then we set the trap. But the first one was never meant for capturing you, or the girl. Originally we intended it to be a threat, to scare you into taking action. Your friend presented the perfect opportunity.”

  “She had nothing to do with any of this,” I snarled.

  He shrugged again. “You were taking too long. I had to push you further so we took her. Aughtie wanted to capture you from the start, but I convinced her to wait. You needed time to accept what you were before you would fight. Besides, I enjoyed the control I had over you. I could have killed you anytime I wanted and you never knew it. And perhaps you reminded me of myself in the early days of becoming a vampire.”

  “I’m nothing like you.”

  I vaguely wondered why they’d felt the need to capture and question me at all, rather than just kill me. Surely he’d learnt all he could from Lady Sarah before faking his own death, so what other information had they possibly thought I could give them? But the one thing that was becoming clear about the Slayers was their blind hatred for the monsters that preyed on them. For many it seemed joining the cause was personal, and they agreed to become a par
t of the Slayers to seek vengeance for lost loved ones. Most of them were so driven by hatred, they didn’t need a reason to inflict as slow and painful a death as possible. Hunting and killing us wasn’t enough, so they’d built bases like the one I’d been captured in to satisfy their own monstrous needs. Aughtie hadn’t really been interested in any information I might have had about the army Lady Sarah had been gathering, she’d just wanted to torture me for her own dark pleasure.

  Vince ignored my protest and carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Imagine my disappointment when you escaped the Slayers’ clutches. Still, now I have you.”

  He was about to attack when Lady Sarah appeared. Her eyes shone with bitter tears, her face unable to conceal the hurt of his betrayal any longer.

  “I risked my life for you. This is how you repay me?”

  “Yes – you should have let me die. But I am grateful for all you’ve done for me over the centuries, so I will grant you a quick death in return. It is more than any of us deserve.” He raised the gun, just as I knew he would, and I made a grab for it. The bullet shot harmlessly into the air as we grappled, but I was no match for a vampire and the gun was lowering towards my face now. He’d have had no trouble shooting me if it hadn’t been for Lady Sarah’s quick reflexes.

  The force I’d been pushing against came to a sudden stop and I took a surprised step back, his hand coming with me. Vince stared at the stump of his wrist in shock as Lady Sarah dropped the blade she’d taken from a nearby corpse. It fell to the ground, wet with the traitor’s blood.