by Nick Stead
Vengeance
Book 3 of the Hybrid series
Nick Stead
A Wild Wolf Publication
Published by Wild Wolf Publishing in 2017
Copyright © 2017 Nick Stead
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine or journal.
First print
All Characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
E-book Edition
ISBN: 978-1-907954-66-5 (paperback)
www.wildwolfpublishing.com
Once again, for my family for all their support, especially Mum, Amanda, Auntie Debbie and my cousins 'Lady' Sarah and Selina.
And for my friends, with special thanks to my beta readers Hannah, Clare, Charlie, Tom (aka White) and Mark (aka Pige) for giving more great feedback to make the finished version of Vengeance as strong as possible. Special thanks also goes to Steve and Nikki for all the encouragement and the awesome fangs to give me a more fearsome snarl at conventions.
And for my fellow writers and friends at Huddersfield Author's Circle whose feedback and support remains invaluable. I really feel I've come a long way as a writer since joining the group.
I would also like to thank the team at Wild Wolf again for their part in bringing my stories to fans to read and enjoy.
And finally I would like to thank my awesome fans who've helped to keep me motivated and pushing myself to keep writing. Without you guys I'd probably still be stuck around the halfway mark! So a really big thanks to all those who helped keep the hype for this next book alive.
Nick
Prologue
A whisper on the wind reaches my ears as I stir from a light slumber, a reminder you are still here, even in death; you, my tether to humanity. It has been another long night of running and fighting, but I successfully evaded my enemies once again and I found another cave to shelter in, similar to the one where I began recounting my tale to you that fateful day when we first crossed paths.
A shiver runs through me in the cool morning air, my body returned to the form of a man. I stand and stretch, venturing out into what little warmth the late autumn sun has to offer. But there is a darkness even the sun can’t vanquish, a blackness untouched by the early morning light on my skin. It remains as strong as ever, despite being currently sated with the life of another human, her earthly self reduced to little more than bloody bones as I fed both the hunger for flesh and for death. Those bones now decorate the inside of the otherwise bare cave. Disgust might have filled you when first I sank my fangs into that human flesh, biting chunks of it from the woman’s body in a wave of hot crimson and gulping them down to satisfy the ache in my belly before she’d even been granted the release of death. Queasiness might have gripped you at the sight of me ripping and tearing human limbs and dragging her guts out from her torso. You might have felt squeamish about seeing me feed, if you still had a stomach for me to turn.
You have already paid for my story with your life, and yet there is still so much of it for me to tell. That story now binds us, and so I suppose I must carry on with the telling, now that I have found a new place to shelter and we have lost my enemies for the time being. No doubt you have plenty of questions by this point, but I beg your patience. There is much still to recount before we catch up with the present and the events that led me to be in the area you once called home, where the telling of my story began. I have found some answers along the way and I will share them with you by the time my story is done. But there are some questions even I still don’t know the answers to.
By now you are probably all too familiar with my darkness, born of my humanity and yet originally given rise through the curse of my lycanthropy. It is that darkness which shaped the events of this third part of my tale I am about to share with you now. This part of my story takes place over only a handful of days and nights, but much happened in such a short space of time and there are things that took place which you need to understand. There will be more questions by the end, though I promise we are moving closer to the answers. Bear with me as I recount this tale for you, and perhaps it will prove to have been worth your life by the time I am done.
We began in 2003, when I was first bitten and started to turn into the monster I have become. I told you of the struggles to adjust to the curse whilst still at home with my family and attending school, and then of the struggles once I was forced to leave to protect all those I cared about. We were forced to leave off that second part of my story in 2005, just after I’d been shot by one of the Slayers, along with my allies. Once again I will pick up where I left off, when a fresh set of trials was about to begin.
Chapter One – Fear and Confusion
Fear shot through me as my eyes opened to blackness. Fear turned to panic, digging its icy claws into my stomach and sending cold waves stabbing through my body in those first few moments of regaining consciousness, my old phobia of blindness overriding any rational thoughts that the transformation would restore my sight if it was a problem with my eyes. I struggled to hear anything over the pounding of my own heart and the rush of blood roaring through my veins.
The last thing I remembered was being struck by the older, experienced Slayer who’d come so close to ending my life earlier in the year, if it hadn’t been for Selina’s witchcraft pulling me back from Death’s clutches. He’d fired five shots during our latest encounter, putting three bullets in Lady Sarah and the fourth in my own chest, turning my upper body to a fleshy container for the blazing agony left in the wake of the destructive lump of metal. I’d fallen to my knees besides the vampire’s prone form, rendered helpless until I could repair the damage through the regenerative power of the transformation. The fifth bullet had been for the witch. I’d seen her go down as well before being knocked out, but I’d had no way of knowing if either of them were alive or dead.
My chest was now free of the searing pain that had been raging through it when I’d lost consciousness. It seemed my body had automatically reverted back to human form while I’d been out, to heal the damage before my life leaked out in the blood flowing from my wound. And yes, there was the usual hunger that accompanied any transformation. There was also thirst, my mouth so dry that my tongue stuck uncomfortably inside it.
The air was warm and still on my bare skin. It reminded me of the one time I’d been in the London Underground in my old life, and I wondered if I’d been taken somewhere deep beneath the soil, perhaps even sealed within my own personal tomb. I was lying on a hard surface, where before there’d been the softness of vegetation to cushion the earth beneath me, so I’d definitely been moved.
I fought to control my fear and the growing sense of dread, attempting to force my imagination in a more optimistic direction than the thought that I’d been left in an underground room to die. Maybe I was inside another of the Slayers’ bases. But why would they take me alive after months of trying so hard to kill me? And if I had been imprisoned again, where were the guards they’d stationed round my cage with me last time? I could detect no other creatures nearby, human or otherwise.
With shaking hands I felt in the blackness around me, but my outstretched fingers found no bars like the electric ones I’d been behind when last captured by my enemies. It wasn’t until I’d crawled a few feet forward that my hand finally met the wall. The surface was smooth and uneven, stone I guessed. Maybe this wasn’t a place constructed by humans like I’d first assumed – could they have taken me inside some kind of natu
ral cave?
I continued to blindly feel my way along the side of the chamber. Moments later my hands found a corner where the adjacent wall connected, so it seemed I was in some kind of man-made room after all. The corner felt too artificial to have been formed by the elements. I was definitely inside at any rate, which would account for the complete lack of any breeze or draughts. That didn’t explain the lack of a cage and armed guards, like last time. In the last base the Slayers had been taking no chances with me, though for all their precautions technology had still failed them, a power outage allowing me to break free and slaughter them all before they could land a killing shot. But that base had been full of rooms with cages specifically built to hold undead, so why would this one be any different? It made no sense.
My weak attempt to calm myself had been mostly unsuccessful, my heart still pounding with the fear that I’d lost my sight. I forced myself to take a few deep breaths in an effort to calm my body’s fight or flight response, until the muscular pump slowed into its usual steady rhythm. Whatever was going on, panicking wasn’t going to help. And once I was calmer, I was able to think clearly enough to try using the transformation to restore my sight.
The latest shapeshift to heal the damage from the bullet in my chest had already drained most of my energy, so I couldn’t risk taking it fully to wolf form or even my hybrid wolf man form. Instead I focussed on my eyes, which I instinctively knew were human once more, despite the temporary changes I’d experienced when first I’d allowed the two halves of my mind split by the curse to become one again. I felt the familiar pain as my primal fury burned through the human greenish brown irises into lupine amber. The nature of the transformation meant my cells underwent a process of regeneration as my flesh shifted from one anatomical shape to another, and if any damage had been done to my eyes since the last transformation it would heal them. Yet no light came flooding in once they turned wolfish, no images or shapes in the darkness waiting to greet them. The blackness remained as complete and impenetrable as it had to my human eyes, despite the greater night vision my lupine sight should have granted me. It had to be the lack of light in the room preventing me from seeing rather than anything physically wrong with me, but somehow I didn’t find that thought particularly comforting. There were no real helpful scents or sounds with which to create a mental image of my surroundings, and I couldn’t help but feel very vulnerable in the darkness, deprived of the senses I usually relied so heavily on. It seemed touch was all I had, and I was forced to carry on feeling my way around the room like a blind man.
The lack of light troubled me on another level as well. I thought it ominous that the Slayers hadn’t bothered to provide any artificial light in this room they’d imprisoned me in. Maybe they wanted me unnerved as part of some new kind of torture they’d devised, perhaps in the hopes of questioning me again like they had the last time they’d captured me. Or maybe this was all part of some sick pleasure to satisfy their need for revenge. Maybe my first thought on my surroundings had been correct after all. Was this to be my tomb? But then, why not just kill me while I’d been shot and at their mercy, instead of taking me alive and risking me escaping again? I could understand if they wanted it to be long and drawn out so they could watch me suffer before the end, but there were no lights in the darkness that indicated any equipment like a camera recording. I supposed it might be possible for them to watch my torment through the powers of witchcraft but somehow that didn’t feel like a satisfying explanation for what was going on. There was more at work here, I was sure of it.
Driven by that thought, I attempted to learn all I could through the sense of touch. I didn’t know what I hoped to find but there was one thing I could rely on at least – if the Slayers had brought me into this room, that meant there had to be a way out of it. I didn’t expect it to be as easy as feeling a door handle set into one of the walls but maybe there’d be some clue as to where the exit was, and if I could find a door then I might be able to find a way to escape.
Just as it was beginning to seem the room would yield no further secrets through touch alone, my questing fingers finally found a crevice running down the length of the stone, of the kind that could indicate a doorway. I felt along and sure enough there was a slight crack further on which suggested it was some kind of door or panel set into the wall. But the panel itself felt no different to the surrounding stone and there was nothing of interest on either side of it, so whatever opening mechanism the Slayers had used to bring me in there must be on the outside of the room. I hadn’t really expected anything different but confirming my suspicions was disappointing all the same. It seemed my only hope of escaping was through brute force. I knew I had to be careful not to injure myself though, since I couldn’t just heal the damage afterwards. Unless I was lucky enough to find any guards on the other side to kill, I had to assume I wouldn’t be given the chance to feed anytime soon, so I needed to conserve my energy for as long as possible.
I tried leaning against the panel and pressing my weight into it, to test if there was any give. I had no way of knowing if it was the kind of door that opened inwards or outwards, or whether it was some kind of sliding panel operated by a button or something. Maybe if I knew more about architecture I could have tried feeling for more clues as to how it was supposed to open, but it wasn’t something I’d ever had reason to study in my human life. In any case, the stone remained a solid barrier between me and freedom, regardless of how hard I pushed. So I also tried letting my nails lengthen into claws, digging them into the stone until I had some handholds to pull it with. I heaved with all the strength I could muster from my battered human body but no matter which way I pulled, the panel refused to budge. It might as well have been fused into the wall, and without knowing which way it was supposed to push or pull, or slide, I was only using up more of my precious energy. I soon gave up my attempts to force it open, feeling that left me with one choice. I would have to try and break through the stone.
Without the energy to fuel the transformation to my stronger wolf form, I was stuck as a human for the time being. The curse granted me a supernatural strength greater than that of most humans, but it still paled in comparison to the full ferocity of my lupine might. Changing again without feeding would leave me weak, however, so my human form would have to be enough.
I could possibly have punched my way through the stone if it wasn’t too thick, but I didn’t want to risk breaking my hand. Instead I threw myself against it to spread the impact, counting on being able to shatter it with the combined supernatural force and my own weight.
The collision jarred every bone in my body, but the stone held fast. My fingers could find no evidence of even the slightest of fractures. I steeled myself for another attempt, but after trying twice more I had nothing to show for it other than the feeling of bruised flesh throbbing in protest beneath my skin. It seemed brute force wasn’t going to get me anywhere after all, which left me at a loss for what to do next. I felt so lost without my eyesight, even though it was entirely possible I’d have been just as clueless with some light to see by as I was without it.
Worst of all was the knowledge of the fate awaiting me if I couldn’t find a way out. The thought of being left to rot in the darkness, suffering the slow, agonising death of starvation was too much to bear. Only the transformation would save me from the damage it would exact on my body and yet, without being able to feed, my cells would lack the energy needed to transform, and eventually my heart and brain would fail just as surely as putting a bullet through either organ would stop them. But not before the hunger drove me back to teetering on the brink of sanity, until I fell into madness. When the Slayers had starved me before I’d been reduced to a primal beast, my mind far more primitive than the wolf had been when he’d existed as a separate entity within my brain, before we’d become one. Since I was further along in my lycanthropy I had no way of knowing if the hunger would exact a similar toll on me before the end, or if it’d be different this time. Eith
er way, I doubted it would be any easier.
Anger stirred within, a coiled serpent in the darkest part of my being just waiting to be set free and fed into rage. I let it rise up until it became a monstrous fiery dragon, blazing with all the feral fury of the curse and filling every inch of me, livid thoughts searing across my brain that after everything I’d been through, this couldn’t be how it ended. I’d thought being executed by the vampires would have been bad enough, especially when I hadn’t been guilty of the murders they’d accused me of, but at least that would have been a quick, clean end to my cursed existence, even if it wasn’t the one I would have chosen. And I’d escaped that sentence for what? To be subjected to something even more terrible? For the suffering I faced if I didn’t find a way out of this cavern was far worse. I couldn’t just give up and surrender myself to such torment, not while I still had the strength to fight.
With a bestial roar, I let the rage send me into a frenzy, raking my claws across the stone and carving deep gouges into the door. Yet I still didn’t seem to be any closer to breaking through to freedom, the panel apparently much thicker than I’d anticipated. My anger would not be so easily defeated, however, and it drove me to lash out at this barrier I couldn’t see, cloaked in blackness as it was. I no longer targeted the door specifically but instead attacked any inch of the stone my fists connected with in the darkness, and my caution was long gone, silenced by the deafening thunder of my rage. There had to be a way out and I would find it, no matter the cost. The alternative was just too horrific to accept.
Dimly I was aware of the trickle of blood running across my knuckles as the skin split from the impact. The pain was no more than background noise this time and it did nothing to deter me from my assault on the stone, not even when the bone cracked from the force as I’d originally feared it would. But my sacrifice was to be rewarded that night (or day since I had no way of knowing what time it was or how long I’d been out after the Slayer had knocked me unconscious) as whatever section of the wall I’d just beaten pushed inwards, causing the panel I’d been unable to move or break to lift upwards with the same ominous grinding I’d heard in countless movies.
