Changeling

by Steve Feasey

  ‘It’s a craphole. What’s nice about it?’

  ‘I meant the area. It’s nice around here. A bit out of the way, but nice.’

  ‘S’OK. It’s mine. I own it, so I ain’t beholden to anyone.’

  ‘When you say it’s yours …’

  ‘All of it. The forest, the land, and everything that you can see for miles around. It’s mine,’ he said as if expecting an argument. ‘Bought it years ago.’

  ‘And you manage OK?’ Trey asked. ‘It must be difficult living way out here if you can’t see to get around.’

  His uncle shrugged and continued to rub the dog’s belly. ‘So what do you want?’

  Trey was taken aback. His uncle’s choice of words and the tone that he used shocked the teenager. He hadn’t known what to expect from this meeting. He’d looked forward to it – nervous and excited at the same time at the prospect of meeting a living relative. Not just that, he was excited about meeting someone else like him … someone who knew what it was to be a lycanthrope. He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, thinking that the man might at least have pretended to be glad to meet him.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ Frank said into the silence.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Trey said finally. ‘I just wanted to meet you.’

  ‘Everybody wants something, kid.’ His uncle pushed the small dog off his lap and on to the floor. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ Trey answered and watched as the old man’s face changed at his response, breaking into a half-smile, half-sneer.

  ‘So you’ve had your Change?’ The man nodded to himself as if answering his own question. ‘You’ve probably had quite a few of them by now – that is unless you’re a late starter like your father was.’

  Trey sat quietly and waited. He didn’t like the way that his uncle was ‘looking’ at him across the room. And he didn’t like the tone he’d adopted when he’d referred to his father.

  ‘How’d you find me?’

  ‘A friend of mine gave me the address.’

  ‘So you said, so you said. Am I allowed to know the name of this … friend?’ The blind man turned his head and stared straight out in front of him. He nodded his head up and down in the air, moving it only a fraction in each direction, as though he had already guessed the answer to the question.

  ‘His name is Lucien Charron,’ Trey said. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. He’s been very good to me. He—’

  ‘I know who and what he is,’ his uncle said. He was completely still now and Trey watched as the man’s face went through a series of expressions as though he were playing out different scenarios in his head. Eventually, the scowl that he had worn from the moment Trey had first laid eyes on him returned to his features. ‘Come over here, kid. Let me get a look at you.’

  Trey stood up and walked over to the chair, standing in front of it. The old man levered himself out of the seat and stood up to face him. He reached out with his hands, placing his fingers on Trey’s face; first tracing the contours of the boy’s features and then running his hands across his hair. He let his hands drop to Trey’s shoulders and then slid them round to his arms, giving the biceps a less-than-gentle squeeze. He nodded his head, his bottom lip protruding as though he were a man satisfied with the inspection of the horse that he planned to buy at market. His hands moved back up to Trey’s neck and paused as they felt the chain that hung around it. Trey could sense the change in the old man as his fingers brushed against the metal links. A small gasp escaped Frank’s lips. His fingers hungrily traced the outline of the chain, seeking out the silver amulet that hung at the bottom of the long loop of metal links. His breathing had got louder and faster, and his face had taken on an ugly, needy look; lips peeled back over crooked and discoloured teeth while the sightless eyes rolled crazily in their sockets.

  Trey’s heart was hammering in his chest. He didn’t like the look on the man’s face. He firmly grabbed his uncle’s wrists, stepped back an arm’s length away from him and watched Frank waver on the spot, caught off balance by the sudden movement. When he was sure that the old man was no longer in any danger of falling over, he let go of his uncle’s arms and took another step backwards.

  Frank lifted his chin up into the air, the grotesque mask slipping from his features. He nodded – a brief downward jerk of the head. Trey thought that he was about to say something, but instead his uncle shakily reached out behind him for the arms of the chair and sat back down, fluttering his fingers in the air in a dismissive gesture that Trey took to mean that he too was expected to return to his seat.

  The old man was shaken. He reached out with his fingers, exploring the table’s surface until they alighted on the edge of his cup, which he raised to his lips and greedily drank from. He appeared to have visibly shrunk in the last few seconds as if what had happened had knocked the stuffing out of him. He stared sightlessly down into his lap, silently mouthing words. Eventually he stopped and sat quite still again, his eyes fixed on some invisible point between his knees. ‘Did you get it before your first Change?’ he asked.

  ‘Not quite,’ Trey said, fingering the amulet through his shirt. Lucien had given him the chain when they had first met, telling him that it had been his father’s. The amulet allowed Trey to control his transformation. It stopped him turning into the Wolfan – the malevolent werewolf that was under the control of the full moon and that would mercilessly kill and murder during the Change. Legend had it that there were once a number of the amulets in existence, but now Trey’s was the only one left.

  The amulet was a blessing and a curse.

  Because of it, Trey did not turn into a bloodthirsty killing beast each and every full moon. Instead, he became the more powerful, feared, intelligent and restrained bimorph werewolf. But also because of the amulet – and because he was a full-blood werewolf born of two lycanthrope parents – he had already lost so much. Friends had died, his life had been turned upside down, and he had been forced to kill while defending himself against evil. Because of the amulet the vampire Caliban believed that Trey was the legendary Son of Theiss – heir to an ancient prophecy foretelling that a werewolf would stop an all-powerful vampire’s rise to power in the Netherworld. And the vampire had dedicated himself to Trey’s destruction.

  There was no doubt: the amulet was a source of both powerful protection and terrible danger.

  ‘I thought that it was lost forever,’ Frank said.

  ‘No.’

  His uncle nodded. ‘Daniel, your father, was given the amulet by your grandfather,’ he paused, waiting for a response. When none came, he went on. ‘It should have been mine. I was the first son and it should have been mine.’ A snort of derision escaped the old man’s nostrils and his face twisted with jealousy and anger. ‘Our father decided that I wasn’t responsible enough to have it. How d’ya like that? Not responsible enough! I was just a kid, and my old man thought he could see what kind of man I’d turn into – he thought I was a bad apple.’ He shook his head, remembering.

  ‘I was fourteen when I had my first Change. Daniel was only five years old at the time, and even though he wouldn’t need it for another ten years, our father wouldn’t give me that amulet. Not even temporarily. “It’s Daniel’s,” was all he would say. “He will be the one to take up where I leave off.”’

  Frank shook his head. His milky eyes had filled with tears that clung to his lashes, threatening to fall, until he sniffed and wiped them away with the back of his sleeve. ‘I hated him for that. I hated my father for favouring Daniel over me, and I hated my brother for denying me the chance to escape the curse that had been passed on to me by our father.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though my dad had any say in it,’ Trey said in a small voice.

  ‘Maybe not. But he was given a chance that I never was. I had, and still have to, become that thing every month, while he was given the control that you now have. If I’d been given what was rightfully mine, things might have turned out differently for me.
I might not have …’

  A silence followed, broken only by the old man slurping noisily from his cup again.

  ‘So, I ask you again, what do you want?’

  Trey looked about him, making his mind up. ‘I’d like to stay,’ he said. ‘If it’s OK with you. For a while at least. I have things that I need to ask you, things about myself and what I am.’ He paused. ‘And I’d like a chance to get to know you some more.’

  The old man shook his head and took a deep breath of the stale air. ‘I’m not good company,’ he said. ‘Especially in the … lead-up. In two days I’ll have the Change. Full moon.’ He frowned and swivelled his head in Trey’s direction. ‘Does the moon still get to you? I know the amulet gives you control, but does it still get to you?’

  Trey shook his head and then realized that the man could not see this response. ‘It does, but I don’t have to change during the full moon. I can … make it not happen. But it’s bad if I do that – I feel like my insides are being torn out and my brain is on fire. If I fight the moon, I can feel sick for days. I tried to at the start, but it got so bad that now it’s just easier for me to find somewhere away from everyone and let it happen. I don’t have to stay changed for long – just get it done, and then I can go back to being … normal.’

  ‘Normal, huh?’ Frank nodded slowly and began to stand up. ‘Back to normal.’ He walked around the chair until he was standing in front of Trey. ‘Follow me. I want you to see something.’ He turned his back on the youngster and walked across the room, his fingers outstretched before him to guide him to the rear wall. He stopped in front of a door set into it, reached out and pulled the handle down to open it.

  ‘Go in, go in,’ he said, nodding his head towards the door.

  Trey stepped through the doorway and his uncle followed.

  The back room was a cell. It was a stark, cold space of about twenty square feet. In the centre of the room was a large cage. Its steel bars were at least an inch thick, and the entire thing was bolted down into the concrete floor. Inside the cage a small mattress was laid directly on to the floor, blankets piled up at one end. Beyond that, there was nothing in the room.

  Trey looked over at his uncle, who seemed to sense the boy’s stare.

  ‘Come in and have a proper look,’ he said, motioning with his head and stepping further into the room. He walked up to the cage, his arms stretched out in front of him. ‘Home sweet home,’ he said when his fingers made contact with the cold metal bars. ‘Well, it will be in a couple of days.’

  ‘You lock yourself in that?’ Trey said.

  ‘Yep. The door’s got a timer lock on it. As soon as I step inside and slam it shut, it can’t be opened for another fourteen hours. It’s either that or waking up in the middle of nowhere, not being able to remember if I’ve torn somebody’s throat out.’

  Trey looked at the cage and then at the man next to it. ‘But you can’t see. How could you be a danger to anyone when you can’t see?’

  His uncle laughed bitterly and shook his head. ‘That’s the real son of a bitch. That’s the thing that makes this curse even sicker than it already was. Because for one day every month, I can see! And guess when that is, hmm? The only time that I get to crawl out of this darkness that I live in is when I’m a psychopathic werewolf intent on killing anything and everything in my path.’

  Trey looked at the man in horror.

  ‘Oh, I can’t see great. But one eye can make out enough for me to be able to get around … get around and … hunt.’ He snorted again, his face set in a sick grimace. ‘So I lock myself up. Like all good little Wolfan boys should during the Change. I lock myself up in this room when I could be looking at the world again. How’d you like that, huh?’

  Trey didn’t say anything for a long time. He stared at the cage and tried to imagine what it must be like to be locked up inside it. ‘I’ll be here this time,’ Trey said. ‘I’d like to be with you.’

  ‘Like I said, I’m not good company at the best of times.’ Frank ran his fingers through his thin hair, letting out a long sigh. ‘But if you want to stay, you can. You’ve come a long way to be here, so it’s the least I can do.’ The old man turned as if to leave, but stopped, adding, ‘We might get visitors. I don’t live entirely alone here on this land.’

  8

  Lucien met the courier outside the lift in the underground car park at the bottom of the building. The man was dressed from head to toe in black motorcycle leathers, his face obscured by the tinted black visor of the helmet he wore. The man handed the package to Lucien, nodding in the vampire’s direction before turning on his heel and walking back to the motorbike that he had arrived on moments before.

  When the doors of the elevator opened up into the apartment the vampire hesitated, as he always did at this point, checking to see if he was alone. The apartment was in complete darkness, but Lucien’s eyes took in every detail as he scanned the room. Happy that there was nobody else around at this late hour, he crossed the floor to the door that led through to his office. Once inside, he leaned back against the door, closing his eyes and steeling himself for what lay ahead. Still carrying the large package, he crossed the room to the desk, using the side of the box to clear a space on which it could rest. The delivery resembled one of those small cool boxes used for transporting cold food to picnics or the beach, and his fingers trembled a little as he slid the zip all the way round and opened the semi-rigid top.

  Inside were two bags of blood. Both full, their contents distended the thick plastic containers so that they looked like giant rectangular berries – full to the brim with a crimson cargo. Lucien reached forward and picked one up. He circled the desk and sat down in the large leather chair. Looking down at the blood bag, he hefted it in his hand, enjoying the weight and feel of it and the flutter of anticipation that it set off inside him.

  He opened the drawer at the side of his desk and looked down at the medical equipment that he kept there. He had everything needed to insert a cannula and administer the blood intravenously – he’d done it countless times since turning his back on his former vampiric existence. He still needed the blood to survive, but he no longer chose to acquire and imbibe it in the way that his kind had throughout the centuries. One of Lucien’s many businesses was a blood laboratory, and his daily dose of the life-sustaining liquid was delivered to him at the same time every day.

  He reached down and started to pull the equipment from the drawer, his fingers pausing as they brushed against the plastic packaging that housed the needles. He paused, glancing at the blood bag again, and thought about how long it had been since he’d tasted the sweet sticky liquid it contained.

  What did it matter how he took the blood into him? What difference would it make if he chose, just this once, to drink it rather than push it into his body through a tube?

  He shook his head as if trying to rattle loose these rogue thoughts, a deep frown lining his forehead. He was being foolish. This was not the first time that he had had to fight the animalistic urges that defined his type. But recently he had felt desires and old urges that he had thought were gone forever. However hard he tried to dispute the fact, he had the uncomfortable feeling that something, something long held at bay, had been reawakened in him.

  He leaned his head back, a long sigh escaping his lips. Unconsciously, he raised a hand, his fingers tracing the area of his shoulder that had been wounded recently when his brother, Caliban, had sunk his teeth deep into him. Becoming aware of what he was doing he sat up, lifted his head and looked down at the area beneath his fingers. He wondered if something more than just the scar tissue might have been left behind as a memento of their last battle – if somehow the infection that had almost killed him might have changed him at a more deep and primitive level.

  He looked at the bag in his hand again, and his pulse quickened. It really didn’t matter how the blood got into him. As long as nobody was hurt it was of no consequence. And this blood had been given voluntarily.

&
nbsp; He shook his head again, unable to believe what he was about to do.

  He opened another drawer, and this time he took out a small knife that he always used as a letter-opener. He held the sharp tip against the thick plastic housing, telling himself that this was foolish and yet still pushing gently on the handle. He would just take a small mouthful. Just enough to prove to himself that it was of no consequence and that this had everything to do with the stresses that he was under at the moment, and nothing to do with any physiological change that was happening to him. He would taste the blood, prove to himself that it had no effect on him, and then administer the rest through a vein.

  The crimson liquid burst free of the puncture, and Lucien quickly pulled the bag up to his face, closing his lips around the hole and sucking greedily at the blood. He sank back into the chair, tilting his head back and closing his eyes as the cold liquid filled his mouth. A small muffled groan escaped him as he swallowed.

  It was too cold. But even so he relished the harsh metallic taste in his mouth. It was a taste that brought with it a flood of memories and emotions. Long-forgotten scenes swam into life behind his eyelids, and he sucked all the harder on the plastic bag.

  He would warm the next bag; warm it to the right temperature so that it would feel like it had just come from …

  He opened his eyes. Sitting up quickly, he threw the bag away from him on to the floor, ignoring the terrible scarlet mess that it made on the carpet. He stood up and rushed to the bathroom, lifting the seat to the toilet just in time as his stomach contracted and ejected a hot spew of bloody vomit into the pan. He straightened up, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  What had he been thinking? What on earth was happening to him?

  He closed the door behind him, trying hard not to look at the growing pool of blood that was now soaking into the floor in front of his desk. He walked out of the office, and left the apartment. He needed to walk. Walk and think. He was in trouble and he needed a solution, fast.

  9

  The dull, overcast morning had transformed into a hot and sunny afternoon, and the park was filled with office workers looking for somewhere away from their fluorescent-lit workplaces to eat their sandwiches. Alexa walked among them, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face and the soft give of the grass underfoot. The bench was set back a little from the path, and she stood in front of it looking down at the prostrate figure that took up the entire expanse of the wooden seat. The bench’s occupant let out a loud snore and shifted around to move its face back into shadow again. Alexa waited patiently, smiling ruefully down at the figure she had been sent here to find.