Turned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 2)

by David Bussell

  ‘Hello?’ I tried again. Still no reply.

  Then I saw a sudden flash of movement in the corner of my eye. At the far end of the lab, something was nudged, causing a beaker to topple over the edge of a desk and shatter on the tile floor.

  We spun in the direction of the disturbance, weapons at the ready. Someone was hiding behind that desk, and doing a pretty terrible job of it.

  Gen looked at me and made some complicated signals with her hands, the way they do in soldier movies. Obviously, I had no idea what any of them meant, though I certainly understood the look on her face as I stared back at her in bewilderment. It was a look that said—in no uncertain terms—‘Why have I been saddled with this absolute cretin?’

  In the end, Gen managed to communicate her message through a short game of charades. It was pretty simple stuff—“You go left, I’ll go right”—hardly worth all the voguing, really.

  Anyway, I followed Gen’s order, tiptoeing over to the desk while she cut around the other side, the pair of us coming up on our target in a pincer movement. We stopped right before we made the final move. A couple of curt nods to make sure we were on the same page, then we swooped—

  Except what we found hiding behind the laboratory desk wasn’t a man in a lab coat. It wasn’t a man at all. It was a chimpanzee.

  It was only the size of a small boy but had strong, sinewy muscle under its downy black fur. Parts of the animal were shaved, and I could make out scars and puncture marks decorating its exposed pink flesh. The chimp’s flattened face turned towards my own and peered back at me with soulful, human eyes. The poor creature made a frightened chattering noise as it quaked in our shadows.

  ‘Hey, little fella,’ I cooed, ‘it’s okay, no one’s going to hurt you.’

  Gen pointed to a cage, its door wide open. ‘Your scientist must have let him out. Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘maybe he developed a conscience?’

  No such luck.

  The chimpanzee opened its mouth wide, and as its lips peeled back, I saw two giant fangs.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me…’

  Chimps had fangs—I knew that from the Attenborough shows—but these were the size of paring knives and were accompanied by the sudden appearance of black talons and blood-red eyes.

  I managed to dodge the animal’s first swipe, but then the second one came at me, too fast to avoid. I felt claws rake through my leather jacket and bite into the skin around my midriff. As I howled in pain, Gen came to my assistance, winding up her morning star and whipping the spiked ball at the back of the chimp’s skull. The animal was too fast for her though, spinning about and fetching her a stinging blow to the side of the head.

  Pow.

  The punch landed with such force that it knocked Gen’s head out of her hood, releasing a springy mass of woolly black hair. At the same time, bloody spit went flying out of the left side of her mouth and patterned the floor. As she staggered backwards, the vampire chimp returned its attention to me, flinging itself my way like it was jet-propelled, both fists raised high. A couple of anvils landed on my head, knocking me to the ground, turning my skull into a piñata of bees.

  I heard a clattering sound and realised my dagger had left my hand and gone skidding across the lab floor, out of reach. I felt powerless. With the dagger in my hand I was a warrior, but without it, fighting a ‘roided-up jungle beast, I felt naked.

  I tried to recall the dagger to my hand, but couldn’t focus beneath the rain of fists the chimp was bringing down on me. Instead, I did the only thing I could to defend myself, tucking my knees into my chest and crossing my arms in front of my face, shielding myself from the battering.

  Gen came to the rescue, pouncing up from behind the chimp and wrapping the chain of her morning star around its neck. With a tennis champion’s scream, she pulled the noose tight and the animal’s eyes bugged from its head. Gen hadn’t counted on the creature’s animal agility though, and before she knew it, the chimp had thrown itself backwards and somersaulted over her head, releasing itself from the chain and almost dislocating her shoulders in the process.

  Unexpectedly, the vampire chimp then bounded on to the desk and sprang for the ceiling. Grabbing hold of the track lighting, off it went, racing to the other end of the lab like it was swinging through jungle treetops. For a moment it looked as though the chimp was making an exit, then it came about and started back our way, picking up momentum as it went. The next thing I saw were the soles of the chimp’s oversized feet as they came at my face like a pair of pistons.

  The force of the kick sent me reeling and left me seeing through a red fog. I was hurting, but nowhere near as much as I ought to be. The brand on my palm turned blue and hot, burying the pain under an avalanche of adrenaline. I’d had enough. No more monkeying around (sorry).

  With a sudden surge, I leapt at the chimp, screaming. It must have sensed a change in me—some animal instinct telling the creature that it had slipped down the hierarchy from alpha to omega—because as I landed, I caught a flash of fear in its all-too-human eyes.

  Two years of RSPCA donations went out the window as I cracked the chimp in the face with my fist. Almost immediately, a bruise rose under its eye, swelling up like puffed bread dough. Now it was my turn to bring the pain. I threw in a left, then another right, pummeling the beast into submission. Rage consumed me, transformed me into a bar room brawler, turned my fists into two busted bottles of lager. The chimp’s face was mashed potato. It’s limbs went slack. Only the faintest gasp of air left its muzzle now. I looked down at my hands, slick with blood.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I heard Gen say over the thunder of my heartbeat. ‘Finish it off.’

  ‘No,’ I said, coming to my senses.

  ‘What do you mean, “No”?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not going to kill it. It didn’t ask to be turned into a vampire, just like Neil didn’t.’

  ‘None of them asked,’ said Gen. ‘That’s not how this works. That doesn’t mean we should just let them run amok.’

  I couldn’t do it though. Couldn’t kill a lab experiment. Couldn’t kill an innocent animal, no matter how dangerous.

  ‘Help me get it back behind bars,’ I said, hooking my hands under the sleeping chimp’s arms.

  Gen sighed. ‘You think you’re doing that animal a kindness, but the most charitable thing you could do would be to put it out of its misery.’

  ‘Just get on with it, will you?’

  Shaking her head, Gen grabbed the chimp by the ankles and assisted me in hoisting it back into its cage. ‘Happy now?’

  I snatched my dagger from the floor and gripped it tight. ‘I will be when I find the fucker who did this.’

  Him I’d put down gladly.

  8

  We left the main lab and crept deeper into the facility.

  After a short while, we found ourselves in an area that looked like some sort of decontamination suite. A row of showers lined one side of the room, and on the opposite wall, hooded plastic suits hung from metal hooks. Still no sign of the scientist though.

  I was fed up of playing hide and seek so I decided—even though I knew it would make me sick as a pig to do it—to use my x-ray vision to root him out. To my surprise, it didn’t make me half as ill this time. The power came to me much easier, and with far less disorientation than before. And, as an added bonus, I found the scientist, hiding in a locker in the far corner of the suite, his glowing outline tattling on him no matter how hard he stifled his breath.

  Shutting off my super-sight, I strolled over to the locker and rapped on its metal door with the blunt end of my dagger. ‘Open up, dickless.’

  After a few moment’s hesitation the locker swung open and a man in a white lab coat stepped out, hands raised in surrender. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he begged, his body cramped from confinement.

  ‘Like you didn’t hurt that chimp?’ I said, grabbing him by the throat.

  Something wasn’
t right. At this point I’d expect to see a glowing letter J stamped on the forehead of the person I was manhandling. Not this guy though. He was clean.

  I pushed him away from me and he hit the lockers hard enough to leave a dent. He looked normal enough. Just a balding, middle-aged bloke in a lab coat as far as I could tell.

  ‘What are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m a person,’ he stammered, ‘just like you.’

  ‘You’re nothing like me. I don’t pal around with vampires.’

  Gen seized him by the wrist and pulled up the sleeve of his white coat.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘A marking.’

  She turned his wrist over, but the flesh on both sides of his arms was bare and unadorned. I figured Gen would let him go after that, but instead she reached into her pocket and produced a slim, keychain torch. With a flick of her thumb, she switched it on and shone a blue light on his arm. There it was: a discreet tattoo of a letter J, revealed under UV light.

  ‘He’s a familiar,’ Gen explained.

  ‘Familiar with what?’

  Gen rolled her eyes so far back she probably caught a glimpse of her own brain. ‘A familiar is a human who works in the service of another, in this one’s case, a vampire.’

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘They're given gifts for their loyalty,’ Gen explained, ‘and a promise that they'll be turned one day.’

  ‘Wait, I thought you said no one asked to be a vampire.’

  Gen instinctively went to argue, but sputtered to a halt when she realised I had her beat. ‘There are exceptions to every rule,’ was the best she could manage.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would anyone want to be a vampire? Well, except for the immortality and the super strength and the pure coolness of it? Actually, I think I might have answered my own question there.’

  The scientist used the lull in the conversation to try and make a break for it, but Gen’s grip was too tight, and he bounced back like a yo-yo.

  ‘Woah there, buddy, where do you think you’re going?’ I asked, stepping in his way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sweating bullets. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I’m scared, okay?’

  ‘Scared? Scared like that animal next door that you used as an attack dog? Experimenting on animals? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘What about the makeup you’re wearing?’ he said, referring to the warpaint that had been caked on my face so long I must have looked like a Batman villain. ‘That stuff’s not cruelty-free, you know? They just outsource it to China now.’

  Now it was my turn to run from a losing argument. ‘I didn’t come here to discuss ethics with a man who works for murderers,’ I said, taking the high ground. ‘I saw the blood bags next door. How many people gave up their lives for that little lot?’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said. ‘The blood we have here is synthetic.’

  What was he telling me? No animals were harmed in the making of this vampire food?

  ‘Keep going,’ said Gen.

  He obliged, talking a mile-a-minute, tripping over his own words. ‘We manufacture our own blood here. Once we’ve perfected the compound and learned how to mass produce it, no one needs to die. Don’t you get it? We’re doing this in service of humankind.’

  Was he on the level? A baby formula for vampires? An ethically-sourced blood substitute? It didn’t really matter, at least not right then. The only thing that counted in that moment was Neil.

  ‘I don’t care what kind of Doctor Frankenstein shit you’re up to here. The only thing I need from you is a cure.’

  He looked at me, head cocked to one side like a dog learning a card trick. ‘A cure for what?’

  ‘A cure for vampires.’

  The request didn’t elicit quite the same response it had from Carlo, but the result was pretty much the same.

  ‘I’m an expert in vampire biology, specialising in haematology, and I can tell you unequivocally that there is no such thing as a “cure” for vampirism.’ He sounded the quotation marks out with his fingers, intimating that the idea of reversing the condition he pined after so badly would be like trying to cure a fish by sewing up its gills.

  I didn’t like the tone of his voice, so I grabbed him by his scrawny neck and the smug look slid right off his face. ‘Try again,’ I suggested, lifting him off the ground.

  His eyes bulged. ‘Who’s... the patient?’ he squeaked, suddenly cooperative.

  ‘My boyfriend,’ I snarled back.

  That’s when the scientist grasped the true gravity of his situation. ‘When... when was he turned?’ he asked.

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Okay,’ he replied, ‘so he’s new.’ Even dangling by his neck, he couldn’t disguise his jealousy. ‘Then there might... be something... I can do.’

  I dropped him to the floor. ‘Talk, and fast.’

  He rubbed his throat and spoke a couple of octaves lower than before. ‘I don’t know how to cure your boyfriend, but I can buy you some time. He hasn’t turned yet, not completely. With the right combination of treatments, I can stall the process and put off the transformation.’

  It wasn’t the solution I was after, but it was obviously the best I was getting from this guy. I could tell just from looking at him that he was giving me everything he had.

  ‘Show me,’ I said, and he dutifully complied, opening the locker he’d been hiding in and producing a small Moleskine book.

  ‘My research notes,’ he said, thumbing to a double-page spread covered in tightly-packed handwriting and arcane-looking formulas. ‘Everything you need to know about slowing the metamorphosis.’

  Gen snatched the book off him and scanned the pages warily. ‘Looks legit,’ she said eventually.

  ‘It better had be,’ I said, grabbing the scientist by the lapels of his coat and shaking a couple of pens loose from his pocket.

  He cringed, pulling his face away from me as though I were about to headbutt him. ‘Whatever equipment you need you can take from next door,’ he said, trembling from head to toe. ‘Now please, you promised not to hurt me if I let you in here.’

  It’s true, I had. I loosened my grip, and the tight bundle of white cotton I was holding dropped from my fist. ‘You can go,’ I said.

  Gen shook the scientist by the hand. ‘Thank you for your help,’ she said, quite unexpectedly, then, even more unexpectedly, pulled a hidden knife from her belt and thrust it into the man’s heart.

  It happened so fast I almost didn’t see it. One moment I was thinking about our next move, the next I saw the handle of a knife sticking out of a lab coat.

  ‘What the hell?’ I screamed, as the stunned doctor slid from Gen’s blade and slumped to the floor, blood flowing freely from a gaping hole in his sternum.

  I crouched down to staunch the wound, but it was too late for that. The scientist looked right past me, gazing at the ceiling, the life gone from his eyes.

  I bounded to my feet and shoved Gen in the chest. ‘You just killed a man! Not a monster, a man!’

  She fixed me with her cold blue eyes. ‘You said yourself that he needed to die.’

  ‘That was before!’

  ‘Let me explain how this works. A vampire familiar only does what he does to become one of them. To become another member of the Clan.’

  ‘I get that, but… but you can’t just go around murdering people.’

  ‘Why can’t I? I was stopping a monster from being born, that’s all. Consider it an abortion. Unless… you’re not against that too, are you?’

  ‘Well… no.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, wiping her knife on the dead man’s body and leaving a thick red stripe across his white coat. ‘Then how about we get out of here and save your boyfriend?’

  She headed for the door, leaving the corpse of the scientist in her wake. On the way out, she executed the chimp too, despite my hollow protests.

  I was begin
ning to see why not all angels had wings.

  9

  It was getting perilously close to sundown, which left me zero time to worry about the moral consequences of our visit to Harley Street. Instead, I hailed a passing taxi and bunged the driver another twenty to put some lead in his shoe.

  Getting back to base was a mad scramble, but we beat the rush hour traffic and scraped our way to Bethnal Green with a little time to spare. Gendith and I burst into the gas tower, surprising Vizael, who was busy watching over Neil in our absence.

  ‘Help us put this together,’ I told the old man, dumping down an armful of medical equipment we’d lifted from the lab—bits and pieces drawn from the dead scientist’s shopping list—IV bags, rubber tubes, hypodermic needles, a drip stand, plus some other key ingredients.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ asked Neil, still chained semi-naked to a chair and at his wit’s end.

  I didn’t have time to answer him.

  Together, me and Viz assembled the apparatus, then Gen read from the notebook while I followed her instructions. She called out the names of various chemicals and their quantities, and I injected them into the drip bag as quickly as I could, fingers shaking, heart hammering. While I raced to keep up, I could see the light dimming through the crack in the tower’s door as the sun dipped into the horizon. Neil’s time was almost up. If this didn’t work, he’d be lost for good.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Look, we don’t have time for what ifs, okay? Do you want me to do this, or would you rather turn completely? Well?’

  Neil bowed his head, frowning.

  While I worked, Viz’s eyes stayed fixed on Neil, monitoring him, looking for any suspicious changes, making sure he wasn’t about to break character and lunge for my neck.

  As Neil sat in his chair, patient but terrified, I finished adding the last of the chemicals to the concoction. ‘Is that it?’ I asked Gen.

  ‘That’s what it says,’ she replied, snapping the Moleskine shut.