by Steve Feasey
The place:
A luxury apartment in Docklands, London. HQ of Charron
Industrial Inc. – a global empire dedicated to fighting the powers of the Netherworld
The time:
Spring. Five months after fourteen-year-old Trey Laporte discovered he was a werewolf
The characters:
Lucien Charron – vampire
Alexa Charron – daughter of above; sorceress
Trey Laporte – ex-ordinary teenager; last hereditary werewolf
Tom O’Callahan – human. Tough guy and enforcer
The bad guy:
Caliban – evil vampire brother ofLucien Charron; bloodthirsty beast, intent on destruction
The mission:
Read on …
Bloodthirsty books by Steve Feasey
Changeling
Changeling: Dark Moon
Look out for
Changeling: Blood Wolf
First published 2009 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2009 by Macmillan Children’s Books
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-51168-1 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-51167-4 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-51169-8 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Steve Feasey 2009
The right of Steve Feasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
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For my mum.
Thank you for all the love.
The vampire Lucien Charron lay motionless on a high-sided bed in his Docklands apartment. The bleak early-morning light that came in through the window made the interior stark and unwelcoming. White sheets had been stretched smooth over Lucien’s body, tucked in around the edges, tracing the hills and valleys of his body to create a miniature landscape of virginal snow. The covers would stay like this, intact and unspoilt, as he lay unmoving beneath them. It would be easy to think that the pale, still creature was indeed dead – the skin was the colour of grey pumice stone, and that essence of being, that you instinctively feel when sharing a room with someone, had all but vanished. The vast array of machines and monitors blinking and beeping from the other side of the bed were the only things to suggest that the vampire still defied the inevitable end that the doctors anticipated.
Lucien had woken only once in the five months that he had been in this state – a few weeks after he had saved his daughter’s life from his evil vampiric brother, Caliban. Even then, he had regained consciousness for only a matter of moments – asking questions as to his daughter’s safety and Caliban’s defeat. Upon hearing the news of their success, he had sunk back into the darkness, diving back down into a coma from which it was unclear if he would ever return.
The doctor glanced up from his chart to his patient, and recorded the data that again signified no change in Lucien’s condition. He returned the clipboard to its position at the bottom of the bed, and turned to the three people waiting just inside the door who were staring back at him with eyes full of hope and worry.
‘There is no improvement, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘As I explained last week, the lung seems to have made an almost full recovery following the surgery, and the wound where the stake was driven through his chest and back has also healed better than we had any right to hope for. But this bite wound …’ He shook his head and glanced down at the dressing that covered the offending injury. ‘It defies all attempts that we have made to treat it. The localized infection that we have been fighting since we first saw it is, I am afraid, getting worse.’
The wound was a result of Lucien ‘misting’ between his daughter and Caliban at the very moment his evil brother had attempted to kill her. The huge fangs that were meant for her young neck had instead buried themselves into Lucien’s shoulder. Lucien had survived only because the young werewolf, Trey Laporte, had attacked Caliban and forced him to release his brother.
The damage to Lucien’s shoulder refused to heal. Like all wounds inflicted on nethercreatures by their own kind, it would not mend in the extraordinarily quick fashion that ‘normal’ wounds would. The rejuvenating powers of vampires and other beings from the Netherworld made them almost impervious to injuries caused by humans and animals from the human plane. But the wounds inflicted by their own kind were subject to different healing processes, and were more often than not deadly.
The doctor peeled back the dressing to reveal a raw, infected lesion beneath. The bite marks where the teeth had punctured the flesh were still wet, refusing even to scab over, and an acrid-smelling pus still oozed from the angry red craters, despite the huge doses of antibiotics that the doctors had administered. The skin surrounding the puncture wounds looked pinched; a purple lividity discoloured the flesh, making it look sore and tender even after all this time. And it smelt. It reeked of the rot that attacked the body – a parasitic infection that was all too eager to consume its host.
‘The sepsis that continues to seep into Lucien’s blood from this wound is not responding to any of our treatments I’m afraid that he appears to be losing the fight that he has waged for so long. The situation is very bad. If we can’t find a new way to stop this infection, then we will lose Lucien.’
Three pale and strained faces stared back at him. A mean-looking man with a scarred face, a tall, lean teenage boy and a fine-featured girl with jet-black hair all searched the doctor’s face for some sign of hope.
‘How long does my father have?’ Alexa asked in a small voice.
‘It is too hard to say, Miss Charron. To be honest, we’re amazed that he is still alive, so it is beyond me to predict how long he might be able to continue fighting. We really have run out of options. We will use any and all palliative care at our disposal to keep your father as comfortable as possible, but you should prepare yourself for the worst.’
The tall Irishm
an, Tom, stepped forward into the silence that followed and shook Dr Tremaine by the hand. ‘Thank you, Howard. We appreciate how hard you and your team are working.’ He gently guided the doctor to the door and followed him out, leaving Trey and Alexa behind.
‘Are you OK?’ Trey asked when the silence in the room became too much to bear.
‘No, not really,’ Alexa replied, trying to summon up a brave smile.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said, feeling utterly helpless as he looked between his friend and his guardian on the bed.
‘No. But thanks, Trey. I think that I’d like to be alone with my dad if that’s OK.’
Trey nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him. On the other side he sank back against it, closing his eyes and trying to absorb everything that the doctor had just said. He sighed and opened his eyes again, briefly taking in the opulence of the apartment that he now lived in – the fine furnishings, the artwork and tapestries that lined the walls, the vast array of technological gadgets and equipment that filled the luxury penthouse. It would not have looked out of place on a TV show about the houses of the rich and famous. But the apartment was only a tiny part of the empire that Lucien Charron had built up through the years, an empire that was dedicated to destroying the evil forces of the Netherworld and to protecting the human race from those creatures within it that would do them harm. It was a business that needed Lucien at its head to function, and Trey didn’t want to imagine what would happen if his guardian was not around to lead the fight. Tom and Alexa had been running things, keeping on top of everything as best they could, but Trey suspected that they had only been able to do so because Caliban had been so very quiet. Too quiet. They hadn’t heard from the evil Netherworld lord since they had returned from Amsterdam five months ago. The lack of contact with the vampire lord had led Trey to hope that he might have perished as a consequence of his own injury – Trey had bitten off Caliban’s hand in the battle to rescue Alexa – but he knew better. Vampires were hard to kill; Lucien was living proof of that. No, Caliban’s silence was deliberate, and that could only be a bad thing – whatever it was that he was planning, it was something big. And they needed to hear from the vampire; Lucien’s survival depended on them doing so and finding out where he was.
Trey nodded to himself and strode towards the elevator set in the wall to his left, heading for the research rooms on the floor below.
Moving to her father’s side so that she could hold his hand, Alexa fought to stop the tears from falling. She leaned forward and whispered to the prone figure on the bed, ‘Don’t you listen to them. There is something that can be done for you. Trey, Tom and I are still working on it. So you … you just hang on in there, OK? Do you hear me? You just keep on fighting for a little while longer.’
She reached out and ran her hand across his bald, smooth head, the way that she had done since she was a little girl, sitting on his lap and listening to stories about the things he had seen during his incredibly long existence. As far back as she could remember, he had always been bald, and she found it impossible to imagine him with hair. She leaned forward and kissed his cool cheek, before placing the hand that she had been holding back on top of the covers.
She left the room and wasn’t surprised to see Tom waiting just outside for her. She nodded to him and smiled sadly. They had only one option left. They were going to have to steal Mynor’s Globe – an ancient object with incredible powers to heal nethercreatures. But to do this they would have to enter the Netherworld and take it from right under the nose of Gwendolin, Alexa’s mother, the most powerful and ruthless sorceress in the realm.
If they failed, her father would die.
‘Ah, here he is,’ Tom said in his broad Irish accent as Trey plodded into the kitchen the following morning. ‘I was debating whether to wake you from your much needed beauty sleep and get you to face the world – it being your birthday and all – but, knowing how you like to lie in for obscene lengths of time, I figured that I’d wait it out, and that you’d rise of your own accord when the sound of your belly growling became louder than that of your snoring.’
Trey squinted, screwing up his face against the strong light that flooded in through the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up one entire wall of the kitchen. He nodded in the direction of Alexa, who was sitting at the kitchen table, a small pile of gifts and sealed envelopes arranged in the centre. They had hung a banner up in the centre of the room – Happy 15th Birthday picked out in silver and blue on a black background.
‘How did you know that it was my birthday?’ he said, sitting down opposite her at the table and helping himself to orange juice. ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Alexa said. ‘You think that because you tried to keep it secret that we wouldn’t find out?’
‘So how did you know?’
‘It’s logged in Dad’s calendar. Tom has access to all my father’s computer files, and guess what popped up as an alert three days ago? Fancy not telling anyone it’s your birthday! How lame are you, Trey?’
‘I’ve just never really been one for birthdays, I suppose. In the care home they’d give you a card signed by all the staff and kids, a cake and an extra few quid in your allowance that week. So it was never really a big deal.’
‘Well, now it’s a big deal,’ Tom said, moving towards him. ‘Here, that’s from me.’ He indicated the largest present on the table and nodded at Trey in a way that suggested that he was to open it first. Trey looked up at the tall, fierce-looking Irishman and picked up the gift, hefting it in his hands as if trying to guess by weight alone what it could be. He looked down at the package – it was long, just over three feet in length, and quite heavy.
‘Oh for God’s sake! Are you going to open the bloody thing or sit there and gawp at it all day?’ Tom came and sat down next to him, the look of anticipation on his features made somehow horrific by the ugly, puckered scar tissue that dominated the side of his face nearest to Trey.
Looking up at Tom’s excited expression, it was almost impossible for Trey to reconcile the person in front of him now with the man he knew to be Lucien’s right-hand man – his enforcer. Tom was as hard as nails – a warrior who was always by Lucien’s side in the toughest of situations, armed to the teeth with an arsenal of guns and explosives – but here he was behaving like a kid on Christmas morning.
Trey let out a short breath of exasperation and pulled at the red ribbon that was tied around the paper. He tore at the paper, frowning down at the long, zippered canvas bag in his hands. Unzipping it along its full length, he pulled the two sides apart, revealing the weapon inside. He quickly closed it again, as if the thing was in danger of leaping out of its own accord, and looked up at the Irishman.
‘It’s a rifle,’ he said, looking at the older man in horror.
‘Well spotted,’ Tom replied. ‘A Marlin Model 60, to be precise. And –’ he reached into his back pocket and pulled out an envelope that he handed to Trey – ‘I bought you a year’s membership to the Marylebone Rifle and Pistol Club. You can come down with me later on, and we can have a little go with it, eh? I’ll have to be with you at first, but after a few months you can go alone and practise when you like.’
Trey opened the carry case again and stared in disbelief at the wood and metal gun nestling among the canvas lining. Then he closed the zip, aware that Tom was leaning forward over him waiting for his reaction to the gift, so he obligingly donned a big, dumb smile and nodded his appreciation.
‘Fantastic, Tom, thank you so much. But I really don’t—’
‘I saw how you liked the guns and things that we took with us on our little sortie over to Holland to rescue the lovely Alexa here. So when I found out that it was your birthday, I thought it’d be just the thing. You’ll love it.’
Trey couldn’t even imagine picking up a gun, and was stupefied to think that his friend had actually gone out and bought him one. He placed the gun bag on the floor next to his chair and nodd
ed his appreciation again. He hoped that Tom had not picked up on his dismay. The Irishman had never treated Trey with anything but kindness and respect, and the teenager felt a debt of gratitude to the man for everything that he had done for him since Lucien had taken him in as his ward. In addition, Trey was still more than a little nervous about Tom; there was a hard and ruthless aspect to the man that simmered just below the surface, which Trey hoped to carry on avoiding for as long as possible.
‘Just humour him, Trey. He’s been so excited about the whole thing since he thought up the idea. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen.’ Alexa spoke directly into his mind, using the telepathy spell that she employed in situations like this. He glanced over and saw her smiling back at him in amusement.
‘This is from me,’ she said, stepping forward and holding out a much smaller gift that looked as if it had been wrapped by an expert in origami.
Trey took the package from her and carefully tore the paper away. It was a book. It appeared to be bound in some kind of skin that was rough to the touch, like very fine sandpaper. He went to open it, but Alexa stopped him with a gesture of her hand.
‘I’d probably wait to open it,’ she said.
‘Why?’ Trey asked, looking over at her suspiciously.
‘It’s a book of spells. Most of which are perfectly safe,’ she added quickly, holding a hand up to stop his objections, ‘but some of them have a habit of catching you by surprise if you are not quite ready for them. It’ll be better if we go through them together to start with.’
Trey wanted to go back to bed. He suddenly felt that the signed card and chocolate cake that he had been given for his last three birthdays back at the care home were infinitely preferable to the gifts he had been given this morning. Tom had bought him a lethal weapon, and now Alexa appeared to have given him a book that was likely to kill him if he opened it unsupervised.
