Changeling Dark Moon

by Steve Feasey

  ‘I’ve got somebody going over to have a look around his house in the UK, and I am trying to arrange for someone else to keep an eye on the villa to see if anything looks fishy. The trouble is, I can’t get hold of Martin at the moment. There seems to be a problem with the phones over there.’

  The two exchanged a look.

  Tom was about to get up when his mobile rang again. ‘Tom here,’ he said quickly, holding the device up to his ear. He listened for a second, slowly rising to his feet. ‘When was this?’ he asked. A deep frown formed on the Irishman’s face. ‘Then why the hell wasn’t I told about it earlier?’ he shouted into the phone.

  Something about the look on Tom’s face as he listened to whatever was being said made Trey step further into the room, placing his unfinished sandwich on the arm of the chair and wiping his hands on the front of his jeans.

  ‘I want an update in fifteen minutes,’ Tom said, and pushed the button on the handset to disconnect the call.

  Trey looked at the Irishman. He could see the strain in every line of his face. ‘What now?’

  Tom issued a small snort. ‘There’s been another massive jump in the use of the Globe detected by our people in London, followed by a signature that they haven’t come across before.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘In the same way that a spell sends out a distinct signal when it is cast, each nethercreature also has a tell-tale signature. You have one when you become a werewolf.’ Tom stared at the boy. ‘A little over an hour ago London detected a signature that they’d only encountered once before – yesterday, in fact. Because it was something that they hadn’t seen before they put it down to a glitch.’ He shook his head and stared down at the phone

  ‘Do I need to ask where this occurred?’

  ‘About ten miles from here,’ Tom said, glancing at his watch and then looking out of the window. ‘We’ve got about an hour and a half until sundown. In no time at all after that it’ll be dark. I for one have no intention of approaching a place like Leroth without the cover of darkness.’

  Trey looked at his friend and nodded. ‘Tom, I wanted to talk to you about this plan of yours. I’m worried about Alexa. If Charles is right, she shouldn’t be allowed to see what her mother has become. She—’

  ‘All taken care of, Trey. Alexa and I will set up shop outside and create a diversion, try to draw as many guards out as we can and keep them occupied. That should allow you and Charles to slip inside unnoticed and locate the Globe. If what your Murkbeast friend told you is true, you’re going to have to get to the top of that place to even have a chance of stealing the Globe, and if Gwendolin is using it as much as she seems to be, that is not going to be easy. I’m guessing that as soon as you get your hands on it, all hell will break loose – something like that is bound to have powerful safeguards in place. As soon as you have it, you and Charles get out and Alexa and I will provide us all with the means to make our escape. Who knows, we might all survive to tell the tale.’

  ‘I’m guessing that you haven’t discussed any of this plan with her. Because it doesn’t seem to me like she is going to be overly enamoured with the way you see things playing out.’

  ‘No, I haven’t, not yet. I know that Alexa wants to go in there for a face-off with her mother. She wants to see for herself what kind of woman could abandon her child to go and serve something as fundamentally evil as Caliban. But Gwendolin gave up the last of her humanity when she tried to sacrifice her own daughter to summon some creature from the pit. I don’t pretend to know what she has become now, but it is something inhuman and something that wouldn’t think twice about finishing off what it started all those years ago with Alexa.’

  Trey thought about this, eventually nodding his head. ‘What kind of diversion?’ he asked.

  ‘I hadn’t really given that too much thought,’ Tom said, jabbing at the keypad of his phone with his thick, calloused thumb. ‘I usually just rely on blowing things up and then see what comes out of the woodwork. Now if you’ll excuse me, young man, I need to get a few things sorted out.’

  Trey wandered back into the kitchen to find Charles and Alexa sitting at the table talking in hushed tones over mugs of steaming tea. He updated them on the phone call that Tom had just received, but didn’t mention the discussion that they had had regarding Alexa’s planned role on their impending trip.

  ‘It’s the Draugr,’ Charles said over the top of his cup. ‘They’re raising the Draugr from their burrows.’

  ‘Couldn’t it be anything else?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Charles, but the shrug of his shoulders suggested that he didn’t believe so. ‘But, whatever it is, it’s only going to mean bad news for us. The stakes have just gone up again, if that’s at all possible. If we thought that our odds were bad before, I fear that they have just got a whole lot worse.’

  Martin walked down the gently sloping hill, his sandals slapping softly against the hot pavement. He’d spied the cafe from a crossroads at the top of the hill and had immediately turned towards it, ignoring the protests from Philippa about the heat and the distance that they had already covered. She was still following him, but had dropped back a little now, her flip-flops hindering her from keeping up with the pace he was setting.

  The building was on the corner of an intersection between two roads and, from the look of it, the owner didn’t rely on tourist traffic to stay open. Small tables spilt out on to the narrow pavement, surrounded by an assortment of chairs – none of which appeared to match one another.

  He reached down and took the front of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger, gently pulling the fabric away from his chest, which was by now slick with sweat. As he approached the front door he noted that the interior was very dark, and his heart sank as he realized that the place was probably closed.

  He pushed at the door and thanked his good luck as it gave inward under the pressure.

  The heavy-set man standing behind the counter momentarily looked up at the sound made by the little bell above the door. Seeing the panting tourist he returned his attention to the glass that he was drying with a tea towel that was itself in need of a good wash. Martin nodded at an old man sitting at the counter nursing a glass of beer, but the gesture was not reciprocated; the old timer returned his rheumy-eyed stare to the television behind the bar, which appeared to be showing a documentary about deep-sea fishing, although with all of the static and white fuzz that danced across the screen, it was almost impossible to see.

  Martin took all this in at a glance, his eyes greedily scanning the dull interior until they rested on the thing that he had been hoping to find. The small payphone was situated at the back of the room beneath a glowing neon sign advertising the local beer.

  He was about to step towards it, momentarily forgetting everything else, when the door banged painfully into the small of his back, the little bell over his head merrily announcing the arrival of his daughter.

  ‘Dad.’ Philippa scowled. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing, storming off like that?’

  ‘Sorry, I just got carried away with the thought of a nice cold beer.’ He eyed the phone with longing, but instead made his way towards the bar.

  ‘You don’t drink beer. What has come over you today? Why are you behaving like a bloody maniac all of a sudden?’

  ‘I just fancy a beer now. Anything wrong with that? I am hot and bothered and I think that right now I would like to cool down with a beer. Take a seat and I’ll bring you over a drink. What would you like?’

  His daughter eyed him suspiciously. He never answered her back, and this sudden show of mettle, along with his tone of voice, took her aback for a moment. She smiled at him, reaching up and removing the oversized sunglasses so that he would be able to see her eyes. ‘I’ll have a lime and soda, please. No ice.’ She took a table close to the bar.

  ‘Hot out there,’ Martin said as he approached the owner. ‘Could I have a glass of that draught beer and a lime and soda,
please?’

  The barman nodded and prepared the drinks. Martin looked over his shoulder in the direction of his daughter. She was within earshot so he stepped up on to the tarnished brass rail that ran around the base of the bar and leaned his body forward over the high counter to speak to the man as he poured the cold lager into the glass.

  ‘Is your telephone working?’ he asked.

  The man looked directly at Martin, but when he spoke it was in a strange accent and language that Martin couldn’t quite identify. It sounded vaguely French, but the rhythm and cadence were all wrong. Martin guessed that it must be the Creole that was spoken by the majority of the Seychellois. The old man laughed at whatever it was the barman had said, nodding his head and hissing through his gums as though he was sharing in the world’s funniest joke.

  ‘Your telephone – does it work?’ Martin repeated.

  ‘Yes, the phone is working,’ the barman said, setting the two drinks on the bar.

  Martin nodded. ‘It’s just that we are staying in a villa a little way up the hill and all our phones seem to have stopped working. I wondered if that kind of thing was normal here.’

  The barman looked at him with thinly disguised contempt. Martin knew how he must appear to this man – another tourist questioning the ability of the locals to get their services and facilities up to the demands of rich Westerners. He couldn’t help that now. He just wanted a phone that worked.

  ‘The phone service here is very good. We don’t have many problems,’ the barman said simply, and he turned his back on Martin to join his gummy countryman watching the TV.

  Putting Philippa’s drink on the table in front of her, he nodded his head towards the payphone. ‘I think I might call work,’ he said. ‘Let them know that the phones are out and ask them who we should contact.’

  To his surprise, she nodded and took a sip from her drink. ‘Good idea,’ she said.

  Martin almost fell flat on his face, tripping over a low stool in his rush to get to the phone. He fished all of the change out of his pocket and hastily fed it into the small slot at the side of the telephone unit. He prayed that it was enough. He jabbed the number of Tom O’Callahan’s mobile phone into the telephone keypad. It rang six times before going to the Irishman’s message service. ‘Tom … it’s me, Martin,’ he said into the receiver after waiting out the pre-recorded message. ‘Something is going on here and I am very worried about it. My daughter …’ He sensed a presence behind him and stopped, half turning to see that Philippa had ambled over to stand by him, sipping at her drink and leaning against a pillar no more than three feet behind him. She gave him a little wave of her fingers and smiled at him. He swallowed, turning back towards the phone, ‘ … my daughter, Philippa, agreed with me that I should call you and let you know that the phones here are out,’ he said, thinking quickly to change what he had really wanted to say. ‘To top it all, I appear to have lost my mobile … If you could get somebody over to look in on us and sort out the phones, I’d be very grateful.’

  He hung up, unable to think of anything else that he could say with Philippa hovering around behind him. He turned to face his daughter, ‘Voicemail,’ he said with a shrug.

  The cold, calculating stare that she gave him completely unsettled his nerves, and it was as much as he could do to stop himself from screaming out at the top of his lungs.

  He looked back at the phone with a little shake of his head. He was on his own. A cold panic gripped him as he realized that whatever it was that his daughter had planned for him he would have to face it without any outside help.

  His heart was beating too fast, slamming into his chest. When he looked at Philippa again he thought that he could detect in her eyes the cruel amusement that she must be feeling right now.

  She looked at her watch and then back at him. ‘We’d better drink up and be getting back,’ she purred. ‘Our boat will be turning up in a little over two hours, and we need to get ready for our soirée. Come on, Dad.’ She offered him her arm as if they were going off on a friendly stroll along a seaside pier.

  He was suddenly filled with an emotion that he had not felt for a very long time – anger. It boiled up inside him, consuming the fear that he had been carrying around all day. It was a good feeling right now and he allowed it to rage through him. The anger, coupled with a grim determination to help his daughter get through whatever it was that was happening to her, might just be enough to save them both. He hoped so, because he doubted that any other help was going to come.

  He remembered what Tom O’Callahan had told him about doing everything and anything he could to not make the journey with her that night. But something had snapped within him. He straightened up and stared back at Philippa with a look that she had never seen before. Taking her arm, he guided her back towards the door.

  ‘Come along then, Philippa. After all, we wouldn’t want to miss our midnight feast, would we?’

  Gwendolin’s eyes no longer saw the Draugr as it raged against the invisible barrier that she had constructed around it – the cold grey irises of her eyes had been replaced by the milky whites of the eyeballs themselves, shot through here and there with tiny blood-red lightning forks. It was difficult magic. She was having to maintain a complete sphere of energy around the creature to contain it, while at the same time lifting and manoeuvring the entire thing out of the fortress. That in itself was complicated, but not beyond the ability of a mage of her power.

  The problem that she was having was the creature’s persistent efforts to break free by changing its size, making it very difficult for her to ‘mould’ the spell around it and move it efficiently – she constantly had to recast the spell, resizing the imprisoning sphere and so using up huge amounts of energy just to stop the creature from simply bursting out and wreaking yet more havoc on those unlucky enough to be in its path (of whom she was one).

  Her attempt to reanimate the other Draugr, as Caliban had instructed her to, had failed. They had dug it out of its barrow and brought it back to the citadel. She had performed the magic needed to bring it back to life and for one moment she thought that she had succeeded again, but the thing had simply bellowed in rage before collapsing in a heap. On reflection, she now thought it astonishing that she had been successful at all in her attempts to revive any of these ancient creatures. But having accomplished this feat she now had the dubious task of clearing up after herself, disposing of the creature – it being too unstable to control and too dangerous to have around – as per Caliban’s instructions.

  The Draugr really was very powerful, and the energy that she had to expend at this moment to keep it from breaking loose and running amok again was beginning to wear her down, despite the incredible powers that she had built up over the years. A small part of her could only admire the Draugr’s raw energy and strength.

  They were almost at the opening that she had created at the front of the tower. A huge armoured truck was waiting for them. Their plan was to get the monster inside the vehicle, whereupon a small detachment of Maug would take it to the centre of the city of Reykjavik and unleash it on the unsuspecting Icelandic citizens while they slept in their beds. She would accompany them as far as the outskirts of the city just in case it should escape before they arrived at their intended destination.

  She smiled inwardly at the thought of the behemoth rampaging through the streets of that city, destroying everything and anyone in its path. And after that? She realized that she did not care what became of the creature. This project had proved to be a disaster for her and, more dangerously, it had put doubt in Caliban’s mind as to the extent and efficacy of her powers. Let the humans destroy the thing that she had struggled so hard to bring back to life. She cared nothing for it now. The power of the Globe when used in conjunction with Skaleb’s Staff was beyond doubt now, and she and Caliban would need to consider an alternative use for it. It was too powerful to simply ignore. Caliban had suggested human zombies.

  She shook her head ruefully at this.
She hated working with zombies – everybody did. They were anarchic and difficult to coordinate, and the longer the body was in the ground the less likely that the reanimated creatures could be controlled. Knowing this, she should have guessed that the Draugr would also prove to be a lost cause. She had convinced herself that they would be different. Legend had said that they would change while underground, drawing on the magic from the land around them and transforming into something alien to the world that they had once been a part of. A monster that would enact its revenge upon the world above it. They did indeed seem hell-bent on destruction, but they were rampageous, chaotic creatures that seemed utterly incapable of being controlled in the way that Caliban had hoped.

  She stopped, frowning again as the creature doubled in size and began to assault the field of magic that she was struggling to maintain about it.

  Gwendolin would rid herself of this troublesome revenant and then leave this land of ice and rain. She already had a new project in mind, one that involved the creation of a particular type of shapeshifting demon that she would send into the houses of humans to replace newborn babies in their cots at night. The demons would eat everything in sight, their hunger would be insatiable and once they’d discovered the taste for meat … the parents wouldn’t stand a chance. There was also the matter of Lucien. The thought of his impending death made her smile for the first time in days.

  She concentrated, summoning her powers to ensure that there would be no surprises now that they were so close to the exit. From the outside, she had chosen to make Leroth appear to any human looking upon it as some kind of refinery. They had chosen a remote location with no urban developments nearby, but anyone who knew the area and happened to stumble across it would be completely amazed that a giant factory appeared to have sprung up out of nowhere in so little time. It was one of the problems that she had with the translocation of Leroth within this realm. It was very large, but needed to be made to appear to blend in with its surroundings. Quite often she would simply opt to destroy an existing building or group of buildings and fashion Leroth to look exactly as they had. But here, in a country with such a low population per square foot of land, she had simply chosen to create a factory from scratch.