Changeling Dark Moon

by Steve Feasey

  The werewolf lifted his head and howled. The long, ululating cry bounced back and forth across the rock walls, filling the tunnel with its desperate sound.

  ‘Trey?’ Tom’s voice seemed to come out of a fog. ‘Trey, we must go. Now.’

  Trey looked up at the Irishman, tears coursing down the short hairs on his face. ‘He’s dead, Tom. Charles is dead.’

  ‘Oh, lad.’ Tom shook his head, turning to look out of the windscreen, for once lost for words. When he looked back at Trey his eyes had hardened again, his mouth set determinedly. ‘We won’t leave him here,’ he said. ‘Put him in the back next to Alexa, but we have to get out of here or his death will have been for nothing.’

  Trey did as he was told, gently placing Charles in the back of the car before folding his great frame into the front seat next to Tom, who crunched the car into gear and shot forward through the gap into the nightscape of Iceland.

  They drove straight to the airport. Tom had broken the silence of their journey only once, calling Hjelmar to make arrangements for their departure.

  Trey sat staring out of the side window, glad for the quiet in which he was able to try to get his head around everything that had happened. He had transformed back into his human form and now sat in the front seat, wrapped in a blanket that Tom had retrieved from the boot.

  ‘It’s OK, Trey,’ the Irishman said in a low voice. ‘We’re free of that place now.’

  Trey nodded and cut his eyes towards his friend for a moment. ‘You’re bleeding an awful lot, Tom.’

  ‘You’re not doing so badly yourself on that front, lad.’

  After about twenty minutes, Alexa came round. She gingerly sat up in the back of the car, cradling her head in her hands and looking about her as if in a daze.

  ‘Did we get the Globe?’ she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘Yes,’ Trey answered, his eyes never leaving the landscape flying by outside the car. ‘We got the Globe.’

  Alexa sat up, a small groan escaping her lips. She frowned in Trey’s direction and was about to say something when she caught sight of Tom’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Something had gone horribly wrong. She looked down at the prostrate figure of Charles next to her, and instantly knew.

  ‘Oh no, Charles!’ she cried.

  She pulled his body towards her, placing his head on her lap so that she could stroke his hair. Her sobs filled the confines of the car and they drove like that for some time, the only sounds those of the road and Alexa’s crying.

  Eventually Alexa looked up, her breath coming in harsh ragged little gasps. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  Trey told them about his and Charles’s experiences inside Leroth, recalling the dangers that they had faced on their way up through the tower. He told them how Charles had forced the globe into his hands and bundled him out of the room to face Gwendolin alone, but he stopped short of describing the terrible scenes that followed inside the sorceress’s chambers. Alexa had gone very quiet, and it was left up to Tom to fill in the other side of the story from their perspective. Finally Trey told them how the young mage had given his life to save him from Caliban. He stopped then, too choked to continue.

  ‘I think he knew,’ he said eventually. ‘I think he used up everything he had to cast that last spell to save us from Caliban. I felt him collapse into me afterwards, as if all his life-force had suddenly gone from him. I think he knew, but he still went ahead and …’

  Trey stared down at the glass sphere nestling on the seat between his legs. The price to attain it had been so very high that he prayed their efforts would not have been in vain. It was terrible that a life had been sacrificed to retrieve something with which they hoped to save another life. He picked the object up, holding it in front of his face, looking into its depths again. He drew in a sharp, sudden breath, turning in his seat to face Alexa, who was looking back at him, already shaking her head.

  ‘Its powers are only effective on nethercreatures,’ she said. ‘And Charles is dead, not ill. Even if we had also taken Skaleb’s Staff and used them together to bring him back, he would not be alive in the sense that you and I are; he’d be … something else.’ She looked down again at the head still on her lap.

  ‘Let’s get him home,’ Tom said.

  Charles’s coffin was carried aboard the plane by Hjelmar and his people. Tom had made all of the arrangements, bypassing the authorities, who would no doubt have insisted on having reams of paperwork filled out before they would release the body. Trey, Alexa and Tom stood on the tarmac and watched their friend being taken aboard, Alexa huddling into the two men’s arms as they all grieved. An hour later they were all aboard, and the plane leaped up from the runway into the heavy skies over Iceland.

  Trey had changed into the clothes that Hjelmar had thoughtfully provided for him. He’d settled down in his seat and slept for most of the journey home, only waking towards the end of the flight when he sensed that someone was looking at him. He opened his eyes and looked across at Alexa. She was staring at him, a sad smile on her face.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘No. You?’

  She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.

  Alexa asked the question that Trey had been dreading, even though he knew that it was inevitable.

  ‘What happened to Gwendolin?’ she asked.

  Trey thought back to the horrific end that the sorceress had met and how her dying eyes had stared back at him in her last moments.

  ‘She was killed.’ Trey glanced towards the back of the cabin, where Charles’s coffin lay. ‘She was going to kill Charles,’ he said by way of an explanation. ‘I’m sorry, Alexa.’

  Trey waited, his body tensed against whatever was coming. Alexa leaned forward and very gently put her hand on his knee. ‘That thing wasn’t my mother, Trey. My mother died long ago. She left my father and me to join Caliban because she loved the power more than she ever loved us. It sounds cold, but I feel nothing to learn that what little was left of her has now been destroyed. I’d say that I hope she rots in hell, but I think that she has been doing that for an awfully long time.’

  They sat in silence, the sound of the aircraft’s engines filling their ears.

  ‘Tell me about the angel,’ she said. ‘What was she like?’

  Trey frowned, a short humourless snort escaping him. ‘Not like anything you’ve ever seen on top of a Christmas tree. She was … magnificent. And she was beautiful, and … scary. Scary as hell – terrifying, in fact. Terrifying and beautiful.’ The words came rushing out of his mouth too quickly and he looked back at her, feeling himself blush. ‘She saved us.’

  ‘What do you think happened to Caliban and her?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘I don’t know. She was taking a lot of punishment from him. She told me to run. So I did.’ He paused, frowning as the scene replayed itself to him. ‘There was something else though,’ he said. ‘Something about Caliban’s expression as he realized what it was that had grabbed him and carried him up into the sky.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Terror. It was all over his face. Even as he was hacking at her with that metal hand, you could see that he was petrified of her.’

  ‘Let’s hope his fear was justified and that she polished him off once and for all,’ Tom said in a low voice, looking up from the table that he’d been working at. His rucksack was on the chair beside him. Trey had given him the Globe just before they’d taken off, and Tom had treated the thing as if it was one of the explosives he was so fond of, placing it carefully in the bag.

  ‘Yeah,’ Trey said, glancing up at his friend. ‘Let’s hope so.’

  But something inside him didn’t believe it. Something told him that the vampire had not perished at the hands of the Arel. And while this intuition depressed him, there was something else that occurred to him that lifted his spirits for the first time since escaping Leroth. It was another one of those gut feelings, another one of those instincts that he had recently begun to t
rust more and more, and it told him that Moriel was also still alive. The Arel battle-angel had survived Caliban’s attacks and escaped him once more.

  Trey thought back to her face as she stood in front of him and Charles after they had released her. He thought of her icy-cold eyes and the scar that wound its way through her features and how she had addressed them by their full names in a way that had seemed so formal at the time. They had only met for a matter of moments, and yet he felt a connection between them. Something that he couldn’t put his finger on, but felt nevertheless. He searched himself now, trying to tap into that connection, and the more he did the more convinced he became.

  Yes, he was certain of it – she was still alive.

  ‘We’ll be landing soon,’ Tom said. ‘Better get yourselves strapped in.’ He nodded at the small leather-bound book that Moriel had thrown down to Trey from the sky. ‘Do you want me to put that in my bag?’

  Trey looked down at it and shook his head. ‘No, I’ll hang on to it for now. Thanks.’

  The man called Christian surfaced out of the ocean about twenty feet away from the boat. The moonlight jumped off the small waves that were playing on the ocean surface, the light a harsh and unwelcome contrast to the velvety blackness from which he had just emerged. He pulled up his mask and swam over to the rear of the dive boat, climbing up the ladder and on to the deck, where he started to remove his tank and the rest of his diving gear.

  ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ Max shouted as he strode across the deck towards him. ‘We said that we would return to the boat immediately if we were separated. What the hell do you think you’re playing at? And what happened to your surface marker buoy? We had no idea what had happened to you, or where you were.’

  Christian looked at him and frowned as if he couldn’t understand why this man was standing in front of him and screaming into his face. He shook his head a little and dropped the weight belt that he was holding on to the deck among his other kit.

  A painful jolt – like a small electric shock – fired into his back, making him wince. He smiled back at his friend. ‘Sorry. I got a bit disorientated down there for a while. It took me a while to get my head together and then I came back up. I’m fine.’

  He could not remember how he had got separated from his dive buddy. They had been swimming near an old wreck when something in the distance had caught his eye. He had swum towards it, thinking that it might be a part of the wreck that they had missed when they had explored it during the day.

  As he approached the shape he realized to his horror that it was—

  He hissed through his teeth as another balloon of pain burst inside him.

  ‘I need to go and lie down,’ he said to Max. ‘I’m feeling a bit strange right now and I really could do with just lying down in the quiet for a while.’

  He walked past his friend, who was now staring at him worriedly, and descended through the hatch into the galley below.

  There was a strange sensation in his stomach and he fought off the need to rush to the head and be sick. Instead he slumped down on to one of the seats, lying out along its length, and closed his eyes.

  The Necrotroph shut down all of the host’s body mechanisms that were not essential to keeping the human alive and plunged him into a deep unconsciousness that allowed the demon to do what was now necessary.

  Against all the odds, it had survived. It would need to contact its master, Caliban, to explain what had happened. He would be enraged that the demon had allowed itself to be discovered in the way that it had. Also, in its panic to survive, it had neglected to discover the secret that Martin Tipsbury had been harbouring. But it was confident that Caliban would give it another chance to get back into Lucien Charron’s organization again.

  It set about preparing the new host. It would not make the same mistakes that it had made with the last one. It would be thorough now, and bide its time until it could wreak its revenge on those that it had been sent to infiltrate.

  It would find a way back into the vampire Lucien Charron’s world and help its master to destroy it from the inside.

  Alexa performed the ritual that brought Lucien back to health. She ushered everyone else from the room and locked the door while she tried to rescue her father from the brink of death.

  It was difficult. She had never studied the ancient texts that described the ritual, and she wished more than once that Charles was there to go through it with her.

  After three hours she opened the door and trudged out into the apartment. Her body was covered with a film of sweat that stuck her clothes to her body and made her hair look lank and depressed.

  Tom and Trey sprang up from the settee and rushed over to her like two buoyant cocker spaniels welcoming their master home at the end of the day. She looked up into their expectant faces and gave them a minuscule shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘Now we wait,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if what I did was enough. We’ll have to wait and see.’

  Her knees gave way a little and she would have fallen if Tom had not grabbed her and helped her over to sit on the leather couch. He sat down next to her.

  ‘I know that you’ve done everything you can, Alexa. And I know that if effort counts for anything, Lucien is going to be …’ He looked at her – she was already asleep.

  Lucien woke just after nine that evening. Alexa was sitting in the chair by his bedside and it was the sound of her crying that brought Trey and Tom into the bedroom, to see Lucien sitting up against the pillows and smiling at his daughter, who was holding his hand and sobbing into the covers. His other hand stroked the back of her head.

  ‘Thomas.’ Lucien nodded at his friend before turning to look at Trey with his fiery eyes. ‘Trey … you were in my dreams. You and Alexa here kept me going.’

  Trey nodded. ‘I’m glad that you’re back with us again, Lucien. We missed you so very much.’

  Alexa looked up and turned to face them for the first time. Her red, tear-stained face broke into a smile, and Trey watched her knuckles turn white as she gripped her father’s hand.

  The following morning Trey, Alexa, Tom and Lucien went to see Charles. Lucien’s recovery had defied all expectations and he’d waved the doctors away when they had suggested that he stay in bed for a while yet.

  Charles lay in an oak coffin at the funeral home, and they stood around him, looking down at the young man who had done so much to ensure that there were four, not three, people there to mourn him.

  Trey looked across at his guardian and found it almost impossible to reconcile the sight of the tall, handsome creature here with him now with the pale and ancient-looking thing that had so recently lain in the hospital bed back at the apartment. The vampire’s golden eyes blazed once more, the mysterious light that seemed to dwell in those fascinating globes more vibrant than ever as he stared down at the lifeless figure in front of him. Trey watched as Lucien reached down to touch Charles’s cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I shall do everything in my power to repay you for what you did for me and to avenge your death. I will not forget you, Charles Henstall.’ Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving the remaining three people alone.

  ‘Goodbye, lad,’ Tom said, placing a single white rose on Charles’s chest.

  Trey and Alexa held hands and let the tears flow, each of them saying goodbye to their friend in their own way.

  It had been four days since they had buried Charles when Trey burst into Lucien’s office without knocking. The vampire looked up from his desk, and if he was annoyed at the rude interruption there was nothing in his expression to betray the fact.

  In one hand Trey held the framed photograph that Alexa had given him for his birthday, in the other the small book that the battle-angel had thrown down to him at Leroth.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ Trey said, brandishing the book in the vampire’s direction. ‘What am I saying? Of course you knew.’

  ‘Know about what?’ Lucien rep
lied, one eyebrow arching slightly. The vampire sat back in his chair, lacing his fingers before him. The light shone off his bald skull and his eyes never left those of his young ward, who stood before him, his chest rising and falling as he sought to contain his anger.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that I had an uncle?’

  Lucien glanced towards the items in the boy’s hands before returning to his face.

  ‘I think you should sit down.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down, Lucien. I want you to tell me why you didn’t let me know I have an uncle. Is this him?’ Trey brandished the photograph in the vampire’s direction. ‘This man with my mother and father. Is he my uncle?’

  Lucien stood up and slowly reached out, taking the frame out of the boy’s hand and studying the picture. He smiled, his eyes taking in the happy faces of the lakeside scene.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘My father,’ Trey said, trying to maintain eye contact with Lucien. ‘Moriel wanted me to have this.’ He threw the book on to the desk. ‘It’s my father’s journal. I had no idea what it was – what with the funeral and everything – today was the first time that I’ve had a chance to open it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’ Trey asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Trey waited, trying to keep a handle on the anger that boiled up inside him.

  Lucien took a deep breath, a frown creasing his forehead as he considered how to respond.

  ‘It wasn’t my intention to keep it from you forever. But I needed to make sure that you … understood certain things before doing so. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Who are the LG78?’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘They’re a pack of werewolves, aren’t they, Lucien? There are others like me out there, aren’t there?’

  ‘No, Trey. They are not like you. And neither is your uncle. You are unique.’

  Trey waited, hoping that Lucien would elaborate. When it was clear that the vampire was still not willing to talk he lost his patience.