Hybrid

by Wild Wolf Publishing

  “Garlic does not hurt us but holy water is as an acid to all our kind because we are of the eternally damned, as are you. Crosses can cause burns, though how severe they are depends on the power of the vampire - the more powerful we are, the less harm is done. I am not all powerful in the vampire world though it may seem so to you, but the vampire who made me thus was one of the most powerful of our kind and so I am more powerful than most.”

  “What powers do you have then, exactly?”

  “I can become a wolf or a bat if I wish and I can control the weather to a certain extent. I also have a certain telekinetic ability, but this is not rare among us. A few of the most powerful of our kind can even control the mind of any being, but this is a rare gift. Most of us can hypnotise our victims, however. The difference being, hypnosis only creates suggestion in the mind of our prey and can be broken by those powerful enough, while complete control cannot be resisted.”

  “So what defines your power? How is one vampire more powerful than another?”

  “It depends partly on the power of the one who made the vampire in question, and partly on the age of the vampire. Our powers increase with time, but some of the weaker ones will never be powerful enough to change form or even use hypnosis. Why this is I know not. Perhaps the story of how we came to be would offer some explanation but that is one story that seems long forgotten.”

  “So in a fair fight I’m guessing a vampire would beat me. In the tale of Lycaon you mentioned our kinds used to be at war before the Slayers forced us to ally against them. Are we still allies or do I need to be wary around some vampires?”

  "The struggle between our kinds lasted for centuries before men fought back and, out of all that bloodshed, the Slayers were born. We were forced to ally out of necessity but many vampires were never happy to fight alongside a race they mistrusted, and in many cases hated. Many have always been of the opinion that you are little more than beasts, thinking of us as better than your race. Some of us see you as allies and a few even equals, but the older vampires who still remember the battles long past nurture the most hatred for your race. You would be wise to be wary of us.”

  "So what about you, do you consider us as equals?" I asked.

  "You would not be here if I didn't," she replied with a predatory smile. “I may seem old to you, yet you are new to our world and in time you will no doubt find I am young compared with many other vampires. The war between our kinds was long before my time."

  “Is that it now?” Vince asked me. He’d been silent throughout the conversation. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “Only, I’m starving and I need to hunt.”

  “That’s it,” I said. Vince looked relieved. Lady Sarah showed no sign of emotion, or at least not outwardly, but I was sure I saw relief in her eyes too.

  Though the two vampires must have been fairly close friends, since Lady Sarah had gone to Vince’s aid and brought him back to the place she currently called home, the solitary hunters split up as they took their leave. That left me to wander the streets alone as well. I was restless and didn’t want to go back home straight away.

  The night dragged by, and in my boredom I was tempted to transform again, convincing myself I could beat the hunger. I’d go home and eat just enough meat from the fridge to keep it under control or maybe I’d find some roadkill to scavenge. I knew it wasn’t worth it though. From what Lady Sarah had said, the Slayers were constantly out looking for our kind, and for all I knew they could be watching me. As it was, I’d been lucky not to have any more encounters with them since my first full moon.

  I doubted they were following me that night as I was sure I’d hear them. But until I learnt to pick out different scents like the wolf did, they could hide behind a wall and spy on me, and I would never know they were there if they didn’t make a sound.

  The streets were practically empty, apart from a few homeless people I came across and drunks staggering home from the pubs. It occurred to me the Slayers might not even need to be hidden to watch me. They were just humans. They could be anyone. They could have been disguised as any one of the homeless people I passed and I’d never know. They could be the neighbours who bid me good day when we passed, or one of the doctors or nurses in the surgery, or part of the police force. Perhaps I was in even more danger than I’d realised before. The drunks were for real though. I might not have mastered my enhanced sense of smell yet, but I knew the scent of beer and when I passed them I could smell it on their breath, beer and vomit.

  I was growing paranoid as I walked aimlessly, feeling their eyes on me. I decided it would be safer to go home after all when Vince stepped out from the shadows in an alley. I hadn’t heard him coming and he startled me.

  He laughed. “Wow, I must be good to stalk a werewolf.”

  “You don’t make as much noise as a human, I didn’t hear you coming,” I said sulkily and carried on walking. He fell into step beside me.

  “Any excuse. You probably didn’t hear me over the sound of your own footsteps! You walk like a human, you gotta learn to move quieter. In fact if you were mortal I’d say your footsteps were heavy, even for a human. Your body isn’t as clumsy as a mortal’s anymore, learn to be lighter on your feet. Anyway, never mind sound, what about scent? I never met a werewolf who couldn’t smell a vampire.”

  “I’m still learning, okay?” I told him, slightly annoyed. “I might not be human anymore, but I still feel human. And scent is just confusing. It’s too powerful, I can’t understand it. I might be able to pick out the odd smell I recognise from my mortal life, or I might be able to work out what a certain scent is, but I can’t understand everything my nose is telling me. And I have no idea how wolves work out gender and age and all that shit from an animal’s scent, ’cause I sure as hell can’t do it.”

  “There’s still time to learn all that. The wolf can help you. You can learn a lot from him, and you need to if you’re gonna survive. I don’t mean to sound like Lady Sarah, all dark and dreary, but the Slayers are a real threat. I’ve seen too many of our kind die, all killed by the Demon Slayers,” he replied.

  “The wolf doesn’t trust me and I’m not sure I trust it, but I don’t wanna talk about that. Lady Sarah’s talked a lot tonight, but you haven’t said much. How did you become a vampire?” I asked him.

  “Well, I’m not much younger than Lady Sarah, just that I choose to live among mortals, so I wear clothes that would fit in with the era and use the latest slang words and stuff. I was born in a village not far from where she would soon be learning to be a princess, but I was just one of the many peasants and it would be decades before we met. There aren’t many years between us. It was on the eve of my twenty fifth birthday when the vampire came and changed my life forever. I’d spent my time up until then dreaming of being someone. I wasn’t satisfied with the simple life I led like most of the other peasants. I wanted to live in the castle we could see in the distance. Sometimes I would dream I was royalty, other times I would dream of being a knight. All that was to change when he came. He took my life and gave me eternity to roam the night, somewhere between living and dead. The same vampire who made Lady Sarah what she was, when he was passing through our village. I’ll never know why he made me this way. For Lady Sarah it was lust. Not love, no matter what she believes, otherwise he would have come back to her. But for me? I’ve been looking for an answer for years, and I don’t think I’ll ever know unless I find him again.

  “A vampire myself when I awoke, I found I couldn’t feed on those I had known for so long and so I moved away to another village. I spent a lot of my time on the move, never content to be in one place for too long. I never stayed anywhere for longer than a few nights, and everywhere I went I brought death and misery. I never had anything to fear except the sun and a few angry mobs, led by the superstitious. I think they blamed me for the deaths because I was the outsider, rather than because they knew what I was.

  “Then the Slayers became a real threat, becoming more organised and closer
to the present force we have to deal with. They hunted me from village to village. I should have died back then, if it hadn’t been for Lady Sarah. She happened to be in the same place as me, having just faked her own death, and she sensed my presence. We were made by the same vampire, descended from the same bloodline. She heard me crying out for help when the Slayers overpowered me. They had me pinned to the ground ready to drive a stake through my heart and then cut off my head to make sure I didn’t return. I knew I was finished if no one came to help so I called out to anyone or anything that might hear and take pity, and thanks to the blood we share she was drawn to me.

  “She killed a couple and the rest were frightened off. We went into hiding after that and we have been friends since, though we didn’t stay together for long. Most vampires prefer to live alone. Few have friends in the human sense of the word, though they may have allies. Now I live in the mortal world, renting apartments, going to nightclubs where I find my victims and lure them out. I go to the movies when I feel like it, that kinda thing. And I only sleep in graveyards when I have to. There aren’t many of our kind that choose this life now. Most prefer to live in graveyards like Lady Sarah, since it can be riskier living among mortals. Not to mention a lot of the older ones are stuck in the past. But it has to be said, graveyards are certainly one of the safest options these days. In a graveyard if someone finds your body in the day when you’re sleeping they don’t think much of it. In an apartment they get the police involved and you wake up in a strange place, then the Slayers find out about it. Sometimes you wake up to find you’re in the middle of an autopsy, and that hurts like hell. I got into some trouble again a few weeks ago and if Lady Sarah hadn’t come to bail me out once more, I would have died. I’m in her debt. It’s the blood that links us, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered coming at all. As for the one who made us, I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

  I nodded, unable to think of anything to say. “So what’s that around your neck? That symbol, what does it mean?”

  “This is the only valuable thing my family ever owned. Life was hard. Dad died when I was young and he passed this onto me. I wanted to sell it, hoped it might give us enough money to make things a little easier, but Mum wouldn’t hear of it. So I’ve worn it around my neck ever since in memory of my father. As for the symbol, I haven’t a clue what it is.”

  Silence fell between us as we walked the rest of the way home. He didn’t say anything about the werewolf’s tooth so I didn’t say anything either. We reached my house and I climbed back up to my room while he carried on down the street, presumably to the room he was staying in, if he’d found one yet. Or maybe Lady Sarah had persuaded him to sleep in the graveyard until the danger passed, since that was where I’d found him that night.

  When I lay down in bed I was more tired than I had thought and I soon drifted off to sleep. Mercifully for once the nightmares did not come, and I found peace through the remaining hours of the night.

  Chapter Ten

  Dark Revelations

  I was allowed some time before the next full moon to forget the Slayers and the world of the undead to which I now belonged. But I couldn’t escape their world forever and the curse was almost upon me again.

  I’d been grounded by my parents and suspended by Mrs Redgewell for a whole week after the fight (a week off school even if I was grounded, why did everybody think that was so bad?), though I considered myself lucky that was all I got. There was also the detention with Aughtie for skiving. I was worried if Jamie’s hand really was broken for good I’d be wanted for GBH in the eyes of the law, but it didn’t come to that. His hand had not been damaged as badly as I had thought. Most of the bones were broken but not to the point where they could no longer be mended. His manhood hadn’t been too badly damaged either, and his head would be okay, once they’d stitched it back together. The hand would take a long time to heal though. The thought filled me with a secret, dark pleasure.

  Once I was back at school I had other things on my mind. It was worse that month: the lupine half of my mind was affecting me more than ever in the days leading up to the night of the full moon. The only way I found to fight this was to spend more time with my mates and have a laugh. It made me feel more human, and it kept the wolf at bay.

  Amy seemed to get blonder by the day, but I was secretly grateful to her for giving me something else to think about. She was watching Eastenders with Mum, and before they started watching she read the description in the TV guide. It said something about two of the characters finally going out with each other, a man and a woman, but somehow she confused them with two brothers in the show.

  “Err, that means they’re gay,” she said.

  “No love, they’re brothers, so even if they were gay they wouldn’t be going out with each other,” Mum told her, rolling her eyes when Amy wasn’t looking. I think she despaired sometimes.

  “Err, what if they had a baby?”

  “What? How can two men have a baby?” I asked her, laughing. Mum had her head in her hands. I felt sure she would disown Amy eventually. She always maintained that her daughter wasn’t really that blonde, she just pretended to be because she liked the attention. I wasn’t convinced.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” she said sheepishly.

  “Forgot,” I repeated, disbelievingly. “Have you done sex education?”

  She glared at me and Mum told me to let it drop. I shook my head and went upstairs, still laughing.

  The next day I was telling my mates about it at break. We were sat at a table in one of the Science classrooms. Everyone who had been with me that fateful night at the cinema was there, and we were all laughing.

  “That’s nearly as bad as my brother’s blonde moment,” Lizzy said when I’d finished. “We were watching this thing on shark attacks and they interviewed this guy and Chris comes out with ‘If he’s got a wooden leg, is his foot still real?’”

  We were in stitches again. Then we fell quiet and I started doodling on a piece of paper.

  “So, have you decided what you’re gonna be famous for yet?” Becci asked me, just to make conversation.

  “Well it ain’t singing,” David laughed. “Have you ever heard him sing?”

  “Piss off, you’re no singer either. No, I dunno what it’ll be yet but someday everyone will know my name. And someday everyone will want this signature.”

  We all looked down at the scribble on the piece of paper. My writing was scruffy at the best of times. My signature was barely legible. I voiced the thought for all of us. “Okay, so it needs a bit of work, but someday this piece of paper will be worth summat I tell you.”

  “Yeah, to the homeless who need it for the fire,” David said. They burst out laughing. I had to laugh too, though I was convinced fame and fortune would be mine someday. It was like Vince had said about when he was mortal, I wanted to be someone. It wasn’t enough I was probably the last werewolf on the planet. I wanted to be someone in the human world. I wanted people to know my name; I wanted fans and I wanted to be worshipped like a god. And a bit of money would have been nice too, but it was the fame that held the attraction for me.

  “Well I might not be world famous but my dance tournament’s next week,” Fiona said excitedly. “I’ve been practising for weeks now, I can’t wait!”

  “You’ll get that gold trophy easily, the others won’t stand a chance,” David told her, his eyes glazing over dreamily. I had no doubt he was imagining her prancing around in a leotard, showing off her amazing body as she went through her routine.

  “Hey Nick, have you finished that English coursework yet?” Ava asked me.

  “Yeah, I did it last night,” I lied. I had been good at getting homework done on time once, when I’d usually complete it the same day it had been set. But I’d grown lazy over the previous year and started leaving it till the night before it was due in. That year I had other things on my mind and my grades were dropping, not that I really cared about school by that point. I was a werewol
f, what did I need with good grades? I didn’t need a job to survive, even though I’d probably end up doing something just to keep my conscience clean. I couldn’t deny the attraction to a life of crime though. With my powers I would make a great thief. Or I could live as an animal, but I decided I’d rather have a job. I thought back to killing the rabbit. Despite what I’d thought at the time, afterwards I had to admit it was pretty cool being a wolf, but I didn’t want to spend eternity in that form. I wanted the best of both worlds, preferably without the flesh that was needed to support the wolf’s form.

  I don’t think Ava believed me. “Just make sure you get it in on time, you don’t want Miss Aughtie on your case again.”

  “Who are you, my fucking mother?” I snarled. She looked hurt and fell silent. I had the feeling she was worried about her own skin as much as mine, since Aughtie had a habit of taking it out on the whole class, not just the student who dared disobey her. So I didn’t feel bad at what had just happened. Everyone else was looking at me in shock. I never used to be like that.

  They all left after that except Lizzy, most of them going to different classrooms, Fiona and David going to their seats. We actually had two teachers for Science: one was Brewins, the other was Mr Enderson, and he was far more capable as a teacher. He was much stricter and made us sit alphabetically. I was stuck next to a guy called Adam. There was something about him that meant I didn’t like him much, something a little strange about him, though admittedly he probably said the same about me to his mates.

  I turned to Lizzy and said “Why does no one believe me when it comes to coursework?”