Hybrid

by Wild Wolf Publishing

  Dad was in his favourite chair watching the news about football, when the noise of the kettle boiling rose above the TV and he commanded me to turn it off.

  “So football’s more important than your own family?” I snarled, the anger flaring up inside. The next thing I knew, he was stood before me, hands wrapped around my throat, his own anger taking control of him.

  “You ungrateful sod,” he said. “I’ll knock your head off!”

  I yelled at the top of my voice, in shock more than anything. I knew it would come down to a fight eventually but I hadn’t expected him to go so far and it had caught me off guard.

  “John!” Mum had come running through from the lounge. She didn’t hesitate before she reacted. She ran over to us and pulled us apart. I stood glaring at him while Mum fought to keep him from hurting me, and the bastard kept shouting over and over again “I’ll have you son! I’ll have you!”

  “Nick, go to your room,” Mum said.

  “I don’t need your help Mum, I can handle this,” I argued.

  “Just go Nick.”

  I swore loudly but did as I was told. Mum didn’t bother to tell me off; she was too busy telling Dad to calm down. I could hear everything from my room and my hatred for him grew every time I heard his voice.

  "The bastard! I'll kill him!" I growled under my breath. "I swear I'll kill him!"

  The anger was free at last.

  "I'll kill him!" I roared to the empty room.

  Then I turned and, with my palms facing upwards, watched my fingers curl into claws. I looked up at my reflection in the window. If anybody else had seen me then, I was a fearsome sight. Anger blazed in my murderous, amber eyes, face twisted in a bestial snarl. It was not a human facial expression. My canines had lengthened and I had barely noticed, both top and bottom, until they were unmistakeably lupine. With another roar I turned and slashed the wall, the claws biting into it as if it were as soft as flesh and causing five long, deep gashes. Man, that felt good. I could feel the wolf beside me and I didn’t fight it, though I didn’t let it take over either. Just knowing I had all that strength and power at my command made me feel better. The knowledge that I could literally rip him apart limb from limb was enough, at least for that night. I wanted blood, but I could wait for it. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, fists clenched by my sides, trying to calm myself. When I raised my head and opened them again, human eyes stared back at me out of the human face in the window, though they were bloodshot, and some of the anger still lurked behind them. Later. I would call on that anger later, and then we would have blood.

  Shadows danced across the ceiling, shapeless things called into life by a combination of the moonlight, streetlamps, and car headlights filtering through the curtains. Somewhere below raised voices argued about their marriage. Footsteps sounded on the landing where Amy crouched, straining to hear everything that was said with her weak human senses. Images lurked just behind my eyeballs, nightmares waiting to ensnare me. I would face them when I was ready. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, and yet they would not leave me alone.

  Restless, I rose from the bed and went to join Amy, though I could hear every word from my room. We sat in silence while the argument raged below. Mum questioned Dad about what had happened with me in the kitchen, asking him what it was really about. He couldn’t answer her. I was willing to bet he couldn’t even meet her eyes. She told him he needed help. At the very least he needed some coaching in anger management. He agreed, but his voice sounded hollow, as if his heart wasn’t really in it. Did he regret what had happened? I wasn’t sure. Then Mum asked him why he was in a mood all the time. He made some poor excuses about how they never did anything together as a couple and they lived completely separate lives, but what he was really saying was that he’d grown bored. Amy turned to me, a look of horror on her face.

  “Nick, they’re talking about divorce!” she whispered fearfully. Of the three of us, I think Amy would have suffered most if the family broke apart. I’d been hoping it would happen for years, feeling certain we’d have been better off without him. Not that I really believed they would ever separate. They’d talked about it before and in the end always made up. It was part of the cycle Dad put us all through. But Amy believed, and beside the fear there was a pleading look, as if I could say something and make it all better.

  The anger growled hungrily, and I felt a fresh wave of hatred towards the bastard for putting Mum and Amy through that. All it needed was a spark now and the rage would drive out the monster in me.

  I didn’t want to lose control at home where Mum and Amy might get hurt. I needed something else to direct it to, someone else. Someone outside the family I could kill and feel no remorse for, someone who would feed the anger before it controlled me. And then I remembered the Slayers. I could shed their blood. They were nameless, faceless people to me back then, and they were the enemy. And in a way, they had made me what I am. For if they hadn’t hunted us to near extinction they would not have driven the werewolf to share his curse and I would most likely still be human. I may have got through a mortal life without ever being bitten and eventually died a natural death. The Slayers had taken everything from me.

  Amy was still looking at me, still waiting for an answer. I turned away. Mum and Dad’s marriage was not my problem anymore. None of it was. We were at war, and I had found a reason to fight.

  Lady Sarah sat on a coffin singing to herself, her voice high and unnatural, but more beautiful than any human voice I’d ever heard before. I wondered what the vampires did in their spare time. It was easy to imagine Vince enjoying human activities, but somehow I didn’t think Lady Sarah had much to do with the human world. She had to do something other than hunt, otherwise how could she bear to go on through eternity?

  “Hey,” I said. “You sing better than me. Didn’t recognise the song though.”

  She smiled. “It is something I wrote centuries ago for the vampire who made me. I have only seen him once since that night, and our time together was brief, though it was enough to know I love him. I will find him again someday, when the war is over and the world is safer for our kind. Until then I could not find him even if I wanted to. It is easier for those with more power to hide from the world. He may even be living in the human world as Vincent chooses to. For him it will be easier to go unnoticed. Vincent has much to learn, even after all the centuries he has seen. Time has yet to bring him wisdom. But you did not come here to talk about my singing, nor my love life.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I agreed. “For the past few months I have been fighting the wolf, but I’m losing and I want blood. You told me we are at war, and I am finally ready to fight.”

  I was vaguely aware I was already beginning to talk like the vampire, that I was losing my humanity even quicker than I’d first thought.

  “You should not seek to fight. The war will find you eventually and once it does you can never again have the life you have known. Are you willing to give that up so soon? I would encourage you to embrace your other half as I have said before, and do not fight the urge to kill, but you do not have to go to war for that. The longer you avoid the Slayers the longer you can live among humans,” she said. “I know how much that means to you, even if it does not seem like it sometimes.”

  “I’ve already crossed the line. I can’t live as a human anymore. And what if it’s too late for that? What if the war has already found me? They tracked me down on the first night I changed. I’ve seen into the wolf’s mind. They would have killed me if you hadn’t killed them first. Why haven’t they come back to finish me off? Why haven’t they hunted you down in revenge? Something is not right. They may not know who I am, but they know my wolf form. I should be dead by now. It doesn’t make any sense now I think about it. After all the bodies started turning up they knew it was a werewolf so they should have tracked me down. I even saw one of them take in a guy who witnessed me as a half man half wolf. They know I exist.”

  Lady Sarah was silent for a mom
ent before answering. “I cannot give you an answer to that. I do not know why they have not attacked again, unless they are hoping to learn your human identity so they may kill you in human form when you are less dangerous and unprepared. I just do not know.”

  I didn’t like her answer. The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. The Slayers were up to something. But I had other questions. I was curious about Lady Sarah. She had been alive for centuries, longer than I could even begin to imagine! “So what role have you played in this war? Do you remember the last battle when there was an army to fight for us, before they began to pick us off one by one?”

  “I fought in that battle. I have fought them many times, when I’ve had to. Often times for survival, and also for revenge on occasion. And other times purely for the love of killing and feasting on their blood. They have not given us any choice. If it weren’t for them we would be far more numerous, and the human population would not have increased so drastically over the last century. Though if it weren’t for them perhaps the war between my kind and yours would still rage on, keeping our numbers in check as well.

  “I have had many reasons to fight the Slayers, but they are too numerous and we are too few to fight the battles of times long past, so the war is reduced to small skirmishes whenever we cross paths. With today’s technology only the most powerful stand a chance, and even then they would rather hide than risk death,” she told me. I liked this answer even less. The odds didn’t look good. “Your race is nearly extinct. They wiped out zombies. We are but a shadow of what we once were. Every undead race has suffered at the hands of the Slayers.”

  “Tell me about zombies.”

  She shook her head. “Not now. I have to feed. And Vincent is out there somewhere. I need to watch him. If he grows careless again he not only endangers himself, but every other vampire nearby. Somebody has to look out for him, for our own sakes as much as his.”

  I knew better than to argue. I went straight back home and lay in bed, thinking about what she had said. We were both right in a way. The war had found me the first night I became a werewolf, but in some ways it had yet to find me. The fighting had not truly found me yet. Lady Sarah had made it her fight when the Slayers first attacked me, and since then they had not so much as threatened me. But surely that could not last. The day had to be coming when they would make their next move. And then, for me at least, the war would really begin.

  Over the next week whenever the anger possessed me I went out and killed. The third time I found that I liked it.

  Dad drove me into another rage that night, and the desire to kill took over me once more. I hadn’t been letting it drain away since I had last spoken with Lady Sarah. No, I took to the streets and let the anger feed my bestial nature. I let it burn inside and mix with the wolf’s unnatural hunger and my newfound thirst for blood.

  There was a man stood waiting at a bus stop. He lit a cigarette as I approached him, briefly illuminating his face. The anger flared up. In the darkness, he even looked a little like the bastard, with a bit of imagination. I smiled, and it wasn’t friendly. The first two times I had strangled my victims and felt nothing, except for the feeling of the anger retreating, satiated, waiting to be called upon again like the wolf in some ways, and very different from it in others. This time it was different. The wolf had had no part in it before, but as the full moon drew nearer, the wolf grew restless, and it hungered.

  The man glared at me with hostile eyes, though he didn’t know anything was amiss, unable to see well in the darkness. Once my eyes turned wolfish, the night became almost as clear as day and it took a greater effort of imagination on my part to see my father stood before me. I willed myself to believe it was Dad glaring at me in the darkness, and it fuelled the anger, the wolf rising with it. But I didn’t grant my lupine side control.

  I let my canines lengthen. At first they could have been mistaken for a vampire’s if it wasn’t for the ones on my lower jaw, until they took on the unmistakeable shape of a wolf’s fangs. My nails became claws, though that was as far as I let the change go. Then without warning, before the guy knew what was happening, I knocked him to the floor and fell on him like the animal I was. He screamed as fangs pierced the flesh of his neck, burying themselves deep, until with a backwards thrust of my head and a spray of blood they came free, taking the flesh with them. His throat torn out, he made gurgling noises, trying in vein to breathe through his torn windpipe. I had taken out enough flesh that you could see a section of his spine at the back of the wound, before blood filled the place of the muscle and cartilage, and the extent of the damage was no longer visible.

  I had finally freed the monster that lurks in all of us, the darkness at the heart of mankind. Not the wolf. This monster was different to the wolf. It enjoyed killing in a different way to the canine within me.

  No creature on Earth other than man could ever know of this monster. It likes to kill, enjoys it above all else. It lives on death and destruction, not flesh and blood. The wolf had always killed to feed and to survive. The monster killed for the hell of it. I killed for the hell of it. I had become the monster. I had fallen into the void made of our own evil, lost in the darkness, fallen for all eternity into a place that had never known the light.

  The wolf didn’t like it. I was wasting life, the thing that is most precious to the universe. It didn’t like watching things die for no reason, and part of it had no desire to even share a body with the human in us, while the other part fought to change and feast on the flesh, the smell of the blood like a drug. It wouldn’t be long before I would welcome the change, but the desire to kill had been satisfied for one night. I licked the blood off my teeth, enjoying the taste. Crimson spots dotted my body and my shirt, congealing to a darker red, almost black. I didn’t care. I’d wash them away later, not because they horrified me anymore but to hide the evidence. I couldn’t let the police or the Slayers find me like that, after all.

  I licked off what I could and walked away, leaving the man dying in the road. Minutes later his bus came. A crunch and a splatter of blood meant the driver hadn’t seen him in time to stop. He was dead anyway, and now there was nothing to tie the body to me. I glanced back to see it flattened against the road. It was just another roadkill now, only this one was bigger than the others and there was no fur or feathers, just a mess of blood and flesh. His face had been pressed into the pavement. They’d need DNA or something to ID him. And then I was gone, leaving humans to clean up my mess.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Prom Date with Death

  While the death toll continued to rise, the time had also come to sit my exams. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. I didn’t belong there, and yet there I was. I didn’t need them marking by examiners to know I hadn’t done well in any of my subjects. I hadn’t bothered to revise, and my mind had not been on my work all year. I only remembered scraps of the knowledge our teachers had tried to impress upon us, maybe enough to scrape passes, but probably not. I would have said I did worst in the year, if it wasn’t for the guy across the room who fell asleep in his Geography exam before he could answer a single question. It was good to know I wouldn’t have the lowest marks in the school (at least not in that subject), even if it didn’t matter anymore. I don’t know why I cared; it just meant something to that last part of my old self that had enjoyed the leaving assembly.

  We put our pens down and closed our exam papers for the final time and left the school for good. Some people worried about their results, others didn’t. Talk turned to the prom at the end of July, only a week away. People asked me if I was going. It would be a full moon that night, so I couldn’t go even if I wanted to. It wasn’t my thing anyway; I couldn’t dance for a start and I had no girl to take with me. I didn’t know why they were so surprised when I said I wasn’t going. I doubted they’d miss me. But no matter how disappointed any of them might be, there was nothing I could do to change the timing: there was no way I could go and that was final.

/>   The night of the prom I left the house long before nightfall and found somewhere safe to transform, plus a hiding place for my clothes until I was ready to retrieve them at dawn. Since I’d decided I wanted to be part of the war, I’d been doing some thinking. Every time I changed in my room, there was a chance someone could see. And whether any potential witnesses were one of the Slayers or not, it wouldn’t be long before the Slayers found out, one way or another. My curtains weren’t great at blocking out the light, and you could probably see my dark shape through them. And even if I couldn’t be seen through the curtains, someone was bound to see me leaping through the window in wolf form eventually. I was lucky I hadn’t been seen already. So that night I left before the change could take hold, telling my parents I was sleeping over at a friend’s.

  I had enough time to reach the woods near where I’d killed Fiona before night fell and the full moon rose. I didn’t fight it anymore. I hadn’t done since April. In fact, now the monster had awoken and the anger had taken over, I embraced it.

  There were no humans in the woods and I had no desire to hunt animals. The anger that lived in the human part of me wanted to taste human flesh, and it had grown stronger than the instinct to feed. Even if that meant suffering the hunger for the best part of the night, only human prey would satisfy. That left me with two choices: either head back to the town and hunt there, or go through the woods. I knew there were houses on the other side, and a bigger building, some sort of hotel. They were playing loud music there; I could hear it from where I stood – the prom.

  Since the anger took hold, the human had allowed me closer to the surface than before, and I had been listening to its friends. A large gathering of human youths would present the perfect feeding ground, even if I didn’t understand why it was so important to them. I don’t think the human part of me did either. I could feel its confusion over why girls went to such great lengths for one night, why they had to have the best dress and why it had to be different to everyone else’s, and so ridiculously expensive. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hunger, the need to kill, both physically and mentally, and the desire for warm flesh between my jaws. I was going to the prom after all. And if only they knew, I could have won the award for the best entrance.