by Juliet Boyd
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Dear Reader
About the Author
Acknowledgements
METALLY FATIGUED
The Hunter Vampire Chronicles
Part 1
JULIET BOYD
Copyright © 2017 Juliet Boyd
All rights reserved.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and situations portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any reference to an actual event, product or location is used in an entirely fictitious manner.
Discover my other work now at
www.julietboyd.com
For Sandy.
You liked vampires, right?
Chapter 1
The words rang loud in Flynn’s ears from more than a mile away.
“Her eyes changed. Went black. She grew fangs. It was like something out of a nightmare. A horror movie. He was just lying there … dead. When she saw me, she ran. I’m not mad, am I? Tell me I’m not mad. I did see her. I did.”
Flynn shuddered. She still wasn’t used to being something people would run away from, screaming like banshees. Not that she’d heard a banshee scream, yet. She was sure she had that to look forward to on some future hunt. It seemed as if every animal ever squeezed from the mind of a man, put down on paper, immortalised in film, was real.
For her own sanity, she shut off her mind. She didn’t need to hear any more. In a way, it was a good thing. As soon as the police officer heard those words, she was certain he wouldn’t be looking any further for a suspect. Poor man. He would probably be the one accused. That made her feel guilty, but not as much as it should have. Not that she was the real suspect. Why did they always think that? That the creature with the fangs was the one out to do damage?
Well, she was out to do damage, but not to them. She was trying to save them.
If she hadn’t failed, the perception might’ve been different. Trouble was, the wraith demon she’d been trying to subdue had, after literally sucking the life out of its victim, disappeared in a puff of smoke right before her eyes. That was no exaggeration. She’d had her hands clasped around its wrists. Vampire tight, as in so tight that no normal being would’ve been able to escape, or even move, and many supernaturals wouldn’t have been able to extricate themselves, either. She hadn’t counted shape-changing abilities on an epic scale. She should’ve known. Things were so different for her now. In mind. In body. She needed to readjust. If only her body would comply.
If she’d realised what was happening, she would’ve cast her own spell. A bubble spell, that trapped you like a Zorb ball, but not quite so much fun, and no door. Even smoke couldn’t get through one of those, if she set it right.
Her brain had changed too much with the transformation. Her thoughts, which used to be filled with spells and magical ways to go about things, was now overwhelmed by the desire to use strength, menace and a little bit of mind control, to solve every problem. It wasn’t working. So not working.
She stopped running and leaned back against a stone wall — a boundary to one of the millionaire properties in the area. Her breath came in heaves, even though they were no longer necessary. It was difficult to stop breathing. So difficult. And so blindingly obvious that you weren’t normal if you did.
She needed to think. To clear her mind. If she were this creature, what would she do? If she could shape-shift into anything, what would she become?
It came to her like a giant wave of ‘how stupid can you be?’
She sped back to the scene. She only hoped she was quick enough to save the man.
###
The car sputtered to an unceremonious halt. Rag thumped the steering wheel with a little too much strength and got a mouthful of a large, white balloon, which attempted to squish him back against the seat. He fought it without thinking, like one of his supernatural enemies, with his fangs. It didn’t make any great popping sound, like a children’s balloon might, just slowly fizzled down to nothing. He suspected that would’ve happened anyway, but when you had vampiric speed and senses, you tended to be ahead of the game.
It didn’t alter the fact that the car had ceased to work, and that he was now going to have to try to find out what was wrong with it, with absolutely no knowledge of how it worked. Of course, the others were all going to think it was his driving that was the root of the problem. Which it wasn’t. Not this time. He’d been particularly careful not to damage the car. He’d even driven slowly. Well, at the speed limit, which was so slow. He’d have been quicker taking a bit of a jog.
Ellie had forbidden him to drive like a maniac, when that was the only joy he could find in it at all. He hadn’t ground the gears more than … twice? He’d even avoided revving the engine at traffic lights. He hated having to use a car, but as Ellie had added to her maniac speech, ‘We need to act like normal humans as much as possible, and that means travelling in a car when we’re going long distances. Humans don’t walk that much anymore. They even take their cars around the corner to the local shop to buy a pint of milk. Unless we’re in danger, we drive.’
Unless we’re in danger, he mouthed, his face screwed up with sufficient sarcasm to crush the cockiest person.
He hated when she was right.
It didn’t alter the fact that the car had stopped and he didn’t have a clue how to stop it being stopped. Turning the ignition key a million times didn’t work — it just caused sputtering sounds as if the car had a bad cold — and there was no way he was lifting the bonnet just to stare at moving parts when he had no idea what they did. Okay, he did know that most of the moving parts were hidden, but he had this cartoon image in his head of cogs and pistons and … all sorts of slick mechanical gubbins going on beneath that. The car was hardly slick. It was no sporty number. It was so old it could’ve done with a walking stick, or even a Zimmer frame.
There was nothing else for it. He was going to have to use his strength to move the damned thing, and if anyone saw him, he would have to make them forget.
###
Ellie lifted up a pair of plain, black cycling shorts and stretched the waistband out, as if that was going to make the thought of wearing them any more attractive to him. Bones crossed his arms. “You can’t seriously be expecting me to put those on.”
Ellie raised an eyebrow. “Have you got any better ideas?”
He huffed the words out before he could stop it. “But they’re … they’re so ….”
How did you describe just how much you hated clingy, black Lycra that would show off everything you normally kept well under wraps?
Ellie sighed so loud in return that one of the shop assistants turned toward them, a smirk plastered across his face. He probably thought they were mother and son — one of those sons who never left the nest.
“I’m not suggesting you wear them on top like some kind of superhero, but at least you’ll be decent when you change.”
He was surprised she hadn’t lowered her voice when she said that, although the words alone didn’t mean much, if you didn’t know. He took the shorts from her and did the same as she had, except he stretched them a lot further, pushing his hands deep inside them. It must’v
e looked really odd to anyone watching. The shop assistant, for example. He tried to imagine just how this would work. He wanted to get down on all fours and … what? Pretend to be a dog? That wouldn’t raise any eyebrows at all.
“You’re suggesting I wear them as underwear?”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
He imagined walking into a public toilet and having to pull them down. He’d always have to use the cubicles. He’d always … realistically, how many times did he go to public toilets? About the same number of times he’d changed in the past three months, since they’d left Midbury with the list. Once.
It begged the question, were the shorts really worth the effort? And then he remembered when the spell had been broken and … well, running into a house and stealing clothes from dead people.
“If we’re going to take this task seriously, and I’m pretty sure we need to,” Ellie did lower her voice this time, “changing is going to be a little more regular. You can’t go running around the streets naked just because the transformation shredded your clothes. You need flexible. You need decent. “
He held up a hand to halt her. She was right. As always. There was no point in disagreeing. “How many pairs?”
“At least one for each day of the week.”
“Got any cash?”
Ellie lowered her gaze, then shook her head.
He did a three-sixty of the shop. “We’ll need to wait. I really don’t want to have to compel dozens of people to forget I was stealing these.”
Chapter 2
Rag pushed the car into the old barn with one final grunt. Luckily, the quiet country roads had provided little in the way of observers: two nosey sheep; one disgruntled-looking goat; and a bird. No idea what it was. Twittery stuff was near the bottom of his list of interesting subjects. Having to push at a vaguely human speed, for what he knew to be two-plus miles, because the signs told him so, had bored him to tears. Three hours. It had given him too much time to think about how everything in their lives had changed recently. How many of their friends had died during the events of the Midbury apocalypse. That was how he thought of it. Complete devastation. Hundreds killed. The dawning of another cover-up by the authorities, because they couldn’t explain what had happened in any sensible human terms. It was also how they’d come to be doing this stupid task. Seriously, recapturing every creature they’d inadvertently freed was going to take a lot of human lifetimes to achieve. The amount of crossings off was severely lacking. The amount of sightings, that was much greater, but there was a limit to how many times you could drop everything for a chase. Even vampires weren’t always out on the prowl. They had other needs. Trouble was, they hadn’t managed to organise themselves properly yet. Hardly surprising, even with Ellie’s in-built analytical and categorising brain. The apocalypse wasn’t the only thing that’d happened over Christmas. Two recently turned vampires, one with witchity powers as well. Bones only just returned to his normal form, but still going all dog when danger jumped out at them. Oh, yes, and one of the recently turned believing she was still human. That, at least, had been resolved. By comparison, he was relatively normal, just being a vampire of many years. Oh, how he still hated that word.
Diverse, and yet the same. That was what they were.
Flynn was waiting when he arrived, a satisfied smirk on her face. He straightened up, stretched out the crick in his neck, and bared his fangs. He wasn’t feeling very friendly. Tall, dark, handsome and broody was what he was going for. “You couldn’t have helped?”
“Seriously? If you need help pushing a car, there’s something wrong with you.”
Not the kind of reply to endear someone to you.
Flynn had changed so much. The innocence had gone. The gingerbread eyes hadn’t, although they’d taken on a more sinister tinge recently. “I wish you were still the little girl who—”
“Who what? Was trapped in a cave? Nice.”
He flashed his fangs again. “No. Who hadn’t suddenly got older with a mouth to match.”
She was in his face in less than a blink. Well, the top of her head was. She wasn’t tall enough to glare at him directly in the eyes. He almost giggled. “I didn’t choose what happened.”
“Not strictly true. You chose to drink.”
“I chose to live. I chose to save Midbury.” She took a step back, flicked her wrist at her distinctly-more-adult body. It had been a good age at which to freeze her existence. The thought of an eighty-year-old vampire made him snigger internally. “This was all collateral.”
She chose. Tick. But to save Midbury? Hardly. Save half of Midbury, maybe. He let it pass. He knew it. She knew it. One day she would’ve succumbed. It was inevitable. The blood connection had always been inside her.
She put her hand on the metal. “So, what happened to this old junk heap we laughingly call a car?”
“It died about two miles back.”
“Died, how?
“Put its hand to its throat as it choked and fell to the ground. How do you think it died? It stopped working. It wouldn’t start again. I’m not a mechanic.”
“And neither am I.”
She thumped her hand on the bonnet, excessively hard. A strange squealing sound replied.
###
When Bones and Ellie walked through the door of the barn, they were faced with the strangest sight — one that Ellie had never seen before and had never expected to, ever. Rag was beneath a car, seemingly trying to do something mechanical, while Flynn knelt on the floor beside him, almost ear to the ground. Their voices did not sound amused.
The car was propped up, rather precariously, on four sets of hay bales, which she supposed were strong enough, they were packed so tight, and Rag was doing who knew what with the undercarriage, so engrossed that neither of them noticed her and Bones entering. Not good.
Ellie cleared her throat as loudly as she could. Flynn span around, then relaxed. She stood up, brushed herself down and shrugged. Some of her actions still reminiscent of a teenager.
Bones stepped past Flynn and crouched down next to Rag. “Can someone tell us what’s going on?”
“I’m mechanic-ing,” Rag shouted, his words echoing a little beneath the car.
“That’s not a word.”
“It is now.”
Flynn butted in. “The car conked out. We heard a noise inside it. It didn’t sound like a car noise.”
Ellie’s senses ramped up a notch. “What did it sound like?”
“Like a pained voice. Sort of.”
“A pained voice? Inside the car?”
“Yes,” she and Rag answered simultaneously.
“Well, not inside inside, as in where you normally sit. In the workings,” Flynn added.
That was odd. If a car was ‘conked out’, it didn’t usually make noises. “And have you heard it since?”
“No,” Rag growled out.
Bones stood up and glanced at Ellie, Rag right behind him, dirt smeared across his cheek. “We might be better just trying the normal route, you know, repairing it. Cars make all sorts of strange noises when there’s something wrong. Have you even opened the bonnet?”
“Yes, I opened it,” Rag said.
“And did you do anything?”
“I looked at it.” Rag fake smiled.
“Come on, let’s get it down on the ground and I’ll take a look.”
“As far as I can remember, the last time you looked at the inside of a car was in the eighties.”
“Yes, I know. But it can’t be that different.”
Ellie tentatively held up her hand, like a schoolgirl. “I think you’ll find it is. Everything’s all … well, codes and stuff, and sealed. Even that one. Been like that for years. I don’t think—”
The car crunched down onto the ground again as four bales were kicked out of the way. Well, if it wasn’t broken before, it probably was now.
Bones lifted the bonnet and stared. He put his hand in and touched something. He turned to her. “Ho
w can it change so much?”
“That’s technology for you,” Flynn said. “Imagine being me. All this is still science fiction to my mind.” She pulled out her mobile and began to tap away.
Ellie winced. She didn’t remember seeing that phone before. It looked brand new. They’d been doing far too much mind control in order to get what they needed. She kept telling herself it was for the good of humankind, but she knew that wasn’t what Flynn was using her social media accounts for. Trying to locate Rufus and Kaleb wasn’t a bad thing to be doing, but it was a distraction.
“We should just buy another one,” Rag said.
“We only just got this one. One trip with you and it’s dead.” Bones scratched his head. “Where did you take it?”
“Only to the farm-outlet shop, that one just on the outskirts of town. There were only normal people there. I was getting supplies. You know, demon-catching stuff. Couple of kilos of salt and some very strong rope. Some decent snacks. For us, not the demons. Don’t want them thinking they’re welcome. Oh, and I got some wine. They were selling it really cheaply.” He winked. “It’s all in the boot.”
Ellie popped the boot. “Oh,” she said, and picked up the remains of a jumbo-sized packet of chocolate buttons that had a rather large hole in the side. Beneath where the packet had been was a rather large hole in the car, too.
“This noise?” she said, “Exactly what did it sound like?”
Chapter 3
While Bones carefully started to unscrew every piece of the car he could get a screwdriver to and laid it out on the ground, Rag helping him in suitably disgruntled-child mode, she and Ellie scanned the list of creatures they were supposed to be trying to catch. It was a monotonous task, and after a while, your eyes went screwy and started glossing over the details. It seemed likely to Flynn that they’d just picked up something by mistake, something completely innocuous. A mouse, or a rat, that had decided to make the car its home. Most of the demonic creatures they were searching for wouldn’t be running around large store car parks, in full daylight, or hiding in car engines. Each one they found that was vaguely possible, they checked out online — the Internet of impossible things was thriving — but really, they had no idea what they were looking for. They needed more facts for a proper search.
