by Stead, Nick
Copyright
A TWISTED FATE PUBLISHING BOOK
First Published in 2017 by Wild Wolf Publishing
Revised edition published 2020 by Twisted Fate Publishing
Copyright © 2017 Nick Stead
Copyright © 2020 Nick Stead
The right of Nick Stead to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and scenarios are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Second print
Twisted Fate Publishing Ltd
115A Armitage Road
Milnsbridge
Huddersfield
HD3 4JR
United Kingdom
www.twistedfatepublishing.com
Dedications
Once again, for my family for all their support, especially Mum, Amanda, Auntie Debbie and my cousins ‘Lady’ Sarah and Selina.
And for my friends, with special thanks to my beta readers Hannah, Clare, Charlie, Tom (aka White) and Mark (aka Pige) for giving more great feedback to make the finished version of Vengeance as strong as possible. Special thanks also goes to Steve and Nikki for all the encouragement and the awesome fangs to give me a more fearsome snarl at conventions.
And for my fellow writers and friends at Huddersfield Author’s Circle and Write Club whose feedback and support remains invaluable. I really feel I’ve come a long way as a writer since joining the group. Special mention goes to Owen for once again doing some intensive beta reading on this revised edition!
I would also like to thank my awesome fans who’ve helped to keep me motivated and pushing myself to keep writing. Without you guys I’d probably still be stuck around the halfway mark! So a really big thanks to all those who helped keep the hype for this next book alive.
And finally, thanks again to the other two founding fathers at Twisted Fate Publishing, Chris for making all this a reality and Gareth for more hard work on the cover design and all the late night formatting to hit our deadlines!
Nick
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Fear and Confusion
CHAPTER TWO
Passage of Torment
CHAPTER THREE
Blood Debt
CHAPTER FOUR
Sacrifice
CHAPTER FIVE
A Glimpse of Hell
CHAPTER SIX
Poisoned Offerings
CHAPTER SEVEN
Return to the Modern World
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unseen Threat
CHAPTER NINE
Death’s Angels
CHAPTER TEN
Ghosts of the Past
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Death Takes Her
CHAPTER TWELVE
Battle of Tooth and Claw
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ocean’s Wrath
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
How Much Does She Really Mean to You
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shadow Guide
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rebirth
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dark Truths
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Between Life and Death
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fight for Life
CHAPTER TWENTY
Family Reunion
CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE
Irresistible Bait
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
Danger Below
CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE
Death to the Wolf
CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR
Mortal Danger
CHAPTER TWENTY–FIVE
Terror Made Flesh
CHAPTER TWENTY–SIX
Endgame
CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN
Predatory Pact
CHAPTER TWENTY–EIGHT
Keeping Promises of Blood
CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE
Vengeance
CHAPTER THIRTY
New Hope
CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE
Hell’s Servant
EPILOGUE
Dear Readers
DAMNED (Sample)
About the Author
Also By Twisted Fate Publishing
THE CROWMAN (Sample)
PROLOGUE
Whispers on the wind. It comes as a reminder you are still here, even in death; you, my tether to humanity. I stir from a light slumber and open my eyes to more cave walls, similar to where we began our tale. It’s been another long night of running and fighting. I successfully evaded my enemies again, but for how long?
A shiver runs through me in the cool morning air, my body returned to the form of a man. I stand and stretch, venturing out into what little warmth the late autumn sun has to offer. But there is a darkness even the sun can’t vanquish; a blackness untouched by the early morning light on my skin. It holds as strong as ever.
I glance back at the remains of the latest life I fed to it. Her earthly self is reduced to little more than bloody bones now, her flesh consumed by the hunger for meat and her blood spilled by the hunger for death. There is nothing but a broken skeleton, looking sad and forlorn in the otherwise bare cave.
Disgust might have filled you when I first sank my fangs into that human flesh, biting off chunks to satisfy the ache in my belly before she’d even been granted the release of death. Queasiness might have taken hold at the sight of me ripping limbs and dragging the guts from her torso. You might have felt squeamish about seeing me feed, if you still had a stomach for me to turn.
The price of my story was high. You have already paid for it with your life, and yet there is still so much for me to tell. That story now binds us, and so I suppose I must carry on with the telling, now that I have found a new place to shelter and we have lost my enemies again for the time being. No doubt you have plenty of questions by this point, but I beg your patience. There is much still to recount before we catch up with the present, and the events that led me to be in the area you once called home, where the telling began. I have found some answers along the way and I will share them with you by the time my story is done. But there are some questions even I still don’t know the answers to.
By now you are probably all too familiar with my darkness, born of my humanity and yet originally given rise through the curse of my lycanthropy. It is that darkness which shaped the events of this third part of my tale.
This part of my story takes place over only a handful of days and nights, but much happened in such a short space of time. And there are things that took place which you need to understand. There will be more questions by the end, though I promise we are moving closer to the answers. Bear with me as I recount my story for you, and perhaps it will prove to have been worth your life by the time I am done.
We began in 2003, when I was first bitten and started to turn into the monster I have become. I told you of the struggles to adjust to the curse whilst still at home with my family and attending school, and then of the struggles once I was forced to leave to protect all those I cared about. We left off that second part of my story in 2005, just after I’d been shot by one of the Slayers, along with my allies. Once again I will pick up where I left off, when a fresh set of trials was about to begin.
CHAPTER ONE
Fear and Confusion
Fear shot through me as my eyes opened to blackness. Its cold waves sent me into a panic, old phobias overriding any rational thought. Why couldn’t I see? Was it a problem with my eyes? My heart pounded at the prospect. Surely death would be better than that.
The last thing I remembered was being struck by the seasoned Slayer – the man who’d come so close to ending my life, if it hadn’t been for Selina’s witchcraft. He’d fired five shots during our latest encounter. Three of those bullets had hit Lady Sarah, and the fourth had landed in my own chest, turning my upper body to a fleshy container of blazing agony. I’d fallen to my knees besides the vampire’s prone form, rendered helpless until I could repair the damage through the regenerative power of the transformation. The fifth bullet had been for Selina. I’d seen her go down as well, and I’d had no way of knowing if either of them were alive. And then nothing. The Slayer had knocked me out, and now I was here. Wherever here was.
My chest had been freed of the searing pain raging through it before I’d lost consciousness. It seemed my body had automatically reverted back to human form while I’d been out, to heal the damage before my life leaked out of my wound. And yes, there was the usual hunger that accompanied any transformation. There was also thirst, my mouth so dry that my tongue stuck to the inside of it. Even werewolves have to stay hydrated.
The air was warm and still on my bare skin. It reminded me of the one time I’d been in the London Underground in my old life, and I had to wonder if I’d been taken somewhere deep beneath the soil. Perhaps they’d even sealed me within my own personal tomb. I’d definitely been moved, at any rate. The surface I now lay on was not the softness of vegetation but something hard and uncomfortable. I was no longer out in the woods.
I fought to control my fear and the growing sense of dread, trying to force my imagination in a more optimistic direction. Maybe I was inside another of the Slayers’ bases. But why would they take me alive after months of trying so hard to kill me? And if I had been imprisoned again, where were the guards? I could detect no other creatures nearby, human or otherwise.
With shaking hands, I reached out to feel the air around me. My outstretched fingers met no resistance. There were no bars like the electric ones I’d been behind when last captured by my enemies, nor were there any walls. That set off a fresh pang of terror. What if I was wrong about my surroundings, and I wasn’t inside after all? That could only mean my initial fear had been correct and it was blindness preventing me from seeing.
I whimpered and started to crawl across the hard floor. It wasn’t until I’d gone a few feet forward that my hand finally met a wall. I let out a sigh of relief. My instincts had been right all along – it looked like I was inside some kind of chamber. But the wall was smooth and uneven, stone I guessed. Maybe this wasn’t a place constructed by humans like I’d first assumed – could they have taken me inside some kind of natural cave?
I pushed myself to keep moving, continuing to blindly feel my way along the wall. Moments later, my hands found a corner where the adjacent wall connected and I decided I must be in some kind of man-made room after all. The corner felt too artificial to have been formed by the elements.
So why had I not been locked in another cage, with more armed guards to watch over me? In the last base they’d imprisoned me in, the Slayers had been taking no chances. That base had been full of rooms with cages specifically built to hold undead, so why would this one be any different? It made no sense.
My weak attempt to calm myself had been mostly unsuccessful, my heart still pounding at an unhealthy rate. I forced myself to take a few deep breaths and gradually the muscular pump slowed into its usual steady rhythm. Whatever was going on, panicking wasn’t going to help. And once I was calmer, I was able to think clearly enough to try using the transformation to restore my sight.
My energy was too drained to risk taking it fully to wolf, or even my hybrid wolf-man form. Instead I focused on my eyes, remembering how they’d changed when I’d first allowed the two halves of my mind to become one again. Those changes seemed to have been temporary. My ears were back to being rounded, my small fangs blunt once more, and my nose had reverted to its human shape. The same went for my eyes – the irises were their usual human colour and size. I’m not sure how I knew that with such certainty. I just did.
There came the familiar pain as primal fury burned through the calmer hazel. But no light came flooding in, no images or shapes in the darkness waiting to greet my lupine amber. The blackness remained every bit as complete and impenetrable as it had to my human eyes.
It had to be the lack of light in the room preventing me from seeing then. Somehow I didn’t find that thought particularly comforting.
Matters were made worse by the lack of helpful scents or sounds I could have used to create a mental image of my surroundings. Deprived of the senses I usually relied so heavily on, I couldn’t help but feel vulnerable. It seemed touch was all I had, and I was forced to carry on feeling my way around the room like a blind man.
The lack of light troubled me on another level as well. I thought it sinister that the Slayers hadn’t bothered to provide any artificial light in the room. Maybe they wanted me unnerved as part of some new kind of torture they’d devised, perhaps in the hopes of questioning me again like they had the last time they’d captured me. Or maybe this was all part of some sick pleasure to satisfy their need for revenge. Maybe my first thought on my surroundings had been the right one. Was this to be my tomb? But then, why not just kill me while I’d been shot and at their mercy, instead of taking me alive and risking me escaping again? I could understand if they wanted it to be long and drawn out so they could watch me suffer before the end, but there were no lights in the darkness that indicated any cameras. I supposed it might be possible for them to watch through the powers of witchcraft, but somehow that didn’t feel like a satisfactory explanation. There was more at work here, I was sure of it.
Driven by that thought, I attempted to learn all I could through my sense of touch. I didn’t know what I hoped to find but there was one thing I could rely on at least – if the Slayers had brought me into this room, that meant there had to be a way out of it. Not that I expected it to be as easy as feeling a door handle set into one of the walls, but I hoped there might be some clue as to where the exit was. If I could locate the door, then I might be able to find a way to escape.
I worked my way around the room, my hope waning with every step. It was beginning to seem it would yield no further secrets, when finally my questing fingers found a crevice running down the length of the stone – the kind that might indicate a doorway.
With a pang of excitement, I felt across and sure enough, there was another slight crack, further on. It definitely seemed to be some kind of door or panel set into the wall, but the panel itself felt no different to the surrounding stone. There was nothing of interest on either side of it either. Whatever opening mechanism the Slayers had used to bring me through must be on the outside of the room. My heart sank. I hadn’t really expected anything different but it was disappointing all the same.
It looked like my only hope of escaping was through brute force. I knew I had to be careful not to injure myself though, with my energy so low. Who knew how long it would be before I could feed again?
First I tried leaning against the panel and pressing my weight into it, to test if there was any give. I had no way of knowing if it was the kind of door that opened inwards or outwards, or whether it was some kind of sliding panel operated by a button or something. Maybe if I knew more about architecture I could have tried feeling for more clues, but it wasn’t something I’d ever had a reason to study in my human life. In any case, the stone remained a solid barrier between me and my freedom, regardless of how hard I pushed.
Next I tried letting my nails lengthen into claws, digging them into the stone until I had some handholds to pull it with. I heaved with all the strength I could muster from my battered
human body, but no matter which way I pulled, the panel refused to budge. It might as well have been fused into the wall, and without knowing which way it was supposed to push or pull, or slide, I was only using up more of my precious energy. I soon gave up my attempts to force it open, feeling that left me with one choice. I would have to try and break through the stone.
The curse granted me a strength greater than any human, but it still paled in comparison to the full ferocity of my lupine might. I could feel it just beneath the surface, waiting to be unleashed again. But another change without feeding would leave me weak. My human form would have to be enough.
I could possibly have punched my way through if the panel wasn’t too thick, but I didn’t want to risk breaking my hand. Instead I decided to throw myself against it to spread the impact, counting on being able to shatter it with the combined supernatural force and my own weight.
Flesh slammed into stone, the collision jarring every bone in my body. But the stone held fast. My fingers could find no evidence of even the slightest of fractures. I steeled myself for another attempt, but after trying twice more, I had nothing to show for it, other than the feeling of bruised skin. Brute force wasn’t going to work after all. And where did I go from there? I felt so lost without my eyesight, even though it was entirely possible I’d have been just as clueless with it as I was without.
