by Stead, Nick
There were no other doors in or out of the chamber as far as I could see, and no evidence of the opening through which the coffin had entered the room with Amy inside. Gwyn led us back the way we’d come and down the section of the intersecting tunnel where I’d been looking for Zee, after the chamber with Lady Sarah and the holy water. But Gwyn didn’t take us all the way along to the dead end I’d found, instead stopping by another nondescript section of wall on the opposite side to where the hidden passage to Selina and Amy had been. He pushed a piece of stone jutting out and it slid inwards. Another secret panel rumbled into life, again so well hidden that there was no wonder I’d missed it when I’d first rushed down that tunnel.
A second prison style door waited at the end of the passage, similar to the one to Selina’s chamber, except the small window set in this one was a panel of glass rather than bars. Gwyn paused before it, his face serious again.
“I don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side of that door,” he warned. “Like I told you before, I did see this place being built so I know most of the layout well enough and I learnt about most of its secrets. I did get a look at the plans with details of which rooms would imprison each of you, but there was nothing about this next one, or at least not while I was still free to roam around. Maybe something was added after they discovered me and locked me in my own chamber, I don’t know. That one was originally going to house more zombies before they discovered me. I guess zombies must be easy to come by when they have their own necromancer to raise them.”
“It doesn’t matter what’s in there,” I said. “There’s nowhere else to go, right? We have to press on.”
Zee drew his cutlass and met my gaze, a glint in his eye and a smile on his face. “I’m ready.”
“Yes, let us face this next trial,” Lady Sarah said, tall and proud, and full of confidence. Selina nodded beside her, looking the wariest of us all, yet resolute.
“Okay, here we go.” Gwyn pushed another hidden button and the door swung open.
I wondered whether we’d have been granted such easy access to Selina and Amy if we’d given Gwyn the chance to press a similar button, or whether that door was always going to require brute strength to smash our way through. Maybe David had never even meant for us to successfully break it down and the window had been there to add to our suffering, allowing us to see how close we were to our loved ones but unable to reach them. Or maybe he’d counted on our combined supernatural strength being enough to reach them, but had wanted to make it more of a challenge. I was beginning to think I’d never know the truth of the demented thoughts that had gone into the planning of that place, unless I could tear them from the mastermind himself.
Regardless of what David may or may not have intended, thanks to Gwyn we were able to pass effortlessly into the new chamber. But it was the scent it contained that brought us to a standstill that time, rather than the shock of any horrific sights. That scent hit me the moment the door opened, somehow stronger than it had been at any other point in the dungeon.
It slithered through the overpowering death stench and coiled round my olfactory senses, blocking out all else. And I wasn’t the only one affected.
The vampires came to a stop beside me, the three of us fixating on the human at the other end of the room. She lay there in a pool of her own blood – that crimson temptress with her seductive scent which set my nose twitching and made the nostrils of the vampires flare as they breathed it in. Still alive, the thundering of her heart filled our ears, calling to us. With each pump it seemed to be saying “This one is for you, and only you. Don’t think; just give in to it and set me free. Take my strength and add it to your own. Let me feed your hunger – I beat for you.”
I knew the vampires were hearing similar voices as they wrestled their own predatory desires. Only Varin seemed unaffected, standing just behind us with Amy on his back. I had a vague sense of him moving closer to his mistress, Selina no doubt recognising the danger to Amy the instant we’d frozen in place.
Some part of me knew it would still be unwise to accept any offering given so freely by the Slayers. David had no desire to see us enjoy even the briefest of moments of pleasure, only to watch us suffer. And the meal was just waiting there, with no apparent obstacles or torments to endure along the way. It couldn’t be that easy.
Some part of me knew that. Some part of me voiced caution and the need to continue resisting temptation. And yet, even with the greater self-control I’d so recently gained and for all my reasoning, I was still slave to my hunger.
My predatory instincts roared through my mind, responding to the allure of our sanguinary mistress and her call to the hunt. I had waited long enough. It was time to spill fresh blood and fill the aching pit in my stomach.
The vampires were surely fighting losing battles as well, but it was my resolve that crumbled first. It didn’t matter that I knew the human laid out on that crimson platter. I had no empathy as I looked into familiar eyes, even when they widened with terror at the realisation that she was about to meet a brutal and painful end. As with so many others before her, she had been reduced to no more than prey, no more than a feast of raw flesh and viscera, indistinguishable from every other human in the world. And she was mine for the taking, this girl I had been so against killing before. I lunged for her, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop me.
CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE
Irresistible Bait
“Hannah!” Amy screamed.
The fact that my sister also knew her didn’t even register. Nor did any surprise to find her still alive after Gwyn had claimed to have seen her body. There was only the need to hunt and kill, and feed on the fresh meat I’d been offered until the gaping hole of my stomach filled with the slippery goodness of raw flesh, and the aching hunger retreated once more. Hannah was doomed and she knew it. She looked at me with eyes dulled with despair, but there was no screaming or thrashing around in panic. It had to be Zee’s spell, still in effect and keeping terror at bay.
I was too far gone to consider why the Slayers had made an offering of her a second time. They clearly wanted one of us to kill her, or they wouldn’t have spilled enough blood to make her irresistible. And there was no doubt it was our enemies who had spilled that precious fluid. The wounds from which it leaked were too deliberate to have been an accident, the flow too callously calculated so that it would be enough to tempt us, but not so much as to kill her before we reached the chamber. Her suffering seemed to be as insignificant to the Slayers as it was to my predatory nature, the bastards yet again revealing the true monstrous nature of humanity. For what else could the acts they’d committed against another living being (and one of their own kind no less) be considered as, other than monstrous?
Truly innocent or not, the poor girl probably didn’t deserve the cruel fate the Slayers had doomed her to. She had no hope of escaping the bone crushing might of my jaws, chained in place as much by the agony she’d been left in as the shackles around her wrists.
A large red square glistened in the flickering flame effect light just above her body, cut into her abdomen with surgical precision. In case the blood wasn’t enough, here was a piece of fresh meat freed from its protective covering to tempt me further, the skin peeled back as if it were no more than a layer of plastic over a freshly bought steak. As for that crimson flow, it leaked steadily from a gash in Hannah’s right side. Her shirt had been ripped away to reveal the two wounds, though it was still intact from her neck down to her chest, preserving her modesty, even on her deathbed.
Threads of drool splattered the floor as I ran, my mouth watering in anticipation of the meal my enemies had presented me with.
“Nick, no!”
Too late, Selina caught a flash of metal and screamed her warning. I was already pouncing on my prey, the world reduced to a red haze as the bloodlust took me. Coupled with the hunger, I would have been too far gone to take any notice of my allies, even if there had been time to abort the kill
.
Hannah just had time to speak before I was on her, though her words also held little meaning. Her voice was weak and filled with pain, and she spoke so softly that even the vampires might have had trouble catching them.
“I’m sorry. They threatened my family…”
Then my maw was clamping down on her throat and I shook my head with all the primal savagery called into being by the hunt: that most ancient of urges felt by the predator in me. Not that it was much of a hunt when my prey was injured and bound, unable to flee before my bestial might.
A part of me loved nothing better than the thrill of the chase, but that darkness of my humanity was all too happy to be given this free offering to rip and tear to my heart’s content. And rip the life from her I would, my fangs severing through muscle and tendon and the fragile bone of her neck which snapped so easily, taking the life from my prey long before blood loss ever could. But not before she plunged that length of metal Selina had spied deep into my own neck.
I roared as cold steel bit into my flesh, the pain briefly distracting me from my meal. This was a pain I’d known well enough in my human life, one I’d always hated to the point where I would fight against it until nurses and sometimes my own parents had been forced to hold me down to keep me still. Not the blade of a knife stabbing into my neck but the length of a needle and the aching sensation of fluid being forced into my bloodstream. A pain that paled in comparison to the many agonies I’d endured in my relatively short time as a werewolf, but one I still despised nevertheless.
Something else happened in those moments of chaos, preventing my friends and allies from rushing to my aid. Metal bars fell from the ceiling and clanged into place, forming a cell to trap me and Hannah in. It was of little concern. The bars wouldn’t keep my companions out for too long – even if they had an electric current running through them like when I’d been imprisoned before, the vampires still had their telekinesis to bend and break them. But it would be enough to slow us, which was perhaps all the Slayers needed. I didn’t much care at that point, with the bloodlust coursing through my veins and driving me to ever greater acts of violence.
My prey was already dead beneath me, her head all but severed from her once flawless neck. There was no revenge to be had there for the injection she’d dared to give me, but I carried on ravaging her mortal remains anyway, lost in the primal ecstasy of the feeling of flesh ripping between my teeth and the splash of blood across my skin. It was still warm with the energy of life I’d stolen from my victim, and all the more satisfying for it.
I don’t really remember what happened next. One moment I was tearing through Hannah’s remains, scattering slippery organs around our cell and shattering bones. And in the next I was crashing to the floor.
Whatever had entered my bloodstream via the needle was seizing control. My vision blurred, and my body succumbed to unconsciousness. I passed out.
My head felt like it had been cleaved in two. I groaned and squinted at the dimly lit cell, struggling to piece together where I was and what had just happened.
A single eye stared back at me. Torn flesh surrounded it, hanging from a bloody skull. I growled at that lipless grin. What was so funny? She didn’t look to be in any position to be mocking me.
I took in more of what was left of Hannah, and everything began to fall back into place. David’s dungeon, right. We still needed to escape, and get Amy home where she belonged.
I tried sitting up, my eyes focusing on my bare, gore stained arm. It seemed I’d shifted to human form whilst unconscious, no doubt in an attempt to fight the injection I’d been given. I didn’t get far before a surge of nausea rose up, and I was forced back to the floor while I fought to keep my dinner down. Fortunately it was quick to pass. The ache in my head also began to ease off, and I tried again to pick myself up. I made it all the way to my feet that time.
The bars locking me in with the bloody mess I’d created were still in place, much to my surprise. My companions stood just on the other side, even the vampires. Looks of concern had replaced the feral snarls on both those pale faces. It seemed they’d successfully wrestled their own hungers back into submission, at least for the time being.
Selina and Gwyn also looked worried. Amy was too busy staring at her apparent friend in some kind of shock, despite the numbing effect of Zee’s spell. I was going to have to ask her more about how they knew each other, and try to piece together why the Slayers would just happen to have captured them both. But first I needed to escape the cell I’d been trapped in.
“I’m okay,” I said, silently adding to myself I think. As far as I could tell, everything felt normal, other than the headache and the nausea. But who knew what the injection had really been intended for? I felt certain the desired effect would have been much more than to simply knock me out, yet there was no sign it had done anything worse to me. Whatever else David had wanted it to do didn’t seem to have worked, unless it was supposed to be slow working like the poison I’d ingested earlier. Only time would tell on that front. “How come you haven’t broken me out of here yet?”
“That’s proving to be something of a problem,” Zee answered.
“The metal has been doused in holy water,” Lady Sarah said. “Neither I nor Zeerin can grip it for long enough to force our way through.”
“So why don’t you just use that same power you used on the door to Amy and Selina’s cell?”
“They can’t,” Selina answered. “There’s more warding around it, similar to what they’d used in the cell which held me. But this protective spell prevents the use of any kind of telekinetic force on the bars, be it from witchcraft or vampiric in nature. The result remains the same.”
“You will have to break yourself out, now that you are awake,” Lady Sarah said.
I shrugged and wrapped my skinny fingers around the bars, my human form seemingly weak and unimpressive compared to the beast I’d been just moments before. But looks can be deceiving. Thanks to my lycanthropy, I would have no trouble freeing myself.
Veins bulged beneath my skin as muscles strained against metal. It shouldn’t have offered much resistance to my supernaturally enhanced body and yet, try as I might to pull the bars apart, they refused to budge. I gave up, panting from the effort and still very much trapped in the cell with Hannah’s remains.
“Something’s wrong,” I admitted.
Gwyn spoke up then. “That there injection they just had Hannah give you. It’s weakened you, right?”
I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “What do you know about it?”
“Nothing much. Only that your old friend David had a bunch of scientists down here at one point, working on some kind of serum. He tested it on a few other types of undead and they all seemed to be left weak afterwards. Those that it didn’t kill outright.”
“Killed? How can it kill things like zombies when they’re already dead?”
“Well destroyed then. It dissolved them into gooey puddles until there was nothing left.”
“Oh, great. And those that survived? Did they recover?”
“Afraid not. Their bodies collapsed as well, eventually.”
“Great. As if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with.”
“Their guinea pigs were mostly zombies, and a few ghouls. I think that was pretty much all they could get their hands on in the time they had. Maybe it won’t kill you. I mean, werewolves are significantly different to zombies and ghouls, what with your living bodies an’ all.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, unconvinced. I wondered if another transformation might purge it from my system like it had the poison, but somehow I didn’t think that would work this time. My body had already used the power of the change to fight its effects, and that obviously hadn’t worked or I wouldn’t be struggling to free myself.
The others were quiet so I guessed Selina had been filled in on what little we knew of the game we were trapped in and who was behind it, or she’d surely have asked who this old friend was. Amy wa
s too affected by Hannah’s death to notice the name she’d otherwise have recognised. It was Zee that spoke up next.
“Can you change back to your wolf-man form?”
I nodded and started to focus, but Gwyn said “Save your energy, fluffy. There’s an easier way out of here.”
“What? Why didn’t you say?”
“I’m saying now, aren’t I?”
I took a deep breath, fighting to keep my anger in check. “Go on then, show us this easier way out.”
“You probably didn’t notice, being so focused on the smell of fresh meat an’ all, but this room has a higher ceiling than the others. Well, there’s a reason for that.”
He strode over to the wall and took a moment to study it, before pushing another hidden button just on the other side of the bars of my cage. Right at the top of the wall, a panel slid across to reveal an opening. It was wide enough that it gaped either side of the metal currently separating us, allowing any of us to enter it who had the means to get up high enough. A second doorway opened up just to the side of where he was standing.
The wall in front of me also transformed, sections of stone sliding outwards until a series of handholds formed. On the other side of the bars it remained the same smooth and uneven rock face as the rest of the dungeon, however, making it impossible for anyone to simply climb up without the aid of claws or tools to grip the stone.
I eyed the handholds in front of me, reluctant to ascend them. It felt ominous that David was making it so easy for me to reach the one and only exit from my cell, like he wanted me to take that route without finding some other way to break through the metal cutting me off from my allies and the other doorway. If he really wanted me to go up there, I felt certain nothing good could be waiting for me at the top. Not that I wasn’t expecting more challenges through the rest of the dungeon, but I had a feeling this was another torment he’d designed for me specifically, something else that was really personal somehow.
