Blood Moon (5 page)

Oh no.

The boy stepped through the metal detector, and Dmitri’s world turned upside down. The high pitched shriek tore through his skull, causing agony like nothing he’d ever experienced before. His crutches fell to the floor and he collapsed beside them, his hands pressed over his ears. The sick youth, and the other passengers didn’t appear to be affected, although Kasha and Adam were as badly stricken as he was. The police officers raised their weapons and pushed their way through the passengers towards them. Dmitri looked at his family and saw that Adam’s eyes had begun to turn yellow.

“No… Adam… Don’t”

It was too late. Adam began to transform, no doubt hoping to fight off the aggressors and save his family. Once the change began, his ears became that much more sensitive to the high frequency noise. Dmitri could see blood running in bright red rivulets down the side of his son’s face, his eyes filled with rage and pain as his transformation progressed.

Then the police officers raised their weapons, and the world erupted in a red maelstrom of fire, noise and pain.

Chapter 3

23rd December 2008. Trecorras Cottage, Llangarron, Herefordshire. 10:05

John took a sip of coffee and stepped back to admire his handiwork. The dusty box of Christmas decorations he’d found in the attic looked like they’d been there since the early 1970’s at least. The tree was plastic with silver branches instead of the usual fake green needles, and had clearly seen better days. The trunk was badly bent and held together with ancient, yellowing sellotape, while half of the branches were bare. John had carefully positioned it so that the kink was face on to the rest of the living room, then covered the sorry-looking thing with pretty much every piece of tinsel and bauble in the box. The lights had been a particular triumph. He’d spent over an hour working his way through them, a bulb at a time, until he’d found all of the broken ones. Now the silver tree twinkled in the corner of the living room, bringing some much needed seasonal cheer to the place.

Sharing a house with others was harder than he’d expected. He’d been on his own from childhood, not daring to even make any close friends, let alone actually live with anyone. Now that he found himself co-habiting with two other people, he began to realise just how used to being on his own he’d become. Of course, there had been many times over the years where the loneliness had been crushing, and he’d wander around his house, not knowing what to do with himself. Now that he had company forced upon him, however, he couldn’t help but resent it, no matter how hard he tried not to. It didn’t help that Marie was such a damn slob. He loved her. Having someone there to talk to and curl up next to at night was amazing. It was a closeness he never thought he’d experience, and he cherished it. He just hadn’t expected it to be so difficult to allow someone into his life and to share his personal space.

“Where the fuck did you find that?” said Marie from the doorway. She wore a pair of tracksuit bottoms and the oversized t-shirt she’d slept in. Her eyes were half-closed and her hair looked as if she’d been dragged backwards through a hedge. Marie, John had discovered, was not a morning person.

He grinned at her. “I found it in the loft, along with a box of decorations. Apparently this place used to be a children’s home, and I thought it’d be nice to put them up.”

Marie cast a quizzical eye at the tree. “You know that it’s bent? And you might have overdone the tinsel a bit.”

John’s face fell. “I just wanted to try and brighten the place up. Make it feel a bit more like Christmas, you know?”

Marie walked over and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s the thought that counts. Is there any coffee left?”

“Yeah, there’s still some in the pot. It’s been there for a couple of hours, though. I can make a fresh one, if you want?”

She shuffled out of the living room, towards the kitchen. “No, it’s alright. I could do with something strong enough to stand a spoon up in this morning. One bloody glass of wine and I still get a hangover. I am officially a lightweight. Where’s Daniel? I thought you’d have roped him into your little decorating project.”

John stood back from the tree and tried to reposition it so the bend in the trunk was less visible. “He went shopping in Ross first thing. Said we needed a few things and he wanted to pick up a newspaper. Should be back soon. He’s been gone for a couple of hours now.”

Even with his enhanced hearing, John couldn’t make out the details of Marie’s grunted response, but he heard the clink of china and the burble of coffee being poured, and figured that any further attempts at conversation were probably better off left until she’d caffeinated herself. She trudged out of the kitchen, mug in hand, and made her way back upstairs without another word. A few moments later, the hiss of the shower drifted down the stairs, and John turned his attention back to the Christmas tree.

***

Daniel drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and sighed. The tractor ahead of him had blocked the single track road for over three miles now and showed no signs of turning off any time soon. Vehicles coming from the opposite direction had been forced to reverse back along the road, adding more delay to proceedings. He pushed the irritation down and tried to relax. No easy matter given what he’d found out that morning. Still, there were only a few more miles to go before he reached the stone bridge that marked the boundaries of the village, and then only another mile and a half before he reached the isolated cottage he’d been forced to co-habit with Marie and Simpson. If nothing else, the journey gave him time to gather his thoughts.

The situation was a difficult one. His orders were clear. Marie and Simpson were to be executed on sight and their corpses disposed of. However, Krysztof and Lukas didn’t run the pack. Not yet anyway, despite the way they were behaving. While Michael lived, there was a chance that things could be turned around. If Michael had been killed by his captors though, or if the council voted to depose him as pack alpha, something that seemed increasingly likely as the days passed, he would have no choice but to carry out his instructions. His loyalties were, and would always be, to his pack. At least, if it came to that, he’d be able to make sure they were put to death quickly and painlessly. He owed Marie that much.

The tractor turned off onto a side road as they reached the outskirts of the village, and Daniel breathed a sigh of relief. In reality, the village was little more than a collection of houses and farms, centred around an old church. There had been a public house at one time, situated next to the river, however it had long since been boarded up. Other than that, there was only a post office that opened for a few hours each morning and a small garage that survived by maintaining the agricultural vehicles for the nearby farms. Most of the houses seemed to be occupied by commuters, the array of BMWs and Audis parked on the neatly maintained driveways testament to the fact that most of the village’s original inhabitants had been priced out of the area. He doubted if there was much remaining by way of a community here anymore. The only focal point would be the church, where people would gather each Sunday to pay lip-service to the hymns and prayers before retreating back into the self-contained bubbles of their lives.

He passed through the village, turning off onto a long gravel track that ran for half a mile across open countryside before it reached their cottage. Pheasants burst from the hedgerows before him, squawking their alarm at the intruder in their midst. They did this every time he drove through here, and their impromptu honour guard always made him smile. Besides, they also provided a useful early warning system in the case of unexpected visitors.

The track branched off into a field where a flock of sheep huddled in the far corner, no doubt able to smell the wolves in their midst but unable to retreat any further from them. The day he’d arrived, one of them had attempted to throw itself across the cattle-grid to escape and had broken its legs as a result. He’d been tempted to take it up to the house, butcher the corpse and put it in the freezer, but decided against it. If the farmer had come up to the house, enquiring after his missing livestock, and he’d caught sight of either Marie or Simpson, then things could have become complicated. Better to let him find the creature where it lay. He had, at least, broken the animal’s neck to prevent it from suffering unnecessarily.

The cottage came into view as he crossed the field. It had red sandstone walls with a grey slate roof and a partially rotted wooden conservatory that leeched the heat from the building in the evenings. Light flashed from the living room window, and another blazed from the double bedroom that Marie shared with Simpson. At least they were awake. He didn’t feel like breaking his news to Marie before she’d had at least one cup of coffee. The car rumbled across the cattle-grid separating the cottage from the field beyond, and he parked by the property’s rear door, retrieved two plastic bags of shopping from the passenger seat, then got out and went inside.

Marie was walking down the stairs with a towel wrapped around her wet hair as he entered the hallway. Simpson seemed to have spent the morning turning the living room into a tasteless parody of ‘Santa’s grotto’. Daniel shook his head, disgusted.

Marie smiled at him as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Morning, Daniel. Everything alright?”

He put the bags on the floor and removed two newspapers, putting them on the dining room table. “No, I’m afraid it’s not. We have a problem.”

Simpson crossed the room and picked up the first paper, a copy of the
Daily Mail
. The headline read “Illegal Immigrant Werewolves on Benefits Stopped at Airport.” He sighed. “Well, that just ticks every bloody box, doesn’t it? The fucking Tories will love that, and the blue-rinse brigade will be up in arms. They seem to be more bothered by the fact that one of them claimed benefits than the fact that they were werewolves.”

Marie picked up another paper and scanned the text, then looked up to Daniel with tears in her eyes. “Dmitri and Kasha? Do any of the reports say what happened to them? Are they okay?”

“I don’t know. The tabloids have sensationalised their accounts so it’s difficult to understand exactly what happened. What is certain is that the situation is now so much worse than it was. People in the coffee shops and supermarkets were talking about little else.”

Marie retrieved her laptop from under the empty box of decorations. After a few moments, a grainy video appeared on the screen, obviously taken on a camera-phone. It showed Dmitri, Kasha and their young son, Adam, fall to the ground, writhing in agony amidst a group of panicked travellers. Then Adam began to transform. Fangs burst from the boy’s mouth and hair surged from his pores. While the quality of the footage was poor, there was no question of what was happening. The image shook as the person filming was shoved out of the way by armed police who then opened fire on the three werewolves with submachine guns. Bullets tore into Adam, Dmitri and Kasha. The police clearly weren’t taking any chances with them and emptied their entire clips into the trio. Then the video ended. Marie stifled a sob and closed the lid of the laptop.

“I… I knew them. Dmitri was like a father to me and Michael. They weren’t hurting anyone. They just lived here, quietly for years. And Adam was only a child. How could they do that?”

Daniel put his hand on Marie’s shoulder. “They only saw the monster, Marie. They didn’t think of them as two parents with a child. They thought of them as wild beasts and put them down. We knew it would be like this. After what Connie did, how could they think otherwise?”

“I know, but seeing it like that, reading those fucking rags that make it sound like some kind of massive victory, it… it makes me sick.” She got to her feet, jaw clenched and red-rimmed eyes blazing with fury. “I’m not leaving Michael in the hands of these fuckers. We need to accelerate our plans. God knows what they’ve been doing to him.”

“We’ve been over this. It’s all Simpson can do to stand up, and your injuries need more time to heal as well.”

Marie glanced at Simpson, then back to Daniel. “There’s a way to sort John out before the next full moon, and it’s not like he’ll be going into the base anyway, unless things go tits up.” She walked over to Simpson and put her hand on his shoulder. “If you’re up for it, we can have your injuries healed by lunchtime.”

Daniel hadn’t expected that. “You can’t be serious? I know what you’re thinking and it could kill him. Please, for the sake of a few more weeks, think about what you’re suggesting.”

Marie took Simpson’s hands in hers. “It’ll work. It won’t be nice, but it’ll work. And it’s our only chance of getting to Michael in time.”

Simpson seemed to take a moment to consider it, then nodded. “Fuck it, I’ve spent the last month or more held together with stitches and I’m getting sick to death of it. What do I have to do?”

“Okay, there’s a reason that injuries inflicted by another werewolf don’t heal until the next full moon. It’s to do with the curse, or whatever you want to call it. When a wolf causes an injury, the wolf spirit is passed along and, in a normal human, it turns them on the next full moon. In your case, you’re already afflicted, so your wolf fights against the new one and they cancel each other out until the moon rises and your wolf becomes powerful enough to defeat the other. You’ll still heal from normal injuries, though. So, in theory, if we cut out the wounds inflicted by the other werewolves, you should then heal normally.”