Changeling (14 page)

Trey frowned at her, casting his eyes behind her at the dense woods. ‘I thought you just said that you didn’t know where we were.’

‘And that’s true, but once we’re all together, we can Change again and then follow our own trail back home. It’s either that, or we wander around helplessly in the
altogether until we all die of exposure.’ She looked at him, smiling kindly at the consternation on his face. ‘It’s what we always have to do following the night of a forced
Change. We might have wandered several miles away from where we started out the night before, and our only hope of getting back is—’

‘I couldn’t go through that again,’ Trey said, cutting across her. ‘I’d rather die out here than experience that agony again.’

Ella stepped out from behind the tree and walked towards him, seemingly unperturbed at her own nakedness. Trey didn’t know where to look. At first he gawped at her as she slowly approached
him, taking in the white, goosebumped skin of her body. He swallowed, the action sounding incredibly loud in his own ears, and he could feel the heat burning on his face. Eventually he fixed his
eyes on a large clump of earth at his feet. She was close to him now, too close for him not to take in her body as she stood in front of him, and suddenly she leaned forward to give him a friendly
bump on the head with her own.

‘Come on, silly, it’s not like that was the first time you’ve been through it. You must have had quite a few full moon Changes at your age?’

Trey mumbled something under his breath, still not knowing where to look.

Ella leaned forward and nudged his head again. Trey thought it a strange action – something between a playful bump and a nuzzle. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it isn’t like
that when we
choose
to Change as a pack. The violence of the forced Change during a full moon is pure, unadulterated agony for us all, but it will be nothing like that, I promise. It will be
a wonderful experience for you. You’ll never look back, Trey. You are one of us now. You’re part of the pack.’

Trey considered this. He thought about how he had transformed into his bimorph werewolf state under the controlling influence of the amulet. Then, the change had been mercifully swift; one huge
supernova of exquisite agony and then it was over. But the long, all-consuming torture that he had undergone yesterday had scared the hell out of him, and he shuddered when he remembered it. He now
understood what his uncle had meant when he’d told Trey how he wished for death as a respite from the agony of the Change during a full moon. He looked up into Ella’s blue eyes and
hoped that she was telling the truth. He had little choice. He would either have to agree to transform with the rest of the pack, or be left out here to die of the cold.

‘Is this blood?’ he asked, noting how Ella’s face and hands were also smeared with the dried gore.

She didn’t say anything; she just stood there looking back at him.

‘Where did it all come from?’

To his surprise she smiled back at him. ‘Come with me,’ she said, turning away from him. She walked back in the direction she had come, and Trey was forced to follow.

They came to a small clearing in the woods where the other members of the pack were now up and about. They nodded in his direction as he entered the area, and Jurgen came up to him, a broad
smile on his face. He clapped a hand on Trey’s shoulder, squeezing the boy’s flesh harder than was necessary. ‘Well, well,’ he said in a voice loud enough that the others
could hear, ‘our little wolf cub is here at last. We thought that we’d lost you.’

Trey looked past the big man at the bloody carcass lying in the grass. It was a huge elk of some kind. Or it had been. Now it was a grisly mess; its innards strewn out about it, one dead eye
staring up at the blue sky overhead. He noted how it had been half eaten, great rents visible in the flesh where hunks of meat had been torn loose, especially around the hindquarters where the
damage was greatest. Trey tried not to imagine himself with his head buried in that bloody mess, but the evidence caked over his skin suggested that that was exactly what had happened, and he knew
that he’d taken part in the creature’s demise just as much as the others.

Jurgen followed his gaze and then turned and walked towards the crimson chaos. He bent down, picked up a torn length of the creature’s intestines and threw them in Trey’s direction
so they landed with a wet thud at his feet. ‘Maybe you’d like some breakfast before we start off back home?’

Trey turned quickly, bending at the waist, and vomited on to the grass. The other members of the pack laughed at this, and Jurgen in particular seemed delighted with the boy’s
discomfort.

‘It seems the youngster doesn’t like his meat too rare,’ he shouted, joining in with the laughter at his own joke.

Once the hilarity had died away, the mood sobered as if by some invisible signal. The other members of the group stared at Jurgen, and they began to approach the big man, forming a loose circle.
They joined hands, glancing around at one another with a look of eager anticipation. Ella looked at Trey, and smiling her reassurance, she nodded her head at him to fill the gap in the circle
beside her. The teenager could feel the tension that had suddenly built up among the other members – it was almost tangible. The look on all their faces was the same – an excited
expectancy.

Jurgen was almost directly opposite him in the circle. Trey could hardly take his eyes off him; that same unsettling look that he’d witnessed the night before was on the Alpha’s face
again: hungry and angry and, to Trey’s mind, more than a touch psychotic. It was the face of a drug addict preparing for their first fix of the day. But if the other members of the pack
noticed, they chose not to draw attention to it.

Trey slowly linked hands with Ella on one side and a tall, ginger-haired teenager who Trey guessed to be about seventeen years old on the other. As soon as the circle was joined, he could feel
it. The power that passed through him was something that he had felt before, and he waited for the Change that he knew was coming.

It was mercifully short. Like the other transmogrifications that he had experienced before coming to Canada, the group Change from human to Wolfan was intense but short-lived, and when he opened
his eyes he looked about him at the giant wolves that made up the pack.

They were huge creatures: great solid slabs of muscle and sinew that moved around each other warily, eyeing the other pack members, their movements and body posture instantly displaying how they
were feeling. For Trey it was as if his mind had simply switched to ‘wolf’. He could instantly tell who were the more dominant members of the pack, noting how these members approached
the others with an upright posture, and how the more submissive pack members would lower their own bodies in response. Jurgen-wolf was by far the largest of the animals; his great black pelt seemed
to suck in the light, creating some great living wolf-shadow that padded noiselessly on the leafy carpet. The Alpha paraded among the others, pacing about high on its paws, tail held straight out
behind it. As it approached the members of the pack, they would sink down in front of it. One wolf, presumably the weakest – the Omega wolf – lay down on the ground as the pack leader
approached, turning on its back so that its belly was exposed to the huge black beast in a display of complete and utter supplication. Trey knew that the subordinate wolf had been the tall
ginger-haired boy that he’d linked hands with only moments before.

The animal that had been Trey Laporte took all of this in without question. He was no longer human, and yet in some part of his wolf brain there remained a tiny element of his human self that
seemed to be looking in at the whole thing from the outside – just as his uncle had described it. Trey took in the smells and sights and sounds of the forest, his brain decoding the stimuli
in a way that it had never done before. He caught the scent of a rabbit brought to him on the faintest of breezes, and he knew that the creature was no more than forty metres away off to his right.
The overriding stench of blood from the animal carcass caused a shiver of excitement to pulse through him and his mouth filled with saliva. He could sense the same exhilaration in the other members
of the pack as the smell of death stirred them, wanting nothing more than to feast again on the dead body. But they had to wait. Wait until the Alpha had started. Trey eyed the dead body hungrily,
so caught up in his thoughts of sinking his teeth into the meat again that he missed the Alpha’s approach.

The black werewolf slowly walked towards the newcomer, its dark eyes never leaving the youngster as it did so. It stopped no more than a couple of metres away and looked hard at the new pack
member, its head cocked slightly to one side as if puzzled by something that it saw. At the last moment the new pack member became aware of the dominant Alpha and turned to face it, too slow in
showing the subordination that was expected of him. The pack shifted in anticipation of the Alpha’s response, knowing that violence would ensue.

The werewolf that had been Jurgen bristled its pelt, the raised hackles making it appear even bigger than it already was. Its eyes took on an angry look and its lips peeled back to reveal the
teeth and gums. A low rumbling growl issued from the huge creature’s chest as it prepared to attack the impertinent young upstart.

Trey knew that he didn’t stand a chance against a beast that was almost half as big again as he was. His rewired wolf brain took over, instinctively bending his front legs in a bowing
motion that lowered his head below that of the Alpha. He kept his eyes glued to the other wolf’s, sensing that the attack would come anyway; that the Alpha would need to prove its dominance
over him to the other pack members and reassert its number one rank within the group.

When the attack did come it came fast and hard, and took Trey by complete surprise. His eyes were still fixed on the great black head of the Alpha when the white furred bitch bowled in low from
his side, biting into his shoulder and causing him to cry out in pain and shock. Trey turned to face his attacker, backing away to keep both her and the male Alpha in his vision. Ella-wolf growled
back, revealing rows of teeth, some of which were still stained with his own blood. Trey recognized the signal and lowered his head in acquiescence.

The huge black Wolfan that was Jurgen eyed the scene, weighing up its options. Eventually it turned its back and walked away, seemingly satisfied that the female Alpha had dealt with the
matter.

The situation defused, Ella-wolf approached Trey, and the youngster moved forward and licked her on the muzzle, thanking her for her intervention, which had spared him from the much worse
savaging that the pack leader would have meted out. They moved against each other, their bodies pressing together at the flanks, sharing scent and reinforcing their friendship.

Jurgen-wolf approached the dead elk and sniffed at the blood on the ground. The others started to move towards the corpse, but the pack was not to eat that morning. The Alpha turned to look at
them, its eyes resting on Trey again, taking him in. Suddenly the black wolf turned away and sprang forward into the forest, leading the way for the others to follow.

They raced between the trees on paws that barely stirred the mulch beneath them. They were like one unified beast as they ran, each knowing the others’ position and
taking it in turns to lead, then follow. Their scent from the night before was unmistakable, but they hardly needed it to find their way back through the forest. Some wolf-sense had kicked in, and
each and every member of the pack instinctively knew the way back to their own territory. For the creature that had been Trey, the world was a tsunami of sounds and smells and sights that were
woven in and through each other so that he believed he could have closed his eyes and still run through the densely wooded landscape without colliding with anything in his path. He was a creature
in complete unison with his surroundings; tuned in to everything around him and part of an even more perfect entity – the pack. He was in ecstasy. Later, he would remember this feeling of
pure elation, the feeling of the
rightness
of what he now was.

They emerged from the woods, eating up the ground that led down to Frank’s cottage with huge, loping strides before coming to a halt; circling each other, rubbing their flanks against one
another and exchanging scents. Eventually Jurgen-wolf turned from the group and looked away at the trees in the direction of the lake and the cottages that they inhabited. Trey looked off in the
same direction, and even though he sensed it was some distance off, thought he could detect the smell of the lake on the air.

Trey knew that they were about to leave him, and he sounded out his dismay at the prospect of this. Once again the white-furred Ella-wolf was the one to come over to him. She used her muzzle to
push Trey in the side, ushering him towards the building and letting him know that this, at least for now, was the way that it had to be. He turned and looked towards the wooden building again,
taking his eyes off the other creatures for a second, and as he did so he
felt
the pack start to leave. He could feel the power and magic that had united them begin to ebb away as they moved
off. He threw back his head and howled, his wolf voice turning into a strangled human cry as he transformed back again. There was no answer from the pack this time.

He looked about him. He was alone and naked and standing in front of his uncle’s house.

Philippa woke up and slowly opened her eyes. The room she was in was nothing short of spectacular, and she propped herself up on one elbow to stare about her in wonder at the
opulent surroundings. She had no recollection of getting here. The Ashnon had told her that this would be the case, and that she would feel disorientated for the first few hours. She glanced across
at the digital alarm clock on the bedside cabinet – it was a little after five p.m. The bed that she was lying on was unimaginably large and she had to roll over twice to get to the edge,
where she let her feet hang down and gently bounce against the deep pile of the carpet. She was incredibly thirsty. Looking about her for some sign of a drinks cabinet or fridge, she stood up and
padded over to a walnut cabinet that looked as if it might conceal a refrigerator, her face breaking into a broad smile as the interior lit up when she opened the door. She grabbed a large bottle
of sparkling water and a chocolate bar and carried them over to the window.