Changeling (6 page)

‘This one is for you,’ it said.

Trey stared down at the stone before looking back at Galroth in horror. ‘If you think that I’m shoving this thing into my—’

‘No. You need not insert the stone.’ The demon’s eyes took in the teenager before it. ‘Besides, I doubt your human body would be capable of such a thing. But if you need
me to come to you,’ the creature went on in a solemn voice, ‘you must hold this stone to your forehead and intone my name. I will hear you and be here as soon as I can. Try not to use
this unless it is absolutely necessary. The energy that I would need to use to get here would be huge and I doubt that I could do it more than once. I would tell Lucien what is happening and that I
have left you with this insurance should you need to use it.’

Trey looked from the stone to the demon again, before curling his fingers around the gem and putting it in his jeans pocket. ‘Thank you, Galroth,’ he said. ‘Please tell Lucien
that I’m . . .’ he paused, before adding, ‘tell him that I am thinking of him – him and the others. Please give them my love.’

The demon blinked at him. Trey was about to say something else, but the nether-creature simply turned its head to look out of the front windscreen, closing the window on him. The car’s
engine started and Galroth drove off.

The teenager walked through the hallway, noting the faded prints on the walls, and how old the furniture looked. Trey guessed that the place hadn’t been decorated in some
time, and the house had a musty, mildewed smell.

The open door at the end of the passage led into the living room and he stepped inside. There were empty bottles everywhere. They were arranged in little clusters here and there, the majority of
them surrounding the battered old armchair on the other side of the room from the doorway. A solitary bottle stood in the centre of a small table next to the chair, half-full of a golden liquid, no
doubt waiting to join its comrades on the floor as soon as it had been emptied.

He heard his uncle moving in another room somewhere behind him, and he stepped further into the room to wait for him. Everything appeared to have been left where it had been dropped and it was
clear that his uncle received little, if any, domestic help despite his disability. There were signs that somebody had tried to tidy up recently – some dusting and vacuuming had been done and
the bin next to his uncle’s chair had been emptied and a fresh liner inserted, but it appeared that Frank preferred to use the floor as the receptacle for his rubbish.

It was the smell that bothered Trey. That mildewed smell of neglect was everywhere and it was laced with a healthy tinge of dog and stale booze. There was another smell woven in amongst these
that Trey couldn’t quite put his finger on – an earthy smell that caused a strange string of unidentifiable emotions to stir inside Trey as he breathed it in.

He moved towards the sofa, shoving a pile of dirty clothing out of the way to create a space to sit down. On the wall opposite was an old stain which suggested that food or drink might have been
thrown against it at some point. Either that or Uncle Frank’s interior designer had a taste for the avant-garde.

Trey idly wondered how anyone without the benefit of sight could live in a place like this. It was a death trap. He’d always understood that blind people needed to live in a structured and
ordered environment to enable them to navigate their way around and locate the things that they needed. But this place was about as far away from that as could be imagined. He was deep in thought
when the little terrier, Billy, hopped up on to his lap, giving him a start. The dog nuzzled its head beneath Trey’s hand, giving the teenager little option but to stroke it. When he looked
down at the scruffy little creature he was rewarded with a frank and open stare, and that same doggy grin that he’d been greeted with at the door.

‘You want something to drink?’ his uncle shouted from a room somewhere deep inside the house.

Trey looked at the state of the abandoned cutlery and crockery that had been left at various points about the room and decided he wouldn’t risk it. ‘No thanks, I’m fine,’
he shouted back. He scratched the dog behind the ears and smiled as the little creature wagged a sorry stump of a tail.

Frank shuffled into the room, his slippered feet hardly lifting from the floor as he ploughed them through the detritus in his way. He carried a cup of something hot in one hand, the other
stretched out ahead of him. He stopped and turned at the beaten-up old chair and sank down into it. No sooner was the old man seated than Billy leaped down from Trey’s lap and secured a spot
on Frank’s.

‘So,’ the old man said, letting the word hang in the air between them. He reached forward with his hand, seeking out the bottle on the table. He unscrewed the lid and poured a large
measure of the clear, golden liquid into his cup. Trey watched, waiting for his uncle to continue, but once it became clear that that single utterance was as much as he was going to get right now,
he tried to break the ice himself.

‘I bought you a present, but . . .’

‘Whatisit?’

‘I didn’t realize that you were—’

‘Whatisit?’

Trey dug into the bag by his side and brought out the silver photo frame. He’d had the picture of his parents with his uncle enlarged and put into a frame. He looked at it now, unable to
believe that the haggard thing opposite him was the same person who grinned back at him from the photograph.

‘It’s a picture. In a frame,’ he said in a small voice.

‘Great. Just what I need,’ the old man said. He motioned with a hand towards the fireplace. ‘Put it over there somewhere.’

There was another uncomfortable silence in which Trey tried desperately to think of something to say.

‘It’s a nice place,’ he said, and regretted it the moment he did.

‘It’s a craphole. What’s nice about it?’

‘I meant the area. It’s nice around here. A bit out of the way, but nice.’

‘S’OK. It’s mine. I own it, so I ain’t beholden to anyone.’

‘When you say it’s yours . . .’

‘All of it. The forest, the land, and everything that you can see for miles around. It’s mine,’ he said as if expecting an argument. ‘Bought it years ago.’

‘And you manage OK?’ Trey asked. ‘It must be difficult living way out here if you can’t see to get around.’

His uncle shrugged and continued to rub the dog’s belly. ‘So what do you want?’

Trey was taken aback. His uncle’s choice of words and the tone that he used shocked the teenager. He hadn’t known what to expect from this meeting. He’d looked forward to it
– nervous and excited at the same time at the prospect of meeting a living relative. Not just that, he was excited about meeting someone else like him . . . someone who knew what it was to be
a lycanthrope. He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, thinking that the man might at least have pretended to be glad to meet him.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ Frank said into the silence.

‘I don’t want anything,’ Trey said finally. ‘I just wanted to meet you.’

‘Everybody
wants
something, kid.’ His uncle pushed the small dog off his lap and on to the floor. ‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen,’ Trey answered and watched as the old man’s face changed at his response, breaking into a half-smile, half-sneer.

‘So you’ve had your Change?’ The man nodded to himself as if answering his own question. ‘You’ve probably had quite a few of them by now – that is unless
you’re a late starter like your father was.’

Trey sat quietly and waited. He didn’t like the way that his uncle was ‘looking’ at him across the room. And he didn’t like the tone he’d adopted when he’d
referred to his father.

‘How’d you find me?’

‘A friend of mine gave me the address.’

‘So you said, so you said. Am I allowed to know the name of this . . . friend?’ The blind man turned his head and stared straight out in front of him. He nodded his head up and down
in the air, moving it only a fraction in each direction, as though he had already guessed the answer to the question.

‘His name is Lucien Charron,’ Trey said. ‘He was a friend of my father’s. He’s been very good to me. He—’

‘I know who and
what
he is,’ his uncle said. He was completely still now and Trey watched as the man’s face went through a series of expressions as though he were
playing out different scenarios in his head. Eventually, the scowl that he had worn from the moment Trey had first laid eyes on him returned to his features. ‘Come over here, kid. Let me get
a look at you.’

Trey stood up and walked over to the chair, standing in front of it. The old man levered himself out of the seat and stood up to face him. He reached out with his hands, placing his fingers on
Trey’s face; first tracing the contours of the boy’s features and then running his hands across his hair. He let his hands drop to Trey’s shoulders and then slid them round to his
arms, giving the biceps a less-than-gentle squeeze. He nodded his head, his bottom lip protruding as though he were a man satisfied with the inspection of the horse that he planned to buy at
market. His hands moved back up to Trey’s neck and paused as they felt the chain that hung around it. Trey could sense the change in the old man as his fingers brushed against the metal
links. A small gasp escaped Frank’s lips. His fingers hungrily traced the outline of the chain, seeking out the silver amulet that hung at the bottom of the long loop of metal links. His
breathing had got louder and faster, and his face had taken on an ugly, needy look; lips peeled back over crooked and discoloured teeth while the sightless eyes rolled crazily in their sockets.

Trey’s heart was hammering in his chest. He didn’t like the look on the man’s face. He firmly grabbed his uncle’s wrists, stepped back an arm’s length away from him
and watched Frank waver on the spot, caught off balance by the sudden movement. When he was sure that the old man was no longer in any danger of falling over, he let go of his uncle’s arms
and took another step backwards.

Frank lifted his chin up into the air, the grotesque mask slipping from his features. He nodded – a brief downward jerk of the head. Trey thought that he was about to say something, but
instead his uncle shakily reached out behind him for the arms of the chair and sat back down, fluttering his fingers in the air in a dismissive gesture that Trey took to mean that he too was
expected to return to his seat.

The old man was shaken. He reached out with his fingers, exploring the table’s surface until they alighted on the edge of his cup, which he raised to his lips and greedily drank from. He
appeared to have visibly shrunk in the last few seconds as if what had happened had knocked the stuffing out of him. He stared sightlessly down into his lap, silently mouthing words. Eventually he
stopped and sat quite still again, his eyes fixed on some invisible point between his knees. ‘Did you get it before your first Change?’ he asked.

‘Not quite,’ Trey said, fingering the amulet through his shirt. Lucien had given him the chain when they had first met, telling him that it had been his father’s. The amulet
allowed Trey to control his transformation. It stopped him turning into the Wolfan – the malevolent werewolf that was under the control of the full moon and that would mercilessly kill and
murder during the Change. Legend had it that there were once a number of the amulets in existence, but now Trey’s was the only one left.

The amulet was a blessing and a curse.

Because of it, Trey did not turn into a bloodthirsty killing beast each and every full moon. Instead, he became the more powerful, feared, intelligent and restrained bimorph werewolf. But also
because of the amulet – and because he was a full-blood werewolf born of two lycanthrope parents – he had already lost so much. Friends had died, his life had been turned upside down,
and he had been forced to kill while defending himself against evil. Because of the amulet the vampire Caliban believed that Trey was the legendary Son of Theiss – heir to an ancient prophecy
foretelling that a werewolf would stop an all-powerful vampire’s rise to power in the Netherworld. And the vampire had dedicated himself to Trey’s destruction.

There was no doubt: the amulet was a source of both powerful protection and terrible danger.

‘I thought that it was lost forever,’ Frank said.

‘No.’

His uncle nodded. ‘Daniel, your father, was given the amulet by your grandfather,’ he paused, waiting for a response. When none came, he went on. ‘It should have been mine. I
was the first son and it should have been mine.’ A snort of derision escaped the old man’s nostrils and his face twisted with jealousy and anger. ‘Our father decided that I
wasn’t
responsible
enough to have it. How d’ya like that? Not responsible enough! I was just a kid, and my old man thought he could see what kind of man I’d turn into
– he thought I was a bad apple.’ He shook his head, remembering.

‘I was
fourteen
when I had my first Change. Daniel was only five years old at the time, and even though he wouldn’t need it for another ten years, our father wouldn’t
give me that amulet. Not even temporarily. “It’s Daniel’s,” was all he would say. “He will be the one to take up where I leave off.”’

Frank shook his head. His milky eyes had filled with tears that clung to his lashes, threatening to fall, until he sniffed and wiped them away with the back of his sleeve. ‘I hated him for
that. I hated my father for favouring Daniel over me, and I hated my brother for denying me the chance to escape the curse that had been passed on to me by our father.’

‘It doesn’t sound as though my dad had any say in it,’ Trey said in a small voice.

‘Maybe not. But he was given a chance that I never was. I had, and still have to, become that
thing
every month, while he was given the control that you now have. If I’d been
given what was rightfully mine, things might have turned out differently for me. I might not have . . .’

A silence followed, broken only by the old man slurping noisily from his cup again.

‘So, I ask you again, what do you want?’