Changeling (24 page)

A stream of blood ran down Lucien’s back and front, sticking his trousers to his legs. He felt his knees buckle, threatening to give way beneath him, but he straightened up again and shook the demon by the leg.

‘Goodbye, Hopper,’ he said, and throwing the demon to the floor, he reunited Hopper with the wooden stake, slamming the sharpened pole though his body. He looked on impassively as the demon squirmed for a second and then sank back, dead.

He turned slowly, seeking out the succubus. The creature had slowly slunk away into the darkened corner that it had first come from. It looked back at Lucien, imploring eyes scanning the face of the vengeful monster standing in front of it.

‘Tell me,’ Lucien said in a level voice.

‘No, I can’t. Please, you can’t make me,’ the demon said, shrinking away from him.

‘Your name, Succubus!’

‘Please, no—’

‘Tell me your true demon name, Succubus,’ Lucien repeated, pulling the bloody stake from the dead body of the sputum djinn. ‘Tell me your name, or his death will be yours too.’

The creature looked into his eyes for pity, but there was none to be found in those burning globes of hate. Lucien took a step towards him, raising the stake over his head.

‘My name is Rashishnrok,’ the succubus said quickly, holding his hands out in front of his face as if to fend off the inevitable attack.

Lucien nodded slowly and lowered the stake. ‘You know the covenant of the Netherworld. Now that I know your true demon name, you are mine.
I
am your master now, and you will obey my every word. You are to return to the Netherworld and never come again to the human plane unless I summon you. If you do, I will enter your name into the Book of Halzog and he will come to claim you.’

He turned his back on the pathetic creature.

‘Go. And remember who your true master is now.’

The creature slowly disappeared until only the merest shadow of it could be detected in the darkness, before that too faded away.

Lucien sank to his knees. A gasp escaped him, and his body refused to respond to his commands. He had lost too much blood. The stake had narrowly missed his heart, but had gone through a lung and the damage was massive. His wounds were haemorrhaging profusely.

He lay down. He was too tired and he wanted nothing more than to allow the coldness that had started to creep through his body to engulf him utterly.

His eyes jerked open at the explosion, and he listened as the sound of Tom’s gun tore through the blackness that had started to descend upon him.

With an effort, he got back up on to his hands and knees and started to crawl towards the noise.

As Lucien crawled back through the filth of the corridor the sooty dust that covered the floors mixed with the blood on his hands and clothes, coating them with an inky, sticky mess.

He was mindful of the constant flow of blood from his chest and back. He knew that he was able to lose a great deal of blood before his body would simply shut down and cease to function, but he tried not to think about how close he must be to that point. This shutting down was the reason that he was alive now, but it would be no good for him to enter this state while he was certain that Tom and Trey were in mortal danger and that Alexa was still in his brother’s hands.

When Hopper had attacked him, he realized that there was no point in struggling against the suffocation. He thought that if he could convince them that he was already dead he might be able to avoid the inevitable staking. He had sunk to the floor and closed off almost all his body functions, reducing his heartbeat to nearly a complete stop. He did this while remaining alert to the movements of the two creatures in the room with him. It was a similar state to that which he was able to place himself in when he ‘slept’ – effectively putting his vampire body into a sort of stasis. In this way, he had been able to reduce the loss of blood to a minimum and almost ignore his inability to breathe.

When the stake had been driven through him the pain had been incredible, but he was able to bear it due to the almost complete lack of bodily function, and he would have been capable of staying like that for some considerable time. But when Hopper had inadvertently released him from the suffocating mask, he knew that he would have to take his chances and try to get free.

He had come out of the stasis very fast, ramping up the body functions necessary to react quickly and seizing his chance to dispatch the demon. And that had left him with so very little strength and life-force that simply crawling was difficult now, and the blood loss was becoming more serious by the second.

He arrived at the junction of the central corridor and stopped, propping himself up against a wall. He reached down and tore a long strip of material out of his trousers, ripping them from the hem to the top of his thigh. He roughly balled the material up and jammed as much as he could into the gaping wound in his chest, hoping to stem some of the flow.

He started off again, this time going down the fork that Trey and Tom had taken, crawling through the doorway into the room at the end.

He noticed the door lying broken inside the room and moved ahead as quickly as he could. He stopped, seeing the figure of the giant spider, and slowly moved towards it, noting the pool of viscous substance that had bled from its body. Other pieces of spider bodies lay scattered around in among spent cartridge shells, and Lucien guessed that the carnage was the result of the explosion that he had heard. Relief washed through him when he realized that none of the bodies was that of Tom or Trey.

He crawled forward again through the filth and debris that littered the floor, forcing his limbs to respond to his will. But there was nothing left in him to call upon any longer – his strength gave out and he collapsed, his arms buckling under him and his face crunching painfully into the floor. Gulping the stagnant air into his one working lung, he finally succumbed to the black mist that swirled in and around him and waited for his long existence to come to an end.

His brother’s voice cut through the darkness, the sound of it reaching out and stopping Lucien from completely sliding down under the murky surface that he had begun to slip beneath. The voice had a harsh, guttural quality, like a saw cutting through bone, and it was utterly without humour, or passion, or pity. It was a voice that had existed on this earth for almost three hundred years, and had during that time threatened nothing but death – or worse – to all that had been unfortunate enough to hear it. It was the voice that had accompanied Lucien throughout his early existence, when it had encouraged, cajoled and spurred him on to greater excesses of blood and misery. It was a voice that he had foolishly listened to and believed in for so long, until one day he had witnessed its owner commit an atrocity so horrific and foul that something inside Lucien had snapped. He had vowed that he would never listen to it again, but instead endeavour to silence it forever and remove its poison from the world. With sadness he realized that he had ultimately failed in this, and that instead it would be his own voice that ceased to be heard.

The roar that cut through the oppressive quiet that followed could only be Trey, and the sound stirred something in Lucien that was a perfect counterpoint to the hopelessness that he had begun to embrace. He formed a picture of Alexa in his mind and used this to push a way through the pain and despair that had threatened to consume him so utterly. On top of this, he considered the terrifying possibility of Tom and Trey trying to rescue her from his brother without his help and he knew that he could not allow this to happen.

Lucien closed his eyes and sucked in a deep, ragged breath. He drew upon some deeply hidden reserve of strength and somehow managed to pull himself up off the floor. On his knees, he ignored the waves of dizziness that engulfed him as he determinedly struggled to get his foot underneath him. Slowly he stood up, wavering on the spot like a drunk.

A small gasp escaped his lips as he forced his foot forward, this insignificant action causing new waves of pain to course through his body. He forced himself to lift his head and straighten up to his full height, ignoring the new streams of blood that sprung forth and flowed down his front and back as a result. Walking towards the open door up ahead, he proceeded in the direction of his brother’s voice.

Tom and Trey turned round to look at Caliban. He was standing in the centre of the room. A small skylight in the ceiling allowed the moonlight to pick him out, like a spotlight trained upon the lead actor in a play. Alexa was standing by his side. She appeared to be unhurt, but her eyes were dull and vacant as though she was under the influence of some powerful narcotic.

Trey could see
things
moving in the shadows of the room, shades and shadows suggesting the forms of creatures that were not quite solid enough to make out. They were communicating with each other. A babbling, discordant din of jumbled voices and animal noises that all sounded at the same time, making it impossible to pick out anything of meaning.

‘Silence!’ Caliban commanded, and the voices dropped to a barely audible whisper.

Trey turned to see Tom raise his gun and aim at the vampire. Trey reached out to stop him as Caliban swiftly pulled Alexa in front of him. The Irishman held his fire, keeping his finger resting on the trigger, hoping for a chance to let off a round into the vampire.

Caliban was as tall as his brother. And, like Lucien, his head was also completely bald. But that was where any similarity between the brothers ended.

Caliban looked ancient. His skin was grey and stretched tight over his skull, revealing sharp cheekbones and a jutting jaw. His eyes, set in sunken pockets, were yellow adulterations of the fascinating pools of colour that were Lucien’s, and the pupils were black and elongated like those of a goat.

He smiled at them from over the girl’s shoulder, his upper lip peeling back over the ivory-white fangs that protruded from his mouth. He raised his hand and began to stroke at Alexa’s throat with long, blackened talons, the slow, deliberate movement putting a stop to any thoughts that Tom or Trey might have had of launching any kind of attack. He watched their reactions as he pressed the hooked claws into the flesh and raked his fingers along the smooth surface, leaving white scratches but not breaking the skin.

He tut-tutted and slowly shook his head in Tom’s direction. ‘Why so aggressive?’ Caliban asked in a wounded tone. His voice was calm, but the menace behind it wound in among the words. ‘Surely we can talk about all this in a
civilized
way?’

He looked at the gun in Tom’s hands and pouted in disappointment, like a teacher that has caught his pupil coming to school with a penknife. ‘Besides, what do you hope to accomplish with your little peashooters, hmmm? Apart from making a rather unsightly mess, they really are of no use to you here, you foolish little
human
.’ He looked deep into Tom’s eyes, and the ugly smile returned. ‘But you already know that, don’t you, hmm? The gun is merely a means to an end, isn’t it? A tool to buy you some time so that you can try to stick me like some pig with one of those terrible wooden stakes that you have no doubt brought.’ He rolled his eyes theatrically. ‘How utterly predictable. You pathetic, insignificant little man.’

He motioned with the fingers of his free hand, and a mass of thick black tendrils shot out from the black shadows of the wall and instantly engulfed the Irishman, pulling him up off his feet and dragging him back into their inky darkness.

‘Uh-uh,’ he said to Trey, with a small shake of his head, as the werewolf made to go to his friend’s aid.

Trey watched helplessly as the snake-like shapes wrapped themselves around Tom’s arms and legs, one coiling itself around his neck and mouth, pulling his head towards it in a constrictor’s embrace. Tom’s eyes bulged slightly at the pressure on his throat, but they flicked quickly from Caliban to Trey, warning the boy to be careful.

Caliban shook his head in a show of irritation. He turned his attention to Trey, continuing to stroke at Alexa’s throat as he spoke.

‘All this violence. It really is so unnecessary, don’t you agree, Mr Laporte?’ He looked up at the werewolf and raised his eyebrows slightly. ‘I believe that we should be able to talk about things and come to some sort of . . . amnesty. Is that unreasonable of me, Trey? You don’t mind if I call you Trey, do you?’

Tom made a muffled sound to his left, but Trey couldn’t take his eyes off the claws on Alexa’s throat.

‘Silence, you dog!’ Caliban shouted in Tom’s direction, without taking his eyes from Trey’s. ‘Or I shall have you permanently removed from the proceedings.

‘The problem with these
humans
,’ he continued, ‘is that they do not understand their real position in this world. They believe that they are the ultimate beings, that evolution has produced in them the pinnacle of existence. What they do not realize is that to be the ultimate being in your environment, you must first occupy the very top of the food chain and that you must rule over all the other creatures that you as the ultimate predator deem fit to share your world. Sadly they have lost sight of the fact that they are not at the pinnacle of this hierarchy: I and my kind are above them in the pecking order. To me, they are nothing but prey, a livestock that my kind have feasted upon for thousands of years. I despise them all.’

He glanced momentarily at Tom before fixing Trey with his devil eyes again.

‘My brother has no doubt tried to convince you that I am evil incarnate – that I would happily eradicate humankind and turn this world into a very different kind of place. Indeed, I have the power to do this. I have the Ring of Amon and, if I chose to, I could have them tear this world of theirs apart. So why have I not done so?’

Trey noticed for the first time the large silver ring on the middle finger of the hand around Alexa’s neck.

‘Come now, Trey, this conversation really is a little onesided. Change back to your human form so that we can talk and sort this mess out.’