Werewolf Parallel (5 page)

“Why won’t you help?”

“It’s not what I do.”

“What d’you mean – it’s not your
style
?”

“No, it’s not
what I do
. Past and future, remember?”

Eve was edging along the wall as the blob-creatures lumbered ever closer. Her back touched the wooden doorway Janus had summoned up. She seized the handle. “I’m gonna risk it, there’s no other way –”

“Eve, no! You don’t know where it goes!”

She yanked the door open. An expression of surprise ran over her face. “Cameron, it’s –

The blobs threw themselves forward. Eve stepped through, slamming the door behind her. It vanished instantly. With an aggrieved roar, the blobs turned to Cameron.

Cameron’s eyes widened.
Their faces resembled a crudely formed version of Mr Grey’s
…

He backed away down the carriage, pushing through
the tapestry that covered the link to the Temple of the Door.

Morgan was in the doorway of the next carriage, waving frantically. “Jump across!” he shouted. “That stone moggy’s only gone and pulled out the pin that holds –”

There was a sharp, scraping sound and suddenly Morgan was a lot further away.

The distance between the carriages was growing.

The gangway plank had gone – fallen away onto the track. Morgan’s temple carriage – still coupled to the driving steam engine – was fast gaining speed, getting further and further ahead. Cameron’s garden carriage meanwhile continued to travel at an incredible pace, carried forward by momentum alone. The wind whipped in his face, roaring in his ears like a howl…

“Jump!” yelled Morgan across the void.

“I can’t!” Cameron screamed back as the rails raced below. “It’s going too fast! I’ll fall under –”

“You’ve got to!”

Cameron turned back to the carriage – the grey blob men were almost upon him, their lumpen features contorted into angry leers.

He took a deep breath. There wasn’t anything else he could do –

He jumped.

“Yeeaaaaaaa–

ooooooooooow!”

In midair, Cameron’s shout turned from a human cry of terror to something else entirely. The carriage in front was too far away, so he leapt at an angle, heading for the railway sidings instead. A steep bank covered with a tangle of grass, trees and bushes rushed towards him.

No clear place to fall.

This is gonna hurt.

His vision sharpened – like autofocus on a camera kicking in – and everything seemed to slow.

He would bend his legs and land on all fours, duck and roll –

An impact – hard earth, stones – a tumble – the world turned 360 degrees. The air was knocked out of him.

Cameron hit the ground in the shape of a wolf.

He had no time to take stock of his unexpected transformation. He bounded up, wolf claws fast finding purchase, and shook free the fragments of human clothing that still clung to his newly furred body. A sharp pain stabbed in his front shoulder. He ignored it, and zigzagged sure-footedly down the bank.

The pace of the engine-less carriage was only just
beginning to falter. He darted past its side – running along the edge of the tracks – then back onto the line in front.

Cameron could call on a good turn of speed in wolf-form, but he was no match for Janus’s locomotive at full throttle. The front carriage continued to gain distance. He could see two grey men swarming up the end of the coach and onto the roof, pulling themselves forward, hand over puffy hand. They must’ve jumped the gap just after he leapt from the train.

They weren’t after him
… Whatever they wanted was still onboard.

With a whistle-scream, the train snaked into a tunnel and Cameron followed. The light level fell away and his eyes narrowed instinctively. In the confined space, the steam from the engine billowed into a thick cloud. Only the greasy touch of the railway sleepers below his pads let him know he wasn’t drifting away into muggy darkness. Scent drew him on: the steam mingled with the sugary-sweet mushroom stink of the Greys.

Cameron’s lip curled, exposing his incisors. There was something subtly wrong about the Greys. They provoked him – and not just by threatening his friends. It was like they didn’t belong, like they had no right to be on the Parallel.

Like it was his duty to chase them down
…

Daylight flared, and he was once again outside. The track banked sharply round a double bend, heading towards a second tunnel. Set into a high wall beneath the city streets, the entrance was low, with jagged flagstones projecting down like teeth. The opening burned with a rippling red light.

Cameron slowed. The Parallel song sounded a warning inside his mind: this tunnel wasn’t just another part of the Parallel landscape, but a portal leading on to the Daemon World itself…

The train hared into it and vanished, swallowed up by the stony maw.

A tearing sensation ran through his chest. His wolf-self desperately wanted to follow – to throw himself in and to hell with the consequences. But his human side urged caution. Morgan had warned him about Daemonic, told him most of the inhabitants hadn’t encountered a living human being in centuries. Even in wolf form, Cameron would be in danger…

Morgan.

His best friend.

Who he couldn’t leave to fight the Greys alone
…

Head down, Cameron raced forward, only for the decision to be snatched away from him. With a guttural sound, the yawning tunnel mouth flexed and contracted. The flagstones bit down, clamping into the earth and sealing the entrance shut. Cameron skidded to a halt.

A dirt-flecked lightbulb pinged, calmly illuminating a sign:

* DAEMON WORLD TRANSFER IN PROGRESS *

ACCESS TO AUTHORISED VEHICLES ONLY
BY ORDER OF JANUS.

He reared up and howled. As he beat out his frustration on the stonework, his paws resolved into fists, and he
found himself abruptly human once more.

One of the many difficult things about being a werewolf was sorting out the clothes. He’d said that to Eve once, and she’d almost died laughing.

“You’ve problems matching your t-shirt to your pointy ears and tail?”

That hadn’t been what he’d meant at all,
clearly
. He’d been talking about practicalities: the sort of things Morgan – who had a lifetime of Were experience – guided him on. You had to be ready to take on a distinctly different body shape for three Fat Moon nights a month. You needed clothes that would slip off easily when the change took over, and a stash for when you shifted back the next day. You needed food: plenty of it, both before and after, to fuel the complex process that re-knitted and reshaped bones and cartilage, and grew fur, teeth and claws.

If you didn’t prepare – as Cameron had explained to Eve – the consequences could be anything from
hugely
dangerous (turning into a large and extremely hungry predator) to a little embarrassing (transforming back into a naked human).

“So if you ever meet a big black wolf looking sheepish one morning –”

“I should search out a sweatshirt and some joggers, turn my back, and not ask any awkward questions?”

“That’s about right, yeah.”

He’d had no warning this time, Cameron reflected, as he tracked his way back along the rails, shivering. He would gladly have turned wolf again, donning his snug fur against the cold, but he didn’t know how. The wolf
lay buried deep inside him most of the time, and he had no way to reach it.

Morgan had told him that down in the Daemon World, Weres could shapeshift whenever they chose. On the Parallel and in the Human World, however, the full moon would call you each month, triggering the change whether you wanted it or not. Full-blooded Weres could – with proper training – resist the call, or at least lessen its effects, but even they could not summon it at will. And as for changing into a wolf outwith the nights of the Fat Moon? That was completely unheard of.

Twice now, the shift had happened of its own volition. First fighting off the Weaver Daemon, and again when he’d leapt from the train. He’d been frightened the first time, uncertain what was happening, but on this occasion his overwhelming emotion was one of relief. The wolf’s agility had allowed him to walk away from that jump with no worse injury than a staved shoulder. Would a human have survived? It seemed to Cameron the change had come exactly when he’d needed it most.

The wolf had saved him, and he was grateful.

Scanning the tracks around the point he’d jumped, he managed to find both his trainers and pulled them on. His jeans and jacket had fallen a little further away, and proved to be in worse condition: ripped apart as he’d transformed. He felt in his pockets to retrieve his keys and belongings, and drew out a silver packet: a foil blanket, like marathon runners wore, all neatly folded up. It was leftover from a trade with a wood spirit who’d exchanged knowledge of herbs for frost protection for her saplings. Shaking the blanket open, Cameron draped it over his shoulders and wrapped it tight around
his body.

He’d pass for human now – at least for one daft enough to go running in January – and not draw many suspicious glances on his way back to the shop. He’d organised with Eve and Morgan to meet there if they ever got separated.

Shifting to the Human World, he walked along the cycle path, nodding to the occasional fellow runner. As he climbed the stairs that led up to Scotland Street in Edinburgh’s New Town, he spotted a semi-circular opening recessed into the wall. A well-used basketball hoop was attached to a row of steel bars blocking off the dank space beyond.

He’d found the Human World equivalent of the tunnel to Daemonic. Just another forgotten part of the city. People probably never even gave it as second glance as they ran or cycled past, or shot baskets at the shuttered gate.

He hesitated, feeling a surge of anger. If Morgan and Eve hadn’t made it out, he’d come back here and tear those bars down.
He’d force his way in, find a way back to them somehow
…

His hands shook.

Perhaps the wolf wasn’t buried so deeply after all.

“Morgan? Eve?”

Cameron’s voice echoed back from the deserted shop. It had been a vain hope they’d both be waiting, full of stories about their adventures.

Still, it wasn’t as if he was without resources… He’d learnt so much running the business this past year. There were people and daemons he could talk to, books
he could consult. All sorts of things! He’d track down Morgan and Eve, rescue them if he had to, respond to the Court summons, take on Mr Grey and Dr Black…

He sank into the chair, momentarily overwhelmed. Where to begin?

On the corner of the desk, the lump that had been Mr Grey’s chin squatted. It seemed bigger than he remembered, and he couldn’t shake the uncanny notion it was watching him.
What connection did it have to the Greys on the train?
He prodded it with a pencil and it pulsed damply.

He moved to the storeroom, returning with a fresh set of clothes and a covered plate. He scoffed the stale cake from below the cover, recharging some vital energy, but his real goal was the lid. With a swift motion, he clapped the patterned dome down over the lump.

“That’ll teach you to sit and look at me with… no eyes.”

A message light blinked from the answerphone and he eagerly thumbed a button, hoping for news. It triggered a long series of clicks.

“– Cam! It’s Amy! Have you
still
not got a new mobile? Seriously? Who doesn’t have a mobile? Well, you don’t obviously; otherwise I wouldn’t be leaving you this message… Anyway, I had to let you know, she got it! My old mum’s gone and got the job! So we’re gonna be moving through to Edinburgh. Can you believe it? Not right away – I’m gonna have to stay with my nan till term’s over, but this summer – boom! This town isn’t going to know what hit it! And we can go to the same school again –”

There was a garbled sound and the message juddered
to a halt. He opened the lid of the machine and a cassette ejected, spewing yards of tape. Like nearly everything else in the shop, the answerphone was years out of date.

“Oh Amy. You broke the phone. You talked it to death.”

They’d been friends for ages, growing up in Cauldlockheart, back when life was simple and he’d lived with his dad. Cameron had been awkward and uninterested in sport, preferring daydreams about guitars and bands; Amy big and bolshy, with a lilting Scots-Italian accent and a refusal to back down in a fight. Seeing less of her was the one thing he regretted about leaving that gloomy town.

He began the laborious process of detangling the tape. Somehow, that felt easier to deal with than his real problems…

He’d never found a way to explain his new life to Amy. No matter how great she was, she was still only human – and human without Inheritance at that. She had no idea the Parallel even existed. One of the most terrifying moments he’d had was coming back from a trading mission to find her unexpectedly in the shop, deep in conversation with Eve.

“We’ve been discussing your faults,” Eve said brightly. “Which are numerous.”

“What are you doing here? How did you even find this place?”

“Weird and arcane powers!” Amy flared her eyes and made witchy movements with her hands. “Also known as Google. I put in ‘record shop’, ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘scary old woman’ and there was a surprisingly long page. Loads of people going on about stuff they’d found here,
and some pretty bizarre rumours too… Eve’s told me everything.”

“She has?” Cameron shot an alarmed look at Eve.

“Isn’t it strange?” Eve said pointedly. “How before your dad died, neither of us knew
we had a cousin?
”

“Oh! Yes. That was… odd.”

“I could tell you were related at once, as soon as I looked at her,” Amy said, oblivious. “Eve must be
way
more fun to live with than your gran. When’s the old lady getting back from her research trip anyway?”

Amy was relatively contained during term time – she never had much money for the train – but if she lived in the same city… How long would it be till she found out all about him?

Cameron sometimes felt like he was two people: the ordinary boy from Cauldlockheart, a bit shy and lacking in confidence, and the world-shifting wolf-boy who had a totally mad and often wonderful existence. He loved his new life, and fiercely wanted to protect it. Now it seemed like his identities were colliding – just as things were falling apart.

He picked up one of the guitars he kept at the shop, placed it on his lap and began to absent-mindedly pick out a tune. Music had always helped him, at both the happiest and saddest times in his life. It was something he could focus on, and lose himself in: a perfect world of its own, far from any worries or anxiety.

He was just contemplating a particularly tricky chord progression when a movement out the corner of his eye distracted him. The cake cover was shuffling along the desk… The dome bumped into the discarded cassette, lifted, drew in the tape, and moved on.

He put the guitar down, and moved quietly to the desk. He whipped the lid off. A long brown strand of tape was vanishing into the lump, sucked in like spaghetti. It froze, mid-sook.

“Caught you! What are you up to?”

A tiny mouth puckered, revealing chalky grey teeth. “You are ordered to attend the Court of the Parallel. The case of Dr Black versus Lady Ives o’ the Black Hill is called!”

He stared at the lump. “That wasn’t meant to be for another two days!”

“The case has been brought forward,” it gurgled smugly. “You must attend. You must produce Isobel Ives or surrender your tenancy of the shop.”

“You can’t do that!” Cameron thought frantically. They had gone off in search of the ward so they’d have a safe base of operations – not that it had worked out. Morgan and Eve were still missing, and he hadn’t even
begun
to tackle the threat posed by Black and Grey. “What if I say no? You can’t make me.”