Changeling (22 page)

Trey sat in the back of the Mercedes and stared out at the lines of cars around them. He thought about his mother and father – memories of them came pouring back to him, memories that he had long since banished into a dark corner of his mind. Great tears slid down his cheeks and he made no attempt to stop them as he had done in the past. He let them fall into his lap, completely surrendering to the weight of the sadness that pressed down upon him.

The other occupants of the car sat quietly, looking anywhere but at the crying boy, allowing the young man to grieve.

They only stopped once during their headlong rush to meet the creature that was hoping to lure them to their deaths. Jens pulled into a small lay-by at Lucien’s request, and the vampire jumped out of the car and retrieved something from the boot.

Tom leaned across the seat during this brief interruption, gesturing with his head towards Lucien as he stood outside. ‘Evening fix time,’ he explained in a conspiratorial tone, making a drinking gesture with his hand.

The sun had finally disappeared behind the horizon now, and when Lucien climbed back into the car he no longer needed the hat and gloves that he had worn throughout the day. Trey watched him as he approached the car. He looked
different
now: he seemed to crackle with that same intensity that Trey had witnessed during their training session together.

Sundown is his time, thought Trey. Heaven help anything that tries to get in his way now. Lucien was in his seat and they pulled out and continued their journey again, merging with the last of the early-evening commuters on the road.

‘Jens will drive us to the bottom of the road leading to the warehouse,’ the vampire explained. ‘He will wait for our signal. If, and when, we escape with Alexa, we will make straight for the airport. Jens will organize the cleanup operation at this end. Tom, do you have the two-way radios?’

Tom dug into his bag and handed one each to Jens and Lucien. He hooked a third to the jerkin that he was wearing.

‘Don’t I get one?’ Trey asked.

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘D’ya think that I want the sounds of a bloody great werewolf growling and barking down the radio at me?’ He turned back to Lucien. ‘Lucien, I know everything that we said earlier, but are we seriously going to just walk in the front door?’

‘Yes. We’ll naturally be as cautious as possible, but I don’t think that we’ll be in any danger until we are all inside the factory itself. Caliban will want us all in one place at the same time so that he can deal with us en masse. He has Alexa, so he knows that you and I will come. Trey is an added bonus – the icing on the cake, as it were.’

‘Wouldn’t we be better waiting until the back-up arrives? Just in case anything goes wrong. If we needed help, we’d be able to get it quickly that way.’

‘If we had more time, and Caliban did not have the Ring of Amon, then that would be my choice too. But we simply do not have that luxury, Tom. We have to do it like this.’

‘Jeez, it’s going to be like the bleedin’ gunfight at the O.K. Corral.’

‘It’s not far now, Lucien,’ Jens said as they came to the bottom of the motorway exit ramp. ‘My people will be here shortly. If you wanted to wait for them—’

‘No. Thank you, Jens, but we’ll be fine. Tell your people to wait. If we need you, we will contact you.’

Lucien turned to look at Trey. ‘As soon as we get out of the car, I want you to morph. I want you to stay in your werewolf form until this is all over and done. On no account should you return back to your human form until we are out of that building with Alexa safely in our hands again. You should be safe if you stay with Tom, but if anything happens to him I want you to get out of there and get to safety as quickly as possible. As soon as we have located Alexa, you and Tom are to leave with her. Don’t wait for me. I must deal with my brother and try to retrieve the Ring. Tom, signal Jens and all of you get to the airport as swiftly as you can and return to London. I repeat –
do not wait for me
.’

Tom glanced over at Trey, an unreadable look on his face as he slowly shook his head. ‘Doc Holliday and the O.K. bleedin’ Corral,’ he whispered, before leaning forward in his seat to look out of the front of the car as their destination appeared up ahead.

The car’s tyres ground against the loose gravel at the bottom of the road as the car came to a halt; a small cloud of fine dust flowering up into the surrounding air before dispersing on the light breeze. It was getting much darker now, and they could just make out the outline of the factory building in the distance as they got out of the car.

Tom opened the boot and placed the grenades and ammunition clips in the various pockets, loops and straps of the sleeveless jerkin that he had on, slinging the shotgun over his back. Picking up the sub-machine gun, he made sure that the weapon was ready for use, going through the checks as though they were second nature to him. When he finally looked up, he saw Lucien and the werewolf looming over him. A crooked smile played on his lips as he looked at Trey. ‘Jeez, you are a scary-looking beast, Trey Laporte, so you are.’

He hoped that the snarl from the giant man-wolf was a friendly acknowledgement.

‘Ready?’ Lucien asked.

Trey followed the two older men as they started towards the building. Layers of smells and sounds assaulted his senses from all around and he felt the same dizziness that he had encountered when he had first morphed in front of Lucien. He concentrated, and found that he was able to screen out most of the white noise and quickly regain his equilibrium. As he took in the myriad of smells he thought that he could detect the faint scent of Alexa in the air, and the thought that she had been dragged to this desolate place against her will caused the hackles on the back of his neck to rise and a low rumbling growl to issue from deep inside his barrel-chest.

His eyes flicked towards the sky and the stars, and something stirred within him – a deep and powerful feeling that he had not experienced before suddenly flooding through him. On the previous occasions that he had transformed he had always been inside, but now he was outside he was filled with such a bewildering sense of
rightness
that he had to fight back the sudden urge to throw back his great wolf head and howl in joy at the euphoria of it all. He had told Alexa that he had felt
alive
in his werewolf state, but this feeling was amplified a hundredfold now. It was as if
this
was where he was truly meant to be: a wolf outside with the wind and the grass and the night sky open above him.

A small cough from Tom brought him out of his reverie, and he forced himself to push these strange thoughts aside and to concentrate again on the task in hand.

The building was about fifty metres away and in complete darkness, but his wolf eyes could pick out the tiniest details of the brickwork around the door, with the broken sign saying Mittendorf hanging above it, as though he were viewing it all through high-powered night goggles.

Whoever the Mittendorfs were, they had not used this place in a long time.

Weeds grew up in the wasteland surrounding the building, and most of the windows were either boarded up or smashed from the over-exuberant attention of the local youth, who had no doubt attacked the place when drunk on the contents of the empty bottles and cans that lay all about.

Trey scanned the windows and thought that he could detect movement behind some of them, as though some people were looking out at their approach while trying to stay hidden. He scanned the windows again, but there was nothing solid to fix upon – the figures behind those broken panes were mere
suggestions
of the things that were really there, and he gave up, sure that he would come to realize what they were soon enough.

They were no more than ten metres from the entrance when two small lights suddenly went on on either side of the open door, their smutty glass shades giving the bulbs beneath a yellow hue so that they looked like jaundiced eyes opening, peering out at them from the grim countenance that was the building’s face.

‘I don’t like this one bit,’ Tom said in a low voice, flicking the safety switch up on the gun.

Lucien walked on slightly ahead. His step was so light it hardly disturbed the tiny stones coughed up by the broken asphalt that had once been the path to this place.

They paused in front of the open door, surveying the dark interior. A corridor led away from the entrance, ending in a set of stairs at the rear of the building, and a series of doors led off from either side of the passageway, the rooms behind them dark and foreboding.

‘Oh great, a bloody rabbit warren,’ Tom groaned. ‘We’d need a full assault team to do this properly. This is madness, Lucien—’

Lucien held up a hand for him to stop. He closed his eyes and stood motionless for a moment, and everything ceased. It was that pure
stop
that Trey had experienced back at the care home just when he had first met Lucien, as though the world had momentarily ceased spinning and everything in it held its breath and waited for it to start again.

Then suddenly it did. Trey blinked as the cacophony of sounds that had filled the night before Lucien had gone into his trance-like state suddenly assaulted his ears again, and looked over at Tom, who simply shrugged his shoulders at him, a don’t-ask-me expression on his face.

‘He has Alexa on the second floor,’ Lucien said, and walked in through the door.

The rooms on this floor had once housed office workers, but they were now merely empty shells. The remains of the furniture had been smashed or set on fire by the vandals. A rusting metal filing cabinet sat in one corner, its bottom drawer jutting out like a child sulking at the mistreatment that it had had to endure.

The factory smelled of decay and neglect. To Trey, it appeared as a brown-and-black powdery smell that filled an area of his mind which, as a human, he had simply ceased to use, and he wondered if this was how prehistoric man might have experienced scents and smells when out hunting with spear and bow: all of their senses dialled up to maximum as they sought their prey, desperate not to become prey themselves.

Suddenly something black darted out from a corner of the room that they were passing. Tom quickly levelled the gun and would have squeezed the trigger if Lucien had not calmly raised his hand and lifted the gun up, away from the creature scurrying in the shadows.

‘Just a rat,’ he said, and continued up the corridor.

‘I get the impression that this place is full of them,’ Tom said in a low voice, ‘and some of them are a hell of a lot bigger and of the two-legged variety.’ The deep, low growl that came from behind him made the hairs on the back of the Irishman’s neck stand to attention.

Lucien walked past the remaining rooms without so much as a glance. He paused at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Tom and Trey to catch up.

They ascended the stairs, stopping at the top of the first flight at a signal from Lucien, who angled his head, listening for something. Trey turned his own sensory amplifier up to full and let the entire gamut of sounds and smells in the factory wash through him. He heard
everything.
And the sounds, with the scents intricately entwined in and through them, told him that there were creatures on the next floor that were waiting for them: shifting around in the dark shadows, their excitement and their hunger carrying on the musty air as they waited for their opportunity to attack. There was a stench of evil that drifted down from the space above their heads – it oozed slowly down the staircase like a dense black fog, and reminded Trey of the smell of death and decay that he had smelled on Hopper when he had first morphed in his presence.

Lucien sensed it too. He looked at his companions and signalled with a movement of his hand that they were to take the next flight slowly and carefully. He moved off first, silently mounting the tiled steps and motioning for the others to follow. They stopped at the top, tense and alert, anticipating an attack. But none came.

Another darkened corridor stretched out ahead of them, ending with a tall leaded window that allowed the moonlight to peer into the murk – its silver light reflected in hundreds of broken shards of glass on the floor – a broken mosaic of light in the darkness. Halfway up the corridor was a crossroads. Two perpendicular spurs led off in opposite directions and the meagre light coming in from the window was unable to penetrate far into these dark arteries. Somewhere up ahead, something let out a deep throaty rumble, like a tiger’s sonorous snarl as it spies the deer through the tall grass. Tom looked round at Trey, flinching slightly at the sight of the giant wolf standing with every muscle tensed, lips curled back to reveal those long, sharp incisors.

Trey opened up the part of his mind that controlled his olfactory senses and tried to locate Alexa’s scent again, filtering it out from the myriad of smells in the place. He was certain that she was on this floor, but the scent came from too many directions, as though she had been moved around a lot. The three approached the junction cautiously, until Alexa’s piercing scream tore through the silence. They started down the left alley in the direction of the sound and then stopped as a second scream sounded directly behind them.

‘Divide and conquer,’ Tom said.

Lucien nodded. ‘I’ll take this corridor – you and Trey take the other.’ He paused and gently grabbed Trey by the forearm, looking up into his wolf features. ‘Stay close to Tom. And remember, I want you to run to safety if anything happens to him. If you manage to get Alexa, remember our plan and get out of here with her as quickly as you can. Good luck, Trey. Don’t do anything stupid.’

Trey nodded at him, a low growl coming from deep within his chest. Something made him lean forward and lick Lucien’s face, his long tongue rasping at the man’s beard.

‘C’mon, Trey,’ Tom said, and pulling the werewolf along behind him, they moved off in their opposite directions. Trey paused for a second and glanced behind him as they crossed the junction, watching the back of Lucien as he disappeared into the darkness alone.