Changeling (7 page)

He turned to look up at her.

She held his eyes with her own, her stare open and frank. ‘I think you already knew,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps you weren’t absolutely certain, but I think that you had a good idea about what my father really is,’ she continued.

‘That’s absurd. How could I possibly have known?’

‘Maybe you have talents and senses that you choose not to recognize,’ she said, giving a little shrug of her shoulders. ‘I don’t know, maybe you’re not as “normal” as you’d like to think. Have you ever felt that, Trey? Felt that you aren’t like the other people around you?’

He paused, taking a deep breath and considering what she had just said. He found both her tone and the question unsettling. Had he known? Had he somehow guessed in that moment that Lucien had removed his sunglasses to look at him that he was not human?

‘I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. Lucien is a vampire. Why would I willingly put myself into the hands of something like that?’

‘Because maybe you feel that you and he are not so different after all?’ Alexa raised one eyebrow and tilted her head slightly to one side. It was an action, Trey thought, that made her look even more attractive and he was once again struck by just how pretty she really was.

What was he thinking?
This was Lucien’s daughter. Lucien Charron, who had calmly admitted to being a fully paid-up member of the undead. And here he was, eyeing her up, when only seconds ago he’d been imagining her father tearing his throat open to feast on his blood. He stopped and looked at her suspiciously, his heart smashing against his ribcage.

She was his daughter, so she must be one too.

He stood up and backed away, holding the pathetic letter opener in front of him in one hand.

‘You’re hypnotizing me right now, aren’t you? That’s what you do, isn’t it? Vampires put their victims in a kind of trance. I’m not thinking straight because you’ve hypnotized me and later on you’re all going to feast on me!’ The words spewed from his mouth and he heard the hysteria rising in his voice. He had to concentrate to stop the hand holding the letter opener shaking too violently.

A small smile played on her lips and she raised her hands in front of her as if to show him that she was of no threat to him. ‘I’m not hypnotizing you, Trey, and I am not a vampire.’ She kept her hands held out in front of her, and stepped to her right to stand directly in front of a large free-standing mirror. She turned so that she faced him in the mirror’s surface, holding his eyes with hers. ‘See?’ she said, indicating the image in the silvered glass with a brief nod of her head. ‘Reflection in the mirror. You
do
know that vampires don’t have reflections in mirrors, don’t you?’ With a soft sigh she turned back to face him, fixing his eyes with her own.

‘I’m a halfling. My mother was a human, I have never fed upon the blood of a vampire, so I am neither undead or encumbered with all of the . . .
difficulties
that my father has to deal with.’

Trey could hear the sound of her voice as clearly as if she had walked up and whispered in his ear, but her lips had not moved. He felt a gentle kind of
pushing
at his subconscious, not unpleasant and not at all threatening. He blinked, trying to take this in as her voice continued in his mind.

‘My father has put himself at considerable risk to save you today, Trey. He has exposed himself to forces and people that, even now, will be using their power to find you and kill you. If he had not acted when he did, there is every chance that you would by now be dead. He has the answers to questions that you do not yet even know you need to ask. And all we request in return is that you listen to these things before you make up your mind about us and about what you want to do.’

Under and between these words were swirling layers of overlapping colour that wove in and out of them. He felt safe, as though he was a small child being enveloped in a warm, soft blanket. He had no doubt that she was using some kind of magic on him to keep him from losing it completely, but, despite this, he was strangely calmed, grateful even, for the brake that she had applied to the panic that had threatened to carry him away with it.

‘You’re hypnotizing me
now
, aren’t you?’ Trey said in a small voice.

‘Kind of,’ Alexa answered, speaking again now. ‘I wanted you to calm down quickly before you keeled over and hurt yourself. You really do need to think about breathing a little more often.’ She smiled at him, and he felt himself smiling back.

‘You’re telling me that I’m not in any danger,’ Trey stammered. ‘Is that right? That despite all this madness – vampires, magic, revelations about myself – I’m not in any
immediate
danger.’

‘About the only imminent danger that you are in tonight is having to face one of Mrs Magilton’s meals. She tries very hard, but she simply isn’t a very good cook. Dad’s too soft and refuses to let her go. She only does one dish particularly well and that’s cottage pie. And there is only so much minced beef and mashed potato that anyone can stand.’ She did that thing that she did when she cocked her head to one side again, and Trey felt himself reddening.

‘Stick with it for a little while longer, Trey. If you don’t get any satisfactory answers and you still think that you’re in peril here, all you have to do is ask to leave and my father will take you anywhere that you want to go. If you don’t want my father to take you anywhere, Tom or I would be happy to help – we are neither of us bloodsucking fiends, as you’d put it.’

Trey held her gaze as though he might be able to find something in her eyes to belie what she had just told him. Eventually he nodded and lowered the weapon that he had been brandishing towards her throughout this exchange. He looked down at the small tool in his hand and flushed red again with the realization of just how utterly pathetic he must have looked waving it around.

She was still standing with her back to the mirror, a sly, coquettish look on her face, and he found himself imagining what it would be like to kiss her on the lips.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
came that intimate whisper in his ear, and he could no longer bear to look her in the eye as his face burned crimson red.

‘Your bathroom is through there,’ she said, indicating a sliding door on his right. ‘And there’s a walk-in wardrobe through that archway over there. Unfortunately Tom picked out the clothes we got for you. Mostly skate wear with some sports gear thrown in that he thought you’d like. Actually, there are some pretty cool jeans in there and a hoodie that I’ve got my eye on if you don’t want it.’ She smiled before turning her back on him and moving towards the door. She added, over her shoulder, ‘As Dad said, we can go out soon and you can pick yourself a whole load of stuff to your own liking. I know some great shops in London that I bet you’ll love.’

He watched her as she started to leave the room.

‘Just one thing, Alexa.’ Trey called after her, and she stopped in the opening, turning towards him again. ‘That mind-speaking thing you do – how did you learn that?’

‘My mother was a sorceress. Before she died, when I was young, she started to teach me magecraft. I’ve carried on learning from books and the people that work for my father. I’m pretty good, if I say so myself.’

‘Can I ask you not to read my mind any more? I’m not comfortable with it.’

Alexa laughed and gently shook her head at him. ‘I can’t
read
minds, Trey. I’m nowhere near
that
good yet. It’s just a simple thought-transfer spell. It’s all one-way traffic, I’m afraid.’

‘But earlier, when you said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” how did you know—’

‘Trey,’ she interrupted, ‘when a boy stares at a girl’s lips and starts licking his own, it’s really not too difficult to work out what he’s thinking.’ She turned and went to leave, stopping one more time. ‘Like I said, just try to hang on in there. We’ll see you in the kitchen for dinner when you feel good and ready. Take your time.’ She gave him a little wave and added with a playful smile, ‘Oh, and if you’re going to hang around here for a while, it might pay to learn the correct terminology. Vampires don’t
eat
people, they tear their throats out and mercilessly drain them of their blood. And the mirror thing? Rubbish. All vamps have reflections. Why wouldn’t they?’ She winked at him, before finally leaving and pushing the door shut.

Trey looked at the back of the closed door. Despite everything, he found himself smiling again and he resolved to at least listen to what Lucien was so determined he should tell him.

He walked into the bathroom that was bigger than his entire bedroom back at the home. Stepping into the shower cubicle, he stood beneath the hot jets of water and allowed the day’s grime to be washed away from him, toying with the silver amulet that hung around his neck. He had to force himself not to dwell too much on what had happened so far that day, redirecting his thoughts to more neutral and pleasant things, because when he didn’t, fresh floods of panic and doubt roared through him, convincing him that he was insane to still be there. No, he’d listen to what they had to say and then make up his mind what he would do.

When he had finished in the bathroom, he quickly dressed, putting on some of the clothes that Tom had bought him, and left the room on shaking legs to eat with his new hosts.

They had sat down to eat around a large, circular table next to the kitchen area. Dinner consisted of a fish and seafood stew that Trey actually thought was one of the best things he’d ever eaten. Alexa kept him at ease, asking him about his life in the care facility and how he had coped with living there. He surprised himself by eating the entire plate of food, losing himself in the conversation and briefly managing to shut out most of the nagging thoughts that nibbled away at him whenever he allowed his mind to wander.

The vast floor-to-ceiling windows that filled the south wall of the main room extended along the same wall in the kitchen, and Lucien sat staring through these at the dark waters of the river Thames throughout most of the meal, hardly touching his food. Trey kept stealing glances at him, and each time he did his heart quickened and banged against its bony enclosure as he thought about the creature that he was sharing the table with. He wondered at how this had all come about. He was a normal boy living a normal, if somewhat dull, life and suddenly he was sitting around a table with a vampire, his
halfling
daughter and a man that looked like he would quite happily reach across the table and gut him with his dinner knife without thinking twice about it.

Keep it together, Trey, he told himself, and thought about what Alexa had said to him before dinner.

A silence descended upon the room once everyone had finished eating, and Trey couldn’t help but notice that it was Lucien who looked the most concerned and distracted of the people sitting around the table. The worry-worm wriggled and squirmed again, burrowing into the tiny island of calm he had managed to create for himself. He began to imagine what it was that Lucien had to tell him that was causing a creature like a
vampire
to look so worried.

‘Do you like football?’ Tom asked, cutting through the silence and speaking for the first time during the entire meal.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Trey replied, completely taken back by the question that seemed so utterly at odds with the situation.

‘Which team do you support?’

‘Tottenham Hotspur.’

‘Humph,’ snorted Tom. ‘Celtic. Now there’s a
proper
football team. Best bloody football team in the country.’

Trey considered backing down. He certainly didn’t want to upset the man with the ugly scar sitting opposite him, but he had been through enough already today, and something stirred inside him that made him answer back with a firmness in his voice that he had stifled until now.

‘Actually, I don’t think they’d make it in the Premiership. I think that if they ever got a chance to play in England, they’d struggle against a lot of Championship sides.’

Tom looked over at him. The hard stare that Trey faced was particularly unpleasant, and he had a tough time meeting it. Suddenly Tom’s face broke into a smile. It was a lopsided affair, the ruined side of his face lacking some of the muscles needed to complete their part of the task, so the end result was a half-smile, half-grimace that was none too appealing.

‘Maybe I’ll take you up there one day – that’s if you’re sticking around, of course – show you just how good they really are.’ He stood up and picked up his plate, reaching over for Trey’s and collecting Alexa’s and Lucien’s in turn.

‘I’d like that. But only if we get to go to Tottenham afterwards, so that you can see a proper team play.’ Trey smiled back at him and received a wink from the tall Irishman before he turned his back and stepped up into the kitchen area to load the dishes into the dishwasher.

‘Shall we move to the reading room?’ Lucien said, standing up from the table. ‘I think it’s time for me to tell you some of those things that I promised to, Trey.’ He looked over at Tom, who was on his haunches, loading crockery into the racks of the machine. ‘Will you join us, Tom?’

‘I’ll be right through, Lucien, as soon as I’ve got rid of the worst of this. You go ahead.’

They retired to a small, book-lined room that was accessed from the main living room. It was, in comparison to the other rooms in the apartment, relatively small. There were no windows in the room, but a skylight in the ceiling revealed the night sky above their heads, the light from long-dead stars winking at them. Artificial light was provided by elegant swan-necked lamps that hung from the walls. Three tall curved reading lamps – their shades hanging over the chairs, like snooping neighbours peering over the garden fence, were also in the room, but these were not turned on yet. Trey looked over at the studded leather door set into the furthest wall and wondered what lay beyond.

The walls were filled with high bookshelves, and Trey guessed that the majority of the books on the shelves were incredibly old. Two comfortable-looking black sofas faced each other across a smoked-glass coffee table, empty except for one of the ancient volumes, which lay face down in the centre.