Child of the Gryphon
David Lugsden
Copyright © 2021 David Lugsden
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: David Lugsden
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
For Tammy,
Without whose love and support, this book would never have been written.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
About The Author
Child of the Gryphon
PROLOGUE
The forest had fallen deathly quiet.
Tarik glanced around nervously, straining his eyes to see. He was enveloped in near total darkness, only slivers of light from the full moon were penetrating the dense canopy above. His entourage were flanking him and were comprised of some of the bravest people he knew, yet he could sense their fear, which meant that the creatures that were now surrounding them could probably taste it. He could not see where the enemy lay, he could not see how many they numbered, yet he knew they were there. Their rasping breaths crackled in the silence like electricity. Moreover, Tarik knew they were there because he could smell them. A stench of rotting meat and decay hung in the air like a sinister mist.
‘Can you see them?’ he whispered to his wife, Chione. Her night-vision was usually exceptional.
‘No, wherever they are, they’re well-hidden... but they’re close,’ she replied.
Tarik’s mouth was as dry as sandpaper. He squeezed his wife’s hand and leant in close enough to smell the sweetness of her hair. ‘When I say, you need to run as fast as you can and don’t stop until you’re absolutely sure you’ve lost them.’
‘Tarik, no... I can’t leave you...’ Chione said, her voice quivering.
He turned to look at his wife, but all he could see of her was the flickers of moonlight reflecting in her eyes and off strands of her long, golden hair.
‘Chione, you have to... our son’s life depends on it!’
‘Then you take him – you can fly him out of here!’
Tarik shook his head. ‘The canopy is too thick, I’d never make it through. They’d take out my wings and the resulting fall would kill us both. It has to be you.’
He leant in and kissed his wife on her forehead, knowing full well that it was the last time he would ever do so. He groped blindly for his infant son, then bent down to kiss his forehead too. Tarik looked at his wife again, wishing that he could gaze into her deep brown eyes for one final time, but seeing only glimmers of reflected moonlight.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I always have and no matter what, I always will.’
‘I love you too,’ she replied shakily.
‘Go, now. As fast you can. Protect our child.’
Wiping away her stinging tears, Chione held her baby close, turned and fled just as the assailants attacked. She forced herself to block out the sounds of her beloved husband fighting in vain for his life. The silence of the forest was shattered with numerous bloodcurdling screams.
Sidestepping a tree, Chione twisted awkwardly as a muscular arm swung wildly at her son. She screamed in agony as the attacker’s two-inch-long claws sunk deeply into her right side, just beneath her ribcage. Fighting to ignore the lightning bolts of pain exploding from her side, Chione pushed onwards and the claws were wrenched free, but not before gouging deep channels into her soft flesh. Blood poured down her right leg as she sprinted onwards. Low-hanging branches and brambles whipped and slashed mercilessly at her. But worse still, her assailants were still hot on her heels.
She felt faint.
She felt nauseous.
But she had to keep going.
No matter what, she had to get her child to safety.
CHAPTER ONE
AN ANGEL AMONG MEN
Alan Millar’s heart was racing.
His Porsche 911 tore along the motorway, turning his fellow commuters into indistinct blurs as he passed them. Normally a safe, conscientious road user, at that moment Alan was driving like a Formula 1 racing driver. Keep it below eighty, he told himself, I haven’t got the time to be stopped by the police for speeding.
With the news he had received in the last hour, Alan’s life had been completely turned upside down. He jerked the steering wheel sharply to the right and zoomed past a haulage lorry as a smile stretched across his face. Nancy would give me such a tongue-lashing if she saw me driving like this!
Alan adored his wife, Nancy, and had done from the moment they had first met during their second year at university. They were so perfectly suited to one another that it was as though they had been carved from the same block of wood. Shortly after graduating, the couple had married and moved into their first home together. They both worked hard and their careers had flourished: Alan as an architect, Nancy as a nurse. In the evening they would come home to their charming home in the quaint, little village of Upper Blessingford and delight in each other’s company. However, despite their success, the pair craved just one more thing to make their happiness complete: a child of their own. For years they had tried unsuccessfully to start a family and even the adoption route had, until that point, failed to bear fruit. They were each on the verge of giving up hope.
Alan had been in the midst of a high profile meeting at Colossal Incorporated when his assistant had knocked on the door and entered to the grumblings and protests of the other executives present. Jonathan Davis was tall, with a frame so wiry that he looked like he could have been swept away in a strong gust of wind, yet he was honest, reliable and the person Alan trusted most at Colossal. He had hired Davis as his assistant several years before, when the young man was a fresh graduate out of university. Phones were banned during these meetings, meaning that at that moment, Davis was Alan’s only method of contact with the outside world. Without making eye contact with the other executives present, Davis hurried over to Alan, discretely slipped him his phone and whispered to him that his wife, Nancy, had been trying desperately to reach him for the last two and a half hours. Despite further protests and threats of being fired being hurled at him, Alan had hastily excused himself and walked out of the room without so much as a backwards glance. Waiting for the lift to arrive, Alan glanced at his phone: seventeen missed calls, all from Nancy.
He hit redial and almost immediately, Nancy picked up.
‘Nance what’s up? Is everything ok?’ Alan said.
‘He’s here!’ Nancy said excitedly. ‘Alan he’s here! Mrs Hansen from the adoption agency called me – I’m at the hospital looking a
t our son right now!’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can! See you soon, I love you.’
The lift doors dinged open and Alan took it all the way down to the basement car park, jumped into his car and soon after joined the main road leading out of the city centre.
***
Since leaving university, Alan had thrown himself headlong into his career and although he loved his wife, his work commitments had kept him away from home more times than he would have liked. Colossal Inc. were internationally renowned for their huge building developments and multi-million pound contracts across six of the planet’s seven continents. As one of their leading architects, Alan had flown all over the world heading up projects for them. But his dream had always been much less grand – owning his own company and working on smaller designs which would benefit his local community as opposed to the international one. After all, on the global scene he was merely a faceless drone of a huge conglomerate, another cog in the machine; on a local level however, he could make a real positive difference. If Alan were to be completely honest with himself he hadn’t once felt truly proud of his professional life. Being such a high profile corporation, there was far too much focus on image, in his opinion (sometimes at the expense of the very quality of the actual work itself!). Ever since joining Colossal, Alan felt that he had been forced to have the best of everything in order to project the appropriate image, not of himself but rather the company. In the eyes of Colossal Inc. expensive indubitably meant the best. Employees were encouraged rather forcibly into spending excessive amounts of money on expensive suits, haircuts, watches, mobile phones and even cars. Alan would happily have kept the battered yet reliable Ford Escort he’d driven around in at university. Now that car had had real character, he thought. Instead he was now driving around in a brand spanking new, sleek Porsche convertible, which was about as interesting to him as the sterile white walls of the Colossal Inc. office building. Although right now it was getting him to the hospital faster than his old Ford could ever have hoped to (one of life’s little ironies), but a family car it certainly was not. It had to go.
The Porsche screamed into the hospital car park and had barely screeched to a halt in front of the reception doors before Alan had leapt out, much to the displeasure of the parking attendant, who warned him rather irately that his car would be towed away if he did not move it immediately.
‘You can keep it!’ Alan called back over his shoulder. He burst through the main doors of the hospital, heading for the maternity ward.
As Alan sprinted along the hospital corridors he made himself a silent vow: he would not miss a moment of his new son’s childhood. His career with Colossal Incorporated was history. Another set of double doors exploded open before him and then there she was, Nancy, standing by the nursery window, looking as dazzling as she had on the first day he had met her. For a moment he stood there completely captivated by his wife; her chest-length, dark hair tumbled over her shoulders framing the flawless beauty of her face as her hazel eyes shone brightly. Alan was enchanted by his wife’s eyes in particular; he swore that at certain times of day they shone like miniature stars.
‘Hey, you, I was wondering where you’d gotten to,’ she said affectionately.
‘I’m so... so sorry,’ he pleaded between breaths, ‘I was stuck in a meeting with the bosses and they’d switched off the intercom. Jonathan had to interrupt it to pass me your message.’
‘It’s OK, darling, don’t worry. You’re here now and that’s what counts.’
‘No, it’s not OK,’ Alan insisted, ‘this job has enveloped too much of my life – our lives – and-’
‘Honey, it’s a high profile job at a major firm. You can’t expect to-’
‘Please, Nance, just let me finish. I hate my job. I hate that it’s taken me away from you on these stupid projects. I hate that I couldn’t get here any sooner... and... and I really hate that damned Porsche!’
‘Darling, you’ve had a stressful day...’
‘No, Nance, you don’t understand. I never want to be taken away from you again, and now that we’re set to be a complete family things have got to change,’ Alan insisted.
‘Alan, dear, you’re scaring me a little now...’
‘Nancy, I’m sorry, I don’t want to scare you. Look, I’m calm, really. What I wanted to say is this: I hate that Colossal is coming between us and I intend to do something about it. If you’re alright with it, then as from right now, I quit. Our lives are never going to be the same again and I want to be there for you – both of you – every step of the way.’
‘Alan, you know I will support your every decision. We’ve got some decent savings and I would love to have you around more. Now, would you like to meet your son?’
‘More than anything,’ Alan sighed, feeling a crushing weight suddenly lift from him. Trust Nancy, he thought, she had a way of improving any situation with just a few simple words.
Staring through the window of the nursery, Alan couldn’t help but notice just how different the maternity ward of a hospital was to every other part. The walls were painted soft, calming shades of baby pink and blue. The smell of disinfectant was none existent, in its place were the subtle perfumes of baby powders and lotions floating gracefully through the air. Even the lighting seemed warmer and more inviting. It’s a wonder why the rest of the hospital isn’t decorated in much the same way, Alan thought, after all it’s so peaceful and relaxing in here that-
‘There he is: second row, third from the left.’
Alan was snapped back to reality. Gazing fondly across the dozen or so cribs all with babies sleeping soundly inside, he zeroed in on the cot Nancy was pointing to and suddenly everything else in the world faded into insignificance.
There was his son.
The infant boy was wrapped tightly in a woollen blanket and fast asleep. The rising and falling of his diminutive chest was barely noticeable under the thick blanket covering him. His rosy-pink cheeks were puffed out, his tiny eyes clamped tightly shut, a sparse smattering of golden blonde hair scattered across his round head like a fine down. A perfectionist in his work, Alan knew that he could have toiled for a lifetime on any given project and never even come close to the perfection that he now witnessed before him in his son. He stretched out his arm, pulled his wife close and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. For the first time in his life, Alan Millar had everything his heart desired.
***
The couple stood there hugging each other tightly, gazing lovingly at the new addition to their household, blissfully unaware of doctors, nurses and other parents and relations coming and going from the nursery window. After what seemed like hours, but could just as well have been only minutes, the resident paediatrician approached them and broke them from their mutual absorption in their son.
‘Erm... excuse me, Mr Millar? Mrs Millar? I’m Doctor Warner. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment about young baby...’ Doctor Warner hesitated.
‘Gabriel,’ Nancy declared proudly.
‘Ah, yes... Gabriel,’ Warner continued. ‘Well as you may or may not know it is hospital procedure to carry out a full health check on all new-borns, especially those that arrive with us under such special circumstances. And well, what we have discovered with Gabriel is quite... unusual.’
‘Un-un-unusual...?’ Alan and Nancy jointly stammered, ‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘Perhaps we should step into my office,’ he said.
Doctor Warner was a kindly old doctor admired by both children and adults alike. Nancy knew him only in passing; the ward she worked in was located on the other side of the hospital. She was aware, however, that he had a gentle and caring approach to medicine and his patients, much more so than many of the doctors she had to work with day in and day out. Everything about him illustrated his calm and endearing demeanour, from his honey-like voice to his big round frame. Doctor Warner’s neatly trimmed beard and circular spectacles completed his friendly appearance. Many of his
patients fondly referred to him as ‘Doctor Teddy Bear.’
The couple obediently followed Doctor Warner through the corridors in a daze. They felt as though their perfect life stretching out before them had come to a sudden, crunching halt. In just a matter of seconds those once welcoming, warm walls were now threatening to close in around them and suffocate them. The walk to Doctor Warner’s office was agonising. It was as though they were being led to the gallows.
Doctor Warner opened the door to his office and invited them both inside. On the opposite side of the desk sat a very thin lady in her mid-fifties. Her greying hair was pulled painfully back into a tight bun. Her sharp cheekbones and jaw were offset by her soft, dark eyes, magnified enormously by her large, wire-framed glasses.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Millar, this is Gwendolyn Hansen of the Children First adoption agency,’ Doctor Warner said.
They shook hands, despite the crippling worry of Alan and Nancy threatening to shake them off their feet.
‘Please sit down,’ Doctor Warner smiled reassuringly.
Alan and Nancy collapsed heavily into their seats, the weight of the world dragging them down into the depths of despair. Despite the pleasant interior of the office, it did nothing to comfort the couple’s ever-increasing fears. What on Earth could be wrong with our son? The colourful charts, posters and cuddly toys that would normally encapsulate the cheerful moods of children and new parents alike did nothing to soothe their anxiety. Instead the paraphernalia seemed to cruelly mock them without a hint of remorse.
‘Now I understand how you must be feeling,’ Warner began, ‘but the important thing is not to worry. Our examinations of young Gabriel have uncovered some unusual results and we would like to carry out some further tests just to allay any concerns.’
‘What... what unusual results?’ Alan questioned.
‘Well, the first is that Gabriel has a very rare blood type, so rare in fact that, as best as we can tell, there is no recorded medical evidence of this blood type ever being documented before,’ Warner said, ‘in addition Gabriel seems to have a rather unique physical abnormality. What is most unusual is the symmetry. He appears to have identical growths on each of his shoulder blades.’
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