Hunted (Hybrid Book 2)

by Nick Stead

  “Must it always end in blood?” Lizzy asked sadly.

  Blood and death, that seemed to be all that was left to me. But I didn’t say it out loud. Even my anger was draining back into the emptiness that was once my soul, and I knew better than to try and cling to it by then. I would only fail as I had so many times since leaving my hometown, so why bother to continue in my struggles to hold onto it? I let it fade away, staring down at the tattered ruins of yet more lives my rage had claimed, flaps of torn flesh blowing freely in the wind, a ghastly flag proclaiming my savagery. Maybe the vampires were right, maybe I was no more than a beast, feral and brutal. I stared down at my bloodied, monstrous hands as if, even more than a year after falling victim to the curse, I still could not believe they were my own.

  Whilst no mortal could ever match the beauty of the vampires I’d beheld during my ‘trial’, as cruel and merciless as they had been towards me, the girl I’d slaughtered had been quite pretty by human standards, which I noticed in a detached sort of way. Half her face remained untouched, the right eye still whole and not yet dulled, the flesh pale in death but unmarred by even the ravages of acne suffered by most humans her age, perfect and unblemished like a porcelain sculpture. The rest of her was unrecognisable as male or female, or even human, her body so badly mutilated that she’d been robbed not only of her life but of that beauty she’d once held.

  My rage might seem dead to me once the gaping chasm engulfed it and the emptiness returned, but, when it did rekindle, it seemed nothing could withstand my wrath. I’d once thought to become a werewolf would be a gift but I had soon learnt why it was always talked of as a curse. This power I’d been granted was destructive and nothing good could come of its ravaging nature. I’d known that when I’d come to realise I could no longer live among humans, unless I wanted more people I cared about to get hurt. And I was reminded of it once again. I wasn’t safe to be around mortals, the Slayers posing as much threat to any around me as my curse. It could only ever end in death, either at my jaws or at the hands of the Slayers who had already proven they would go to such lengths to end the curse for good. The hallucination of Lizzy was right; how many more must die before I surrendered myself to my lonely fate?

  It seemed I couldn’t tear my gaze from that one perfect eye staring at me out of what remained of her beauty, and in that instant she was no longer some unfortunate stranger that happened to cross my path, but Amy’s friend Mel, as she’d lain in the frozen ground just over a year ago, her once beautiful form similarly mutilated. It had snowed that night as well, a night that now seemed a lifetime ago.

  In the midst of all the grief and the guilt I’d probably thought about how the world would never know such beauty again, but that was foolish. There were billions of girls on the planet, many of them blessed with good looks. There would be more, just as beautiful as the girls and women I’d stolen such beauty from, along with their lives. Was that all mortals were, just another of their species briefly walking upon the earth until death claimed them, each just another face in the crowd, unremarkable and so very alike hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of others around them? And what did that make me, a being with no foreseeable end and no others of his kind? I had never truly been one of them, the blood of wolves making me different to the sheep I’d tried so hard to imitate and fit in with. So why did I still torment myself with that which was denied to me, even before my wolfish half was awoken?

  “It’s a terrible thing, to walk this world alone,” came a male voice from somewhere behind me, as if he had heard my thoughts. But it wasn’t Luke this time. I hadn’t noticed the human since I’d lost him in the chaos I’d created. “Do you not tire of it?”

  “Better this way,” I grunted. “I can’t control it. Friend or foe, my bloodlust claims all. This world holds no place for one such as me. I have no place among humans, nor among wolves. The vampires shun me. So who else can I turn to? I am the last of my kind. To live in this void, between worlds but never truly a part of any of them, is to be alone.”

  “You need not be alone,” he replied, walking into my line of sight so I could see that he was the same vampire who had saved me from Ulfarr’s judgement, and the execution he had been about to sentence me with.

  “Look at the carnage surrounding us. I destroy everything around me. For all I know I did kill those vampires last time I lost control. You should leave, before I kill you too.”

  “Do not mistake me for some weak human or lowly vampire,” he said coldly.

  “And what would you care of a lowly beast?” I asked, as if he’d not spoken. “That’s all we are to you vampires, right?”

  “To some, yes,” he answered, his voice growing warmer again. “Ulfarr is a fool, however. I do not believe you killed those vampires, no more than I believe you are nothing but a beast. Even the mortal predatory animals are more than savage killers. Is it not humans that are the true savages?”

  “Now you sound like the wolf part of me,” I growled.

  “Maybe you should listen to him.”

  “Yeah right, next you’ll be telling me to make my peace with him, like Lady Sarah kept nagging me to do for so long. Is it so wrong to want to cling to my humanity, however little there is left? Maybe eventually I’ve got no choice but to let my mind become whole again and embrace my wolfish half. But I’m not ready yet.”

  The vampire held his hands up as if he didn’t want to fight. “Forgive me, I meant no offence. I offered you the chance of some company other than Lady Sarah’s before, if you recall. It seems to me you are more lost and alone than last we met. These bodies speak of your anguish. Both wolves and humans are social animals. You cannot endure while you remain alone. Whether in a year or a hundred years, it will eventually be the end of you. Both parts of you yearn for companionship, and I would offer it to you again. Come with me and I can teach you more than Lady Sarah ever could.”

  “Why do you care?” I asked again, not bothering to hide my suspicion. The more I was forced to deal with vampires, the warier I became of them. Once again I thought about how it seemed they all had some ulterior motive, as Vince had proven when he’d sought to hand us to the Slayers, and then Lady Sarah had betrayed me to Ulfarr just months later. I might never even know why she’d turned on me, but that didn’t really matter. For some reason she’d seen fit to help me in the beginning, until eventually it had served her purpose to give me over to Ulfarr to abuse and torment as he saw fit. Though Lady Sarah had never really been a friend, there was still some anger and feeling of betrayal smouldering beneath the emptiness that currently smothered it, and when we next crossed paths as I believed we would, if it saw fit to flare up again, I knew my wrath would seek to destroy her too. I had no wish to go through another betrayal with this new vampire, or any others of their wretched kind. “Maybe it’s better to die alone.”

  “As you wish, but know that my door remains open to you, should you change your mind. And as a show of good faith, I will clean up the mess you created here. You should tread carefully for the Slayers have likely already caught your scent, but I can at least take care of any video footage captured of your transformation, so the world at large does not learn of the existence of our kind outside of myth and legend.”

  I frowned, but before I could say anything more he was gone. The cold had crept back into my body and I knew I would only grow colder the longer I remained there. I turned away from the body of the girl and loped off on all fours, forced to keep moving in a desperate bid to fight the cold. I couldn’t stay in the town if I didn’t want the Slayers to find me, for surely it would not be long before humans discovered the bloodbath and the Slayers came to investigate. My thoughts turned to the blanket and the little extra warmth it had to offer, and so I found myself out on the moors once more. The blanket had long since been buried in the snow, however, and for hours I searched in vain for the spot where I might have left it. Finally I was forced to admit defeat, cold and weary. I sat down in the snow and hugged my knees,
the loneliness and despair smothering in its intensity, leaving me utterly dejected.

  “How many more must die?”

  I looked up to find Lizzy had reappeared, but didn’t answer.

  The apparition changed as before, this time becoming Fiona, my brain making the image exactly as I remembered it the morning I’d found her dying from the horrific wounds the wolf had inflicted on her. Her leg was in tatters, scraps of flesh hanging off the bone and dripping blood, her stomach red raw, the muscle beneath the skin glistening and wet.

  “No!” I screamed, rising to my feet. “Don’t appear to me as her, not her!”

  “What’s the matter, Nick? You can’t face me?” the hallucination said. “Are you going to continue blaming my death on your wolfish half? He might have been in control, but it was still your teeth that ripped through my flesh. It was still your body that murdered me, that murdered them all.”

  “No, you won’t do this to me again,” I snarled. “I’m done feeling guilty over you. It wasn’t murder; I needed to feed and you were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I didn’t choose you as my prey: that was the wolf.”

  “Is that all we are to you, prey to your predator? I was supposed to be your friend. If you truly cared you would have protected us from yourself. And you want to go back home, for what? So you can prey on more of us under the full moon and slaughter us in the daylight hours when your anger gets the better of you? Do you even remember the faces of all the people you’ve beaten and savaged in the grip of your own rage?”

  My anger flared up again and I roared at her, lashing out with those bloodied claws. My hand passed through her and she disappeared, but a noise from behind caused me to turn and find Luke stood watching again.

  “Don’t feel bad, Nick. There’s nothing wrong in indulging guilty pleasures when the need arises,” he said.

  I didn’t answer, trying to work out how he could possibly have just turned up in the middle of nowhere. I was starting to wonder if he was even human. Or could he be some kind of supernatural being as well, one I couldn’t detect as being something more than human?

  “I was human,” he answered the unspoken question. “Don’t you remember me? That month where you gave yourself so completely to all that delicious rage that you spent the entire cycle in wolf form. I watched in awe as you tore through the town, much like the massacre you committed today. And then you turned on me even as I begged you to turn me. That wasn’t cool, bro.”

  Gashes made by my fangs slowly began to appear on him while he talked, shredding through his clothes and his skin, blood welling up and soaking through the ruined material. Ribs streaked red were visible in his chest and half his face peeled away, revealing bare jaw bones grinning morbidly.

  “Don’t feel bad man,” the embodiment of my inner darkness continued. “Just remember how good it was to embrace your bloodlust, the primal ecstasy of savaging prey with tooth and claw. Don’t listen to the other voices. With me as your guide, you’re truly unstoppable. I’m the only one you need.”

  “No,” I breathed, unable to believe my mind had fooled me so completely into thinking he was a real human.

  “Come on, there’s more towns just waiting for you to unleash your rage on them. Already it bubbles back to the surface. Time to feed it with more blood.”

  “No!” I roared, and again I lashed out at the hallucination. He also disappeared, leaving me to rage and wrestle with old emotions I thought I’d lost. I howled in anguish, overwhelmed with a new wave of guilt and despair, the threat of the Slayers and the vampires forgotten in the grip of my latest emotional turmoil. The thought about how far the sound carried never once crossed my mind. I lost all sense of time while I raged and grieved and indulged my re-awoken conscience, the murders I’d committed still weighing so heavily on it. But my latest breakdown was brought to a sudden end when the sound of gunshot rang in my ears, just as an explosive pain ripped through my chest, and in the shock of that thud from the impact I felt my heart stop. The world seemed to spin as I crashed backward, still conscious.

  Blood pumped out of the hole from my ruined heart and pooled on the ground where I lay. The Slayers had found their mark at last and I knew I would never be able to transform quick enough to save myself. There was a reason we could be killed by destroying the heart or the brain – it was the only wound the change couldn’t repair before death claimed us. But even though my heart could no longer function, my death wasn’t instant. I remained conscious as my body grew weaker and the agonised seconds ticked by. And as I lay there helpless and unable to escape the end drawing ever nearer, I was aware of my killer standing over me. The same grizzled old Slayer I’d encountered before raised his gun a second time, now aiming it at my head. It seemed they hadn’t completely forsaken the town I’d brought death to after all. I assumed he’d tracked me from there, though why he hadn’t appeared sooner to put a stop to the carnage was anyone’s guess.

  So this is how it ends, I thought to myself. I was going to die alone and unloved, my body left to rot in a shallow, unmarked grave. Maybe it was a fitting end for a monster such as me, and no more than I deserved, but in those final moments I just wanted to see Mum and Amy one last time, to tell them I was sorry for what I’d done to our family and to have the comfort of a hug goodbye. Instead there was only the loneliness and the face of my enemy staring down at me.

  Even if it hadn’t been too late for me and I could have somehow repaired the damage from the first bullet, there was no escaping the second he was about to put through my brain. Fast as I was, the older man was disciplined and had mastered his fear. He wouldn’t panic if I found the strength to lunge for him, and there was no hope of him missing his target at so close a range. Even if that first bullet hadn’t sealed my fate, there would still be no way out. My luck had finally run out and I was going to die at the hands of my enemies.

  My vision was growing blearier with each passing second as my brain struggled to keep its hold on reality, the lack of fresh blood being pumped to it starting to take its toll. But beside the blurry form of my killer, the hallucination representing my conscience reappeared, still in the form of Fiona. She crouched over me with a sad smile, the last clear image I had of the surroundings that were fading away as quickly as my life. Her injuries were gone again and so was the accusation from her eyes.

  “Just let go, Nick,” she said gently. “It’s time to stop fighting now. Let it wash over you and find peace in death.”

  I tried to reply, to tell her I couldn’t just give up even though I knew there was no way out this time, but I couldn’t make the words form. There was too much blood in my throat and I was growing too weak from the blood loss.

  “Just let go,” she repeated, as I slid into blackness.

  Chapter Eighteen – Cheating Death

  I floated there in the blackness, a stream of consciousness seemingly cut off from both the mortal realm and the afterlife. Where was I? Lady Sarah had once explained that some souls made it to some form of afterlife, while others stayed on the Earth to become wraiths or ghosts, and others faced oblivion. But how could this be called oblivion when I still had some form of awareness? Yet it didn’t seem to fit any form of an afterlife I’d been given reason to believe in, and I certainly wasn’t still trapped on Earth. Even if I’d become a spirit too weak to manifest as a ghost, I would surely still be able to see the mortal realm if something kept me bound to it. But there was just nothing other than my thoughts, as if I’d fallen into my own inner void, lost in the emptiness that had claimed me in the last few months of my cursed life.

  You might think this situation would have been terrifying, to be faced with an eternity of nothing but my own thoughts, completely independent of any other part of the universe. But I was surprisingly calm and felt a sense of peace as I drifted in the darkness, soon losing interest in trying to fathom where exactly I might be. Some part of me continued to exist, free of the pain life had held, and for that I felt a sense of gratitude.r />
  “Wolf,” came the alien voice in the blackness. It was female and not part of my own consciousness, so it seemed I wasn’t alone after all. But it felt like it didn’t belong in that little pocket of reality I’d found myself in, a place that was mine alone to exist in as this small part of me lived on, even after my earthly remains rotted and eventually crumbled away to dust. “I need you to come with me now. Follow my voice, and I will guide you back.”

  Back where, a part of me wondered. I found I didn’t really care, and I continued to float in that peaceful state.

  “I know you can hear me, wolf,” the voice said again. “This is not your path. Come to me and I will help you rise up, to face your true destiny.”

  My curiosity got the better of me and mentally I reached out to that voice, wanting to find out more. There was a brief sensation that felt like our thoughts touched, and the next thing I knew that blackness turned to a blinding white light, pain crashing back over me as nerves reconnected with my mind. It was as much of a shock as the initial impact of the bullet had been, and a part of me wanted to fall back into the darkness where I’d been blissfully free of the agony of my flesh. But instead my eyes snapped open to find a blonde haired woman leant over me. I was still lying on my back and my heart was just as ruined as it had been before I’d lost consciousness, incapable of pumping the lifeforce through my arteries which my body needed to keep my brain alive. The woman was speaking to me, but I struggled to make sense of her words through the agony of my damaged chest.

  “I have to take the bullet out now, then you must transform or you will die.”