Hybrid (Book 2): Hunted

by Stead, Nick

  I circled round the village, keeping to the gloomy cover of the woodland, such as it was now the trees had shed most of their leaves. I watched from between the trunks as the village’s inhabitants went about their business, to and from work and their other mundane daily tasks. As an outsider looking in their entire existence seemed so pointless. The majority of them hated work or school, and they spent the whole week looking forward to the weekend, only for Monday morning to come and the monotonous cycle to start over.

  Once I would’ve thought escaping the human world would be a dream come true. I was free of the chains human society placed on their people, free of the arduous routines they were forced to repeat day in, day out and the hours they wasted on work. So why did I want to return to that life so badly?

  Every creature must fight for survival, and yet humans had created so much more work for themselves just to survive in their own world. And here I was, free to do as I pleased and spend my time as I wished. Surviving wouldn’t have taken much work if it weren’t for the Slayers, my supernatural speed and strength ensuring my place at the top of the food chain. Short of any threat posed from any fellow undead, I’d have had nothing to fear. Time was mine to do with as I pleased: no authority or law governed me. Yet as much as I had always hated the thought of a lifetime stuck in the same old routine – whether that was due to education or employment – was freedom really worth it without the human comforts I had always taken for granted? Freedom had come at a high price, one I wouldn’t have been so quick to pay if I’d truly understood the cost. I watched them go about their business, feeling I would gladly go back to the monotony of that existence if it meant having somewhere warm to sleep and hobbies to occupy my mind, half-heartedly wrestling the hungers fighting to rob me of the last of my self-restraint. The hunger for the life I had once known was not enough to combat the hunger to feed and, I hoped, to feel, and with a snarl I withdrew deeper into the woods, moving on in search of the perfect opportunity to hunt as safely as possible, knowing it would only serve to widen the divide between myself and the village.

  The sound of children playing relatively close was unmistakeable to my sensitive ears. They had to be young, no more than six or seven years of age. To the predator in me they only represented one thing – prey. I tried to lose myself in those predatory instincts, even though my lupine half wanted nothing to do with this hunt. Like Lady Sarah, he was too cautious and cared too much for our survival. The recklessness and risk taking lay solely with the human side of my nature, the part of me that no longer cared if I lived or died, so long as I escaped this depression I’d sunk back into, one way or another.

  I let the change take me back to that halfway point between man and beast, in a further attempt to lose myself in my primal urges. It felt much smoother than usual, as if my body was responding to the anticipation I was trying to build inside, trying to induce the bloodlust so I could lose myself in the violence.

  I was able to keep off the streets as I circled round towards the kids, guided by the sound of their laughter. The landscape was very hilly, full of little valleys that provided further cover as well as the trees themselves.

  My destination turned out to be a park. Luckily the woodland bordered it on two sides, and the street running round it seemed quiet. There were six children playing: four girls and two boys. Two women stood watching over them and chatting, their backs to the woodland I lurked in. Seeing the families brought another stab of grief for all that I had lost, and the depression and despair threatened to overwhelm me again. I shook my head as if that would clear it and tried to focus on the hunt.

  Even though I’d been taking my hybrid form most of the time, it still required a great amount of energy, and the hunger was there, the craving for raw flesh, to replenish my reserves. It was never quite as strong as after a full transformation, but it was still a potent force, all the worse for being unable to satiate it properly, and I let it drive me towards my prey.

  The humans had been completely unaware of me as I lurked between the shadowy trees, and I moved so fast my first victims didn’t know what had hit them, until it was too late. The mothers died too quickly to raise the alarm for their children, and then I was on the first of the kids.

  Laughter turned to screams and with screams came tears. Fear was thick in the air, contagious amongst my prey and almost suffocating. Once I would have revelled in it, but my dark pleasures remained lost to me. I released the first little girl with her leg almost completely chewed off, and grabbed one of the others as he tried to flee. It became less about satisfying the hunger and more about the brutality of the attack, in a desperate attempt to spark those emotions a kill used to bring me.

  I bit down on the throat of the little boy, intending to rip it out. He was so small that I bit clean through his neck, sending blood spraying over the concrete of the play area. His head rolled to a stop by the swings he’d been enjoying just moments before, and blood pooled around his corpse.

  Before his body hit the floor I’d already lashed out at one of the other girls, ripping a gaping wound in the soft flesh of her belly and sending her crashing to the ground, screaming in pain and shaking uncontrollably. I left her bleeding out and lunged at my fourth victim. Catching her by the arm in my jaws, I tossed her around like a slab of meat, because that’s all that she was to me in that moment. My fangs ground against the bone of her small, fragile arm with every movement of my head, but I gripped the limb tight and wouldn’t let go. It snapped with the force of my attack, her blood spraying into my mouth and dripping down my jaws, matting my fur, while the shock proved too much for her small body. Finally I dropped her still form to the concrete, her blood running to join that of the decapitated boy.

  The other two had started to run but I was upon them before they’d barely gotten to the edge of the playground. The fifth received a swift and merciful death as some rational part of my mind knew they couldn’t be allowed to leave and alert the village. The screaming would bring more humans soon enough, of that I was sure, and I had to act fast now.

  Wolves don’t use their paws to swipe like cats but I was also part human, so I slashed my claws across the final child’s throat before she could scream again, then proceeded to savage her body. I ripped off her arm and bit through her leg, tossing the body parts with each mighty shake of my head. When finally I resigned myself to the fact my bloodlust still remained silent, I began to feed, ripping chunks from her torso and gnawing the remaining limbs. Though the screaming had stopped several minutes before, the shrill sounds continued to ring in my ears, until eventually all was silent.

  The world took on that unnatural stillness that follows certain atrocities. There weren’t even any birds singing in the trees, or rodents rustling through the undergrowth; no dogs barking in the distance. It was as if the entire area had felt my presence and its inhabitants had fled before me. Most noticeable was the absence of the children’s laughter that had so saturated the air before my arrival, and the silence was all the more oppressing following the screams I’d elicited from each victim before stealing away their final breath.

  I knew I should be feeling the guilt and remorse, and the horror, that I’d felt in the beginning. But there was only that emptiness, that gaping wound in my soul much like the one I’d ripped open in the body of the little girl. I truly was one of the undead. My body continued its mockery of life but inside I was every bit as dead as the tiny carcasses I’d surrounded myself with. Their small, ruined frames continued to ooze out blood, once a substance that had seemed to fill me with the life force of my prey, back in the early days when the curse had made me feel truly alive, before I’d come to realise the true cost of my newfound powers. But now it only ran cold and dead into the void, offering no comfort or brief reprieve from my own inner state of death.

  “God, Nick, what have you done?” a voice said, making me jump.

  “Lizzy! You can’t really be here…”

  “Are you really so desperate that you mu
st turn to such mindless slaughter?” the apparition continued, as if I’d not said anything.

  “I just wanted to feel something,” I answered miserably. “I can’t take any more of this nothingness inside. I need something to give my life meaning again.”

  “And did their deaths hold any meaning? Can there be any meaning from brutal murder?”

  I remained silent and crouched over the little girl I’d been feasting on, staring at the bloody remains. The small limbs scattered around and the severed head were like gruesome doll’s parts, but the mutilated torso bore little resemblance to anything human now.

  “What have I become?” I finally whispered.

  The hallucination didn’t answer this time, so I continued along my line of thought. “Pathetic. A lost, wretched soul, intent on killing for no reason other than in an attempt to combat his own misery. And for what? It seems my rage is truly spent; I don’t even feel pleasure in this like I did just a couple of months ago. No wonder the wolf part of me hates me. I'm no better than the human hunters I once despised for slaughtering animals for 'sport'. How did it come to this?”

  “Yes, you who has the blood of wolves in you, who could be so much greater than either man or wolf if only you’d look to the best of each half, yet still you continue to let the worst rule you. That darkness that lies at the heart of mankind that once you hated, that a part of you still hates.”

  “So what do you want from me?” I snarled. “To ask forgiveness, seek redemption from some silent God who doesn’t even care, if He even exists? I’m a killer now and my soul is dead; how do I come back from that?”

  I tried to be angry but still it would not come. Then a fresh scream brought me back to reality, the first adult to find the horrific scene. I like to think now that I looked at her with those same soulful eyes a dog gives his master knowing he’s done something wrong, but in reality my gaze was probably as cold and empty as I felt inside. There seemed little point in killing this other human so I slunk off into the woods, stringy bits of the children’s flesh caught between my teeth, and their blood staining my fur and the skin beneath, as if death now clung to me, as meaningless as my own pitiful existence.

  I returned to the remoteness of the moors, the place so virtually devoid of life as the state I had regressed to. It would be dark soon and I knew the vampire would only look for me if I didn’t return to her before she rose from the ground. But I couldn’t face her in light of the sheer hopelessness of my situation that came with the realisation that not even human prey could renew my bloodlust. And I wasn’t in the mood for her lectures about my recklessness in taking human prey. Instead I continued to wander the moors in search of a water source big enough to submerge myself in, and finally found a large glacial lake.

  The liquid was icy cold but I gritted my teeth and forced myself to immerse my entire body in its cleansing waters, trying to wash away some of the blood to help hide what I’d done. I let the liquid pass through my jaws and lessen the metallic, salty taste that suddenly seemed foul, though the water couldn’t take it away completely. A part of me wanted to just close my eyes and let the water take me, but still I couldn’t bring myself to end it. And even if I had tried, no doubt my lupine half would have prevented me from dying. Short of destroying my heart or my brain, I would never be able to manage suicide without him bringing me back from the brink of death. Eventually I felt a presence at the side of the lake and I dragged my numb body back onto dry land, to find it was of course Lady Sarah.

  I could tell she disapproved of my decision to take a bath as I lay shivering violently at her feet, but she wouldn’t let me escape another night of training. So my misery continued.

  Chapter Eleven – More Confusion

  By the next full moon, Lady Sarah had grown yet more cautious. Despite her conviction that it was unlikely I would kill another vampire – if I’d even been responsible for the deaths of the other two – she wasn’t taking any chances. She was determined to keep me close this time.

  I had enough sense not to give into the transformation too early, so she had a chance to rise before the temptation to run off and kill took hold of me. But with no cloud cover to hide the moon, I couldn’t fight it for long.

  My teeth lengthened into fangs, my amber eyes burning with hunger like two powerful flames in my skull, which was already stretching outwards into a snout. Digits lengthened, hard pads forming beneath, while other bones, most noticeably my femur, seemingly ground together as they shortened. Internal organs shifted and also changed in size and possibly shape, my ears grew pointed and shifted to the top of my head, and fur now covered my body from head to the tip of the tail growing at the base of my spine. As the human part of me sunk down towards our subconscious I briefly wondered if this transformation would be my last, and whether I was destined to die a lone wolf, shunned even by my supposedly ‘fellow’ undead. Then the wolf took over and I surrendered control of our body to him.

  I was aware of what had happened during the last full moon and why the vampire was so afraid to let me out of her sight that month, but I could already feel my bloodlust stirring.

  Though I hated the human for killing the children for little reason other than in an attempt to feel something, deep down their deaths had excited me and left me hungry for more, even if I wouldn’t let the human share in that. And with the full moon overhead, the hunt called to me.

  Lady Sarah had evidently decided it was better to risk the Slayers’ wrath than that of her fellow vampires, for she took her wolf form and bade me to follow her. She didn’t trust me not to wander off if given the chance again, and with the moon calling to my most primal instincts, I didn’t trust myself either. I was still as much a slave of the moon and the hunger as I had been during the first few months of my initial wakening, and I didn’t possess the strength of mind needed to fight its hold over me.

  I could hear the sound of cars in the distance and smell the toxic fumes that meant we had found our way back to the human world. Judging from the wall of sound assaulting my ears the closer we drew, this was a larger settlement than the village where the human had committed its latest massacre the previous month. It was fortunate she hadn’t taken us to the same one, perhaps unwittingly leading us to our deaths as the Slayers must surely have been alerted to that most recent attack by now, or at the very least the villagers would have no doubt made some preparations for the ‘rogue wolf’ as I’d been named after the discovery of my kills in Yorkshire.

  Eagerly I ran towards the sound of humanity at the vampire’s side, no thought in my mind except the need to hunt, to kill. I would’ve lost myself in the bloodlust within minutes had I been on my own, falling upon the first hapless victim unfortunate enough to cross my path. But the vampire was still cautious, and her powerful presence kept me in check this time.

  Footfalls sounded from a street nearby, causing us to turn as one towards the sound of prey, ears pricked and snouts raised into the wind. We caught the scent of two female humans out jogging, but no other scents to cause alarm. As the prey came closer I could hear their hearts pumping frantically like two caged things, begging for me to set them free, rip them from their bony prisons and let the blood flow freely. I whined and looked to Lady Sarah for permission to give in to our desires. She didn’t answer but began to bound towards the approaching humans, and excitedly I kept pace at a loping run.

  The humans were soon within sight and we were on them before they’d had chance to fully comprehend what was happening, sending them crashing to the ground. I had longed for this and now finally I could rip into living flesh again, feel my prey die so that I might live. Her death came in a blur of movement and savage abandon, my powerful jaws ripping her throat out, exposing her spine in the gaping hole I made, blood spraying everywhere. My first satisfactory meal in weeks, I ravenously tore into the fresh meat and greedily gulped it down, spattering the pavement with blood and entrails, the less palatable organs such as the stomach bitten in two and left in a slimy lump
as I greedily hunted for the most prized offal – the heart, liver and kidneys. Beside me Lady Sarah was human once again, drinking deeply from her victim and making considerably less mess as she fed.

  Once I’d finished feasting on the fresh kill there was little left, and still the hunger burned within. I glanced at Lady Sarah’s victim but knew better than to encroach on the food of my alpha, and besides, she was draining the blood so quickly from her corpse that the dry meat would bring less satisfaction than I’d just experienced. The moon and the hunger screamed at me to find more, and while the vampire was lost in her own bloodlust as she fed, I forgot the dangers the night held and slipped away from her yet again.

  Some small part of my rational mind appealed to my sense of caution and I wasn’t yet completely consumed by the bloodlust, so I was careful to keep to the shadows. There I waited for the perfect opportunity to make a second kill without immediately drawing attention to my presence.

  On the fringes of the human world the night was silent, unnaturally so. Humans may have considered it eerie but I was used to it. Not even the local wildlife stirred. They knew better; death had come within their midst, and death awaited them. To do anything but hide and cower in the hopes they wouldn’t be discovered spelt certain doom. I inspired fear in the living, it was my curse. The only sounds my sensitive ears detected came from the town centre, where humans indulged in their nightlife. They were so easily taken, the one species ignorant enough not to recognise me for what I was and hide with the other animals. And I hungered for their flesh above all others…