Hybrid

by Wild Wolf Publishing

  Limousines filled the car park. A yellow taxi, like the ones they have in America, pulled up and four girls spilled out of it. One couple even arrived in a tractor, and a boy named John Smith brought a case of beer by the same brand name, all trying for best entrance. I could hear it all as I ran towards the feast that awaited.

  I didn’t fear the Slayers in that moment. The need to kill was too great, and I doubted they would be near the prom. They probably didn’t think we were foolish enough to feed in somewhere so crowded.

  Music blared out from inside. It was a posh hotel. They probably had their own ballroom. Over the music I could hear human voices. I could pick out individuals, people’s voices a part of me recognised. Adam, the boy from Science the human didn’t like. Lizzy, David, Becci, all its friends. Those who used to bully it before they learned to fear us. And any one of them was mine for the taking.

  The woods thinned as I reached the end. I knew better than to even attempt to go in the front way. The people on the door would sound the alarm the minute I stepped out onto the road and it would cause too much panic too soon. Men with guns would appear before I even had chance to feed.

  A shadow in the night, I slunk silently along the border between woods and tarmac, weaving in and out of the trees just far enough from the road to go unnoticed. I crossed over once I was confident I was out of sight and made my way round to the back of the building.

  It was built on large grounds, and there were just as many people outside at the back as there were inside. I crouched behind the other side of the wall ready to pounce, enjoying the sounds and scents carrying to me on the light summer breeze. Most powerful was the scent of human bodies sweating in the heat, and beneath that the smell of burning flesh from a pig being roasted, and the sickly smell of some sauce they would drown it in. Why did humans always have to spoil a good piece of meat? That was something I couldn’t understand. The sauce took away the taste of the meat. Roasting it was bad enough, but whatever sickly sauces and flavourings they added to it was sacrilege. The scent of the meat didn’t excite me at all, not like the live prey surrounding it.

  Once I judged most of them were outside, enjoying their cooked meat, I leapt with all the strength I had. The wall would have been too high for a mortal wolf to cross, unless it was able to scrabble up, but I cleared it with that single jump. I landed on the other side and roared, almost like a lion rather than a wolf. That was the human, voicing its anger. It had fought with its father again that day.

  Pandemonium ensued. Screams almost deafened me. They started to run, all in different directions, panicking, remembering the pictures they had seen of my other victims. A girl tripped and fell on a dress that had no doubt cost her hundreds of pounds, and now her life. She cried out to her boyfriend. He started to run back to her.

  I was on her before anyone knew what was happening, and the boyfriend hesitated. I moved too quickly for them, and I was just suddenly there, stood over her, drool falling from my jaws and spattering her face. For a second I saw her as her boyfriend saw her. I didn’t need the human to know she was considered beautiful among others. Blonde hair framed the perfect face, which could have been sculpted by a god. It was hard to believe it was the mere creation of random genes thrown together from her parents. The skin was smooth and pale, the lips round and full, just the right size for her face, the nose small and straight, everything in proportion. Green eyes like emeralds looked up at me, filled with shock and terror. If she’d had fangs she could have passed for a vampire. No living creature should have been that perfect. And she was mine: her life was mine to take.

  I could take her beauty as easily as her life. In that first moment I couldn’t do it, but then she screamed and tried to crawl away, and the moment was gone. She made a pitiful attempt to escape and found it was too late. She was helpless when I started to feed, helpless when my teeth pierced her soft flesh, bit into that perfect face. I savaged her, lost in the bloodlust. No inch of her body was spared. The face went first, my fangs gouging deep lines in the heavenly sculpture. If I wasn’t ruled by the hunger it would have seemed an act against God. Or at least to the human part of me it would have, once when I had been truly human. But no longer. I could hear its thoughts: God never did anything for it when it cried and begged for His help, so why should it spare her? To me, she was just another animal trapped inside nature’s vicious cycle, her life forfeit so I may continue my own. That didn’t mean her life was not sacred. I understood that better than any human. I did not kill so freely as the human part of me, at least not on my own. The human was with me that night, and we were closer to becoming one again than we had been since I first heard the call of the moon. Only then, when I was truly awake, did we begin to separate, to become two beings living in one body. The male vampire had hinted that we needed to become one again if we were to survive eternity. And he was right. But I did not like it. I only killed for food or to protect myself. The human wanted to kill to feed its anger, and I did not want to be a part of that.

  Her blood flowing into my mouth brought me back. I ripped some more flesh from her face and moved further down her body, like a sick, perverted nightmare of two lovers, except I brought the kiss of death. I left blood and gore behind whenever my mouth touched her.

  I tore one of her breasts off and ate what flesh I could from the ribcage, though I left the organs beneath intact. Her stomach split open and I bit into the liver. I swallowed and went back for another bite when something slammed into my side and we rolled away from the dying girl.

  Her boyfriend had leapt on me in a desperate attempt to save her. We landed in a tangle of limbs and I breathed in his scent. It was the boy the human didn’t like, Adam. He was trying to pull away, fear chasing away the last of his nerve when he realised his act of bravery may have cost him his life. Still under the influence of the bloodlust and the moon, I snapped at him, straining to reach his throat. But we were locked too close together for me to twist my head round so I could close my jaws around his neck.

  He fought against me, determined not to end up a mangled corpse like his girlfriend. He slammed a fist into the side of my muzzle. I growled, the blow frustrating me more than anything else. When he realised he couldn’t hurt me, he drove a finger into my eye, struggling to be free at the same time. We disentangled ourselves just as my eye exploded with pain, and I fell back, yelping, while he got to his feet and ran over to the girl I had mauled. Something wet and sticky dribbled down my cheek, matting my fur. The eye had burst, and half of the world turned black. Somewhere inside the human screamed and I felt its fear and anger rise up simultaneously, one step closer to the thing it feared the most. He would pay for that.

  With another roar, I pounced and ripped out Adam’s apple, all in one movement. He was dead before we hit the ground. His girlfriend was also dead by then. I looked at that face, so beautiful in life, yet in death there were no distinguishing features to set her apart from the rest of humanity. She had been the envy of the school, almost a goddess among them, worshipped by her fellow students. In death she was nothing. Just another carcass in a world filled with the dead.

  Her emerald eyes would have sparkled in their sockets, before death dulled them. The rest of her face was gone, so badly mutilated that without the eyes it would have been unrecognisable as a face at all. Just another lump of meat, glistening wet in the moonlight. Her figure, conformed in the shape every female died for, gone. She didn’t curve in the right places anymore. The missing breast made her lopsided, ugly. I’d managed to bite into one of the hips before Adam had distracted me from the kill, and the bone had shattered, on the opposite side of her body to the missing breast. Nobody wanted to be her now.

  Movement behind me made me turn. I lost interest in the dead, my attention on the living. The bloodlust wanted more lives. The hunger didn’t care whether the meat was living or dead. If I had been a true wolf, there would be no bloodlust and I would be content with the meat from the dead. But I was a monster and killing w
as in my nature. The part of me closest to a true wolf didn’t want to kill more than was necessary, but the part bound by the curse needed fresher blood. The dead would not satisfy.

  People were still running in panic. A girl stared at me in shock. The human knew her as Kerri. She was the next victim, gutted like a fish, and still I hungered. One boy was not running. He stood watching me with a mixture of horror and hatred. I glared at him with my good eye, readying to attack. The human knew this one too, and now it decided to interfere. No, not this one. David. The name came to me and it meant something. The boy was nothing to me, no more than prey, but the human fought me, and there were enough potential victims that I gave in. I turned away, catching a glimpse of his puzzled expression as I went for someone else. He knew he should have been dead once I’d turned my sights on him, and he couldn’t understand why he had been spared.

  I forgot him as I feasted upon the fourth body that night, the most I had ever killed at one time.

  I plunged my snout deep in her innards as I had with so many of my kills before, when I became aware of a shadow looming over me. I looked up to find another familiar face. Like David, this one was not running, but she was not held in place by shock. She’d taken advantage of the chaos I had created to draw a gun. I don’t know enough of guns to tell you what model it was, I only know that it had been concealed somewhere on her person, small enough to fit on the inside of her trousers. And finally she’d revealed herself as one of the Slayers, as I had known all along.

  I had smelt her on the others who had attacked me the first night I changed. To me, that made her their leader. Wolves rub their scent on other pack members to identify each other as pack, to mark them as belonging to the pack. Her scent was on them and her scent alone, and to me that meant they belonged to her. Of course, she wouldn’t have touched them in the way that wolves do to bond, and it wasn’t sexual, but her scent had been there. She was high ranking among them, and I feared her. That’s what the dream had meant of hunter and hunted, back in the classroom, months ago. The human hadn’t realised what it meant, but I knew. Maybe the human could have worked it out, if it hadn’t been lost in its own horror. If it had known, we could have killed her long before that night. But we had not, and there I stood, snarling at her with fear, knowing the gun could end my life.

  And yet she did not shoot. She could have killed me then and I would have been powerless to stop it, just as my victims had been. And she knew it. I could see it in her face, the smugness about the eyes and the mouth, the cruelty glittering in the soul that peered out from behind those eyes. She could have ended it, but she did not and I knew in that moment she wanted me alive, though for what reason I couldn’t say. And I wasn’t staying to find out.

  Once I knew she would not kill me, I slowly backed away. She aimed at my front leg. Not a killing shot, but it would slow me down long enough for her to catch me. I didn’t know how she would do it with so many witnesses. They thought I was just an animal, a large wolf gone rogue. People would want me dead, either in revenge for the lives I had taken or to prevent more deaths. And if the authorities were called in they would see to it that this man eater terrorising the town was killed. They would not let civilians take me. Perhaps this Slayer had already called in the reinforcements. Perhaps they would bring guns loaded with tranquilliser darts to sedate me, and take me away under the pretence of being professional animal handlers sent to transport me elsewhere. Whatever their plans, I couldn’t let it happen. They would take what they wanted from me and end it. Handing myself over to them would only delay the inevitable, they would kill me eventually.

  Her aim never wavered as I continued to back away. Those pitiless eyes just watched me, maybe reluctant to shoot before the others arrived. It would draw too much attention to her. But it wouldn’t last; she would have to shoot me eventually. I didn’t really have a plan. I just knew I had to get away from her before more of them arrived, and I had to do something soon before she was forced to shoot.

  Confident in the knowledge that she would not kill me, I turned my back on her and ran. She pulled the trigger, but for some reason she’d panicked. The shot had been wild. She hadn’t given herself chance to adjust her aim after I’d moved, and it thudded harmlessly into the wall beyond which was freedom. I bounded over to the wall and threw myself at it, but fear clouded my brain. I hadn’t judged the distance as well as the first time, jumping just high enough to hook my front paws over the top. My back legs scrabbled against the brickwork as I fought against gravity, pulling myself up, but it took precious time. It gave her the time she needed. The next bullet buried itself in my back leg. I yelped, and the shock and the pain almost caused me to lose my footing. But somehow I managed to keep hold and pull myself up before I slid back down. I heard her cursing behind me as I limped away.

  Some time later, I lay hidden in the undergrowth of the woods, blood leaking into the soil around me. I could only hope they wouldn’t find me. I’d tried putting weight on the leg and it had collapsed beneath me. I’d had to struggle on three legs to find somewhere safe to wait for dawn, when the change would heal me. If the Slayers found me before then, they would take me. Without the use of my back leg, I would not be able to escape them a second time, not if they had more guns. As it was, I was lucky I was much stronger than a mortal would have been after the blood loss I had suffered. And not even I knew if the eye would heal or not. Only time would tell.

  Morning came and the moon sank beneath the horizon, driven away by the sun. They’d been searching for me. I’d heard them crashing through the undergrowth, stealthy for humans but clumsier than any other animal in the woods. It had been a long night, and I almost welcomed the change back to human.

  Pain spread through my body. Limbs shifted. My paws shrank and separated until they formed outstretched fingers, the claws shortening, going blunt, until they became harmless. My canines shrank and extra teeth I didn’t need as a human melted back into my gums as if they had never been. Guts reformed within, changing size and shape. My tail was sucked back into my spine. I cried out with the pain, forgetting the danger of the Slayers. The noise started out as yelps and yips but soon became human screams of agony uttered from a shrinking snout, reforming into a human mouth. My ears became rounder and moved back to the side of my head. One eye turned from amber to greenish brown, while the damaged one repaired itself. I felt the human’s relief as it came to the surface, pushing me back into oblivion. And then I knew no more.

  Pain. Overwhelming pain as I became human again. Not only the agony of the change, but the searing pain in my damaged eye as it reformed, swelling up like a balloon, filling itself again with more of the gunk that had spilled onto my cheek. I rolled it around its socket to test my vision. It seemed to be working as well as it ever had, thank God. The one thing that truly scared me was the thought of being blind. I’d always felt I’d rather die than live without my sight but, judging from the events that night, it was something I no longer needed to fear, thanks to my lupine blood.

  My leg throbbed to greater heights of pain while the damaged tissue changed and tried to repair itself. Just as the pain became unbearable I could feel something being pushed out of the limb, and then felt the small hole close over and heard something small and metallic fall the short distance to the ground. Finally the pain ended and I was fully human, where I lay in the soil, shaking from the after effects of the pain, naked and bloody. Something glinting in the dirt caught my eye and I found the bullet that had been embedded in my leg for most of the night. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew what it meant. The war had found me, and I welcomed it.

  From then on, I couldn’t go anywhere without being followed. I first noticed when I walked into town to meet up with Lizzy. I heard footfalls somewhere behind me. Whenever I stopped so did the footfalls, only to start up again as soon as I did, matching my pace. Yet when I turned round there was no one there.

  I had to get into the habit of doubling back on myself and circlin
g my destination, taking the longer route until I could lose them so I didn’t lead them to my friends or my family. I was hoping even though they knew who I was, they still didn’t know where I lived. Otherwise they’d have killed me in my sleep, wouldn’t they? I could see no reason why they wouldn’t have killed me already if they knew where I lived, since they had people in the police force to cover their arse when it came to the legal stuff. Hell, they were the police force from what Lady Sarah had told me, or enough of them were. For all I knew they could have members in the government too, and they probably had judges sympathetic to their cause in case it ever went to court. So I let them follow me when it suited me, and slipped away from them when I was sure they would cause no one else any harm. As long as they were only following me, there would be no bloodshed, no matter how much I thirsted for blood. I would let them make the first move, just to be sure this wasn’t some kind of trap. Of course, they could still spring a trap even then, but from the way they were simply following me and hadn’t yet attempted anything more, even when they’d had plenty of opportunities, I couldn’t help feeling it was a trap they wanted me to walk into. I stuck to crowded places as much as I could, hoping they wouldn’t risk anything with so many witnesses around. Surely they couldn’t be immune to the law, even with a number of their people in high places.