by Stead, Nick
The stab of a needle pierced my shoulder muscles and I gave another angry growl. Then I felt a metallic taste on my tongue, and my world went black.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unseen Threat
I awoke to find myself back in darkness, wreathed in the same foul stench of the earlier parts of the dungeon. This time it was made all the worse for the underlying smell of Zee’s rotting flesh, somewhere nearby. His wounds hadn’t healed. But there were no groans or sounds of movement, so I guessed the Slayers had knocked him out as well. That was probably a blessing for the time being.
I fought the grogginess from the tranquiliser and attempted to stand, but my paws didn’t want to obey me. Fear cut through my sluggish mind. My back legs, and my tail! I couldn’t feel them. Why was that?
My front paws were reluctant to take my weight, and I struggled to pull my upper body off the floor. I twisted my head round to look at my lower half but I still couldn’t see anything. Then a wave of nausea rose up, forcing me to keep still until it passed.
Memories of the fight with the Slayers began piecing themselves together. Of course. I’d been shot, and the bullet had left me paralysed. That’s why I couldn’t feel anything below my ribcage.
I took a deep breath and fought another urge to throw up. The tranquiliser must have counteracted my body’s ability to shift forms whilst unconscious, and for a moment I feared I might be stuck in my broken wolf form for as long as it stayed in my system. But the transformation took hold as normal, my muzzle shrinking back into a human face and my digits stretching into fingers.
Relief washed over me as my spine fused back together, complete with all the nerve connections responsible for sending the messages from my brain down to my legs. Feeling flooded back into them. It was mostly pain while my body was shifting but I welcomed the discomfort. Anything was better than that terrifying nothingness I’d had just moments before.
The transformation completed. I stretched and wiggled my toes, enjoying the feeling of being complete and able-bodied again. Thank God.
Hannah’s scent found its way into my nostrils, and my mouth watered. The hunger reared up, stronger than ever, and every bit as nauseating as the after effects of the tranquiliser. I tried to focus on the question of why she was still down here with us. The Slayers must have given her some part to play in their game, but what that might be was beyond me. It wasn’t like she could have lied to Zee whilst under his spell, so she wasn’t working with them. What was her role in all this?
She groaned and began to stir. Then her heart sped up, thundering against her chest with the sweet song of terror. It gave rise to another hunger pang and I struggled not to lunge in her direction, my instincts screaming at me to feed.
“What’s going on? I can’t see!” Her voice was high with fear. Had Zee’s hold on her been broken? I felt another stab of my own fears. What if he wasn’t simply unconscious?
“Zee?” I yelled.
“Nick?” Hannah said. “I saw that man shoot you! Are you okay? You sound human again.”
I groped my way over to the rotting flesh smell and my hands found a body, utterly still and lifeless on the stone floor. It was impossible to tell whether he was truly dead or not and I slumped in defeat.
“Yeah, I needed to change back so I could heal the damage. I’m fine now.” It came out despondent and probably did nothing for Hannah’s fears.
“So what now, try and find another way to escape?”
I brightened a little at the thought of escape. “Well, when I was first captured they had me in a dark room and I had to feel around to find the exit, so I guess they want us to do the same again in here. This feels different to that first challenge though; the stink in this place didn’t hit me until I’d got the door open for one thing.”
I stood and felt my way over to the wall. It was the same smooth and uneven stone surface as every other part of the dungeon we’d been through, but it seemed to be stretching on forever. I could hear Hannah working her way along the opposite side and, judging from the short distance between us, I began to suspect we weren’t in a room at all but another tunnel, with the lights switched off. There did feel to be lights along the walls though, again shaped to mimic the burning torches of fantasy or medieval dungeons.
“This is useless, it all feels the same to me,” Hannah said.
“Wait, I think I’ve got something.” My fingers found a slight indentation in the stone and passed across a different surface, one that felt smooth and flat. “It feels like there’s a pane of glass here.”
“Glass?”
“Yeah. Seems to take up this entire section of the wall.”
In my mind’s eye, I pictured a zoo enclosure with a large viewing window so visitors could get a closer look at the animals. And I suddenly had a bad feeling about what might be on the other side.
“Can’t you break through?”
I laughed as I backed away, into the opposite wall. “Oh something is probably about to break through, but it won’t be me.”
Hannah’s voice rose another octave. “What?”
Light flooded the passage, blindingly bright again after total darkness. I raised a hand to my eyes and squinted at the window opposite, expecting another pack of ghouls or zombies to come crashing through at any minute. But my vision was still adjusting, and whatever new horrors awaited were hidden in the light now.
A hiss distracted me and I turned to look back down the corridor. There was a figure standing there, no more than a shadowy outline in the glare, tall and menacing. I tensed, but then my eyesight began to adapt enough to make out my friend, and the hideous spectacle he had been reduced to.
“Zee! I thought you were dead.”
His eyes showed no hint of recognition. He charged.
A blur of rotting flesh and blazing fury hurtled down the tunnel, hunger once again devouring all ability to reason. I swore and took up a fighting stance, but he wasn’t coming straight at me. Hannah was standing somewhere just behind me, and it was her blood Zee wanted.
“Zee, no!” I shouted. He didn’t even slow, the damage done by the holy water turning him to a thing of rage and bloodlust. And if Hannah’s blood was poisoned, it would be his undoing.
I cursed again and rushed forward to intercept him, sending us both to the ground. New cuts and grazes opened up as we rolled across the stone, but somehow I managed to keep from banging my head. At best it would have sent me back into unconsciousness, and at worst I could have cracked it open. Either outcome may well have spelt my doom.
Zee was quicker to recover from the fall than I was, but I’d succeeded in distracting him from Hannah. Unfortunately, that meant he was focused on me instead, and he was too far gone for me to trust with drinking from my veins. So what to do?
In a matter of seconds, he had me pinned on my back, his ruined face filling my field of vision as I struggled to wriggle out from his grasp. The holy water had done such horrific damage to his flesh that I’d have wondered if his body would even be able to heal through feeding this time, if I hadn’t seen Leon recover from similar injuries just a few nights ago. But until he had fresh blood inside him the wounds would remain, red raw and probably agonising to bear.
The imprint of the netting made his skin look like a gory chessboard. Bloody tracks crisscrossed over his face, so deep in places that the white of bone showed through. One eye had been injured, the lids gone and the white of the eyeball turned to blood red, the iris dulled. Gunk from the damaged tissue stuck to his skin, rotten and stinking as if it had been there for days. There wasn’t even anything appetising about it. The smell was just bad.
If he’d still had lips, they would probably have been pulled back in a feral snarl, but they’d been completely eaten away, leaving him with a terrible grin that would no doubt make a reappearance in my nightmares at some point. And that gruesome face was made all the worse for the fury and the bloodlust burning in his one good eye, fixed solely on me now.
His rage mad
e up for any weakness the wounds had caused. I strained against him but I didn’t have the strength to push him off. That ghastly mouth was lowering to my throat and there was nothing I could do.
Fangs pierced my skin for the second time in what was probably only a matter of hours. And my blood flowed once more.
“Zee,” I gasped. “Fight it, Zee. It’s me, Nick. You don’t want to kill me.”
My heart thundered and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I felt sick again.
“Zee!”
It was no use. I slipped back into unconsciousness.
My eyes snapped open and fixed on Zee’s face hovering above me, now healed and flawless as ever. I was back to being weakened and hungry after first healing my own wounds, and then having to donate more blood to my friend. But I was alive. That was something, at least.
“How long was I out this time?” I growled, accepting his hand and getting to my feet.
“Not long.”
Hannah was still standing a little way off from us, looking uncertain. She met my gaze. “Why did you save me?”
“Honestly? I think the Slayers want you in here with us for a reason and I still suspect if either of us tried to feed on you it would go badly. And who knows, maybe you’ll prove to be of some help when it comes to finally getting out of here. Or if nothing else, at least you’ve not really been in the way so far.”
She looked hurt that my answer hadn’t been something more heroic or altruistic, but we didn’t have time to worry about her feelings. There were still the potential dangers lurking behind the window to deal with. And besides, in ordinary circumstances she would have been just another human to prey on. If she wanted to survive the experience then she needed to understand the harsh truth of our predatory nature and remain wary, no matter how friendly we might seem at times.
I turned my attention to the glass. “What’s on the other side of it, have any of you checked yet?”
“I think you should see for yourself,” Zee said, his eyes impossible to read.
“Why, is it bad?”
He motioned for me to go look. That feeling of dread was back and I had to force myself to move over to the window, certain it would look into a room full of more monsters to fight. But what I saw in there was possibly worse than anything I could have imagined.
The window looked into a large room which seemed to be empty for the most part, though that didn’t mean there weren’t more nasty surprises hidden in there. The one thing I could see was a slab of stone big enough to lie a body on, and there was indeed a body on there, utterly still and seemingly devoid of life. Cold fear stabbed through me as my eyes took in her features, recognising one of the two faces I’d been hoping to find, ever since I’d first woken up in the dungeon.
I strained my hearing for any sounds of breathing or a heartbeat, but I could detect neither. Though for a vampire that didn’t necessarily mean anything. There was a chance Lady Sarah remained one of the undead, and was just in need of fresh blood to heal from her gunshot wounds, still apparent through the holes the bullets had made in her dress. Neither looked to be killing shots but if they hadn’t found their mark, then why had she gone down to them in the first place? I refused to believe she was truly gone, and even though we’d argued a lot over the last year and still had a lot of bonding to do in the way of becoming true friends, she had tried to help me as much as she could. I owed her.
My gaze roamed across the glass, looking for weak points. There was nothing obvious to attack, so I summoned what strength my body had left and prepared to throw myself against it. Zee’s hand gripped my shoulder.
“We have to get to her,” I snarled, trying to shake him off.
“And we will – I know Lady Sarah of old and would not leave her in the hands of the Slayers either. But look to your left; see the open doorway? And if you look closely, you can just make out the top of a staircase leading down from it.”
“I see it.”
“Good. Now look to your right – there’s another open doorway there as well. I don’t think we’re meant to break through here; I think they want us to go round and probably battle through more enemies to gain access to one of those doorways. Save your energy for the fights we have ahead.”
He made a good point. I hated leaving Lady Sarah there when she was only a room away, but common sense told me it wouldn’t be as easy as breaking through the window.
“Come on then,” I growled, turning away.
We were in a long tunnel but it felt to stretch even further now that I was in a hurry to work through the level and reach my mentor and ally, and friend of sorts. As with the section of the dungeon I’d started in, there was only one direction to go in this new passage: straight ahead. Whatever lay behind was blocked off, with no evidence of any doors the Slayers might have brought us through. The only other thing of interest was more words on the wall, this time proclaiming us to have reached ‘Level Three’.
It seemed like an age for us to reach the next chamber. The door to this one was closed, but it ground upwards as we stepped in front of it. I couldn’t see much of what lay beyond. It was pitch black in there, and I glanced at Zee with another bout of uneasiness. He kept his eyes on the door as it slid high enough for us to step inside. Then the lights went out again. A small whimper escaped Hannah’s lips, the fear of the unknown made worse for a species that relied so heavily on eyesight.
“Stay here,” Zee commanded. She was still under his spell after all. We felt our way forward but she didn’t follow, even though it had to be making her fear worse for being left alone by the door.
My senses failed to pick up anything in the blackness: no faint traces of any scents underneath the dungeon stench, nor any sounds of movement. And yet, I had the distinct feeling that we weren’t alone. It was kind of like that sense of someone watching you, even when you can’t see anyone around. I thought back to the first time I’d faced Selina’s familiar. It hadn’t given off any signs of life either.
The barghest had been of another realm, seemingly made from shadows and yet very much there when it attacked. In my mind’s eye, I found myself back out on the moors, recalling then how the only thing to give it away had been its glowing red eyes.
A flash of something similar appeared in my peripheral vision. My heart quickened again and I turned my head, trying to get a proper look. Nothing. There was only that impenetrable blackness, and the occasional flash of light that was nothing more than my mind playing tricks.
We were each following a wall on opposite sides as I’d done out in the passage with Hannah, but I still hated having to walk blindly forward with not even a good mental image of my surroundings through scent and sound. It might have been the third time the Slayers had forced me to feel around in darkness but that didn’t mean it was getting any easier. Especially when I was expecting an attack at any moment. I wished they’d just put the lights back on and get the inevitable torment over with, be it another fight or more flesh and blood sacrifices to open the door on the other side.
Something brushed against my arm. A sinister laugh sounded, seeming to come from all around us, as if the darkness itself had been given a voice. I would have reminded myself that laughing shadows were impossible, but again I thought back to the barghest and the way it could dissolve into a kind of mist, and then reform into the shape of the black dog. Who was to say we weren’t facing another creature made of something similar, and yet perfectly capable of harming flesh and blood? And if our adversary was a being from somewhere other than the earthly plane, what hope did we stand of beating it? The only reason I’d survived the barghest had been because Selina actually wanted me alive. If she’d wanted me dead, I knew for certain the shadow beast would have killed me. When it had attacked Leon and we’d done our best to fight it off, neither of us had managed to deal it any damage. We hadn’t found any weaknesses, and it had been every bit as supernaturally strong as we were. None of which boded well for this new threat.
I couldn�
��t help the warning snarl that escaped my throat, animal instinct responding to the perceived danger with a threat of my own. I barely felt the pain as my eyes turned amber and my teeth and nails grew, instinctively making myself as fierce as possible without fully transforming. Whatever was in the chamber with us seemed to find that amusing, another laugh echoing around us, which only made me growl more. If I’d been in wolf form my hackles would have been raised, my stance defensive. And still I could see nothing to indicate the presence of any apparition.
A scream came from behind us. Had it brushed against Hannah? I imagined it playing with us like a cat with a mouse, but there was no smell of fresh blood. It hadn’t attacked – yet.
Something bumped into my leg and I turned, lashing out and snapping at thin air, even though my jaws were still human. Both fangs and claws passed through nothingness which only heightened my rage, straining to break free of its fetters like the great wolf Fenrir from Norse mythology. I wanted nothing more than to sink my teeth into this new enemy and tear it apart limb from limb, and my anger roared its defiance that it would not be denied. But if I couldn’t even sense our tormentor then how was I supposed to fight back? I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable but I was reluctant to unleash my rage too soon. Working myself into a frenzy would only be a waste of energy when all I could do was strike out blindly with no real hope of actually hitting anything.
A flash of light appeared from behind. Blackness rushed in again, only to be pushed back a second time, moments later. It wasn’t so much a beam as it was a small sphere, stable now and just bright enough to illuminate the fear etched on Hannah’s face, but too weak to reach me and Zee. And yet, the shadows around her parted before it, creating a ray of hope. And was it my imagination, or had I just seen something fleeing from the edge of that light?