Changeling Dark Moon Read online

  Trey walked into the dining room to discover Alexa and Charles waiting for him. Charles was in a suit but had foregone his tie in favour of an open-necked shirt. Alexa was wearing a long black dress and had a necklace around her neck that Trey guessed was extremely expensive. Her hair was scooped up and arranged on top of her head in what he thought was some kind of French pleat. They were in mid-conversation as he entered and he tried not to allow the colour to rise in his cheeks as Alexa looked over at him and smiled broadly, her eyebrows lifting slightly above her blue eyes as she noticed that he had changed into a jacket and formal trousers. He self-consciously tugged at the hem of his jacket and walked round the side of the table opposite to them.

  ‘Trey, you’re just in time. Charles was about to tell me about his theory as to why Caliban might have chosen Iceland as his base.’ She nodded for him to sit in the chair directly across from her own and reached over to fill his glass with water from the bottle beside it.

  ‘Great,’ grumbled Trey under his breath as he sat down, ‘another hour-long lecture, no doubt.’

  If Charles heard this he didn’t say anything, turning in his seat instead to face Alexa. ‘During the two hours that we’ve been apart I’ve—’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for Tom?’ Trey interrupted.

  ‘No need.’ Tom’s loud voice came from behind him and Trey turned round to see the Irishman entering the room wheeling a huge hostess trolley in front of him. ‘Carry on, please, Charles. I’ll dish up the dinner while I’m listening. I’ve given Mrs Magilton the rest of the evening off.’ He shot Trey a look of warning, muttering something about ‘making an effort to get on’.

  ‘As I’m sure everyone else has,’ Charles said, ‘I’ve been wondering if there could be some significance in Caliban choosing Iceland as the site to try out the Globe’s powers. After we split up downstairs, I went back to the research rooms and searched for links between Nordic countries and zombies, and I was amazed at what I found out. There’s a long Icelandic tradition in the belief of the existence of revenants – people that return from the dead. Icelandic legend has it that the Draugr would rise up from their burial barrows and roam the countryside murdering people and killing livestock. They are undead blue-black creatures with superhuman strength who envy the life still possessed by the living. There are countless stories of them breaking into houses and murdering everyone inside, crushing them to death with their immense power. Google it,’ he said, looking over at Trey. ‘There’s simply tons about them on the web.’ He shifted his attention back to Alexa and Tom, before adding, ‘I believe that Caliban may be trying to resurrect these creatures.’

  The room was utterly quiet. Tom set down the large serving spoons that he’d been holding; the rasping sound they made as their metal surfaces slid against one another reminded Trey of a butcher sharpening a knife against his steel.

  ‘Why?’ Tom said in a low voice.

  Charles looked over at him and gave a tiny shrug of the shoulders. ‘The obvious reply is, why not? Caliban might just be exercising his sick desire for chaos and reanimating these creatures for the sheer hell of it. Or maybe, and this theory is something that I do not want to consider, he sees Iceland as the perfect place where he can set up a permanent base in this realm – those long, long nights must have a certain appeal to a vampire. If the Draugr are as vicious and cruel as legend would have it, they could be used to wipe out the human population. That’s if they can be controlled, which, if our previous experience with zombies is anything to go by, is far from clear.’

  ‘Why can’t Caliban do that with the demons and vampires at his disposal?’ Trey asked.

  ‘Because he wouldn’t be capable of creating a portal large enough, or keeping it open long enough, to get sufficient numbers of nethercreatures through. The Draugr are already there. A ready-made army buried in the ground just waiting to be unleashed. All he needs to do is resurrect them. Once he has control of the country he could start to bring his forces through a bit at a time.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Tom. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not a lot more.’ Charles reached for his glass and drank a large mouthful of wine. ‘It’s suggested that these Draugr might be capable of increasing their size at will, enabling them to achieve huge proportions while maintaining fantastic speed and strength – although it would seem that they are unable to sustain this for very long. They’re described locally as hel-blar, meaning blue as death, and they carry the unmistakable stench of death upon them.’

  ‘Can they be killed?’

  ‘They’re already dead, Tom. But they can be stopped.’ He glanced at Alexa before continuing, ‘It’s quite ironic when you think why it is that we may have to face these creatures, but they can be dispatched in much the same way as a vampire or a werewolf can – beheading or burning would seem to do the job.’ This time he shot a look at Trey before going on. ‘However, there have been no reported sightings of any Draugr for over a hundred years so the background details are a little thin on the ground.’

  ‘If they’ve been buried for that long,’ said Alexa, ‘surely they’ll be nothing more than bone by now? They’ll have been whittled down to next to nothing by the worms and the microbes in the soil.’

  ‘Apparently not. Legend has it that they lie untouched in their underground barrows, waiting for an opportunity to rise again and take vengeance on the world for their untimely deaths.’ Charles shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

  ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘I think that if something as unusual and powerful as one of these Draugr had been resurrected, our people downstairs would have picked it up, so I am assuming that Gwendolin has not been successful – yet.’

  ‘Then time is of the essence,’ Tom said, starting to dish up the food. ‘We not only need the Globe, and quickly, to save Lucien, but we also need to get it away from Caliban to stop him letting loose these … Draugr.’ He ladled generous portions of a creamy chicken concoction on to the plates and passed them round the table before finally sinking into the chair to Trey’s right. ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I could do with a drink,’ he said, and reached for the red wine. ‘Dig in, everyone. We still have the element of surprise on our side and we’ll need all our strength for what lies ahead. We could have done without this added complication, but it doesn’t alter our mission – we have to get into Iceland, take the Globe from under Caliban and Gwendolin’s noses, and get back here with it for Lucien.’ He nodded at them, a smile briefly touching his lips. ‘Piece of cake.’

  ‘Can I read through the research that you’ve managed to dig up so far?’ Alexa asked Charles.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘In light of what Tom said earlier about there being a rat in the camp, I’ve saved everything to disk and deleted any references to either Draugr or Icelandic revenants from the system downstairs. I’ll let you have the disk as soon as we’ve finished here.’

  Alexa smiled at him, and Trey felt a little sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he watched her reach over and squeeze Charles’s hand. He looked away, digging into his food and shovelling a huge forkful of the piping hot chicken into his mouth, wincing at the pain it caused to his tongue.

  ‘When do we leave for Iceland, Tom?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘All things being well, the day after tomorrow. We have some things that we need to set in place at the other end, and then we’ll be on our way. And from what I’ve just heard, that’s not a moment too soon.’

  ‘But we still don’t know where my mother keeps the Globe inside Leroth,’ Alexa pointed out. ‘In fact we know next to nothing about the layout of the tower or what to expect once we get inside.’

  ‘Trey?’ Tom said, raising his eyebrows in the teenager’s direction.

  Alexa and Charles exchanged a brief look before turning their attention to the boy sitting across from them.

  A brief embarrassed smile flashed across Trey’s features. ‘During the last few months Tom has set me up with sparri
ng partners – various nethercreatures. It was Lucien’s idea, to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses. Anyway, one of them – a Murkbeast called Klimbock – mentioned that some years before joining up with Lucien it’d been a guard for Caliban. Caliban crucified Klimbock’s brother, so you can imagine that the vampire’s no longer on the Murkbeast’s Christmas card list.’

  ‘What has this got to do with—’

  Alexa hushed Charles. ‘Go on, Trey.’

  ‘I asked Klimbock if it had ever been to the Tower of Leroth, and it told me it had, on many occasions. The demon has described its layout to me – some of the guard positions, that kind of thing – and provided us with a map, not a great one, but better than nothing. In addition, it remembers seeing the Globe once; Gwendolin keeps it in her private chambers towards the top of the tower.’

  He looked over at Alexa’s frowning face and shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘Tom asked me to keep this to myself until – well, until we were certain who was going and who we could trust.’

  Then he reached into his pocket and retrieved the hand-drawn map that the Murkbeast had put together for them.

  ‘You’re assuming this demon is telling you the truth,’ Charles said. ‘How do we know that it’s not the traitor? Caliban’s insider.’

  Trey looked back at Charles, his eyes unblinking. ‘How do we know you’re not?’

  The Necrotroph looked in the passenger-side mirror to ensure that there were no cars entering the street. It glanced down at the printout that it had made from the company’s HR files, checking the address once more. Satisfied, it pushed the car door open and stepped out into the cool evening. The smell of freshly cut grass was in the air and the scent evoked a thousand memories inside its head – none of which were its own, and none of which it could truly say that it had really experienced – they were just vague and distant memories from the thousands of bodies that it had possessed during its considerably long existence.

  The demon walked along the pavement towards the house and nodded to itself when it saw the black BMW car parked on the driveway in front of the garage. It slowed down its approach, taking deep breaths in through the nose and blowing them back out from a lipstick-painted mouth. These moments before a possession were always the worst, and while it was confident that it would be able to carry out its plans without too many problems, it nevertheless felt something that it guessed was akin to nervousness.

  It began the process.

  Anyone passing Ruth Glenister at that moment would have considered the look on her face – or rather the complete lack of expression on her face – as somewhat disconcerting. She resembled a patient that has been placed under a general anaesthetic with all vestiges of the life that inhabits the body seemingly absent, as if this middle-aged woman was sleepwalking up the street, oblivious to everything and anything around her.

  The Necrotroph turned into the property, neglecting to close the small red gate to the pathway leading to the front door. Pressing the doorbell, it stepped backwards slightly and waited on the doorstep for the house’s occupant to answer.

  The teenage girl that opened the door was perhaps sixteen years of age. She was dressed all in black, with black nail polish and black lipstick finishing off the ensemble. The girl was already frowning as she opened the door, and her scowl deepened as she looked at the strange woman standing on the doorstep.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Are you Philippa Tipsbury? Martin Tipsbury’s daughter?’ asked the visitor.

  Philippa Tipsbury stared at the woman standing on her doorstep, noting how she wavered slightly on her feet. Something didn’t seem right about this visitor, and the girl wondered for a split second if she might be drunk. The way that her expressionless face stared back at her and the swaying motion of her body suggested that this might be the case, but there was something else about the woman that she couldn’t quite put her finger on – it was almost as if she might be in shock.

  The stranger held up a pass that bore her picture and her name: Ruth Glenister. ‘I work with your father, Miss Tipsbury, and I’m afraid that I have some rather bad news.’

  Suddenly it all made sense. The woman wasn’t drunk; she was in shock. Something terrible had happened to her dad and, for some reason, this poor woman had been sent out by his company to let her know. Philippa’s hand flew up to her mouth as if to stifle any sound that might try to escape.

  ‘Can I come in?’ asked the woman called Ruth.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ Philippa said, standing to one side and ushering the older woman into the hallway. She glanced out on to the gradually darkening street before turning back into the house and closing the door behind her.

  The possession had gone far better than the demon had any right to have hoped, with the added bonus that the human called Ruth had died during the transmigration process, instead of surviving as some gibbering lunatic that would have to be dispatched before the rest of the plan could be carried out. The demon had looked down at the dead body without the slightest feeling of remorse, despite the considerable time that it had inhabited the human that it had once belonged to. Like all Necrotrophs, it cared nothing for the host that it left behind following a transferral – they were no more than a means to an end.

  After dragging the body into the garage, Philippa Tipsbury returned to the house and straightened herself out in front of the full-length mirror that hung in the hall, pushing her hair back into place and examining herself for the first time. She was not unattractive. The clothes that she wore were a statement. Everything was black. She had a small silver ring hanging from the edge of her eyebrow, and when she opened her mouth she could clearly see the large silver stud that pierced her tongue. A mild look of concern crossed her features and she frowned slightly at her own reflection, unable to pinpoint exactly what was wrong, but certain that something was amiss. She had a strange feeling that she had just come in from the garage and the smudge of dirt on her shirt would seem to endorse this belief. But she had no recollection of going into the building or, indeed, what she might have been doing there.

  The demon concentrated on dispelling this anxiety, hooking into the area of the host’s brain that was controlling these emotions and suppressing them as best it could. This was the most difficult time following a transmigration and it knew that in this instance it had little choice but to let the host retain most of its faculties while carefully closing off the paths to certain thoughts and memories that might cause the human to panic. Later the Necrotroph would assume full control and squash the former inhabitant entirely, but for now it had to walk a treacherous path and bide its time.

  Philippa brushed at the mark on her shirt, tut-tutting at herself for being so clumsy. She glanced at her watch and wondered if Liam, her boyfriend, would be home yet from his job. They’d been going out with each other for over a year now and they had planned to go to a party together this weekend with some friends. She glanced at the time again and made her way upstairs to her room. If she called him now, she could make certain of the plans before her dad got home – he thought that Philippa was going to a sleepover at her friend Gemma’s house while her parents were away.

  She started to cross the room towards the phone on the bedside table when she stopped, shaking her head in irritation as if to loosen a thought or memory that just eluded her attempts to pinpoint it. Something about her dad. She had some vague recollection of somebody coming to see her about him, and the sensation that he was in some kind of danger.

  And then, as quickly as the feeling came, it was gone again. She mentally admonished herself for being so foolish. Picking up the phone, she dialled the number, at the same time moving over to the curtains to look out on to the street below to ensure that her father would not turn up unexpectedly and interrupt her conversation.

  The phone was answered on the third ring. ‘Hello.’ It was Brian’s voice.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said into the handset. ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘H
ey, gorgeous. How you doing? I’ve just got in from work. I was about to get some dinner. What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all. How was work?’

  ‘Ah, you know, same stuff, different day. How about you? School still a drag?’

  Liam had left school last year. He had done well in his A levels, but instead of going to university he’d decided to take a job in his father’s IT company. He was three years older than Philippa, and she knew her dad wouldn’t approve of her going out with a boy who was that much older, so she had kept it from him.

  ‘The place is full of losers, Liam. Not a single interesting person in the whole school. They’re all just sheep – pathetic, mindless sheep, bleating their way around the corridors between pointless lessons. I hate it, and I hate everyone there.’

  ‘Are we still on for the weekend?’ he asked. ‘I’ve spoken to James, and he said that we can stay the night after the party.’

  She smiled at the way he stumbled over his words and imagined him blushing on the other end of the line. She was about to answer that she was looking forward to it when the words caught in her throat. She frowned, shook her head and tried again, but all that came out was a thin little croak, and she found it difficult to breathe as her throat constricted again to strangle off the sentence that she had tried to form. A ripple of panic washed through her. Was she having some kind of a fit? Her hand gripped the receiver tightly so that the skin stretched over her knuckles, bleaching them of their usual pink hue, and she stared down at them in horror.

  ‘Hello? Philippa, are you still there?’

  ‘I can’t see you any more,’ she said. The words tumbled out from her mouth in a torrent.

  Her heart leaped inside her and she tried to speak again, tried to correct the absurd utterance that had just poured forth from her, but no words would come. She wanted to scream, and she shook her head in frustration and fear at her sudden inability to control her actions. She tried to pull the phone away from her head but her muscles were locked, the receiver jammed up against her cheek.