Turned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 2) Read online

  Turned

  A Branded Story: Book 2

  David Bussell

  Copyright © 2018 by Genre Reader

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Also Available From the Uncanny Kingdom

  Become an Insider

  Turned

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

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  Dark Lakes: Magic Eater

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  1

  My boyfriend was a vampire.

  It sounds like the title of a dodgy B-Movie, but now it was my reality. Now it was my Sunday.

  Rewind...

  Neil and I were splashed out in bed, dog-tired and ready to sleep off an evening of intense carnal celebration. Too much information? Not very ladylike? Yeah, you can stop clutching your pearls and get off your fainting chair, princess. I’d earned my bit of fun and then some; I mean it’s not every day you rescue your boyfriend from a sacrificial altar and save the city from an unholy vampire uprising, is it?

  It really had been a hell of a night—both inside and outside of the bedroom—and I was all set to conk out. I wouldn’t be asleep for long though, oh no. One of the many, many crappy things about being the woman chosen to guard the frontier between civilisation and an undead apocalypse is that I don’t get much sleep. And I love sleep. Love it. Before I got the Nightstalker gig, my ambition in life was to basically be in a coma, now I’m lucky if I manage to snatch a couple of hours. I’m telling you, it’s not easy being London’s heroic and incredibly modest saviour.

  But let me backtrack a little further. Not all the way back to me getting Sanctified (because shame on you if you’re not up to speed with that already), but to the moment right before my boyfriend sprouted fangs and went for my neck like I was made of prime Kobe beef.

  Yeah, that moment.

  The two of us were marinating in post-coital bliss when things took the unexpected swerve. Actually, it was less of a swerve swerve than a full-blown, skidding on the chicane, smashing through the guardrail, and plunging headlong over the edge of a cliff swerve.

  I first realised something was wrong when I woke up and noticed that Neil wasn’t wearing his oxygen mask. Straight away, gooseflesh went creeping up my arms. Neil suffers from a condition called cystic fibrosis, which means he needs extra O2 to raise his low blood oxygen. It’s a bitch of an illness, but he gets by, at least he does so long as he wears his respirator, which at that moment was lying beside him, breathing air into nothing.

  What followed was a blur. A giddy little waking nightmare that ran the gamut from Neil being dead, to Neil being alive, to Neil being something halfway between.

  When I saw the colour of his fishbelly white skin I obviously thought the worst, but when I rolled him over and saw his eyes staring straight at me, I felt a huge wash of relief. He’s just sick, I thought, that’s all. But he was more than that. Much more. He was one of them.

  ‘Hello,’ he growled, his tongue flicking across his razor blade smile. ‘I’m really hungry.’

  Then he was lunging for me, canines gleaming, eyes blood-red. I thrust out my hands and held him at arm’s length as he chomped at my throat, thirsty for the taste of my hot blood. Two pearl daggers scraped my flesh, eager to gnaw through skin and sinew to get at the juice beneath. Claws sprang from his fingers, shredding the bed sheets as he swiped at me, turning the quilt into confetti.

  ‘Neil!’ I cried. ‘It’s me, Abbey, your girlfriend! You know… the one who never remembers to unload the dishwasher!’

  Then I saw it: the mark of Judas on his forehead, a glowing letter J, visible only to me. He’d been turned by my sworn enemies, the Judas Clan, the same people I’d just rescued him from. That did not fill my heart with smiles and cupcakes, let me tell you.

  The Clan had made Neil into one of their own, and now he was doing their bidding, trying to sink his chompers into me and snack on my red stuff. Well, lucky for me, I have a letter of my own: a big letter N seared into the palm of my hand that makes me a vampire’s worst nightmare (well, daymare, I suppose).

  The brand turned hot and bright, throwing darts of blue light about the bedroom. I felt a tremendous surge of adrenaline as my powers kicked in, snarling inside of my belly, filling me up with impossible strength, making me powerful beyond the limits of my puny frame. Something had woken inside of me. My own kind of monster.

  In one smooth move I seized Neil by the wrists, flipped him on to his back, and pinned him to the mattress. He bucked beneath me, a trapped animal, growling and thrashing and throwing his weight from side to side. The headboard beat a frenzied tattoo against the bedroom wall, only now the noise didn’t signal pleasure, now it was the noise of a man trying to throw me across the room and tear out my jugular.

  ‘I know you’re in there, Neil,’ I said, pressing down on him, 'and I’m going to get you out. Somehow.’

  One of his arms momentarily broke free of my grip and he caught me with a wicked punch to the jaw. Ow. Not so long ago, a knock like that would have left me with a lump the size of a gobstopper. Not anymore though. Now I’m the Nightstalker, I heal about as quickly as I wound.

  Neil let fly an awful, pterodactyl screech, loud enough to make the bedroom windows rattle. If he carried on like that he was going to wake Mr Munford across the hall, and then I’d really have a problem. It was bad enough that the love of my life had transformed into a bloodthirsty nosferatu, but the last thing I needed was to give the Residents’ Association any more of a reason to turf us out.

  Wasting no time, I gathered Neil’s wrists in one hand and used the other to whip off a string of fairy lights tacked to the bed’s headboard. As my vampire boyfriend fought and fussed, I tied him up with the lights and looked for something to gag him with. The only thing in reach were the socks I was wearing, so using all of my yoga training (by which I mean the one time I tried yoga), I arched over backwards, hooked one off, and stuffed it into Neil’s screaming mouth.

 
'It's for your own good,’ I assured him. ‘Now, hold still.’

  Of course he didn’t, and how could I blame him? I certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed having a smelly old sock stuffed into my gob, and I hadn’t had the misfortune of being turned into a bloodsucking hell beast. He spat the sock out, and before I could stuff it back in and secure it with a bit of tape, managed to use the F word as a verb, a noun and an adjective, all in the same sentence.

  My boyfriend was a vampire, and it was making a real pig’s ear out of my weekend.

  2

  I had to get Neil to the angels, which, believe it or not, wasn’t a euphemism for putting him down like a sick dog, but an actual thing that I needed to do.

  Vizael and Gendith were the ones who’d dubbed me the Nightstalker, and knew just about everything there was to know about vampires and their kin. If anybody was going to help me flip Neil’s condition, it would be those two. Until then, I had to deal with what I had, and what I had was one extremely pissed off bloodsucker.

  Vampire Neil thrashed and flailed like he was undergoing an exorcism, sending the mattress bouncing up and down on its frame and causing a terrible, creaking din. Clearly, he had no intention of going quietly, which meant I had to figure out a way to get him out of the flat without anyone seeing him. How exactly I was going to manage that I did not know. I had a few dozen neighbours, lived nine storeys up, and the lift to the tower block I called home had been out of order since Thatcher took office.

  I tried to marshal my thoughts but couldn’t hear myself think over the racket Neil was making, so I tied his ankles to the bed’s footboard and sat on his stomach. It didn’t shut him up entirely, but it stopped him using the mattress as a bouncy castle. I set my mind to the task at hand. How in the name of sweet Siouxsie Sioux was I going to smuggle this boyfriend-turned-beast out of the building and get him across the River to the angels?

  Come on, Abbey, think. Think, think, think.

  Seizing on an idea, I went in search of something I could use to keep Neil in check while I manoeuvred him to the ground floor. It would have to be something that kept him constrained as well as concealed, because the sight of a girl towing a non-cooperative, half-naked guy down nine flights was likely to raise a few eyebrows.

  I considered my options. I could use the bed sheet Neil was lying on I supposed – tie up the corners like a knapsack and sling him over my shoulder. Or how about the living room rug? I could roll him up in that and carry him downstairs like a man burrito. No, that wasn’t going to cut it either, he’d make too much fuss and be seen. I needed to disguise him better than that.

  Think, think, think.

  I could always knock him out of course, but where would I start with that? This wasn’t a movie. I wasn’t going to fetch him a quick tap to the skull and drop him peacefully on to the pillow, only for him to wake up later at my convenience. Nor did I have the nerd credentials to put him out with a subtle Vulcan nerve pinch, which meant I’d be smacking the guy over the noggin with no rhyme or reason, and even though that was tempting—given that he’d just tried to rip out my windpipe—I knew my boyfriend was still in there somewhere. Punching the poor guy out carried the distinct risk of permanently damaging him, or worse, killing him.

  So no, I couldn’t just club Neil over the head and drag him to Bethnal Green by the roots of his hair. Not unless I wanted to get felt up by the law, and that was the last thing I needed. The war I’d been drafted into—the war against the Judas Clan—was a secret one. The cops weren’t equipped to deal with an ancient sect of vampires descended from Judas Iscariot himself. Christ, they were barely equipped to kettle a few demonstrators armed with harshly-worded placards. Let them look after the real world. This other world—the world of the Uncanny, the world of bloodthirsty monsters and things that went bump-slash-devour in the night—that was a job for the Nightstalker.

  If only the Nightstalker could figure out how to haul her boyfriend out of bed and get him out of this place...

  Think, think, bloody well think!

  Then I saw it. A suitcase stored under the bed, edged out by Neil’s thrashing and sent halfway across the room. It was a large one—the largest you could check into a plane without paying the excess—and made from a solid clamshell of hard plastic. We’d bought it a couple of years back thinking we’d use it for a holiday one day, only Neil’s health had taken a turn for the worse and we’d had to spend our vacation money on antibiotics and mucus thinners to offset his cystic fibrosis. I know, what a life, eh? Christ, I feel like a bitch even joking about it. Neil’s life kind of outweighs a week in Tenerife. Two weeks, even. With a free hotel bar thrown in.

  Wrestling Neil into the suitcase wasn’t going to be easy, but I’d fought harder battles already.

  ‘I’m going to untie you now,’ I told him, ‘so please behave.’

  The moment the fairy lights slipped off his wrists he made a lunge for me, but I was ready. Wrapping myself around his torso, I pinned his arms to his sides then keeled him over sideways and forced him into the suitcase. His ankles were still tied, so I could only get his top half inside, but it gave me a chance to flip the case’s lid shut on his waist and protect myself from his claws and fangs while I undid the rest of his bonds. With one foot pinning the lid shut, I went to work on his ankles, and once I had those free too, I was able to bundle Neil’s legs into the suitcase and snap the thing shut.

  Was he going to be okay in there? Neil’s respiratory condition meant that he rarely left the flat for fear of coughing up blood trying to climb the stairs back to the ninth floor – what chance would he have trapped inside an oxygen-deprived suitcase?

  Then again, he seemed to be doing fine. Well, maybe not fine, but he was certainly full of energy. His breathing tank was across the other side of the room, yet the suitcase he was trapped in was bouncing around on the carpet like a jumping bean. Whatever the drawbacks to being a vampire were, the transformation had done wonders for his lung disorder.

  Always a silver lining, hey?

  I threw on some clothes—black drainpipe jeans, black Bauhaus tee, black leather coat (black’s kind of my thing)—and wheeled the twitching suitcase to the front door. I took a deep breath and steeled myself. Was this really going to work? Was I seriously going to ship a vampire all the way to Bethnal Green in broad daylight without anyone noticing? It was a stretch. Truth told, it was about the biggest stretch since Stretch Armstrong and Plastic Man got into a dick-measuring contest.

  Still, what choice did I have?

  I snatched the luggage up by its handle in one sharp tug. Neil resisted, throwing his body against the walls of the case, trying to dislodge himself from my grip, but I had him locked in my claws like a hungry bird of prey. I opened the drawer of my bedside cabinet and grabbed the Nightstalker’s dagger; fifteen-ounces of hallowed silver, guaranteed to ruin any bloodsucker’s day. The blade glowed cobalt blue as it met with the brand on my palm, and the two throbbed in synchrony. Using the tip of the knife, I punched a couple of breathing holes in the wall of the suitcase—stab stab stab—just big enough to stop Neil from suffocating, but not so large that he’d be able to use them for a mouthpiece.

  Time to go. I slipped the dagger into its leather sheath, hid it under my jacket, and made for the front door. I lugged the suitcase to the top of the stairwell and started to descend, slowly at first, then picking up the pace the more sure-footed I became. Neil groaned and fidgeted, but his protestations soon fell away as he began to run out of steam. I carried his dead weight down five flights of stairs, edging ever closer to the exit, ever closer to the idea that I was actually going to get away with this, when a familiar and most unwelcome figure appeared.

  I screeched to a halt in front of Mr Munford, local busybody and long-standing Chair of the Residents’ Association. Munford was a constant thorn in my side, and one that I’d only recently taken it upon myself to aggravate when I all but kicked in his door looking for my kidnapped boyfriend.

  ‘You,’ he
said. ‘I take it you found your man then?’

  He scrunched up his ancient face and peered at me over the rims of his cheap, two-for-one spectacles.

  ‘Yup,’ I replied, being extra careful not to let my eyes stray to the suitcase I was holding, else he realise that the man in question was inside of it. ‘He showed up at the flat in the end, wouldn’t you believe. Men! What are they like, eh?’ I offered him a silly little laugh, as authentic as I could make it.

  Please don’t let the old bastard catch me kidnapping my own boyfriend, I think my irony bone might snap.

  ‘Where did he get to then?’ Munford asked, stabbing his hands into the pockets of his ratty old overcoat. ‘And who were the blokes he took off with?’

  ‘Oh, um… poker buddies,’ I tried. Best I could come up with at short notice.

  ‘Poker buddies?’ he sneered.

  ‘Yup. Texas Hold ‘Em. Don’t understand the attraction of it myself. “What’s wrong with a nice game of whist?” I tell him, but it’s poker or nothing with that one.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ the old man replied. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘And look, I’m really sorry about knocking on your door last night, that was… well, that was about as out of order as our lift is, eh?’