Prey

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Nick Walker can pass for eighteen, which comes in useful while living on the streets. But Nick isn't eighteen. He's fourteen. He's been fourteen for years . . . A chance encounter with Manta, an exceedingly powerful witch, sees Nick cursed with changelessness. Not only will he never age, but, more usefully to Manta, broken bones and sliced flesh, while excruciatingly painful, will mend themselves in a short space of time - making Nick the perfect weapon against the demonic assassins sent by the evil Cartel. Constantly hunted, Nick is forced to run - evading his enemy when he can and facing gruesome and bloody battles when he can't. But, help comes from a surprising source - April, a young girl Nick rescues from some occult enthusiasts intent on sacrificing her, has powers beyond her control or understanding. Together, might they be a match for the sinister forces that stalk them?

Release date: July 31, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The cracked mirror stopped me in my tracks.

It reminded me of the mirror I saw on the night when the ordinary desperate life I was living came to an end. When I was … changed.

People say that a broken mirror is bad luck, but they’re wrong. Luck, good or bad, isn’t something you can bring on or keep away. It just happens, whatever you do, like rainfall or nightfall. It’s a part of life.

Part of my life, anyway.

But this mirror, in a dirty shop window, turned out to be good luck. When I stopped to look, it showed a twitch of movement on the street behind me. A dark shape, pulling back into shadow.

Without turning I took out the knife. The October afternoon gloom was making the blade glimmer a little, but in its usual silvery way, not golden. So the shape behind me could just be an ordinary person, nothing to do with me at all.

But it was more likely to be something else, just not close enough to make the knife react.

I thought about circling around and coming up behind it, but that would be risky until I knew more about it. As all wild animals and street kids know, when in doubt it’s usually better to run.

I put the knife away, yanked open the shop door and stepped in. I’d been in that place before, because it sold old books and other bits and pieces to do with magic and the supernatural and so on. It was also dingy, dusty and cluttered, on a slow downward slide to being just another junk shop.

‘What d’you want, boy?’ The owner was bulky, tough-looking and loud-voiced, and didn’t see me as likely to buy anything. ‘I’m closing!’

‘Good,’ I said, slamming the door behind me and turning the key in the lock.

‘Here!’ the owner growled. ‘What’s your game? Get out!’

He came at me, beefy hands reaching. But for all his noise his bulk was mostly loose fat, and he moved in slow-mo. I swerved around his lunge, leaving a foot trailing, and when he tripped I added a push that sent him headlong into a free-standing bookcase.

He and the shelves crashed to the floor, books and curses flying everywhere, and I leaped past the tattered curtain across the doorway at the back of the shop. It led to a back room holding more heaps of books and fortune-telling junk, along with a chair and a kettle and a tiny TV. It also had a window, which didn’t squeak too loudly when I forced it open.

Slipping through, I dropped down into a small, badly paved area with dustbins that didn’t smell much worse than the shop had. It was one of many fenced-off areas – they couldn’t be called gardens – behind that row of shops and crumbling old houses. I slid through a handy hole in a fence, hopped over the next.

Behind me I heard a crash of breaking glass. I wondered if the shop owner would have the sense to stay out of the way.

Several more fences brought me to a spot with a few straggly bushes. I used their cover to take a quick look back, just in time to see whatever it was come up on to a fence some distance behind me. A smooth movement, but not springy like an athlete or a cat. More like slithery.

I didn’t look at it directly, since it might have felt my eyes on it. Even ordinary people can tell when they’re being watched. But I saw its long crouching shape, all in black, on the fence. I felt a faint edge of the chill that such creatures always bring with them. And I noticed the oval eyes that seemed to glow faintly in the twilight as it stared around, searching.

Right, I thought. No question now what it was. But there’d be better places to face it than littered yards behind houses, at night – if I was going to have to face it at all. So when it moved again I moved too, finding another gap in another half-collapsed fence. And leaping away just in time, as a mouthful of long sharp teeth clashed where my leg had been.

It was a big heavy-shouldered dog, trained to attack without barking or even growling. Luckily, it was held by a sturdy rope that kept its teeth away from me.

Edging sideways, I drew the knife again, which was starting to glow gold now that the dark slithery shape was closer.

Then I whisked around behind the dog, sliced through the rope and was over the next fence before the dog realized it was free.

One more fence, then a higher wall of old weather-worn brick. I’d got good at climbing over the years, and old brick offers lots of fingerholds and toeholds. So I was up and over in a flash.

Somewhere behind me I heard a gargling shriek of pain and fury. ‘Good dog,’ I whispered.

A narrow passage between two houses showed the way to a street, and I sprinted flat out with the knife lighting my way. So I still had the knife in my hand when I burst out on to the street, busy with people and cars and lights coming on.

And two big policemen in my way.

But of course they didn’t – couldn’t – see the knife.

‘What’s the rush, sonny?’ one asked.

‘Getting home,’ I said, sheathing the knife. ‘I’m late.’

‘Where’s home?’ the other asked.

I gave them a non-existent address, along with a wide-eyed, anxious, innocent look.

‘What were you doing in there?’ the second one growled, nodding towards the dark passageway.

‘I thought it might be a short cut,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t.’

The first one grunted. ‘Let’s have a look at you, then.’

I’d had the standard stop-and-search more times than I could count. It was because I look like the kind of kid who might be carrying drugs or burglar tools or some sort of weapon. But they’ve never found anything. I didn’t usually carry much at all, except a bit of cash when I had some. And the knife.

One of the cops actually pushed its sheath aside as he was prodding around my waist, but didn’t notice a thing. And since my pockets were empty, they finally sent me on my way with a suspicious glower.

They would have seen what was stalking me, though, if it had got past the dog. So maybe their presence helped to hold it back. Anyway, I saw no sign of it behind me, and the knife’s gleam was pure silver again as I ran all the way home.

I’d been staying in a small two-storey house on one of the city’s back streets where shabby houses huddle together in terraces. Usually with broken furniture or leaking bags of rubbish decorating the pavement. But when you live more or less in the shadows, on the wrong side of whatever line there is, you don’t much care what your home looks like.

If where you live has a roof and walls, you call that a blessing. And if you’re safe there, it’s perfect.

With the front door firmly closed behind me, I stood in the hall for a moment, enjoying the relief, glancing at the old cloudy mirror in the hall. I always knew I wasn’t going to see even the tiniest hint of a change. But I always hoped …

The image was the same as ever. A lean dark-eyed youth in frayed jeans and a faded jacket. With black hair that needed cutting and a cheekbony face that sometimes let me get away with pretending to be eighteen.

But I wasn’t. I was fourteen.

I’d been fourteen for years.

Outside, a wind was getting up, joined by a burst of rain. But it wasn’t the weather that made me shiver. It was the memories, rising up as always when something has come to hunt me, as clear and nightmarish as if it had been only the day before.

I turned towards the stairs, heading up to my small room on the upper floor of the house. It held only a narrow mattress on the floor, a small cardboard box for the few spare clothes and other bits that I owned, and one or two beat-up old books. Still miles better than some places I’ve lived.

As I dropped on to the mattress, the single bulb hanging from the ceiling swayed, making the shadows in the corners move. But I paid no attention. I wasn’t even thinking about the slithery shadow that I’d run from.

As so often before, I was locked into the full-colour non-stop horror show of the memories …

It was October back then, too, and it had been raining for days, on either side of my fourteenth birthday. I had a flimsy shelter, bits of boards and plastic bags, on a patch of waste ground. But after the wind knocked it over for the tenth time, I left it and wandered out to the edge of town, looking for a disused shed or something.

I knew there were probably better places to sleep rough on the streets than that grimy east-coast town. But I’d been born there, and knew every inch of it. Another place might be warmer, but I wouldn’t know my way around. And that was more important.

By then I’d been on my own for two years. It hadn’t been that much different from how I’d lived for as long as I could remember. I never knew my dad, and my mum was more interested in booze than in me. Home was a series of cheap dirty rooms, where I invented games that could be played with empty bottles and tried to ignore being hungry.

When mum died of a ruined liver, official strangers wanted to put me into a children’s ‘home’ that looked like a jail. I wasn’t about to swap my freedom for their rules, and I’d already learned some survival lessons, the hard way. So I took off – into that shadowy outcast world that ordinary people try not to see.

I got along well enough, on the streets, so I was still fairly healthy and not too unhappy on that particular rainy October night when I was looking for a new shelter. When, on the edge of town, I found a deserted building on an abandoned railway line.

It had probably been both ticket office and waiting room – now with smashed windows, a door sagging half open and holes in its thin walls. But it had a roof, and it was a lot better than huddling under plastic bags.

As I slid in through the door, I was grinning at my good luck, thinking that if the place was isolated enough I might make it my home through the winter.

I’ve wished every day since that I’d never seen the place, that I’d taken my chances with sleeping in a ditch under a bush.

It was nearly pitch black inside, so I crept forward slowly, hands held out to keep me from walking into something. It had all the usual smells of an old disused building – mildew and rotten wood, mouse droppings and cat spray. And the sewer stink that told me other homeless people had passed through.

Then I noticed another faint smell, totally out of place. Like perfume, sweet and musky.

That was when the light came on.

It wasn’t a bulb or any kind of electric light. It was as if the cobwebby ceiling itself had begun to glow.

And I would have jumped with the sudden shock of it. But I couldn’t move.

In the instant when the light came on, something that felt like cold rubbery slime wrapped itself around me, head to foot.

It was a powerful grip, so that I couldn’t twitch a finger or open my mouth or move an ey. . .