The Twilight Circus Read online

  WOLVEN

  THE TWILIGHT CIRCUS

  BY DI TOFT

  PHIL, THIS ONE’S FOR YOU!

  —X

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Panic on the Platform

  2 Things are Getting Hairy

  3 Deal or No Deal

  4 A Single Drop of Blood

  5 The Black Tent

  6 Smoke and Mirrors

  7 The Silver Lady

  8 The People Under the Ice

  9 An English Werewolf in Paris

  10 People Who Are Different

  11 A Chapter Mainly About Vampires

  12 Eyeball, Eyeball

  13 Agent Fish

  14 The Girl from St. Pancras

  15 Journey South

  16 Looks Like Christmas Is Canceled

  17 The Cardboard Box Club

  18 Frightening the Horses

  19 The Black Chateau

  20 Bitten

  21 The Slayer’s Apprentices

  22 The Fearless Vampire Killers

  23 Maccabee Hammer

  24 Hive

  25 Hunting with the Howlers

  26 White Wolf Falls

  27 T.R.A.P.P.E.D.

  28 Nat and Fish

  29 Nat Meets the Queen

  30 Cocoon

  31 Mindhowl

  32 Black Snow

  33 Death by Wolven

  34 Amnesty

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  PANIC ON THE PLATFORM

  Nat Carver was genius at keeping secrets.

  He knew that seeing or feeling stuff before it happened was called precognition. And it usually meant that something bad was going to happen. Nat and his mum, Jude, were waiting impatiently on the platform for the London-to-Paris Eurostar train when his pulse started to race and he only just managed to control the urge to pant like a wolf. He had felt crazy jumpy ever since leaving Temple Gurney, but had told himself it was just excitement at the thought of seeing his dad and Woody again.

  He glanced at his mum and couldn’t help wincing at her appearance. Yesterday, Jude Carver had undergone a complete transformation. Her long brown hair had been bleached blond and rolled into dreads. Her dark blue eyes were now emerald green, courtesy of some colored contact lenses, and were framed with unflattering wire-rimmed glasses. Worst of all were the slightly protruding false teeth fixed over her own, which Nat thought made her look a bit like a llama or a slightly insane English teacher. Lady Iona de Gourney, their great friend and ally during the whole Proteus saga, had been responsible for Jude’s makeover. She had provided them both with sanctuary until Nat had recovered enough to travel, as well as procured the cleverly forged documents they carried, giving both Nat and Jude brand-new identities.

  Nat was thankful he had escaped his own extreme makeover. Over the past few months he had grown taller—his muscles had filled out and he’d grown his hair longer. He was barely recognizable as the puny kid of last summer.

  It was freezing, and due to the recent power strikes, the St. Pancras train station was in near darkness. Nat felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck like hackles. Why is it, he thought, that you only have a premonition when things are going to go wrong? He scanned the busy platform. It seemed to Nat that everyone on it had bad BO. He could see the vapors rising from people and hovering above them like a sort of stanky aura, making him feel as if he was about to lose his breakfast. He tried to concentrate on finding what could be alarming him, but he had brain freeze from overhearing so many snippets of other people’s thoughts and conversations. Sifting through all the psychic white noise to zone in on the source took all of Nat’s concentration. It was like when you pat yourself on the head with one hand and make circular movements on your stomach with the other. It’s impossible to do both things at the same time unless you practice for about three hours every day. Nat couldn’t wait to ask Woody how he managed to cope with all the extra information.

  In the months following the werewolf attack that had almost killed him, Jude had watched Nat carefully. She had heaved a sigh of relief when the first full moon passed and her only child hadn’t shown any signs of sprouting fur and turning into a slavering wolf. When the second full moon came and went, she allowed herself to relax, thanking her lucky stars that whatever gifts Nat may have acquired from Woody’s Wolven blood, it didn’t include shape-shifting.

  Nat was also thankful, not least because he had watched Woody’s struggle with his own shape-shifting. He had seen up close and personal how uncomfortable, not to mention stomach-churningly weird, stretching out of shape could be. But once Nat had realized how thrilled his mum was when there were no physical changes in the weeks after his emergency blood transfusion, he decided to keep what was really going on to himself. His physical recovery following Lucas Scale’s attack had been incredibly fast thanks to the new blood … but the recurring nightmares had left scars on his soul.

  Since the summer, Nat had developed some seriously cool improvements to his human senses, and had so far managed to keep them secret. The cool things were:

  Long-range, high-frequency hearing

  Sixth sense (needed a bit more practice)

  Telepathy, also known as the two-way mind-meld thing (ditto)

  Super-enhanced infrared vision

  His eyesight was awesome. Nat had needed glasses for school before all the bother at Helleborine Halt; now he could see for miles and, even more amazing, he could see in the dark!

  But there was a flip side. Nat struggled with self-control, sometimes resenting his new senses as they threatened to take over. Other problems were:

  Occasional dog breath and increased flatulence (the latter more difficult to keep secret)

  Overdeveloped olfactory glands (which made all smells stronger: see above)

  Other people’s nasty, dark thoughts (which he really would rather not know)

  The eye thing

  Their train was due to leave in a few minutes and Nat was still sensing that something bad was going to happen. More people spilled onto the already crowded platform, some impatiently pushing and shoving. Nat positioned himself between his mum and the platform edge, worried that the crowd was going to push too much and someone would fall onto the tracks. He hoped like crazy that that wasn’t going to be the bad thing. Then someone shoved past him, causing the crowd to scatter. In the confusion, Nat heard a scream, and he caught the flash of a steel blade as a knife slashed through the leather strap of an elderly woman’s bulging handbag. The woman was knocked to the ground, lost in the melee of people struggling to get out of the way of the knife-wielding thief.

  Nat’s sight locked onto the slightly built figure running away. He was dressed in black, his hood pulled over his head, a scarf covering most of his face. Nat’s body was overtaken by an overwhelming urge to make chase. He could feel his heart pumping Wolven blood, preparing his muscles for fight and flight. He wanted to chase, to run him down—not because the thief had committed a nasty, cowardly crime, but because Nat needed to, as though an on switch had been flicked in his brain. He shoved his way through the crowd and was off on his toes. He could hear his mum screaming for him to stop, but he ignored her and honed in on the hoodie, who by now was near the terminal, glancing over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. When he spotted Nat gaining on him, he sped up, and Nat could smell his fear as he closed in. As Nat ran, he realized there was a strange noise coming from his throat. He was growling!. It both excited and frightened him.

  He launched himself at the hoodie, knocking him to the ground with a muffled whump and wrenching the bag from him. Nat pulled the sca
rf away from his face. The thief was a girl! She stared up at him, panting hard.

  “Your eyes!” she said breathlessly.

  “What?” snarled Nat.

  “Your eyes …,” she repeated.

  Nat sprang to his feet. Other people, including his mum, had joined in the chase and were fast approaching. He examined the backs of his hands as though expecting to see them covered with fur. They weren’t. He willed his pulse to slow and his muscles to relax. He glared down at the girl.

  “What about my eyes?” he demanded.

  “They … they changed … they were golden,” she gasped.

  “And now?” growled Nat.

  “N-normal!” she stammered, shocked. “Blue. But when you took me down, they changed.”

  “You better get out of here,” said Nat. The last thing he wanted was to get involved. If the police were called and he was a witness, it could lead to all sorts of unwelcome attention. Luckily, the hoodie didn’t need to be told twice. Nat watched her speed off into the afternoon gloom.

  CHAPTER 2

  THINGS ARE GETTING HAIRY

  Nat and Jude Carver were happily unaware that their plans to leave England had already been discovered. A few days before they left the southwest countryside for London, certain information regarding their whereabouts had been passed on to a man named Quentin Crone, the former head of Her Majesty’s Military Intelligence, otherwise known as MI5, the British Secret Service.

  At a clandestine location in London not far from Fleet Street, Quentin Crone was sitting in his new office, trying hard not to think about the night he had first heard Nat Carver’s name. Sighing deeply, he gazed around his new place of work with something like dread. Although it wasn’t yet three o’clock in the afternoon, the narrow street outside was dark and eerily deserted. The only light inside was from the embers of the fire and the glow of Crone’s computer screen. The rest of the vast room was murky, with shadows in every corner.

  Crone glanced nervously around him as he so often did these days, half expecting to see something lurking behind him, hidden in the gloom: a nightmare creature that slavered and snarled, its eyes glowing with violence and hunger.

  Stop thinking about it! he told himself sternly. Unfortunately his brain had other ideas. Awake or asleep, Crone was both haunted and taunted by images of creatures that he had believed only existed in the most lurid of horror movies.

  The night his world had turned upside down—when he had no choice but to believe that monsters were real—was tattooed on his brain forever. Quentin Crone had seen things he had never thought possible. Werewolves! Great big black ones, ten feet tall, loping toward him, coming for him, thick ropes of drool swinging rhythmically, almost hypnotically, from their impossible-looking, bloody jaws.

  At a remote stately home in deepest, darkest Somerset, experiments to create the ultimate fighting machine for the twenty-first century had gone badly wrong. Barking-mad scientist Dr. Gabriel Gruber had tried to fuse the DNA of crazed werewolves with that of a telepathic Wolven—a noble shape-shifting creature thought (until recently) to exist in legend only. And the government had known all about it! Quentin Crone had felt he had no alternative but to resign as soon as he had been decommissioned. Two good things had come out of it, though: The crooked prime minister and his entire corrupt cabinet had all been fired, and, even better—a warm smile lit Crone’s tired face whenever he thought of it—the boy, Nat Carver, and the shape-shifting Wolven creature had escaped!.

  His appointment as head of NightShift had followed shortly after, and Crone had hit the ground running. He hadn’t even had time to take off his coat on his first day before he had been called out to investigate a nasty poltergeist infestation in Putney.

  Not for the first time, Crone wondered what the devil he had been thinking of by accepting the appointment in the first place. He had never even heard of NightShift, for a start, until he had been contacted by an old colleague, a Professor Robert Paxton. According to the professor, the covert agency code-named NightShift had been operating for a number of years, quietly exterminating evil beings or forces without too many humans getting shredded.

  The professor had shown Crone disturbing new evidence that supernatural events were on the rise, the threat to humans from malignant forces was now greater than global warming, and vampires and werewolves had overtaken human terrorist activity. In light of recent events (and an unexpected vacancy), Professor Paxton had convinced Quentin Crone he was just the man for the job. An unheated office in Middle Temple Lane was the NightShift headquarters, where Crone was to spend his days and nights making lethal decisions, drinking tea, and counting the dead bodies.

  BBBBRRRRRRRZZZZZZ.

  Crone’s heart almost leaped up into his throat as the old-fashioned intercom on his desk made him jump.

  For heaven’s sake, man, get a grip, he told himself sternly. “Yes?” he rasped, sounding more bad-tempered than he felt.

  “Cuppa tea, boss?” a bright female voice crackled through to his office.

  “I’m awash with the stuff, Fish,” he groaned, his voice sounding echoey and insubstantial in the cavernous room, “but if you’re making hot chocolate with sprinkles and marshmallows, I’d be glad of some company.”

  There was a knack to opening the heavy, studded door to his office, and Crone waited patiently until the sounds of someone grappling with the handle stopped. A slightly built girl tottered across the ancient carpet on the highest, shiniest pair of platform shoes that Crone had ever seen, plonked a tray with two steaming mugs onto his desk, and arranged her skinny body in the chair opposite him.

  “Woohooo, you’re looking a bit rough,” blurted Agent Alexandra Fish, studying Crone’s features with her beady eyes.

  “Not sleeping,” said Crone bluntly, distracted by the pile of red files she had also brought with her. Someone had scrawled Really REALLY Urgent across the top in thick black marker. “What are those?”

  Fish looked down at the folders she’d carried in as though she was surprised they were there. “Oh … uh, more cases, boss.”

  Crone groaned and leaned forward again, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Fish had only known Quentin Crone for a few days, but she could see how worry and tiredness had drawn lines onto his craggy face. She fervently hoped he wasn’t going to quit on them, or worse. Dear old Freddie Alton, the last head of NightShift, had cracked under the incredible pressure of running the agency. The last Fish had heard was that poor Freddie was currently in a high-security facility for the chronically insane, locked in a windowless room with walls made of mattresses, wearing a very tight jacket with lots of buckles and no armholes.

  “We have more cases than we have agents,” said Crone wearily, gesturing to the pile of red files.

  You can say that again, thought Fish, impressed that Crone had already caught on to the freakish trend that was keeping her sleepless: Since she had joined NightShift, there had been a worrying increase in werewolf goings-on, not to mention vampire activity and the number of people affected by demonic possessions and hauntings.

  “So, like, things are getting hairy”—she grinned—”if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  At last Crone smiled, his tired eyes crinkling at the corners. “We’re learning all the time,” he said, “but, as you know from experience, we’re only human.”

  “Obviously!” said Fish in surprise. There was something in Crone’s voice that made her look at him more closely from behind her glasses. “What are you getting at?” she queried.

  “Well … do you not think that perhaps we are at a disadvantage?” asked Crone.

  “Huh?” Fish mumbled.

  “We’re only human,” he stressed. “Humans investigating supernatural and paranormal activities. Not exactly a fair fight, is it?”

  “We do OK.” Fish frowned, still not sure what her new boss was going on about. “And NightShift is growing. We’ve got ten fully trained agents and two trainees.”

 
; “Remind me again why NightShift was formed,” said Crone, steepling his fingers.

  Fish gave him a quizzical look, kicked off her unfeasibly high platform shoes, and curled her stockinged feet underneath her.

  “To kill monsters,” she said without hesitation.

  Crone grinned.

  “These are dark days, Fish. The events in Somerset last summer, proving that werewolves really do exist, meant I had to ask myself a very important question.”

  “Like, if werewolves really exist, what else is real?” Alex Fish said solemnly.

  Crone nodded. “And NightShift answered those questions for me. Investigating the paranormal has always been seen as a bit of a joke for those not in the know.”

  “If the public knew what really happened …,” began Fish. “Like, if they knew what was down there …”

  Both Crone and Fish allowed their gaze to slide toward the floor. Underneath the faded red-and-gold carpet that covered the mammoth room was a giant trapdoor. If opened, it would reveal seventy-seven steps, each one painstakingly hand-cut into the granite many centuries before. The catacombs beneath were stuffed with more fabulous secrets and priceless artifacts than those allegedly held in the Vatican and Area 51 put together. Crone allowed himself a small shudder whenever he stopped to think about the strange and often terrible things stored down there … in the dark.

  “And since you mentioned Somerset,” said Fish, running a hand through her sticky-up hair, “anything new?”

  Crone hesitated and chewed on a marshmallow, watching Fish’s nimble fingers flick through one of the more urgent files. Although Fish looked as wholesome and shiny as a kindergarten teacher, Crone knew she was shaping up to be one of their toughest and most efficient operatives. She fought dirty, and played dirtier. Just last month, she had successfully trapped and dispatched the Highgate Cemetery Zombies with a simple but brilliant combination of pulleys, string, and trash bags. It had been a scheme of pure genius. On NightShift’s last case, she had single-handedly dealt with the Blackwall Tunnel Banshee and sent it screeching back to the underworld where it undoubtedly belonged. Traffic now flowed through the tunnel beautifully, all thanks to Agent Alexandra Fish. Crone considered her sharp little face as she flipped briskly through the file on her lap.