Three Years Later
There are places on Earth that are cursed all the way down to their roots. Places that hold pain, that tasted blood and can’t get enough. Places where darkness grows, and even in daylight, they lie under a shadow.
Those places feel a lot like home, and I suppose that’s why demons are attracted to them. Not to say Hell is some wretched, unpleasant place. To the contrary, Hell is endlessly fascinating, even to an immortal. It’s vast, far more vast than Earth. It holds darkness, it holds pain and, in some places, misery and agony beyond words. But Hell is inhabited by those who have existed for centuries, for millennia. It has seen wars, uprisings, the growth and destruction of cities, of cultures. It is full of magic and memories.
Abelaum, like Hell, was built on a foundation of magic and memories. It was beautiful; it drew in curious minds and ensnared them, like a spider weaving its web. Some humans stayed there forever; others swiftly left.
But Abelaum had something not even Hell did: Abelaum had a God.
Gods and demons had never gotten along. We’d taken Hell back from Them, and They’d ended up on Earth, weak and asleep. But always, inevitably, curious little humans took things too far. Curious human hands went digging, and curious human minds woke something up.
Humans and Gods were a bad combination. Give a human knowledge, and he thinks he’s wise. Give a human magic, and he thinks he’s strong. Give a human religion, and he’ll think he’s right.
Demons were better off avoiding Gods, despite the intrigue a town like Abelaum held. Yet there I was in Abelaum, back again after several years away. I always came back, and I’d keep coming back, as long as Leon was there.
We demons didn’t take our bonds lightly. When one of our own was summoned and held captive by some wretched human magician, we didn’t simply abandon them. Leon and I had sworn our bonds to each other centuries ago, and that bond had never broken. It never would. We may not have been lovers as we once were, but relationships that lasted through hundreds of years had to eb and flow like the tides.
“That fucking hurts,” Leon hissed, baring his sharp teeth as I cleaned the burns across his shoulders. I didn’t know why his summoner had punished him this time. Leon was volatile, and I couldn’t blame him for that. He’d always been unlucky, and getting summoned and kept captive by that wretched family — the Hadleighs — was just the latest in his string of terrible circumstances.
“You don’t need to clean it,” he grumbled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.” I shoved his head back down when he tried to raise it to stand up. Even his blond hair was burned. His summoner wielded brutality like a weapon, using pain to force obedience. “I know you’ll heal, Leon, but you can’t pretend this physical body doesn’t need to be cared for. You’ll heal faster if it’s clean.”
“Fucking Kent,” he muttered. “I swear I’ll kill him. I swear it.”
Kent Hadleigh — a man whom God had given knowledge, magic, and religion. A dangerous trifecta, leading to a man who fancied himself untouchable.
“What was it for this time?” I tossed the bloodied rag away. I returned to Abelaum so often that I’d gotten a house here, and it was useful even outside of giving Leon a place to recover. Humans were far more likely to trust you if you had a house, a car, the illusion of money and grandeur. As a soul hunter, gaining humans’ trust was part of my job.
“The girl,” Leon said. “They let her out today. Three years later, and Kent’s still furious she ever got away. Told me to find her…fuck him. Fuck his orders. She can run for all I care. He can break every bone in my body, but it won’t bring her back.” He chuckled bitterly.
The girl. I knew the story, only because Leon had told it to me: how Kent had his daughter lure the girl into the woods, how he and his followers had gathered in the old church, how they’d cut the girl before they’d thrown her down into the mine.
Their first sacrifice to their wicked God.
But the girl escaped and ran, and not even Leon had been able to catch her.
How the hell a fifteen-year-old mortal girl had managed to escape from Leon, I’d likely never know. How she’d endured her escape through the woods — bleeding, lost, and drugged — made no sense.
“Why did they lock her up?” I said. “Last I heard, the police were all over her case.”
“She tried to kill Victoria Hadleigh.” Leon leaned his head back on the couch, closing his golden eyes. “Kent has the cops under his thumb. Fucking humans. So goddamn easy to corrupt.” He sighed. “They locked the girl up in some hospital, called her delusional. I don’t think she was too upset about it. Kept her safe for the last three years. But now…she’s out on her own.” His voice was getting softer, weaker as sleep took over. Demons didn’t sleep often, but when we did, it was because it was desperately needed. “The God has her scent. It’ll keep hunting her. She’s in for one hell of a wild ride out there.” He yawned. “Going to rest my eyes. Just for a minute. Just a minute…”
He was out cold.
From cursed places come cursed humans. I was fascinated with them: humans who had been broken and survived; humans who had just turned out wrong. I liked to hunt oddities, souls with a heavy history and heavier scars. They fought the hardest, and that made it even sweeter when they eventually became mine.
This girl, the one who had escaped from Kent Hadleigh’s cult — she was an oddity, certainly. But if being outcast from society didn’t kill her, then the monsters hunting her certainly would. I could smell them lurking in the trees — the Eldbeasts. They’d be lured to the magic lingering around her, hungry for a taste.
She likely wouldn’t even survive the night.
Since Leon was resting, I wandered. There was too much energy in the air, a tingling at the back of my head that warned me things were shifting. The boundary between Earth, Hell, and all the numerous other realms, felt thin. That boundary waxed and waned like the moon, and some thought it would eventually disappear altogether, plunging reality into chaos.
I didn’t know if I believed all that, but I did believe there were other demons in Abelaum, demons that hadn’t been here only a few days ago. It was their scent I followed curiously through the night.
It led me to an old diner perched at the water’s edge, its blinking neon sign advertising that they were open 24/7. I lit up a joint in the parking lot, trying to get a good look inside through the windows. Three demons sat within, all apart from each other. Two I recognized as soul hunters, so I could only guess the third was the same. They knew I was there, shooting me wary glances out the window as they sipped their coffees and poked at plates of food they had no interest in eating.
What the hell were they here for?
As I smoked, the wind shifted. The skunky, herbaceous odor of weed was wafted away from me, replaced instead with a sharp scent of iron and rot. I turned toward the trees, staring back into the shadows. Deep in the darkness, a howl pierced the night; the kind of wretched animal scream that sounded almost human. I took a long drag, exhaling slowly. First demons, and now the beasts…all gathering here.
I wandered inside, and the other demons quickly put their heads down. I’d been around long enough to have made a name for myself, and I’d taken enough souls to have earned a reputation as a hunter not to be trifled with. These demons were young, inexperienced. Eager for their first soul, perhaps, but whose?
I went up to the counter, tapping it to get the nervous waiter’s attention. His eyes were wide, his fingers twitching. He didn’t know the guests gathered in his restaurant were all unearthly creatures, but his primal instinct knew and would be warning him of the danger.
“Coffee, no cream,” I said, and watched his hand shake as he filled a mug from the coffee pot. “Slow night?”
He shrugged. “Weird night. Something’s not right about it.” He glared out the windows as he handed me the cup. “Did you hear those howls out there? We don’t usually get wolves around here.”
“It wasn’t wolves,” I said. I could hear someone sprinting outside, distant but coming closer. Bad night to be out for a run. “Make sure you don’t walk to your car alone.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?” he said. Suddenly his eyes widened even further, staring behind me. “What the fuck?”
The sprinting feet were coming closer, closer —
The door burst open, the bells dangling from its handle jangling erratically. I turned slowly, sensing the tension rising in the air. There, standing inside, was a young woman with long, messy brown hair. She was tall and lanky, wearing a backpack and muddy boots. All her clothes were stained with mud — mud…and blood.
She froze, scanning the room. Every eye was fixed on her, and three pairs of them were hungry. Her scent was intoxicating, sweet with lingering magic. But the blood on her wasn’t her own. I knew the smell of it immediately.
It was the beasts’ blood. She’d been fighting the Eldbeasts.
“Hey!” the waiter called sharply. “Hey, I know you! Juniper Kynes! You — you’re supposed to be locked up! You tried to kill that girl!”
She took a deep breath, and wiped a splatter of blood from her face with her sleeve. She walked across the dining area, heading toward the corner where the bathrooms were. The waiter likely didn’t hear her mutter, but I did.
“She tried to kill me first.”
She locked herself in the bathroom. Every demon in the place was tense, their eagerness for her palpable. I chuckled softly, taking a sip of the steaming coffee. Young soul hunters like these were always desperate for easy prey, eager to make a deal with someone who they didn’t need to convince that magic and monsters were real.
This girl already knew. She’d seen the worst of it. But that wouldn’t make her easy, no. Far from it.
“I should call the cops,” the waiter said, staring warily at the bathroom. The sound of running water from within cut off, and the door opened again. Juniper trudged out, her wide eyes flickering around the room. She moved like a frightened animal on the verge of sprinting. Like a wolf…a little wolf, left without a pack, alone and hunted.
She really was fascinating.
She came up to the counter, eyeing me. “I need food.”
The waiter shook his head. “No. No, you gotta get out.” He was reaching slowly for the phone.
She whipped out a pistol and aimed at the waiter. With her other hand she pulled a knife from its sheath on her thigh, and pointed the blade toward me. I raised my hands innocently.
“Don’t do anything funny,” she hissed, her voice shaking. “Just give me some fucking food. I don’t care what. Just put some food in a bag. Now.”
The waiter nodded, his face white as a sheet as he disappeared back into the kitchen. Juniper kept the knife pointed at me, shooting nervous glances in my direction and at the demons seated behind me. She couldn’t have known what we were, of course. We all wore our human disguises in public.
“You know he’s going to call the cops while he’s back there,” I said. She jumped at the sound of my voice, her breathing quickening as she looked rapidly between me and the door leading back to the kitchen.
“Fucking hell.” She climbed over the counter and reached beneath it, hurriedly collecting bags of cookies and tiny packets of oyster crackers that she stuffed into her bag. She vaulted back over, right as a shout came from the kitchen, and ran out the door.
“Cops are on their way!” The waiter crept out from the kitchen. The cook stood behind him, a massive man with a frying pan wielded in his hands like a baseball bat. That vicious woman had really put some fear in them.
I liked that.
With their prey on the move, the demons were moving too, all of them heading out the door. I sighed, and gulped down the rest of the coffee. I wasn’t interested…or at least…I hadn’t been. But with so many other hunters after her, and that desperate, vicious look in her eyes when she’d brandished the knife at me, I couldn’t help but feel intrigued.
I left the restaurant faster than I should have. To the confused waiter’s eyes, it would have looked as if I simply vanished, leaving an empty mug behind. The hunters were in the lot outside, heading toward the road, laughing amongst each other and betting who would reach the woman first. I got ahead of them.
They stopped abruptly, their human disguises instantly slipping. Three pairs of golden eyes watched me cautiously, claws extended, and the hunter I didn’t know bared her teeth. I smirked.
“Don’t growl at me, darling, it’s rude,” I said, and the hunter beside her gave her a hard nudge in the ribs. “All this fuss for one little mortal woman, eh?”
“You know she’ll be desperate for a deal.” Amiria was the one who spoke up. I knew her to be a fresh soul hunter, yet to make her first bargain. She was hungry for it; I could see it in her eyes. “But we were here first, Zane. Let a novice get a soul for once.”
I cocked my head, stepping toward them. With only one step of mine, they all jerked back. I chuckled at their nervousness. “I don’t think I will. There’s plenty of souls out there, fledglings, trust me. Find someone selfish, someone greedy, someone eager for life’s riches with no care for the afterlife. That’s an easy bargain. But this one…”
I let my body change. My veins ran black, like trails of ink beneath my skin, as my teeth grew sharper. I gathered energy around me, condensing it, creating a shroud of darkness. It was petty, perhaps, but it was a warning. It let them know how much power I had at my disposal: enough to destroy all of them, here and now, if they dared try to argue with me.
“This one is mine.”
Juniper had covered a lot of ground in the time it had taken me to disperse the other demons. I spotted her along the winding road, her pistol still in her hand. She was walking in the middle of the road, her head jerking from side to side. The forest had grown right up to the edge of the asphalt, and thick blackberry bushes formed a wall of tangled thorns on either side. The trees loomed high, and beneath their boughs, monsters lurked in the shadows.
I could hear them scrambling through the trees.
The woman heard them too.
She turned, her weapon aimed. The bitter scent of fear surrounded her as adrenaline coursed through her. It got my heart racing, that pungent odor of terror. She faced the darkness, eyes wide. The stench of rot was in the air, growing stronger as the beast under the trees crept closer.
It fled the moment I drew near. One Eldbeast alone wouldn’t face me.
“You need to shoot for the head. It’s really the only way to kill them.”
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of my voice. She aimed the gun at me, clutching the small pistol with both hands, her extended arms shaking. “Who the hell are you?” she said, then, she narrowed her eyes. “You…you were in the diner. You followed me.”
“You have quite a few things following you, little wolf, and they all wish you a lot more harm than I do.” I looked off into the trees. More of the beasts were encroaching on our position, their silhouettes scurrying through the dark. They had long, boney limbs, and vile, hunched bodies. They resembled spiders as they moved. “You need to get indoors. If you’re going to travel at night, use a vehicle.”
She didn’t lower the gun, but curiosity began to creep over the fear on her face. “Those things…do you know what they are?”
“Eldbeasts,” I said. My golden eyes were hidden behind brown and I had sheathed my claws. I would appear as just a normal human to her, at least for now. No point in scaring her even more. “They’re elder monsters, from when the world was young. But magic can stir them from their slumber. Magic…and Gods.”
Her face looked stricken. She cocked the gun. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of the Libiri?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not part of Kent Hadleigh’s little cult. I have no interest in sacrificing you to an old God. That would be such a waste of your soul.” I looked her over, catching a glimpse of her scars at the neckline of her shirt. They were ritual marks, cut into her flesh as she was offered up in sacrifice. “And what a beautiful, damaged soul it is.”
She began to back away. “What the hell are you then? What do you want?”
“For now, I want nothing at all.” I let my eyes shift, and her entire body went tense. I let my claws come out, and my teeth sharpen. She nearly stumbled as she backed away, barely keeping her feet. “But someday, little wolf, I may want everything.”
She fired the gun.
The bullet struck my shoulder. It felt like nothing more than a pinch. I looked down at the wound curiously, poking my finger in to dig out the bullet. She watched, in horror, as I dropped the bloodied bit of metal onto the ground.
“My, my, so flirtatious.” I chuckled. “Do that again, Juniper, and I might think you want to play.”
“What the fuck are you?” She was going to run at any moment. She was shaking her head, her brain unable to process what she was seeing.
“You’ll see me again,” I said. “Survive a few years, Juniper, fight for your life. I like fighters. They make better prey. Survive, and the next time you see me, I may have an offer for you.”
“I don’t want your offers,” she said. “Stay away from me!”
I tsked. “You say that now. But as the years go on, and the danger keeps coming, you may change your mind. Or you may not.” I shrugged. “The choice is always yours. But I will see you again. Now, get inside. Get away from the trees. Wait until morning to travel. Juniper Kynes…” I crossed the space between us in a second. I stood over her, her wide eyes defiant and terrified as they looked up, and I smiled with a mouthful of sharp teeth. “Run.”
She did run, sprinting down the road. The Eld would keep following her, but I’d hold them back, at least for tonight. May as well give the little wolf a fighting chance.
She had more viciousness in her than I’d thought. So much fire, for a human so burned. I’d hunted enough souls to afford to be picky, so I could hunt by my whims rather than necessity.
She would be a fascinating hunt, indeed.
