Julia Firth couldn’t seem to remember a time when she wasn’t an outcast struggling to get along in a game seemingly designed to defeat her. True, there were moments of happiness despite the bad, but hardship seemed omnipresent, like a generational ghost haunting her very blood. 594Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡy2wIdCai0J
The highlights of her beleaguered existence included a briefly happy childhood, before her father’s abuse and unfaithfulness towards her mother concluded in his painful and angry departure. She had a half-sister and step-brother somewhere in the world, but whenever she had tried to connect with them either her ex-dad or his now-ex-girlfriend detrimentally intervened. During high school, she had enjoyed a close-knit group of friends that stood up for and looked out for each other; branded as social degenerates because of a clique-level refusal to adapt to what they perceived as irrational norms. That happiness crumbled when a night of typical teen-aged rebellion took a turn to the wild, and then to terror. Former bonds turned to taunts in between nights of blood-stained sheets, agonizing pains, and scars external, internal, and within the soul. After birthing a stillborn, doctors and the charity clinic worked out she was likely sterile due to the traumas her reproductive organs had suffered. Around that same time, her mother died of alcohol poisoning.
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When she’d first met Christopher Blake and his young family, Mary, Synthia, and Arianna, she finally experienced an unconditional acceptance like never before. She was still homeless, though they leveraged friendships and contacts on her behalf to help her find work and a home more permanent than their couch. Even when she slipped back into destructive behaviors, betrayed their trust, or did things to try and get them to push her away like everyone else did, they did the opposite. They would sit her down and talk, not berate and yell; they established boundaries and rules, but always emphasized how welcome and valued among them she was. Even when she had tried to seduce Chris in his own bed, he was nothing but gentle in his refusal and his wife Mary was nothing but forgiving. They came after her whenever she left, not to drag her back, but to ensure she was safe.
During one of her escapades away from the sanctuary of the Blake household, she saw a mortifying news report. Crime scene photos depicting an impossible amount of blood painted around dismembered flesh and gore scattered like macabre confetti around a thrashed house. Ice had poured down her spine at the recognition of the layout of the ruined home and it’s sundered decor. Despite being in a public bar when the story aired, she had broken down screaming in uncontrolled hysterics when the outlet flashed the canned photos: Mary, Synthia, and Arianna dead, and Christopher missing, wanted for questioning but also a possible victim. It had to be a mistake, this was impossible: a family so loving and pure didn’t have tragedies like this. This had to be another family, and the reporter posted the wrong photos. Maybe she was still feeling that last batch of shrooms; surely this was just a bad, late-manifesting trip.
The next day she tried calling Chris’ and Mary’s phones, and again every day thereafter until an FBI investigator answered. The proceeding conversation had left her far more numb than any alcohol or drug she’d ever taken, as if her heart and every ounce of feeling had been gouged out of her with a piece of jagged tin. The one home that had always been open and welcoming: gone.
Whether from desperation to feel again, self-pity over her own loss, her first taste of true grief, or a futile attempt to die even artificially happy, she plunged into the deepest, most dangerous cesspool of binge of addiction in her young but piteously miserable life. Days and months, even seasons and years mingled together in the shallow stupor of inebriation. More nights were spent under clouds and stars than within the warm walls of hotels, shelters, or homes. During what few moments of lucidity she did experience, she sometimes underwent an existential realization that she no longer recognized her clothes or remembered where she had gotten them; moments of even deeper awareness saw her having quite conversations with her reflection, as though getting to know a shy but friendly stranger.
Then came the night she referred to as her Awakening. She was uncomfortably sober, and had finally negotiated an exchange with one of her more generous dealers: her body for a single blunt. Things were going going as she had expected in the back of his van in an ally, when all the doors opened and a crowd of his friends reached in, each trying o grab a personal handful of her.
“Have fun, boys. She’s finally making her back payments,” she heard him say as he finished with her and tossed her towards them. Panic set in as the gang pawed at her, seemingly ready to pull her apart as each one competed for his place in the pecking order. In her terror, she wasn’t aware when their screams began, or the initial punctuating sounds of scuffle, bodies hitting metal and masonry, or bones snapping. However, it finally registered as she realized her predators were no longer howling for a successful hunt but panicking and one by one leaving her be.
As suddenly as the deal had turned to nightmare, quiet descended upon the ally. Realizing she was inexplicably no longer in danger, her first thought was to find the blunt her dealer had promised her. It wasn’t until she gave an involuntary shudder that the cold and her nakedness registered in her mind. Although she saw that, in their pawing, her attackers had shredded every stitch of her clothes; wouldn’t you know it, there were numerous shirts, pants, a jackets strewn about for the picking. Sore, smeared with grime of numerous sources and textures, and dressed in new threads, Julia resumed her search for her dealer’s stash.
Her fruitless searching, building to blind desperation, was interrupted when she caught the sound of quiet sobs outside the van. Somewhere between a frightened whimper and stifled agony, she felt the tug of pity pull her out of the vehicle. Following the noise, she found a bedraggled figure huddled up against a dumpster; clad in dark, dirty clothes, she could have mistaken the person as one of her attackers, except scattered around were their unconscious and bleeding bodies in various states of undress, their shallow breaths and rivulets of blood steaming into the cold air.
“Umm, I …” she began awkwardly. “Thanks, I guess.”
The figure turned to look, then appeared to freeze at the sight of her. Due to the shadows of the ally, she could not see their face, only the shift of their form as they looked away, then back again as if unsure they had actually seen her. After that moment of quiet uncertainty, the figure began to rock in their fetal position, scream-sobbing anew.
Confused and unsure, she stood watching the commotion for some time before deciding that, perhaps, it would be best to move on. “I, uh… I’m going to go, now,” she said awkwardly, gesturing to the open street beyond the ally, turning to go without actually leaving.
“Julia…” the figure whispered. Whatever confusion she might have experienced at a seeming stranger knowing her name was staunched by an implacable familiarity with that voice: she knew it from somewhere, a time or place beyond recall.
Slowly, staggeringly, the figure stood. At their full height, enough ambient light now fell where she could see blood-drenched hands hanging limply, defeatedly at the side of black-stained clothes, with new red dye dripping from their mouth. Hollow eyes stared at her from beneath a mop of unkempt hair. Despite time and circumstances, she recognized this man.
“Of all people, sweet girl Julia, it had to be you,” Chris said in desperate relief before striding forward — almost inhumanly fast — and grasping her in a fierce, grateful, and ecstatic embrace.
As she stared out the window of the SUV at the white hills with patches of brown underneath the pallid grey skies as the federal agents sped them down the highway, she couldn’t help but absently stroke the edge of the coffin-sized crate-style box next to her. Whenever she felt the hunger for a high again, she thought back to that night, when someone who had rescued her from herself time and again appeared out of nowhere and rescued her yet again. How, despite being a random victim, she herself by simply being there had, in fact, finally returned the favor and saved him. Due to her accidental detox, she had been sober enough to sit with him as he explained the torment he had been put through, the games of survival he’d been forced to play. The pure and good man she had known, forced to stoop to levels of deceit and betrayal that made the skin of her calloused heart crawl. The subsistence-tier addiction he now found himself tied to, putting her petty self-serving addictions to shame in their pointlessness.
She could never replace the family that had been stolen from him. Out of respect for him and what he had gone through, she never tried to offer herself as a surrogate lover to replace Mary — a role she deeply felt inadequate to fill. Nor, she knew if they ever did develop that kind of bond, could she ever produce a child to even begin to fill the void left by Sythia’s and Arianna’s deaths. She felt their absence, too, missing the girls like the little big-sisters they had been to her, and Mary like the mother or aunt that she had never had.
Two years had passed since that fateful night, her Awakening. She understood better now the latent monster harbored within her friend and mentor; a more feral form of the same monster inside her. By night, he protected her from the dangers of the world she had left behind as well as the world he now walked; by day, she protected him from hazards neither of them imagined would ever be more than a paranoid concern. Together they worked with homeland security and other agencies that ran specialized teams that hunted monsters: serial killers, predators, terrorists, organized crime bosses. But the unique something that all of these monsters shared in common was leashed inside Chris, as well: a Beast that craved the blood of humans above all else. Those monsters hid behind a masquerade, pretending to not be what they are, and that their flavor of horror existed only in fiction.
Her rescuer, her partner-in-crime, her second chance refused to accept their game, bloodily broke away, and bartered his abilities, insights, and aid to what he referred to as the Second Inquisition for his continued survival. And the monsters that made him hated him for it.
“Ms. Firth,” came the baritone voice from the front passenger seat. As Julia turned to see what Agent Davis Macovey wanted, she noticed the blonde ponytailed driver maintained an unreadable expression in her eyes, though she did glance in the mirror to monitor her reaction; for a mere instant, the two women locked eyes in the polished glass.
“How much as Priest told you about his interactions with the federal government?” the lead agent asked, using Chris’ codename.
“He tells you what you need to know to take down monsters; he tells me everything,” she answered, coyly replying with the subtle truth.
“So if there’s something we need to know that he isn’t telling us, you could?” Macovey inquired.
“Priest tells you what you need to know. If you want to know more than that, I suggest asking him nicely. Just because he and I keep no secrets from each other doesn’t mean I’m going to share them with you without his say-so, just like he won’t share my secrets without mine,” she replied calmly.
“So if he says to obstruct a federal investigation, you’d do it?” Agent Macovey continued.
She stared back at him for a long moment with firm determination. “Your keyword is, ‘if.’ He won’t.”
“But if he did,” the agent pressed, leaving the rest of the question unreiterated.
“Then I trust his judgement over federal bureaucracy, and if he says to obstruct a federal investigation it’s because there’s good reason to. The greater good cannot, does not bow to the rule of law; otherwise we end up with nazi Germany or soviet Russia all over again,” she replied. She gave the crate another pat, seemingly as an affectionate exclamation point of loyalty to bookend her statement, but in reality to reassure herself of the box’s durability in the event of disaster.
The two agents studied her in silence as several miles passed by before Macovey nodded. “Good. Can’t say I approve, officially, but… Good,” he said, then turned back to face forward again. “What in God’s name prompted him to hike through the this desolate country in the dead of winter, with you on his back no less, is beyond me; I can think of a dozen better ways to get away from the Ivory Tower in Utah, especially if Colorado Springs is the destination,” agent Macovey mused aloud.
“Our greyhound tickets said Las Vegas,” Julia offered.
“We know,” replied the driver.
“And then you went north. On foot, with limited supplies, in winter no less,” he added.
“All to go east,” Julia concluded aloud.
“Exactly,” he replied.
“Exactly,” she echoed.
“All that, just to go east?” the driver asked.
“A cash-bought pair of tickets to Vegas, rival territory but hardly safe for a traitor to the blood; or, innumerable locations with opportunities to quickly move north, possibly even to allied or rival factions in Canada. Which one do you think the Ivory Tower is going to focus on?” Julia asked, paraphrasing the strategy Chris had confided in her weeks ago. The two agents pondered for a moment before blondie took a breath to respond.
“Either way, they’re wrong,” Julia concluded before either agent could speak.
Thoughtful silence fell yet again. Julia’s eyes returned to the passing, monotonous terrain outside, and the stroke of her hand on the black and chrome crate returned from the steady reassurance of a conspiratorial partner to gentle affection.
“Clever bastard,” Macovey commented aloud at length.
Julia replied under her breath, “clever, yes; a bastard, no.” Deep down, she wanted him to take her, to make her his partner in the final sense. But she also acknowledged that her first attempts in his simpler, peaceful home had been misplaced; if that were to happen now, it would be at the right time, when he was ready. It killed her inside, but she could now see the strategic, as well as moral and vital, importance of patience. She had an advantage over her Beast that he did not; if he could hold out, why couldn’t she?
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