Chapter Five
The fuck…. I laughed. I wasn’t sure if it was a mocking laughter or a genuine, heart-felt work of art, responding to a really funny joke. It’s been a while since I cracked a huge laugh outside of hunting. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t spend my days writhing in gloom but they weren’t sunshine and rainbows. I stopped when I noticed the glares. This was serious? Oh shit.
“Look, I think I should go now,” I said. “It’s a pleasant offer that I must decline.”
They were in utter silence as I left without turning around. If they tried anything, I’d be ready to fight. I’m not afraid of taking on a whole clan of fay. In mystic mode. Fortunately, no one moved and I was let out of the gate without problems.
As soon as I got back to the dorm, I took myself a long, long hot shower. Then I brushed my teeth for another five minutes, while staring at myself in the mirror. The boy with neck-length dark hair and emerald-green eyes sighed inside the mirror.
The bed felt a little uncomfortable as I tried to sleep. The nightmares didn’t help. Each of them were playbacks of that horrible day. I swear I could smell the iron in the air, see hack and slashes of dark red flying everywhere. Weird spells casted against my family. The shocks on their faces as my brother lurched into action against them. The disbelief of guns not firing. The realization that they had no time to unveil their bladed weapons. My sister’s scream of agony flooded the living room as she was sliced up. Through all of that, I couldn’t move, paralyzed by a spell that didn’t even let me shut my eyes. Then the five son-of-bitches didn’t even put me out of my misery. They simply left me there to soak in the massacre. Eventually the spell wore off and I was able to pass out, my last feeling being hyper-intense hatred, anger, sadness. The police found me hours later. After doctors did an examination, bandaged a single slice on the arm, police and detectives were all over me.
The next morning, I woke with a replenish of hate. My roommate was just about to head out the door when he noticed me sitting up. He grinned.
“You might want to hurry, lady-killer. You’ve got like ten minutes to get your class.”
“Shit!” I jumped up as he left, threw on some jeans and a black shirt, a pair of running shoes, grabbed my English book and bolted for the bathroom. Took a piss, brushed my teeth, you know the usual morning stuff and hurried to class.
Too bad I was still a few minutes late. You know that embarrassing feeling you get when you’re opening the door in the middle of a lecture, walking in, and everyone except the instructor looks at you. I hate that feeling. I sat in the back. Someone poked my shoulder. I turned to see Haley’s smiling face.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. She gave me a flirty look before raising her hand to answer a question asked by the professor. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve considered dating her a dozen times. She only flirted with me. The only problem with that is the hunter part of me. The last girl I dated was attacked, raped, and turned into a vampire as means of retaliation. Both the vampire clan took her some place far away and she wasn’t heard from again. No matter how hard I tried, I could not pick up the trail.
Since then, I avoided the dating scene intently. Unfortunately, girls thought it was cute that I played hard to get and accepted the challenged. Talk about a pain in the ass to keep them alive.
After class ended, I left campus, not giving Haley the chance to undo the gap between us. And she didn’t have much to do before I accidently gave in out of lust.
For lunch, I decided to stick to a bowl of ramen in my room while watching Iron Man. Hey, there are decent Marvel movies out there. Just overlook Thor and you’re good to go, right? A lot of people don’t pay much attention to the mythologies and legends, clearly stating how these beings actually are. And Thor. Ha! This guy was a battle machine.
Just then, I felt an odd pressure in the air as if gravity said, “fuck it.” My weapons were locked in my car with an exception of the silver sword I kept under my bed. Something told me that this wasn’t the time to use that. I closed my eyes and allowed my senses to take over, pinpointing the disturbance. Just outside my door. Something dared me to come out. Challenge accepted. I’m a mystic, dammit. Wielding essence was second nature to me. I pointed at the door and willed it to open. It did, knob turning and all. And I saw exactly what stood there and frowned. Its skin was a bright red with a human upper half and goat lower half. Standing at five feet, ten inches tall, muscled, with long claws and razor sharp teeth, slanted eyes, this fucking thing looked like a reject from some Tolkien film. With a Michael Bay director. I could tell nobody was around because they tend to warp reality upon their appearances. Their natural aura triggers the “stay away” instinct in anyone that does not have permission to get within feet of it. They’re usually attracted to half-fay, half-human scents and go after the half-breeds with an intention to keep them out of modern society. You can’t find them in any kind of lore though. Only their cousins, satyrs, fauns, and centars.
The Espa must’ve caught onto a leftover fay scent molecule from my car mixed in with mine and followed it up to here. Seeing how the creature just stood there, sniffing, confusion mixed in its expression, it realized that I was human. But…the hunter within me didn’t want to let him get away. I pulled my silver sword from under my bed while still looking at the sniffing Espa.
“You have some nerve entering my territory,” I said. To my surprise, it spoke, and in a humorous tone.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Thought I caught an anomaly, if you know what I mean.” It laughed, a throaty laugh. The hunter within debated. “I’ll be on my way kid, just had to verify the all clear.” The creature shimmered then shapeshifted into tall, grey-haired man with angular features, a suit, and sunglasses. Holy shit they can shapeshift. And this one turned into my astronomy professor, Mr. Highland. “Don’t be late for class next week.” He continued on, nonchalant. My mouth hung open. I thought I knew the truth about the world but there were some things that even I couldn’t detect. I don’t know if that’s sad or a new challenge for a hunter.
I put the silver sword back under the bed. I actually owned two of them. One in the room and the other in the car. A hunter can never be too cautious.
Phycology class went by in a breeze but that’s because too many things swirled in my mind at once. Mr. Highland, fairies, my place in the world, the Dead Five, my brother, and the possibility of all of my professors being Espas or some other kind of creature that not even I had the power to detect.
I decided to do a patrol around the city that night. Hunts come and go. But they will not knock on your door. The hunter must look for signs, read newspapers, watch the news, and search for anything that appears to be out of place, too obvious, or just invisible to the normal human eye. A properly trained hunter will spot bad vibes on his turf almost immediately and seek to end the creature that dared killed on it.
I was on feet walking around a few blocks, my car parked in a common store parking lot. That’s when I saw two hot girls walking off with mission-like preps in their steps. This wouldn’t be odd in a college town like Gainesville; however, the dark pressure they emitted screamed witchy witchy witches, to me. I followed them, curious. If they were regular girls, I’d feel like a creeper. But with witches, who were on missions, that was another story. One had black-hair, the other a blonde. They strode into an alley and met with two other witches. I kept my distance, only peeking around the corner, and relying on my senses. I didn’t need them to pull the old camp behind the corner and kill trick.
I felt another presence from behind and then a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Ariana standing there. She hugged me.
“Hi, what are –”
“Shhh,” I hissed and peeked around the corner again. The four witches were gone. I felt myself erupt with anger. “Fuck!”
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