by Lucy Auburn
Not everyone knew just from looking at me that I was dangerous enough to have scores of confirmed kills to my name.
As I headed out onto the streets, I paused for a moment while I decided whether to get in my car or not. Most nights I would drive slowly down the darkened roads, taking the sketchiest turns, the windows rolled down so the humid air flowed inside. Sensing darkness and danger was more of an art than anything, but for me it seemed to have something to do with my sense of smell. My sister Iva hunted mostly with sight, somehow seeing danger coming just by glancing in corners, even on nights without a moon in the sky. And my mother—well, she felt it with touch, able to tell someone was coming just by touching a doorknob or taking her shoes off and planting her feet in the grass.
We were a strange family, scattered in the wind so our abilities cast a wide night. Sometimes it was lonely to be so far from them. But I wouldn’t trade my calling for anything; the fae blood that blessed me with the skills of a hunter was worth its weight in gold.
This night, I stepped out and smelled a sharp and uneasy danger in the air. Separating it out from my other senses, I turned down the street and followed it on foot. It felt three, maybe four blocks away, and imminent.
Sometimes the dangers I scented were threats against myself, but more often than not they were bits of evil hanging in the air and making mischief. Demon possessions were the thing of the day, but I’d also hunted my share of wildlings, magical beasts that sometimes broke through the veil between Earth and the fae realms. I hoped this one was a wildling or even a dark fae—it was far more satisfying stabbing something to death than merely banishing it.
Well, technically I was supposed to bring the dark fae to Leon or Petyr, not kill them. And I did. Mostly. If I felt like it.
As I got close to the source of the danger all my hairs stood on end. Slowing down, I subtly brought a knife out of my arm sheath and cupped its point so that it didn’t stick out of my jacket sleeves.
The part of Baton Rouge I lived in was often busy at night even when the rest of the city was asleep, and tonight was no exception. There were drunk people gathered on outdoor patios despite the cold, huddling near heaters as they flashed their legs and arms as if it was summer. One of the bars was the source of the danger—and it was heating up soon, I could tell. There was always a sharp, almost bitter taste on my tongue when something bad was coming and there wasn’t much time.
I scoured the street with my eyes, searching the dark shadows for something that might be lurking. My danger sense helped me find the nearness of a threat, but it wasn’t exact enough to pinpoint a small radius. I was on my own in that department.
“Hey!” As I passed one of the patio bars, a drunk full of confidence approached me and clumsily grabbed my arm so hard my knife slipped out a few inches. I jerked away, pushing my knife back up my sleeve. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I said as I walked away. In my experience, the words “I’m a lesbian” only spurred them on even harder, especially if I was out with another femme woman.
The things I wouldn’t give to make stabbing legal. Just small stabbings. A little slash here, a little cut there—no one would ever decide “no” was the start of a negotiation.
As I walked towards the next bar crowded with people, my senses came alive and told me I was in danger. There was an alleyway between the two bars that was pitch black, not a light to be seen in its depths. Dropping the knife into my palm and clasping it, I reached into my jacket for one of my long, curved daggers and headed straight for the darkness.
“Who’s there?” I called out softly, hoping the tremulous uncertainty in my voice would attract whatever lurked in the alleyway. “Hello?”
Ahead, there was the sound of a scuffle and a quiet whimper. I rushed towards it, every nerve in my body coming alive at the nearness of a threat. This was what I was made for: diving into the dark and bringing death to the evil things that thrived there.
“Please!” The pleading was a woman’s voice. I saw her as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light. She was pressed up against a wall, clasping a torn shirt to her chest. “Just leave me alone.”
“You don’t get to say no to someone like me.” The voice sent chills up my spine, and I had to clamp down on a groan of frustration. Another fucking demon possession. “You’ll pay for what you did, Chrissy. Just as soon as I get these pants off.”
He clamped a hand over her mouth with one hand and reached down with the other. I didn’t have to look to know what was happening. I snapped my right hand back in a fluid agile motion and threw my short knife right towards him, hitting him squarely in the meat of his shoulder. He howled, and I closed the rest of the distance between us, coming between them.
“Not tonight, asshole,” I snapped. Rushing forward, I used my momentum to swing my leg forward and kick him in the chest. He stumbled, and I took the opportunity to pull another, very special knife from my jacket.
This one didn’t do a very good job of killing things.
But it did send demons back to the Underworld the instant it came in contact with the flesh of the possessed. A small, simple scratch was enough—but in the heat of the battle, I preferred a deep stab to the chest. It was easier to get the job done when you were thorough.
“You little bitch. I’ll kill you for that.”
The demon bared his teeth at me, and he must have been in his host for a while, because what were once human teeth were now sharp and pointed. I heard his victim whimper behind me, and my hand curled tighter on the knife. Slowly, I stepped to the left, leading his attention away from her just a bit.
“You couldn’t kill me if you tried,” I said, darting a quick look at the woman then back again as I drew the demon’s attention towards me. “You’re just some Underworld lowlife.”
Roaring, he rushed at me with his teeth bared, prepared no doubt to kill me with his bare hands. Demons were always like that—the lower ones, at least, didn’t have the mental capacity to think ahead and grab a solid weapon. They were all instinct and idiocy.
I dropped down into a crouch as he barreled towards me and swept out my leg. He stumbled on it but recovered easily, swinging back towards me with a wicked look on his face.
“When I’m done with you, bitch—“
He never got a chance to finish. Springing to my feet, I impaled him with my banishment knife. There was a brief flash of hellfire in his eyes before I felt a rush of sickening dark energy drawing his soul down to the Underworld.
“Gotcha.” Smirking, I pulled my knife out and watched as he stumbled back and fell to his knees, fully human now. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
The man stared up at me, then over at the woman—who was huddling in the alley’s mouth instead of running away. I fought the urge to roll my eyes; what was it with human women and battles? They didn’t know a damn thing about combat.
“Chrissy?” The man’s voice was different now, without the demon in him. “What happened?”
“You assaulted her,” I said.
“No, I would...” He trailed off, looking sick and confused. “Chrissy?”
“Stay away from me.” Her voice shook with anger and fear as she did her best to cover up despite her torn clothes. “I’m going to go to the police station and press charges. You’re a monster.”
“I can help you with that. I work with the police. My car is over this way.”
Walking over to her, I took her elbow and guided her out of the alley with me. She huddled near me, clearly upset to be topless. I would’ve given her my jacket if it weren’t so full of knives.
“Thank you for saving me,” she said, her voice steadying the further we got away from the man who had been a monster. “I don’t know what happened to Craig.”
I told her, “Men are pigs,” because the demon thing didn’t always come across correctly.
“We were just talking. He’s a coworker—we go to happy hour together sometimes, in a group. But this time it was just the
two of us.” I could tell she needed to tell the story to make it real, so I didn’t interrupt her as she spoke. “He was flirting with me, so I did my best to shut it down. You should’ve seen his face. He looked so angry. I never thought he was that kind of guy. When he went to the bathroom, I thought he was going to sneak out the back and pretend like it never happened. Instead he showed back up again, and he was... different. He attacked me.”
Alarm bells went through me, but I didn’t say anything. If this Craig had only recently been possessed like she said, the fact that he had already changed was a bad sign. It meant the possessions were getting stronger.
“You’re safe now,” I told her, as we reached the spot where I’d parked my car. “I’ll take you to the station to make a statement, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“And I have a spare shirt in the back.” She smiled at me as I circled around to open the back door of my car and hand her the shirt, an old graphic tee from high school. “A girl has to be prepared, right?”
What I didn’t mention was that I kept the spare clothes around because mine often got splattered in blood and guts.
Some things were better left out of the story.
By the time I got home later that evening I was exhausted. Leon hadn’t been at the precinct when we stopped by, but another officer I worked with sometimes was there. She took the statement instead of him—I would brief Leon and the commissioner on the particulars of this possession in the morning.
Normally I didn’t bother to tell them about every little thing that I hunted. I reported to the fae Elders first and foremost, and anyone else only secondarily.
But I was starting to get worried about the frequency of these demonic events. Normally I hunted demons maybe a few times a year, and always in their lower forms. They’d started coming more frequently at a certain point, but not enough that I noticed. Once a month, maybe twice.
Now it felt like I stepped outside to that particular danger a few times a week. Whoever was summoning them had to be powerful, but I couldn’t see a method to the madness at all. The only thing the possessions were causing was a bit of chaos—and in a city so easily riled up by the latest football game or heat wave, no one seemed to really notice the difference.
Just as I was opening up a bottle of wine to pour myself a glass and sink into a good book, I got a phone call. My sister Iva’s name flashed across my screen, along with a photo of her covered in pigment after we did a color run together—so many years ago now it felt like a dream.
I took a sip out of my glass of wine before I picked up. “Hey sis, what’s up?”
“Naomi. I hope you won’t mind if I cut the chit chat. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Settling in on my armchair by the open window, I sensed an acrid kind of scent in the air I got only when there was bad news. “Tell me. It’s not good, whatever it is.”
“I’ve been here in Tampa for about a year and a half now,” she said in a low, serious tone, “and I’ve encountered fifty demon possessions.”
My mind whirled. “That many?”
“I’m one of just two dark hunters here,” she said. “And the only good one, if I’m being honest. So I thought maybe it was just that I was seeing more than I did back home, where all of us hunted together. But Naomi—there’s more every week, I swear.”
“That’s not normal for a city like Tampa,” I told her. “Beijing, maybe. Or Seoul. But there aren’t even half a million humans there.”
“So it’s not my imagination,” she said with a relieved sigh. “I thought maybe I was just green in the field.”
“You’ve killed more evil than hunters twice your age.” No one compared to my little sister—except maybe me and my mother, but only because we had more experience on her. “You were right to think that you were seeing something unusual. The same thing is happening here. There are demon possessions all over the city.”
Iva was quiet for a moment before she spoke again, this time in a steely voice. “We have to talk to Mom.”
“Agreed. I’ll patch her in. Just give me a sec to pour myself another glass of wine.” I pushed the button to put her on speakerphone.
“God, I wish I was there with you right now.”
As I grabbed the bottle, I imagined the long overdue family reunion we would no doubt be having soon because of this.
“Don’t worry, little sis,” I told her as I settled back down into my armchair. “I have the feeling that we’ll all be together again before you know it.”
Chapter Sixteen
After I helped Naomi catch the real killer, my life became even more of a whirlwind. What I’d thought would be the end of the story was actually just the beginning.
Talia was released late that evening, after her defense attorney spent at least an hour calling whoever it was he had to call—the district attorney, the prison, the judge—to get the charges dropped and Talia released without bail.
At first the prison wanted to wait until the next morning to bus her out, but somehow her lawyer, whose name I’d learned was Peter, called in a favor to get the warden personally involved and have her released before sundown. He drove down to get her himself, promising that he would have her to us as soon as possible.
What I wished for more than anything was that I could just drive up to the prison and get her out myself, but instead I had to sit around and wait. Only her lawyer could walk into prison after visiting hours without any prior notice. So we waited for her at a diner not far down the street from the prison, silently picking at stale waffles and sipping staler coffee, none of us really hungry.
After all the action and excitement of questioning leads with Naomi, it was almost a let down that I couldn’t swoop in there myself and take care of things.
But I’d done it. I’d helped her find the guy who committed the murder and got him to confess. It had seemed so easy at the time—but in reality it wouldn’t have felt that way without my powers. For the first time since I learned who and what I really was, I felt like I had something to look forward to, a light at the end of this very bleak tunnel.
As we waited to be reunited with Talia, her father commented suddenly, “The police should be raked over the coals for not even checking that wine cellar for evidence.” It was the most animated I’d ever seen him—usually when I visited Talia’s house her dad just listened to conversation and silently nodded along when he agreed. “They never should have arrested our baby girl in the first place.”
A lump formed in my throat when Talia’s mother reached over to grab his hand and told him, “Henry, it’s all over now. We have to let it go.”
“She deserves justice.” He sighed, heavily. “Another young black woman incarcerated because of the BRPD.”
“I know, Henry. But let’s just take what we can get.”
“It ain’t right,” he grumbled. “Someone should pay for what happened to her.”
I felt the same way, but I didn’t know if this was my place to speak. It felt like a family matter. So instead I just stared out the window in silence, watching a light drizzle fall.
Which is how I was the one who saw Peter’s car pull up, Talia sitting in the passenger seat. Talia’s mom, Deena, saw where my eyes went and gasped, her hand fluttering to her mouth as she was overcome with emotion.
Together, the three of us sprung to our feet and rushed to the door. I heard the waitress call out to us in a startled voice before I was hurtling out the front door and straight to the car where Talia huddled.
As soon as she stepped out of the car I threw my arms around her, holding her close. I had to step back to let Deena and Henry follow, each of them wrapping their girl in tight grips and kissing her on the head. Deena cried, the tears falling down her face as she gathered Talia to her and held on tight. Seeing her so emotional at being reunited with her daughter made me cry a little too; I wiped the tears away only for more to follow.
“Okay, okay.” Talia smiled as she stepped
back from the repeated hugs, wiping her own face. “I’m out. I need a real shower, and some food. I barely ate anything while I was there—I knew I’d be out before it mattered.”
I laughed at her lighthearted response to such a terrible few days in her life. “Always looking on the bright side, our Talia.”
“It’s good to have you back, baby.” Her mom was beaming, she was so happy. In fact we were all happy—and standing so close to Talia that we hadn’t even managed to move towards the diner at all. The waitress was standing in the door, staring at us with a pensive expression on her face.
“We better go back in,” I said, motioning towards her. “I think they thought we were trying to run out on our check.”
Henry looked over and chuckled lowly. In a stage whisper he murmured, “If we had, they would’ve deserved it, that’s how bad the food here is.”
Talia’s attorney was the one who ushered us inside, almost like he was herding a small group of cats. “C’mon, let’s go back in. We’ll join you for food. I don’t think I’ve eaten properly since lunch.”
And as I sat down to eat, I reflected that the waffle tasted much better now that the company had improved. Talia’s presence alone was enough to make stale food fresh again. Heart happy and stomach rapidly headed towards full, I basked in my contentment.
Never suspecting how temporary it would all be.
“I still don’t understand,” Talia said that night, curled up in the middle of the sofa after taking a long, hot shower. I perched at the end of the sofa, my heart aching for her. “One minute I was in my body, then the next... it was like I was watching myself do all these terrible things, and I couldn’t stop it. I almost stabbed you, Selena.”
“I remember,” I said ruefully. “Did you tell your parents what happened?”
“I wouldn’t know how to explain it if I tried.”
Swallowing, I decided it was time that I tell her everything. Or as much as I understood so far, at least. “You trust me, right?”