by C. A. Saari
“You got it. And…you know we can’t tell anyone about this, right?”
“I know Rem, you didn’t even have to say it.”
She walked back to the truck with me.
“You out tomorrow yet?” She asked.
“Yes.” I pointed to my face.
Kendra stood before Jake and looked him over.
“You take care of my girl, Jake Wagner. If you don’t, I swear to God you will wish you had just listened to me.”
He smiled, simply said; “I’ve got her back.”
She turned back to me. “It’s getting dark and cold, I’m going back inside. Text me tomorrow, okay?”
“I will.” We shared another hug, which thrilled her to death, she ordered Jake not to let me get rusty, she’d worked years to get me to the hugging stage and if he screwed up all her hard work she’d kick him the balls. He laughed. Jake went around and opened my door for me. I saw him scanning the area around Kendra’s home before he finally got behind the wheel again.
“Everything okay?” I asked and for some reason I thought of creepy red eyes.
“Fine. Ready?”
I nodded, though honestly, I was nervous. We were going to go home and eventually we’d crawl in the same bed together. What would happen then? I liked kissing Jake, and I knew I’d want more eventually, but I also knew I wasn’t ready for that step yet. Would he get upset if I told him that? Is that why he had insisted to his dad that I stay with him? Because he was expecting something more?
We’d been on the road for over five minutes and I was still pondering this, still as confused and nervous as I was five minutes earlier, when suddenly Jake slammed on the breaks, locking the wheels and causing the back end of his truck to swerve into the other lane. I looked up as if in slow motion and saw it. Right there in the headlights. A black beast, I couldn’t tell if it was hairy, but its head was covered in horns of all various sizes, its hellish red eyes looked right at us before it ran off –ON TWO LEGS- into the woods on the other side of the street.
“What the hell was that?” I nearly screamed. Jake looked at me.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to slam on the breaks so hard; dog ran across the road. Are you okay?”
Dog? DOG???
“That was no dog Jake!” I was still nearly screaming, and now his eyes widened.
“You saw it?” He asked. He went from wide eyes to frowning fiercely.
“Saw it? How could I miss it? You nearly hit it with the truck! What was it?” I turned to look out my window at the woods where it had disappeared. Was it a deformed wolf? But…on two legs? Maybe I’d been seeing things. But no, I’d seen those eyes before.
“You saw it?” Jake repeated. He took my face in his hands and turned me to face him. “What did you see?”
“What do you mean what did I see? Didn’t you see it? You had to have, you slammed your breaks!”
“Remi, what did you see?”
“I don’t know what I saw Jake! Some big black thing with red eyes! Was it an animal?”
He let my face go and sat back in his seat.
“Holy shit.” He whispered.
I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was freaked out beyond belief.
“Do you know what it was Jake?”
He sprang into action then. He jammed the truck into gear and the wheels squealed as he stepped on the gas. He drove at least twice the speed limit.
“Let’s just get back to the house. We’ll talk there.”
“Talk about what?” But he didn’t answer me. At his house he parked, came around and pulled me from my seat and up over the porch at nearly a running pace. He slammed the front door and was calling for his dad as he led me down the hall towards the kitchen.
“In here Jake.” His dad called back. Jake spun us around and backtracked to the library. His father sat behind a massive mahogany desk. “Everything alright?”
“Another family meeting.” Jake shoved me in a chair and went back to the hall to yell for the others. I stood back up –I was so not able to sit still right now- as his dad picked up the phone and called for his brother to meet them in the library.
It took less than a minute for them all to assemble. They took their family meetings seriously.
“What?” Ana said, her voice dripping with annoyance when she saw me. “I was in the middle of a bath.”
“She can see them.” Jake blurted out. He’d come back to stand next to me, but instead of trying to hold my hand like he usually did, he crossed his arms over his chest. Complete silence greeted his statement.
So I spoke up.
“What did I see?” I asked, looking at each and every one of them, but my eyes settled on Jake; he was looking at his dad. Still nobody spoke, but slowly they started to move. Like statues coming to life. Mr. Wagner pulled the small wire rimmed glasses off his face and dropped them on his desk, Ana’s hand went to cover her lips, Ryan’s lips made a tight little circle and he whistle breath out through them and Uncle Quinn put his hands on top of his head, like a long distance runner trying to catch his breath. His wife, who I hadn’t met yet, sat down in the very same chair I had discarded only two minutes earlier. “What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Is this the first time you’ve seen them?” Mr. Wagner finally asked, his voice calm.
“Yes!” I cried out. But…was it? Jake watched me closely as my face went from incredulous denial to doubt.
“Remi, have you seen them before?” He asked.
“Um,” I shook my head, but not in denial. “I don’t know. Earlier in the week…I was in the woods behind my old house and I thought I saw…shadows. But not normal shadows so I left the woods and when I turned around I thought I saw…” How could I say this without them thinking I was completely off my rocker? I looked up at Jake who watched me expectantly. “Red eyes. Several sets.” Then there was that evening in the parking lot at school when I’d glanced across the hill to the same woods…oh my God, had that just been yesterday? “And yesterday, when you gave me a ride home, I thought I saw the same thing, but at that distance I could have been mistaken.”
“You weren’t mistaken. I saw them too.” He looked from me to his dad.
“’Saw them’. What is them exactly?” I asked, desperate to know what was going on.
Jake sighed, “Maybe you should sit down.” He suggested.
“I don’t want to sit down Jake, I want to know what’s going on.”
Ana finally spoke up. “I don’t think-” But Jake cut her off by holding his hand up to silence her, his eyes never left mine; so she turned to Mr. Wagner. “David, he can’t tell her.” She insisted, her voice an octave higher than normal.
“I think that’s up to him at this point.” Mr. Wagner answered quietly.
Ana’s jaw dropped and she turned back to Jake.
“You can’t tell her! She’ll freak out and tell everyone else and we’ll become the crazy family in town again. We’ll have people poking into our business and you know what’ll happen then!”
“Ana.” Mr. Wagner warned.
“He’s going to ruin us over a piece of tail!” She shouted.
“Shut up Ana.” Jake turned on her, his eyes filled with anger. “Where would you be right now if we hadn’t told you?”
Ana scoffed –she was much better at it than I was. “I’m not a basket case.” She looked pointedly at me when she said it.
“You’re not really proving that point right now.” Jake’s voice was low, full of warning. Ana stared at him for a time, then shook her head and walked to the other side of the room. Jake turned back to me. I had waited, silently. I hadn’t doubted him.
“Okay. What you saw tonight was a kind of…” He seemed to be searching for a word he could work with, I waited. “Demon.” He finally said. I looked at him blandly. What was I supposed to say? To think? I was expecting some kind of tale about some rare mountain animal that had accidentally found its way down into the woods around our little town. I was not expecting
the word demon to be thrown out there like it was an everyday occurrence. Hey, no big deal, right? WRONG!
“A demon?” I asked; not that I thought he’d lie to me…but maybe he was the one off his rocker. “Like, from hell?”
“No. Demon isn’t actually the right word for it either, but it’s a simple one, so we use it. It’s a sort of an evil entity…though it’s not really a spirit either. It’s been around since man, but it’s not a heaven or hell, or a God or a Devil thing. It’s just something that’s been here since time, and man has been fighting it since time. There are groups of us called hunters, we seek them out and destroy them. We were alerted to a concentrated number of them here in Webber last year, and that’s why we’re here.”
I looked around the room at everyone, they seemed to be watching me intently.
“Mmmhmm.” I said, my eyes found their way back to Jake. Of course, I finally get a boyfriend, and a really hot one at that, and he turns out to be completely loony-toons. “And, everyone in this room is a hunter?” When he nodded, I went on. “And what exactly is it that these demons do? I mean, why do you need to be hunting them?”
“Well, they kill. Innocent people.”
“Really? So why have I never heard of a single news report of demons attacking and killing people?”
“You have, you just don’t know you have. Over half the deaths you hear about are caused by demons. Car accidents where only one car is involved. Drownings, people falling down stairs or getting lost in the woods, things of that nature. Even some deaths deemed to be caused by natural causes, like heart attacks, strokes, brain aneurisms; etcetera.”
“Wow.” I needed to find a way to escape, these people were nuts. “Well, if they’re such powerful demons that need hunters to track them and kill them, why do they resort to sneaky tricks, like disguised car accidents, to kill people?” Yeah, answer that one fruit loop.
“Because most people can’t see them.”
I laughed then. Oh lord. I couldn’t help it. This was insane, and I didn’t want to participate anymore. I took a step away from Jake.
“Remi?” He asked and took a step towards me. I held up my hand to hold him off.
“Please, just stay there. I don’t even know what I am supposed to say right now.” I took several more steps back, and Jake didn’t follow. I knew it was because I asked him not too, it made me almost sad. He was so gorgeous, and he’d taken Bob out for me. He kissed like it was the end of the world and it was the one thing he wanted to go out doing. Why did he have to end up being certifiably insane? Because that was just my freaking luck, wasn’t it? I was destined to always be either disappointed or underwhelmed. I turned and ran. I ripped open the front door and had only taken one step out when I heard Jake call out my name.
And I screamed.
I was not a screamer by nature, even when Bob was playing bongos on my ribs I always managed to use my inside voice. But if a girl was going to scream, then seeing a long line of big, horned, red eyed demons standing at the end of your boyfriend’s driveway was a pretty good reason to start using your outside voice.
“Remi!” Jake grabbed me around the waist and swung me behind him, he scanned the area quick and shoved me back inside. “Get inside!” He ordered to everyone else. He slammed the door shut and gathered me up in his arms. I buried my face in his chest and cried “oh my God” over and over again.
“Well, I think she believes us now.” Mr. Wagner said and patted my back. “I’ll go call Mick’s team, he can make a patrol through here when he’s done in town.”
“We’ll be in the kitchen.” I felt Jakes voice rumble through his chest and felt intensely bad for thinking him crazy. Or if he was crazy, then I was too. “Come on.” He said gently to me and led me down the hall. He set me on a bar stool at the island and poured me a glass of water, I drank a little while I tried to wrap my brain around what I saw. A thought occurred to me and I nearly jumped from my chair.
“Can they get in here?”
“No.” Jake took the seat next to me, while everyone else either occupied the other seats around the island or stood around it. “We have protections we use on our boarders. So far they haven’t been able to cross them.”
“So far?” I asked and took another sip of water. It was cold and felt good on my throat.
“Well, over the years they’ve been developing a tolerance, if you will, to our protections, so we’re constantly changing them. So far this one is holding up. Unfortunately though, it does mess with our resources, so we can’t protect everyone. Just homes, borders. If someone leaves their house at night or their neighborhood in some cases…there’s not much we can do for them. Our teams are small, so we can’t go out and keep an eye on each and every individual person.”
“Your teams?”
“Yes, there are groups of us scattered around every city in the country that has an infestation. It helps to have more than one team for each city, that way while one group is hunting, the other can rest, or mend if their fight has been particularly bad.”
I took that in. The bandage on his wrist? I bet that wasn’t a football injury. But I asked instead; “You’re protections…is there one around my neighborhood?” Jake nodded. “My house?” I knew I shouldn’t worry about Bob…but I couldn’t help it.
“Yes.” Jake said, seeing where my mind was, even though I’m sure he didn’t think I should worry about Bob either. “Your house had its own protection, I put it there myself. We try to restrict the beings to woods as much as possible. It keeps them away from the human population and it’s safer to hunt and to fight if we know we don’t have to go through buildings or around people.”
“Kendra?” I whispered. Jake nodded.
I ran my hands through my hair. I had roughly two million more questions, but I was already having a hard time wrapping my head around what I’d already been told. I just couldn’t seem to process it; but I still had to know more.
“You said, not everyone can see them. Why can I? Why can you?”
Jake shook his head. “I don’t know. We haven’t really been able to figure out why some of us can see them but so many others can’t.”
“So, since I can, does that mean I have to become a hunter?”
“That’s entirely up to you.”
Mr. Wagner stepped into the kitchen.
“They’re gone, back into the woods. But Mick’s going to do a scout out this way a bit later.” Jake frowned and looked at his father.
“Any idea why they’d line up at the border like that?” He asked.
Mr. Wagner shook his head then looked to me.
“You alright?”
“No.” I answered simply and honestly. Jake smiled and took my hand, I held his tightly. I still had more questions.
“So, if my home had extra protections, how were they able to get into my dreams? I mean, do the protections not guard against that?”
Every single pair of eyes in the room rocketed in on me, Jake’s grip on my hand tightened until I almost winced.
“What? What is it?” I was already bracing myself for another shock. Those looks couldn’t mean good things.
“What kind of dreams?” He asked me.
“I don’t know, it was of them. I mean, at the time I didn’t know it was them, I had never actually seen one, just shadows and eyes in between trees; but the things I saw out there tonight, that was what I saw in my dream. How could I have known what they looked like before I’d ever actually seen one?”
There were swear words murmured all around.
“Oh, God. What? You’re freaking me out, and I’m already freaked out to the max here people!”
“She’s the one?” Ana muttered.
“They were lined at our border for her.” Quinn said.
That did not sound good.
“Why for me? Jake?” Jake shook his head, he brought my hand to his lips, kissed it and then held it there, like he didn’t want to be the one to tell me this part.
“There’s
a legend.” Mr. Wagner finally said, stepping closer to his son’s side. “I don’t know all the details because it only happens once every few hundred years, and it’s not happened in my time. Although, before I explain, I think you should know how these beings work first. They feed off human spirits or souls. It makes them strong and if they can consume enough spirits, they’re able to multiply, or split off from themselves. Say for example, a being consumes ten human spirits, or souls or auras, whatever we chose to call them, we all have one, and when a demon is able to consume these ten spirits, it becomes strong enough to split itself into two beings. That number is just an example, we don’t actually know how many spirits they have to consume to split. It may take ten, it may take twenty; it may take a hundred.”
I nodded to let him know I was following. So he continued.
“But as the legend goes, there is a rare human spirit that has the ability to split demons by the hundreds or maybe even the thousands, so if a demon was to feed off this human spirit there’s a possibility that it would have the ability to create thousands of new demons, but again, those numbers are just an example.”
“But what does that have to do with my dream?”
“This spirit is a warrior. No demon has ever been able to consume this particular human spirit. This spirit is strong and probably has its own defenses so they will try anything to weaken the spirit in the hopes of consuming it. One of those ways is to attack this human in his or her dreams.”
I frowned.
“Well, why don’t they attack and weaken all hunters that way?” I asked. “What makes my dream so special?”
“Because forcing themselves into a human’s dream weakens them as well. They’ll only do it if the reward is worth it. Say a reward of thousands more of their kind in just one kill.”
“So, I’m going to have more of these dreams?”
“No, there are other protections we can give you.” Jake finally spoke.
“Okay. So, how do we make me not the one? Is there some kind of protection for that?”
“No.” Mr. Wagner said. “We just keep fighting them, keep picking them off one by one.”