by D. M. Nash
“Kind of. I finished high school and stuff, but yeah, I’ve always known that I wanted to follow in my mom’s footsteps.”
“This was in California, right?”
“Yeah. A little desert town called San Blanco.”
“You saved that town,” I said, and I meant it.
That was the reality of being a hunter. It was the reason most hunters decided to be what they were. A lot of the hunters I’d met talked about it a lot. They say things like how in the corporate world there are so many teams, networks, positions, sometimes it can be hard to just point at a result and say, I did that, without having to give a million qualifications. But when you’re a hunter, you know that if you hadn’t been there to do what you did, chances are no one else would have been, either. There just aren’t that many out there, and there’s no guarantee for success.
He said, “My mom didn’t die for nothing. I can’t stop until these guys are dead.”
“Did you know about the woman, the one who came here?”
“No.”
He was looking in my eyes, and I was kind of getting lost in them. I know how that sounds, but really it was more of a vampire thing than a he’s-a-really-cute-guy thing.
Probably.
I said, “Is that why you became a vampire?”
“Yes,” he spoke with a certain finality that made me think he was probably still trying to convince himself he’d done the right thing. “I needed a leg-up this time.”
“How did you turn?”
His mouth was a thin line. “I don’t really… that’s not something I want to get into right now.” He stood up, and whatever spell his eyes had been casting—probably without him even thinking about it—was broken. “I’m going hunting with your dad tomorrow night. I think we’re going to try to take them all out. We’ve been mapping their movements, and now that we know fire works on them, thanks to you, we think we can get them.”
So he was talking about a trap.
He didn’t have to say it for me to know. It was the classic hunter tactic. I myself am not that big a fan of traps. I’ve just heard too many stories of traps gone wrong. You plan too much and when something falls through you don’t know what to do. I was more on the nuevo end of the hunter spectrum that valued improvisation over plans. But I wasn’t going to try to convince them not to use a trap; both of these guys had more experience with this stuff than I did.
“Good luck then,” I said.
And he gave me a pretty nice hug.
What did I say? Impulsive, the whole lot of them.
He was a bit taller than me, so my head tucked neatly under his chin. He smelled like a vampire for sure, a very faintly leather-like smell nobody had ever been able to give me a good explanation for.
I probably don’t have to even mention that it’s one of my favorite smells.
I also didn’t argue about Dad and Richard letting me come with them. I’d been around that closed-circuit track more times than I cared to count. Unless you were straight-up, one-hundred-percent a hunter—which I knew I was not, at least not yet—you were not welcome on planned hunting trips, end of story. I didn’t think there was a hunter alive who didn’t feel that way. Permission was out of the question.
That’s why I was just going to have to find out where they were going and meet them there.
XXIII
One thing you learn fast when you’re a hunter—or, you know, in my case, part of a hunter’s family—is that you have to decompress. You can’t just face scare after scare, even if you happen to like it, and expect your brain and body to just keep functioning right.
So that night I wanted to do something fun, and Dad had no objections. There had been plenty of times growing up, when things had gotten really hairy, that he had actively encouraged Abby and me to go get into a little light-hearted trouble, or go to a movie, or just go stargazing.
I called up Becca—which admittedly felt a little weird after her little stalker confession—and asked her if she had any ideas. I, of course, didn’t go into details, but I made it clear that I wanted to have a good time tonight with no heavy stuff.
Half an hour later she was driving us into downtown, such as it was, so we could go to this open-mic night thing they do at the Camp Café.
“When are you going to get your license?” she asked me, and I just shrugged. I kept meaning to get around to asking Dad to help me prepare to retake my test, but it always seemed like there were bigger things to worry about.
At the café we met up with Antoine Duggary, his little sister Silvia, and Brian Smith. This was a pretty good chunk of my friends, so I was happy with that. This was a good group to unwind with, as the Drama Queens were absent.
Antoine and Silvia’s parents came to the US in the mid-90’s as refugees from the Somalia civil war. I’m not sure how they ended up in Northern Arizona, and I’ve certainly never asked. They’re Muslim, at least their parents are, but I’ve never heard either of them talk about it. I sometimes wonder if they think people won’t be very accepting of it. Antoine is a junior, like Becca and me, and Silvia’s a freshman, but she acts more mature than most of the rest of us so we don’t really mind when she tags along.
Brian is a Mormon kid, and he definitely acts like it. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard him say “damn.” I’m not kidding. Sometimes when I’m talking to people online they seem kind of surprised that we have so many Mormons in Northern Arizona, but it’s like, Hello! You do realize we’re like forty-five minutes away from Utah, right?
I hear from the Drama Queens that last year and the year before Brian was a complete nerd, and his wiry red hair and coke-bottle glasses hadn’t done much to help his case. It’s kind of hard to imagine that now. He keeps his hair clipped short, got contacts, grew three inches taller, and turned into something of a football star—with the body to prove it—all in one summer.
The only time I can really picture the old Brian within is when he laughs, and then it’s like, Ahh… there’s the nerd.
They all greeted me with warm hellos, and I had to think, You guys are a big part of the reason I’m still here. And I also had to wonder if that was really a good thing. I mean, that “lady” could have—
Stop it, I reminded myself. You’re not here to think about that.
I sat down and tried to really let my mind relax.
“Whoa,” Brian said. “Is sitting down really that nice?”
“Huh?” I said, realizing I’d closed my eyes like I was sinking down into a hot tub or something. “Oh, ha ha. Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, you’ve got to teach me sometime.”
“Teach you what?”
He said, “Whenever I sit down…” he looked up a little, pretending to be thoughtful, “I don’t know, I find I don’t get that much out of it.”
“I’ll tell you the secret,” Becca said, standing next to me. “You need to get really stressed-out and wound-up and then try sitting down. I’ll show you.” She pulled out her own chair and made a big production out of melting into it like it was the greatest moment of her life. She slouched way down, so her drooping hands were almost on the floor.
“Okay,” Brian said and grinned. “I’ll give it a try at my AP test.”
“What’s new with you?” Antoine asked. “Feels like you haven’t hung out with us in a long time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not much, really. I was sick last week, that day I missed school, and that’s about it.”
This. This is the worst thing about being in a hunter family. Some hunters, I think they actually like having a good reason to lie about what’s really going on. But I don’t get that at all.
Becca raised her eyebrow at me, but she wasn’t so obvious that anybody else noticed. Well, maybe Silvia did—not much got past that girl—but she wasn’t the type to say anything.
Becca said, “And I’ve been trying to get through that stupid Great Gatsby book. I mean, if I wanted to read about a bunch of rich people hanging out with each other
couldn’t I just read US Weekly?”
“Hey,” Brian stepped in. “I read that last year, and I didn’t think it was that bad. You just have to look a bit deeper. You know, beyond the stuff that’s literally happening.”
“Right,” Becca said. “It symbolizes boredom very well.”
I got an Italian soda and a little overpriced pastry thing. I wasn’t really hungry or thirsty, but sometimes I just liked spending money, you know? Not the most responsible way to unwind, but it’s better than meth I always say.
The open-mic deal wasn’t that bad, either. Brian had his guitar and played this little, kind-of-cheesy love song that I guess he’d written. I didn’t think it was really about anybody, at least as far as I knew, but it was sort of sweet. Some community college kids played some songs and did some poetry. I don’t know, none of it was great, but there’s just something about seeing a live performance that makes it seem like you had a good time.
By the time I got out of there and Becca dropped me off, I was hardly even thinking about the black suits and the trap The Men were planning for the next night, which was my plan precisely. Well-rested, I thought I’d be ready to actually lend some assistance at the showdown, if that was what was needed.
It was dark as Becca dropped me off. Some people have this weird little thing called “common courtesy,” where, you know, they stay long enough to make sure the person they are dropping off can get inside okay. I guess Becca didn’t get the memo. She sped off almost as soon as I was out of the car.
I didn’t mind. I was unwound. I was definitely not on my guard, because in my mind all the action was tomorrow night, something I’d prepared for, like a test. So of course it was then, in the tiny interim between Becca dropping me off and me getting in my house, that someone grabbed me from behind, slapped their way-too-strong hand over my mouth and dragged me toward some car.
Damn it.
I was handled roughly, blindfolded, dumped into an empty trunk, and then the car took off to God-knew-where. I didn’t even have time to scream.
XXIV
I would say I “came to,” but I didn’t ever really lose consciousness during the journey to wherever the heck we were going. It took a long time, and while I was definitely pissed, it almost felt like sleeping, being in total darkness like that, totally cut off from everything except the sound of the road and the occasional bump beneath me.
Obviously I knew the second they’d grabbed me what this was all about. It seemed Richard wasn’t the only one who thought I looked like bait material.
After what felt like hours, but probably wasn’t even close, the trunk opened. Sure enough, when my kidnapper unhooked my blindfold with one of his mercifully human fingers, I saw the two besuited gentlemen standing there with reserved smiles on their faces.
Campville has a beautiful view if you look north-west of town. There are red sandstone buttes running in a jagged line east to west for miles and miles and miles, not to mention some pretty killer sunsets if you don’t mind the lack of green you might be used to if you live out in the Eastern US.
I felt giddy with anger—which almost totally overrode my fear—and said, “Hey do you guys know if you go straight over these mountains, up into Utah, you’ll run into the pink sand dunes? No joke, they’re pink. It’s actually very cool.” This might sound like I was just trying to be “so random,” but this was just another oddly-effective hunter trick. You say things your captors don’t expect and they’re a lot more likely to say something they didn’t mean to in response—something they hadn’t planned to say—which can sometimes give you an in, or at least something to work with.
One of them looked at me and I saw that I actually had interested him. I guess I forgot these guys were basically repositories for information. At least, they got their energy through answers to questions. Did that mean they liked all information, no matter what it was?
“Did you know that a third century Greek philosopher once died from laughing too much when he saw a drunk donkey trying to eat figs? It’s true, you can look it up on Wikipedia’s List of Unusual Deaths.”
They glanced at each other.
“You know… that brings up a good point,” I said, trying to get something out of them or maybe just give my dad and Richard some more time to figure out what was happening. “Why don’t you just go online if all you’re trying to do is get info? There’s more info on there than you could ever read, even if you lived to be a thousand years old.”
But they weren’t about to let something slip. They kept their lips tight and carried me over to an overhang at the base of a mountain foothill.
Now, when I say “mountains” I don’t mean white-capped Rockies. These are red-rock, cliff-riddled Northern Arizona mountains, punctuated with sagebrush and stuff like that, not fields of grass and thick forests all over.
The overhang was about twenty-five feet above the sandy reddish ground and jutted out about half that. I could see the flickering light of a campfire as we rounded the corner to their secluded little area. A camp stove, a garbage can, and a couple of camping chairs were set up around the fire in such a way that made me think this was their home-away-from-home and not just a pit-stop for the night.
The woman wasn’t there, and I guessed it was probably so she could tail my dad and Richard when they came out here and come up behind them. I wondered if they knew that my dad thought he had a good idea where they’d been spending their time. That might give him an edge.
“Huh,” I nodded to the garbage can, “you guys wipe out whole towns and yet you care about not littering? I’m not sure I follow the logic.”
Finally, this got one of them to speak. “It’s not just your world, human.”
And actually that made sense, so I didn’t pursue it any further. “So what are you guys, anyway?” I asked. “We call you black suits.”
The one who hadn’t answered my question took his turn. “Don’t ask questions, human.”
“Come on, just tell me what you are. What’s the dog-thing your mom turned into?”
“She is not our mother. There is no name for what we are. No human name.”
I said, “Come on, you have to talk, don’t you? I mean all you do is ask people questions. Well, and kill them. Can’t forget about that. And I guess wipe their towns off the map. You have to have a word for what you are.”
“The word in our language means ‘person,’” one of them said. Who knew which one. They’d walked around a bit, and I honestly couldn’t tell them apart.
“Oh I get it,” I said. “So you’re just people and we’re, what, animals?”
“A pestilence,” the other one said. I guess they didn’t just look alike. They were so much alike it didn’t seem to matter which one of them spoke.
“That’s pretty big talk for something nobody really even has a good name for. I mean you’re not like vampires, where there are like a bunch of you.”
“We are legion,” one of them said, and I had to roll my eyes.
And yeah, I’ll admit it: I was kind of having a good time. My heart was thumping, my brow was sweating, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I imagine it’s very much the same feeling a professional rock climber gets at the top of some tall, sketchy climb.
“So okay, if we’re a pestilence, your kind has been around, what, millions of years? Billions? Oh, I know, maybe you came from another planet!”
This was yet another tactic. Most creatures don’t have the kind of records humans do, so a lot of their history is word-of-mouth, almost like folk stories, and they can be very touchy about it. It can be really useful to get a handle on how they view themselves.
And getting these two angry would probably work to my advantage too because more often than not anger and caution don’t go hand-in-hand. I pegged these guys as the type to really get riled up about their past based on the whole Legion/pestilence BS.
“We have been since the beginning.”
“I think you might be surprised how man
y creatures claim their kind was The Original Life on Earth. Chances are you guys are just like pretty much everything else. You developed ten thousand years ago or something when there was a bunch of magic going on, and—”
And then one of them had my throat in his hand. It felt clammy and cold on my skin, and I tried to swallow reflexively but couldn’t.
Too far! my brain screamed. You went too far too fast, Cath. That was the major danger in trying to push the buttons of something that was really a lot stronger than you.
Suddenly, I wasn’t really having fun anymore. Imagine that. It’s usually when straight-up pain gets in the mix that the party’s over for me.
“Listen here hunter’s daughter,” he said this like he’d just called me scum, “we don’t care what you believe or don’t believe. It’s not your place to decide our worth.”
And while this was true, I knew I’d really tapped a nerve with this guy. That meant he probably had some doubts about what they were doing, but just now I couldn’t think of any way to use that to my advantage.
And anyway, I was looking for a different kind of advantage at the moment. This funny little substance I like to call air.
“Brother,” the other one said, and instantly his grip loosened around my neck. But he didn’t take his hand back quite yet, probably to remind me that he could take my life any moment he wanted.
“Pretty tough,” I coughed out. “Can’t believe you’re actually strong enough to knock around a teenage human girl who’s tied up. You must really be a black-suit-lady killer, huh?”
My throat was pounding, but I was way too mad to show him that he’d taken me past my fear threshold.
His “brother” put the gag back on me, and I was glad because it let me save some face. My throat hurt way too much to just keep talking, but I would have felt I had to go on if they’d let me.
We waited for a while. They looked super weird in their black suits and black 50’s business-guy hats sitting around a campfire in second-rate camping chairs.