by Massey,M. D.
“Potential? You mean for hunting them? Let me tell you, that part of my life is over. All it’s done is brought misery to me, tragedy and heartache to Jesse’s family, and—”
I stopped, because I couldn’t say what I’d been about to say next. Dr. Larsen finished my sentence for me. “And it cost you the love of your life.”
I nodded and looked off at the wall. My voice was paper thin and nearly inaudible as I replied. “Yes.”
“And you still blame yourself.” A statement, not a question.
I flew out of the chair and roared at her. “Of course I blame myself! I remember everything—everything! Every moment of madness as the curse kicked in. It was like the real me stepped outside myself, and another me—a darker part of me—took over. I was just a passenger as I watched it all happen. And there was nothing, nothing I could do about it!”
I slumped back down into the chair, feeling defeated and drained just by that simple admission of guilt and shame. “You don’t know what it’s like living with a monster inside you. Every day I live in constant fear that it’ll happen again, and that this time I’ll kill someone else I love. And every night I relive those moments in my dreams. I can’t sleep, because when I do I have to go through it all again. I can’t eat, because I get sick to my stomach every time I think about the feel of her blood on my hands.”
I paused and stared down at those hands, which had curled into fists in my lap without my awareness. “I can still feel her neck snapping beneath my fingers, and see the light leaving her eyes. And I can’t bear it any longer. I just want it to be over, everything, over and done with.”
“But you can’t die, can you? You’ve tried to kill yourself—how many times now?”
I snorted with derision. “Seven, if you include the walk I took off the Frost Building last week.”
“And every time, the curse takes over, and you wake up somewhere alive and perfectly healthy.”
I nodded and placed my head in my hands. “Yes.”
She leaned forward and grabbed my hands, pulling them into hers. “Look at me, Colin.”
I looked down at the floor, but she continued squeezing my hands, waiting patiently for me to respond. After a few seconds, I looked up and met her gaze. As I did, I caught just the slightest hint of gold in her unnaturally blue eyes.
“You know, your story is not all that unique in the supernatural world. Many a were-creature has had a similar experience the first time they turned. And, similar to your predicament, many therianthropes have tried to commit suicide in the midst of their grief and self-loathing, only to wake up the next day with one less round in their gun. They find themselves no worse for the wear, physically speaking.
“I want you to know that I’ve treated dozens of people who have had similar experiences to yours, who faced similar tragedy and loss. I don’t say that to diminish your feelings or what you’ve experienced in the slightest—I am sharing this with you so you know there is hope after such a tragedy. Things will feel just a little less heavy and a little easier to bear as time goes on. While the memories and pain will never completely go away, they’ll fade over time. Eventually, you will learn to live again.”
She squeezed my hands a final time and let them go, and I sank back into the chair and laid my head back against the cushion to look at the ceiling. “That may be true, Dr. Larsen, but I just can’t find a good reason to keep on living.”
She nodded. “It’s absolutely understandable that you should feel this way. And no one, not one soul has the right to blame you for not wanting to go on. But the fact remains that you really have no choice in the matter at this time.
“Now, for someone in your situation, there are only a few motivating factors that would be strong enough to keep a person moving forward through the process of healing and recovery. One of them is to seek redemption.”
I tilted my head forward and glanced at her. “And the other?”
She sat back and crossed her legs. “Revenge. And frankly, given the choice between redemption and revenge, I’d strongly advise you to choose the former and not the latter. One way offers forgiveness and healing, while the other will only lead to more violence and suffering.
“Moreover, if you seek revenge you could easily have another episode. As you said earlier, there’s no telling what could happen should that occur. So I suggest that you continue to work on the mindfulness exercises I’ve shown you, that you get involved in a spiritual community somewhere where you can connect with loving, caring people, and that you stay on your medication.” She scratched out a few lines on a pad in her lap and tore the top sheet off, handing me a script for a refill of the antidepressants she’d prescribed me.
“Definitely stay on the meds, and call me if you need someone to talk to. I’m here to help. Now, I want to see you again—same time next week.”
I forced myself out of the chair, swaying slightly as I stood up. These sessions always took a lot out of me, and I had low blood sugar from not eating since forever. “Gotcha. Meditation, church, people, meds.” I tipped my ball cap at her. “Same time next week.”
She stood and walked me to the door, reassuring me with a gentle touch on my shoulder as she held it open. “You will get through the pain, Colin, I assure you. You’re strong enough to come out the other side of this functioning and intact.”
I tried to smile as I nodded. “Alright, Dr. Larsen, I’ll do what you say.”
As I walked out of her office, all I could think about was making a choice between revenge and redemption. To be honest, revenge sounded really, really good to me. But I had enough blood on my hands already, which meant there was no way I’d risk another episode by hunting down the witch who had cursed me. And since I didn’t think I deserved redemption, it occurred to me that I was basically screwed, for life.
2
Journal Entry—Eight Months and Three Days A.J. (“After Jesse”)
Dr. Larsen said I need to write this stuff down, since I can’t seem to talk about it in therapy. She says it’s necessary for processing my pain. So, here goes…
In every great love story, tragedy strikes, so I suppose our story is no different from the rest. When I was just a kid, my dad was killed fighting the war in Afghanistan. Losing my father so young had devastated me, and it didn’t help that I was pudgy, shy, and nerdy as all hell, too. I withdrew inside myself, and quickly became the target of some pretty vicious bullying. My saving grace was making friends with a pretty little tomboy by the name of Jesse Callahan, who was also a bit of an outcast. From the day we met, it was us against the world. Nothing they could do to us mattered, so long as we had each other’s backs.
A few years later, we were both introduced to the world beneath our own when a vampire dwarf came looking to chow down on my still-beating heart. As it turned out, I was the last in a long line of male descendants of the great Fionn MacCumhaill, a.k.a. Finn McCool. Sometime in the way distant past, Fionn had defeated this vampire dwarf, the Avartagh, staked him, and buried him upside down so he couldn’t escape his grave. Well, two thousand years later a construction crew accidentally dug him up, and after he slaughtered them he tracked Finn’s family line to America, where he came after me to exact his revenge.
That’s when Finnegas the druid showed up. Uncle Finn, as my family had always known him, had been training the McCool family line to fight supernatural creatures for nearly two millennia. And while he hadn’t planned on introducing me to the family tradition for a few more years, his timetable got moved up when the Avartagh took over our town and cast a glamour that made everyone’s wildest dreams come true.
Only it was nothing like Napoleon Dynamite. People walked around in a daze, the town was a wreck, and the local economy took a nosedive. If you couldn’t see through the glamour, everything looked perfect, but in reality people were living like animals and being hunted by unseelie fae without anyone being the wiser. It took a “chance” encounter with a leprechaun to open my eyes to what was happening, and
after that the first thing I did was free Jesse from the Avartagh’s spell. Then, we went after him.
Long story short, I nearly died killing the thing, and soon after that, Finnegas started training the two of us to become hunters and champions. At the time we both thought it was great. We had a secret lair where the old man trained us in hand-to-hand combat, spellcraft, and all manner of violence and mayhem. And we could see through the glamour that kept humans from noticing the supernatural creatures that existed all around them. It was like living in a J.K. Rowling novel… for a time.
Shit. I have to stop now. I’ll write more about it tomorrow. It just hurts too much to keep going today.
-McC
Austin, TX—Present Day
The bloody tooth flew through my window, ricocheted off the wall, and landed on my pillow. I knew that it flew through the window because of the sound it made when it pierced the glass at several hundred feet per second. And I knew it was a tooth, because I turned the light on saw it gleaming on my pillow, just inches from where my head had rested moments before.
How did I know it was a human tooth? Because humans are the only species known to replace their teeth with gold facsimiles. The fae races weren’t very fond of having metal anywhere in their bodies, even precious metals that didn’t cause them pain. And weres and vampires, well—if they lost a tooth, it’d just grow back after a good night’s sleep. Or day’s sleep, if it had come from a vampire.
Nope, this was a human tooth, no doubt about it. And while I wanted to pretend it had just been some neighborhood kid with a pellet gun, it fell on me to find out who was tuning this person up, and to stop it before they got seriously hurt. Because while the victim may have been human, whoever was dishing out this beating definitely was not human—no human could hit someone hard enough to knock a tooth out and send it flying at several hundred feet per second. Plus, the dogs weren’t barking, which told me they were using a glamour to hide themselves from the mundane world.
I sighed and stuck my bare feet in my running shoes, heading out my bedroom door into the warehouse. I paused to kiss my fingers and transfer that kiss to Jesse’s photo before leaving my room. Two years after Jesse’s death, and I was living in a rented room that held nothing more than a cot, a hot plate, a huge steamer trunk, a meditation mat, and plenty of shelves to hold all my books and my dad’s classic punk LPs. It wasn’t much, but my mom’s cousin let me sleep here in exchange for keeping an eye on his junkyard at night. Since I hadn’t been able to hold down a real job, this was the best I could manage without having to move back in with my mom. The room came with use of the public restroom facilities (joy) and access to a garden hose out back, which I’d attached to a makeshift outdoor shower for whenever I needed to bathe.
Truth was, it wasn’t all that bad. Whenever I wasn’t in class I could help out at the counter or in the yard pulling parts, and I got paid for that work just like any other employee. You couldn’t beat the rent, considering that I lived in Austin, Texas, where even cheap apartments were well beyond the means of a struggling college student. And, living just off South Congress gave me ready access to public transportation. Plus I was just a short hike from SoCo, where all the cool kids liked to hang out. So I wasn’t about to complain about having a cheap place to live for the next six years or so.
As I exited the warehouse, I saw the dogs pacing back and forth and whining by the gates. Rufus and Roscoe were both the result of a love match between a Doberman and pit bull, and they were up for chewing on pretty much anything that crossed over the fence at night. And while they couldn’t see or hear whatever was outside the gates, they knew something was up, so they were both anxious to go outside and bite something. I scratched them both behind the ears and gave them the command to stay. Until I knew what was going on, I didn’t want some unseelie nasty eating my uncle’s dogs.
That was another benefit to living in a junkyard—none of the fae bothered me inside the fence. That was partially because of all the iron and metal, both in the cars and in the sheet metal fence itself, but also because I’d warded the entire property line against any and all fae. I’d had enough of the fae, and wanted nothing more to do with any of them, except for my friend Sabine. Besides, Sabine was only half-fae. While she’d inherited her mother’s magic, she took more after her father than her mom, which was just fine by me.
Hoping I’d be able to catch a few extra zzz’s before I had to leave for school, I exited the gate and took a few deep breaths to calm myself so I wouldn’t accidentally lose control as I confronted the culprits.
And culprits they were—four, in fact. I spied their diminutive silhouettes as I exited the junkyard and crept along the fence to where they were soccer kicking a prone, lifeless figure viciously and repeatedly. While the dogs couldn’t sense or smell them, I knew how to see through a glamour and spy on fae who didn’t want to be seen. For years I’d been trained on how to fight every supernatural creature, how to combat their magic, and how to cast wards and cantrips that could turn their powers against them. My teacher had been a powerful druid, the best of the best.
And currently, he was lying on the ground, getting tuned up by a bunch of bloodthirsty, drug-dealing red caps. Not again.
“What’s going on here, fellas? Just out for an early morning stroll and decided to beat up an old man?”
The red caps kept kicking Finn for a few more seconds, until they realized that I was talking to them. I crossed my arms and leaned up against a light pole as I waited for them to stop beating my former mentor senseless. Oh, I suppose I should’ve jumped in to save him, but then I’d just have been enabling him, and he’d never learn the consequences of his addictions. And besides, he was immortal or damn near it… and I was currently avoiding violence in all its various forms.
The red caps all turned to look at me at once, and one of them spoke to his pals with a thick New York accent. “Hey, ’dis mundane can see us! No fair!”
Ignoring his comment, I watched them to see what they’d do. While modern culture has turned the red caps into harmless little garden gnomes who sell discount airline tickets and hotel bookings, in truth they were nasty, vile, vicious little sociopaths who killed for fun and dyed their caps with the blood of their victims. Like so many other folk legends and fairy tales, their species was far more dangerous and twisted than the stories made them out to be.
The largest of the four dropped his hand to the hilt of a wicked-looking knife, tucked in the white leather belt that held his polyester pants up. He was about a meter tall, sturdily built, and clean shaven. His hair was slicked back under a dark red trilby, and he wore a rather loud silk shirt and a set of gold chains that would make any East Coast guido jealous. A pair of white patent leather shoes topped off the ensemble.
The rest of his crew were similarly dressed. They smelled of cheap cologne and Brylcreem, and sported clothes that made them look more like eighties Italian gangsters than the living nightmares they were. Each of them had a large butcher knife or cleaver hanging from their waists, and they gave me hard stares as their leader spoke up.
“’Dis ain’t no business of yours, pal. We’re just having a talk with the old man here about a debt he owes us. I suggest youse back off and find something else of interest, or else you’re gonna end up like ’dis guy. Capisce?”
3
Journal Entry—Eight Months and Ten Days A.J.
Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I needed some time to think about how things went down… and I guess to get the courage to keep telling this story.
Like I was saying, Jesse and I spent a few years living out a fantasy novel. Then, shit got real. Unbeknownst to us, this bitter old hag named Fúamnach showed up behind the scenes, and as it turned out, she had a hard-on for Finnegas. He’d once helped this Celtic deity by the name of Aengus Óg behead her, because she’d driven the love of his life Étaín away with a spell that made her roam the world for seven years. Never mind that Étaín had once been married to Aengus Óg�
��s foster father Midir, who was also his half-brother, or that Midir had been married to Fúamnach before Étaín stole him away from her. Sure, Étaín got around alright, but apparently this chick was hell on wheels in the sack, because these fools chased her halfway around the world and were willing to trick or kill anyone and anything that got in their way.
Well, the thing about supernatural creatures is that the really powerful ones can’t truly be killed. Oh, sometimes you can permakill their offspring, but the really strong ones aren’t of this world. So you can kill their physical form, usually by beheading them or burning them to ash, but when you do their spirit just travels back beyond the Veil to whatever hell they came from, and then in a few hundred years they’re over here again doing all the vicious and cruel shit they did before.
So, this Fúamnach witch returned from the dead and has been harassing Finnegas ever since. And a witch she is, in every sense of the word. She was a sorceress among the Tuatha Dé Danann, these old-school Irish deities who were eventually defeated by mankind and forced underground, and who would later become known as the sidhe—faery folk. All the modern fae are their progeny, which explains why they’re evil as hell. Fúamnach was among the worst of their kind, bitter and heartless and a master of eldritch sorcery.
And because Jesse and I were Finn’s students, we ended up in her crosshairs, dead to rights.
Meh, I’m getting tired now. Think I’ll turn in and pick this back up later.
-McC
P.S. This seems to be helping. It’s easier writing about it than it is talking about it.
P.S.S. I can’t believe I wrote that. What a shitty choice of words.
Austin, TX—Present Day
I nodded to the dwarf. “I ‘capisce’ just fine. But what I don’t understand is why you boys thought it would be a good idea to bring your bullshit down to my junkyard. Didn’t Maeve tell you to stay away from here?”