by Jack Knight
“Motus desisto!” I shouted as I lunged toward the wizard.
For a second, the guy became a statue. He froze exactly where he had been when I said the spell. Even the lightning that was coming off of his hands froze in place. It was kind of cool that the magic had worked. Also, I was really glad that I learned that spell.
I slammed into the guy’s chest hard enough to knock him over. Unfortunately, the spell broke as soon as I did.
The two of us hit the floor at the same time, and I lashed out with my knife.
“You bitch...” the wizard groaned.
My blade had hit its mark. I pushed myself off of the fallen wizard and pulled my knife from his chest. Blood was already coming out of his mouth, and he was looking at me like his eyelids were becoming heavy.
“Shouldn’t have gone around killing people,” I told him as I straightened up.
He coughed a couple of times, spraying blood each time he did. “Cops... who deserved it. Nobody innocent.”
I hesitated. Had I just been sent after another person who wasn’t doing anything wrong? Was Ezra sending me out to kill murderers, or was he sending me to kill vigilantes? This was all getting really confusing really fast.
It had been so much easier when I was a Hunter. Kill the creatures that deserved to die. No mess, no fuss, just killing. As I watched the wizard’s eyes slowly close, I began to wonder how many people I had killed as a Hunter that were just cleaning up messes that wouldn’t clean up themselves.
“Gen,” I said when the wizard’s eyes closed and his body went limp.
“Yup, thanks for that.”
I looked up, Gen was still putting books into her backpack, but now she was taking her time with it.
“What’re you doing?” I demanded.
Gen glanced over at me with a smile. “My job,” she said as she put another book into her bag. One backpack was on the floor beside her, already full to bursting with books she had stolen.
“Your job is to steal shit?” I asked as I left the dead wizard behind.
“My job,” she replied as she scanned the bookshelf, “is to collect grimoires from any mage we kill. I keep a few for myself, I give the rest of them to Ezra to sell. We have to make money somehow.”
“I thought that Ezra and Magnus gave money to the Reapers,” I snapped.
Gen didn’t even bother to look at me when she answered, “That money will run out eventually, we need an income.”
Alright, fine. Since the people the Reapers killed couldn’t exactly use them anymore, it sort of made sense. Grimoires sold for a lot. One mage kill could probably bring in six figures, that I got. My problem was what the wizard had said.
I sheathed my knife and stretched my injured back as I asked, “Did you know this guy was killing cops?”
“Dirty cops, cops taking bribes, one pig that killed a black guy and didn’t even get punished for it,” Gen listed off, as if that wasn’t a big deal.
My heart felt like it had turned to stone in my chest.
“Are you telling me that we just killed someone because they were helping people?” I demanded.
Gen put one last book into her bag, threw it over her shoulder, and picked the full one up off the ground before she turned to look at me.
“He was a wizard killing normal humans. Yeah, he was doing good stuff, but we can’t risk the human world finding out about the magical one. That’s why the Hunters existed in the first place, remember?”
“So,” I crossed my arms over my chest, “the Reapers just kill whoever might draw attention to supes, it doesn’t matter if they're good or bad?”
Gen tilted her head, like she was putting real thought into her answer. “We kill one to save a thousand,” she said after a moment. “If word of the supernatural got out and people really believed it, it would be chaos. Vampires wouldn’t have to look for ghouls, people would flock to them. Vampires and shifters would Turn people by the hundreds. Everyone and their mother would try to become a wizard or a witch. Think about how many people would die then.”
Without giving me a chance to answer, Gen strolled out of the room, stepping over the dead wizard like it didn’t bother her in the slightest. Something told me she had done this a few times.
She had a point though. The reason the Hunters still existed was as a warning: if you let the secret out, you die.
I had always focused on the part that made me feel better about the Hunter’s mission. I didn’t care about the secret world of the supes, I just wanted to stop bad people from hurting those weaker than them. Nobody had ever explained it quite as succinctly as Gen had.
I did my best not to look at the body of the wizard I had just murdered as I walked over him and followed Gen back to her car.
The sun was starting to set when I got outside. It was hard to believe I had been up an entire day, less my couple hours of sleep in the disgusting motel in Sacramento. The ache in my back, the feeling that I had been lightly microwaved, it made it really hard to remember that I should have asked Gen to drop me off at my place. I drifted in and out as soon as she started the car, and suddenly we were at the church.
Fine. I would stay one night in this place, but that was it. I didn’t need anyone thinking I was getting cozy.
I followed Gen into the building, and quickly lost her as she raced off into the hallway. She was probably going to go sort through her mound of stolen books, I doubted she even realized I had been with her, even though I’d done most of the fighting.
My legs started to feel heavier with every step. Once I had decided that I would sleep, my body started shutting down. I made it to the room that had been given to me in a haze. When I collapsed on the bed, looking around at all the weapons on the walls, I admitted defeat.
Okay, this is kind of cool.
My eyes closed for what felt like a fraction of a second. When I opened them again, I could smell bacon. That was enough to wake me up completely.
I hurried from the room, following the intoxicating smell through the hall, when I was certain I was close, I started opening doors, not even bothering to knock.
The day before had passed by so quickly, I wasn’t sure I had eaten anything. I was starving, and there was bacon somewhere in this place.
Finally, I found it. I pushed open a door and saw a professional looking kitchen. Several stoves, pots hanging from the ceiling, three different sinks, and a wide, open space near all the cooking equipment with a long table that already had a ton of food laid out on it.
Well, it was about fifty links of sausage on one plate, a pile of bacon on another, and a huge bowl of scrambled eggs. There was orange juice in a strange looking bottle, and a tea kettle set between the three dishes. It was beautiful.
The only bad part was the room was full of people. It looked like every one of the Reapers was in the room, all of them already seated at the table and dishing themselves out breakfast.
“Hey, sleepyhead. You were out like ten hours,” Asher called to me. I hadn’t even made it all the way through the door, it was like he was expecting me.
“We were going to come check on you soon,” Magnus told me. “Come, sit and eat with us.”
I took a slow step inside the kitchen and closed the door behind me. This felt awkward. I never ate with people around a table. Scarfing down food with the blondes I pretended to be friends with, sure. But... this was weird. This looked like a family meal. I had never done anything like that, because I had never really had a family.
“Coffee?” I asked as I took a few tentative steps toward the table.
Gen, who was barely taller than the chair she was sitting in, turned and pointed at a coffee pot sitting on a nearby counter. The pot was already full, and I could see steam coming out of it. If all the people would leave, this would be the perfect way to wake up.
I poured some coffee into one of the mugs that was set up next to the coffee maker and slowly made my way to the table, taking a seat between Asher and Magnus.
“
Don’t be shy,” Magnus said as I sat down. “Darius tried to think of you when cooking,” he said as he nodded toward a thin, scrawny looking guy with dark skin and short black hair on the other end of the table, “but this lot will eat everything before you get a bite if you don’t hurry.”
Alright, well, I’m not missing out on bacon.
I hurried to grab myself a little of everything, piling it onto the plate that had been sitting in the empty seat, waiting for me.
“Do you guys do this every morning?” I asked.
“E’ry on’” Asher said through a mouthful of sausage.
Magnus chuckled and translated. “We always have breakfast together, because lunch and dinner are so hard to organize. For most of us, this is our only family, so we do our best to have some time together as a group.”
“Better eat up,” Asher said as he nudged me with his elbow, having finally cleared his mouth of food. “As soon as we have another lead on the Hunters, we head out. Until then, you and me are practicing magic until you pass out.”
I glanced up at Magnus as he took a sip of orange juice. “Does Ezra not join you guys?”
Every Reaper I had seen since I first arrived was at the table, except Ezra. His absence was easy to notice, because he was the thing that made me most uncomfortable being in the Reaper’s church.
Magnus gave a soft smile and slowly lowered his glass back down to the table. “Ezra is absent more often than not,” he admitted, “but the rest of us do just fine without his presence at breakfast.”
“Yeah, ‘cause he’s a fucking grump,” Gen laughed before she ripped a piece of bacon in half with her teeth.
I knew that much, Ezra was my actual father and he had never been around much. Still, it seemed like maybe this place wasn’t terrible. Maybe waking up here wouldn’t be so bad. Every so often.
Chapter 21
“YEAH, WE FOUND THEM. Are we sitting around and waiting again?” I asked as I looked out the car window at a group of eight Hunters walking into a bar.
“Yes,” Magnus answered from the front seat. “This time, we wait in the car. We cannot give them any reason to suspect that they are being followed.”
I slouched down in the backseat. Waiting around was going to drive me insane, especially because the Hunters had just walked into a supe bar. They could be in there for hours.
At least Matt wasn’t with them this time. For all I knew, the Hunters had found out he had let Asher and me go and they had killed him. It was a lot easier to just not think about it.
“Am I at least allowed to try out the mind reading spell?” I asked.
Asher, who was sitting in the backseat with me, laughed. “You’re wearing yourself too thin.”
We had spent the last three days studying from the second we finished breakfast until Asher said he couldn’t do any more. I usually continued a few hours after that.
Asher had started teaching me Latin. He had explained how sigils could hold spells or empower magic after they were drawn. I had even learned some of the properties of ingredients mages used for spells more complicated than the ones that just needed you to shout a couple of words. My brain felt like it was going to explode with all the information I had crammed into it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to test it out.
I was itching to try one spell in particular, but Asher said it was way too dangerous. It was supposed to inflict permanent death on anything that had touched you in the last minute, even vampires. Asher insisted that even if I only tested it out on plants, the magic would be too much for me to handle until I had practiced magic for years.
“Maddison, that’s a bar,” Magnus chuckled. “If you try to read the minds of everyone in there, you’ll go insane.”
I took a deep breath and just sat back to wait. Sitting still was going to drive me insane, too.
“Did you and Atasha figure out the vampire thing?” Asher asked Magnus.
That piqued my interest. Magnus, and a tall, asian woman that I only ever saw at breakfast, had been trying to figure out how someone could have found a spell to create vampires. Last I heard, there was no progress at all.
“Not yet,” Magnus answered.
I let my head fall against the window. It looked like I was still just waiting.
“They’re done,” I announced, as soon as I saw the Hunters walking back out.
Magnus started the car immediately and I hurried to buckle my seatbelt.
“It looks like they were just after information,” Magnus mused.
I didn’t care what they were after. We needed them off the trail of the Reapers, before they figured out how to find us. The only way to do that was to ask them. Possibly violently.
The Hunters didn’t get into a car, they all started walking down the street away from the bar. No driver’s licenses, no possibility of legally registering a car, Hunters tended to avoid anything that left a trail unless absolutely necessary. It made sense, but it was really boring.
Magnus waited until the Hunters were almost out of eyesight, and then followed just closely enough that we could see them again before he parked. Over and over. It took us so long it would’ve made more sense to follow on foot, but Magnus insisted we needed a fast getaway if necessary.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the Hunters all ducked into a building. The three of us unbuckled and were about to get out of the car when Magnus shouted.
“Wait!”
I glanced at him and then back to the building. It looked like more Hunters were following the first group into the same door. It didn’t make sense that they hadn’t just met up outside and walked in together, until I realized that no Hunter was that pale.
“You don’t think those are the new vampires, do you?” Asher asked.
I turned to glare at him. “Are you asking if the vampires that are going around killing Hunters would be following Hunters?”
“Good point.”
“We stay here,” Magnus ordered, “it’s too dangerous. We do not know the extent of their abilities.”
A fire raged through me. No, that was not going to fly with me.
“Excuse me?” I demanded. “I seem to recall I killed someone because he was killing bad people just a few days ago. Those vampires,” I point at the building, “are obviously going to try to kill those Hunters. Are Shadow Reapers supposed to help people or not? It feels like I’m getting some mixed signals.”
Magnus hesitated for a second and then sighed. “Protection Sigils, then we go.”
Oh, great. Lots of sigils were cool, most of them had to be drawn on objects using blood, but that wasn’t so bad. The ones that affected a person’s body, though, were kind of a pain.
I pulled my knife from my belt and used just the very tip of it to start carving into the back of my hand. The protection sigil was supposed to be pretty powerful, it would make it harder to hurt you, you’d heal faster, and anything that tried to drink your blood or eat your flesh would have a really bad day, like ‘burning their mouths like acid’ bad. The issue was, the sigil was intricate. And, it had to be cut into your flesh.
Five minutes later, with a stinging that I didn’t think would go away any time soon covering the back of my left hand, we all got out of the car and raced toward the building.
It kind of looked like a normal, brick apartment building. For all I knew, it could be, until we reached the door and I saw the glyphs that were etched into it. They were magic warding glyphs. This was a building owned by the Hunters.
“Ready?” Magnus asked as he held up a knife that looked almost identical to mine and put his hand on the door.
“Let’s do it,” Asher answered, with confidence that sounded way out of place when we were about to enter a Hunter’s building.
I just nodded. Hunters and new vamps in the same place. As exciting as this was, I was not liking our chances.
Magnus slowly pulled the door open and slipped inside, Asher went next, and I followed, closing the door almost silently behind
us.
This was definitely not an apartment building.
The walls were metal, and we had walked right into a hallway with several doors on either side. At the end of the hall, there was a large room with a staircase on one end, and more doors all around us.
“Where are we supposed to go?” Asher asked.
I snuck over to one door, opened it, and peered inside. It was empty except for some chains bolted to the floor and a single lightbulb hanging down in the center of the room’s ceiling.
When I closed the door I looked at the others and whispered, “Found the interrogation room.”
Asher looked at me with wide eyes and mouthed the word, “Nice!”
Magnus walked over to another door while I moved to a third one. I don’t know what Magnus saw, but I had found the right door.
I was looking into a wide room with several tables covered in maps and books. The Hunters were spread out and talking among themselves. As soon as I peaked in, another door on the other side of the room opened and the three vampires that we had seen follow the Hunters into the building burst out and charged the Hunters.
“This one!” I shouted as I bolted into the room.
It was chaos. First of all, the eight Hunters we had watched go in weren’t the only ones there. There were at least a dozen more than I hadn’t been able to see from the doorway. One of them just happened to be Matt, which was a momentary distraction.
Secondly, the vampires couldn’t be hurt. I watched as Hunters stabbed at the creatures only to have their weapons bounce off the vampire’s skin like they were made of steel.
I ran forward and stabbed one that was already draining one of the Hunters. Blood spilled from the vampire’s mouth as I approached. The creature looked up at me and smiled right before I threw all my weight against my knife, forcing it toward the vampire’s face as hard as I could.
The blade bounced off the vampire’s skin. The creature smirked at me before he sank his teeth back into the neck of the already limp Hunter.
“Maddi, fire!” I heard Asher yell.