The Hunter

by Jessica Gunn

  “I don’t know,” I said to her. “I figured it’s better we know how to use and control these powers than to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist.”

  “Hey, I’ve never had an issue with mine,” she said. “At least, not after they released me from the hospital and stopped asking questions about me drowning but not drowning.”

  I squeezed my fist and the sparks grew, not quite into a ball, but bright enough to be somewhat menacing. I thought so, anyway. “Even still.”

  “Maybe it’s time we start looking to see if anyone else has ever developed weird powers after near-death experiences,” Rachel said as she dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone.

  “You’ve never looked?” I’d had an excuse: with football, I hadn’t had time. But she’d dealt with having powers while I was in a coma, and every week since.

  She shook her head, then gestured to a nearby log. We took a seat and she held her phone out so we could both see the screen. “I think I was afraid of knowing for sure. It’s a lot to take in.”

  That it was. “Maybe now’s the time, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rachel opened up the Internet and tapped the search bar. “What should I type in? Where do you even begin with something like this?”

  “Exactly what you said. Search for ‘powers after near-death experiences.’”

  “Okay.”

  The search results pulled up thousands of pages, but they were all useless and full of god-types talking about angels and demons, and the great beyond.

  “This isn’t what we want,” I said.

  Rachel handed over her phone. “Then you try.”

  I let my thumbs hover over the screen and bit my cheek. If I wanted information about people controlling elements—as surely that was what one would classify this, going off my extensive sci-fi movie knowledge—where would I find it?

  “‘Controlling the elements,’” I said as I typed. Then I added: “magic,” “magic powers,” “power,” and “witchcraft.” That was what always seemed to happen in the movies. The main character would turn a certain age, something insane would happen to them, and suddenly they’d have powers and some sort of outrageous destiny they’d try running from before ultimately accepting it and defeating the evil villain.

  I didn’t think ninety percent of that would happen, but if it might help find answers, I included it in the search terms.

  The second search took longer than the first, though that could have been due to bad reception in the park. The first page of results was more of the same god-type people stuff, but page three included references to Boston and how, since the time of the Salem witch trials, Massachusetts had been a sort of power center for people with magic. Only it wasn’t spelled normally. The article spelled it, “magik.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “What?”

  I handed the phone back to her. “Look. These articles all talk about Boston and magik.”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Why spell it the wrong way?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s intentional. Try searching for ‘Boston’ and ‘magik,’ spelled like that.”

  She did, and it brought up quicker results but a much smaller amount of them. Only one thousand hits, most from universities and their archeology departments.

  Except for one. An article on a well-known hoax website claiming that the fire in a Boston office building a few decades back had been an intentional one lit by demons. I remembered it vaguely. A hundred people had died inside. It’d been all over the news. But demons?

  Except… “Fire is an element,” I said.

  She peered up at me, thoughts racing in her eyes. “You don’t think?”

  “No idea. But that’s the closest thing we’ve found.”

  She frowned and turned her attention to the stream in front of us. “That accident was horrible.”

  “According to this article, it wasn’t an accident.” Granted, The Moon Times wasn’t exactly a perfect source of verifiable information, but sometimes those rumors and tabloids turned out to be true. Right? “We should go there. To this address.”

  “And do what?” she asked. “Poke around and see if we can find evidence of demonic activity? Do you hear yourself, Ben?”

  I nodded. “I do. I often hear just myself, or so I’m told.”

  She leveled me with a look. “If our powers are demonic, I don’t want to know. I’d want to go to confession and be blessed until I died.”

  My mind was already made up. This was the closest thing to an answer we’d gotten so far, and Boston wasn’t too far away. One hop on the commuter rail and we’d be at the address of this fire within a few hours.

  “It’ll be a day trip,” I said. “We can do it next week and skip classes. No one will know the difference.”

  “Sandra will. Aren’t you guys house-hunting next week?”

  “Not during school hours.”

  Rachel sucked in a deep breath and heaved it back out again. “Fine. But I’m only going so I can help you keep your head on straight about this.”

  “You can’t tell me you’re not as interested as I am in how and why we were given these abilities.”

  “What I think is that the lightning did something to your body, and that the same strike made me have an affinity for water,” she said.

  “Because that sounds any more logical than demons. Let’s at least go and knock this possibility off the list.”

  She glanced down at her phone for a long moment, then back up to me. “Fine. We go next week. But you need to tell Sandra where we’re going.”

  “I will,” I said, nodding. I just wouldn’t tell her why. She didn’t know about my lightning powers. And I didn’t intend to tell her until I had better control of them.

  Or answers as to why I had them in the first place.

  I hadn’t been into the city in months, since way before the accident. Rachel and I caught the last train in for the morning and sat at the back out of everyone’s way. We didn’t bring much. Rachel’s backpack, containing a notebook and a battery pack for our phones, sat at her feet. Neither of us owned cameras, but we weren’t about to let this research day go without photographic evidence. Just in case.

  An hour or so later, we arrived at the station and disembarked into the city, using the address of the office fire as our guide. Turned out the office building had been rebuilt and, as soon as we stood outside of it, it was obvious the building was still in use. One hundred people had died there and these businesspeople just went along, rebuilding and forgetting.

  Disgusting. My gut churned as I looked at the towering glass and steel building soaring fifty stories into the sky. If ever one needed evidence of demons, this atrocity on a site of death was it.

  “We shouldn’t go in,” Rachel said. “I feel like they won’t take too kindly to strangers asking questions about the fire.”

  “You’re right. Where else?”

  We’d made a list on the way in of other points of interest, including Castle Island, which at some point might have been used in some witch ritual. Honestly, all of this made little sense. But without any other direction, following this list was all we had.

  “Ben, look,” Rachel said, pointing.

  “What?” I followed her line of sight up to a window on the fourth floor. A man stood behind the glass, watching us with a dark object in his hands.

  Rachel tapped my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Were we unintentionally trespassing or something?

  I nodded. “Good idea.”

  We hopped on another subway and then climbed into a bus that took us out to Castle Island. The frigid walk from the bus stop was nothing compared to the open area on Castle Island that allowed the cold bay air to whip our faces. Suddenly, I was back on the rowboat on that lake for Amanda’s birthday. The memory slammed into me so quickly and without warning that I actually stumbled as we walked.

  Rachel wrapped an arm around my middle. “Ben
?”

  I stood and brushed off my jacket. “I’m fine. Sorry.”

  “You went there, didn’t you?”

  I looked at her. “Where?”

  “The boat.”

  My breath stilled. Rachel had always been able to read me so easily. Much more so than my actual sister. “Yeah. I go there sometimes. Especially when I’m smacked in the face with water in the air.”

  We continued walking and got twenty yards before Rachel uttered, “Me too.”

  I didn’t stop walking but glanced over at her. “How often?”

  “Not as much anymore,” she said. “But right after. Every time I showered or it rained. I haven’t gone swimming since that day. I can’t take baths.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “I know I have control over the water around me—for the most part. But I can’t help thinking that one day it’ll all turn on me again, and I’ll drown for real.”

  “You won’t,” I said. “You’re too strong for that. You’ve already got a better handle on your power than I do, and you didn’t drown the first time.”

  She nodded. “I know. Doesn’t mean I don’t think about it, though.”

  I frowned.

  Silence enveloped us as we made our way farther up Castle Island, much closer to the bay. That’s when we saw it: Out on the last stretch of land, someone stood halfway in the water, raising his hands above it. Lifting the water out of the bay and into the air. Like Rachel was able to.

  “Do you see that?” I mumbled, eyes drawn to the way the water bowed to the man’s command. Witch ritual or not, clearly Castle Island had some importance to whatever Rachel and I had gotten ourselves into. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  She nodded. “Yeah. Is that what I think it is?”

  “It’s too far away to be sure, but I think so.” Someone else working magik. We’d finally found an answer.

  The man continued manipulating the water, bringing it up into small circles that arched wider on every rotation. He had way more control than Rachel. But that didn’t explain why he was out here using his magik in the middle of the day for anyone to see.

  “Ben.”

  What’d she want me to do, go talk to the person? What if it was just an illusion created by the bay and the wind and—okay, maybe it wasn’t an illusion. Obviously he was actually there. But if what we were seeing was real, it at least confirmed that Rachel and I weren’t the only ones with powers on this planet. That was worth something.

  We walked a few more steps toward the man before I called out, “Hey! Can you help us?” Okay. Not the smoothest move in the book.

  The man, his figure less blurry now that we were closer, turned and looked at us. The water he was lifting dropped back into the bay.

  “Please. We have powers, too,” Rachel called to him. Grasping at straws.

  For a few long moments punctuated by my pulse pounding in my ears, the three of us stared at one another. But instead of walking toward us or running, he vanished into thin air. A ripple on the horizon and nothing more.

  Rachel peered up at me, her mouth hanging open. “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ben—”

  My breath came in shallow gasps as I blinked rapidly. What the hell just happened? “I don’t know. He was there and now he’s not. That’s the only explanation.”

  One that made zero fucking sense.

  I walked through my dorm’s front door at 7 p.m. that night, more exhausted and confused than I’d been since the night before last week’s big failure of a game. The person at Castle Island had up and disappeared, and despite searching for him or evidence he’d actually been there at all, Rachel and I had found nothing.

  We’d left Boston with more questions than we’d had when we’d arrived. Except we did now have the knowledge that we probably weren’t alone. But finding those other people… finding them and making them tell us what was going on, that’d be impossible if they all disappeared like that. That was the next step. And I was more than ready to hop on tomorrow’s commuter train and try searching again.

  When I opened the door to my dorm room, I found Sandra sitting on the bed, watching TV with Derek and his girlfriend.

  Shit. We were supposed to be house-hunting over dinner tonight. And Friday breakfast tomorrow. No commuter rail for me.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling up at me.

  “Hey.” I put my coat on the chair and kissed her forehead before settling down next to her. She lay her head on my shoulder, cuddling close. “How was your day?”

  “Good. Did you have fun in Boston?” she asked.

  I’d told her we were going, as Rachel had asked, but I hadn’t told her why. Sandra thought we’d spent the day at the art museum for Rachel’s capstone project, so Rachel wouldn’t have to go alone. “Yeah. It was educational.”

  “Educational,” Derek mimicked. “Do you hear this kid?”

  Sandra rolled her eyes. “See what you made me endure while you were gone?”

  I tightened my arm around her and kissed her again. “Sorry. Want to go get dinner now?”

  Sandra nodded. “Sure. Hey, next time you go to Boston, can I come? I love art museums.” As she should. Art history was her major.

  “Uh, okay,” I said. Super unconvincing. But the last thing I needed right now was for Sandra to find out I was definitely going to Boston again to search for demons and people with powers, like the person manipulating water on Castle Island.

  “I mean, I don’t have to.” She looked down at the floor as she tugged on her coat.

  I did the same, though I was too warm now for a jacket. “I’d love for you to come.”

  “Not enough to take me this time,” she said. “I’m pregnant, not immobile.”

  “Obviously.” I shouldn’t have let it slip out, but it was the truth. She wasn’t even showing yet and wouldn’t for a while.

  Her eyes met mine, expression unreadable. Neither Derek nor his girlfriend said a single word. “Good. I look forward to our trip, then.”

  I smiled, though now I wasn’t sure that was the right response. “It’ll be fun.”

  “When did you want to go?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Whenever you’re free next.”

  “Finals are right around the corner,” she said. “After those?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Except after finals were the holidays and winter. It might be hard to get to Boston. Which meant I’d have to go again soon if I wanted any more answers.

  Sandra smiled up at me and said, “Awesome. Now, let’s go get dinner.”

  I followed her out into the hallway and we made our way to the mess hall. The entire time we walked, all I could think about was what she’d think if she found out about my lightning powers. We’d survived high school and almost all of college. And now her being pregnant. We were working on that one together. But would our relationship survive me being a freak of nature, possibly a demon?

  Tell her, my heart told me.

  But my head kept my mouth shut.

  Chapter 7

  Five months later…

  “Come on, man, it’s not that difficult,” Michael said. He groaned and fell back into his chair.

  We’d been at the library for the entire day preparing for finals. Michael was an economics major and I’d for some reason decided that the last semester of college was the perfect time to try taking an economics course.

  I’d majored in physical therapy, if that gave an indication of how well this was going.

  “I throw footballs, Michael,” I said. “This crap is useless.”

  “Correction: you threw footballs until you threw that game.” His face was deadpan, the line delivered without a single ounce of regret or humor. There was absolutely zero way to tell if he was screwing around.

  My fist clenched and I threw my workbook onto the table between us. The sound echoed throughout the common room in the library, drawing everyone’s attention my way. I seethed, my lips pressed together. Fuck
college. Screw this economics bullshit. In a few months, none of this would matter. I’d be a father. A father with freak show powers I still hadn’t any idea about. Though, in the past five months, I’d definitely gained some measure of control.

  I couldn’t believe that in a few short months, it’d be a year since the accident. A year since my life had changed forever.

  Michael picked up the workbook and tossed it at me. “I was joking, Ben. Let’s keep going. You need this to ace this final.”

  Or I’d fail. I knew that. I’d skipped too many economics classes to go information hunting in Boston since the semester had started. Not enough to get me thrown out of the class, but enough that I had no idea what was going on, even on a good day. School had never been my thing. I’d only ever wanted to play sports. And even hoping to go into physical therapy didn’t help because there was all this bullshit coursework standing in the way.

  And now my obsession—and yeah, I recognized it as such—regarding my powers had pretty much filled up my life. I saw Sandra and had continued hunting for a place to live with her, but I knew I didn’t hang out with her enough. But if I just figured out why Rachel and I were given these abilities, or how we’d actually gotten them beyond some freak force of nature interrupting our lives, then I’d rest easier at night. Then, I’d know my child wouldn’t suffer some similarly strange fate, and also that I wasn’t some sort of hell demon. Because that was honest to god the only answer I had.

  “If you’re not going to focus, I’m out,” Michael said. “I have my own finals to study for.”

  I nodded, scrubbing my face with my hands. “Right. Okay. I can do this.”

  “Hopefully,” he said.

  I shot him a glare. “Not helping.”

  He shrugged, unapologetic.

  Dick.

  I dove back into the workbook and tried to solve the problem I’d been working on. But before I got too far into it, my phone rang. The ringer bounced off the walls of the library, louder than the smack of the notebook had been. Everyone looked our way again as Michael shot me a death glare.

  “Really?” he asked.