by Izzy Shows
But still, the humans knew about the vampires, and they knew they were as “safe” as they could be from them, and even with that knowledge, most humans chose not to be out after dark. Most of them didn't want a run-in with a vampire, even if the law protected them. Most of them were smart, and while we were all too young to actually remember—it had been a century or two ago—we all had heard the stories, handed down from parent to child, of the way things used to be, when the vampires had no king and ravaged the world unchecked.
Yeah, it was good that they had organized themselves and created the system of power with the king and all, although I didn't particularly understand how that worked, but they could have stopped at that instead of jailing all the blood mages. It had happened at the same time, so it was still a sore point for me.
None of that was the point, though. The point was: that threat was known to the humans. What they didn't know was that a new threat had appeared out of nowhere, basically overnight, and it was killing them on a scale that was comparatively worse than when the vampires had been unchecked. The vampires, at least, had been intelligent creatures capable of rationalizing that they couldn't just attack everyone left and right. They had cared, somewhat, about remaining as unknown as possible so that no one could organize a hunting party against them.
The hybrids, though, all they cared about was the hunt, the kill, the feed.
Or at least, that's what I’d thought.
Mercy…
The memory came to me of the voice in my head just before I'd succumbed to the pain of my wounds, just before I'd almost died—and make no mistake, I would have if I'd been left to human medicine. It was only the magic of the other blood mages, and their knowledge of hybrid attacks now, that had saved my life.
That voice, if it hadn't been a figment of my imagination, threatened everything I'd thought I'd known about hybrids, which hadn't been a lot to begin with, considering I'd only known about them for a quarter of a year.
And I wasn't entirely certain it hadn't been a figment of my imagination. After all, I could barely see at the end there, my brain had been all kinds of foggy, and I was teetering on the edge of death. That was a recipe for delirium. It made much more sense that my brain had been playing tricks with me, creating things that weren't there, than the possibility that hybrids were capable of rational thought on the same level as the rest of us.
The vampires used to think the werewolves were mindless animals.
I stiffened at the thought, stopping in my tracks on my walk through the city, a dangerous thing to do, seeing as it was the middle of the night and the moon was at its fullest. I was hunting through the city for a hybrid, any hybrid would do, but it wasn't one of my usual nightly patrols. I'd gone out so many times in the past month hunting for hybrids, to eliminate them so that my people could walk the city in safety, but this was different.
I had to assuage the curiosity that hadn't left me alone since I'd woken up, the curiosity that a hybrid might be a sentient creature.
It was true, the vampires had thought that werewolves were incapable of thought, although it had been a long time ago that they had thought that. They'd quickly learned their lesson after a few wars, when it had been obvious that the wolves were using actual strategies instead of just attacking in rabid fashion.
I only knew any of that because of a book I'd read in the library at the vampire castle when I'd been a thrall. There had been an accounting of the old wars by a vampire that had attempted to give an unbiased view of the wars—an admirable thing to do when you thought about it, considering the rest of the accounts were weighted heavily on the side of the vampires. And I'd read them, too, because the first had made me so curious. So I knew that the first one had actually tried to give a true accounting of what had happened. It was the only one that had admitted the arrogance of the vampires, that they'd thought the wolves incapable of thought in the way that they were.
If they had realized it sooner, they might have avoided a lot of bloodshed or at least won the war sooner. I didn't want to make the same mistake as the vampires, I realized, now that I saw the similarities.
I'd been given no reason to believe the hybrids were sentient—every other time I'd interacted with them, or rather fought them, they'd been rabid. Like, actually rabid, driven only by the urge to kill. They hadn't thought strategically from what I could tell.
What about the first attack? They fought as one unit against the vampires, like they knew what they were doing.
I frowned. That was true. But they hadn't done anything even remotely similar since then, which was why I'd forgotten about that fight. I'd been a little distracted with everything that had gone on with the vampires and the Council afterward. And Gray. I couldn't forget how easily he distracted me, though of course that wasn't a conscious effort on his part. I distracted him as much as he distracted me.
Look, you're doing it again. Thinking about Gray when you should be focusing on the job.
Damn, the snarky voice had a point. Somehow, my thoughts always circled back to him. I had no wounds left to speak of from the fight with the three hybrids, as the mages had fully healed me, but my heart ached just as badly at the thought of Gray.
I had to put him out of my mind.
I focused instead on my hunt through the city, being careful this time not to move too quickly through it, stopping at every corner to spread my magic around it and ahead of me. I didn't want to be surprised, to turn a corner and come face-to-face with a hybrid. If I could avoid a fight, that was what I wanted to do.
For once, tonight, I wasn't looking to kill anything.
It took three more hours and god only knows how many alleys and corners—I lost track—before I found what I was looking for. I was standing on an actual sidewalk—I almost never went out of the back alleys onto a main street—just a few feet away from a side alley that I knew from previous explorations into the city had no outlet. Since I had to take back alleys everywhere for my job, I learned which ones were dead ends and which ones actually connected. This one was definitely a dead end, and inside it was a hybrid.
Rather than speeding around the corner to come up to my target, as I might have if I was hunting it, I waited where I was and let my magic slide over the creature. As it did whenever I had the time and patience to send it seeking like this, instead of brute forcing my way through a fight, my magic recoiled from the hybrid. If I was in the middle of the fight, I thrust my magic out and didn't waste time feeling anything out, but in this situation, I was trying to get a lock on the creature's biorhythm without alerting it to my presence. Which meant going slow and steady, not pushing too much of my magic onto it at a time.
Other supernatural creatures can often sense a mage's magic—blood mage or any other kind of mage—but usually only if they know what to feel for. So if you're dealing with someone that's never come into contact with your flavor of mage before, because fire magic feels different than blood magic or earth magic, for example, then you don't really have to worry about them feeling your magic if you're trying to sneak up on them. But at the same time, you still shouldn't just rush into the situation, because even if they don't recognize your magic, and they don't know that it is magic, they can still feel that something is off about the situation. Some of the more sensitive supernaturals can even feel that something is touching them, even though they've never felt the magic before.
I didn't think the hybrid would be sensitive enough to feel that something was touching it or that it had ever come into contact with magic before—I was the only blood mage that hunted, after all, and the other mages had cleared out of the city pretty quickly after the blood mages were captured—but I didn't want to make any stupid assumptions. I'd assumed that they were all unintelligent, rabid animals, and I was starting to think that might not be true.
So I was going slow and steady with this one. Taking my time. Besides, if it did come to a fight, I would be better off already having a lock on its biorhythm beforehand rather
than scrambling to get hold of it in the middle of the fight.
Just so you know how difficult it is to latch onto a hybrid, it took me five frustrating minutes. But that was a minor improvement over the last time I'd latched onto one without physical contact, so it seemed that I was learning their rhythms enough to begin to get ahold of them from a distance.
I chanted under my breath, taking advantage of what I was—a blood mage, who could kill from miles away if she could lock onto her target—to subdue the creature. I didn't go for my normal incapacitation spell, the aneurysm-induced migraine, but rather I focused throughout the creature's body to swell the blood vessels around its muscles, effectively paralyzing it.
A loud snarl told me that it was working. I was upsetting the creature; it didn't know what was happening to it. I didn't know how to feel about that. If it was upset, that might indicate that it had the capacity to be concerned about its sudden paralysis. But it also could just be an animal reacting with dumb confusion to being confined.
Well, I wasn't going to find out what I wanted until I dug in. I reassured myself one more time, sending my magic through its body to check that its muscles were incapacitated, before I rounded the corner to find it.
My heart sank at what I saw. The creature was literally foaming at the mouth, its eyes dull and empty, and roaring about in a state of madness, looking for something that wasn't there. It wasn't looking for its attacker. I could tell that right off the bat. Because it should have recognized the first creature that came up to it after the paralysis hit as a potential threat, and it didn't even take note of me. Its eyes darted more past me than at me, taking sight of me but not paying me any attention.
"Rabid," I said with a sigh. "Absolutely rabid."
There was nothing I could do about that, then. I couldn't turn it free to terrorize the city any more, and there was no information that I could glean from it. I made quick work of the hybrid, chanting a new spell to kill it as quickly as I could while the paralytic held. It fell to the ground with a loud thud.
Well, I had my answer then.
Do you? You hunted and killed many like this one, but you only just met one that could speak. This isn't over.
My spine chilled at the thought.
Thirteen
"I really don't like you going out anymore," Tita said, not looking up from her needlework as she spoke.
I was curled up on the corner of the couch, taking up as little space as I could, with a book. It had been a relaxing evening thus far—I had hunted the hybrid the night prior, so I was taking the day and the night off to reset my sleep schedule so that I wouldn't be stuck in a nocturnal cycle.
We'd just been sitting on the couch together, each absorbed in our own thing, enjoying each other's silent company until now. I hadn't realized it before, but Tita's words indicated that she'd been thinking about this for at least the past few minutes, and probably it had been bothering her for a while longer than that. I'd thought she'd been enjoying the peace as much as I had been, but clearly I had been wrong.
"What do you mean?" I asked, looking over at her from my book.
She studiously kept her eyes on her needlework. "It's dangerous out there on the streets. Bad enough to have to go out for supplies, but you're actually going out looking for danger. Hunting those creatures. It's asking for trouble, and after what they did to you here…"
Her voice wobbled, and she was unable to finish the sentence.
"Tita, that was a really abnormal situation," I said, placing a hand on her arm. "I've only had to deal with multiple hybrids at once one other time, and I made it through that as well. Otherwise I wouldn't be here now. It's really not something you need to worry about. When I go hunting, I make sure to spread my awareness out around me so that I know I'm about to come upon a hybrid before I do. There are no surprises, I'm always prepared, and I know ahead of time if there's going to be more than one. Which there isn't, usually. They don't hunt in packs—probably their vampire nature kicking in on that one. This was just a freak accident because they surprised me."
"But what if you get surprised again?" she asked, sniffing, and I realized that a tear had slipped down her cheek. "What if they're hunting you the way you're hunting them? What if they tracked you back to the house, and they try to track you out in the city while you're hunting, and they catch you out there where none of us could find you in time to heal you?"
She was really crying now, her words coming out between little sobs and hiccups. I put my book to the side and scooted closer to her, wrapping my arms around her, trying to comfort her. I didn't have a lot in the way of social skills, and I really didn't know what to do with a crying person, but I was trying my best.
"That's not going to happen. They aren't intelligent enough for that. Like I said, it was a freak accident. They're just rabid dogs."
But inside, I wasn't so sure. I had no proof that they were capable of rational thought, aside from that one voice in my mind that had more than likely been a hallucination, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was true. Proof or not, my gut was telling me to keep looking for the evidence I needed.
And if I was right and they were intelligent, than Tita's words were more than a little unsettling. I hadn't thought that they might be hunting me. It made sense—I never cleaned up my kills, so it wouldn't be difficult for one of them to catch my scent on one of their fallen comrades, and then they could have just followed me back to the safe house.
I'd have led them right to the people I was trying to protect.
I resolved to be more careful in the future. I would dispose of all the kills I made so that none of them could be found and traced back to me. If something was hunting me, I wasn't going to let it find Tita or the other mages.
"Tita, Nina?" Eva's voice came from one of the side rooms, I believed the one they used as something of an office. It was where they preferred to do their healing if the situation wasn't so urgent as to require the large space of the dining room.
"Yes, Eva?" Tita was the one to respond.
Even though Eva had been much more respectful of me of late, I still wasn't entirely comfortable around the old woman. I still expected her to turn on me at any moment, to throw me out of the house just for existing.
"Could the two of you come in here?"
Tita and I shared a look, then I shrugged and stood up. She swiped a hand at her cheeks to clear her tears, and I gave her a quick hug.
"Everything's going to be okay. You'll see," I whispered before we walked into the office.
Eva was sitting crisscross on the floor, an ancient book in her lap and various herbs on either side of her.
"Is there anything I can do for you, Eva?" I asked, a little nervous.
"Indeed there is," she said, nodding. "You can learn."
"Learn?" I arched an eyebrow, glancing at Tita. She didn't seem to have any idea of what was going on either, though.
"Yes, learn. It's time you learned a bit of healing, to connect to the way of your ancestors. It is your heritage, your birthright, to heal, and it is long overdue that you dedicate time to it."
I was shocked. It might have sounded like she was reprimanding me for being a hunter again, but I could tell that wasn't what was going on. She was making an effort to include me in her family's work—healing. When I had first come here, I had offered to help with Isaac, the man who'd been attacked by a hybrid, but she had ignored me. The message had been clear at the time; I was allowed to be in the house, but I wasn't welcome in the true parts of their life.
Even after they had begun to accept me more for the protection I afforded all of them, this had remained a barrier between us. I was a hunter, a killer, and nothing more. Now Eva was offering me an opportunity to be both. A hunter and a killer. To have a foot in both worlds and be a part of her world.
I sat down across from her. "It would be my great honor to learn from you, Eva. I do have some knowledge—I can heal myself, but I've never tried to heal another pers
on."
She nodded. "It is always the first step to heal oneself. It is the easiest form of healing, for you know your body and the nature of your wounds more than anyone else. But I suspect this will not be so difficult as you might think. Because of what you are and what you do, you are very intimate with the concept of examining another's body, are you not?"
I blushed. "Yes, ma'am. I know how to find the weak points in a body."
"And normally you would use that knowledge for harm. But that same knowledge can be used to heal. You can find the weaknesses in a body and repair them instead."
"I suppose that makes sense," I said slowly. I wasn't so sure it would be as easy as she suggested, but I was willing to give it a try nonetheless.
"Here." She picked up an athame and cut her palm. It was a shallow wound, but still, Tita sucked in a shocked breath.
I looked over at her, confused. "What's wrong?"
"Tita is surprised that I am going to allow you access to my body given our history. But you have proven yourself trustworthy; you have put the protection and well-being of our people above your own survival several times now. You will not harm me."
"Of course not!" I couldn't help the astonishment in my voice. "I would never just hurt someone for the sake of it. That's not the kind of hunter I am. I protect people. I always have. I protected the humans from the vampires, and now I protect you from the hybrids."