by Mary Dublin
"And it got it," Jon tacked on quietly. There was a long pause before he caved and acknowledged Sylvia's imploring stare. "We tried everything from voodoo to prayer circles until we found a way to kill the spirit—before it could hurt anyone else."
"Anyone else?" Sylvia pried gently. She slid her hand comfortingly on to his knuckle. His large hand shifted out from under her as he abruptly excused himself from the table.
After regaining her balance on the table, Sylvia leaned to the side, glimpsing the kitchen past Cliff's broad frame. Jon shook a few blue pills into his hand from a bottle.
"It took his mother."
She jerked her head up at Cliff, the soft words hitting her like an icy blast. "So she's…"
Cliff nodded grimly. "Killed her from the inside out. After seeing something like that… there is no normal to go back to."
Shuddering, Sylvia looked down at the table and regretted asking in the first place. She had upset Jon, and no wonder. Being a hunter meant having a first encounter with a monster at some point. Chances were those rarely ended well.
Her kind were taught about hunters from a young age, and not once had she heard anyone ponder the reason a human would hunt. They were painted as bloodthirsty murderers without a conscience, killing out of pure prejudice. She already knew that wasn't the case, but getting a glimpse of what Jon had been through made her angrier at how the High Council had punished her for healing him.
Sylvia stammered for an answer, turning her eyes back to Jon. "I-I'm so sorry. Losing a parent is…" She tapered off and folded her hands in front of her, threading her fingers tightly. A part of her said to stop talking, but she had to know why Jon would continue to put himself in danger after he survived the spirit. "What about the rest of your families? You just… left?"
Jon finally caught her eye from across the kitchen, the hand she'd touched now shoved out of reach in the pocket of his jeans. He'd been fiddling an awful lot with his hands the past few days. She wondered if she was making him self-conscious in some manner, strange as it was to picture someone so massive being bashful of all things.
"It wasn't like we headed out, looking for more things to hunt. That came later," Jon said. "Anyway… there wasn't much to leave behind."
Sylvia edged closer to him, wishing he would allow her to comfort him properly. "Your father… did the spirit kill him, too?"
"Not exactly." Jon made his way back over to the table and took a seat. "My dad… his mind just couldn't deal with what we'd seen. The way my mom went… some part of him went empty afterwards. Blank. Hitting the road with Cliff seemed a better alternative than taking up space in an empty house."
He's practically an orphan, Sylvia realized. She wondered if that would have made any difference to Councilwoman Adela or the rest of the Council.
She gnawed on her lower lip before turning around to Cliff. He immediately held up a hand to stop her in her tracks. She opened her mouth, but his deep voice easily overlapped hers.
"Don't give me those little kitten eyes. My folks are fine. They just didn't really care to have me around afterward. I said ghosts and monsters were real, and they tried have me medicated like some psychopath." Cliff waggled his eyebrows, a playful quirk that came across as decidedly bitter. "So… sayonara."
He pulled a long swig of his coffee. Sylvia tried not to stare at the sheer amount of liquid he could put away in one smooth, muscular motion.
Nodding slowly, she felt sick at the thought of a younger Jon overjoyed to finally force the spirit out of his mother, only to find that he lost her forever in the process. Left without even his father to turn to. Sylvia knew a thing or two about having a single event change the course of life, but at least she knew her family was still there, loving and worrying about her.
She cleared her throat and gave Jon doleful but admiring smile, barely managing to keep her feet on the table rather than rushing over to comfort him.
"So, you hunt in order to stop other people from going through what you did. That's so…" Noble? Sad? "Amazing. I had no idea. Of course you know what you're doing at this point, but I'm glad I can take the guesswork out when it comes to tracking things down. You deserve to have it easier on you."
"That's not your job." Jon sent her a terse look out of the corner of his eye. Sylvia stumbled back a step, the ice in his voice abrupt and unmissable.
Cliff seemed to notice too, and lifted his head with a frown. "Okay… maybe it's not a permanent gig, but we need all the help we can get. This thing has been slipping through our fingers for months. Sylv's practically a werewolf detector sitting right in front of us."
"Doesn't mean she needs to be out there with us," Jon insisted.
"She wants to."
Sylvia battled between outrage and offense, her wings spread agitatedly. "Jon—"
"It doesn't matter!" Jon slammed his palm on the end of the table. Sylvia stumbled midway through her stride as the force of the sudden blow that rattled the table. She crashed to her side, wings twitching as they folded in a hurry. Getting to her feet was a sluggish process, and she never once taking her eyes off Jon.
His gaze at last dropped down to meet hers. The blood drained from her face when she found not anger, but fear staring down at her. An awful, sudden fear.
What is he so afraid of?
"Look at what happened to her last time," Jon mumbled, looking back to Cliff.
"She was just trying to—"
"Trying to help. That's exactly my point. Good intentions doesn't fix what happened. Enough is enough. We hunt this thing the way we always have."
Despite the finality in his tone, Sylvia didn't let up. She couldn't. "I won't use ice!" she blurted. "The only reason I got hurt was because I used ice. I won't use it, I promise! The only thing I'll do is try to sense the werewolf and heal you if you get hurt."
Hands shaking at her sides, her composure began to crumble. Between Jon's unexplained bout of pain last night and the idea of him getting gashed up by a werewolf, keeping it together was beginning to be more effort than it was worth.
"You can't leave me here," she said, voice hushed so low that she wondered if they could even hear her. "What if something happens? And don't say it won't. You would have died from that dog bite. Something like that could happen again. What if it happens, what if you're hurt, what if you die, and I'm not there to—" Short of breath, she had no choice but to stop, bringing a hand over her racing heart.
The table was silent. After a beat of hesitation, Jon's hand lifted from the table and made a tentative approach. Sylvia all but threw herself into the curve of his fingers, clinging to him.
"We'll go out this afternoon," Jon rumbled.
She lifted her head sharply, her short hair bouncing around her flushed cheeks. "Really?"
He nodded, wrapping his hand a little more snugly around her shoulders and folded wings. "You and me. We'll scout out the local area, see if anything turns up."
Her breathing slowed to a normal pace, and her shaking eased with the assurance that he wouldn't leave her behind. She relaxed in his comforting grasp and pressed her cheek to his index fingertip, soaking in his presence. The panicked edge all but disappeared from her voice.
"Maybe there's more affected animals," she said, able to stifle her natural aversion of those beasts if meant being there to help. "Or people. Who knows, maybe I'll even be able to sense the source while we're out there." She never thought she would be eager at the thought of seeing a werewolf, of all things, but the sooner it was found and killed, the sooner she wouldn't need to worry about infected animals taking a chunk out of Jon.
"This sort of thing doesn't just disappear without a trace," Cliff encouraged. She glanced through the gap between Jon's fingers, catching the other man's eye. "You'll catch wind of something, Sylv."
"You should check the other outflows in the meantime," Jon went on, looking at Cliff now. "See if anything else washed up after the storm."
"Great, Monster Gator, the sequel," Cliff grumbl
ed. Nevertheless, he stood with the remainder of his coffee in hand and headed toward the bedroom.
Sylvia watched him leave, then lifted her eyes to Jon again, resting her tiny hand on his.
"I should go change, too," he said, pulling away.
"You didn't eat anything," she protested, looking at his untouched bowl of grainy 'o' shapes.
"I'm not hungry."
"But you have to eat—" Any further argument died in her throat as he hurriedly exited the room, footsteps fading until they no longer rattled the table beneath her. She could have trailed after him and insisted that he finish his breakfast, but she made herself silence her concern.
Upsetting Jon again could put their afternoon outing in jeopardy.
At first it was hard to remember the reason for their venture outside of the apartment.
The new sights and sounds stole her attention, along with the windstorm of Jon breathing right beside her as she huddled near his neck. With the hood of his jacket up, she didn't need to cram herself into a careful position beneath his collar. Even so, she was nervous to even stir in the shadows once Jon was among fellow humans walking along the sidewalk and going about their business.
Although she was getting used to numerous giants being so close, it was the first time the walk from the apartment building lead into the thick of the human city rather than straight to the safety of the car. Watching from behind the car windows didn't do the view justice.
The area itself felt alive even though it was made of cold, hard concrete, and everything was so much louder on the outside.
For a time, she gawked at the buildings that shot up above her line of sight and focused on trying not to flinch every time a car horn blasted from the street. When it finally hit her that she was supposed to be paying attention to a werewolf threat, she stiffened and gave Jon an immediate update.
"I don't feel anything," she announced, speaking as loudly as she dared. "No gasher, I mean. I feel a lot, in general." She let out a soft chuckle and peered back at the sidewalk. "How can anyone get anything done with all of this going on around them?"
There was a long pause, in which Jon waited for a pair of brisk-paced men in crisp clothing to pass him on the walkway.
"It was pretty quiet back in your village, huh?" His voice sounded strained again, like he was in pain. But at least he was talking to her.
"Usually. I used to think celebrations were loud. Birthdays, weddings, Midsummer. But they're nothing compared to the noise out here." She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around an entirely different world being near her home. "There's so many humans, and it would probably take only a few of you to be louder than all of us combined. Besides that, there's all these cars."
It baffled her that people could cross the street right in front of those idling metal monsters with no visible worry of being run down. The green and red and yellow lights hanging over the streets seemed to orchestrate the controlled chaos, but it wasn't the time to ask for an explanation.
"So, you've hunted gashers before," she surmised, seeing as Jon and Cliff had recognized the signs right from the beginning. "I know the lunar cycle is what turns them into monsters, but I never really thought about what goes on when they're not… gashing. They're out here, like everyone else."
Of course her village wouldn't put any emphasis on the danger werewolves posed among humans. For all intents and purposes, a regular human of the street could be as dangerous to Sylvia as a werewolf, yet those regular humans were precisely the ones that she was helping defend.
Why?
The thought of blood trickling from Jon's dog bite silenced her uncertainties.
"Maybe they're easier for me to sense when the moon is fuller," she sighed, feeling a stab of guilt at the possibility that she couldn't be helpful to Jon right then and there. "How would you normally deal with this? Just go looking for a fully-transformed werewolf in the middle of the night?"
A strangled chuckle rattled through her. "No, daylight is just as useful. The problem with werewolves is that the transformation is so short-lived. The mutated state lasts for less than an hour at a time, during only specific times during the lunar cycle."
Jon paused, and Sylvia held tight to the fold of his shirt as he jogged straight across the road. Though it was brief, she was left feeling like a piece of driftwood washed up on the shore of Fog Lake. She stayed curled up with her knees to her chest long after Jon's pace slowed again. His stride resumed a steady rhythm, and he continued.
"Luckily for us, gashers leave a mess," he explained. "And because the mutation is brief, we can assume a radius around the point of attack. From there… that's when things get messy."
Mouth halfway open to reply, Sylvia was suddenly struck that the landscape before her was something more familiar than boxy buildings and black tar. She raised her head, for the first time growing bold enough to lean forward on Jon's shoulder. The metal machines and crowds of humans sounded further away. A stretch of soil and grass softened Jon's footsteps, and a small body of water winked at her in the sunlight. Trails wound around the perimeter of the lake, disappearing into a thicket of pine trees that spanned to the horizon.
"Is this still part of the city?"
"Verging on the edge, but it counts."
Sylvia snapped upright, wondering if she heard him correctly. "Is this your Edge? You… humans have boundaries too?"
"Yeah, city limits."
Under the shade of a mistletoe-ridden tree, his lumbering stride slowed to a halt. His large hands rose within view of the hood, pinching at the edges and pushing inside to offer her an open palm. Without a beat of hesitation, Sylvia scooted aboard. She folded her legs, getting comfortable in the pit of his palm. Once she signaled him with a gentle pat, he pulled her into the light, holding her out at chest level.
Sylvia glanced around, then fixed him with a grim look. "So… what's the punishment for crossing?"
"What?" Jon's face screwed up in bemusement. "There's no punishment. The limit… these boundaries just let us know where one place ends and the next begins."
Dumbstruck, she waited for him laugh and tell her he was joking, but he looked about as puzzled as she felt.
"You mean," she said slowly, "Nobody cares if you leave? You can just go? Nobody's going to stop you?" She gave an astonished laugh, wondering why anyone would want to stay in one place when so much freedom was for the taking. "They always say humans live in chaos, but… you're telling me no one keeps you in line?"
He arched an eyebrow at her, looking halfway between offended and amused. "We do have people that put a stop to some of the crazier shit… but going where you want to isn't a crime. It's a right."
Sylvia stared up at him, letting the weight of this settle in. He could go anywhere. Anywhere he wanted in the entire world. No one would bat an eye.
Wind whistled across the grassy area, bringing with it the scent of yesterday's storm and spice of the neighboring pines. On a blossoming instinct, Jon's other hand curled around the first to block out the brunt of the gust. He still watched her, something broken revealed in those immense brown eyes.
"My God, you really were like a prisoner there, weren't you?" he breathed.
Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh. "I always thought it was bad, but now it seems even worse."
She tore her eyes away from him and the barrier of his hand beside her. The breeze rippling through the grass cared nothing for boundaries, either. She used to dream of the possibilities lying beyond the Edge, waiting for her, but now it was so overwhelming that she needed to focus back on Jon's face to stay grounded.
"There's some fairies out there who just wander," she said wistfully. "We get some at the village from time to time, only passing through. They never stay long. They're wild. Unwelcome. Undesirable. I wanted to be like them so badly, but I was born and raised in the village. They don't let us go so easily. Leaving means never showing your face again if you know what's good for you. But who needs the village when
I've got everywhere else?" She offered Jon a warm smile. "You'll show me, won't you?"
She'd never seen so many emotions pass through someone's gaze. Maybe it was the size of these particular eyes that translated the range of expressions so well. How quickly she had come to love those eyes.
"Y-yeah." Jon flashed her a fleeting smile of equal fondness. "Of course."
The hand that guarded her from the wind turned inquisitive, gentle enough to brush at the side of her face with a few fingertips. The comfort from such an action was fleeting. Sylvia's gaze flitted to the side, eyeing the massive digits with alarm.
"Jon, you're warm."
His smile turned curious. Cautious. "That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"No, I mean you're really warm." Sylvia frowned, struggling to get to her feet on the unsteady surface of his palm. "It feels like you have a fever."
His smile vanished, his jaw squared as he glanced away. He pulled away the gentle touch at her face, just like he had during breakfast that morning.
"Sylvia, I'm fine," Jon said shortly. "We should check the woods. There's a chance the gasher crossed through to save time."
Air whisked past her as he tucked her close to his chest and started trudging purposefully onwards once again. Each step rattled her, and she quickly lowered herself to kneel on his palm once more.
Despite Jon's startling abruptness, she tried to focus. There could be something hiding among the trees—if not the werewolf itself, then another twisted animal like the dog and alligator. Jon's safety rode on her being able to detect a threat quickly enough to warn him.
The darkening sky put her on edge, as did Jon himself.
The farther he walked, the more labored his breathing became. It was hard to be sure with the way his stride shook through her, but she was certain there was a little tremble in the hand that held her. She wanted to believe his assurance, but the deep thud of his heart picked up speed until it was practically vibrating against her through his chest and clothing.
Enough was enough.
"Jon, stop!" she commanded, determined not to let him brush off her worries this time. There was something wrong, and he wasn't being open with her. The thought made her chest tighten, but she didn't allow it to weaken her voice. "You're not fine! If you're sick, you can just tell me. Why won't you let me help you?"