They had witnessed mass starvation when the Soviet Union began collectivizing, but this was intentional. This was an effort to eradicate everyone within the city without having to fire a shot. And Colin and Anna, in all of their years on this Earth, had only found themselves this angry at their fellow humans once before.
Colin and Anna hadn’t been in Srebrenica for long. They had traveled throughout the region and had just arrived from Sarajevo. Fifty years ago, they had stayed in Germany; they had never traveled to Poland to witness the atrocities of the death camps. They had never seen genocide in person. Sarajevo had scarred them. Colin and Anna had begun to wonder if their faith in humanity could ever be restored after this.
There was so much hatred here, so much of everything within humans that demons fed off of that the entire region was swarming with them. Like stray cats, they roamed the streets littered with debris and bodies, searching for weak victims and Anna and Colin couldn’t possibly keep up with the influx of evil personified.
Summer had just arrived in the Balkans when they made it to Srebrenica, following the rumors that this supposed U.N. enclave was about to erupt into explosive chaos. Like every other city they’d been to in Bosnia, Srebrenica was teeming with demons, but they had no idea yet how bad it would get.
It was early July now, and the hot humid weather was doing nothing to help the starving and sickly inhabitants of this city. Anna and Colin had come to save souls, but found themselves trying desperately to save bodies instead. In one of the few miracles they would ever experience and would only ever talk about one time since those traumatic days in Bosnia, they walked the streets of Srebrenica with a single bottle of water that never emptied and a single backpack with several MREs that were always there, no matter how many people they handed them to. Anna and Colin would never know how many of those people survived the next few weeks anyway.
They had just stopped to help a woman and her child when they heard the shelling in the southern part of the city. Everyone froze and stared at the sky like it would promise them it had only been in their imaginations. But the next barrage assured them it was real.
Neither Anna nor Colin could speak Bosnian. They’d picked up a few words while hunting here so Colin used one of the only words he knew and told the woman, “Hurry!” and gestured toward a flat squat building with a deep basement where others were running to try to find someplace safe. The child had started to cry.
Colin and Anna weren’t worried about mortar attacks. As thousands of people pushed their way toward the center of the city, away from the southern barrages, Colin and Anna fought against the swarm of bodies and headed south. They had no real purpose in heading toward the Serbs; they couldn’t stop them, they couldn’t stop this war, they were powerless. But they were furious and there was only one way to take out their anger: by finding as many demons as they could and killing them.
They spent several exhausting days fighting almost non-stop. But on the fourth day, everything changed. The small Muslim force that had been defending the city was defeated and the road to Srebrenica lay open: the Serbian army advanced into the heart of the Bosnian refugee town and began separating the men from the women and children. Anna and Colin could do nothing but watch with a sickening dreadful premonition of what was to come.
Thousands of men were led out of Srebrenica on a march many wouldn’t survive, but thousands of others stayed in the city while the women and children were put on buses and sent away. Anna and Colin didn’t know where they were being sent.
For the most part, the O’Conners were left alone by the Serbian army because they assured them they weren’t journalists and had simply gotten trapped here when the war started. It wasn’t a very convincing lie, but the soldiers had more pressing matters on their minds than a couple of western Europeans who didn’t seem to be causing any trouble.
Over the next week, Colin and Anna learned the intended fates of those Muslim men, or some of them just boys, who had been separated from their wives and children, their mothers and sisters. And it was then that Srebrenica became a Hell on Earth.
Anna and Colin had never been so frightened. Demons oozed from every orifice in the city, every window and doorway and every drain on the street. They clung to the broken street lamps and telephone poles, dangled from signs and metal support beams jutting from gutted buildings. These weren’t like stray cats picking through the litter on the streets now; they overran the city, crowding the roads and sidewalks and communicating in some shrieking warbling cacophony that sent chills through both Colin and Anna.
They had backed inside a building to hide from the onslaught of demons invading the city. While most of the humans here were either hiding from the Serbian army or were part of the army rounding up civilians to either pack them onto buses or massacre them, Colin and Anna held each other’s hands and watched the city teeming with these monsters, some of which had morphed into animal shapes while others kept their amorphous forms. A few bothered to look human but amidst this chaos, it seemed like wasted effort.
The city was flooding with them. The weight of their presence in Srebrenica pushed at the windows and doors of the building Colin and Anna were hiding in, and they backed away from the wall, but the rear of the building was no different. They were surrounded by the tidal wave of evil that had swept through this place. And Colin and Anna were trapped.
They each gripped their daggers in their free hand but what good would a single dagger do against thousands of demons? How could they fight their way out of a deluge of malevolence? The sounds of glass shattering in the back of the building alerted Colin and Anna that they were inside now; they had been discovered, and they were hunters. Demons didn’t leave hunters alone.
Anna and Colin crept toward the back of the building where they’d heard the shattering glass and watched as the amaranth hued lynx worked its way through the broken window. They stabbed it as soon as its head was inside the building and its growling moaning roar sent new waves of demons pressing against the doors and windows. Glass shattered all around them as multiple windows broke and a rainbow of beasts infiltrated the room they’d been surrounded in.
“Oh, my God, Colin. What do we do?”
Colin backed against a wall with her and looked around him. There was no passage, no escape. The room was filling with the rotten decaying smell of the beasts around them, their eyes all fixed on the prizes in front of them.
Colin grabbed Anna’s hand again and squeezed it tightly. “This is it, my love. Don’t be scared. I’ll be with you forever.”
“Pray with me.”
And so Colin did. In their long lives, they had experienced few miracles. They had often hunted feeling like they were on their own. But since arriving in Srebrenica, things kept happening they couldn’t explain, like the water in the bottle or the pack of MREs that never emptied. And as Anna and Colin prayed in that building swarming with demons, knowing their lives were about to end on Earth, they were confronted with one more inexplicable event, one more miracle they would only ever talk about once.
As the putrid odor of those demons drew near them, a blinding light filled the room, causing those dozens of demons who were descending upon Colin and Anna to shriek and wail in what sounded like painful cries of agony. But the light didn’t hurt Colin or Anna; they watched as the demons shrank away from it, scampering back through the openings they’d created to get inside.
At first, Colin and Anna didn’t move. They were terrified of going outside where thousands of those monsters were waiting to tear them apart: two hunters killed, two trophies for Hell’s game room. But when Colin stepped toward one of the windows to see if the demons were waiting right outside the door, Anna noticed the light was surrounding him.
“Colin, the light. It’s around you.”
Colin looked back at Anna and gasped. “It’s still around you, too.”
“We’re meant to leave now. Get out of the city. Our Angel is protecting us.”
Colin nodded
and took her hand once more.
“We saved no one,” he thought sadly.
But Anna shook her head at him. “We can’t fight the world, Colin. We do what we are asked. She wants us to leave because she still needs us.”
So Colin and Anna fled Srebrenica, a city overflowing with demons because of the massacre of thousands of innocent people, under the protection of their Angel. And they vowed to never speak of that city again.
Chapter 10
Dylan finished off his Mephistopheles’ beer. After reliving that memory, Anna was reconsidering her earlier rejection of it.
Max was tapping his fingers against the bottle again. He looked between Colin and Anna and inhaled slowly. “So you kind of do have a guardian angel.”
“Not exactly,” Colin clarified, “we have an angel who made a deal with us, and we found ourselves in an impossible situation. She got us out of it because finding hunters who are willing to commit to this job long-term is difficult. And she didn’t have to break any rules to do it. Lesser demons are naturally afraid of an angel’s presence and will run from it. If there had been greater demons in Srebrenica, she couldn’t have saved us like that.”
“What part of that experience makes you want to keep it secret?” Dylan asked.
Anna shuddered again at the memories. “Everything we saw there, Dylan. In Sarajevo, in Srebrenica, in Kosovo. You can’t even begin to imagine what kinds of things people will do to other humans.”
Dylan thought about it for a few moments then agreed with her. “I went to college. I studied history and all that, but I guess you’re right. Seeing it in pictures and seeing it in person can’t ever compare.”
“So do you think all of these dreams you’ve been having with the encounters with multiple demons have anything to do with what’s going on now?” Max asked. He got brave and took another sip from his black beer but still grimaced as it hit his taste buds.
“It does seem to be a pattern, but I don’t know what it can mean,” Colin answered. He’d already finished his beer and tossed the empty bottle into the trashcan.
Dylan eyed him playfully. “Damn Irish. You must have some sort of malt beverage gene.”
Colin smirked. “True, it’s one of our better traits.”
Anna rolled her eyes at him because she didn’t think Colin had any bad traits. Unless she counted his self-deprecating humor, which wasn’t always meant as jokes.
“We were talking about those dreams right before I was abducted. This all has to be connected somehow, and if Colin was having those dreams, too, then this demon is getting inside his head as well.”
The room was quiet except for the humming of the air conditioning. Protecting their bodies in a fight was one thing; having to protect their minds while they were asleep scared the hell out of all of the hunters.
“There’s no way to stop them,” Max sighed. “From getting in our heads, I mean. What will it do to you? Or us if they come after us, too?”
Anna eyed the Demon’s Ale again. It was looking better and better. “When I was in that camp in the woods, it was trying to wear me down. Get me to go crazy because psychological torture can be just as brutal as physical torture. And once they’ve got you willing to do anything to get them to stop the mind games, you might just give them your soul.”
Dylan hissed a quick seething breath. “No way. No amount of nightmares are going to get me to sell my soul.”
But Colin didn’t share his conviction. “Maybe it would be better if you both went back to Baton Rouge. If they are just after Anna and me, they may leave you alone if…”
Dylan wouldn’t let him finish. “Look, we’re still a team. And Jeremy put you two in charge before he died. Or sort of died. So I’m staying in Boulder and if you go to Tijuana, I’m going to Mexico with you. We’re finding and destroying these bastards together. That’s what your angel said to do, right?”
Dylan’s dark eyes had lost much of the anger and betrayal that had been such a regular feature lately. He was a hunter, after all, and his allegiance to those who fought with him overruled his desire to hold grudges.
Max nodded along with Dylan. “I’m not leaving either. This isn’t just about Jeremy, but we committed to fighting demons years ago, and this isn’t a battle any respectable hunter could walk away from. Besides, I like you guys.”
Anna smiled at him. “You have a wife and kids and a job. How are you going to get away with spending so much time here?”
Max shrugged a shoulder at her. “My wife is understanding, and my boss is not. I have two weeks off. We’ll see what needs to be done then.”
“I hate my job anyway,” Dylan added.
“This is far more personal for Dylan than just avenging Jeremy’s transformation. He lost Jas, too, because of these archdemons who are after us. If he needs to do this, don’t argue with him,” Anna cautioned.
But Colin agreed with her anyway. Anna had survived, but this had still become personal. They had taken his wife from him. They had forced her to believe he was being tortured and she had spent twelve long hours believing days had passed while he was trapped in that Hell and she had prayed for death. Those demons wouldn’t escape his retribution.
But as night fell and Dylan and Max left for their own hotel, Colin and Anna found themselves fearing something they couldn’t escape. They would have to sleep sometime and they were defenseless in their dreams.
Colin had spent so much of the night before lying awake next to Anna, scared that he would become disconnected from her again, so as Anna switched off the lights and began flipping through the channels on the television, he felt his eyes closing against his will. He’d wanted to stay awake for her and watch her again, but even with immortality, physical needs still won out.
And it didn’t take long for him to dream. He and Anna walked through the front door of their flat in London, but this was a different London. Factories had emerged along the waterways around the city, and steam power had transformed life here. But Colin and Anna had returned to London not because of their fascination with these new innovations, but because of the destitution their existence created.
Anna and Colin didn’t remember London as a clean or uncrowded city, but it had been nothing like this. The slums of the city were overfilled with poor tenants who had little to eat, who were overcome with epidemics from the rampant filth, whose children worked alongside them with dangerous and sometimes deadly equipment. London had become a miserable city.
Seeing the children on the streets, shoeless and dirty and underfed, tired from being overworked and occasionally, missing a limb from the demands of their labor, was agonizing for Anna. She had begged Colin to go somewhere else, to pick another city, to find some other place where they could do their jobs without causing her quite so much pain.
Colin had come so close to giving in, to packing their things and taking Anna anywhere she wanted to go. Nothing hurt Colin more than knowing Anna was unhappy. But they were often directed as to where they needed to be through the dreams they would occasionally share, and both Anna and Colin had dreamed about coming to London. They knew The Angel wanted them here.
So they stayed in the city with the children whose privations were breaking Anna’s heart. And day after day, she would load a bag full of bread and take it to the nearby slum where hundreds of families who worked at two of the nearby factories lived. She couldn’t feed them all, but they came to expect her visits, and Colin would help her as she handed out the bag full of bread, loaf by loaf to the starving children who excitedly ran home to share it with their families. And every night as they returned back to their flat, Anna would cry.
They had just gotten back from one of those trips to distribute the bread Anna had spent most of the day baking. Anna tossed her empty bag onto the table and tried to stifle her sobs because she knew it upset him, but Colin would have known she was crying even if he hadn’t heard her. He put his arms around her and hugged her tightly to his chest, kissing the top of her head a
nd wishing he could promise her what he knew she wanted: that they could go back to that neighborhood and take every child back home with them, that none of them would go to bed hungry again. None of them would have to wake far too early to work fourteen-hour days in a factory making textiles to enrich a few men.
But that was impossible, of course, and she couldn’t cry for them all night. They still had to go hunting. Their days were long here, too. Anna gave herself a few minutes to feel the aching sorrow of those small lives being wasted on the factory floors then wiped her eyes and stood taller, just as she did every night. She wouldn’t let Colin down nor would she let The Angel down. Colin thought his wife was the strongest person he had ever known.
They waited until midnight before slipping back into the slum where they’d just handed out bread a few hours before. Demons feasted on desperation. It never took them long to find one trying to prey on someone here. This night was no exception. As they crept along the shadows in the narrow dirty streets, they saw a wolf prowling at the stairs of a flat at the end of the street. Only they were almost sure this wolf was the color of juniper and they were far more sure it reeked of rotten meat and sour mulch.
Anna recognized the flat as one a small child, not more than five or six years old, had run into earlier, his small thin hands clasping the loaf of bread she’d just handed him.
“Anna, there are probably a half dozen families in that flat alone. What would it want with a child?”
Colin was trying to reassure her, but Anna could only think of the child.
“We need to get its attention. Get it away from there. Get it to chase us.”
The wolf hadn’t sensed them yet. It was sniffing at the door like it was an actual canine. Colin’s fingers tightened around his dagger. “It’ll sense us when we get closer. It’ll follow us.”
“Hurry then,” Anna begged.
Colin picked up his pace and Anna had to jog to keep up with his longer legs, but she was anxious to get the wolf away from the child she knew was inside that flat. There were probably multiple children in there, as most of these buildings were teeming with destitute families.
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