Saturday 2 July 2016

In Which I Place My Bets

Dear Diary,

I decided to head to class instead of dick off and stay in bed with Curtis all day. It was sorely tempting but I need my head on straight and giving into the stupidity of romance and love wasn't going to be the way either of us stayed alive. So I slipped off to the neurology course I'm responsible for and watched the students in the first years range from bored to exhausted to overtly attentive. Only one or two stared at my bruise eyebrow or the cut on my forearm.

No one asked me questions anymore. Stories always traveled around, between me being a gangster to being in an abusive relationship to me self harming. It used to bother me. Now usually I smile when I catch someone staring and say I'm in therapy. They interpret that however they want.

As I sat and listened to the parts of the autonomic nervous system be described and attributed to branches of the spinal cord, I drifted into thoughts about the deaths of the hunters. The heart I held in my hand. I had ripped it out of the demon. No sword needed. Just the bloodlust and rage. It's heat was still fresh in my hand. Merov had ate a heart, exactly like that one, raw.

Was that still Merov?

The question haunted and I decided it needed an answer. Merov and I had never been the best of friends. He had given me weapons when I needed them, and I had given him the lay of the land for the unnatural world. Somewhere in there, I had thought we connected. Probably because I felt myself inextricably pulled towards him, a magnet in my mind I couldn't escape.

When I arrived I was brought to his office. He moved with a newer, easier grace than I remembered upon my first meeting with him. The dragon. It was growing comfortable in his human skin. And I made him uncomfortable, at least, by the way he looked at me for weapons and the way he moved with some unease around me.

I opened conversation with a concern for his humanity and like any true politician, he turned it back on me. It was a game I was used to with demons, fae, and the odd vampire I had met. Politicians at their core. So I answered honestly and waited to see if it made him reconsider. It did something. We openly admitted our fear of each other, of the inevitable fight that was always circling our minds. Neither of us were confident in who would win. It was as enticing as it was terrifying. To show I wasn't here to murder him, I tossed my knife on the desk. Peace. I was here, I supposed, in some sort of peace.

Then he asked why I didn't trust him. I told him why. Being played and used as a political pawn was something that always pissed me off. He laid it out as he saw it. That it wasn't what I thought. That we had just come together by fate and we had both done what we naturally do. I hunted and killed. He conquered.

The thought made my insides hurt after the hunt the night before. It was true. There was a base nature to my existence that he saw. It complimented in his own in a way that had so far resulted with him with more power and demons in the city. I wanted to feel assured that it was a good thing, that the dragon was doing as I had asked, reforming the city to be peaceful.

But he conquered. I killed.

The very real possibility that we were the villains, not just he, began to form in my mind. Together, we could make the city new. Even without me, he probably could do it. I would just make the way easier, destroy and cause chaos in just the right amounts to give him a chance to seize power. Like with the lions.

There are only a very few people to put faith in. The city was struggling to find leadership and harmony, as all unnatural communities did. My choices were Merov or Maeve. Curtis had chosen Maeve. Why? I will never know.

Merov had shown vulnerability in an attempt to offer trust. He had talked of destiny, of his dragon, of Curtis' dragon... and that there was one resting inside of me as well. There was a ritual. He could awaken it, solve the mystery of why I found myself constantly drawn towards him. I didn't want the answer. I had to focus on trying to figure out the dance between Curtis and myself.

So instead I agreed to help with his mission. On the condition he tried to stop too many casualties from happening, and that Curtis was left out of it as much as possible. He agreed to try to prevent casualties. And he said that it was always Curtis who killed him.

That tug towards him pulled at me again. I felt the need to touch him, to reach for him. Instead of fighting it, I did. He had turned to see me out and I reached for his arm to thank him, I guess, for his time. The touch tried to encourage the tug. Instead, I let him go and grabbed my knife from his desk. I had placed my bets on Merov. He was the horse that would win the race to power. And I had said I would be his weapon to forge.

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In Which Demons Own the Night

Dear Diary,

There's an artistry to killing that I never confess to. Everything can die, and the way you kill them, the way you leave them, is the message you send to others that would cross you. When I was so lost in the world of hunting that I barely remembered my name, this message became the key focus of my killing. I hunted without mercy then. I destroyed anything that came across my path.

It's part of the compulsion, the hunger of the hunter. We exist between human and monster, needing the compulsion to push us beyond our physiological capabilities. This mostly manifests in how people perceive us, stronger, faster, a little bit more adaptable and a little bit tougher than the average human. But the blood we spilt to get there is the part people don't see. The cost is high. The continued cost is higher still.

The hunter is just as it sounds. We hunt. We yearn for blood to be spilled and for the kill. The more we do it, the more we want to do it. The more we avoid it, the crazier we get, the more disastrous the fallout when we finally do succumb to the base instinct of blood letting. I try to only kill once or twice a week. It's enough to keep the urges at bay with the liberal application of alcohol and fucking. Fucking is close. It's probably why I leave my lovers with bruises at times.

But emotional stress, or even physiological stress, can trigger the instinct. Sometimes it's a choice we make, like when I killed Florence. Sometimes it's just the thing inside takes over. No one looks at hunters like we're lunatics though because it's monsters we kill. No one sees the casualties that we leave behind. We're too solitary, too lost in our own world of kill or be killed.

When I walked away from Merov to hunt the demons, I thought it would take a couple hours, at most. I'd be there to have last call with Curtis, fuck him, and probably have a decent sleep before class tomorrow. I didn't realize I was entering a brutal fight to the death that would end in more blood that I had anticipated.

Boston's been on the radar for most of the supernatural community. Between the Amber Vampires and the ley lines that Cesar is trying to fuck with, hunters have felt the trembles of the on coming war for awhile. It meant there were more of us. A city alive with hunters is rare. A crowded city of hunters means there's maybe ten of us. Ten people who are lost in the hunt and the kill. The sanity of the hunters ranges from people in control and stable, to those who are feral hunters just living for the kill.

We were lucky that of the eight of us, only one was mostly gone to the urge. Every inch of the fucking city was crawling with the demons. People were screaming. Most were just dying. None of us knew each other. None of us were friends. But the blood speaks to us and we hunted as a pack, solitary and yet unified. If one of us fell, we didn't flinch or try to save them. We moved on. It's the way of the hunt.

It was three in the morning when the pounding of the wound on my neck and shoulder had begun to make me pull away from the joy of the hunt. I don't remember a lot of what happened between the fifth kill and the last one. Some people would call it frenzy, but it doesn't look like it. From the outside it looks controlled and deliberate, even when we leave our enemies in pieces. Salza and I were the last standing.

My phone buzzed. It was enough to break the spell. The vampires were dead. Demons. Whatever. Salza was struggling with the last one. I dropped the heart that was bloody in my hand and walked over to end the last one. It sank its fangs into my arm and I sank my dagger into its skull. It was a fair trade. The other hunter was horribly wounded, his leg mangled.

Curtis left a message. Something about Derek. And that I needed to come home. My muscles hummed with the urge to keep going. I had to grit my teeth and turn away from the world to be able to even fully remember Curtis. Then it came back, crashing into my reality like a wave of cold water. The torture. Florence's death. Solomon's hands on me. The drugs. Carla's eyes. I had abandoned Curtis because I didn't want to feel any of it. I didn't want to tell him I had fucked Solomon because things between us were complicated and I didn't want complicated.

The hospital didn't question me when I dropped off Salza. They're used to me just appearing with half dead people. It used to make a difference. Now they knew they couldn't stop me. One of them offered to look at the wounds on my shoulder and my arm, but I shook my head and walked out. From my pocket I slipped my driver's license and as I climbed into the truck, shoved it back into my wallet. Beside my wallet, a bag of driver's licenses sat, blood smeared across it.

We always keep our licenses on ourselves when hunt. It's a way of leaving a message to our families. We died. You don't have to wonder. We died.

The pile of them made my jaw tense. There was just Salza and I and he was out of commission for awhile. It would be up to me to protect the whole fucking city. When I reached home, Curtis was still mostly drunk, but at least showered. Carla was no where to be found and he called me home... because he was worried.

I tried to ignore the immediate anger that flooded my body. Curtis knew better. I was a hunter. I hunted. If I disappeared it was usually for good reason and not arbitrary. He's afraid of abandonment. But this is who I am. It's what I am. I hunt. I kill.

The shower revealed just how many scrapes, scratches, and bruises I had managed to get. The cut over my eyebrow wasn't bad, and the bite had closed over, but the deep gouge in my shoulder was still seeping blood. I covered it and grabbed a towel before I walked out to talk to Curtis. He offered coffee and booze. Smart man.

We talked. It was a conversation I didn't want to have. Not really. It was admitting that we had changed, that something had changed enough we needed to take it out and talk about it. I hate talking about how I feel, more than I hate most things. But the words were said and they can't be unsaid. We love each other. In ways that we shouldn't and that aren't going to make life any easier. We talked about what that meant, and ran in circles with it. I was too tired. My body hurt.

Finally I told him the truth about my research, that I was finding a way to remove the hunter genes in me. He asked if it would work for him, and I honestly didn't know. In theory it should. It worked on a vampire, once. One of Alistair's friends. It was petty of me but I wanted to know. He was only one of other humans I had killed.

Curtis reluctantly let me take his blood. Morning began to arrive and we crawled into bed. I needed a few hours of sleep. At  least two. Just enough that my hunter genes that I so wanted to get rid of would start to heal me. It was the first time I had slept beside someone who knew I loved them since I was a teenager. It was terrifying and comforting and I was afraid for the future, more than I had been in a decade.

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