Ben was never a particularly interesting person. He had few hobbies, fewer friends, fewer still...
Hunter, Hero, Monster, Beast [World of Darkness Oneshot]
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Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
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Ben was never a particularly interesting person. He had few hobbies, fewer friends, fewer still talents. In the sanitized high school movie of life he was one of the boys who didn't even have a clique, just wandered the halls when everyone else did to pad things out a bit. When he dropped out in the first semester of his final year, nobody seemed to notice. He never saw anyone from school ever again. It took him three years to find a job, menial 9-to-5 burgerflipping that nonetheless felt like such an ordeal that sometimes he would take sick days when nothing was wrong with him at all.
He wasn't all that shocked when the divorce became official. Didn't react much to it really, at least outwardly. Nineteen-year-olds aren't meant to feel sad just because mummy and daddy don't live together any more. They aren't meant to feel sad when they have to move somewhere unfamiliar. Which he didn't, really. It was more of an academic notion that led him to take dripping fistfuls of antidepressants and painkillers in the bath and go to bed one night. When he woke up in the morning, the incident passed forever unspoken. Almost forgotten.
He remembered it on a cold December afternoon, not long after turning twenty, when his brother's hands were around his throat and he truly wanted to live for the first time in at least five years. When the adrenaline and blood coursed through his body like electricity and the air couldn't reach his lungs, when he was drowning on the cheap carpet and looking up at eyes that held not even a flicker of remorse for what would happen if he didn't let go. He'd spoken out of turn. He'd been an ungrateful leech and he was being punished for it and he would say anything if it meant he could live for a second longer.
He regretted it later that night, stumbling through the driving rain, hoodie plastered down across his shoulders and hair. Regretted ever opening his mouth and daring to presume what he said mattered. Regretted the spark of hope, will to live, he'd felt in that moment. Hated its aching absence. Hated every neon, plastic artefact of commercialized cheer that sneered down at him from the tops of every single building. Reminding him of the most wonderful time of the year right around the corner, the time for family to be together and share and love. He hated every single warm, yellow light he saw in every window, every single happy person or couple or family beyond. He hated everyone had what he didn't.
The planks of the pier were slick beneath his shoes. No matter how hard the rain fell, the sea remained as still as glass below. Looking down on the edge, it seemed infinite. An endless, starry reflection of the universe above, inviting him to pass through the mirror and into a world where everything could be different. He was cold. He was so cold that his bones were ice and his blood was freezing in his veins.
He took a single step.
Something warm found him in the deep.
***
She just wanted to have a nice, easy morning. She was up all night running around trying to handle three kids with colds and of course Jack wasn't helping out, either he was out with the boys or asleep on the couch snoring like a wounded hog. She felt like a corpse warmed up and the man who stepped through the door of the diner was the last thing she wanted to deal with right now.
Biker-type. Boots, pants, jacket, gloves, all leather, all black. Half-inch silver spikes on the shoulders like that made him some kind of hard man, matching chain from wallet to belt. Full-face helmet, so dirty it'd probably turn the bay brown if he dipped it in. She told him he'd have to take it off if he wanted to be served, quicker than she should have. He turned away, bowing his head to pry the plastic prison off. Ran gloved fingers through sweat-slicked hair the same colour as his skin - snow-white. He paused to don sunglasses from his front pocket before he turned around. She gave a thought to telling him he couldn't wear those either. She relented at the last minute. She remembered reading about albinos being sensitive to light like vampires or something.
He ordered bacon, eggs and coffee with an accent she couldn't place. She rang it up and he sat down in a booth with his back to the wall, watching the news on the TV. Something about a missing kid. He put a, old, scuffed guitar case on the seat opposite him. No one else came in for a while, so found her eyes slowly drawn back to his table. She found him taking notes with pen and paper while perusing an actual paper map like some kind of caveman. She glanced outside and managed to spy his 'hog' or whatever they called it. It looked like a junker that any cop with half a mind to safety would ticket in an instant. It was like the guy had time-jumped out of the 80s.
He didn't even look up when she took him his order. Just sort of grunted, sliding the plate aside so he could keep looking at his map. Had some random building and one of the piers circled, a winding penstroke leashing the two bubbles together. Mumbling to himself. For someone so disinterested with the outside world he went through his food like a pig at a trough, chasing it with coffee like the mug hadn't come straight from a fresh pot. He folded up the map and stowed it with the notepad and pen quickly, peeling a few bedraggled bills from his wallet for the check. Then he was out without so much as a how-do-you-do, shouldering his guitar case.
She checked the pile. He didn't tip. Asshole.
***
The town car rolled smoothly along the road, the reflected sky gliding over its mirror-shined body. The tinted windows betrayed nothing of the freshly-shaven driver in a too-new suit, of the passengers in the back seat. The man on the driver's side seemed more like a partially-shaven bear. He tugged uncomfortably on his collar as if choking, lip curled in a snarl that exposed prominent canines. His employer was quite a lot more comfortable.
He was dressed in a neat charcoal suit and black tie, a pair of hundred-dollar glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. A book sat spread across his lap, text cramped around symbols that seem to shimmer out of focus in active defiance of the human eye. He held a smartphone to his ear.
Yes, he understood. No, it wouldn't be a problem. Yes, he had it under control. No, the target would be contained safely and with a minimum of undue harm. Yes, it was shaping up to be a very pleasant day.
He ended the call and looked down at his phone. The screen showed a neat little ring around the pier where the boy had last been seen. He looked down at the book, committing passages to memory that would make his driver require a few sick days if he ever saw them. Mad ravings of academics unhinged by their meteorically plummeting careers, but the grains of truth within had their uses. Preparation was the name of the game.
***
Ben gasped as his lungs finally tasted air instead of water. He breached the surface in a great white spray, gagging, choking, desperately clawing for purchase. His curled fingers raked through gritty wet sand and he crawled out of the surf, burdened by clothes so waterlogged they felt like woven lead. He retched acrid bile salty with seawater and blinked burning, blind eyes.
The sun was out. It was high in the sky, almost directly overhead. He remembered his first step into the depths, remembered reaching dry land once more. The in-between was a blur. He couldn't remember the long hours he spent sinking deeper and deeper into the brine. The realm of creatures from millennia past, unchanged by the march of time and forgotten by mankind. Thinking about it made his head hurt, made things flit through the corners of his eyes.
He rose to his feet, hugging himself tightly for warmth. Trying to bring life back to his cold, clammy hands. He walked out of the surf, one staggering stride after another, gritty wet sand squelching between his toes. Sand turning to stone as he found the street, leaving shining footprints on the blacktop as he crossed. A horn blared in his ear, distant and forgotten. He snatched a newspaper out of a waiting rack and clutched it tight, soaking it through with seawater, disintegrating it in his hands. The date was wrong.
He had been gone three days.
***
Some bounty hunter motherfucker. Everything about the guy oozed it. He reeked of it, literally. 'Official' private investigator creds were the only reason he wasn't telling him to fuck off. Told him exactly what he told the real cops - Ben was probably just hiding somewhere. Sulking, or doing it for attention. Guilting Mom into giving him a few more months doing nothing but jack off in front of his computer eating Cheetos.
Guy kept being pushy, saying a guy like Ben wouldn't go missing for three days for attention. Wouldn't 'have the resources'. He told him that maybe Ben was sucking dick for an apartment or dead in a gutter somewhere - either way, not his problem. Guy thought he was a real hard man, trying to loom over him, say it was his problem now. He told him the 'tough biker' act didn't work without backup. Backed the fuck down then.
Guy left to go drive his shitty bike somewhere else. Jesse scoffed at him and his stupid jacket as he left, turning back towards the counter to finish paying for his stuff. Added a couple of lottery tickets on a whim, a warmup for cards later that night. It took him hours to notice the missing bottle of vodka.
***
She practically threw open the door at the ring, unable to quash the vain hope rising in her chest. It wasn't Ben coming home. It wasn't the police telling her he was in the hospital but alive. It wasn't even that weird biker PI from earlier with news. It was a man in a neat charcoal grey suit and black tie with expensive glasses over serious grey eyes.
He was quick to inform her that Ben wasn't in any trouble. He wasn't involved in drugs or theft or a gang or anything dangerous. All he could say was that he was of interest for 'certain matters', matters that required direct intervention. He was quite convinced that Ben would come home eventually. All he asked was to stay in the guest room until he did. It seemed reasonable. He just wanted to help.
He was already opening his briefcase when she left to make tea, moving the furniture to give himself space. She warned him from the kitchen that Jesse kept abnormal hours and could come back at any time. He said that would suit him just fine.
***
He was cold. So cold. No matter what he did he couldn't shake the chill of the sea. His clothes remained sodden and heavy as lead, making him bow under the weight, puffing to force achingly cold air into his lungs. Arms crossed tight over his chest for some semblance, some memory of warmth. Ben left damp footprints as he shuffled home.
It was all he could think of. The only thing that sprang to mind. The rest of the night was dark, clouds gathering to blot out the stars. The moon's light slowly smothered by the thick black blanket of an oncoming storm. He could smell it on the air, feel the shift in his bones. The streetlamps overhead fizzled and shorted out as he set foot beneath them.
Something ached. Something gnawed at his insides like he hadn't eaten for days. It made every step an effort, a herculean task. If he didn't have a destination, a goal in sight, he doubted he would be able to move. So exhausted that the world swam before his eyes, what light there was rippling and refracting like water. He looked at the world through aquarium glass. He couldn't tell from which side.
He was stupid. He was careless. He didn't check how many cars were in the garage. He didn't think. He never did. Ben realized his mistake the minute he set foot across the threshold, too late to stop it. Jesse was on the couch watching TV, in a foul mood already. A sneer spread across his face the moment he spotted Ben.
Oh he had milked it especially long this time. What had he done this time, stolen money from Mom's purse and eaten ice cream in the basement? She actually bothered to get some Private Investigator guy to look for him She wasted all that money on him. She could have done something worthwhile with it. It wasn't all bad, though. He'd pawned Ben's computer. He hadn't been using it, after all. He hadn't said he was coming home. Assumed he'd finally decided he'd stop spending every waking moment on it.
Ben was quiet like he always was. He stood there and took it like he always did. Just stood there, doing nothing, saying nothing, slowly soaking the carpet beneath him through. Useless, waste of space, why'd he even bother coming back.
But he didn't have to do nothing.
The rain drove against the windows like a thousand frozen needles, rattling the glass in its frame, practically horizontal. The trees swayed outside.
He took a step forward. His brother laughed - did he really want to do this now? He was feeling charitable, he'd give him a free swing. Then he'd swing back. Then he'd take Ben down. Then he'd teach him a lesson he wouldn't forget this time. Storm was loud - Mom wouldn't hear it.
Every bulb in the room blew. The TV cut out with a harsh crackle. The acrid stench of ozone filled the blackness.
Something slithered under Ben's skin.
No. She wouldn't.
***
There was one upside to the all-natural-remedy organic-grown farmer's-market detox-diet horseshit sweeping the globe these days. It made it easier to find ingredients. No need to comb mountains for six hours like an asshole when he could swipe most of what he needed off the shelf. Latest 'shopping trip' had left them a couple hundred dollars down the drain, but that wasn't his problem. Not like half of their shit did anything on its own.
Not unless you knew what he knew. The right herbs in the right amounts cooked the right way, turning a worthless hodgepodge of leaves into into something so thick it was almost paste-like. Smelled like death, no matter how much vodka he mixed it with. Three brews got through most of the bottle he'd swiped from the kid. He didn't bother to decant them. He drank them all straight down, one after the other, and chased it all with the last of the vodka.
His stomach roiled, groaned, flipped and turned inside-out. Every muscle in his body cramped and stretched in a great ripple outwards. Blood raced through his veins at double speed as they swelled against translucent paper-white skin, pipelike. A blood vessel burst his eye, unable to take the strain. Red spread around red, as if the iris were turning ragged and expanding. Slowly shrank again as the blood was wicked away, as the vessel healed. As the nictitating membrane slid back and the reflective slit-pupil beneath slowly widened.
The guitar case clasps clicked softly as he opened it. First he retrieved the sword from its shaped hollow in the foam, drawing it slowly to inspect the edges for any nicks or imperfections. Silver was a temperamental material, after all. Thirty-five inches of it carefully honed to a cutting edge even more so. Next came a small bottle, one of a dozen that lay in their own hollows in uniformed rows either side of the sword. The label had long since rubbed off, but he remembered the mixture well enough. Six drops in its matching cloth, long smooth strokes along the silver blade. Coating had to be even, or it would be useless. Had to get it in the fine recesses of the etched runes. When he was done, it shone as if glowing.
The hunter rose, closing the case and leaving it with his bike. He wouldn't be long.
***
The storm was inside the house. The wind howled deafeningly through the shattered windows, turning the living room into a suburban hurricane. The rain railed against every inch of exposed flesh like a storm of knives. Jesse huddled in a corner, skin already raw and bleeding from the whirling debris. The mother clung to the doorway for support, screaming herself hoarse to be heard over the gale. Ben was the eye of the storm, driven to his knees, screaming in pain and fear as he threw his shoulders madly against the limits of his prison. Translucent walls of force caged him, generated by squat black emitters that had been hidden beneath the furniture. Three men clad all in black inspected the emitters, clutched boxy black rifles from no known manufacturer close to their chests.
The man in the suit watched, a single hairline fracture running across the right lens of his glasses from rim to rim. His smoothed-down hair and neatly-pressed blazer and clipped-down tie barely wavered an inch in the gale but the emotion on his face was crude and unrestrained by comparison. He was smiling with the satisfaction of a job well done. His bodyguard's ceaseless caged-tiger pacing went unnoticed. The unwanted intruder almost did too.
The hunter was not needed. The matter was already well within control. He could pack up his leeches and potions and oiled-up sword and move on. The entity's new host had been captured early, before it could feed for the first time, courtesy of a well-laid trap. It could be stabilized for transport, studied in captivity, become a crucial tool of enlightenment for the rest of humanity.
Ben didn't understand what they were talking about. He couldn't see, couldn't breathe, it was all swimming like water. He was in his house and he was so far below the surface of the sea that there was no light but the great baleful eye staring deep into his soul where there was nothing he could hide. Something inside him he couldn't name hurt more than he could possibly imagine. He didn't want to go. He didn't want to stay. He didn't want to feel this hungry for another moment. He didn't want to hurt anyone. He peered through the depths and saw the pale, crimson-eyed hunter.
The hunter said he had a livelihood to look after. Said he was here on a job, and no results meant no pay. The man in the suit laughed and dug a black leather checkbook with gold at the corners out of his pocket. He wrote a check with more zeroes than the hunter had ever seen in his life. That included the one in rubles he saw in his parents' hands when he was six years old. The slip of paper was torn away by the wind the moment it left the man in the suit's hand, circling the room twice before landing half-sodden by the hunter's boot.
The host hadn't even fed yet.
The host would feed unless stopped.
Ben didn't want to be in a box, forever looking through the glass at the world he'd been taken from.
He was just a kid.
He was a danger to the world. At least this way he would serve a purpose.
The hunter was not a complicated man. He did not deal well with shades of grey, with weighing two evils carefully to determine which was the lesser. He went for the simplest solution. The one he could believe in.
Had to be quick. Precise. Outnumbered and outmatched. Given the choice, he would rather be outmatched. The hunter dipped his hand beneath his jacket and hurled something that shattered against the brine-soaked carpet. A blinding flash, a deafening thunderclap, lightning in a bottle. Upflung arms shielded seared eyes behind gas mask visors. The hunter's were unharmed. Trained soldiers' reflexes responded an instant later, but an instant was all the hunter needed.
A stainless steel combat knife emerged from within his jacket. A deep gash in the wrist of the first, severing the tendons, nearly taking the hand with it. Froze the trigger finger. He whipped the blade across the throat, certain death. Pivoted, drove the tip into the larynx of the second, left it there. Stepped inside his reach, controlled the dead man's grip. A wild spray of bullets stitched its way across the third man's chest, shattering body armour, punching through the man within, cratering the wall beyond with blood and brass. Over in seconds.
Long enough for the Glass Walker to shift. A changing steel-knuckled fist crashed into the hunter's sternum with the force of a runaway train. Every scrap of breath in his lungs was torn free in a single sickening gasp as he was launched clean off his feet. Internal bleeding, tissue trauma, organs largely undamaged for now. Manageable. Drywall cracked and wood splintered beneath his back as he went through the wall, the world blurred as he tumbled. He hit something, a washing machine maybe. Rose to see the mountain of hard, shifting muscle sheathed in snow-white fur cast off the last scraps of its ruined suit. To see black lips pull back in a snarl, exposing titanium fangs. To see steel claws as sharp as scalpels unsheathed.
The white wolf charged and the hunter moved, evading death by a hair's breadth. Only the silver blade was left where he once stood, rising in a backhand slash across the Glass Walker's ribs. Parting hide. Scraping against tungsten ribs. The blade emerged bloodstained but blunted, edge crushed almost flat. The hunter whirled fast enough to blur, spinning the sword in his hands. Aimed the undamaged edge at something fleshier. A nick, a flesh wound, as the wolf darted back with speed that belied its size. Responded with an uppercut slash that would disembowel the hunter, tear him in half like the dishwasher that had borne its first strike.
The hunter hurled himself back through the hole in the wall, hearing the white wolf's claws slash the air across his back. The carpet squelched, stung his nose with the stink of salt, as he rolled and rose to his feet. The hunter fished another IED out of his jacket, launched it at the charging werewolf with a desperate backhand toss. The Glass Walker saw it coming. Batted it out of the air easily.
The casing shattered. The silver dust burst free in a glittering cloud. The storm winds caught it like a great hand and force-fed the werewolf its choking anathema. Whirring, luminous eyes did not betray the Glass Walker but the sockets they sat within did. Furious tears flooded forth, blinded it. Its great body convulsed in wheezing, barking coughs. The moment of weakness as the white wolf attempted to purge the hated metal from its body was all the hunter needed.
The hunter drove his silver sword between the third and fourth ribs on the right side of the sternum. Punctured the lung clean through. The hunter tore it free, rending a great gash through its chest. The wolf collapsed to one knee in a pool of blood, heaving, retching blood. The hunter's to finish. He turned away.
The man in the neat charcoal grey suit raised an angular black handgun that would not be on the market for two hundred years. Cyan light flickered within the barrel as jets of hot steam vented through slits in the frame. The man's eyes blazed with fury through his cracked glasses. No cover, no chance of dodging, no chance of reaching him in time.
The hunter raised his free hand, tracing a runic shape in the air that made his ears ring and his teeth rattle in their gums. Made himself a conduit, a circuit for something that reopened old scars and made faded ink burn like hot coals. A tunnel was torn through the storm, water rippling at the passage of power. An invisible fist drove into the man in the suit's stomach, driving him against the wall behind him. A bolt of plasma erupted from the handgun, went wide, tunneled clear through the house and soared off into the night sky like a comet in reverse. The not-so-neat-anymore charcoal grey suit protected the man within, as it would protect him from anything short of close-range anti-materiel rounds. The hunter collapsed to his knees, silver sword splashing down beyond his reach. Retched up blood that sizzled as it spattered in the brine, smoked as it mingled in crimson threads.
Ben saw the hunter, his would-be saviour, go down. Saw his captor rise, ruffled but unhurt. Angrily adjust his cufflinks, smooth down his hair, and level the pistol right out of a sci-fi movie once more. All this happening because of him and there was nothing he could do, nothing with all the pain and fury and mind-numbing cold filling him up inside but-
-see the emitter, displaced by the hunter's final gambit. Flickering and dying on its side. A break in the circle.
He looked inside, stopped drowning, and dived deeper. He found the warmth again.
The second shot went off-course too. Boiling water spattered against the hunter's cheek as the plasma bolt tunneled through the carpet, through the foundation, into the earth's skin beneath. A third did not follow because the shooter was rigid, flesh pale and blue from cold. Because his eyes were bulging near out of their sockets. Because the only sound that could escape him was a weak, wheezing death rattle. Because several feet of oily blue-green flesh that reeked of salt and ozone were wrapped around his wrist and throat, squeezing. Because they squeezed until bone clicked and broke, until cartilage crushed, and the man in the charcoal grey suit went limp as a ragdoll.
The nerveless corpse splashed down in the inch-deep lake the living room had become. The tentacle followed suit with a heavy, wet 'slap'. The indoor storm slowly ebbed as the immense pseudopod retracted, slithering back to its host. Tears glistened on Ben's cheeks, blue-veined and ghostly pale, as the tentacle sank beneath his skin like a creature returning to the deep. As he watched the uncomprehending horror on his mother and brother's faces. Too terrified to even scream.
The water rippled as the hunter picked up his silver sword. As he straightened, blood streaming from his nose and mouth in watered-down rivulets. Each footfall splashed as he approached, standing over Ben. The blood-spattered killer and the monster he came for.
"I don't… want to hurt anyone…"
"I know."
Leather creaked softly. No sword fell. Ben looked up. A gloved hand was extended to him.
"I'll take you somewhere safe."
Ben didn't look back. Not at his brother, whispering in terror to 911 on his phone. Not at his mother, hiding behind the doorframe from the monster in her son's skin. The distant wail of sirens, growing steadily closer, meant little to him. Weakly, numbly, he took the offered hand.
By the time the sirens got there, the hunter and the beast were long gone.
He wasn't all that shocked when the divorce became official. Didn't react much to it really, at least outwardly. Nineteen-year-olds aren't meant to feel sad just because mummy and daddy don't live together any more. They aren't meant to feel sad when they have to move somewhere unfamiliar. Which he didn't, really. It was more of an academic notion that led him to take dripping fistfuls of antidepressants and painkillers in the bath and go to bed one night. When he woke up in the morning, the incident passed forever unspoken. Almost forgotten.
He remembered it on a cold December afternoon, not long after turning twenty, when his brother's hands were around his throat and he truly wanted to live for the first time in at least five years. When the adrenaline and blood coursed through his body like electricity and the air couldn't reach his lungs, when he was drowning on the cheap carpet and looking up at eyes that held not even a flicker of remorse for what would happen if he didn't let go. He'd spoken out of turn. He'd been an ungrateful leech and he was being punished for it and he would say anything if it meant he could live for a second longer.
He regretted it later that night, stumbling through the driving rain, hoodie plastered down across his shoulders and hair. Regretted ever opening his mouth and daring to presume what he said mattered. Regretted the spark of hope, will to live, he'd felt in that moment. Hated its aching absence. Hated every neon, plastic artefact of commercialized cheer that sneered down at him from the tops of every single building. Reminding him of the most wonderful time of the year right around the corner, the time for family to be together and share and love. He hated every single warm, yellow light he saw in every window, every single happy person or couple or family beyond. He hated everyone had what he didn't.
The planks of the pier were slick beneath his shoes. No matter how hard the rain fell, the sea remained as still as glass below. Looking down on the edge, it seemed infinite. An endless, starry reflection of the universe above, inviting him to pass through the mirror and into a world where everything could be different. He was cold. He was so cold that his bones were ice and his blood was freezing in his veins.
He took a single step.
Something warm found him in the deep.
***
She just wanted to have a nice, easy morning. She was up all night running around trying to handle three kids with colds and of course Jack wasn't helping out, either he was out with the boys or asleep on the couch snoring like a wounded hog. She felt like a corpse warmed up and the man who stepped through the door of the diner was the last thing she wanted to deal with right now.
Biker-type. Boots, pants, jacket, gloves, all leather, all black. Half-inch silver spikes on the shoulders like that made him some kind of hard man, matching chain from wallet to belt. Full-face helmet, so dirty it'd probably turn the bay brown if he dipped it in. She told him he'd have to take it off if he wanted to be served, quicker than she should have. He turned away, bowing his head to pry the plastic prison off. Ran gloved fingers through sweat-slicked hair the same colour as his skin - snow-white. He paused to don sunglasses from his front pocket before he turned around. She gave a thought to telling him he couldn't wear those either. She relented at the last minute. She remembered reading about albinos being sensitive to light like vampires or something.
He ordered bacon, eggs and coffee with an accent she couldn't place. She rang it up and he sat down in a booth with his back to the wall, watching the news on the TV. Something about a missing kid. He put a, old, scuffed guitar case on the seat opposite him. No one else came in for a while, so found her eyes slowly drawn back to his table. She found him taking notes with pen and paper while perusing an actual paper map like some kind of caveman. She glanced outside and managed to spy his 'hog' or whatever they called it. It looked like a junker that any cop with half a mind to safety would ticket in an instant. It was like the guy had time-jumped out of the 80s.
He didn't even look up when she took him his order. Just sort of grunted, sliding the plate aside so he could keep looking at his map. Had some random building and one of the piers circled, a winding penstroke leashing the two bubbles together. Mumbling to himself. For someone so disinterested with the outside world he went through his food like a pig at a trough, chasing it with coffee like the mug hadn't come straight from a fresh pot. He folded up the map and stowed it with the notepad and pen quickly, peeling a few bedraggled bills from his wallet for the check. Then he was out without so much as a how-do-you-do, shouldering his guitar case.
She checked the pile. He didn't tip. Asshole.
***
The town car rolled smoothly along the road, the reflected sky gliding over its mirror-shined body. The tinted windows betrayed nothing of the freshly-shaven driver in a too-new suit, of the passengers in the back seat. The man on the driver's side seemed more like a partially-shaven bear. He tugged uncomfortably on his collar as if choking, lip curled in a snarl that exposed prominent canines. His employer was quite a lot more comfortable.
He was dressed in a neat charcoal suit and black tie, a pair of hundred-dollar glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. A book sat spread across his lap, text cramped around symbols that seem to shimmer out of focus in active defiance of the human eye. He held a smartphone to his ear.
Yes, he understood. No, it wouldn't be a problem. Yes, he had it under control. No, the target would be contained safely and with a minimum of undue harm. Yes, it was shaping up to be a very pleasant day.
He ended the call and looked down at his phone. The screen showed a neat little ring around the pier where the boy had last been seen. He looked down at the book, committing passages to memory that would make his driver require a few sick days if he ever saw them. Mad ravings of academics unhinged by their meteorically plummeting careers, but the grains of truth within had their uses. Preparation was the name of the game.
***
Ben gasped as his lungs finally tasted air instead of water. He breached the surface in a great white spray, gagging, choking, desperately clawing for purchase. His curled fingers raked through gritty wet sand and he crawled out of the surf, burdened by clothes so waterlogged they felt like woven lead. He retched acrid bile salty with seawater and blinked burning, blind eyes.
The sun was out. It was high in the sky, almost directly overhead. He remembered his first step into the depths, remembered reaching dry land once more. The in-between was a blur. He couldn't remember the long hours he spent sinking deeper and deeper into the brine. The realm of creatures from millennia past, unchanged by the march of time and forgotten by mankind. Thinking about it made his head hurt, made things flit through the corners of his eyes.
He rose to his feet, hugging himself tightly for warmth. Trying to bring life back to his cold, clammy hands. He walked out of the surf, one staggering stride after another, gritty wet sand squelching between his toes. Sand turning to stone as he found the street, leaving shining footprints on the blacktop as he crossed. A horn blared in his ear, distant and forgotten. He snatched a newspaper out of a waiting rack and clutched it tight, soaking it through with seawater, disintegrating it in his hands. The date was wrong.
He had been gone three days.
***
Some bounty hunter motherfucker. Everything about the guy oozed it. He reeked of it, literally. 'Official' private investigator creds were the only reason he wasn't telling him to fuck off. Told him exactly what he told the real cops - Ben was probably just hiding somewhere. Sulking, or doing it for attention. Guilting Mom into giving him a few more months doing nothing but jack off in front of his computer eating Cheetos.
Guy kept being pushy, saying a guy like Ben wouldn't go missing for three days for attention. Wouldn't 'have the resources'. He told him that maybe Ben was sucking dick for an apartment or dead in a gutter somewhere - either way, not his problem. Guy thought he was a real hard man, trying to loom over him, say it was his problem now. He told him the 'tough biker' act didn't work without backup. Backed the fuck down then.
Guy left to go drive his shitty bike somewhere else. Jesse scoffed at him and his stupid jacket as he left, turning back towards the counter to finish paying for his stuff. Added a couple of lottery tickets on a whim, a warmup for cards later that night. It took him hours to notice the missing bottle of vodka.
***
She practically threw open the door at the ring, unable to quash the vain hope rising in her chest. It wasn't Ben coming home. It wasn't the police telling her he was in the hospital but alive. It wasn't even that weird biker PI from earlier with news. It was a man in a neat charcoal grey suit and black tie with expensive glasses over serious grey eyes.
He was quick to inform her that Ben wasn't in any trouble. He wasn't involved in drugs or theft or a gang or anything dangerous. All he could say was that he was of interest for 'certain matters', matters that required direct intervention. He was quite convinced that Ben would come home eventually. All he asked was to stay in the guest room until he did. It seemed reasonable. He just wanted to help.
He was already opening his briefcase when she left to make tea, moving the furniture to give himself space. She warned him from the kitchen that Jesse kept abnormal hours and could come back at any time. He said that would suit him just fine.
***
He was cold. So cold. No matter what he did he couldn't shake the chill of the sea. His clothes remained sodden and heavy as lead, making him bow under the weight, puffing to force achingly cold air into his lungs. Arms crossed tight over his chest for some semblance, some memory of warmth. Ben left damp footprints as he shuffled home.
It was all he could think of. The only thing that sprang to mind. The rest of the night was dark, clouds gathering to blot out the stars. The moon's light slowly smothered by the thick black blanket of an oncoming storm. He could smell it on the air, feel the shift in his bones. The streetlamps overhead fizzled and shorted out as he set foot beneath them.
Something ached. Something gnawed at his insides like he hadn't eaten for days. It made every step an effort, a herculean task. If he didn't have a destination, a goal in sight, he doubted he would be able to move. So exhausted that the world swam before his eyes, what light there was rippling and refracting like water. He looked at the world through aquarium glass. He couldn't tell from which side.
He was stupid. He was careless. He didn't check how many cars were in the garage. He didn't think. He never did. Ben realized his mistake the minute he set foot across the threshold, too late to stop it. Jesse was on the couch watching TV, in a foul mood already. A sneer spread across his face the moment he spotted Ben.
Oh he had milked it especially long this time. What had he done this time, stolen money from Mom's purse and eaten ice cream in the basement? She actually bothered to get some Private Investigator guy to look for him She wasted all that money on him. She could have done something worthwhile with it. It wasn't all bad, though. He'd pawned Ben's computer. He hadn't been using it, after all. He hadn't said he was coming home. Assumed he'd finally decided he'd stop spending every waking moment on it.
Ben was quiet like he always was. He stood there and took it like he always did. Just stood there, doing nothing, saying nothing, slowly soaking the carpet beneath him through. Useless, waste of space, why'd he even bother coming back.
But he didn't have to do nothing.
The rain drove against the windows like a thousand frozen needles, rattling the glass in its frame, practically horizontal. The trees swayed outside.
He took a step forward. His brother laughed - did he really want to do this now? He was feeling charitable, he'd give him a free swing. Then he'd swing back. Then he'd take Ben down. Then he'd teach him a lesson he wouldn't forget this time. Storm was loud - Mom wouldn't hear it.
Every bulb in the room blew. The TV cut out with a harsh crackle. The acrid stench of ozone filled the blackness.
Something slithered under Ben's skin.
No. She wouldn't.
***
There was one upside to the all-natural-remedy organic-grown farmer's-market detox-diet horseshit sweeping the globe these days. It made it easier to find ingredients. No need to comb mountains for six hours like an asshole when he could swipe most of what he needed off the shelf. Latest 'shopping trip' had left them a couple hundred dollars down the drain, but that wasn't his problem. Not like half of their shit did anything on its own.
Not unless you knew what he knew. The right herbs in the right amounts cooked the right way, turning a worthless hodgepodge of leaves into into something so thick it was almost paste-like. Smelled like death, no matter how much vodka he mixed it with. Three brews got through most of the bottle he'd swiped from the kid. He didn't bother to decant them. He drank them all straight down, one after the other, and chased it all with the last of the vodka.
His stomach roiled, groaned, flipped and turned inside-out. Every muscle in his body cramped and stretched in a great ripple outwards. Blood raced through his veins at double speed as they swelled against translucent paper-white skin, pipelike. A blood vessel burst his eye, unable to take the strain. Red spread around red, as if the iris were turning ragged and expanding. Slowly shrank again as the blood was wicked away, as the vessel healed. As the nictitating membrane slid back and the reflective slit-pupil beneath slowly widened.
The guitar case clasps clicked softly as he opened it. First he retrieved the sword from its shaped hollow in the foam, drawing it slowly to inspect the edges for any nicks or imperfections. Silver was a temperamental material, after all. Thirty-five inches of it carefully honed to a cutting edge even more so. Next came a small bottle, one of a dozen that lay in their own hollows in uniformed rows either side of the sword. The label had long since rubbed off, but he remembered the mixture well enough. Six drops in its matching cloth, long smooth strokes along the silver blade. Coating had to be even, or it would be useless. Had to get it in the fine recesses of the etched runes. When he was done, it shone as if glowing.
The hunter rose, closing the case and leaving it with his bike. He wouldn't be long.
***
The storm was inside the house. The wind howled deafeningly through the shattered windows, turning the living room into a suburban hurricane. The rain railed against every inch of exposed flesh like a storm of knives. Jesse huddled in a corner, skin already raw and bleeding from the whirling debris. The mother clung to the doorway for support, screaming herself hoarse to be heard over the gale. Ben was the eye of the storm, driven to his knees, screaming in pain and fear as he threw his shoulders madly against the limits of his prison. Translucent walls of force caged him, generated by squat black emitters that had been hidden beneath the furniture. Three men clad all in black inspected the emitters, clutched boxy black rifles from no known manufacturer close to their chests.
The man in the suit watched, a single hairline fracture running across the right lens of his glasses from rim to rim. His smoothed-down hair and neatly-pressed blazer and clipped-down tie barely wavered an inch in the gale but the emotion on his face was crude and unrestrained by comparison. He was smiling with the satisfaction of a job well done. His bodyguard's ceaseless caged-tiger pacing went unnoticed. The unwanted intruder almost did too.
The hunter was not needed. The matter was already well within control. He could pack up his leeches and potions and oiled-up sword and move on. The entity's new host had been captured early, before it could feed for the first time, courtesy of a well-laid trap. It could be stabilized for transport, studied in captivity, become a crucial tool of enlightenment for the rest of humanity.
Ben didn't understand what they were talking about. He couldn't see, couldn't breathe, it was all swimming like water. He was in his house and he was so far below the surface of the sea that there was no light but the great baleful eye staring deep into his soul where there was nothing he could hide. Something inside him he couldn't name hurt more than he could possibly imagine. He didn't want to go. He didn't want to stay. He didn't want to feel this hungry for another moment. He didn't want to hurt anyone. He peered through the depths and saw the pale, crimson-eyed hunter.
The hunter said he had a livelihood to look after. Said he was here on a job, and no results meant no pay. The man in the suit laughed and dug a black leather checkbook with gold at the corners out of his pocket. He wrote a check with more zeroes than the hunter had ever seen in his life. That included the one in rubles he saw in his parents' hands when he was six years old. The slip of paper was torn away by the wind the moment it left the man in the suit's hand, circling the room twice before landing half-sodden by the hunter's boot.
The host hadn't even fed yet.
The host would feed unless stopped.
Ben didn't want to be in a box, forever looking through the glass at the world he'd been taken from.
He was just a kid.
He was a danger to the world. At least this way he would serve a purpose.
The hunter was not a complicated man. He did not deal well with shades of grey, with weighing two evils carefully to determine which was the lesser. He went for the simplest solution. The one he could believe in.
Had to be quick. Precise. Outnumbered and outmatched. Given the choice, he would rather be outmatched. The hunter dipped his hand beneath his jacket and hurled something that shattered against the brine-soaked carpet. A blinding flash, a deafening thunderclap, lightning in a bottle. Upflung arms shielded seared eyes behind gas mask visors. The hunter's were unharmed. Trained soldiers' reflexes responded an instant later, but an instant was all the hunter needed.
A stainless steel combat knife emerged from within his jacket. A deep gash in the wrist of the first, severing the tendons, nearly taking the hand with it. Froze the trigger finger. He whipped the blade across the throat, certain death. Pivoted, drove the tip into the larynx of the second, left it there. Stepped inside his reach, controlled the dead man's grip. A wild spray of bullets stitched its way across the third man's chest, shattering body armour, punching through the man within, cratering the wall beyond with blood and brass. Over in seconds.
Long enough for the Glass Walker to shift. A changing steel-knuckled fist crashed into the hunter's sternum with the force of a runaway train. Every scrap of breath in his lungs was torn free in a single sickening gasp as he was launched clean off his feet. Internal bleeding, tissue trauma, organs largely undamaged for now. Manageable. Drywall cracked and wood splintered beneath his back as he went through the wall, the world blurred as he tumbled. He hit something, a washing machine maybe. Rose to see the mountain of hard, shifting muscle sheathed in snow-white fur cast off the last scraps of its ruined suit. To see black lips pull back in a snarl, exposing titanium fangs. To see steel claws as sharp as scalpels unsheathed.
The white wolf charged and the hunter moved, evading death by a hair's breadth. Only the silver blade was left where he once stood, rising in a backhand slash across the Glass Walker's ribs. Parting hide. Scraping against tungsten ribs. The blade emerged bloodstained but blunted, edge crushed almost flat. The hunter whirled fast enough to blur, spinning the sword in his hands. Aimed the undamaged edge at something fleshier. A nick, a flesh wound, as the wolf darted back with speed that belied its size. Responded with an uppercut slash that would disembowel the hunter, tear him in half like the dishwasher that had borne its first strike.
The hunter hurled himself back through the hole in the wall, hearing the white wolf's claws slash the air across his back. The carpet squelched, stung his nose with the stink of salt, as he rolled and rose to his feet. The hunter fished another IED out of his jacket, launched it at the charging werewolf with a desperate backhand toss. The Glass Walker saw it coming. Batted it out of the air easily.
The casing shattered. The silver dust burst free in a glittering cloud. The storm winds caught it like a great hand and force-fed the werewolf its choking anathema. Whirring, luminous eyes did not betray the Glass Walker but the sockets they sat within did. Furious tears flooded forth, blinded it. Its great body convulsed in wheezing, barking coughs. The moment of weakness as the white wolf attempted to purge the hated metal from its body was all the hunter needed.
The hunter drove his silver sword between the third and fourth ribs on the right side of the sternum. Punctured the lung clean through. The hunter tore it free, rending a great gash through its chest. The wolf collapsed to one knee in a pool of blood, heaving, retching blood. The hunter's to finish. He turned away.
The man in the neat charcoal grey suit raised an angular black handgun that would not be on the market for two hundred years. Cyan light flickered within the barrel as jets of hot steam vented through slits in the frame. The man's eyes blazed with fury through his cracked glasses. No cover, no chance of dodging, no chance of reaching him in time.
The hunter raised his free hand, tracing a runic shape in the air that made his ears ring and his teeth rattle in their gums. Made himself a conduit, a circuit for something that reopened old scars and made faded ink burn like hot coals. A tunnel was torn through the storm, water rippling at the passage of power. An invisible fist drove into the man in the suit's stomach, driving him against the wall behind him. A bolt of plasma erupted from the handgun, went wide, tunneled clear through the house and soared off into the night sky like a comet in reverse. The not-so-neat-anymore charcoal grey suit protected the man within, as it would protect him from anything short of close-range anti-materiel rounds. The hunter collapsed to his knees, silver sword splashing down beyond his reach. Retched up blood that sizzled as it spattered in the brine, smoked as it mingled in crimson threads.
Ben saw the hunter, his would-be saviour, go down. Saw his captor rise, ruffled but unhurt. Angrily adjust his cufflinks, smooth down his hair, and level the pistol right out of a sci-fi movie once more. All this happening because of him and there was nothing he could do, nothing with all the pain and fury and mind-numbing cold filling him up inside but-
-see the emitter, displaced by the hunter's final gambit. Flickering and dying on its side. A break in the circle.
He looked inside, stopped drowning, and dived deeper. He found the warmth again.
The second shot went off-course too. Boiling water spattered against the hunter's cheek as the plasma bolt tunneled through the carpet, through the foundation, into the earth's skin beneath. A third did not follow because the shooter was rigid, flesh pale and blue from cold. Because his eyes were bulging near out of their sockets. Because the only sound that could escape him was a weak, wheezing death rattle. Because several feet of oily blue-green flesh that reeked of salt and ozone were wrapped around his wrist and throat, squeezing. Because they squeezed until bone clicked and broke, until cartilage crushed, and the man in the charcoal grey suit went limp as a ragdoll.
The nerveless corpse splashed down in the inch-deep lake the living room had become. The tentacle followed suit with a heavy, wet 'slap'. The indoor storm slowly ebbed as the immense pseudopod retracted, slithering back to its host. Tears glistened on Ben's cheeks, blue-veined and ghostly pale, as the tentacle sank beneath his skin like a creature returning to the deep. As he watched the uncomprehending horror on his mother and brother's faces. Too terrified to even scream.
The water rippled as the hunter picked up his silver sword. As he straightened, blood streaming from his nose and mouth in watered-down rivulets. Each footfall splashed as he approached, standing over Ben. The blood-spattered killer and the monster he came for.
"I don't… want to hurt anyone…"
"I know."
Leather creaked softly. No sword fell. Ben looked up. A gloved hand was extended to him.
"I'll take you somewhere safe."
Ben didn't look back. Not at his brother, whispering in terror to 911 on his phone. Not at his mother, hiding behind the doorframe from the monster in her son's skin. The distant wail of sirens, growing steadily closer, meant little to him. Weakly, numbly, he took the offered hand.
By the time the sirens got there, the hunter and the beast were long gone.
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