Talia

I’m a gymnast, you know.

Well, I was a gymnast anyway. I don’t get much chance to compete these days. Plenty of chances to practice with the gymnastics bit, though, so I still count that. My brother’s always on my bloody case about it. He says ‘Talia, you’re not getting a score. Just kill the damned things already,’ but he’s just a big damn spoilsport. Flipping around and pretending I’m flying is at least half the fun, if you ask me.

I guess it all started back when Daddy adopted my brother. Well, really, it started before that, but I don’t even remember that so it’s as far back as I’m damn well going, and all I’ve got to go on is what my brother tells me. His name is Ryan, by the way. Ryan Fearghas Kavanagh. I’d give him more hell than I already do for that, but my middle name isn’t much better. It’s all because of Daddy, and the names he picked out ages and ages ago. I’m just glad Mom got him to give us regular first names, or else I’d just be Delwyn Kavanagh and I would never hear the end of it. I guess it worked out well enough for high school, though, since we were all into nature and peace and that sort of s**t, so everybody who actually knew my middle name just thought it was some sort of Tolkien thing and thought nothing of it.

Right, right, I was telling you something important.

It started when Daddy adopted Ryan. He was already a year old or so by then—Ryan, not Daddy—and his parents had been killed in the crossfire, so to speak. Goodness only knows what possessed Daddy to adopt a bloody baby all by himself in the middle of a war, but he did, and it worked out in the end. Not too long after the war was over Daddy met my Mom and they got married and had me. Mom and I look almost identical, except she was five-foot-nine and I’m only five-foot-one so I think I got Daddy’s height—he was five-foot-nine, too, which is tall for a girl but kind of bloody short for a guy, at least compared to my giant of a brother. I grow my hair longer than Mom did, too, but it’s the same color blonde as Mom’s and I have Daddy’s eyes.

Anyway, we grew up together and nobody would believe that we were related until we told them he was adopted because I’m short and blonde and pasty-white and he’s tall and he’s got black hair and sort of dusky skin. I think Ryan got kind of sick of having to tell people he was adopted, because he hates to talk about it even though plenty of people are adopted, but that’s my brother for you. The only real problem was that he wasn’t blood-related to Daddy so he couldn’t be a hunter after he turned eighteen, so maybe that was it. I certainly gave him enough s**t about that. I was related by blood, so I was actually ‘hunterborn’, so I would be a hunter when I grew up, but Ryan wouldn’t. I really shouldn’t have teased him about it so damned much. I know I shouldn’t have. But he’s got this way about him that makes it really, really easy to tease him and it’s really unfortunate that underneath it all he’s a big damn Mister Sensitive.

We hung out it way different crowds, too. Not just because he’s four years older than me, so he was a senior in high school while I was still in eighth grade. I was in gymnastics, and I was a cheerleader, too, so I was always hanging out with the rest of the popular girls and going to parties and concerts and s**t. Ryan was more of the loner sort of guy, with his motorcycle and leather jacket—which always made me laugh—and he would get all pissy if somebody invaded his space. So he didn’t have many friends, really. He spent most of his time after school helping Daddy out in the store for a little spending money.

Despite what you might be thinking, though, we got along great. He’s always been there to sort of keep an eye on me and bail me out whenever I got in trouble. I remember this one time I was really little and I don’t know why Daddy or Mom didn’t notice, but I managed to get out onto the fire escape and I was trying to climb all the way up to the bloody top of our building. I almost got there, but then my hand slipped off that damned rusty metal grating and I fell. I scratched my arm pretty bad in the process, too, and I still have that scar even though I was only five at the time. I really thought I was going to die, at that point, and I fell backwards for what felt like forever, but it was only a few feet. Before I even landed on the platform on the top floor Ryan caught me and carried me back down to our apartment. I don’t think he was any more than nine, then, so that should tell you something.

Daddy had a best friend, Seth, and he lived about an hour away by taxi, out in Brooklyn. Seth had a wife and a daughter, Lily, who was a few years older than us. She used to baby-sit us all the time when Mom and Daddy wanted to go out for the evening. Lily was really nice. She would cook us these cool French things that her mother had taught her to make, and she would get down on the floor with us and tell us stories Seth had told her about when he and Daddy used to go hunting together. I think she was about six or seven years older than Ryan. All seven of us—Mom, Daddy, Ryan, me, Seth, his wife Rosalie, and Lily—would go on trips together sometimes, too. Sometimes it was just a few of us. Daddy and Seth were best friends, of course, and I decided when I was six that Lily was my best friend too.

We went down to the shore at least a few times, and also to a couple different amusement parks. We didn’t really go that often. Mom was a schoolteacher and Daddy had the convenience store, so we had enough money to live in the city but not much else. Our apartment was upstairs from the store, and it had been in the family for a while—the apartment and the store. Our cousins had bought the entire building back when everything in Manhattan was still pretty cheap, and our apartment was actually pretty damned big, considering. None of the friends I had over from school had any idea. They all thought we were all bloody rich, to live in an apartment that big. Three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a nice, big living room.

The only problem was that since we had such a big space, our cousins would use it a shitload when they needed to check over the maps, or something. I never really got what all of the maps and binders and paperwork were for. Ryan told me it was all red-tape bullshit and he wasn’t going to get worked up over it. Not that he was going to have to worry about it anyway, since he wasn’t hunterborn. Either way, it all seemed way too damned complicated to me. I was more interested in the demons and nests, and all that s**t that sounded like it came out of a grand, heroic fairytale. I still remember when Daddy first told me that I would be a hunter one day—I felt like some sort of princess or elf or something, which of course led me to tell Ryan that he would be my vassal… yeah, that didn’t go over too well.

Still, though, Ryan is the best brother ever, because he forgave me for all that silly crap I said when I was a kid, even though I really was a bit of a b***h about it. He’s just nice like that. He started watching me when our parents went out, after he was old enough, so we didn’t always have to go to Lily’s house. It was kind of a shame, because Lily was the nicest girl in the entire world, but it was bloody awesome being able to hang out, just the two of us. I know he regrets it now, but he would let me eat whatever s**t I wanted. Cookies, ice cream, popcorn… Popcorn was the best. He’d stand there and pop a damned mountain of it for me and we would camp out all night in the living room and eat popcorn and watch television until Mom and Daddy came home, and then we’d get our asses off the floor and jump in bed real quick before they caught us.

Ryan wanted to be a mechanic. He was really bloody good at taking care of his motorcycle, and he would sometimes change the oil in Seth’s car or something for a few dollars. He was never into that whole higher-education s**t. I tried to picture him as some stuffed suit working in a skyscraper, once, and I laughed my a*s off for ten bloody minutes straight. I mean he’s not an idiot or anything like that. He’s as smart as anybody, and probably smarter than me, but he doesn’t give a rat’s a*s about having a lot of money or showing up nine-to-five at a job he hates. So he wanted to be a mechanic. It probably would have suited him just fine, too.

Me, I never had any kind of career ambition. I guess I just always figured I would end up doing what I do now—waitressing, retail, that kind of s**t. Any place that would take me. By the time I was in eighth grade the only thing I gave a s**t about was learning how to hunt. I got in trouble more than once for the horrible grades I got in school because of it—mostly from Mom. Daddy only worried if there was a chance I would actually fail something and have to take it over. He didn’t even have a damned diploma. They weren’t exactly handing those things around to everybody when he was a kid back in last bloody century. I think all he ever did was just apprentice to his own father, and that was it.

Mom, though… Mom would get pissed. I don’t think it helped that she was a teacher too, even if it was only for elementary school. Every time I got disciplined—I mean really disciplined—it was Mom’s idea. Daddy wouldn’t ever believe that I was anything but a little princess.

I feel bad about it, sometimes. I know it wasn’t my fault. There was no way it could really be my fault. But I couldn’t take back all those times I wished Mom would drop dead, mostly when she grounded me for getting a D in a class, and it made me feel like absolute s**t. Something you ought to know—and I don’t know if anybody else has told you this part yet—is that Daddy was married before, back before he was called, and his wife was killed by sucker-demons. It took him half a bloody century to get over that s**t, if he ever really did, before he met Mom.

Anyway, Daddy was out on a hunt somewhere in Central Park I think—he really loved hunting out there—and Ryan and I were staying at a cousin’s place. Mom had to go to the store, because she wanted to make spaghetti for Daddy only there wasn’t any sauce to use so she went out for just a minute, down to a little specialty store that sold Italian food, only she never came back.

I don’t know how it could have happened. There should have been enough people around for it not to happen, since it wasn’t that late or anything. Nobody really knows what happened. The only reason I know is because I eavesdropped on Ryan and Daddy talking while I was supposed to be in bed. Daddy had walked back home and smelled blood in one of the alleys two blocks away, and he found Mom on the ground. By that time it was way too late to do anything to save her. He was so shaken that he left her there for just a minute to track down the sucker-demon that had done it—it still smelled like Mom—and destroy it. Then he called us, and he made Ryan and me stay there overnight and lock the doors, even though they’re not supposed to be able to come inside people’s houses. Daddy came by a few hours later and I heard him telling Ryan what happened.

The funeral was the next day. One of our cousins was a clerk at the police department so he filed all the paperwork, or else there would have been too many questions. Daddy was awful. He just… shrank into himself, and he looked close to dead inside. No emotions, no caring about the world. I don’t know much about grief, but I think what happened, especially after the same thing happened to his first wife, just broke him inside.

Ryan, who was seventeen by then, took over a lot of the things Mom and Daddy used to. He started skipping school to help out more with the store, and he cooked what he could for dinner, and made sure the apartment got cleaned and the clothes got washed, and all that kind of s**t. I’m not sure when the last time was that I really gave him any hell—not just the teasing kind, that doesn’t count—but I know I never did after Mom died. He had enough s**t to deal with, without a little b***h of a sister making his life any harder. I even tried to help out when I could, even though I was completely useless in the kitchen for anything but popping popcorn.

Daddy never got better. It took him a bloody month to leave the apartment and go downstairs and deal with our convenience store, but after that it was all he would do. He never even went hunting after that. I asked him, of course, because I was getting really bloody worried about him, and he just grumbled “What for?” and didn’t say anything else. He was like that for a year.

I started high school that next year, and Ryan had me join up for all the teams that I could. Gymnastics, cheerleading, chorus, he just kept pushing me to join all those bloody groups. I mean, yeah, I loved doing all that stuff but it kind of felt like he was trying to get rid of me or something. I ended up staying at school late almost every day of the week. Ryan stayed home for most of it and took care of Daddy and the store. Seth had moved to Spain to live with Lily, or I’m sure they would have come by to help too. And I have the feeling that Daddy told anybody else that came by to check on him to go to hell. So we were pretty much on our own.

Daddy stayed for a year.

I think he was holding on as long as he could. He was waiting until Ryan turned eighteen.

There is more than one way for a hunter to adopt someone, you see. Not just the legal kind that makes them a parent. Not all of our cousins are born to all this. Daddy himself was adopted, in that sense.

I’m sure you know by now that we can use our blood to heal people. The fire that gives us such life is strongest in the blood, carried by it. By sacrificing a part of it to somebody else we’re giving that person a part of that fire… including its handy side effect of healing injuries. Give a person enough blood, and you give them your life. Your fire.

That doesn’t mean it kills you, necessarily. The idea is that just as you’re about to die the person you’re adopting is able to heal you back, only after it’s done the hunter and the human have swapped. Daddy swapped with a hunter sixty years ago, and he swapped again with Ryan the day he turned eighteen. They say there’s a bit more than that to the whole thing, but you only get it if you go through it.

And then he left us.

I came home from school one day to find Ryan sitting on the couch and Daddy’s body in his arms, blood everywhere. He was always so collected, and calm, and in control, but I saw him sitting there with his face all red and streaked, and his hand was still against Daddy’s chest, and his arm was bleeding from a gash down the vein. He had tried to save him, tried to heal him, but you can’t heal somebody who doesn’t want to live and was never injured anyway. He was still trying to save him even though it was already too late. I finally pulled Daddy away from him and he stopped bleeding. Our skin only stays open if we’re touching someone, so we can heal them all the way.

Ryan looked up at me from where he’d been staring at Daddy and his eyes looked twenty years older. He just gave this sigh, and swallowed, and stood up. We had to call some of our cousins to help with the body and then we had to get a completely new couch, since that one was completely bloody ruined. I was sure it would take forever to get the damned stain out of the carpet. He had me stay at one of my friend’s places for a couple of days and when I came back I couldn’t even tell that there had ever been anything wrong. The only thing missing was Daddy, but then again he had pretty much been missing for a whole damned year.

There was another funeral, of course. Ryan called the Organizer and got the papers drawn up to make him my legal guardian. Everybody knew what had happened, of course, even if Daddy hadn’t let them help. But they were helping now. They even gave him new ID to say that he was twenty-five so he’d have an easier time of it. There’s a lot of a******s out there that wouldn’t have treated him like an adult if they knew he was really eighteen. He dropped completely out of school, and took over the store full-time. It was enough for the two of us.

He spent a lot of time at all that—working, taking care of the two of us, and I started to get a bit worried about him. He was always a bloody loner, but it was getting out of hand, so I did my best to get him to come with me whenever one of my friends had a party. My best tactic turned out to be to just annoy the everlasting s**t out of him until he gave in and did what I wanted, or I wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace. I got him trained pretty damned good, actually. After a while all I had to do was start in on it and he would tell me to shut up, he’d do it. I figured it was the least I could do, to get him out and about, after all he did for me.

The rest of high school passed by pretty quickly for me. I kept up with most of my groups, and even started one or two of my own, including a “Friends of the Beautiful Earth” club that my brother still gives me s**t about. What can I say? It was the sixties. We were all about that loving-nature s**t. Well, we still are, but we’re not quite as obnoxious about it. Cheerleading was fun, though not as fun as gymnastics, and I got to date all the football players I wanted. Every so often I’d go out with a guy from the chess club or marching band for variety. Ryan was lucky, at least, since Daddy had already given me that talk about the birds and the bees, so all he had to do was show me where he stocked the condoms in the store. Oh, and he also told me he’d be there to get me out of trouble with anything but that—if I got myself into s**t in the bedroom I had to deal with it myself, because he just wasn’t going to go there.

Ryan started training me, too. He had a dummy set up on the roof that he would sometimes practice on, since he hadn’t trained at all, or even had any warning, before he was called. He made me some fake claws, too, out of bits of wood and leather and old belts, so I could practice and get used to what it was like to hunt with claws. To say I was enthusiastic about all this s**t would be seriously understating things. Poor Ryan got up to the roof one day and found out I’d kicked that dummy’s a*s all over the place. You’ve got to make sure they’re dead, right?

Anyway, eventually I graduated, and Ryan got his GED. I actually turned eighteen while I was still in high school, but he wouldn’t let me get called until I graduated, the b*****d. He probably thought I’d blow off school if I was a hunter, and he was probably right, especially since he’d done the same bloody thing. So I passed all the classes, and I graduated.

It’s usually a blood relative that helps with the calling, but Mom had only been human and Daddy was gone so Ryan took his place. It kind of fit, anyway. He was as much my brother as he could be, especially now that Daddy had given him life. The morning after I graduated he took me out to the edge of the island, just the two of us, so we could catch the first light of dawn. I’ve heard that that part’s not actually necessary, but I can’t even imagine what being called would be like without that sunrise burning through me and making my whole body glow, it felt like. Everything was so much sharper, clearer, and damn was it prettier. Forget me, the whole bloody world was glowing, and Ryan stood there like a human bloody floodlight.

I got back home and realized I was stronger, too, and faster. Mostly faster. All those flips and gymnastics I’d been doing half my life really did feel like flying, I could get so high. I spent that entire night racing around the rooftops and jumping over entire bloody streets and landing on roofs a story higher than me. Ryan was absolutely bloody furious. He ranted and pissed for an hour about how I shouldn’t be risking myself like that and people could have seen me and blah blah blah. I put on my “sweet little girl” bit and calmed him down, and after that he told me to just stick with him when I wanted to go out at night and he’d take me hunting with him.

I offered to help with the store, too, but he told me he had it all covered even though it was really just him working there, so I got a job waitressing at one of the restaurants that was in walking distance of our apartment. I made good bloody money at that too. Not the wages, of course. My wages were absolute s**t. But I got really, really bloody good at getting the customers to leave some really generous tips for me. I don’t know about blondes having more fun, but we do seem to rake in the cash when it comes to tipping customers. It was great fun for a while, me waitressing and Ryan working in the store and the two of us going out and hunting every bloody night. We didn’t always find anything, but that was okay.

I don’t know, I guess I got kind of bored after a while. Sure, the hunting was great, but we could do that anywhere. I’d lived in that same damn building for my entire life and after a while… I guess I just got bored of it. You live in any one city for very long, you start to realize that most people are pretty much the same, though maybe within certain categories. You’ve got the rich white-collar b******s, all trying to play in the stock market and buy the most expensive designer suit. There’s the aspiring artists, actors, singers, and what have you, all obsessed with their bullshit drama on and off the stage. The assorted ethnic groups, descended from immigrants who built up their livings from scratch and maybe they weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury now but they’d be damned if they moved away from their home that great-great-grandpa had made for them. There’s a few others too, of course, but you get the idea. The point was, I was bored of that city, and bored of the people, and honestly I was bored of our building.

Ryan was cool with it. I don’t know whether he was bored, too—unlikely—or if he just didn’t want to deal with the s**t he must have known I’d pull if he said no. Although I don’t think it was the latter, either, because he’s usually more pissy when it’s something he doesn’t want to do and he b*****s a lot more too. Well, anyway, he said okay and asked where I wanted to go and called up the Organizer so he could find another hunter family to take over our old place. We ended up selling most of our stuff, so we wouldn’t have to worry about taking it with us. Ryan didn’t have much to begin with. I was a little more hesitant to give up my things, especially my gymnastics trophies, but he finally convinced me that I could then go shopping for all sorts of new clothes and things once we got to wherever we were going.

Eventually I decided on California. We left in the spring, so it was nice and warm out, and took off on Ryan’s silly damned motorcycle. We headed south a bit first, down through Pennsylvania and Maryland and stopping in WashingtonD.C. for a while and staying in a crap-a*s motel, and then we got onto Route 66 and headed west. Daddy had left us a decent amount of money that Ryan hadn’t touched while we were still in New York, so we were able to stay in motels and get food and all that s**t without worrying about finding any kind of work on the way. It’s a good thing, too. Seeing all those places was fun and all but I would have gone apeshit if I had to stay in one of those little towns long enough for a paycheck. At least the demons held out. Even without any clubs or bars there was plenty of nightly entertainment to keep us busy. It was kind of weird, actually—we passed through towns with a population I could count on my fingers and there were still just as many of the damned things for us to kill as there had been in New York, taking into account that there were also more hunters back there too.

We didn’t see too many of our cousins on the road. It was always great when we did, since that meant we could stay overnight at their houses instead of finding yet another piece of s**t motel. We ate better those nights, too. Neither one of us wanted to cook anything even when the motel happened to have some sorry bullshit excuse for a kitchenette, but Ryan wouldn’t let us go out and eat anywhere nice so we ended up at the greasiest spoon diners ever created. Mostly Ryan would sit and pick at his sandwich or whatever and watch me eat my chili-bacon-cheeseburger in horror. Ever since I was called food just doesn’t seem to stick to me, so I like to take advantage of that as often as I can.

Next thing I knew, we’d made it all the way to Nevada. The flat, dry emptiness had stopped freaking me the hell out finally but the mountains in the distance where a wonderfully welcome site, even if they weren’t quite the same as skyscrapers. Hell of a lot better than Utah. I made him let us stay in Las Vegas for a month, just to celebrate the return to my idea of civilization. The bright lights everywhere were like Times Square only more interesting and more of them. I even tried my hand at some of the casinos, but honestly the whole thing didn’t really appeal to me. I got bored after a few pulls on one of those machines with the levers on them and snuck into a show instead. My poor brother holed himself up in our damned hotel room for almost the entire time, while I had a bloody blast. It’s amazing how many people will let a flirtatious little blonde girl do whatever she wants, and any clubs or shows I couldn’t get into by flirting I just snuck in through a side door. Thank goodness Seth had showed me a bit of how to pick locks before he left for Spain.

There were a lot of demons, too. Now that was one thing that Ryan would leave the hotel room for. I couldn’t hardly walk down the street without running into one. They were bloody everywhere, just walking around like they owned the damned place. If it hadn’t been for how miserable Ryan was and me having my heart set on seeing California I might have been tempted to stay there.

Great place, Las Vegas.

I wanted to see more, though, so we were off again, still going west. We ended up in San Francisco for a little while, and it was a pretty great place all in all. We wandered around for a few days, getting a feel for it—and s**t, there was a lot to see—and spending some time out on the beach enjoying the sun and mocking the s**t out of the surfer dudes. There were also plenty of our cousins walking around so we stopped and talked to a bunch of them. They, at least, were all super nice to us. I bloody love having cousins in every damned city. I really liked it there, and Ryan seemed pretty okay with it, so we found a cheap little apartment through the local Organizer and we set up shop.

I found another job working as a waitress at this great little place just two feet from the beach that had the best fried fish in the whole damned world, and Ryan ended up as a security guard for this really ritzy jewelry store. Apparently they sold some seriously expensive s**t and didn’t even want to take the slightest chance that it’d get swiped, regardless of whatever insurance I’m sure they had on every bloody piece. I have this feeling whoever interviewed him took one bloody look at him and hired him on the spot. Six-foot-four and covered in muscles and he looks I swear like he could take out a truck if it crossed him. Come to think of it, he probably could. So the job was a total cinch.

We did that for… s**t, I don’t know how long. A while. A few years I guess. We moved around a bit more. Sometimes we’d get an apartment for a year or however long the shortest time the landlord would let us, and sometimes we’d find some friendly cousin who let us sleep on the couch. Well… I got to sleep on the couch. Ryan usually got a blanket and the floor, not that he ever complained. He’s way too tough s**t to complain about something like that. I eventually got myself a rental car—I was plenty old enough to be able to get one all by myself by then-—and I would drive all up and down just looking at all the new s**t I found. If it wasn’t the gorgeous coast it was the bloody awesome gorgeous celebrities’ homes, and I saw a lot of celebrities, too. All hot s**t and Prada. Some of them were pretty decent people, too. A lot of total b*****s, but a lot of cool people.

We tracked down all the hunters that lived near us… well, I tracked them down. Ryan still didn’t really give a s**t. Not a sociable guy, that brother of mine. I had them over for parties a whole lot, those times that we actually had our own place, and we would just order a dozen damned pizzas and sodas and chips and s**t and stay up until crazy hours of the night. Sometimes I even got Ryan to join us. Usually, though, he would only get himself up and about to go to work, run errands, or go hunting with me. We still did that every night, and it was even more fun with all the bloody demons running around everywhere. It was a damn bloody miracle that people weren’t disappearing right and left, considering how many of the things there were. Well, we made a nice dent in them.

We made it to Los Angeles sometime around 1980, and of course I had to make a few jokes about that. Cool place, though. I’m kind of glad we waited to move there, because by the time we did I already knew a whole bunch of people so that made everything just so much more fun. I probably would have gotten bored of the place eventually, although I definitely liked it a lot more than the other places we’d been, just because of not knowing many people there.

When we were there, though, I had met a whole lot of people—even humans—who knew a whole lot of really good clubs and party scenes and especially bands.

We actually ended up meeting a lot of people who knew people that we already knew. Like, we ran into Lavanya Prakash, Sari’s daughter. Sari was the Organizer for New Jersey back when Daddy was living there. And Luciano Benenati, who was pretty good friends with Daddy and Seth. It was weird—Daddy had told me that Luciano hardly ever left his own bloody country, and never set foot outside of Europe. Seriously, never. That being the case, I of course took him under my wing and brought him around to really experience the cool s**t that was Los Angeles. He seemed to dig the punk music, particularly, or at least the scene. Who could blame him? It was always good times, and the people there never gave a s**t about what kind of job you had, or anything like that. It was just flat-out anarchy. Got to love it.

I tried getting Luco into other s**t, too—some of the parties and whatnot—but he wasn’t as into all that. Come to think of it, he was always kind of moody. Not like Ryan—he’s just got this vibe about him—but really pissing about something all the time. I tried to wiggle it out of him a few times, but the b*****d was shut off tight, so I just ignored it after a while. I never really got people that could be so angsty and feeling so s****y all the time. Especially hunters, I mean seriously! Humans, okay, they’ve got their hormonal imbalances and s****y jobs and middle age and heaven knows what crazy-a*s diseases so I can see them getting depressed. Imagine going around feeling so lonely all the time! I couldn’t do it. But, hunters! Bloody hell, we don’t have to worry about any of that s**t! What’s there to be depressed about? Hell, just waking up in the morning makes me feel all warm and shiny.

So, no, I didn’t get old Luco at all. He wouldn’t cheer up, so I just kept bringing him around to the concerts and hoping something would stick.

 S**t, there were so many great concerts that we went to.

All hardcore badass punk groups that seriously knew how to start up a good time. The places were absolutely flooded with demons, too. I got to go to these places with awesome music blasting and living, sweating souls all rubbing against me and everybody else and step into the back and nail a sucker… and then come back and start back with it all over again! Oh, absolute bloody heaven. The stupid demons never even knew what hit them.

Only, they started to.

It was really bloody weird, right? I mean, everybody knows that the demons can’t see us. We just look like any other person to them, since they can’t really see us. Well, they can see us, but not see u-… s**t, you know what? Just take my word for it. Way too hard to explain. The point is, there’s no way they should have been going after us specifically. S**t, if anything, they should have been avoiding us, since we’re not even close to being the easy meal that anybody else would be. Smart predators go after the weak prey, not the prey that gets its jollies off killing the predator.

So, yeah, it was bizarre.

We didn’t really think anything of it, at first. Any demon retarded enough to take us on got its damned head removed, and that was the end of that. It was several months before we realized that it was a shitload worse than we’d thought.

It wasn’t just us at the clubs and bars getting jumped. That would have been alright. But hunters just going about their lives started disappearing, when they weren’t even out hunting or even thinking about hunting. Sometimes there were bodies that showed up… sometimes not. I walked into Lavanya’s place one day—since that’s where we were crashing at the time—and the landlord was in the apartment, packing all her s**t into boxes. He told me that she’d just skipped out a couple days back, he couldn’t find her anywhere, so he was going to give the apartment to somebody else. We hadn’t seen her, either, but we paid the b*****d off and he let us keep all our s**t and the apartment, anyway. I never did find out what happened to her for sure, though I can guess well enough.

The L.A. Organizer called a Council meeting not long after that. He had heard the rumors of hunters getting killed, and had gone around to everybody in the area just to check on them. We were getting killed, alright. Almost a third of our population in the city was unaccounted for, and most of those were families. The best explanation we had was that somebody must have betrayed us, either a human who’d accidentally seen something he shouldn’t have, or else a hunter, although the second one was so unlikely we just laughed it off. The only trouble was that whoever the traitor was, it was somebody who’d had access to Records in order to give away those addresses and s**t, so then that meant it must have been a hunter or, if not, a human who knew way way too damned bloody much.

The Organizer told us to keep an eye out and never sleep alone. We had to move out of our apartment, too—most of the time when a cousin was killed, he was right in his own backyard, so we decided to have everybody up and move and not even tell a damned soul where we were moving to, since they seemed to know where we all lived, or at least most of us. Let me tell you, real estate prices jumped like a b***h for a few months while we all played at our musical chairs.

The good news was, it got a little better after that in L.A.

The bad news was it was spreading.

We called around to the other areas, to let them know what was happening, and they all said that the same thing was starting to happen to them. It spread out from our area, eventually getting to Vegas and up to San Francisco. The worst part was, when our Organizers took the time to check on human deaths, they were actually dropping. The bloody b*****d demons really were going after just us, and they were winning, which was the really scary part.

See, for as long as anyone can remember, we’ve always had the upper hand over the demons. They might reproduce faster, especially the bloody feeders, but we’re just as strong as they are, if not stronger, and we’ve definitely got the whole element of surprise, so I guess we were all taken by bloody surprise when they got the drop on us. We started going after them during the day, just to try to get some advantage. It was harder to find them, then—they tended to hole up in whatever nests they’d made for themselves. Sometimes feeders would be wandering around, but it was a lot harder to snag one when they were going around just like ordinary people and even working jobs.

Luco skipped out about that time. I figured at the time he just got hit and disappeared like the rest of us were disappearing. Anyway, I didn’t see him again after that. I didn’t really worry about it. I hate to say this, but we were all sort of getting used to everybody we knew getting killed. Ryan in particular really stepped up to all the s**t that was going on. He’s always been a good fighter, but something about the whole situation just snapped him, and he went total ape-s**t berserk. Heaven help a nest if he found them. He would go at them like some sort of pissed-off firstborn-killing avenging angel and I would feel like a weird spectator for all the kills I got… or didn’t get, more like, because he shredded through every last one. Don’t ask me where he got so good at it.

I got good, too, though. I mean, how could I not? There’s getting one or two demons most nights out of the week, and then there’s going through closer to a nest a week and you’re going to get good or you’re going to get killed and, well, I got good. The whole gymnastics thing helped for damned bloody sure. I’m not half as freakishly strong as Ryan but there’s not a demon alive who can catch hold of me when I’m on my game. I screwed around a little one time when I didn’t have anything particular else to do and I was kind of bored, and I got up to fourteen feet on a good night’s rest. Just going from a cold start, no prep or handsprings or any of that s**t. So, obviously, that tended to help with keeping myself out of reach. It’s always a hell of a thing to jump clean over one of those bloody buggers and land in back of them and see how completely baffled they are, considering that they just thought I was a helpless little human girl with no means to protect her poor little self.

It wasn’t easy, though.

S**t, we lost so many bloody people. It was worst in the big cities. For whatever reason the more rural areas got left alone. Higher concentration of both our kinds in cities, I guess. Anyway, we lost a lot of our cousins. Too many. Way, way bloody too many. It was bullshit how many died. Some people just up and left, taking their families with them if they were still alive. Meanwhile the Organizers and Record-keepers were up to their asses in paperwork, getting death certificates cranked out for everybody that died that said s**t like “boating accident” or “drug overdose”. I’m telling you, it’s a damned good thing we’ve got hooks in the system, or there would have been some serious sniffing around by all those nosy government red-tape bullshit bureaucrat types.

Bloody useless, all of them. They just make life more difficult. Ours are bad enough, and they don’t even give a s**t what people do as long as everybody gets what they need to get by. That and keeping track of family lines and where people are. It’s always good to be able to track down a relative after a few decades of having no idea where they are, and it’s even better to find out that the guy you’re about to marry is actually your second cousin, as in, same exact great-granddaddy. Not me—s**t, that would have sucked—but it did happen to this other girl I ran into in France. So, thank goodness for Record-keepers, but that’s about it.

Bloody hell, I was talking about the war.

Well, we got word from all up and down the coast of the same thing happening, and also from further and further East. Vegas, definitely, and then Tucson and Salt Lake City and Denver and Chicago and Baltimore and New York. Straight out to the bloody East Coast, and back to where we’d come from. It turned out that our dear Lily had gotten herself a couple of kids, and her son Alejandro was in Manhattan and living in that very same damned apartment we’d moved out of all those years back. It was weird thinking about how there was somebody else living in our old place, but it did fit at least that it was Seth’s grandson. Seemed right, somehow.

By the time we’d heard that Alex was in New York, we had just about completely wiped out the demons in L.A. S**t, Ryan himself was responsible for shredding through at least half those damned nests almost single-handedly. I told you, he was possessed or some s**t. It was almost kind of scary. Unfortunately, just about all the hunters were gone too. I’d say about three-quarters of them had been killed, either minding their own business or fighting with the rest of us. A good chunk of the rest made it out of the city and into the country, where we all hoped they’d be safe. It took bloody forever to track down all of them after the war, since they hadn’t exactly left any forwarding addresses that the damned demons could follow. It did turn out that most of those were just fine, and they moved back a few years later, if they felt like it. That left only a handful of us and our cousins still in L.A.

The others had it under control. Ryan and I decided to head back East, to go after the rest of the damned demons and kill as many as we could. At first we figured we’d go through the cities one by one, working our way east through the major cities until we hit the other coast, but I guess since there was Lily’s son back in New York we just skipped over everything else and hopped a plane to Manhattan first chance we got. I don’t really like flying. It’s so cramped where we have to sit, and there’s bags and s**t packed in so tight you can hardly breathe. Okay, yeah, so it’s probably fantastic if you actually sit up where you’re theoretically supposed to, but s**t, who has the money for that? Not a bloody waitress and a security guard.

It turned out Alex had made a bit of a name for himself as well. I don’t know who he got it from, since both Seth and Lily were more of the laid-back family-focused healer-not-fighter types, but he’d gotten good. Just one of those things, I guess. Maybe his dad was badass. His girl was good, too, although she usually rocked the crossbow sniping them all from the rooftops and s**t. We ended up hunting together a whole lot. Ryan would have just as soon gone off by himself, but I made him come with the rest of us and we cleared out a whole shitload of nests.

Alex’s sister came, too, a gorgeous girl that looked creepily like Lily although more exotic and Mediterranean. Fioralba, I think, though we all called her Firi, or rather me and Aria called her Firi. I kind of thought Ryan might get into her, since she was so gorgeous and also Seth’s granddaughter, so our families had history together, but he never showed any interest. Not really the romantic type, my brother. He dated a bit in high school that I can remember, but not a word to me about any girl after Daddy died. Took him bloody decades for his hormones to kick back in and remind him that he was, for all intents and purposes, a horny eighteen-year-old. Idiot.

Even Seth was there, although as I said he’s not much for actual fighting so he spent most of his time talking with the Council and sending people where they were needed and making sure all the kids got out of the city and upstate where they could stay with relatives and s**t. All the adults—the actual hunters—were more or less drafted to help kill off these bloody demons who had for whatever reason decided to kill us in our sleep, the b******s. Basically, everybody over eighteen. As I understood it, little Firi was barely over the cutoff, or else Seth would have sent her right back home to Spain, where they’d been living. Can’t do a damn thing about it once somebody’s a hunter, though. Once immortal, always immortal, and you can’t be any more or less bloody immortal than anybody else. Just doesn’t work that way.

We did the same sort of thing we did in L.A., though we didn’t bother holding down jobs and there were more of us on a hunt at a time. Thank goodness we’ve been saving money for centuries—us as in all of us, that is—so there wasn’t any problem in supporting ourselves while we put all our efforts into getting rid of the b*****d demons.

I’m not sure where exactly we get all our money from. Bank accounts, I suppose, passed down through the years and transferred every so often. We own some land and some buildings, I do know that, like the building we used to live in and also townhouses and such. People leaving everything to the collective trust fund, so to speak, in their wills, that sort of thing. I don’t really know the details, but seriously if you as a group or culture or whatever have been around for bloody millennia, you’re really just going to have some cash saved up after all that time, so, like, if there’s ever a situation where somebody or a lot of somebodies needs money, it’s there. I guess the Organizers all keep track of it, or maybe the Record-keepers. I’ve never paid attention to all that red-tape bullshit.

So, another year maybe, and a whole shitload of hunting and fighting and more cousins killed and it turned out that Alex really was getting pretty badass about it. Not nearly as awesome as Ryan, of course, nobody can shred a demon like him, but he was really good at killing them, and knowing where they’d be. Sort of an intuitive thing, I guess, and his girl was exactly the same way. Cute little thing, kind of elfin features and ginger hair that looked like somebody had torched a load of rocket fuel on her head. Creepily intuitive, but a bloody good sharpshooter. Apparently she’d been killing demons even before she’d gotten called, so… yeah. Bloody fantastic for her, s**t.

Now the next few bits are kind of fuzzy in my head, mainly because I wasn’t there for a lot of them and they got told to me later. From what I could put together, rumors first started that there were demons now in Europe killing our cousins. Alex and his sister Firi called in to check on their family and found out that their parents were dead, as well as Seth’s wife and a few other relatives, mostly in that bit of Southeastern Spain and a few bits of France and Italy. Right about the same time that old b*****d Luco showed back up, right there in New York of all bloody places, looking even more miserable than ever. I think his family got hit too, so no wonder he was horrible. Wouldn’t tell us where he’d been, though. I think Alex was actually the one to find him, wandering around the streets in Hell’s Kitchen.

Then Alex comes to Ryan and says he thinks old Luco was in a bit of trouble somehow, like the demons were even more specifically after him than any other hunter, even. They got him out to a safe, cleared area out in Brooklyn somewhere, and Ryan had me stay on the island to keep fighting, so I didn’t get to be there for any of this. They came back, like, two days later, all three of them, and suddenly Luco was looking fantastic and happy. Not, you know, cheerful or anything, but all that bloody angst he’d been going through for the last few decades—according to Seth—was just gone. I was thrilled, of course. I sent him off with some of my friends who took him to a couple of concerts and parties to completely cheer him up and get him back to the land of the living.

But then Ryan pulls me aside and tells me what actually happened out in Brooklyn. I already told you that Luco’s family had gotten hit, and his mom and dad and I think most if not all of his brothers and sisters were gone. Well, apparently, that wasn’t supposed to happen. As in, they were supposed to be skipped over. As in, that b*****d Luco knew exactly what was going on so when suddenly it was his family ending up in the ground with falsified death certificates handed all around he like to s**t himself.

Yeah. I know. It was completely unheard of, for a hunter to betray his cousins like that, but that is exactly what he bloody well did. He came to America, tracked down a whole bunch of records of where we were, and just handed them to the damned demons. Alex tried to explain why he did it, but I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around it. It was too ridiculous, too inexplicable. Not Luciano Benenati, the sweet golden Italian boy from the Pyrenees.

So apparently the demons had turned on him, for whatever reason—probably because they’re demons, and they’re evil like that—and killed his family specifically as well as whoever else they ran into over there. Add that shock to the shock of his family dying, and poor old Luco was completely bloody done for, which is when he got careless and got found by Alex. All I know is, they took him out to Brooklyn, and Alex had a talk with him, or probably more like several damn talks, and he did something and brought him back. Once they’d told me, the next time I saw Luco I could tell. I don’t have the slightest bloody clue why I hadn’t noticed before, but now he just felt more… oh, what’s a good word? Attached? Tangible? He was more there with us than he’d been before, back when I was hanging out with him in Los Angeles.

He was completely turned around after that. Smiling, happy, made a few friends. Word got around about what had happened, and I think a lot of people were angry, but it’s hard to stay angry when you can see right into a guy and know that he’s changed, and that he’s better now, and that he really is devastated for everything that happened because of him. Of course it stayed awkward for a while after that. There was still clean-up to do, but now that most of the damned demons were dead anyway and they didn’t have access to Records anymore the attacks went back down to more or less normal levels.

We gutted Manhattan just to be sure, and actually ended up clearing out a lot of the East Coast from Boston down to Baltimore, but now that the big, horrible threat was over and done with it was mostly clean-up work, and it was mostly Alex and Ryan. I started to spend more of my time hanging out with Firi and Aria—that is, Alex’s girl. Firi had decided to go back to Spain after the fiasco was done, to be with what was left of her family. Alex had told Aria he was going to take her back there, too, where it was safer and there weren’t so many people dead. Apparently the suave b*****d had all but proposed to her and they were going to get married as soon as the war was over.

And it was over, soon enough. Well, no, I shouldn’t say that. Not soon enough. Soon enough would have been if the war had ended when it began, before all our cousins died. Ryan and I lost all of the friends we had made in California, and it got to the point where I got the feeling that he was scared shitless that all his friends in New York would get killed, too. He really wasn’t the same after the war. I mean, he’d always been sort of a loner-type, but he had friends and he would occasionally let me drag him to a concert or something, and he did know how to have fun. He was around, and he was still willing to go with me to those big crazy fun cities with more people than you could ever hope to meet in a normal lifetime.

Something during that war, though, just shut him the hell up. Shut him up and shut him off. He started getting like that somewhere towards the beginning, back when all our friends started to die instead of just cousins we’d never even met. Don’t get me wrong, it was horrible that our cousins were dying at all, and I would never say that it was less s****y for people we didn’t know to die just because we didn’t know them, but it does kind of bite you harder in the a*s when it’s people you’ve gotten to be pretty good friends with. Hell, even loner Ryan had made a few friends. Those guys weren’t really the party types, so I didn’t see them a whole lot, but they hung out and went hunting together every so often. I didn’t even sleep with more than one of them—a cute blond—because they just weren’t my type. The important thing is, they were Ryan’s friends and they all ended up dead. Then we started losing all the people like Lavanya who were close to Daddy or Seth somehow, and then it was just everybody.

Ryan got more and more closed off as the war went on. There were days he wouldn’t say two damned words to me all bloody day, and I ended up following him to work sometimes just to make sure he was okay. He finally quit his job altogether.

Then, one day, I got back to the apartment we were staying in at the time. Most of his s**t was all still there, but there were a few things missing and I found a note taped to my popcorn stash:

 

Talia,

You’ve probably noticed I’m not here by now. I hate leaving like this, but I couldn’t stay anymore. I wish I could explain… I just can’t. I don’t know where I’m going, yet. I promise to send you something when I get there. Don’t worry about me—you know I can take care of myself. You’ll do just fine. You’ve grown up and you can take care of yourself now.

Just try to stay out of trouble, Little Sister.

                            Ryan