by Jerry Hart
It appeared to be finished but he knew it wasn’t. It was missing a key component. He closed his eyes once again.
* * *
Owen slowly came awake and looked around, already knowing he was in his room; looking around had become a reflex. He looked out his window; it was dark, but the streetlights outside made it slightly bright. That grueling throb was already beginning in his head.
He left his room and headed downstairs into the living room. The lights were still on but no one was around. He continued to walk around the condo, noticing Chris’s keys were gone from the hooks by the front door. He was probably driving around, blowing off steam.
In the far corner was a room Owen knew to be the armory. In there were the weapons Daniel made for them; Chris hadn’t wanted to risk buying real weapons from a shop. Owen walked up to the closed door; on it was a sign that read “Dangerous Toys.” He laughed to himself, and then walked in slowly. He trusted Daniel with his life, but this room was filled with a lot of dangerous “toys,” and they weren’t meant to be taken lightly.
In the middle of the room was a table with an assortment of crossbows, arrows, pistols, and tracking capsules (the latter looked like common pills and could be digested or placed in something you wanted to keep tabs on). In the corner of the room was a chest marked “Busters.” Owen knew what was inside: tiny red bombs the size of baseballs, cousins to the Rejecters. He wasn’t sure why Daniel made these; they’d never been used. Of course, Owen had thought the same thing about the Rejecters once, and they saved him from Eric earlier, so he decided not to press the issue.
He made his way to a closet in the far corner of the room. Daniel kept this door locked at all times. Owen didn’t know what was inside; it was “private,” as Daniel constantly reminded them. “I’ll reveal it in due time,” he always said.
It bugged Owen that they used weapons so freely. Sure, they were fighting monsters, but in the back of his mind, he always thought it seemed wiser to go to the police with whatever information they had instead of taking action themselves. It was Chris who chose to act, though, and he always convinced the rest of them to follow suit.
Owen went back out to the living room, making sure to close the armory door behind him. He walked over to the bookcase in the corner of the room and browsed through the books they had at their disposal. There was a seven-part series about a young wizard Chris was fond of, but Owen never could bring himself to read it. He knew some day he would crack under Chris’s insistence, but that day hadn’t come yet.
These dreams of Owen’s were very disturbing to him, though. He’d had this last one a few times before, much like the one he’d had outside of Stephanie’s house: That memory/dream had been the last time he’d seen his father. But the other dream, the one with the green light and the orb, was only vaguely familiar to him. He had to understand what it meant.
He grabbed two books—How to Deal with Suppressed Memories and Dream Moods: A Guide to Understanding Your Dream—and sat on the couch. He placed them on the table and pondered which one to read first.
Before he knew it, he was reading both books at the same time. For as long as he could remember, he had always had a short attention span. He had to know everything now. He kept reading; he was sure the “orb dream” wasn’t a memory, unlike the “meteor-shower dream.” Whenever he thought of the meteor shower, he thought of his father, which, naturally, led to thoughts of his mother.
Owen’s mother had disappeared from his life for no apparent reason a year before Dad’s death. “She just up and left us,” his father told him whenever he’d asked about her, “because she and country living just didn’t agree, I suppose.”
After the death of his father, he had stayed with his childhood best friend Cullen Matthews and his father for a few weeks (Owen had no other family), but that hadn’t worked out for reasons still unknown to him. That was why he’d left in the middle of the night, heading, on foot, straight to the streets of downtown San Sebastian. Even though he wound up on the streets, he had felt more comfortable there. It was more of a home than the Matthews’.
Owen suddenly realized he wasn’t retaining anything he was reading—these dream books were useless. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the information. He had gone through the library and couldn’t find one good source about his bizarre dreams: the green light, the electric hum, and the orb. He had no idea what it all meant.
He put the books back on the shelf and lay down on the soft couch. He stared up at the high ceiling. This place was enormous; he was so grateful to Alyssa for getting it for them. She was perversely rich and tremendously generous.
His thoughts suddenly drifted back to Chris. He had to tell him the truth about Eric. Chris was his best friend, and he couldn’t continue to lie to him. Plus, Chris already had trust issues. Not only did Owen owe him the truth, he owed him his life. Once, while wandering the streets of downtown, he had nearly walked into the path of a car. Chris had pulled him out of the way. That was how they met in the first place.
* * *
“Whoa, buddy. You have a death wish?” Chris had asked.
Owen said nothing.
“You look like you’ve been walking a while,” Chris said. Owen’s clothes had been torn and dirty, his face sunburned. He had also been very skinny. “When was the last time you ate, buddy?”
Owen still didn’t answer. Chris studied him for a moment, then grinned.
“You look a little young to be walking around the city by yourself. You’re not, you know, homeless, are you?”
Silence. Owen just couldn’t bring himself to talk.
“Hey, if you’re hungry, I have a friend who works at the coffee shop in the bookstore down the street who hooks me up every now and then. I’m going to try my luck today.”
Chris started to walk away. Owen slowly started to follow without even realizing it. It had been midday, and the heat was strong. The cool air in the bookstore had been very welcomed. Chris had managed to get a couple of free muffins and cappuccinos for them.
After finishing up, they walked through the bookstore. Chris pointed out all of his favorite books, asking Owen if he’d read any of them. Owen shook his head to all of them. At fourteen, he hadn’t read much.
After an hour, they left and continued walking the streets. Owen just felt completely aimless; all he could do was follow Chris.
“I don’t really have anywhere to go,” Chris said. “I live over there.”
He pointed to some unseen place down the street. Owen stared for a while; Chris started crossing the street. Owen automatically followed. After a while, they’d come to a red Camaro parked under an overpass just outside the city.
For hours, Chris talked about his life and his favorite books. There had been nothing else to talk about, and it wasn’t like Owen was contributing much.
A day had gone by and Owen still hadn’t said anything. He slept in the passenger seat of Chris’s car. When they woke up, Chris tried again to get Owen to speak.
“You know, you don’t have to live like this,” he said. “I have a reason why I’m out here. If you have family, you should go back to them.”
That’s when Owen spoke: “I don’t have any family.”
Then he started to cough. His throat had been croaky since he hadn’t spoken in a long time.
“You all right?” Chris asked.
Owen nodded. After his coughing fit ceased, Chris asked him what his name was, offering his own in return.
“So, Owen, where did you come from?”
“Birch.”
“Where’s that?”
“The country.” Owen suddenly remembered how his friends always referred to where they lived as “the country.”
“Wow,” Chris said, his eyes widening. “How did you get all the way here?”
“I walked.”
“No way,” Chris said. “There’s no way. I don’t believe that. What happened? Did you run away from home or something?”
“Kinda,”
Owen said. “My dad died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, bud.”
They had spent the day walking around, exploring the city, which was what Owen had always wanted to do anyway. They’d done that for a few months, always discovering something new and exciting.
“Where’s cutie-pie?” Owen heard the coffee-shop employee ask Chris one day. He was around the corner, because Chris had instructed him to stay out of sight and keep his head down for some reason.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Chris answered. “He took off a while ago.”
“You know, he looked rather familiar,” the clerk, Bonnie, said with a conspiratorial tone. Owen had heard that tone in the movies enough times to recognize it.
“Really?” Chris said, though he didn’t sound the least bit interested; he sounded distracted. He’d gone inside to get his and Owen’s free muffins and iced coffees for the week.
“Yeah. He looks like this kid.” Owen didn’t know what Bonnie was talking about because he couldn’t see from behind the bookshelf in the adjoining store, but he heard paper crackling.
“I guess you’re right—he does look like him,” Chris said nervously.
“Why are you getting two of everything, Chris?”
“I met a girl.”
“Oh. Is that so? I’d love to meet her.”
“Some other time, Bonnie. Just remember you’ll always hold a special place in my heart.”
“That’s sweet, doll. Just don’t do anything stupid. I can’t, in good conscience, be a part of anything that shouldn’t be going on.”
Owen had no idea what she was talking about and it worried him.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” Chris said, then added, “I’ll do the right thing.”
A second later, he was walking out of the coffee shop and past Owen. Once they were out in the streets again, Chris handed him his snacks.
They dodged into a familiar alley and sat down on the ground next to a trashcan.
“Why did you want me to hide?” Owen asked as he took a bite of his blueberry muffin.
“No reason,” Chris said unconvincingly. “I just think you should stay hidden for a while.”
Owen, at the tender age of fourteen, simply accepted the answer as he enjoyed his snack. At that point, he had been living on the streets with Chris for a nearly two months. He’d felt more at home there than he ever did with the Matthews. And he could tell Chris was enjoying having a buddy.
“Do you miss your old life at all?” Chris asked.
Owen stared at him for a while before answering. “Not really. I mean, I miss my dad, and my mom.”
“What happened to your mom? You never told me about her.”
Owen didn’t know how to answer that.
“She left me and Dad last year. She just disappeared. Dad said country living didn’t agree with her, so she ran away.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Deep down, I don’t. I think something happened to her, but I don’t know what. I think wherever she is, she’s okay. She’s happy.”
“Happy?” Chris asked, confused. “Without you?”
Owen nodded. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t have left.”
“And you’re happy, living with me on the streets?”
Owen smiled. “Extremely.”
Chris smiled too. He seemed almost relieved. “That’s what I needed to hear.”
A silent moment passed between them.
“Did I ever tell you I used to make movies?” Chris asked after finishing his coffee.
Owen shook his head.
“Me and a buddy started this company, and we went around looking for talented filmmakers to make movies with. Then we were going to release those movies through our company.”
“That sounds cool,” Owen said, grinning. “Did you release any movies?”
“No,” Chris said sadly. “The company fell apart. My producing partner and I didn’t get along very well. But there was this one guy who wrote this fantastic script about these monster hunters who went around town, killing vampires and demons. And the monster hunters are young, like us. I would have loved to have gotten that movie made.”
Owen snickered.
“What’s so funny?” Chris asked, grinning.
“You’re not young. I’m young.”
“I’m twenty-four.”
Owen laughed even more. “That’s old!”
Chris thumped him on the head. “You little punk.”
They laughed together, completely separated in the alley from the rest of the world.
And then someone came stumbling toward them from the opposite end of where Owen and Chris had originally entered.
The two boys stopped laughing immediately and watched the newcomer. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, because the figure wore heavy clothes, even though it was July and the sun was blazing.
“Stay here,” Chris told Owen as he stood up. The figure took a step forward, then immediately fell to the side, leaning against a brick wall.
The alley was mostly covered in shadow, though there was a slice of sunlight that cut an angle a quarter of the way in. The fallen figure was bathing in the light.
Owen slowly stood and looked over the trashcans to see the figure better. He had no intention of going near it, like Chris was doing.
“Oh, my god,” Chris said as he stood over the figure.
“What is it?” Owen asked.
“Hey, are you okay?” Chris asked the stranger. “Did you get burned? Your face looks burned.”
There was no reply. Owen, seeing no immediate danger, walked up behind Chris. The young boy saw what the old boy had been talking about. Owen could now tell the stranger was a woman, though he couldn’t tell how old she was.
Her face was red and severely cracked—it looked like she was suffering from very bad sunburn. She was wearing what had once been a red sweat suit with a hooded jacket, but the suit was so dirty it was brown in most places. The hood was drawn over her head, but her face was exposed to the sun.
Both Owen and Chris gasped as her face appeared to burn and crack even more before their very eyes. The girl must have been severely sensitive to sunlight.
“Help me drag her into the alley,” Chris said to Owen. They grabbed her arms and started pulling the unfortunate girl into the shadows.
What happened after that turned Owen and Chris into what they were today: monster hunters. The girl turned out to be a vampire and she had attacked them once they were out of the sun. Owen and Chris didn’t kill her that day, but instead ran away, leaving her alone in the alley. The seed had been planted, however, for they devoted their lives to fighting the creatures after that.
The alley vampire showed up again later, when Owen and Chris had been sleeping in Chris’s car under an overpass. Owen stabbed her in the heart with a pencil. He and Chris learned these vampires were slightly more allergic to the sun than the most fair-skinned humans, and the sun wasn’t much of a useful weapon.
As for the Busters and Rejecters, Daniel said those would be the most effective tools in their arsenal. When Owen once asked why those weapons in particular, Daniel said, “Alyssa encouraged me to make them.”
* * *
Owen snapped back to the present and realized his eyes were leaking. He wiped away the tears and thought of something else, something he hadn’t thought of in years. His family, together, before Mom left. He remembered how they all used to play in the field that surrounded their home in Birch. Owen could feel a headache coming on but ignored it.
He also remembered an old man with white hair—Grandpa? Owen had been very young when the old man passed away, so he barely remembered much about him. All he could remember was that, at some point, the Walters family had been together and happy.
The headache increased drastically; it became so bad he forgot what he’d been thinking about just then.
Oh, yeah, he was thinking of Chris. Owen had to tell him something, right? He pulled out his cell phone and dialed.
CHAPTER 7
Stephanie sat awake in her hospital bed, subconsciously rubbing the bite mark on her neck. The nightmare she’d had was still fresh in her mind. She had lost a considerable amount of blood but did not require a transfusion. Her doctor had told her hours earlier she would be able to go home the next day. Stephanie simply nodded, not really listening.
When asked for an emergency contact, she had picked her best friend Becky Simon. Stephanie didn’t want to call any of her actual family members; she hadn’t spoken to her parents in nearly ten years, back when she had been a “difficult” teenager.
No, there was no need to involve them in her life now. Not after they had walked in on her and Becky sharing a harmless cigarette. They’d kicked her out of the house for that. Her life had been going perfectly fine until Eric…
Stephanie started to shake suddenly; just thinking of him forced that nightmare back to the front of her mind. She had met him at City Lights, her favorite downtown club. He had seemed nice enough: He’d bought her a drink and didn’t come off as desperate or forceful. He had been a perfect gentleman. And it had been her idea to invite him back to her place, though she hadn’t planned on making out with him or anything—that had been a completely unexpected surprise.
Then the two of them had become animals.
And then, once gaining control of themselves, they’d gone back to her room to watch some TV. She had been pretty embarrassed she’d forgotten her self-control, though it had been Eric who’d made the first move.
Now Stephanie remembered what had happened after they’d gone back to her room. The TV had only been on for a minute when he started kissing her again. She tried to push him off playfully, but then he started getting forceful.
And then he bit her.
Stephanie still couldn’t believe what had happened. She tried to understand but found she couldn’t. What she also couldn’t understand was where those two guys—both wearing dark hoodies as if to hide in darkness—had come from. They had been in her house, though she didn’t mind now, given the circumstances. But where had they come from? Why had they been there in the first place? Stephanie hadn’t thought to ask them these questions at the time because she had been in shock and weak from blood loss.
