Part-Time Monster Hunter

by Nicholas Woode-Smith

  “Know it all,” Brett chided, picking up the bags and carrying them over to the truck. “Will make fine dragon bait all the same.”

  “A dragon would never fall for that,” Treth laughed. I did not give Brett the benefit of a response. I only asked:

  “My money?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  Brett rubbed his hands on his black-camo jeans and took out a wallet. He drew out three blue and red notes. I quickly counted them and was relieved to see that Brett hadn’t short-changed me.

  “Thanks. Now cheers.”

  I began running down the street. The sun was rising.

  “Hey! Not wanting to hang out?”

  “Our relationship is strictly professional, Brett.”

  I was around the street corner before he could respond.

  Chapter 2. Early Riser

  The sun was firmly in the sky, flooding the land with a merciful golden tinge, when I finally reached my apartment. The vampires would be going into hiding now, along with the rest of the dregs of this magical society.

  My apartment building was a small, dingy little place, right in the shadow of a magicorp skyscraper. Its rent had plummeted after repeated wraith sightings. While that normally would be cause for alarm, as wraiths were quite partial to eviscerating the living, I hadn’t seen a wraith for the year and a half I had been living here.

  I fiddled with the lock to my door, my vision bleary from exhaustion. It was jammed again. There were downsides to cheap rent. I heard mewling on the other side.

  “Yes, I’m home, Alex. Just…be…patient.”

  I fell flat on my face as the door opened under my weight. Alex, my black and white cat, came up to me and licked my nose. The cat’s sandpaper tongue tickled me and I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “Thanks, Alex.”

  I lifted myself up and surveyed my apartment. Messy as I had left it. The rubbish bin was overflowing with polystyrene ramen cups, study-notes adorned tables, floor and windowsill, and the curtains hadn’t been dusted in a year. I shook my head at my own untidiness.

  “First out of these clothes, and then…sleep.”

  Alex meowed.

  I rubbed my head. My eyes were heavy. “How could I forget my favourite little guy?”

  I closed my door behind me and shambled further into the apartment, to the small kitchen adjoined to the lounge/bedroom. I cracked open a can of cat food and let Alex eat straight out of the can.

  I sniffed. I reeked of sweat and blood. I needed a wash. The bathroom thankfully had a shower, but I was too tired for that. Too tired…

  My eyes blurred, and I swayed. My sword clinked on the coffee table. When did I get to the coffee table? I reached to unbuckle my sword belt and felt nothing.

  “Kat…Kat?” Treth whispered.

  “Let me sleep,” I mumbled, eyes closed.

  “You’re going to get sick, Kat…”

  “You’re not my mom.”

  “And you’re going to be late for class...”

  I jumped up with a start. I had been keeled over in my living room. A wet puddle of drool had soaked into the carpet. I quickly checked my smartphone.

  Five minutes to class…and I’d been only asleep for ten minutes.

  “Rift-damn Brett.”

  I brought my hand to my eyes to rub out the sleep but then noticed my sleeves. They were still covered in necro-blood.

  “Shit.”

  I realised I was still covered in necro-blood.

  “Get dressed. I’ll close my eyes.”

  “Do you even have eyes?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I let out a small chuckle. Treth, always the chivalrous and innocent knight-paladin.

  I peeled off the layers of monster-hunting gear and discarded them in a wash basket. At least I had money to pay for a full purification now over and above a cosmetic clean. Must’ve picked up some curse in the last few weeks with all the necro-blood that had been touching it. Not to mention the wight incantations! Detergent didn’t get out magical stains, so I’d need to splurge on a bit of exorcism. To replace my currently filthy clothes, I put on some denim jeans and a black t-shirt with the logo of the band Rage.

  “Always the goth,” my friend Trudie would say. She was one to talk! She wore a spiked collar. And Rage wasn’t goth. It was punk. Big difference.

  I made my way to the bathroom to wash my face and put on all manner of chemicals to mask the stench of my late night. I would shower when I got home. The necro-blood didn’t touch my skin and I had mistakenly ingested so much of it already I must’ve become at least a little bit immune.

  In the mirror, I was greeted by a girl of nineteen years with dark-chestnut hair tied into a messy bun with a black ribbon, caked in dirt. She had heavy bags under her eyes. Done with the necessities of civilised life, I petted Alex and then left.

  “The buses better be running on time.”

  “They never are,” Treth replied. “You should get a horse.”

  “With all the money I have, yeah. And I’d much rather be in a bus or car when zombies are roaming around than on horseback.”

  “Not if it was my master’s horse.” Treth’s voice started sounding distant, happy. He was lost in memory. “Gallant was the finest steed in the duchy. Even wraiths couldn’t spook him. My master rode him into battle and never once did he balk or flinch. A brave, wonderful stallion.”

  Treth’s tone saddened. “Haven’t seen any like him here.”

  “We can go to the countryside sometime, Treth. I’m sure there’ll be some decent horses out in the farmlands.”

  I couldn’t really tell for sure, but I felt Treth give me an appreciative smile.

  The bus was on time, but so was traffic. Just as the bus started moving, with me and one other headphoned passenger inside, it stopped, and then started again. Bumper to bumper. Probably a damn griffin holding up traffic. If one had made its nest in an intersection, traffic would be at a standstill for hours until the City could decide which agency to hire to eliminate it.

  I took out my phone and opened up the news.

  “Russian MagiPol have detained three sorcerers attempting to tap into the weylines near the Vortex Rift in Siberia.”

  “Why do they even guard it? The frost wyrms will get anyone strong enough to survive the Spark pulses,” Treth asked.

  “They thought they needed to guard it back then and never stopped. Nothing as permanent as a temporary government programme.”

  I glanced at the next headline: Necromancer Warlords increase hold on Central Africa.

  “And nothing they hate more than doing what they are supposed to do.”

  I closed my phone and the less than stellar news headlines and looked out the window. The sun had risen only slightly more in the minutes that I had been in my apartment, bathing Hope City and the Cape in a magical golden haze. From the bus window, I could clearly see Table Mountain, in all its glory. The flat-topped mountain had a table-cloth of clouds, casting a slight shadow where its rock-grey was not painted gold in the morning light.

  No matter how bad this city gets, I thought, that damn mountain makes it all worth it.

  It was just so unfortunate that it was usually closed to the public to allow for pilgrimages to the citadel and the peaks. I was not an acolyte of the Titan under the Mountain, nor one of the mages that kept it asleep, so had never managed to reach Table Mountain’s flat top. The closest I came was my university, constructed over two centuries before and still named after the old city of yore: The University of Cape Town.

  I sometimes wondered why the city was renamed after the Cataclysm, when the Vortex Rift opened and unlocked magic and released monsters on our world. As the city was consumed by dark magic, refugees and monsters, the weak bureaucrat who found himself misfortunate enough to be in charge must’ve thought renaming the city after the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ historical nomenclature was a swell idea.

  It didn’t really bring much hope.

  Hope City wa
s an urban sprawl. The old city was either kept afloat by magicorps, a local monster hunting agency or sheer stubborn tenacity. Everywhere else was decaying. A husk of a city ruled by sorcerous crime bosses, vampire cartels and cabals of necromancers seeking to turn the last bastion of freedom on the African continent into another undead wasteland.

  I clenched my fist.

  And the damn Council does nothing about it.

  I released my fist and looked again at that damn mountain. Maybe it was for the best that they didn’t do anything. The Council government tended to make a mess of things. The better the intentions, the worse the mess. Just like when I phoned Sanitation to clean up some discarded zombies after a gangster popped their necromancer. Guys arrived all prim and proper and picked up the zombie bits, no sweat. I soon found out they’d thrown it in the bay, choking countless seals on necro-blood and rotting corpses.

  That was the last time I trusted Sanitation to do a job unmonitored. I might have hated Drakenbane, but they never did stuff like that. The big agencies might ignore the little guys and chase the big fancy monsters instead of the gruesome and much more sinister ones, but at least they were competent.

  The engine on the bus renewed its huff and I jolted as the traffic started its melancholic crawl again. Then it stopped. I tapped my foot, impatiently, and checked the time on my cell. I was going to be late.

  I peered out the other window. This part of town was a much better sight than the decaying suburb I had been hunting in last night. Shops were opening, displaying wares ranging from computer hardware to good-luck charms. Banners with old-timey fonts contrasted with neon-signs and computer displays. If one didn’t travel out of these parts of Hope City, one’d forget all the problems the city was facing. Their biggest concern would just be rising taxes to pay for the Titan Magi and the occasional interruption by a monster. These were petty problems that Hope City denizens were adept at complaining about but problems that remained comparatively petty nonetheless. The richer denizens of this too-large city didn’t understand the real dangers facing their home. No wall separated the city-centre and new weyline locales from the undead and crime-infested slums. Only hunters did. Hunters like me.

  The bus wrenched forward and continued at a healthy, walking pace. I checked the time again. It would be almost quicker to walk! I sighed. I hoped this lecture wouldn’t be too important, but this close to test season, it was likely to be. I opened up some notes on my phone. I could at least use this time to study.

  “Kat,” Treth said.

  “What?” I whispered back, my eyes scanning across a passage about the establishment of the first weyline business district in Hope City.

  “Look out the window.”

  I rolled my eyes but did so. Just outside, in an alley between shops, were three men. Two wore red jackets, stitched with rune-enhancers. The symbols would enhance latent magical energy and help its incantation. Behind the two jacket wearers was a boy around Kat’s age, cowering. He was clutching a leather bag as the jacket wearers shoved into him. A spark. The one now held a flame in his palm.

  “Not my problem.”

  I turned back to my notes. Treth did not respond. I itched. My heart beat fast. Faster. I pocketed my phone and jumped out the bus window.

  What are you doing, Kat? I asked myself. I did not reply. I withdrew a paper sachet out of my pocket and started shaking it, feeling the sands within swoosh from side to side.

  Closer to the three, I heard them speak.

  “These are just books. They are useless to you,” the victim panted, anxiously.

  “You assuming we don’t read?!” one of the assailants retorted. He held the flame in his hand closer. The boy’s face paled.

  “We’ve got the Spark, and you don’t. All the books that matter don’t matter to a husk like you. Give us the bag.”

  “Hey!” I called, arriving at the scene, only a few metres from the three.

  The jacket-wearers turned, irritation and anger turning to bemusement.

  “Scram, chick, we got no beef with you.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” I said, still shaking the paper sachet. It was getting warmer. “I’ve got beef with you.”

  Before the jacket-wearing mages could react, I tore open the sachet and threw its contents over them. As I had hoped, not only did the one not extinguish his flame, the other attempted to cast as well. Their magic backfired as the powdered demanzite hit them. The anti-magical mineral not only dispelled active casting, but temporarily burnt out magic-users spark. The powder hit the mages and there was a flash. Screaming followed as the mages covered their eyes and ears. Apparently, demanzite caused extreme sensory overload to its victims. The Mages Union had lobbied to get it outlawed. Luckily to “husks” like me, the usually harmless mineral was still available at alchemists around the city.

  The flash abated, and I followed through by kicking both men in the stomach, doubling them over. They keeled over onto the floor, their babbled speech sounding a tad like incantations. The powder wouldn’t last much longer, and it was my last sachet.

  My last sachet…

  Shit.

  I shook my head in frustration. Demanzite wasn’t cheap and I needed them against wights, and if I ever found one of the necromancers behind a zombie horde.

  Too late now, though. I looked around. The victim was gone. No sign of him.

  “Ungrateful…”

  “Heroes don’t need gratitude to do what they do, Kat,” Treth quoted. I didn’t exactly know who he was quoting but Treth’s tone always changed when he was sharing the wisdom of his long-lost masters and comrades.

  I grunted. Gratitude and reward was something Treth claimed to not need, but I was quite partial to it.

  The mages at my feet were beginning to rise. I bolted.

  I arrived on campus somehow minutes before my lecture was to begin. Despite all the curses that were doubtlessly clinging to me, it seemed my luck was still healthy. I looked up at the stairway to the main avenue of the campus, where my class was located. When I first became a student, the stairs were daunting. Every morning was a huff bringing searing pain across my body. With my new part-time work, however, it was a breeze.

  I effortlessly ascended the stairs to the sound of protest chanting and shouts.

  “You are the monster!”

  “No to flaying fairies!”

  “Down with the Agencies!”

  Another one! I thought the protesters got their fill of demonstrating last week. They were protesting the general treatment of what society deemed monsters by picketing on campus, being a nuisance and disrupting foot traffic. I don’t know why they thought campus was the appropriate place to protest. Most of the university administration were sympathetic to them and had no power over what society called things. My Undead Studies lecturer even refused to refer to the undead as monsters, much to my chagrin. If anything, the protesters should be protesting the likes of Drakenbane – but that’d require them to go into a dangerous neighbourhood, where they’d see what their precious “non-monsters” were really like.

  I didn’t always look upon the protests disparagingly. Pixies and fairies were, for the most part, harmless, but were often slain and collected by alchemists to be used in product development and magical rituals. But, when the protesters started arguing for the rights of zombies, my sympathy for them stopped.

  I clenched my fists, took a deep breath, and waded into the morass. I hoped that the barely coated stench of necro-blood on my hair would cause the protesters to give me a wide-berth. It did not. And by the time I had waded through the horde of people stinking worse than I, I was thoroughly late for class. I lost all sympathy I might have had for the protesters.

  I opened the doors to the lecture theatre. Mercifully, people were still filing in half-way through the class. Despite Undead Studies being quite a hardcore subject, this could not change the apathy of the typical university student.

  I took a seat at the back and began scribbling down notes by pe
n, despite my exhaustion and bleary vision. I used my phone to study, but I preferred taking down the initial notes by hand. My friend, Trudie, always tried to convince me to just type straight onto my cell, or get a laptop, but old habits die hard.

  “All undead corrupt weyline purity,” the lecturer said, as I scribbled down what she said and the notes on the board.

  “Not wights, or masterless undead,” Treth said.

  I ignored him and continued note-taking.

  “Corrupted weylines attract more undead, creating a self-driven cycle,” the lecturer continued, drawing a circle on the whiteboard with a marker.

  “Unicorn waste!” Treth swore, a rare occurrence for him. “Undead are created by intentional necromantic incantation…”

  “Sssshhh,” I whispered, covering my mouth so that nobody could see me speak.

  “She doesn’t know the first thing about undead, Kat.”

  “Shut up…”

  “Problem, Ms Drummond?” the lecturer asked, stopping her note-taking. The entire class looked back at me. My face heated up.

  “Nope, sorry.”

  The lecturer nodded and continued. Mercifully, Treth did not speak again.

  I almost dozed off twice during the class. When the cacophony of shuffling people and papers signalled the end of class, I was glad to be able to leave. Unfortunately, I still had history later in the day.

  Outside the lecture theatre, I was greeted by the sight of a short girl wearing a spiked collar and black leather jacket. She had short black hair with a blue-highlighted fringe. Her lipstick was black.

  I smiled as I approached my friend, bustling past some students also eager to leave the class.

  I greeted Trudie with a hug, hoping she didn’t notice the smell. Well, she should be used to it. I’d been in the game for over a year now.

  “How is my big man?” she immediately asked.

  “Alex is fine, Trudie.”

  Sometimes, I was sure that Trudie liked Alex more than she liked me. I was fine with that. Alex was worth liking. He’d been a little black ball of sunshine in my life since I’d saved him from a pack of undead dogs. I didn’t know anything about his life before he was cornered by the beasts, but after that point, we were inseparable – and Trudie loved him.