A Cat's Chance in Hell

by Sharon Hannaford

  They left the lights of the City behind and as they sped towards an area where fewer lights blinked in the dark, Kyle knew they were nearing the light industrial and agricultural area that surrounded the Stadium.

  There was a parking area on the far side of the stadium which wasn’t fenced off. Kyle directed Gabi to it and they found that some of the other members of the SMV had already gathered. The stadium loomed large and ominous in front of them; huge openings in the walls that once allowed public access to the interior and now looked like dark maws waiting to swallow unwary trespassers. Gabi parked the blacked out van near the others, turned off the engine and threw Kyle the keys.

  “I’m going to get dressed and kit up. See what else you can find out,” she ordered, climbing into the dark depths of the van. She didn’t need any light, Gabi could see perfectly well in the dark.

  “Yes, Ma’am!” Kyle shot back, throwing her a mock salute, and getting out of the van. He pretended to realign his neck, and check his arms and legs were all in one piece after the wild drive.

  “Idiot!” she hissed from inside the van. “Don’t think just because I can’t see you I don’t know what you’re doing. Now get going or I’m going to spit on all your knives and make them rust!”

  He sighed dramatically. “You can be a cruel, cruel woman Gabrielle Bradford. You know exactly how to poke at all my soft spots,” he lamented mournfully.

  “The only soft spot around here is your head!” Her retort was muffled by clothing.

  He chuckled and sauntered off to join the others. A team of three was busy climbing back through a tear in the fence and they quickly loped over to report the area clear. He touched base with everyone else who had already arrived; none of them had any more information than he did, so he headed back to the van to update Gabi.

  When she emerged from the van, a bystander probably wouldn’t have known it was the same woman. As she stepped into the dull light thrown by the security lights he could see why they called her Angeli Morte. Angel of Death. That was the name she’d earned for herself among the greater supernatural community, though her fellow Hunters tended to use a different nickname for her, one that Kyle had been calling her for years. She was dressed in black, toughened leather pants, a tight-fitting Kevlar-reinforced jacket and black flat-soled boots and with her hair tied up in a severe knot. She’d made no attempt to hide the myriad of weapons attached to her body in every conceivable way. She appeared cold, ethereal and deadly. Kyle knew just how deadly. She was one of more recent additions to the Hunter squad but she’d already notched up the highest number of clean kills. She stepped out of the van and began pacing back and forth across the tarmac, stopping every now and then to stretch out or warm up her muscles, running through short sequences of complicated martial arts moves.

  Due to Gabi’s hair-raising driving they’d made good time to the stadium. They had ten or fifteen minutes before they could expect any kind of action and he’d gone to the calm, quiet place he went to when a difficult fight was staring him in the face. He leaned back against the van and watched the members of the other Elimination Teams arrive and begin getting ready. There was a hushed, anxious kind of excitement running through them. Byron had called up everyone he could get hold of (and a few he couldn’t); he was obviously going with the concept of ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at them. Mind you, half a dozen Demons coming out of the Etherworld at once, was something you would want to throw the kitchen sink at, if that kitchen sink happened to contained a nuclear bomb. Demons hated everyone, other Demons included. They very rarely, if ever, made any kind of attack in numbers over two or three, and generally attacked alone. He briefly wondered if the Magi at SMV Headquarters could have been mistaken, but shook that off. They had never been wrong about an attack in all the time he’d been part of the SMV. Sure, they missed some attacks, it was impossible to monitor every inch of a city the size of this one, but when they said there was an attack coming they were right.

  He looked around again re-counting the numbers of SMV members who were milling around in an ordered sort of chaos. Normal Elimination Teams consisted of two Hunters, one Magus who was strong at sending Demons back to the Etherworld, known as a Banisher, and a Clean-up Crew in a specially kitted out van. The Clean-up Crew consisted of a Magus who was gifted at wiping human memories, known as an Eraser, a Medic, and a Driver/Muscle person to help with hauling bodies when necessary. The Driver was most often a Werewolf but occasionally a Magus or Shapeshifter. There were different team set-ups for captures and for street patrols, but those details he left to Byron and the rest of the SMV Council, it wasn’t for him to worry about, and as long as they teamed him and Gabi together as much as possible he didn’t interfere. Tonight he saw all three of the other Hunters; Douglas, a 6 ft 6 Shapeshifter who knew more about weapons than he and Gabi put together; Matthew, a Werewolf, particularly welcome tonight as Werewolf saliva was fatally poisonous to Demons; and Lance, a very powerful Magus who could launch fireballs at you as easily as he could set you alight where you stood, he was affectionately called Zippo by the rest of the Team, and nobody tread too hard on his toes – not even Gabi. Kyle didn’t know all the other members who had shown up; he knew a few of the ‘Offensive’ Magi, the ones who had some kind of gift that could be used in a fight, and most of the Banishers he had worked with before, but the Clean-up crews he rarely interacted with and they were switched out on a regular basis, he knew some faces but not names. The Medics he knew intimately of course, both of them had patched him up more often than he cared to remember. He blew out a deep breath, hoping that the Medics wouldn’t be needed tonight.

  Gabi had resorted to muttering and cussing to herself and Kyle glanced back at her. He almost grinned, but thought better of it and bit it back at the last second. Her vocabulary got more inventive in direct proportion to her adrenaline level. She’d had a short temper and florid vocabulary for as long as he’d known her. He turned back to the van as his memories finally cracked through the controlled mask he’d tried to cover his grin with. He started to get various weapons strapped to his own body as an excuse to keep his face turned away from her, as he remembered their very first meeting.

  Chapter 2

  Saying that he switched schools a lot as a child was rather like saying the Pope prayed a lot. In fact, he couldn’t remember spending more than two terms at any one school. His mother was a single parent, and they lived on the small wage she made from casual work on farms or in factories or restaurants, moving on once work dried up or his mother felt it was time to go. When he got into his teens he finally put his foot down and told her if they moved again he was dropping out of school permanently. That seemed to be the incentive she needed to settle down and keep one job. She found work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in one of the better suburbs on the edge of a rural, forested area. She and Kyle had the use of a small, self-contained apartment above the garage. He’d been enrolled in the local High School, which was full of rich snobby types, along with a few poorer souls who were allowed in from lower class suburbs because they excelled either academically or in sports.

  It’d been important for Kyle and his mom to settle down near a rural area as she was a Werewolf and needed access to a large forested area during the time of the full moon. Werewolves were generally volatile creatures who struggled to contain their tempers, and were forced to change to wolf form over the three days of the full moon. Fortunately, the need to change was strongest at night, once the moon rose. So as long as his mom wasn’t expected to work in the evenings, and managed to keep her temper during the day, the housekeeping work suited her perfectly. Her supernatural strength made the daily chores easy and she was generally finished with everything before the bratty kids arrived home from school, thereby eliminating the chance of them igniting her temper. To Kyle’s utter astonishment, it had all worked out amazingly well.

  A few weeks after he started attending Parkhurst High he met her. Kyle had certain abilities that no one else in the wo
rld possessed, or so he thought. These abilities stemmed from the fact that when his mother had been infected with the Lycanthropy virus she had been over eight months pregnant. She’d survived the attack of the Werewolf, as well as the attack of the virus, and had given birth to him a few days later, shortly before she underwent her first change. She never told him the exact details of how she coped those first few weeks and months; it had obviously been an extremely difficult time for both her and his father. Kyle seemed to be a perfectly healthy baby and didn’t seem to be affected by the lycanthropy virus. His mother had hoped that somehow the womb had protected him. Kyle’s father hung around for a year or so and then vanished, leaving her and Kyle to fend for themselves. Kyle still had no idea where his father was, or even if he was still alive. Although he didn’t hold any real grudge against the man, he had no interest in finding and reconnecting with him.

  As Kyle grew, it became apparent that he had indeed been affected by the virus, but not in the usual way. He had heightened senses of smell, hearing and eyesight, and an uncanny ability to move absolutely silently. He was fearless and agile and often astounded other people with his physical coordination and ability. His mother began to tell people he was older than he actually was, for fear that someone would begin asking uncomfortable questions. She kept him well away from doctors and hospitals, terrified of what they may find. Fortunately he never got so much as a cold or flu, and with their frequent moves, no-one became suspicious of his incredible abilities and growth spurts. She taught him from a young age how to disguise his extra abilities, but he found it difficult to “play dumb” when he could smell and hear better than any normal human. He never experienced a need to change as his mother did, and somehow didn’t seem to have the volatile temper innate in all ‘made’ Werewolves. But the fact remained that he was a supernatural anomaly. Lycanthropy renders males sterile and females unable to carry a child to term. This startling fact meant that all Werewolves are made by surviving a Werewolf bite – Werewolves are not born. He was something no other Werewolf had ever heard of, abnormal in Werewolf society, and certainly outcast in human society if anyone ever found out the truth. This left him feeling like an outcast in life. He would’ve had no shortage of female company with his looks and physique, but he tended to brush them off when they tried to strike up any kind of conversation with him, he was too nervous of unwittingly revealing his true nature. And so he became known as a quiet loner with no close friends and no major enemies. Until the day she walked past him in the school corridor.

  He’d been walking to Science class when a peculiar scent caught his nose. He was used to sifting through a million different smells every day, everything from deodorant, perfume and shampoo, to bad breath, dope smoke and teenage hormones. This scent triggered an instant adrenaline surge through his body. He had never experienced anything like it. He froze on the spot, his mind going blank as students jostled him in their rush to class. He shook himself aware enough to shove his way to the corridor wall, putting his back against it and looking around anxiously to locate the source of the scent. He closed his eyes and concentrated on that individual smell, following it to its strongest point. When his eyes flashed open they were looking directly into the eyes of a petite, auburn haired girl on the other side of the corridor. She also seemed to be frozen in place, staring directly at him, as a tide of children surged around them.

  Could this strange, alarming scent really be coming from this tiny slip of a girl? He blinked, confused and slightly dazed, wondering about his reaction to the smell. It wasn’t even a bad smell, just different, and it was making his senses scream ‘Danger’. He felt his breathing quicken and his pulse speed up, his muscles tense to attack or run. The “fight or flight” instinct took control of his body. Then a student clipped him with her bag, breaking his intense concentration on the girl and his rational mind had a chance to assess the situation. He forced himself to calm down and look at the girl with an open mind. He realised then, that although this slip of a girl, barely into her teens, was standing in the middle of the flow of students, no one touched her, no one jostled her, no one cussed her for standing in the way. It stuck him as extremely odd.

  Her eyes suddenly narrowed, and her face took on a predatory look, as though she’d made up her mind about something. She stared directly into his eyes and then flicked her head to one side; her auburn curls bouncing, and looked pointedly at the exit door at the end of the corridor. He glanced at the door and then back to the girl, but she was gone. He gasped, looking around in confusion at the mostly empty corridor. A second later he found her looking at him from just outside the open door, a small, condescending smile on her lips and open challenge in the slight raise of her one eyebrow. He didn’t give himself time to think, he simply reacted to the dare. Curiosity killed the cat, not the wolf after all.

  He slipped quickly to the open door and out onto the concrete path, closing the door behind him. His breathing was still coming too fast and his heart was pounding in his chest. He located her almost immediately; she was standing under a tree almost behind the gymnasium building. Anyone looking out of a classroom window wouldn’t see her, but he was going to have to get really close to her if he didn’t want to be spotted by a teacher. He decided to ignore his base instincts and go with the cocky self-assurance of a youth who hadn’t met anyone who would be a danger to him; semi-werewolf that he was. He should probably have trusted his instincts. He melted into the shadows of the building and slipped quietly through their protection to come up a few feet behind her. The next instant he was lying face first in the dirt with both arms behind his back and a slight weight in the very centre of his spine. He was utterly stunned. His muscles bunched to throw her off when her voice came from just behind his left ear.

  “If you move I will break your spine,” she said from between clenched teeth. Her bony little knee pushed further into his vertebrae to illustrate her point. “Hold still and we can talk.”

  Her hands had his wrists in an unnaturally powerful grip. His wolf instinct howled to get away from her immediately, by any means necessary, but his human intuition overrode that. She wasn’t actually hurting him; if she meant him harm she could have hurt him already. He found himself wondering if she was as scared of him as he was of her. He realised it was possible that she had also never smelled anything like him, and was just as curious. Years of dealing with his mother had taught him that violence rarely solved anything, so he lay passively underneath her. Now that he was calmer he could hear her heart racing as well, could taste the slight tang of fear in her, could hear her breath coming much too fast.

  “What are you?” She growled in her little, feminine voice. Her words confirmed his suspicions.

  He raised his head a little, cautiously, spitting out dirt. “If you let me up and stop acting like a little animal, I’ll tell you,” he admonished. “There’s no need for all the theatrics!”

  She’d let him up after some assurances from him that he wasn’t going to retaliate for her unprovoked attack on him. They’d moved further away from the school into a nearby thicket of bushes and spent the rest of the school day talking.

  He’d never thought he would meet someone else with a story as bizarre as his own. He’d never thought to meet anyone aside from his mother that he could open up to about his life without fear of rejection, revulsion or horror, and with total understanding. What were the chances of the two of them meeting, how astounding that they had found each other. How ignorant he’d been, thinking that Werewolves were the only supernatural beings wandering the planet, the only creatures from human nightmares that actually existed.

  Her name was Gabrielle and, like him, she was an anomaly and had been from birth. Gabrielle had the blood of a Vampire running in her veins. Her mother had also been attacked when she was already pregnant, although it was so early in the pregnancy that she hadn’t known it at the time. It was dark and late when she headed home one evening. A lone Vampire had attacked her and dragged her into a
back alleyway. Unbelievably, another Vampire had appeared in the alley and, instead of joining in the meal, had attacked the first Vampire. During the fight Gabi’s mother had been forced into a corner of the alley trying to stay out of the way. The two Vampires ripped into each other, showering everything close by with their blood, including her mother. At one point a fountain of Vampire blood had sprayed directly into her face and she had reflexively swallowed the blood in her fright. The second Vampire had ultimately beaten the first one, but seemed badly injured himself. He left the scene without a word or a glance her way. Weeks later she discovered she was pregnant and had been already at the time of the attack. Her parents kept this terrifying story from everyone except her father’s close friend Byron who had his own reasons for believing and understanding the outlandish tale.

  Gabi was born a few months later, premature but healthy. As Gabi grew, there still seemed to be little that was unusual about her, aside from extraordinary good health and being quick to walk and talk. There was nothing that couldn’t be explained by good genes and conscientious parenting. Her parents had breathed a sigh of relief and stopped worrying about it, settling down to enjoy their new little family.

  That had all changed shortly after her seventh birthday. Her parents had gone looking for her in their back garden, and found her sitting on the grass surrounded by wild animals. When they called to her, asking what was going on, she had calmly replied that she liked talking to them and they liked talking to her. This had been the first of her powers to manifest. She could literally talk the birds down from the trees, or soothe the most vicious dog. Soon she began to develop amazing eyesight and hearing, and then an incredible sense of smell. Her father had gently explained to her that she needed to hide these extra abilities from other people, and she had only been allowed to “talk” to animals when she was safely alone at home, or around Byron, who was privy to all the new developments. Though they constantly locked horns over why she needed to do it. She’d become a somewhat spoilt only child; wilful and accustomed to getting her own way, and she had quite a temper. Her father was adamant however, and she conceded in the end.