by Erik Lynd
“Why did she want you to wait for me?” Hamlin asked. If the kid thought he was the Hunter, he would play the part. He had to get what he could before it was too late.
“She knew you would come because she took the soul of the girl. Then she changed me, she made me hungry. And now I know,” the boy said, standing slowly.
“Know what?”
“What I’m hungry for,” the boy said and turned from the wall he had been drawing on.
The entire front of the kid and half his face was black. Coal black. At first, Hamlin thought he had just been pressing up against the wall, rubbing the black dust over himself. But then he could see it, the burnt flesh. His body had been burned so severely it was hardening into bits and flecks of charcoal. He had been peeling parts of himself off to make his drawings. Cracks in his blackened hide oozed blood and pus, like a burn victim who should be dying in a hospital bed, not walking and talking in front of Hamlin.
The kid's face was the worst. One half looked normal, maybe even handsome. But the burnt side was a horrible visage. Lips peeled back, exposing blackened teeth and charred gums in another sneer, this one much more gruesome than the last. His eyelid had burned away, but his eyeball stared back at Hamlin, an undamaged white orb.
Hamlin could see faint wisps of smoke rising from the blackened side of the kid’s body. Despite being impossible, he was still burning. The kid must have been in intense pain.
“Jesus kid, let me help you. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
“No,” The kids voice had become deeper, edged with slyness and barely contained desire. “I just need a good meal.”
The boy charged forward, a half-normal, half-burned sneering smile on his face. He kicked trash up from in front of him.
Hamlin reacted slower than he should have. He had hoped to talk the kid down, he was just a kid. The sudden charge caught him by surprise. He raised the gun. But the kid, the thing charging him, was faster than he expected, certainly faster than he should be considering he was a walking burning corpse.
Before Hamlin could squeeze the trigger, the kid slammed into him like a wrecking ball, his arms splayed out, knocking the gun from Hamlin’s hand. A round went off, punching through the rotting floorboards. Hamlin watched the drooling lips pull back even more, exposing soot-covered teeth. Now his mouth opened wide to take a chunk out of the detective.
Hamlin recovered quickly, but not enough to catch his balance before tripping over the debris on the floor. He brought his arms in and between him and the kid holding those chomping teeth inches from his throat.
He almost lost his grip on the monster as he landed on the ground. Wood and nails from the fallen ceiling raked at his back. Something hard and sharp cut straight through his shirt and gouged his skin.
Despite the impact and cuts, he held the kid at bay, despite its unnatural strength. Here was yet another thing a half-burnt corpse shouldn’t be able to do. Whatever the girl had done to this kid, he was more monster than human now. Hamlin could feel the heat pouring off its body. Wherever his hand or arm touched the blackened flesh, he could feel it burning him. Not a severe burn like an open flame would create, but uncomfortable heat like a bad sunburn eating at his skin.
Taking the risk, Hamlin held the monster back with one arm while he quickly released his grip with the other hand to punch it. His fist slammed into the human looking half of its face. The kid’s head twisted from the force of the blow and his grip lessened, but held. Hamlin pounded him again and again. Blood flew on the last strike as a cut opened on the creature’s face.
But the blows only had a marginal effect. The monster reared back and let loose with his own blows. With the temporary reprieve from the snapping jaws, Hamlin was able to get his hand up to protect his face from the full force. Still, the fist was like a sledgehammer making stars fill Hamlin’s vision.
A second blow followed the first, then a third. Blood ran into Hamlin’s eye and he knew it was his own. The kid was now straddling his chest, he had the leverage and the angle. It bellowed in some sort of primal victory cry. Another blow and Hamlin would be out, but the monster didn’t go for another punch. Instead its head came down for a bite, no doubt thinking Hamlin was stunned. It was expecting a docile meal.
Hamlin was anything but docile.
The head diving at him was a wavering blur made fuzzy by blood, but Hamlin threw his arm up shoving his forearm blindly at the gaping jaw. He caught it by surprise, but then Hamlin felt teeth sinking into the muscle on his arm.
Now Hamlin’s own screams joined with the monster’s animal grunts as it latched on. Pain, as well as disgust, drove the adrenaline coursing through his veins to a whole new level.
He bucked hard and the monster, for all its viciousness and strength still weighed the same as an emaciated teenage kid. He flew off Hamlin, but with his mouth still attached, he didn’t go far.
He landed next to Hamlin, wrenching the detective’s arm to the side and setting off even more pain. The floorboard creaked loudly, followed by a crack and suddenly the floor beneath the monster was gone. With a surprised grunt, the kid fell through the hole.
Unfortunately, Hamlin was still attached. He was pulled into the hole, catching himself just as he slid partially over the edge, hanging half in, half out. For a moment, despite the monster hanging from his arm, he thought he might be able to work with this. Then there was another crack.
The floor collapsed beneath Hamlin and they both plunged into the darkness.
The room below was pitch black. During the fall he felt the monster pull away, ripping off part of his skin in the process. But he was no longer attached. Then Hamlin slammed into the concrete floor. His breath was knocked from his body and he was pretty sure that sharp pain in the side of his chest was a rib cracking.
He was surrounded by darkness, the only light coming from the hole above, and that was from his dropped flashlight pointed at a wall. Only the faintest of gray light was down here, but it was enough to see the large mouth-shaped black spot on his forearm. Though he couldn’t see it well, the pain was enough to tell him it was bad.
He saw a glowing from the darkness, like angry red cracks. It took him only moments to understand what he was looking at. It was the kid. The flame underneath his charcoal half had flared. The monster now looked like some kind of lava creature.
Hamlin struggled to roll to his feet. His ribs and the rest of his battered body cried out in pain. The sharp stab in his ribs stunned him with its intensity, he sucked air in through his teeth.
The monster moved toward him, limping slowly; it must also be injured from the fall. It moaned a gurgling crackle sound like water on fire. That was all the motivation Hamlin needed to fight through the pain. He staggered to his feet, his hands falling on what felt like a bottle on the floor. Desperate for any weapon, he grasped the neck and came to his feet.
The monster lurched forward swinging at the detective. Hamlin couldn’t see anything about the room in the murky dark, but the glowing red fissures crisscrossing the monster's body gave him a nice target. He swung the bottle up, smashing it into the human side of the monster’s face.
The glass shattered as the shard still in Hamlin’s hand dragged across the creature’s face. It screeched and staggered back, its half-blackened hands came up to its face in a reflexive gesture.
Hamlin took advantage of the moment and charged. The darkness made it impossible for him to find a way out of the room quickly; his only option was to take the thing head on. He slammed into it, shoulder down in a brutal tackle reminiscent of his football days.
Of course, when he played football he had been thirty-five years younger and didn’t have a cracked rib and bruised body. The sharp stitch of pain in his ribs made him falter, his charge lacked power. His shoulder made contact with the smoldering creature’s chest. He felt the burning heat through his shirt and its tough charcoal like skin was like connecting with brittle rock. Chunks fell away from it, and Hamlin pushed it up against a stone
wall.
Its arms came down in a massive blow to his back, driving him to his knees. The creature took hold of Hamlin’s torso, and with unnatural strength tossed him to the side. Hamlin spun through the air and landed in a heap.
More bruises and cuts and a thousand points of pain. With cold dread, he realized this might be it. He lay on his back in the pile of debris from the room above. He could see the faint light filtering in from the windows above. His eyes must have adjusted to the low light because he could now see some moonlight cutting through, stirred up dust danced through it.
He never thought he would be one of those guys that waxed poetic at the moment of his death. But here he was not even considering getting back up. The monster was just too much.
He could hear it grunt, taking its time to pounce. Maybe it was hurt more than he knew. The thought emboldened him, and he ran his hands through the debris searching for another bottle or piece of wood, anything he could use as a weapon. Then the monster was looming over him.
It gazed down at him with a mix of amusement and hunger. All traces of humanity were gone. It was a monster in the dark, unnatural and as far from a human kid as possible. There was a smile-sneer on its face, but he could see the cuts and blood on its human side. It might think it had won—and truthfully, it might—but it was hurt. Hamlin could at least say he put up a good fight.
Then his flailing hand hit something hard and metallic. It was the butt of his gun. Somehow it had fallen with him. He wrapped his hand around it.
“When she made me, when she showed me a new way, she said the Hunter would be hard, he would be dangerous and I had to be careful to kill him,” the monster said. His voice was more stone on stone than human. Then he shrugged. “I think you are not dangerous, you are no Hunter.”
“You’re half right,” Hamlin said. “I’m not the Hunter, but I am dangerous. I’m NYPD motherfucker!”
He pulled the gun from the debris and swung it at the monster. He felt a moment of satisfaction as its eyes went wide for a moment. Then Hamlin was pulling the trigger, and its head slammed back as the round found his forehead. Hamlin kept pulling the trigger, firing round after round into the thing. The first round might have killed it, but Hamlin wasn’t taking any chances. The force of the shots knocked it back and as bullet after bullet found its mark, it jerked left and right in a macabre dance.
By the fifth shot, it fell against the far wall. Hamlin kept firing. He heard a cry that built up to a scream nearby before realizing it was him. Then the gun was clicking in his hand, the magazine empty.
The blackened creature sat against the wall, eyes open but unseeing. His body was still giving off smoke where the fire burned.
Hamlin was sitting up, the pain in his body nearly forgotten as he used every ounce of concentration on killing that thing.
Once he was sure it wasn’t going to jump up like every bad guy in every horror movie, he holstered the gun and focused on trying to stand. He got to his feet but quickly staggered to a wall to hold himself up. His stomach turned and he wanted to throw up more than he had ever wanted to throw up in his life. Somebody was listening to his inward pleas, and he spilled the half-digested contents of his stomach all over the wall and floor.
He became aware of a strong odor in the air, and there seemed to be more light in the room. The body was brighter now and burning.
Flames licked up and down the unmoving body, consuming the remains of the thing’s clothes and human flesh. It burned hot, changing flesh and bone to brittle charcoal. An acrid cloud of smoke formed above the body. In moments the body, now almost burned through, collapsed in on itself. Soon all that was left was a pile of ash.
Well that takes care of trying to dispose of the body, thought Hamlin.
The flames were quickly burning out, but in the dimming light Hamlin saw a doorway. He was able to reach it before everything went dark again. The atmosphere was different now, the darkness less dark and more natural. It was as though killing that thing had lifted some kind of curse. Light from the streetlamps and moon outside found its way in through cracks and holes.
In the faint light, Hamlin was able to find his way out with minimal stumbling and barked shins. His injuries slowed him down and he moved with a careful slowness.
Outside he sat beneath a park light to examine his wounds. He couldn’t see the damage to his face, but he could feel it. Ditto with his cracked rib. His arm, however, was another matter. He could see that quite clearly, even if he wished he couldn’t. The bite of the thing had ripped away skin and some muscle. His arm and shirt were soaked with blood and he knew anybody who saw him would assume he had just walked through a blender. He needed a doctor.
But first, he called Christopher’s cellphone. The call went straight to voicemail.
“This is Hamlin. We were right, it’s her. I just had a run in with a little present she had left behind for you. I’m okay, just a little beat up. I assume you talked with your book buddy. Call me when you get this so we can compare notes.”
He was in no condition to drive; he would have to make it to the street and call a cab. With what seemed like the greatest effort he had ever had to summon, he stood up and limped—when did he screw up his knee?—down the path. It sucked getting old, but then again it also sucked fighting a soul-twisted monster in an abandoned building.
He pulled out his phone again and called a cab to take him to the hospital. He could have used Uber—he wasn’t that old—but he knew New York. The cab drivers here might ask a lot of questions, but they also knew how to keep their mouths shut. They would ask how he got the shit kicked out of him, but whatever he told them wouldn’t make it far beyond that ride.
He fell into the backseat when the cab pulled up and told the driver to take him to the nearest hospital. It occurred to him that it was the same one Eris was at. He could stop in and check on her. Demon or not, he liked her. She was a good kid.
Meanwhile, he stared out the window, watching the city go by while he tried to think about what to do about their new problem. It seemed the little girl was growing up—and she was a bitch!
7
It was in pain. The thing is, she didn’t care.
The soul floated in the air two feet in front of Grace, eye level. She examined it, head cocked to one side, staring at it the way someone sitting around a campfire stares at the flames, seeing shapes that made sense only to them. But what she saw in the soul was real, in a sense. The images of the life it once had. She was learning to thumb through them with her mind.
They weren't really memories, they were emotional states, dreams, desires. These were more important than simple memories. They told her more about who this poor person had been and what she had experienced than any set of memories, no matter how detailed. No, these weren’t memories of events; they were images of how those events made the person feel.
Grace was in the laboratory that also served as her bedroom in the New York apartment. It was her favorite residence. It had all the luxury she had come to appreciate in the last year, mixed with the utility a witch in training needed. The laboratory was an industrial mixture of steel and glass, with quite a few splashes of hot pink. Just to make it pop.
It was at once cold, professional, sterile, and tastefully pretty. Just like Grace herself. A king size bed of pink and gray was pushed up against one wall, along with a matching dresser and vanity. Large, floor to ceiling windows filled another, letting in copious amounts of natural light.
The whole room was immaculate. It had been just recently cleaned top to bottom. The faint smell of cleaning fluids filled the room, but she was used to it. She was not a clean person by nature, but she had a personal maid. She had to use her for something.
The other half of the room was a cross between a science lab and an occult temple. Chemicals, vials, and beakers sat on shelves alongside ancient books and mystical symbols. On one wall hung an old tablet from prehistoric England right next to a picture of Harry Styles.
Severa
l wooden exam tables filled the other half of the room. Crystal jars sat on each. Two of them held glowing souls. A third was empty, its inhabitant floating two feet from Grace’s face.
Grace herself was less than basic today. She had on simple jeans and a t-shirt that read “F CK, all I need is U” on the front.
Her maid was currently scrubbing the floor near one of the wooden tables. Grace watched the bent over back of the woman as she worked.
Things change so quickly, she thought. Once you can be on top of the world, the next, you fuck up and you’re scrubbing floors.
“That’s enough, Anabelle. Wait in the corner until I call for you. Face the wall.”
Grace’s maid, Anabelle, former ranking member of the Alliance of dark souls stood slowly and made her way to the corner where she did as she was told and faced the wall. Gone was the beauty and grace that had framed this woman’s life. She had been tortured and beaten, her power weakened by the others in the Alliance to the point where she could no longer hold up the illusions she used to control the minds of men and make her beauty a thing of legend.
Now she was a broken old hag. Wrinkles covered her face, shriveling it up like a raisin. Her hair hung in greasy locks across her face. Her frame was thin and wasted, her arms like toothpicks.
Grace had no sympathy for her. She loved to watch Anabelle suffer and constantly thought of new horrible tasks for her to undertake. Just over a year ago their positions had been reversed. Grace had been held prisoner in Anabelle’s basement, herself tortured and beaten by this hag.
“This is hubris,” Golyat had told Grace. “Anabelle thought she could step aside from the Alliance and take on the Hunter by herself, thereby taking the leadership for herself. She thought she was better than the rest of her brethren. This is what happens when your loyalty slips, when you think yourself above your betters.”
Grace was not an idiot, she knew Golyat meant this as a lesson for Grace: Don’t fuck with me, remember to be loyal or worse will happen to you.
