One

They say there's no happy ending for hunters. Once you start, you're in it for life and the only way out is through a body bag.

In my short life I hadn't seen any reason to dispute this. I had no hope of being normal, of not being in the life. I practically came out of the womb swinging a machete, my mother and father had been hunting their whole lives too.

They met while both investigating a vampire nest. Dad said he fell for my mother the second he saw her decapitate a vamp in a single blow. They had only known each other four months before my mother realised she was pregnant. She apparently wanted to get married straight away, to provide something more stable for their baby.

That always made me laugh, as if a piece of paper offered stability when the very nature of their jobs meant that stability would always be a pipe dream. But Dad loved her and wanted the best for her and his unborn child. He married her when she was 7 months pregnant, it was a simple ceremony, no frills was the way Dad put it.

I still have a photo, Dad was wearing the usual hunter garb, jeans and T-shirt with his leather jacket over the top. My mother on the other hand was dressed to the nines, she had a flowing lilac dress and flowers through her hair, the silver charm necklace Dad gave her hung around her slender neck.

The photo was so clear you could make out each individual charm, silver angel wings, a silver sword and a small silver pentagram, each charm representing a part of my mother, the sword represented her hunting abilities, the pentagram her family history with the supernatural and the wings because Dad called her his angel. She looked like something out Greek mythology, like a nymph or fairy. She was stunning, ethereal even. They both looked so happy.

Looking at the photo made me sad.

They were soul mates, so in love and it all went away because of me. Three weeks after they were married she went into labour, it was early and on their way to the hospital they were sieged by demons. Dad had to pull over and exorcise them, in the midst of the chaos I was born. Because the demons took longer than Dad thought, my mother bled out. Dad raced her to the hospital but she was gone by the time he got there. Me on the other hand, I was completely healthy. Dad was able to take me straight away.

After my mother died Dad was bitter and angry, not just at the world or demons, but at me. He raised me to be a hunter, taught all the tricks of the trade, how to exorcise a demon, salting and burning a body and how to kill vamps. He also wrote everything down in a journal, a common practice among hunters.

There was never any love for me, or if there was he never showed it. He resented me, I was the cause of my mothers death after all. I never went to school, but I craved learning so I taught myself. Dad taught me practical things like how to fix a car, load a gun, keep a knife sharp, kill a deer and pitch a tent, I studied the ins and outs of literature, poetry, biology, law and other things Dad had deemed useless.

I think this was another reason my father was disappointed in me. I was a little nerd and not a perfect hunter. When I was 14 he took me to a tattoo shop run by a fellow hunter and held me down while I got an anti possession tattoo on my arm. I cried and Dad gave me a look of disgust.

Another way I had disappointed him. It only took another two years before I was sick of it.

I ran away. I kept hunting on a small scale, I didn't know what else to do, despite how much I longed for normality, I knew that my skills and experience lay in hunting. For another two years I hunted and kept a low profile as much as possible.

Dad never once tried to contact me and I didn't contact him. I occasionally did jobs with other hunters and managed to build up my contacts. My main source of information was an older hunter named Bobby. He ran the phones for lots of hunters and was a well of information.

It was Bobby who called me a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. Called to tell me Dad had died. He was hunting a shapeshifter somewhere in Idaho and had joined up with a hunter named John Winchester. It all went wrong and Dad was caught, but John managed to kill it, then because Dad was on the verge of death John apparently "put him out of his misery" was the phrase Bobby used. I thanked Bobby for telling me and hung up.

I didn't cry, I knew Dad would of hated that, I jumped in my tiny shit-box of a car and travelled to Idaho. Dad's body was in a local hospital morgue and I had to ask a hunter named Joshua to retrieve it for me.

There was no way at that age I was going to pass as a funeral director. Joshua was a friend of Dads and he felt bad because he was the one who suggested he work with John Winchester.

He helped me build the funeral pyre and stood with me while Dad burned away to ash. He then handed me my mother's necklace. Dad had been wearing it when he was killed; there was a faint red tinge to the angel wings. Joshua explained he had tried to wash it but that had remained, I nodded and thanked him while slipping it over my head. He also handed me the keys to dads car, a 1969 black ford mustang, his pride and joy, he explained Dads things were still in the car, his weapons, supplies and journal were all there, and now were mine.

I took my things out of my car and placed them next to Dads things in the trunk, my measly supply looked pathetic next to a lifetimes worth of specialised weapons. I dropped Joshua back at his car in town, he hugged me and asked if I needed anything, I shook my head and drove down the road. I pressed play on the tape deck in the car and Metallica's Nothing Else Matters began to play, Dads favourite song.

I felt a tear roll down my cheek but I quickly wiped it away. I promised myself that even though we had never really gotten along in life, in death I would make sure I became a better hunter and used everything he taught me. Maybe then he'd be proud of me.