The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 5:
Two days ago, I was Imbued. Two days ago, I learned that the world was a very different place from what I had thought. Two days ago, I resolved to bring the truth to light.
Today, I started to think that that wasn't going to be as easy as I had thought.
For one thing, how do you actually prove that people rise from their graves? That there are men who can turn into something that's not quite a wolf, and wolves who can turn into something that's not quite a man? You could catch it on tape, I guess, but there are plenty of amateur videos of UFOs and paranormal phenomenon, and no one believes in those anyway. No, the only simple way to show the world the truth is to drag every human being in front of an Anomaly, one by one. But Anomalies are good at hiding what they are. They had me fooled for twenty-nine years, didn't they?
So then we start thinking about more difficult ways. DNA analysis. Tissue samples. Instrumental readings. All of which, aside from being very difficult to get, will cost money. Damn. What a time to be out of a job…
And what happened tonight goes beyond even problems like that…
---
The man who was no man was young, and to an objective eye he was plain, if not quite homely. But his clothes were costly and fashionable, his haircut was understated and elegant without being conservative, and he wore it all with a confidence so great that he didn't even seem to be aware of it. The general effect was attractive. If he had asked Catherine if he could buy her a drink, she didn't think she would have said no.
Well. Under ordinary circumstances, that was. Yesterday, ordinary circumstances had become a thing of the past.
It was hard to say what she saw when she looked at him the other way. Something bad, that much she was sure of. Something scary, in the process of crumbling to pieces but nevertheless filled to the brim with persistent, malevolent life. And that wasn't a very scientific description, she had to admit.
She was new at this; she wasn't completely sure that she wasn't doing it all wrong, and Allen had refused to teach her. He said that you didn't need to be taught. God had instilled the ability in you, and so all you had to do to use it was let go of yourself and let Him guide you.
Yeah, right. Trust the common man on the street to turn to God to explain anything he didn't understand, rather than take a scientific approach to it. Catherine had nothing but contempt for Allen and his entire ilk. Unfortunately, for the moment she needed him – needed someone who had survived the Hunt (stupid name – she was a vegetarian, for crying out loud) for going on six months and had picked up a trick or two.
She was picking up some of her own already, though. One of them was to wear sunglasses when you were observing someone. They couldn't tell that you were looking at them if you wore sunglasses, not if you stood turned slightly to the side and looked at them from an angle. She supposed that it might look a bit odd for her to be wearing shades when it was dark enough that the streetlights were on, but heck with it. There were people with eye conditions that forced them to wear these things all the time.
Besides, the Anomaly – she had decided to call him Proper, until she could supply herself with the correct name; it was the word that his appearance brought to mind – wasn't looking around to see if anyone was spying on him. He was too busy spying himself.
Both of them, Catherine and Proper, were sitting on a streetside café. Catherine was sipping a plain cup of coffee and watching the Anomaly, who was sitting a few tables away. He had a cup of coffee, too, but though he put it to his lips every now and then, Catherine didn't think that he was actually drinking. She reminded herself to go over and check his cup after he left.
While she was watching Proper, he was watching someone else; an elderly woman, sitting over by the fence separating the tables from the sidewalk. She was wearing dark glasses, too, but for another reason than Catherine – the white cane leaning against her table suggested as much. She was a little thing, short and fine-boned, and watching the Anomaly watching her made Catherine feel decidedly uncomfortable.
A predator goes for the weakest member of the herd, she thought. The oldest, the smallest, the infirm. This… thing… had got three in one, hasn't he?
And what could she, Catherine, do about it? She did have a gun, loaded with silver bullets no less; Allan had given it to her. She didn't know more than the very basics about shooting, though. Besides, bullets hurt some Anomalies and not others – Catherine hadn't managed to memorise the information on that Hunter website yet, so she wasn't sure which types there were, and which were vulnerable. For that matter, even if she had known all about the breeds, she wouldn't have been able to sort this guy into one of them.
As for warning the woman… well, that would probably get her arrested on the charge of harassing helpless old blind people and trying to scare them with wild stories about monsters. She'd rather not do that, if it was all the same to everyone.
Eventually, the old lady finished her tea and walked out of the café, moving with the careful precision of someone who has lived without sight for long enough to have developed the right skills. Proper waited until she was out on the sidewalk, and then followed. Catherine let a few seconds pass, and then she, in turn, followed him. She allowed herself a quick detour to check his cup first, though. It was still brim full; whatever sort of Anomaly he was, human food didn't do anything for him.
She kept as far back as she dared, trying to blend with the crowd. Not an easy task, that; she had spent most of her life not blending with crowds. Not that she looked particularly different from anyone else – she was a little taller than most women, but otherwise she looked like anyone you might meet at the supermarket – thin, a little pale, long black hair, pretty if you liked the type. No, it was something in the way she moved, in the look in her grey-blue eyes. Catherine dared the world to try anything, every second of her life. You didn't hide that kind of personality in a crowd. People could sense it.
And predators could sense it even better.
The first time Proper looked back, Catherine pretended to read on a billboard. The next time, she walked around a corner and waited there for about thirty seconds before resuming her trail, on a slightly longer distance this time. Still, it was clear that this wasn't going to work. Heck, if he was a lycanthrope, he could probably smell her a block away. And while she was packing silver, she didn't think enough of her shooting skills to test them against a born killer.
Maybe she should rethink her approach…
"Darn," she growled as she turned around, black coat flapping dramatically around her as she did. Most people can't make a coat flap in a properly dramatic fashion, but Catherine was one of the lucky few who did. Muttering to herself, she started walking back up the street.
All right, so she apparently didn't have the skills to tail an Anomaly. That drastically reduced her chances for studying them. The only other alternative she could think of off-hand was to approach one openly, and she was highly hesitant to do that. Anomalies had hidden themselves deep into human society, reduced themselves to the stuff of tabloids and fairytales, and they hadn't spent all that effort just to have an unemployed lab technician suddenly just find out.
Granted, considering the way certain people – cough Allen cough – reacted when they did find out about Anomalies, she couldn't quite blame the Anomalies for hiding. People didn't like things they couldn't understand. Which, she supposed, was why most people didn't like science. Science just wasn't cute and fluffy enough to work with most people's muddled thinking.
The Anomalies weren't cute either, and the closest they got to 'fluffy' was 'shaggy'. People were fully ready to believe in ghosts, because they liked to think that something of them survived after death, but they probably had some more reservations about vampires. The idea of vampires weren't nearly as stupid as the idea of ghosts, but it was unpleasant, and people didn't like unpleasant truths.
Did we drive the Anomalies into hiding because they were hurting us? she wondered for the first time. Or because we just couldn't stand the fact that they existed? The medieval church didn't care much for night-crawlers, I imagine. They didn't fit into their narrow little world-view, so on with the torches and pitchforks.
Still, we have science now, even if everyone hates it. The Anomalies could come out of hiding again. Or at least, I don't know, sneak some info out at the time, let people get used to the idea that there might be Anomalies…
Someone grabbed her by the arm, hard. Catherine gave off a scream, more in anger than in fear or pain. How dared someone touch her without permission? No one touched her without permission!
She turned her head, and looked into Proper's strangely empty eyes. He was grimacing wildly and shaking his head.
"Let go of me!" Catherine yelled. A crowd was quickly starting to gather to see what was going on. They were gathering at a bit of a difference, true, but they were gathering all the same. Fine. Let it start here, then. Let this guy turn into a wolf-monster, and let a whole street full of people see what the masters of the world were trying to hide from them.
"You were following me," Proper said. His breath wasn't laboured, she noticed. In fact, when he didn't speak, there was no breath. "Care to tell me why?"
"Help!" Catherine bellowed. She was still more angry than scared; she knew that no amount of onlookers could stop the creature from tearing her to pieces if he wanted to, but she'd be damned if she wasn't going to make it as troublesome to him as she could. Touch her, would he? "Assault! Rape! Someone get the police!"
"Hey!" A heavyset young man in a leather jacket stepped forward, his hands balled into fists. "Leave her alone, you fucking pervert!"
Looks like chivalry isn't dead, Catherine thought sardonically. Then again, he probably expects to score with me if he comes to the rescue. Well, much as I hate to disappoint, all I need is for the effing Anomaly to look the other way for a moment while I ever-so-subtly sneak my left hand into my coat and get my gun…
Proper gave the guy in the leather jacket a look of sick despair. Then his features hardened. His eyes bulged in their sockets and he pulled his lips back in an animal snarl.
"Be thou still, thou child of Abel," he growled.
Leather Jacket hesitated, and then stopped in his tracks. He stared blankly at Proper, his jaw hanging down.
The Anomaly looked around at the assembled crowd.
"Thou hast naught seen!" he gasped, sounding pained. "Get thee hence!"
There was a moment of complete silence. Then one man in the crowd started shuffling off with clumsy, zombie-like steps. One by one, the rest followed him, wandering away with dazed expressions.
Proper turned back to Catherine, and found her gun pointed at his heart. Straight at his heart – Catherine might not be much of a shot, but she did have a university degree in medicine.
"Let go of me," Catherine said. Her breathing was quick and laboured, and perhaps her hand trembled ever so slightly, but her eyes were steady.
"Ah. Yes." Proper's eyes glanced nervously downwards, watching the barrel pointed at his chest. "That won't kill me, you know."
"Is that so?" Catherine tried to cock the gun – that menacing click always worked as a very good argument of persuasion in movies – but unfortunately, she had cocked it when she drew it, and so the click did not present itself. "Then how come you're not snapping my neck right now?"
"Well, two reasons, really," Proper said unhappily. "One, that was never what I planned to do." He sighed deeply. "And two, it won't kill me, but it'll hurt like crazy. I don't deal too well with things that hurt like crazy."
"Well, I got bad news for you then, buddy," Catherine said. Her full house had just dwindled into a mere three-of-a-kind, but she was still intent on making the most of it. And this guy actually seemed a bit more human than the lycanthropes had. More like he could actually be made to doubt himself and less like he just meant to tear his way through anything that came up with his bare hands. And while Catherine had never had what one might call people skills, she could bully or bullshit her way out of anything. "This is a pretty high-calibre gun. Your heart isn't just going to puncture, it's going to explode. And after that, the bullet is going to go on, hitting your spinal chord between – oh – the second and third vertebrae, I would say. Then we're talking torn-off nerves and…"
"All right! All right! Jeez!" The Anomaly groaned. "I'm letting go, I'm letting go."
He did let go, and took a couple of steps back. Catherine wasn't sure how she felt about that. On one hand, it meant that, well, she was that much further away from a mind-controlling revenant. On the other hand, she didn't trust her ability to hit a moving target on a few feet's distance, and Anomalies could be very, very fast sometimes.
"Can we talk now?" Proper said pointedly. "You know, have a civilised conversation?"
"Oh, you're one to talk!" Catherine said. She had gotten into the shooting-position Allen had taught her; leg's spread, arms outreached, gun held in two hands and aimed square at the target. "I was minding my own business, and you just walked up to me and grabbed me."
"All right, I admit that that was perhaps a bit rude," Proper said. "I don't like people following me. Why were you following me?"
Catherine considered briefly and then decided to tell a version of the truth. Those were usually best, anyway.
"I saw you following that blind old lady," she said, shrugging. "I figured I'd better make sure nothing happened to her."
"I see." Proper sighed, looking very tired. "Well, I'm afraid that old lady is my business, not yours. Stay out of it, please." He raised his gaze, and once more his lips were drawn back, his eyes opened wide and his voice sunk to a snarl. "Sheathe thy gun and get thee hence."
Catherine felt it. It was like a heavy weight on her brain, like a dark cloud of deep depression lowering itself over her. His voice was in her head now; sheathe thy gun, and get thee hence. She felt his will, and she wanted to obey it.
But, surprisingly, she didn't want it that much. The Anomaly expected her to give in without a fight, expected her to obey willingly, even eagerly – she could feel that in her head, too, his certainty of his own power. And why not? Hadn't that been exactly what everyone else had done?
But I'm not like other people – not quite, anyway. I'm a Hunter…
Even so, after a moment of hesitation, she decided to not fight the command, even though she could easily have done so. What would happen if Proper figured out that she could resist his mind-control? Presumably he'd resort to something a bit more physical – and she didn't trust her gun to protect her against that.
So she tried to adopt the blank stare of Proper's previous victims, and walked away down the street with slow, shuffling steps. The Anomaly didn't call her back, and after a moment she heard his steps disappearing in the other direction, so she supposed that he had fallen for it.
Meanwhile, she clearly wasn't fit to stalk anyone, especially not someone who would be especially alert after this. She might as well go home and try to read up on the Hunter-Net archives – she wasn't getting anything more done tonight.
She supposed that meant that an innocent old lady was going to get killed, though.
So what? People always die, and old people even more so. Besides, probability states that this old girl is just another moron with no respect for science. Big deal.
But she couldn't quite make herself believe that.
---
The next morning, as she scanned the obituaries, she was surprised to find no account of any old women having died of violent causes during the night. It had been a bit of a slow death-night, to be honest. In a city, even a relatively small one like Dougal, there were always someone dying, just as there was always someone being born, but all females of even remotely the right age bracket had died of natural causes, or disease, or something like that. No exsanguation. No being-horrible-mauled. Nothing that might indicate an Anomaly on the rampage.
She considered the situation as she toasted her bagels and brewed her extra-extra-extra-strong coffee. It was possible, she supposed, that the old lady had simply gotten away. She, Catherine, might have occupied Proper for long enough. Or Proper might have caught sight of something younger and juicier. Or some other Anomaly might, as Anomalies sometimes did, pulled some strings to keep the newspapers free of signs of Anomaly-related activity.
All perfectly plausible ideas – so why didn't she believe any of them for a moment?
Because you're a researcher, Faller, she thought with a wry smile as she poured herself a cup of almost-solid coffee. She had heard of people who actually liked coffee, but she drank it for the effect. The moment someone invented pure, liquid caffeine was the moment she switched to that. You know when explanations just don't fit, even if they're logically plausible. People think intuition is somehow magical, but it's really not. It's just that the human mind is constructed to turn disparate facts into patterns, and right now mine is telling me that these facts form a pattern that's still missing one heck of a lot of pieces.
The question is, how do I start filling out the picture?
---
The only real benefit of being unemployed was that you made your own schedule. You could, for instance, spend most of your day patrolling an area of town and hope for the best. It gave you aching feet and acute boredom, but when you couldn't think of any better way to find an anonymous blind old lady, at least you had the option of going through with it.
It also gave you a lot of time to think.
As she walked back and forth along a route she had calculated to cover the most ground in the least time, Catherine tried to figure out just what the hell she was doing. This wasn't very bright of her, she knew that. Proper knew what she looked like, and if she kept turning up in his path, he was bound to get sick of her sooner or later. And if he decided to kill her, what could stop him? He could tear her to pieces with his bare hands in the middle of the street, in front of hundreds of witnesses, and then he'd just tell them to forget it all. He was untouchable by anyone other than a Hunter, and the only Hunter around wasn't much of a fighter.
It was true that she had a few other little advantages than just being immune to the hypnosis. She could stop an attack on her with nothing more than her voice, and sometimes she had… flashes… showing what would happen if she kept doing what she was doing, offering her a chance to stave off the consequences. Both highly useful gifts, even if she would feel a lot better about them if she knew just how they were possible. And what using them did to her body and mind.
Seeing an attack before it came and being able to stop it should, in theory, make her impossible to harm. But the reality wasn't quite so ideal. The flashes came when they wanted to, not when she needed them. And as for the Denial, her foremost shield against all knives and arrows the world might see fit to send at her… well, getting your mind into the right gear to use it was freaking hard, especially when you had only a split second to make it work.
No, her foremost weapon was her wits, just as it had been for all her life. And right now, her wits were telling her to let sleeping bears lie. And to let hungry Anomalies feed.
Still… here she was. What on earth for?
The charitable answer was that she was looking out for someone who could not – no pun intended – look out for herself. Wasn't that was Hunters were supposed to be for? That was what Allen said, at least – not that she was exactly ready to grant him the honour of being the official voice of Hunterdom, but still. Hunters stood against the forces of darkness, not because they were necessarily up to the challenge, but because they were the only ones who had the option of doing so. Anyone else who tried would either flee in the supernatural panic that lycanthropes inspired, or fall before the kind of hypnosis that Proper had demonstrated. Hunter bodies could be rent asunder as easily as anyone else's, but their minds, at least, were inviolate. And that gave them a chance. Just a chance – but that was more than anyone else had.
And by all means, Catherine could see the logic. Back in the tribal days, she imagined, there had been a great need for people who could deal with all the things that went skulking around in the darkness at the end of the firelight. Why wouldn't special protectors have evolved, a subspecies with the abilities necessary to deal with the danger? If the Hunters of today were really the descendents of those ancient guardians, then it was their genetic destiny to safeguard their 'tribe' – whatever that might mean these days.
On the other hand, Catherine's medical studies had taught her that what humans were most evolved for was living as nomadic packs of advanced apes, rustling up food however opportunity allowed, breeding indiscriminately and generally doing very little of intellectual interest. You didn't get anywhere by following your genetic destiny.
All right, so she'd prefer it if no harm came to innocent old ladies. It wasn't that she liked people so very much, but she didn't hate them enough to want harm to come to them. But quite frankly, the area the woman in question had headed off into when Catherine last saw her had been pretty rough-looking. She would be in far more danger than that of one lone Anomaly if she lived there, but Catherine still didn't intend to dedicate her life to guarding her. Shit happened. If you happened to find yourself in a position to stop it from happening, you did, but otherwise, you didn't need to bother. Or so went Catherine's philosophy on the matter.
But… there was the mystery…
Aside from the caffeine addiction, Catherine led a pretty vice-free life. As a physician, she knew exactly what drugs, nicotine and alcohol did to your body, and as such, it wasn't that hard to stay clear – and besides, the first and only time she had gotten seriously drunk, she had an awful feeling that she had lost her virginity without having any memory of it the next morning; not really one of her prouder moments, that. And as far as intentional sex went, well, you sort of needed to interact with other humans beings to get there, and Catherine wasn't especially good at that sort of thing.
But mysteries – mysteries pulled her in. She both loved and hated them; felt both offended by their very existence and fully, deeply alive when she was in the middle of solving one. That was why she was a scientist. Heck, it was probably why she was a Hunter – hadn't she heard a voice in her head saying FIND THE ANSWER when she saw her first Anomaly, and hadn't that been her goal all her life?
There was something strange going on with that Anomaly and his prey. Catherine wanted to find out what it was. Needed to find out, maybe.
And what that vice might do to her body wasn't hard to imagine. In fact, once you started, it got kind of hard not to…
She was resting her aching feet on a streetside bench when she saw the old woman again. It was late in the afternoon, now; Catherine had started considering giving up for the day, especially since her finances wouldn't allow her to eat out and she therefore was somewhat starving. When she saw the blind lady, however, all thoughts of such bodily concerns evaporated. Here was her chance.
But first of all, she needed to follow the old girl home. It would be suspicious to tag her on the street, but once Catherine knew where she lived, she could ring the doorbell and claim to be a journalist wanting to write an article about senior citizens or some such. Catherine was hardly a great liar, but she could keep a straight face, which was more than most people could, and in this case, all she would need was a straight voice. She'd learn more about the woman easily enough.
The blind woman walked down the street, and Catherine followed.
She was going in the same direction as she had last night, and again Catherine had cause to note the way the houses around her were growing scruffier and less well maintained. Just what the hell was a senior citizen doing living in this kind of neighbourhood? More to the point, how did she manage it? Why wasn't she robbed and murdered?
There was a flicker of understanding there – wait, it must be… – but it disappeared as quickly as it had come. Either way, Catherine was busy looking around warily. The street was almost clear of pedestrians now; there were people to be seen, but most of them were standing, not walking. Which was a bad sign as far as Catherine could tell, because someone who didn't have anything better to do than to stand around was someone who probably didn't have much of an income other than that which stupid middle-class people brought with them if they strolled into this neighbourhood without a care in the world…
But Catherine had her gun. And, more to the point, she had her brain. There couldn't be one person within several blocks' radius of here that had even finished high school, and she had a university diploma. That, as far as she was concerned, meant that she was a higher order of being, and she would not be hindered or threatened by stupid animals like these folk.
Speaking thereof, one of the clusters of young men who had been hanging at the corner now seemed to be heading her way. Catherine felt a sting of fear in her belly. She forced herself to be calm, though; for all she knew, they just had an errand somewhere in the direction she had come from.
No such luck; when they reached her, they stopped, forming a human wall in front of her. A few of them branched out, covering her sides, too. Well, crap.
"That's far enough, baby," one of them, a black man with a shaved head, said. "The boss told us about you. You should mind your own fucking business, that's what we think."
Catherine was scared. In fact, she had gone from mere fear into deep terror, the kind of limb-chilling feeling that felt like death was wrapping itself around you like a burial shroud. But she was not a woman who let fear paralyse her; for her, fear was for anger what wooden logs were for fire.
"Oh yes," she said. "We. Rats think in terms of pack, don't they? It takes a human being to have the guts to have his own opinion."
He was slow enough that she saw him move, but fast enough that she didn't have time to call out the one word that would trigger the Denial. His fist slammed into her gut, making her fold over. Her eyes bulged. No one had hit her since kindergarten, no one!
Adding insult to injury, he followed up with a back-of-his-hand slap across her face. Catherine gave off a sound between a whimper and a growl.
"Watch what you're saying, bitch," he said.
Catherine slowly got up again, and he let it happen. She had tears of pain in her eyes, but her mouth was locked in a crazed smirk.
Rats. Vermin. Insects. How dare they lay hands on their betters?
"You know he's not human, don't you?" she said, her voice strained. She was still trying to get enough air into her lungs to speak. "That boss of yours. He's some kind of thing."
Shaved Head didn't answer, just kept his level stare at her. The rest of the men exchanged uncertain glances, though. Catherine guessed that they either did know, or at least they knew that something wasn't right. But as long as no one brought it up, they could manage to not think about it.
How pathetically human. People prefer ignorance. It means they won't have to learn anything that might upset them.
At a hunch, she squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them for real, letting the world as it was, as opposed to the world as the Anomalies wanted her to see it, rush in…
Shaved Head wasn't human. The others were, as far as she could tell, but not him. To her Sight, he seemed covered with a thin, oily patina. His eyes gleamed feverish in their sockets, not empty like Proper's, but so focused on a single objective that they were inhuman in their own way.
She had seen people like this before. And hunter-net had given her a decent idea about what they were all about.
"And you've been drinking his blood," she added. "You sick bastard. You used to be a man, but what the hell are you now?"
"Shut up!" Shaved Head struck out with his fist again, this time against her face – but Catherine was ready now. Heck, she had been expecting it.
"No!" she snapped, and the fist stopped right in front of her chin. She wanted to flinch away, but forced herself not to. She had to seem like she was fully confident in her power. They had to see her fully confident in her power. She could only Deny one assault at the time, as far as she could tell, but if she could make them believe that she couldn't be touched…
Shaved Head slowly drew his hand back, staring at her. Then, giving off a shrill howl, he struck out again and again, aiming a flurry of punches at her.
"No. No. No. No. No." Catherine remained where she was, stopping every attempt before it could reach her. If she failed once, if she couldn't make the Denial work every single time, she'd go down, and then she'd never get up again. He'd make sure of it.
After what felt like an eternity – in truth, it was less than five seconds – Shaved Head backed away, trembling, mouth opening and closing silently. Catherine still didn't move, just watched him passively.
When she judged it to be the right dramatic time, she spun around, glaring at the rest of the men. They shied away from her glance. She had beaten the leader. That sort of thing made rats very scared.
"You knew he was a spawn of Satan!" she screamed. "You knew and you worked for him anyway! Did you think you would get away with it? Did you think the eyes of Heaven were blind? Be grateful they sent me and not one of the others, because I'm nowhere near as bad as most of us! There are flaming swords that can smite the unrighteous!"
She didn't believe in Satan, or Heaven, but as a metaphor, she was close enough to the truth to satisfy her. Besides, right now, with them so frightened and her riding on a wave of fiery adrenalin, she sounded very convincing indeed.
She pulled the gun from out of her coat and fired a shot into the air. The men scattered fleeing down the street. Only Shaved Head remained.
"That's right, run!" Catherine yelled. "Run for your miserable, sinful lives!"
As the last of the men disappeared out of sight, she turned back to Shaved Head. He was staring at her with a kind of terrified defiance, refusing to flee, but not daring to attack, and so trapped where he stood.
"He's a bloodsucker, then," she said. "I wasn't sure exactly what, but bloodsuckers seem to be the only ones who have flunkies like you."
"The boys…" Shaved Head grimaced. "He takes a little blood from them, a different one each night. Not more than they can deal with."
"But not from you." Catherine gestured with the gun to make him more talkative. "You he gives blood to."
"Yeah." Grotesquely enough, Shaved Head started smiling – a wide, feverish smile of twisted bliss. "I'm his main man."
"Sure you are." Catherine scowled in disgust. Anomalies were one thing, but regular people not only accepting them but working for them, furthering their ends? That was sickening. "What about the blind woman? What's her story?"
He shrugged.
"We don't touch her. And if someone else tries to, we take care of it. That's all."
"Why?"
"Dunno."
"Where does she live?"
Shaved Head smirked.
"I'm not telling. And if you've got a problem with that, bitch, you can pull that trigger for all I care, because I'll fry in hell before I sell the boss out."
Catherine believed him. She was enough of a liar to recognise a lie when she heard it, and this wasn't one. The crazy idiot really would die to protect the object of Proper's strange brand of charity. Proper must have hypnotised him so deeply that he could hardly think for himself anymore.
"Fine." Catherine sighed. "Okay, you can go. But before you get it into your thick, Anomaly-boot-licking head to try to ambush me somewhere down the road, let me warn you. You've already noticed that I'm not infallible. But you've also noticed that I see more than I have any business doing." She grinned mirthlessly. "And the next shot I fire won't be into the air. Now beat it!"
Shaved Head beat it. Catherine remained standing where she was until he was out of sight. Then she dropped to her hands and knees.
Considering how little she had eaten during the day, she managed to keep throwing up for a very long time.
---
A few hours later, she was lying in her bed, and she still couldn't stop trembling. But if the flesh was weak, then at least the spirit was willing; her mind was still working, sorting through facts, trying to make some kind of sense of it all. And that was at least some comfort, despite the fact that a locked front door, a bedroom door barricaded by a dresser, and a gun beneath her pillow wasn't enough to make her feel safe from all the dangerous lunatics out there.
He wasn't stalking her, she thought, for at least the tenth time. He was watching over her. And he's got a gang of minions who he's ordered to watch over her when he can't. Why, for God's sake? We're food to them. Livestock. Who protects one particular cow at the expense of the rest of the herd? Madness.
In vampire stories – or so she had a foggy impression of; she didn't really read horror fiction – they sometimes went after special mortal women and tried to turn them into their eternal brides. Catherine was almost willing to believe that one, even though she could see very little romance in real-world vampires, who usually seemed just as dirty, stupid and generally mundane as any human she had known. But this woman was so old. Did Proper want a girlfriend with a face covered with wrinkles?
Well, there was no accounting for taste, of course, especially not Anomaly taste… but still…
This called for investigation. It called for the careful scrutiny of a true scientist. This called for a dedicated campaign to bring the truth to light.
Unfortunately, all of that would mean going outside, and Catherine wasn't sure she could bring herself to do that. In fact, she wasn't sure if she could bring herself to come out from beneath the covers. She had almost died today. They had almost killed her. She had stopped them, by intelligence and Denial and pure desperation, but if she had failed… if she had been just a little slower, or a little weaker… then Shaved Head would have crushed her skull against the pavement while his friends looked on and laughed.
And he was still out there. He would doubtlessly rally his gang again; they were used to obeying him, used to being afraid of him, and the new, unfamiliar fear of Catherine would be defeated by that habit very quickly, once Shaved Head got a moment to work on them. Maybe they would be a bit antsy about meeting her again, but as long as she didn't spring any new surprises at them, they'd stay in line.
She didn't have any new surprises to spring at them. The Denial was all she had – her only visible power. If she ran into Shaved Head again, he would eat her for breakfast.
Proper hadn't scared her like this, for all that his powers were doubtlessly much greater than his lackey's. He had seemed… hesitant. Like he wasn't quite sure what to do with her, and with the situation. Shaved Head was a thousand times scarier, because he knew exactly what to do – protect Proper's interests, no matter the cost to himself or anyone else.
She needed to find Proper. He could make his goons stay away from her, if she could give him a reason to. Somehow, she had to find either enough force to make a walking corpse think twice about angering her, or something he would want badly enough that she could negotiate with… him…
In the darkness beneath the covers, Catherine's eyes opened wide. When you thought about it like that, the answer was actually quite simple.
--
She found the blind lady easily enough the next day. It was a skill like any other, apparently. Blind-lady spotting - possibly something for the next Olympics. This time, she forewent the stalker routine, and stepped right up to the woman.
"Ma'am?" she said in her best businesslike tone, the one that she had tended to use at patients during her internship at the hospital - and that was probably why she had almost failed to graduate, come to think of it... "Detective Stein, Dougal Police Department. I need to ask you a few questions."
She waved her hand in front of the woman's face, to give the impression that she was holding up a badge. If anyone caught her doing this, she'd probably be in jail for a pretty long time. But she had to deal with Proper...
Actually, that was pure bullshit, when you thought about it. Proper didn't know who she was, where she lived, anything about her other than that she was nosy and had some tricks up her sleeve that he probably hadn't seen before. She could just stay away, and Proper and Shaved Head would never find her. But...
... she wanted to know. It was stupid and suicidal, but she couldn't help it. She was a moth, and the promise of knowledge, of understanding, was a great big flame that would very probably burn her to cinders.
"Have I do anything wrong, detective?" the woman said. She had a weak, trembling little voice.
"Not at all," Catherine said. "This is simply a routine investigation. Even so, I would appreciate it if we could go somewhere private and talk."
"My... my apartment is just a few blocks away?" the woman offered.
"Very good," Catherine said. "Lead the way."
The woman obediently went down the path that Catherine had followed her along twice before. Again the slow descent from 'reasonably well-maintained neighbourhood' into 'slum'.
And would you look at that... there was Shaved Head and his gang. Catherine's stomach turned a knot on itself, and she couldn't quite hold back an involuntary gasp. In her mind's eye, she saw the lot of them surround her again, blocking her escape with a wall of strong bodies and speaking to her in that snarling, contemptuous way that was the prelude to serious violence...
She steeled herself. She was Catherine by-God Faller, scientist and Hunter, and she would not be frightened by her inferiors. Even if they killed her, these brainless thugs would never be as alive as her, as aware as her, as human as her. You didn't waste your time fearing that wild dogs would eat you. If it seemed likely that they would, you took steps to prevent them from doing so.
Which she had.
Slowly, carefully, she pulled her gun out of the pocket and aimed it at the blind lady's head. And smiled.
"Are you all right?" the woman said, unaware of street thugs and silver bullets alike. She might have been afraid of Catherine and what she thought Catherine represented - the law; a vastly more frightening thing to law-abiding people than to crooks - but she still sounded concerned.
"Yes, ma'am," Catherine said. Shaved Head and his gang were silently forming a moving circle around her and the old woman. "I just stumbled."
Five minutes took them to a battered-looking apartment building. Those were five very long minutes for Catherine, who had to keep an eye on every single one of the thugs. She didn't think they'd risk rushing her, not when she could pull the trigger the moment she felt someone touching her, but she couldn't be sure. They might chance it.
Not that she would pull the trigger, even if she felt someone touch her.
Probably not, anyway. Killing an innocent woman just because Proper wanted to keep her alive would be a pretty pathetic way to get her revenge for her own impending demise, but God, the temptation to make any kind of damage before being beaten to death...
The thugs didn't follow them into the building; instead, they spread out around it. Catherine had gotten in, but getting out would be harder. She had a gun and they didn't seem like they did, but as long as some of them were brave or foolhardy enough to rush her, that would just mean she would take a few of them with her.
Could Renfields shrug off bullets, like bloodsuckers could? Did anyone know? She wished she had checked the hunter-net archives for that piece of information. Too late now, alas.
The name on the door said "Daisy Linkletter," and the apartment inside was an oasis of order and cleanliness in this urban desert. Catherine supposed that when you were blind and living alone, you had no choice but to be tidy. You wanted to know for a certainty where everything was, because otherwise you'd never find it... or worse, you might stumble on something you hadn't expected to be there, and hurt yourself badly with no one to help you.
"Sit down, detective," the old woman - Daisy, apparently - said kindly as she walked into the kitchen. "Would you like some coffee?"
"Please," Catherine said, slumping down on a pillowed chair. "Strong as you can make it."
Outside the window, the sun was setting. Soon, Proper would wake up and come out of whatever hiding place he had arranged for himself. He'd seek out his minions and have them tell him what had transpired during the day. And they'd say that the pain-in-the-ass woman in the black coat was up in Daisy's apartment, and that she had a gun. And then things would be decided. One way or another.
"Would you please tell me how long you've been blind, Mrs Linkletter?" Catherine said.
"It's Miss, detective, Miss," Daisy said, gently rebuking. "I never did marry."
"Sorry," Catherine said neutrally. Damn, stupid mistake. It didn't do to assume that all little old ladies had been married at some time in their lives. It was just that what with everyone marrying each other all over the place, it was hard to get to an advanced age without having stumbled onto the aisle at some point. "I misremembered. Please answer the question, though."
"Oh, forever," Daisy said, somewhat uncomfortably. "There was... was... an accident... when I was a little girl. It was a long time ago, though. Surely it is nothing that anyone can care about now?"
"We're not quite sure, ma'am," Catherine said. "May I ask why an elderly, visually challenged citizen such as yourself lives in such a bad neighbourhood? Don't you have the option of living anywhere else?"
Daisy looked confused.
"Bad neighbourhood?" she said. "It's not too bad, is it? I've always felt perfectly comfortable here..."
She doesn't know, Catherine realised. Proper protects her, and it's not like she can see how this place has fallen apart.
And I think I know why. But if I'm right, then things are even more screwed up than I thought they were.
---
It took about an hour of sitting around, asking needlessly thorough questions of no real importance, before Proper showed up. It was lucky that Daisy had had such a long life, with plenty of things to ask questions about, and even luckier that she belonged to a generation that respected authority. Even so, Catherine wasn't sure she could have kept up the charade for much longer. She was almost grateful to see Proper walk through the door. Almost.
"Hello?" Daisy said when she heard the door opening. "W-who's there? Detective Stein, what's happening? I locked that door..."
"I've had a master key for years," Proper said gruffly. "Slumber and forget."
Daisy's head peacefully sank down, her chin leaning against her chest. Se started snoring gently.
Catherine aimed her gun to the old woman's head.
"I think I like you right over there," she said. "Not one step closer, or I'll kill her."
"You'd really do that?" Proper said. He actually sounded disgusted. "Kill a harmless, blind, old woman?"
"And what were your goons going to do to me yesterday, huh?" Catherine said. "Give me a wedgie? You'd better believe that I'm as serious as it takes to save my life."
"Relinquish thy arms," Proper said. And pushed, sending a spike of pain through her head along with a demand that she do as he said... but just like before, the demand was easily ignored.
"No," Catherine said.
Proper did a double take. Then, very slowly, he locked eyes with her.
"Drop. The. Gun," he said, very carefully.
"No," Catherine said.
Proper shook his head.
"How are you doing this?" he said. "You've got an amazing will on you, but I've handled stronger ones. You're not resisting me. I overpower you completely... and then my commands just fade away before you have a chance to act on them."
Catherine shrugged. She wasn't entirely sure herself.
"You lot have been messing with our heads for how long now?" she said. "Ten thousand years? More? Didn't it ever occur to you that eventually evolution would make some of us immune?"
"I suppose it didn't," Proper said. "So... what did she call you? Detective Stein, right?"
"Call me Angela," Catherine said. "That's not my real name either, but it's got a certain fitting quality to it."
"Angela. Very well." Proper nodded. "My name's Edmund. Edmund Linkletter. And that is my real name."
Catherine grinned, despite the danger she was in.
"I knew it!" she said. "I knew I was right! I wondered, why would you protect her so carefully? What was she to you, if not just a meal? And then it occurred to me." She glanced smugly at Daisy. "She's your mother, isn't she?" Then something occurred to her, and the glee died away. "Wait... she said she never married..."
"She didn't," Edmund agreed. "I couldn't allow that, you see. A husband would have taken her away, to somewhere where I didn't have any power. Where I couldn't look out for her. So she's not my mother, no.
"She's my daughter."
Catherine realised that she was gaping, and quickly closed her mouth. She looked from Daisy to Edmund.
"But..." She shook her head. "But you're dead."
"Well... yes... sort of," Edmund said reluctantly. "But I was alive for twenty-nine years before I died. Plenty of time to have a daughter. And to start to love her." He sighed. "I loved her far too much, as it happens."
"How's that?" Catherine said.
"When I... died..." Edmund said, looking away, "I tried to hold on to her. Her mother left me, but I held on to Daisy. My wife wanted to take her with her, but I couldn't let that happen. I loved her." He laughed hoarsely. "Dead men shouldn't love."
Catherine didn't say anything.
"I'm not sure how much you know about... my kind," Edmund said. "Perhaps you already know that sometimes when we get angry, or frightened, we..." He winced. "I believe young people these days use the word 'spaz'?"
"I don't," Catherine said. "But I know what it means."
"There was trouble, when she was seven," Edmund said. "One of my associates turned against me. There was fighting, and I was hurt... badly hurt. I lost control." He shrugged. "When I came to my senses again, my enemy was dead, and my daughter was unconscious on the floor. I had hit her over the head. Hard. You have no idea how strong we are, Angela."
"I have an idea," Catherine said.
"Well." Edmund grimaced. "When she woke up... something in her head had broken. Her eyes work, but the part that's supposed to interpret what she sees... that part's just not responding anymore."
Catherine nodded. She had read about the condition. It was sometimes curable. And sometimes not.
"Dead men shouldn't love, Angela," Edmund said. "It doesn't do us or the people we love any good. So I disappeared from her life that night. But she never disappeared from mine. I've spent the last sixty years keeping her safe by every means at my disposal. Those resources that I did not have, I acquired. My kind rules the world, did you know that? Ruling one street wasn't really very difficult."
"And you never considered just leaving her alone?" Catherine said. "You drove away any potential husbands. What else did you drive away? How many possibilities? You've been her guardian angel, but if she had had the choice, would she have chosen to make it on her own?"
"Maybe," Edmund said. "But maybe I still love her too much to let her go, even if that would be best. And I have a debt that I can't ever repay. Don't you see? I have to help her. After all, I was the one who made her helpless in the first place."
"I see," Catherine said. "So now what happens?"
"I don't know," Edmund said. "What do you want, in return for putting that gun away?"
"Safety," Catherine said. "I stay away, and no one comes after me."
Edmund shrugged.
"Deal," he said.
For a moment, she considered asking for information, too. There was so much, so much, that someone who had been dead for sixty years could have told her. But she had already pushed her luck, and pushed it far. She didn't want to worry about Shaved Head waiting for her in some dark alley. She had gotten her answers, solved her mystery. Now she just wanted it all to be over.
"How do I know you'll keep your end of the bargain?" she said. "And not change your mind as soon as I walk out that door?"
"You don't," Edmund said. "But you've already seen that I'm not one to take the easy way out. No matter what it costs me. Or others."
Catherine nodded silently. Then she put her gun away, and walked out the door and down the stairs.
Shaved Head and his gang parted before her as she left. When she looked back, they had closed ranks again, blocking the door to the building.
No one followed her.
---
From the journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 5 (continued):
So there it is.
Anomalies with human reasons for doing stuff. Now there's an unnatural concept for you. I don't want Anomalies to have human feelings and human frailties. I want Anomalies to be completely evil so I can feel good about feeling bad about them.
But I guess that's not a very scientific viewpoint.
So what's the conclusion here? Anomalies are just like us? Just bigger, badder versions of us, who can act on their impulses? Just humans who happens to have the power to escape consequence?
Follow that logic. Then what are Hunters? What are we, with our vigilantism and our powers and our self-righteous little crusade?
Anomaly wannabees?