Chapter 2- old wounds and nightmares

A woman's pained screams filled the room. A child's terrified cry pierced the uproar. Merciless and inhuman laughter blotted them out. A bloody hand reached out to the shadows before a shower of broken glass blocked the view of those shadows. Then the whole world erupted into a firestorm, the screams were even louder then before. Then from the flames strode a dark figure wielding three axes.

The man identified as Alaric opened his eyes suddenly, sweating bullets and groggily taking in the scene. He was in a strange room and he could feel that he was on a rather large bed, with what looked like a fur blanket on the top of the fine linen sheets that he was lying on. Bandages were wrapped around his torso and shoulders and he could make out stitches on his body where gashes used to be.

'What am I doing here?' He thought. 'I should be dead and my skull mounted on a wall?'

He tried to lift himself up, but the pain made it extremely laboring. Breathing deeply he sat up quickly. The pain was excruciating but he made it into a sitting position. His whole body was tender and he saw his axes, cleaned and shining, propped up neatly on a stool by the bed he was on.

"So that hunter didn't kill me…" He said to himself.

He raised his right hand to scratch his head, his fingers passing through the spikes in his hair. He felt stitches in his head and it irritated him. He decided against scratching them.

'Hmm…'He thought. 'Maybe it'll want to fight me or torture me once I've recovered.'

He had heard of hunters healing humans who had shown exceptional fighting skills in order to have an honorable fight rather then attacking them while they're injured. Their often strange code of honor forbid them from doing that. Unless they were Bad-Bloods obviously.

'Just maybe…' He thought with hope. 'This will be the right one. Number forty-one.'

His answer soon came when the door slid open and in came Ja'anya dressed in a flowing gown, her dreadlocks came down to just above her waist and she had what looked like meat and fruit on a tray she was carrying. Her eyes went wide as she noticed that Alaric was awake and moderately well.

Alaric's mind went into a bend as saw his misjudgment of the Yautja who had nursed him back to life.

'It's not the one!' He thought with frustration. 'It's not any of them!'

"Ah, so you finally woke up." She said in the ooman language in which she was surprisingly fluent. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't ever wake."

"So it seems." Alaric said with obvious distrust in his voice.

She sat down at the edge of the bed as she laid the tray down. Alaric looked at her with puzzlement in his maroon eyes. Obviously, he was confused at the sight of a small Yautja huntress. The hunters that he fought against were all over seven feet tall at the least.

"Aren't you a bit short for a hunter?" He asked dubiously.

"That's what every one says when they see me." Ja'anya answered. "My lack of height is what they always see first. It's... what's the ooman word?"

"Frustrating."

"Yes, that's the word."

She handed him one of the fruit that was on the tray. Alaric accepted it somewhat cautiously. He examined it very carefully, looking for any sign of poison or any nasty trick.

"Why am I still alive?" He said to himself.

"Well, because I took your battered body and nursed you back to life for the last seven days. For one thing I'm actually surprised you lived with the amount of blood you lost"

"I'm not. Although, quite frankly I was sure I met my end when you arrived."

He took a bite out of the fruit not even bothering to peel it and he chewed it, waxy skin, seeds, and all.

"Why the attitude Ooman?" Ja'anya asked; she was clearly offended by Alaric's behavior.

"I'm a Slayer. What else would you expect?" He asked rhetorically before swallowing.

Ja'anya raised an eyebrow.

'Slayer? Is that what he calls himself?'

"A what?" She asked confused.

Alaric looked at her, in a manner that said his words should have been clear enough.

"You don't know what a Slayer is, do you?" Alaric said, sighing. "To put it short, a Slayer is a warrior brooding about the misery of existence and seeks death at the hands of any dangerous beast or warriors he finds, or to put it even shorter a suicidal loner."

Ja'anya looked at him. A human who loathed living and sought death by hunting down dangerous animals; she never heard of such a thing. She flexed her mandibles open as she ate some meat of the tray.

Alaric lifted his left arm and flexed the muscles. He was relived that the bite didn't cause too much damage.

"I never heard of any oomans that call themselves that." Ja'anya said.

"Well you wouldn't." Alaric said. "I'm the only one you'll ever find."

He started picking out bits of skin and crushed seeds from his teeth. Ja'anya watched him. So far, her questioning wasn't getting anywhere, so she decided to try a different approach. She decided to introduce herself, and get to know him a bit.

"My name Ja'anya of the Lai'kairis clanship." She said.

Alaric merely nodded. Like he was not paying any attention.

"So, your name is Alaric?" Ja'anya asked, trying to make conversation.

Alaric shot her a hard look.

"Sneaked a look at my tags while I was out, did you?" Alaric bit out.

He was about to take another bite from his fruit when she said something that immediately got to him inside.

"Why do you seek death when you have a family?" She asked.

Alaric suddenly squeezed the fruit so hard and fast that it squirted juice and pulp on his face and on Ja'anya, making her pull back in surprise. His eyes were staring of into space and his lips were quivering slightly. Ja'anya looked at him while wiping the mush off her face. He looked at her with anger in his eyes and a snarl in his mouth.

Ja'anya knew immediately that she had struck a nerve, and she decided that it was a good thing she had a knife behind her back just in case.

"I had a family once." He said, in a surprisingly calm tone. "They were taken from me."

He tossed the pulped fruit on the tray, wiped his face, and leaned over where he picked up one of the axes and he held it on his lap in a way a child often does with a much loved pet.

"These are all that I have left, heirloom axes and my memories. Your race saw to that, with a lot of relish and satisfaction on their part."

Ja'anya came closer so her head was a foot away from his.

"What happened to them?" She asked. "It's evident that you mean it when you say it was my people who did it."

"Not evident. It's the truth."

He looked up at her. He sighed as he tried to think of the best way to tell her.

"To know about me, you have to know about the bloodline of Grimnir, the first slayer." Alaric started, choosing his words carefully so that Ja'anya could understand. "My ancestors were all warriors from Europe, descended from the ancient Spartans of Greece, according to our family legend anyway. Grimnir was the warrior chief of my clan who had suffered the loss of his wife and all but one of his four children who were killed and mutilated by Mongol invaders. The only survivor was his youngest son who had been nailed onto his throne as an act of vilification of the highest scale. Enraged, he swore an oath that came to be called the Slayer Oath, how he would personally hunt down and kill the enemy leader who ordered the attack and those responsible or die trying."

'Sounds like a colorful history,' Ja'anya thought. 'A bit barbaric and tragic but interesting.'

"However, since he was chief he was honor-bound to lead his clan and so he couldn't seek to kill the Mongol leader and so the oath was passed down his bloodline, the eldest son in the family taking up the oath when his father died. It wasn't until four years ago, when I was eighteen, that the oath had finally been fulfilled and that Genghis Kahn's last living descendant was killed by my hand."

He stopped for a moment and held out his right arm, she looked at it and saw six runes of the same kind on his locket, colored jet black and tattooed on his forearm. One of them, the one on his wrist was just a patch of faint scar tissue were it had been removed by a sharp, bladed instrument. The other five were fresh; no more then a year old.

"It was pretty fortunate that he was a wanted extremist priest." Alaric said, with a hint of amusement.

"You fulfilled that oath, so why have you got five more?" Ja'anya asked dragging her finger lightly over them.

She had seen human runes in various historical texts from hunters in the past. But these runes were unlike anything that she had seen. They were all arrow shaped, with a secondary chevron near the base. The squat size of each of them would suggest that they were etched within a square no bigger than a square inch.

"One year ago, that was when I finally had a family after my ancestor's oath had been completed that it was taken from me, exactly the same way it started." Alaric said, keeping a strangely calm tone, "I came home on leave to hear sounds of screams and breaking objects. I ran upstairs to find that my family was being murdered. I broke the door down only to have two wrist blades plunged into my chest."

He carefully moved the bandages on his chest and shown her two jagged scars on his chest, they were positioned 3 inches apart from each other, one scar in each pectoral muscle. She hadn't seen these earlier because his torso had been covered in his and those reptiles' blood.

"The shooter didn't have a good aim from the look of it." Alaric explained. "Though I think it was deliberate that it didn't get my heart."

He moved the bandages back up.

"There were five of them, Predators as we marines call them. Some of them were... raping my wife…I'll never forget her screams." He explained, masking his emotions well. "My infant son was chained against the wall in the way a crucified man would be in some kind of twisted game."

He shook his head in disgust as he bitterly remembered that day.

"He was only three years old and he was being brutally tortured without remorse."

Ja'anya couldn't believe that anyone of her race would do such things to a child. Where was the honor in killing a small child that couldn't fight back?

Alaric mimicked the action of pulling the blades out of his chest.

"I pulled the blades out of my chest and I threw them back blindly, by chance catching their leader in the left eye. Enraged, like he had never been cut open before, he ordered his subordinates to have me thrown against the wall and beaten into submission."

He took a breath.

"They were surprised at how long I lasted and the whole time they were mocking me about how they had hunted down what few family I had looking for me and how the great warrior they had sought after was nothing more then a washed up weakling. With that the leader personally threw me out of the window and everything went black the moment I hit the cold, hard ground."

He looked at his locket.

"As I lay there broken and dying on the ground, I came round only to see my home in flames. Torched to remove all evidence of the atrocities that happened. I could still hear them, screaming as they were being burned alive. My life turned to dust as I blacked out again."

Alaric rubbed his eyes, trying to remember what came next, or maybe in an attempt to hide tears. Ja'anya found it difficult not shed her own tears. He regained his composure as he finished.

"I woke up three weeks later in hospital only to confirm that my entire family line, even those who had been close to me, had been murdered except for me. That was when I retook the Slayer Oath just as my ancestor did. I broke out from the hospital that night salvaged what I could before heading to that hunting planet and here I am."

He stopped then and apparently, from the look on his face he looked a little relieved, like he finally glad that he was able to confess this to someone after all this time. The pressure of not being able to tell anyone had been a heavy weight on him since he first learned of his heritage. Ja'anya didn't know what to say. This man and his whole family line had known nothing but hardships for hundreds of years and when it seemed it was over it had only begun again.

"That is just terrible." She said.

"No, I wouldn't expect any of your race to understand." Alaric said, placing his axe back with the others. "But there you have it, my life story."

"I know that pain of losing a clanmate." She insisted.

"So you lost a loved one then?"

"Yes, my father died when I was a young pup."

Alaric scoffed in mild praise.

"You're lucky." He said. "I never met my father and my mother died in childbirth. Luckily, she lived long enough to see me born. My first kill so to speak."

"You were orphaned at birth too?" Ja'anya asked in shock.

"More or less. My father was in the Marine Corps just like I was and his squad took it upon themselves to raise me. A proper army kid I was. When I was older, they told me that during one operation, he went MIA during the fighting and was presumed dead. That was the official's story anyway."

"What happened to this squad now?"

Alaric stayed his mouth, clearly not wanting to talk about it. Like it was a sensitive subject.

"I don't want to talk about it." He said, firmly "Just leave it at that."

Alaric got off the bed, straining a bit because of his wounds and picked up his axes. He slung his double one in the harness on his back and clipped the hand ones onto loops on his belt.

"I thank you for your hospitality, but I must go back outside and hunt those bastards." He said with a bit of forced politeness while walking to the door.

"Only if you fancy asphyxiating yourself." Ja'anya cautioned, getting off the bed and following him.

Alaric thought she meant those plants that release choking spore clouds. Little did he know that things had changed since he had in a coma for the past week.

"I have dealt with spores before. If your ship is parked near a hedge of them, I'll just hold my breath."

She shook her head.

"That would be impossible as my ship is in deep space now." She said with a slight grin on her face, her mandibles curling up. "I set course back to my clanship shortly after I found you."

Alaric suddenly got a sickening sinking feeling in his gut. He went up to a closed view port, fumbled around for a cover switch and as the panel slid up, he saw nothing but endless space. The stars like pinholes in the curtain of night. He put his hand on his head in frustration. He showed a great deal of self control containing his anger.

'Calm down Alaric.' He thought rationally. 'This might be the chance you were waiting for.'

He took a couple of deep breaths and he turned back to Ja'anya, his face showing a grudging acceptance.

"Okay, so I guess I'm stuck here." He said, processing this information. "Oh well, I could do with some travel. I had been living in that hell hole of a planet for a year now with no results."

Ja'anya walked up to him, picking up the tray and offering it to him.

"When we get to the clanship in about a week, the Elders will be intrigued to meet you." Ja'anya said. "I know I was."

"I could find out if anyone has any information about those five." Alaric added. "That is if the natives don't try to mount my head on a wall the moment they set eyes on me."

"They won't if I'm with you." Ja'anya assured, slightly offended by Alaric's comment.

He placed his axes back on the stool before accepting a piece of meat. Then he started scratching his head in irritation, careful not to catch the stitches. He munched on his bit of food.

"Now if you excuse me I gotta go clean my hair. Having blood, dirt, and grease in your hair is extremely irritating." He said walked up to the door. "Not that it matters to your kind I think with those dreadlocks."

"What do you mean grease?" Ja'anya asked, suddenly dreading what he was going to say.

"Well, engine grease is the only thing that'll keep my hair standing up like this. So I apologize for your sheets."

He walked out of the room, scratching his head and muttering under his breath. Ja'anya looked at her bed and saw a large nasty looking stained mark where his head been lying, the mark was all spiked like a multi pointed star. She sighed as she clenched her bandaged hand, wincing as she felt a sharp tingle.

She looked at her hand.

"Why won't this cut heal?" She whispered to herself.