Chapter Four
In a basement lined in stone, a figure draped in black cloth ruminated on a large chair framed like a throne. He was surrounded by shelves of books and glass equipment, as well as fine tools of science, natural philosophy, and sorcery — including a cauldron bubbling in a fireplace, a copper summoning circle embedded in the floor, and a grandiose, silver scrying mirror.
The figure drummed his fingers against the armrest as he waited for one of his minions. It wasn't a long wait, as the door to the laboratory soon swung open to reveal the dark shape of a snarling gevaudan. The creature padded forward, its growls steadily quieting until it knelt before its master with begrudging deference.
"Speak," the figure said in a deep baritone.
The gevaudan's eyes glowed sickly green as it's mind made contact with its master's. 'A pair of strangers have reached the town, Master. They slew three of our brethren as they neared.'
The master was silent for several moments. "Members of the Shining Sun work alone," he growled, "unless accompanied by an apprentice … or a turncoat." He drummed his fingers again in a rhythmic cadence until he came to a decision and stood from the throne. "It seems I must resolve this myself."
As he passed his elaborate scrying mirror, the reflection warped for a moment into a feminine shadow, icy eyes flashing.
Willow stirred from her slumber with a content sigh, then frowned in her half-sleep at the feeling of something off. She wriggled and blinked her eyes open to look behind her and deciphered the blurriness of an empty bed. The faint clink of metal on metal drew her attention and she reached for her glasses, slipping them on to find Hunter on the floor of the room, his pistol disassembled and its pieces spread out on a wide cloth as he meticulously cleaned each one with a small rag and a bottle of oil by the light of a candle.
Willow glanced at the window, the glass dark with the night, and then settled on her elbows to watch Hunter's work, fascinated by the intense focus he gave to his task as well as the weapon he was cleaning. The tri-chambered pistol was a characteristic weapon of the Shining Sun, a definite advantage compared to the usual single-shot pistol. But its complexity and the unique nature of its self-contained ammunition made it difficult, and therefore very expensive, to produce and arm and its resultant rarity made it difficult to learn to use.
"I didn't mean to wake you," Hunter said, not pausing his motions as he glanced up at her and blushing at her sleepy pose that she effortlessly made attractive.
"You didn't," she said, a blush of her own rising. "The empty bed did."
That made Hunter pause. He swallowed, the back of his mind clamoring for him to drop his work and climb back into bed with her. His lips thinned as his sense of duty beat it back with a mental stick and he released a pent up breath. "Give me ten minutes and I can fix that."
Willow smiled sleepily and replaced her glasses on the nightstand before settling back into the sheets, the faint clink of Hunter's work somehow soothing. Soon enough, the clinking stopped and the faint light was snuffed out. Willow breathed deeply as Hunter crept over her and settled behind her. Before he could wrap his arms around her from behind, she rolled over and draped herself over him to nuzzle into his chest as her wings settled over them both, and he responded by wrapping his arms around her waist.
"Do you want to talk?" Willow asked quietly.
"Not really," he replied, though she felt him tense under her. "Why?"
"Because you were cleaning your weapon in the middle of the night," Willow pointed out. "You're nervous about tomorrow."
"A little," he admitted. "Gevaudan are serious business."
"We handled three of them just fine," she replied, curling into him to try and offer support.
"They didn't know about us," he said. "Now they have an idea of what we can do. They're apex predators, Willow. They learn. And if anyone is bitten, they could be turned into one of them." He drew her closer. "Like Evan was."
Willow's eyes widened in the darkness. His mentor, the one that had been killed by gevaudan … "Oh, Hunter," Willow whispered. She rose up and cupped his face, placing her forehead against his. "I'm so sorry, Hunter."
"It's not your fault," he said, brushing her nose with his own and placing a chaste kiss on her cheek. "I just want to be ready. I … I can't lose someone else."
"You won't," Willow promised. "Especially if you get some rest. Whatever comes next, we'll figure it out together." She rubbed her nose against his with a tired chuckle and settled back against him. "Go on, get some sleep."
"I don't know if I can," he admitted, his voice defeated, verging on tears.
Willow bit her lip and made a decision. "What if I could … help with that?"
Hunter was silent for so long, she thought he wouldn't answer. And then … "Do it." He pressed his forehead against her lips, his body tense as a bowstring. Willow placed a deep kiss on Hunter's forehead … and fed. Hunter gasped, a deep chill reaching to his skull, and then he went limp and began snoring. Willow winced and settled him as best she could before rolling over and away, refusing herself the pleasure of his touch.
She curled into herself and tried to assure her conscience that it was the best thing. He'd need his rest come morning. She knew what she was doing to put people into a dreamless and restful sleep. He had told her to do it, even if she had suggested it.
She quietly wept as she tried to ignore the pit in her stomach.
Hunter groaned as his awareness slowly came back to him. He rolled around and felt the cold half of the bed, patting the sheets blearily before he truly woke up. He sat up and looked at the rumpled sheets with a feeling of subtle sadness.
"So that's what she meant," he grumbled. He barely had time to rub his forehead before the door to the room opened to reveal Willow with a tray of breakfast food. She was dressed already, the tray tucked close, and her eyes widened behind her glasses.
"Hunter!" she said, her cheery tone as false as her grin.
"Willow?" he asked. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing!" she chirped, in a way that practically screamed that yes, there was something wrong. She sat with the tray on her lap and handed him a plate from it before she began eating. According to her, succubi and incubi didn't technically need to eat, but it helped just a little bit to reduce their reliance on life energy. And Willow, naturally, would take that as far as she could.
Hunter ate mechanically, concerned eyes never leaving his companion. It would have been invisible to a stranger, but to him it was clear as day. Her movements were jerky under the disguise of energy, her smile too wide to be real … her eyes full of pain, even masked by bright cheer.
Hunter put his plate aside. "Willow?" he asked. Willow stiffened and looked at him, her false smile faded into neutrality. She put her plate aside too. "What's wrong?" he asked again, placing one hand on hers.
Willow's eyes became hollow and she looked away as she drew her hand away to clasp them on her lap. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, the sound broken.
"For what?" Hunter asked in shock. What could she have done that warranted this kind of reaction?
"Last night, when I put you to sleep," Willow said. She turned to look at him again and her eyes were red and wet. "I told myself I would never feed on you, Hunter. Never offer it. But the first chance I get, I offer and …" She broke off and whimpered, covering her mouth with her hands. "I'm so tired of crying," she sobbed gently.
Hunter's heart felt like it snapped in half. No … not that clean. More like it was ripped in half. He gathered Willow in his arms and held her close, sorrow and shame warring in his belly. "I'm the one who should be sorry, Willow," he said into her ear. "I took the offer without thinking about how it would affect you." He held her closer. "I'm sorry I didn't think."
"You were tired," she argued weakly.
"So were you," he replied.
"You needed the sleep," she said, a paltry defense.
"And you gave it to me," he pointed out.
"I just don't want to hurt you," she whimpered, finally throwing her arms around him in turn. "I'm a monster. We hurt people. I don't want to hurt you!"
Hunter drew back and held her face in his hands, eyes hard. "You are not a monster!" he said firmly, almost harshly. Willow trembled in his grasp, her hands rising to hold his wrists. "I've seen real monsters, Willow. I've hunted and fought and killed real monsters. Creatures that kill and destroy and spread chaos with no guilt or remorse. With glee."
His voice became softer as he held her gaze, his thumbs stroking her soft cheeks. "Willow, the fact that you feel this way over something so small as putting me to sleep? It shows that you're not a monster. You care about people, more than anyone I've ever met." He smiled softly at her. "You heal people even though your very nature says you should hurt them. You fight with everything that you are to be different from your own kind." He leaned forward to place a light kiss on each of her wrists. "If there's anyone in this world I would not call a monster … it's you, Willow."
Willow's face had gone blank during his speech, her eyes wide. She just looked at him in something like mild shock. It went on so long that Hunter started to get uncomfortable. "Willow?" he prodded unsurely.
And then she crashed into him so hard he fell backward and onto the bed. She began peppering his face with the lightest of kisses, like the touch of a butterfly or a ladybug. And within the haze of infatuation from such passion, Hunter realized that felt warmth from each kiss, and not the faint chill of feeding. She was just kissing him.
"Thank you, Hunter," she said, her eyes still wet but her smile small, and shy, and real. "I won't let you down. I promise."
"I know you won't," he said warmly. Then he hauled himself and her out of bed, dropping her to her feet on the floorboards. "And we really need to get moving," he said.
"Right!" she said, adjusting her glasses with a professional air and collecting their plates. "The mission."
"The mission," he agreed.
"Find anything?" Willow asked, three hours later.
"Maybe," Hunter admitted, crouched to look at the ground and lightly running his fingers over a patch of bent grass as wide as his hand. "I think I have the start of a trail, here. Anything on your end?"
Willow puffed her cheeks in frustration and shook her head. "No. Their scent is strong with sulphur, but I think they've been running around the town's walls every night." Willow had told him some time ago that succubi had very keen noses when they focused on them, meant largely for judging the moods of their prey — but it was just as good for tracking. "I can't find a good scent trail."
Hunter hummed in thought and stood up, looking to the sun to gauge its position. "We have about an hour left of viable sun. Once it lowers to about two past midday, we'll have to make our way back to town and try again tomorrow. The early morning and late evening will let them roam too easily to track down."
Willow nodded and followed him as he in turn followed the faint trail. With the gevaudan being sensitive to direct sunlight, they had a narrow window of the day to locate their den. Even cursed supernatural killers had to sleep, and the high time of the sun was the general time for that.
"What if they hide in separate dens?" Willow asked, the skirt of her dress tied at the waist to bare her stockings and knee-high boots. Not to mention letting her dark, spade-tipped tail free.
"They won't," Hunter replied with utter certainty. "They may be vicious and bloodthirsty, but they're still based on wolves. Whatever demon first created them kept their pack mentality intact. May have actually strengthened it, since killing one tends to throw the whole pack into a frenzy."
Willow swallowed at the words, her thoughts turning to their encounter with the scourge's scouts the night before. Hunter shooting one with a deadly substance had infuriated the other two, and the last had been mad with rage after she'd killed the second. Having seen that kind of twisted loyalty made Hunter's words that much more believable.
"Wait," Hunter whispered, holding an arm out to stop her. He gently took her hand and guided her behind a tree before peeking out at a large crevice in a small cliffside with a sizable clearing bowing the treeline around it. Willow sniffed the air and held back a cough at the sudden thick miasma of sulphur. "How did I miss that?" she whispered.
"You weren't paying attention," Hunter replied, his tone utterly matter-of-fact instead of condescending. "They'll have a single sentry awake to alert them of any problems, so we need to draw it out first."
"How?" Willow asked.
"With this," Hunter said with a grin, revealing a long, hollow tube of wood with a mouth piece. "If a gevaudan favors any meat above others, it's pork." He held the whistle to his lips and blew into it, the tube producing a high sound much like a pig's cry. "Climb the tree," Hunter hissed before using the call again. Willow blinked but removed her short cloak and spread her wings, flapping them once to bolster her leap upward. Her wings were not suited to sustained flight, but were just fine for quickly gaining altitude.
Willow settled in the tree to find Hunter climbing his own tree. He settled in the branches against the trunk and used the call again and Willow's ears perked at a soft padding sound. She looked down to find the huge form of a single gevaudan racing toward their position. It leapt and slammed into Hunter's tree before swinging its head around and snarling. It lowered its nose and began snuffling before growling in frustration.
Willow looked up to find Hunter aiming the nozzle of a canteen over the gavaudan with an unsettling smirk on his lips. He waited until the creature was just below him before pouring out its contents to splash upon the beast — and searing its coat like fire where it touched. The beast cried out in pain, and then Hunter poured out another canteen that splashed upon it and sizzled as if it were merely boiling. As the gevaudan lashed out in wild agony, Hunter armed his long, silvered knife and leapt from the tree to thrust it downward into the back of the creature's neck.
It's snarls were cut off almost immediately and its legs scrabbled for a moment before falling still.
Hunter jerked the knife clear, the blade smoking and glowing blue-white from contact with gevaudan gore, and gestured for her to come down too. She leapt and flared her wings to catch the air, flapping once on the way down to land lightly. "What was that?" she asked.
"Silver water and then anointed water," Hunter said, his smile wide.
"'Silver' water?" she asked.
"This canteen," he held up the first, marked with the Shining Sun emblem and a crescent moon, the alchemical sigil for silver, "is lined on the inside with silver. I've read that water that has been stored in a silver container for three days is used by mages in some potions and spells. It purifies it, and even lends it some of silver's properties. They call it 'silver' water." He smirked. "I figured that it might be hard on gevaudan … and it turns out I was right."
"And the other canteen?" Willow asked, eyes bright.
"Anointed water," he smirked. "For comparison."
Willow smiled and blushed shyly, her belly feeling like it was swarmed with butterflies. She had never said it aloud, but Hunter's intellect was one of the aspects she found most attractive about him. And this had been a very clever experiment. "What now?" she asked.
"If it's a wild scourge," he said, using the term for a random outbreak of the gevaudan curse caused by the whims of a mid-tier demon, "they will all be in that den." He knelt behind a tree to survey the entrance.
"Is there such a thing as a 'domestic' scourge?" Willow asked wryly, crouching down beside him.
"A 'commanded' scourge, actually," he said, face blank with focus. "Sorcerers can create a scourge of their own, whether by finding one in the wild or making a deal with a demon capable of creating one. Then they bind the beasts to their will and can have a small army of vicious and effective minions under their command."
"And you think this is a commanded scourge," Willow realized.
"I don't know yet," he admitted. "But if we clear these out, we wipe out a wild scourge. If it's commanded, it will summon their master for us to handle."
Willow was silent as she mulled that over. "So what would you recommend?"
He looked at her with that same vicious grin. "Now that I know silver water works," he rooted around in a bag at his hip for something and removed another canteen marked with a crescent that he passed to her before taking another for himself and also a large glass bottle filled with a clear liquid and with a cloth stuffed into the neck. "This," he indicated the bottle, "is anointed oil. It's more powerful than regular oil and burns brighter and hotter when close to evil things. I'll toss this in to scare them and if any flee, we lance them with the silver water-" he lifted his arm to show his gun belt that now sported two pistols and his bag of silver bullets, "-and then we pick them off one at a time."
Willow nodded in affirmation and took one of the pistols and a canteen. Both of them moved as silently as they could to the mouth of the cave, Hunter unsealing the lid of the bottle of oil and stuffing a length of cloth into the opening. He knelt at the mouth of the low cave and, with a flick of his thumb, lit a match to light the cloth in the bottle.
The sound seemed to stir the beasts inside, but it was too late. With an underhanded swing of his arm, the lit bottle sailed into the cave and landed with a sound of shattering glass … and the mouth of the cave was filled with searing blue-white light that burned like the heart of the sun! Cries of pain that belonged more to a small bear than wolves sounded and Hunter motioned for Willow to back away and arm herself.
They didn't have long to wait before a burning gevaudan rushed out of the cave, only to be put down by Hunter's keen eye and aim. Two more times he fired, each shot taking a gevaudan, before he shouted, "Reload!" Willow armed herself and fired, taking a gevaudan that had rushed out while Hunter fed more bullet cartridges into his weapon.
After ten minutes without a fleeing beast, and the light from the cave dying down, Hunter looked at Willow and motioned for her to wait while he checked it out. He leveled his reloaded pistol and crept forward, nerves tight. His heart was pounding, visions of his mentor's fate flashing across his mind's eye. He shook that away and focused on the present, removing something wet and wrapped in thick paper tied with string to toss into the cave mouth. He waited for a count of three-hundred and heard nothing, and so he relaxed and motioned for Willow to do the same.
"What was that?" Willow asked, smiling to herself at how often she had asked that question today. Though honestly, she really should ask him more questions before the next hunt.
"A rotten steak the innkeeper was willing to part with. Gevaudan can't control themselves around meat, fresh or otherwise. If any had been alive, they would have been tearing into it." He smiled. "Looks like we're at least halfway done."
"At least," Willow repeated with a laugh in her voice. "I would have thought you'd smoke them out and then climb a tree to shoot them all, or something."
"This was faster and easier," he commented. "The best in the Corps generally prefer pragmatism over personal glory." His grin turned wolfish and he tipped his hat at her. "We tend to live longer that way."
Willow clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward a bit. "And, of course, we all want that," she said, her voice smoky.
Hunter blushed and averted his eyes, and Willow giggled. It was so strange — in the best way! — that the cold, professional hunter of monsters could so easily falter into a stammering mess or endearingly enthusiastic scholar in the right situation.
Willow opened her mouth to reassure Hunter, but her smile faded at a strange sound. Like flickering flames … and getting louder! She reacted on instinct and pushed Hunter away — before a tight sphere of fire splashed into her back! Willow screamed in pain and was sent hurtling away by the force of it, to crash and roll against the ground and settle at the base of a tree.
"Willow!" Hunter shouted in shock, then lurched to the side as his instincts screamed at him to move! He avoided an identical ball of fire that seared a head-sized hole in an oak tree and slid behind a tree of his own, arming his pistol. His heart was pounding in shock, no small amount of sudden fear … and searing rage!
A slow, condescending clap echoed through the forest, accompanied by the low growls of more gevaudan. Hunter inched his way around his cover to get a look at this person. He finally saw a tall figure dressed in hanging, black clothes, particularly the deep-hooded cowl that warlocks seemed to prefer for who-knew-what reason.
"Such a shame," came a baritone voice from within the cowl, emphasized by louder growls. "She seemed a pretty little thing." He turned to face Hunter's direction. "Don't worry, Shiner." He drew a long-barreled musket and leveled it at Hunter's hiding place. "You won't be apart from her for long."
And a shot sounded through the forest.
Chapter four, everybody! Hope you all enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun with the worldbuilding!
*I had to do quite a bit of research into the origin of firearms to figure out how to explain Hunter's pistol. I mean, I tangentially knew the origins were not very simple, but WOW. It's a fascinating topic! It turns out that handguns in China where gunpowder was invented - or something very like them - date back to as early as the 1280s! As for repeating handguns, the earliest known THREE-SHOT repeater dates back to Venice, Italy in 1548! *And the issues Willow mused over were based on real limiting factors for handguns way back when.
*To be clear, Hunter and Willow were tracking the scourge on foot because they knew horseback would be too far from the ground to pick up signs. Not to mention the horses might alert the beasts.
*Yes, the "gevaudan love pigs" is inspired by "The Three Little Pigs". I like the classics; sue me.
*Silver actually does have anti-microbial properties that allow water to stay drinkable longer in a silver container. It's believed that this contributed to its reputation as a "pure" and "good" substance. So I took my own spin on that.
*The term anointed water is straight from "Gravity Falls"!
*It took me forever to figure out a way for them to clear the scourge without actually "storming the castle."
If you liked this entry, leave a review - they always make me feel like writing more! May your inspirations flow freely!