Of Hearts and Souls

Of Hearts and Souls

Another hotel. Another mindless hunt. Another twenty-three-year-old hunter sitting on a double bed, surrounded by newspapers, books and pieces of white paper covered in some strange symbols at some ridiculous hour of the morning. Said hunter didn't even need to look at the alarm clock to know that she'd only have a couple of hours before it got light enough outside to go searching for more clues - it was a general rule of thumb that hunting in daylight was safer than doing so at night.

"Fuck this..." The young woman shoved the offending book off the edge of the bed, scowl deepening as it thudded onto the floor. "This makes no sense. First it's a ghost, now it's a demon... what the bloody hell does it want?"

She'd been directed to Small Town, Middle of Nowhere by a hunter she'd caught passing on the road. Apparently there was a big hunt occurring up North, one that Liza had no intention of involving herself in (not to mention she'd been told to stay away by three separate hunters) and the hunter on his way up there had asked her to take over the lead he'd caught on a being that was going from town to town, taking widows.

Why the hell some supernatural thing would want a widow was anybody's guess, but this hunter didn't try to linger on the 'why do they do it?' aspect of her cases when the 'how do I get rid of it?' angle was far, far more important.

"Could just be a demon trying to recruit," she murmured to herself, looking over yet another newspaper that had reported on the disappearance of two widowed sisters whose husbands had both drowned on a fishing trip. "'Sell your soul, we'll bring back your husband - just turn up here at this time.' Then they kill them? Drag them to Hell? Or they could --"

The alarm-radio on the bedside cabinet crackled into life, quietly playing some piss-poor excuse for a song by some group of teenagers who clearly had no idea of the horrors this hunter had been fighting since before she was out of high school.

'You cannot run and you cannot hide. Yeah, you gotta face it, baby, things go bump in the night.'

The hunter grimaced at the choice of song; she'd heard it on her car radio quite a few times on the way here and it never failed to piss her off. Glorifying bumps in the night? Yeah. Way to go and attract demons. She wouldn't be surprised if she ended up ganking the teenagers.

Her thoughts were disturbed by the television flickering in the corner.

"Are you shitting me?" It was a phrase often used by the hunter, especially when she came across new monsters. The more she met, the more difficult it became to fantasise about a world without any form of supernatural creature lurking in the shadows.

The hunter stood, intent on turning off both of the offending electronic noise-makers (distractions, just distractions) when a knock at her hotel door came.

Now that was not good. Retrieving the silver revolver she'd dumped on top of the jacket sitting on the tiny table in the corner, she slowly approached the door and, after twisting the key, pulled it open.

"Liza Covet?"

"Oh, motherfucker..."

"I'll take that as a yes, shall I?" The speaker was met with a face-full of revolver, the response to which was a mere twitch of an eyebrow above an unnaturally dark eye. "Are you really going to shoot me?"

"Yes." Covet seemed to have trouble speaking through clenched teeth.

"But I've such great news to tell you!"

"You're the one taking the widows."

"Well... have to make the trip up here worth my while now, don't I?" The man - at least, he looked like a perfectly average man - let himself into the room and took a seat on one of the two worn out chairs at the table. "Don't you want to hear my news, Liza?"

"Not particularly."

"Don't be a bitch. Take a seat."

"I'll stay standing, thanks," Covet sneered, an altogether distasteful look on her face. "You shouldn't be here."

"I shouldn't, you're right. The fact remains, however, that I am here. Someone down there has big plans for me, I think."

"Oh, Lucifer's interested in you, is he? Some bottom-level soul-stealer?"

"I prefer the term salesman."

"You trick innocent humans into selling their souls to you. You rarely give them what they ask for. Your contracts are loophole cities."

"Well, you would know all about that now, wouldn't you?" The man was smirking. Where his eyes had been dark, perhaps shaded by the darkness and dim lighting, they were now completely black - iris, whites and all. "Let me tell you something, Liza, then I promise I'll go back home."

"No more murders."

"They're not dead. Not... really dead, at any rate."

"Michael." The warning in her voice sat thick in the air.

The demon cringed, frowning for the first time since arriving at the hunter's less than hospitable abode. "Do call me James instead, would you? That name makes my blood boil."

"Yeah, that's why I'm using it. For a demon, you're a bit of a wuss about your name."

"The angels share it."

"What angels? There are none!"

"Can't risk it - either way," his voice smothered the words in that cool indifference he had originally exuded, "we need to talk."

"Talk quickly or I'm sending you back the old-fashioned way."

"Fine. All of the hunters who went to the hunt they wouldn't let you go to? Dead. All of them. They have no hope of surviving." Michael James (who, he had informed her gleefully at their first meeting, had been a professional male escort back when such men were required for exquisite ballroom parties and other such extravagant dos before he sold his soul to a demon while on his deathbed in exchange for an extra year to father a child - a year that had turned out to be fruitless, although his demon predecessor still took his soul and moulded it into the black-eyed creature left today) sounded all too happy at the prospect of hunters' blood spilled by something so many of them had gone to fight. "It's some blood-sucking, memory-robbing thing that my boss thought up and the chances of them figuring out that it's tied to a human's heart before it kills them all are very, very slim."

Liza visibly fought back the urge to plant a bullet in the demon's head. "And?"

"And... I need you to go kill it."

"Why?"

"Because you know how to."

"I don't. You do."

"I can't kill it. I'll be dragged back to Hell before I get near the thing and I have a quota to fill before I can let that happen."

"Souls?"

"Yup, you guessed it. Perfectly fair contracts this time, though... The boss-man wants to have an army of humans up here that he can control with a click of his fingers. You know as well as I do that it'll be easier for him if he's on good terms with them."

"The thing?"

"Child living in a house two blocks from the church - you'll know it when you see it, trust me. Its eyes are as unnatural as mine. Stab it in the heart. The thing'll collapse. You have to go stab it in the heart too."

"I have to kill a child?"

"You killed my last body, that didn't phase you. Don't over-think this."

"You were strangling me. This will be some innocent child who doesn't even realise what its done wrong! Someone who hasn't done anything at all, in fact!"

"And that monster that the child is linked to just killed eighteen hunters. Better hurry, Covet, otherwise you'll be the last clump of human flesh who knows that there are even demons walking the Earth! Though... what I wouldn't give to see you ripped to shreds --"

The bullet went straight into the wall.

"Fuck..."

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