The Hunters

by ~gyroscope

Hornet watched the cement parking complex through a filter of cigarette smoke, waiting for a scream or some kind of explosion. He knew the pair would be there, in a car, instead of on a bed in one of the twin apartment buildings. Aril's intel was good like that – and when the bounty was as generous as this one, her intel became that much better.

'Do you have a plan?' Carol-Rose Aril's eager voice asked tinnily in his ear. It was a question she often asked him on missions like this, and as always it resulted in her revaluating her future involvement with the team.

'I always have a plan,' Hornet stated raspingly. He then muted his earpiece so he would not have to say what that plan was.

He took a drag of his cigarette and flicked it to his feet. He stood alone in the large, grassy field that children sometimes played in, their wooden airplanes littering the ground around him.

Hornet did not look like a man who would play around with children: he wore dark stubble in an attempt at hiding a smattering of small scars around his jaw, but the scars made his stubble grow out patchy and uneven; his green eyes were once as piercing as emerald-tipped arrows, but one shocking event after another had given them a milky gloss; his hands were always gloved to hide severe burning from a time he would rather not think about.

The clothes he wore would have looked clean on anyone else but appeared dirty and tattered as soon as he put them on; Aril had once half-jokingly said it was because he wore his emotions on his outside in order to keep his inside empty.

'A Hornet in the field,' came the gentle voice of Basque, packed into his ear like a sardine. 'Seems suiting, don't you think?'

'I thought I muted my earpiece,' Hornet said.

'You thought you did,' Aril's voice returned, 'but we kind of had to override that feature. Sometimes being a lone wolf works against the team. And, really, it's only right that you can't control the voices in your head.'

'Sometimes I feel like I can't even control you when you're around physically,' Hornet said.

'Oh?'

'I'm going in closer. I want you guys to flank the east and west sides of the complex. Aril, I want you to take the east. There are no openings for the pair to see you, making it the best spot to set up an enchantment.'

'Anything else?' Aril asked.

'No. Let's pretend I just muted you again.'

The sky above was a perfect block of pink; the crisp twilight air entered Hornet's lungs and tickled his throat, the sharp atmosphere coaxing faint pain out of the marrow in his bones.

Some said he was called Hornet because of his numerous sting operations, but really it was because he was as thin as one – and because his teeth, fingers and the walls of his apartment were just as yellow. A Hornet in the field – yes, it was somewhat suiting, he thought.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and advanced towards the parking complex. The only sounds were those of creaking insects and the grass brushing against his feet; the screams and explosions would have to come later.

* * *

Basque was often confused for either Tor Johnson with hair or a rock monster with brown moss on its head. When he headed to his position at the west side of the parking complex, it was with a lumbering gait, his feet leaving distinct impressions in the ground beneath him. The fastest things about him were his brain and his trigger finger. But it was actually his large size that made him most useful to the group: enchanted with a powerful magic that had been strengthened throughout the course of many years, his body was capable of withstanding the deadliest attacks the trio had come to face.

He was a living, breathing shield, fast enough to protect Hornet and Aril but too slow for offense – unless, of course, he was in the right spot at the right time, in which case his body could do more harm to their targets than anything Hornet or Aril could do combined.

He wondered if this was going to be one of those times. There was no way for him or C. R. Aril to read Hornet's mind, though he knew Aril had once tried.

Odd that her magic worked better on demons than humans.

They were forced to accept the fact that Hornet tended to only divulge the barest minimum of information, as he was doing now, imparting a few words that suited his own needs; it was as if Hornet felt the entire world existed only in his head, that everything and everyone was somehow linked to his mental processes. Basque considered that nearly everyone felt this way, but in secret, with Hornet being one of the few who actually put the theory to practice.

Odd that he could not decide if this meant Hornet had balls or an acute case of insanity.

He looked up at the top edge of the parking complex, the cement line that met the pink sky. Pink and grey. Birth and death. And hunting demons in-between. Nobody would do this unless somewhere, deep down, they thought it was fun.

'I'm in position.'

Basque in the field. Basque in the twilight. Yes, it was somewhat suiting. He had to admit that all the excitement, all the adrenaline, the bounty, the assault, the peace – all of it, in the end, added up to one small word, tucked away in the recesses of his heart: fun. He smiled a rubbery smile.

'Aril?'

'Shh! I'm concentrating.'

* * *

Aril's feet were firmly planted in the soil but her mind was much higher. Even she would be the first to admit her mind was stronger than her body: she was slender when not wearing her light but bulky armour, and her black hair spilled onto her shoulders when not contained in a tailor-made helmet. The helmet helped focus her powers in addition to keeping her head safe, while the armour protected her if she ever needed to run away. A close-quarters combat situation was simply out of the question for her.

'Aril in the air,' the voice of Basque whispered inside her ear.

She winced as she tried to ignore him. An intricate enchantment had been set up where she stood, an ancient sign she had written on the ground with her finger and which had sunk deep into the earth below, emanating a faint blue power. Tapping into this power required a great deal of concentration, something Aril often lacked.

'The pink sky . . .' she said, shutting her eyes tight to open her mind's eye wider. 'The pink sky is a side effect of the demons' power. They must be feeding.'

'Is it too late to save the poor bastard?' came the voice of Hornet.

'Yes, it seems that way. This is definitely the work of Eryle and Celia.'

'How much time do we have before they notice us?'

'A few minutes. But I have a lock on them – they're in a car on the top level. I'll draw a new sign and determine their weaknesses.'

'Considering they just received a fresh jolt of power-'

'It'll take me a while,' Aril agreed. 'You and Basque will have to hold them off until I'm blessed with further recon.'

* * *

There were three ways to the top level: the first was a large, two-lane ramp on the other side of the complex; the second was a set of stairs from the main level; and the third was to scale one of the walls leading up to it. A thousand too many cigarettes and a single meal a day meant Hornet could no longer attempt the latter, and he would feel too naked walking up the former. He decided on the middle option. He slipped into the parking complex through one of the openings that served as glassless windows, landing hard on his feet.

The soreness that passed through his body as he relaxed his muscles was like a drug. He wanted more. Being confronted by the limitations of his own body made him feel more powerful, as if the signs of his mortality were but a mask hiding something omni.

There was a reason he rarely explained his methods to Basque or C. R. When he had worked alone, taking out demons in their own carefully constructed, miniaturised worlds of shadow, he had largely existed in his own head. There was nobody for him to talk to – to really talk to – on anything resembling a human level. His world had become the shadow world. His thoughts had become more and more abstracted, almost primal, until the language in which he thought was a language purely of his own creation.

When Hornet did speak, he felt as though he were watching his words drift into the air, permanently etching themselves with their own unique colours and smells. Those he talked to – meaning, Basque and Aril – tried breathing those words in, but they always slipped back out of their mouths and nostrils. The syllables became bumps in the space between them.

Hornet's actions spoke louder than his words. When he reached the top level of the parking complex, he would speak eloquently.

The stairs urged his feet forward. The lower foot always wished to rise above the high foot; this was the act of ascension, and in the end it made his feet equal. He turned the dented metal handle of the heavy metal door in the phone booth-sized room he found himself in. The door then opened onto the top level.

'Ah,' he said.

A crack had formed in the sky above, a green mark with all the intricacy of a frozen lightning bolt. Something was up.

'Aril?' he asked the woman in his ear.

'I still don't have anything,' she told him. 'I need another minute.'

He was lucky to have his teammates, he knew, even if they were not always as perfectly competent as he desired. The demons had been getting smarter in the past few years and had begun working together themselves. Eventually things would break into outright war.

For now, though, it was enough for two teams to face off on a single playing field: shirts versus skins, light versus shadow. Hornet just needed Aril to pass him the ball.

He strolled along a corridor of cars, glancing casually from window to window, expecting a sign of the demons' presence to be blatant and gaudy: last time it was a door made of smoke, and the time before that a warbling siren that sounded from everywhere at once. This time he found it in the form of a purple shadow beneath a red car with tinted windows.

He stopped in front of the car, disturbing a shallow puddle with the turn of his boots, and pulled his pistol from the inside of his jacket; if the demons had reached the point of being so obvious then he would as well. Both were displays of a malicious power. However, the gun was not Hornet's main weapon: he was most skilled with a bladed chain and most known for his versatility with a dagger.

The gun felt cool in his hands but it also felt entirely natural, its matte white metal like a well-cleaned bone he had plucked from his own body. He had purchased it recently but was already on familiar terms with it. Of course, he considered himself familiar with all instruments devoted to death.

He wished he could say the same about demons. Despite devoting so many years of his life to the capturing of their inverted souls, he still had no idea what, exactly, would be emerging from this purple-shadowed car. That was why Aril was in his ear. He wanted to hear her words.

The vessel of fate that was parked before him carried the heady scent of human decay and sulphur, a combination of smells Hornet still could not get used to, no matter how hard he tried; even after spending so long denying his own humanity, the stench of dehumanisation was something he knew he would never be able to stomach.

'Hornet,' Aril's voice broke into his thoughts. 'I'm . . . I'm only reading one form. I think I've been reading only one form this whole time. It's difficult to fully scan this demon. Its aura-'

'The car door has just opened,' Hornet breathed through his teeth. 'Tell me something that'll matter in the next few minutes.'

A thin, red, heavily-spiked boot appeared beneath the car's fully-open rear door, touching the cement with a click. The red of the boot pulsed as if alive, its spikes jagged, yellow and thinly veined. A steady electric hum poured out of the car and touched the centre of Hornet's brain.

'Now show us the rest of you, you bastard.'

A human head dropped down beside the red boot, its matted brown hair turned towards Hornet. The hair was muddied with blood. Hornet had trained himself to look upon such a thing as a mere object and utilised this training now. A pair of hands then fell upon the head, clapping as they did so. Hornet readied his pistol.

'You hunters make me sick,' said a silken voice.

The torso of a red-skinned humanoid female appeared above the opened car door, its facial features asymmetrical in all the right places, its lips full and curved at the ends, its ears small and translucent. The demon's hair was as ragged and uneven as seaweed, yet somehow this only added to its strange beauty. And, like seaweed, the demon's hair seemed to move in slow motion whenever it moved its head.

Hornet fired a bullet at the centre of its forehead but the bullet ricocheted off, chipping one of the cement walls.

The other rear door opened and the demon's twin stepped out, its skin blue instead of red.

'So very, very sick,' said the blue demon.

'Aril?' Hornet asked his ear.

'Yes, I can see what you see,' Aril said. 'The red one is Eryle and the blue one is Celia. For some reason they're still only reading as a single entity.'

'Whether they're one or two, I'll have to kill them both,' Hornet said.

Eryle smirked.

'You do realise we can hear everything you're saying, don't you?' the demon asked.

'The more time you spend listening to me talk, the more time I have to prepare,' he told them.

'Then-' Celia said.

Eryle finished Celia's sentence for it by tearing the door off the car and throwing it towards Hornet. Hornet sent the car door back to the demons with an electrified crack of his bladed chain, the door crashing into the car's windshield. Blood poured out of the opening like dark water spilling out of an overflowing bathtub.

The chain was the weapon he kept most ready, hidden in a spot that was unexpected but could be accessed at any time. He had burnt a permanent enchantment into his body which prevented the chain's blades from cutting his own body; this enchantment also allowed him to charge the chain with an electric surge depending on how much strength he had in him at the time.

'There's a tail . . .' Aril said somewhat uncertainly.

Celia disappeared back into the car and re-emerged at Eryle's side. The demons watched Hornet as carefully as he was watching them, the violent car door attack already forgotten like some introductory handshake or other trivial greeting.

'You gals like to stick together, is that it?' Hornet asked with dry sarcasm. 'Off to powder your nose and talk about the boys? The boys can certainly no longer talk about you.'

'Humans and demons,' Eryle said, though its voice seemed to be coming from Celia.

'Animals that hunt each other,' Celia said, though its voice seemed to be coming from Eryle. 'In the end we're both meat, only you don't eat ours. You research it.'

'Inspect it.'

'Cut it up and keep it in jars.'

Eryle smirked and Celia shrugged.

'Funny how you don't electrocute yourself, standing in that puddle,' the demons said. 'That level of enchantment came from us and you know it. You want our power but don't want us to have it. You want to take our power and get rid of us at the same time. You want to take our power and pretend it has been yours for all of your short history. But time will not be as kind to you as it will be to us. There will be no lasting document of humanity. But-'

'But it'll take you ten thousand years to reform on Earth,' Hornet said, lighting another cigarette, 'and by that time we'll be gone. You'll have nothing to feed on and starve to death. Your eternal souls have damned themselves.'

'Then let us grant you oblivion,' the demons told him, 'so you can experience how much worse the swallow of nothing is compared to the gasp of something.'

Hornet spat out his cigarette and cracked his chain, striking the car with a hot yellow streak.

The car exploded into twin halves, sending the demons screeching to the edge of the parking lot. Hornet rushed breathlessly towards them, pins prickling his heart and lungs, and drew his dagger from its sheath at his waist. He fell upon Celia's blue body, its skin sucking his dagger into its bone. Both demons screamed at once.

Eryle kicked Hornet's side, her exposed bones tearing his jacket, the tallest bone piercing the soft flesh between his ribs. He cried out and twisted his dagger.

'Its tail is where it stores its power!' Aril shouted distortedly in his ear. 'Destroy the tail!'

'Tail?'

Hornet widened his eyes, forcing out tears of pain. He saw the reason why Eryle and Celia were still sprawled together: they shared a giant, long, lizard-like tail that combined their colours in overlapping swirls. The tail grew out of the pair as a giant Y.

He pulled free from the demons, taking his dagger with him. The demons spat black blood onto the cement and struggled to their feet. Hornet wobbled backwards.

'How about some more chatter,' he suggested. 'Tell me more about how evil I am.'

The demons laughed a high, piercing laugh.

'Such cheap tricks,' Eryle said. 'We have no more desire for play.'

'Then why did you fall for this?' Basque called out, slamming his body into their backs.

Not even Hornet had seen him coming. Basque was always so full of surprises.

'I found out what we're looking at,' Aril said excitedly. 'Eryle and Celia are merely facets of a single being. The demon we're hunting is Janus.'

'Janus?!'

Hornet could hardly believe it. Janus had been listed as terminated in the organisation's official documents. But that would explain the lack of available information on Eryle and Celia.

Celia helped up Eryle and the two simultaneously turned to Basque as he went in for another attack. Eryle grabbed Basque's arm and tossed him up into the air as though he were a stuffed animal.

With the demons distracted by Basque's bulk, Hornet gathered some of his remaining strength and lunged towards the tail. He clutched onto it as a drunk clutches a pillar for support, and before Celia or Eryle could tear him away he dug his dagger deep into the pulsating flesh where Eryle's body met the tail.

In six quick, jagged movements he hacked away most of Eryle's portion of the tail. He tore the rest of the flesh away with his bare hands as Eryle screamed in mindless pain at her flowerless stem.

'This is a tail I'll be sure to tell my children about,' Hornet said as he forced his hand into the tail's gaping wound.

The sound of a pipe bursting popped his ears. He suddenly found himself choking on an onrush of water he could not close his mouth around.

Celia had formed a protective shield of water around the tail and Eryle; Hornet forced himself off them, losing his dagger in the process. But even as he landed in one of the puddles Celia was sapping for the shield, he still had his bladed, electrified chain at the forefront of his mind, and seeing a focused, unprotected Celia was too good an opportunity to miss.

He held the chain taut between his hands. That was when Basque finally crash-landed back to Earth, crushing Celia beneath him. Hornet could tell the poor demon was going to stay crushed.

The water shield splashed to the cement and mingled with the stain that was once Celia. By now Eryle had recovered from the shock of losing its connection to the tail and was charging an attack with what little remained of its energy. The water that Celia had used for the shield was now being sucked into Eryle's body.

Hornet only managed to realise this at the moment he spotted small beads of water floating in the air in front of Eryle, a sure sign of an elemental attack. There was only enough time for him to open his mouth in surprise before feeling the hard jet of water full on his face, breaking his nose and forcing him to sallow a loosened tooth.

The back of his head hit the pebble-strewn cement. From this point on the rest of the night for Hornet was but a dreamless dalliance in the realm of the void.

* * *

He awoke groggily to Basque standing over him with a mewing kitten cradled in his arms.

'He's awake,' Basque said evenly to someone Hornet could not see.

'Ah, good,' came the sound of Aril's voice, for once clear and human. 'I knew the smell of coffee would wake him up.'

'I'm on my couch,' Hornet mumbled to himself, as if to make sure it was real. He then pushed his tongue through a newfound gap in his teeth.

The faded gold of sunlight fell through the fabric of his drapes and warmed his face. He wondered where Basque had found the kitten. Basque was always feeding strays. Was he going to find cat pee on his carpet when he got up?

'Stay down,' Aril told him as she came into view. 'You shouldn't move too much for the next couple days. We had one of the guys come in to fix you up, and . . . Well, I'm amazed you didn't wake up when they reset your nose.'

'Eryle?'

'Both are now listed as terminated. The organisation took the tail.'

Hornet reached for one of the packets of cigarettes on his coffee table. He flipped it into his mouth and lit it with a match, the scent of sulphur rising into the air.

'You two did well,' he told them. 'Whatever it was you did, you did it well.'

He immediately regretted talking if only for the immense pain it caused his mouth

Aril shrugged.

'With no more need to seek out weaknesses, I switched my efforts to forming an illusion that Celia was still alive, which threw Eryle off to say the least. Basque then took care of the rest.'

'They say sleep is the closest to death a person can come,' Basque said as he petted the kitten. 'For a demon, death is closest to sleep. It's an eventuality that both Eryle and Celia will awaken one day, either as themselves or as Janus.'

'When that happens we'll just have to do it all over again,' Hornet said, smirking. 'Hunting, like death, is a dream we can't seem to wake up from. Now please feed me some painkillers and excuse me as I go back to sleep.'