Blake

The other side of the bed was cold when she woke up.  Sunlight streamed in through the cracks in the window, leaving a fractured shadow across her face.  She opened her eyes blearily, blinking out the light, and groaned as she threw her arm over her face. 

Blake was many things but a morning person she was not.

            Still, there were things to be done.  Chores that needed to be completed, training courses to run, a shift at the restaurant to be finished.  The day was short and it was only made shorter the longer she slept in.  Given the chill of the other side of the bed, Malachi must have been awake for a while now.  Not surprising given that he was one of the community leaders and his days were always busier than hers.

            Reluctantly, Blake hoisted herself out of bed.  She dressed quickly, pulling on the jeans and top she'd worn when she'd come to visit Malachi the night before.  The rest of her things were back at the house she shared with her brother on the other side of town.  She would need to go home before she was really ready to take on the day.

            Blake headed for the window instead of the front door.  It was a bungalow and the drop to the ground was only six feet.  The risk of falling was better than the risk of being caught by Malachi's sisters.  Blake wasn't ready to face them with this.  She didn't want anyone else to know.

            She crept her way home, avoiding all of the souls that she saw.  She strayed near but didn't go into the dense expanse of the Boise National Forest and the monsters that hid within its depths. 

Even now, years after it had happened, Blake felt the hair on the back of her neck begin to stand on end.  One of her hands strayed to the knife she always kept in her belt loop.  Though she still liked the woods, Blake never forgot what lurked inside. 

            It was only when she bounded up the steps leading to the back door of her house, some ten minutes later, that Blake's shoulders relaxed. Her brother was standing by the sink in the kitchen washing dishes when she walked into the house and locked the door behind her.

            "Have a good night?" Josh asked as he scrubbed at a plate with a sponge.  There was a bitter note to his voice, his lips downturned at the corners, but he hardly spared her a glance. 

            They looked remarkably similar, even for siblings.  People often mistook them for twins, though Josh, at twenty, was three years younger than she was.  They both had the same midnight black hair, brown skin, and grey eyes.  He was taller than she was but only by a few inches. 

            Blake glared.  "You know I didn't."

            "I don't know why you do this."

            "Yes, you do."  She crossed the kitchen to throw open the fridge.  There was a cluster of apples on the top shelf.  She pulled one out and took a bite. 

            Josh rinsed off the suds on the plate and turned to look at her.  His brows furrowed over his eyes, creating a solid black line on his forehead.  "Blake—"

            "I don't have a choice, Josh.  You know that I don't." 

            "I hate this."

            "Not as much as I do."

            Her brother sighed and went to sit at the table.  "Did he tell you anything?"

            She shook her head and swallowed another bite of the apple before she spoke.  "More of the same.  A few of the trackers came back late last night.  Another dead in Seattle and a few in Chicago.  Seems to be unrelated.  The Seattle count is up to five.  Malachi said he may send me out somewhere soon along with a few of the trainees but hasn't made any decisions yet."

            "When?"

            "I don't know.  It's escalating.  Maybe soon."  Blake watched as Josh's hand clenched into a fist, the skin on his knuckles stretching white.  "I'll be fine.  If I go, I'll be fine."

            "You can't promise that."

            He was right.  She couldn't. 

            Blake polished off the rest of the apple.  "I've gotta work at the restaurant tonight but I've got a training session this morning if you wanna come?"

            Josh nodded but he wasn't really listening.  She knew that he was running all of the scenarios in his head, if she went or if she didn't.  What could happen if she did go.  What would happen if she didn't come back.

            It was a risk, of course.  Leaving was always a risk and she had seen enough to know that not everyone made it back.  But it didn't matter really.  If she stayed, then more people were going to die.  If she went and didn't come back...Well, at least they'd know to send more hunters the next time.

            "I'm leaving in ten," she said to Josh who was still staring in a sullen silence.  "If you're coming with me, be ready by then."

            Blake showered in five minutes and took the time only to dress in a pair of leggings and a tank top before braiding back her hair.  It was an intricate braid but her fingers knew the pattern easily.  Her mother had taught it to her when she was a child. 

Before.

            They walked over to the rec centre and training field in silence.  While the rec centre contained the typical assortment of workout equipment, the training field was located within one of those big indoor fieldhouses.  There were three soccer fields spread out next to each other and everyone training this morning had found their own space to stretch.  Even as they arrived, people began running around the long track.

            Josh was still brooding, angry at her and at Malachi and at the whole damn world.  He'd hardly said three words the entire walk over.

            "Hey, Blake."

            She turned at the sound of her name.  Josh kept walking, leaving her behind as he strode for the farthest field away. 

            "Hi, Mick."

            In front of her was a stocky man with broad shoulders, dark hair, and green eyes set into a young boyish face.  Mick was older than Blake by a decade but his face didn't show it.  Whenever he got sent out of town for booze runs, he still got carded. 

            He brushed his fingers through his hair.  It was the colour of ink.  "Malachi said he wants a meeting with you this afternoon.  Two o'clock."

            "Did he say what it was about?"

            "Something about a job."

            Blake nodded and felt her stomach tighten.  Perhaps it was best that Josh had rushed off so quickly.  At least now she wouldn't have to listen to his cutting remarks during her training session.

            Mick scratched at his neck and as his shirt shifted, Blake caught sight of the ring of scars around his throat.  They were similar to the scars she carried but came from a different monster.

            This was the secret to the community at Beare Lake, although lake was a subjective term.  In reality, it was a small town located over an hour away by car from the nearest city, which was Boise, Idaho.  The lake from which the town was named was completely artificial but served as the focal point of the entire town.  The rest of the buildings fanned out around it.

The community had been crafted intentionally as a guise and the tenants of the town, averaging about a thousand people, all shared a similar story.  Each of them had lost something or someone to a beast.  An other.  Something supernatural and downright wrong.

            Mick had been deceived by a woman he'd thought he loved.  Before he'd killed her, she'd been a huldra – a beautiful creature that used her looks to lure men away.  The legends claimed it was so she could marry them.  Mick had claimed that she had only tried to kill him once she'd seduced him and led him out to the woods in northern Canada on a hiking vacation.  It had been there in where talons elongated from her hands and racked across his neck, narrowly missing his jugular.  Mick had killed her with a switchblade he'd been carrying.

            Blake and Josh had a tale that was different than Mick's but far more tragic than being deceived in love.  Their parents had been lost to a werewolf attack.  Blake had been only eleven when they'd been butchered, leaving mental and physical scars that still lingered.  Her entire back was covered with them.  Those claws had run sharp and deep. 

            She still remembered the feeling of bleeding out and dying.  Was certain that she had died – at least for a moment.  And then she'd woken up in hospital a week later to find Malachi waiting for her and her parents dead. He'd saved her and Josh – and then given them a chance to come to Beare Lake and train for the day that they'd find the werewolf and finish the hunt. 

            Others in the community had been victims of vampires and nymphs, or warlocks and fae.  Old Tom – one of the few elders in the community – claimed to have been attacked by a kappa in Japan during his youth.  He had been one of the founders of Beare Lake and had once led the community entirely.

Now that torch had been passed to Malachi.

            "Need a sparring partner?" Mick asked as his shirt fell back into place, obscuring those scars from view.

            Blake looked around – Josh was stretching with some of the others.  Brad and Leo were his closest friends.  They'd been the pair to take Josh under their wings when he and Blake had first arrived after their parents' murder.  It had been a return to normalcy in a way.  They were all close in age and the ability to play and laugh had healed Josh in more ways than Blake could count.

            Play and laughter hadn't been enough for Blake.  She had been too consumed with blind rage.  In many ways, she still was.

            "Sure," she answered Mick who grinned.

            Mick led her towards a set of training mats that had been laid out.  They stretched, chatting amicably to pass the time.  He was telling her about how Javier – one of the young men in the town whose mother, Elise, was a doctor – had decided to follow in her footsteps and take over his mother's practice.  In the fall, only a few short months away, he'd be heading off to college to begin his formal medical training.

School would teach him about the regular human maladies.  His mother, on the other hand, was teaching him how to deal with injuries less commonly explained in medical journals.  Vampire bites and werewolf scratches; poison from the fangs of a siren or the infectious illness transmitted from a ghoul.

There was no shortage of monster-related injuries.  Blake had experienced quite a few of them herself but was relieved to have someone like Javier learning the ropes.  There were entire books filled with the knowledge his mother had accumulated over the years.  Someone had to be able to stitch all the hunters up when they returned home bruised and bleeding.

"Did you hear about the pack in Denver?" Mick said as they started to train.  Blake finished wrapping her knuckles and started throwing an organized series of punches into the mitts that were covering Mick's hands. 

Blake nodded.  "The kill count is getting high."

"Yeah, I know."  He dropped his voice so that it couldn't be heard beyond the sound of her hands colliding with the pads.  "And you didn't hear it from me but they think the monster that killed your parents might be in it."

For just a second she went still.  The next punch came with more intensity.  "That is something that Malachi conveniently forgot to mention."

            "Maybe that's why he wants to meet with you today."

            The thought was pleasing. 

            "Where's your next case?"

            Mick shrugged.  "I don't know.  He and I are going to meet up for dinner with Brullo and Ida to discuss next moves.  Apparently, a few other groups have reached out to us over the past few weeks looking for input and aid.  Malachi is considering putting together a task force to send on the road to train other units."

            Not a bad idea and it was one Blake already knew about.  It had been a pillow-talk conversation on more than one occasion.

            They continued on with their training circuits.  After sparring came sharpshooting and knife throwing.  Blake practiced with a machete for a while and then moved on to endurance and cardio.  She ran a few miles around the track until she was exhausted, after which she headed for the showers and went to find Malachi.

            He was in his office in the centre of town.  Officially, it was the Mayor's office, even though he didn't go by the title.  Everyone in Beare Lake had a cover story.  It was a way to disguise the true nature of the community in case anyone official, like the feds, ever came looking.  Malachi was the Mayor.  Brullo and Ida were Sheriffs.  Mick sat on the town council.

            Blake was a waitress. 

They had a school and shops and restaurants, and there was a large park that sat in the middle of town where the actual lake for which the town was named was located.  Everyone played their part, breaking from character only to hunt.  Beare Lake was near-mechanical in the way that it operated.  As smooth as well-oiled gears.  Everyone knew their part and for the town to survive it needed to be executed flawlessly.

She arrived at Malachi's office five minutes before her two o'clock appointment.  She paused a moment, listening for voices inside to indicate if he was in a meeting.  When she heard none, she knocked quietly – just above the gold-plated plaque that bore his name, Malachi Pierce – and then let herself in without waiting for consent.

            "You wanted to see me?"

            Malachi was seated behind the large oak desk against the far wall that was covered almost entirely by a large window.  He was older than she was, thirteen years her senior, with cropped dark hair and light brown skin.  As she entered, he looked up at her.

            She had always thought that his eyes were strange.  Light brown, almost too pale, but clear.  When she was younger, those eyes had scared her.  Made her feel unsettled.  Now, she had long grown used to the gaze he turned her way.  The eyes that had begun to roam over her, considering, around the time she'd turned twenty.

            "Yes," Malachi said as he closed his laptop and leaned back in his chair.  His voice was rich and smooth.  It'd be good for poetry or audiobooks...If he didn't have such a talent killing monsters, that was.

            Blake relaxed into the seat across from him.  "What's up?"

            "I've got an assignment for you."

            Mick was right. 

            "Okay."

            Malachi smiled at her eagerness.  "I'm sending you to Chicago with Hix and Caden.  There's an issue.  Mermaids in Lake Michigan."

            She froze.  Chicago.  Not Denver where the werewolves were.  Not to where the beast was that killed her family could be.

            "You're shitting me, right?  This is some fucked up joke?"

            "Excuse me?"

            "Denver is having werewolf problems and you're sending me to deal with some oversized fish?"

            Malachi narrowed his eyes.  "Remember who you're talking to."

            "I will when you stop being a total douchebag."

            "Blake—"

            "Is it true?" she asked.

            "Is what true?" he countered.

            Blake lurched to her feet.  "That the werewolf who killed my parents are in that pack."

            Malachi leaned back in his chair, face carefully composed.  "Who told you that?"

            "It's a small town," she said evasively, to avoid throwing Mick under the bus.  "People talk."

            She watched him consider – saw the wheels turning in his mind.  Trying to decide what he thought that she needed to know. 

            That was one of the things she hated about Malachi.  He never told the whole story.  Instead, he chose the parts he thought were applicable and nothing more.  The problem, Blake knew, was that the parts he thought were necessary were never the ones that she deemed essential.

            Finally, he murmured, "It's possible."

            "How long have you known?"

            "I've been in contact with Daryl Morris and I've been down to Denver a few times over the last few months to keep an eye on this issue.  The werewolf has been going through hot and cold periods so I've been heading to meet Daryl each time a new body drops.  We found a rogue wolf about two months ago that claimed a wolf in that pack near Denver was also responsible for a trail of bodies with the same M.O. as the incident that took your parents' lives.  We didn't catch it because those slaughters have drastically different indicators from the murders in Denver."

            Blake pursed her lips.  "Were you going to tell me?"           

            "I was waiting to see if the information was accurate.  I didn't want to get your hopes up.  That's why I'm not including you in this hunt.  I'm heading out with a group to personally scout out the area.  If it seems like we're facing the same werewolf...I'll bring you in.  I promise.  But for now, I need you in Chicago."

            For a long moment, she searched his eyes.  "Fine."  Blake headed for the door, still fuming.  

            "I'll see you tonight," Malachi said as he went back to his computer. 

            Blake stiffened but didn't give him the satisfaction of a response.  Mostly because she knew that, no matter how much she didn't want to go, she would end up on his doorstep anyways.