“Our family’s been hunting like this for generations,” Carter said, leaning back like he could see it all playing out in front of him. “It’s damn near clockwork: same drills, same prep. Nothing really caught us off guard anymore… not with the bestiaries we had. Basically, they’re books that our relatives have developed over generations. Helps us learn and understand what we’re dealing with.”

  His voice had that steady rhythm to it, but there was weight underneath… heavy. The kind that stays no matter how much he tried to hide it.

  We were all still out by the vehicles in an open area that Carter had driven us into. It was still the middle of the afternoon, and we were completely isolated. Part of me still had a fear that they brought me here to kill me. Maybe Jane would eat me or something. That was the worst-case scenario. But I knew I was just being a little scared bitch when I had thoughts like that.

  “Vampires were the big ones in our generation,” he went on. “Most common threat to us in St. Louis by far. Other weird stuff popped up now and then, sure, but nine times outta ten? It was leeches. And the night we met him… we were out hunting’ three of ’em.”

  I could feel it; whatever this story was, it mattered. Not just to Carter. Frank’s jaw was tight, eyes low, like he’d already walked this memory a thousand times. Jane wasn’t as tense, but she kept glancing at Frank, reading him more than the room. They seemed close.

  “It was supposed to be simple,” Carter said. “Three vampires, isolated, we had them boxed in, kill zone set, escape covered. Easy work. In and out.” He let out a short breath through his nose. “Then this guy just… walks in and fucks up the whole plan.” Carter laughed the last words out like he still couldn’t believe it.

  I frowned. “Walks in?”

  “Yeah. Just strolls right into the middle of it. Stands toe-to-toe with three vampires like they’re just two dudes and a girl outside a bar. No fear… no hesitation… nothing you’d expect someone to feel when standing near one.” He shifted slightly as he explained, “For normal humans, monsters like vampires put off a… vibe, or atmosphere, that can paralyze someone in fear. The murderous intent and need to drain your blood can just roll off them. They look at you like the meal you are… in their eyes, at least. Even with all that, he didn’t budge.”

  Carter couldn’t help but chuckle under his breath, shaking his head at the memory.

  “What happened next?” I asked, waiting for some crazy shit. “Did they attack him?”

  “In the grand scheme… what happened wasn’t that wild. But here’s the thing… he killed one of them. Straight up dead, and he did it clean. That’s not something some random civilian pulls off. Not without knowing what he’s dealing with.”

  “So he knew?” I asked.

  Carter’s smile faded. He shook his head slowly. “That’s the thing. He didn’t act like he did… not in the way we’d expect. Afterward, he seemed… clueless. Like he’d just been in a bad fight and didn’t even realize what he’d swung at. But… there was no shock at the bodies as we dismembered them, or at having to move corpses around. It didn’t faze him at all.” Carter looked at me funny. “We make sure they don’t get back up, and hide them from sight until sunrise… then there’s no trace. They just burn up… real fast,” he explained the question he could see lingering on my face. “He wasn’t shaken by any of it like we’d expect. He just… shrugged it off. To us… he just looked like a normal guy who’d gotten lucky… and a bit apathetic.”

  “But he wasn’t normal,” I said, more to myself than him.

  Carter’s eyes darkened. “No. He wasn’t.” He leaned forward a little, elbows on his knees. “We figured maybe he was just skilled. Natural fighter or something like that. So we made him an offer… learn from us. See the world for what it really is. If he was gonna be bumping into monsters, better he know how to survive them.”

  “And he took it,” I said.

  “Oh, he didn’t just take it,” Carter replied. “He dove in headfirst and soaked up everything. Every bestiary entry, every weakness, every ritual, every rule. He studied like it was oxygen. And looking back? That should’ve tipped us off to something. Nobody absorbs that much that fast unless they already know something. Usually, the shock of knowing the truth takes longer to settle.”

  I was still trying to piece together where this was headed. It felt like too much detail about a guy I’d never met. But there had to be a reason Carter was telling me this. Maybe it tied back to the thing that took the guys. To that hole in the earth. That blood-soaked dirt chamber still made my stomach twist when I thought about it.

  “It wasn’t until later,” Carter continued, voice lower now, “that we realized something was off.” He rubbed his jaw, eyes distant. “We already had our suspicions. He didn’t have much of a paper trail. Came and went mostly on foot. Never talked much about his past. We paid him under the table, too… had him working at our construction company while we trained him. Kept him fed, paid, looked after. But we never had the kind of info you can punch into a system and pull up. You’d be amazed at how many people are in the world under one name.”

  Carter paused, like he was sifting through the memory.

  “There was this one night… we had a big family get-together. Everyone was there. Food, drinks, laughing… it was a celebration. He and my daughter had gone out into the city to get some air from a… situation,” Carter was careful with his words there. “When they were gone, they got attacked by a pack of vampires. They went missing until morning, and we thought the worst… but then… he brought my daughter home. He protected her from those monsters… and we wanted him to know how much we appreciated him, and were considering him one of the family. That’s what the get-together was all about.” Carter set the scene. “We’d all had a little too much to drink, so we told him to crash at the house. It was no big deal.” His jaw tightened slightly. “Next morning? He was gone before the sun was fully up. He was rushed… jittery, acting like he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “That’s weird,” I muttered, actually falling into this story. I wondered what changed in one night.

  “Yeah… I thought so too.” Carter nodded. “So I called in a favor. Got an old friend of mine, Martin, to tail him. Just to make sure he wasn’t in trouble, or running from something we didn’t know about.”

  Silence stretched between us. Even Frank looked up now. Carter’s eyes weren’t in the room anymore. They were somewhere else entirely, back in that moment.

  “What Martin told me he saw…” Carter said quietly, voice rough around the edges, “That’s when everything changed.”

  I felt this tight knot twist in my stomach. The way Carter was talking, low, steady, heavy, it wasn’t just a story. It was history. The kind of thing that changes a family forever. And with everything they’d seen, everything they knew was out there… what in the hell could scare them?

  “Martin followed him,” Carter said, voice quieter now. “Through tunnels under the city. Not sewer lines. Not maintenance shafts. I’m talking about old passageways, used by supernaturals. Hidden routes and places normal folks don’t even know exist.”

  A chill crawled up my spine. Who was this Martin? How could he follow through?

  “And somehow,” Carter continued, “he was down there moving like he belonged down there. He knew the turns… the exits. He didn’t hesitate once.”

  Frank’s jaw flexed, like he was reliving it. He shifted his posture to refocus on what Carter was saying. Frank’s eyes crossed mine for a moment. They were calm, assessing me in a way that made me think they were hoping I would take all this well.

  “He came up in a residential district. Real high-end, big money area with gated properties. The kind of place where every house looks like it’s worth more than your whole life.” Carter swallowed once. “He went into one of them. When Martin caught up and went inside, it was already done. Carter’s eyes went distant. “Everyone in that house was dead.”

  My brain stalled. “Dead how?” I could tell it was more complicated than just dead.

  “Slaughtered,” he said flatly. “It was a bloodbath that coated the entirety of that house.”

  I shook my head. “Wait… what?” I knew something bad was coming, but some things didn’t add up from our deeper conversations before all of this.

  Carter looked at me sharply, seeing that I was catching on. “You remember what I already told you about silver, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Monsters are weak against it.”

  He nodded slowly. “Exactly. And he’d been carrying a silver blade since the night we met him. Months at that point. Once I gave it to him, it never left his side.”

  I frowned. “So that means…”

  “If he were a monster, then it would have hurt him. It means he shouldn’t have been able to carry it,” Carter cut in. “Not if he was like the rest.” He rubbed his hands together like he was trying to shake off something. “But Martin said the scene didn’t look like clean kills. Didn’t look tactical. It was… savage: walls were torn up, bodies ripped apart, bones crushed. It was like a storm of murder had gone through there.”

  My breathing picked up without me meaning it to, and my heart thudded harder. I didn’t even know this guy, and somehow I was already dreading where this was going.

  “Naturally,” Carter went on, “we had to figure it out. I kept thinking, maybe I’d let a murderer into our circle. A psychopath. The idea that he was a monster didn’t cross my mind because of the silver blade. But a monster wearing human skin? A killer…” His eyes hardened. “That’s a different story.”

  Jane shifted slightly, “There are humans in this world that can be just as evil as monsters of our world. I’ve seen my fair share… killed them too… and that's what we thought we were dealing with.”

  Jane’s gaze on me felt raw and scathing. I don’t think she meant to stare daggers at me; it was just her unfortunate RBF. She was just really serious about what she spoke, and I could feel it. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of her aggression… not after seeing her eyes and claws shift out. Even with her normal brown eyes staring out of a normal-looking face, framed by her straight black hair… I couldn’t help but find a reason to look away and back to Carter.

  “There was a lotta fear back then,” Carter admitted. “He’d gotten close to us. We liked him. Hell, we trusted him. Didn’t wanna push away someone who might’ve just made a few bad choices. But we couldn’t ignore what Martin saw.”

  “So we tested him,” Frank said quietly, the big, red-haired man flexing his hands together as he thought deeply on his past.

  “We’ve got friends… special ones. Think about psychics, but more than that. They see things before they happen. Bend the odds in our favor… make stuff occur that looks damn near like magic. Practically is… ” He shrugged like it was no big deal. “We used them to set up a little trap. Lured him somewhere controlled where we could… run a test.”

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  “And?” I asked.

  “He failed,” Frank let the cat out of the bag. He leaned his large frame over, his elbows on his knees as he let Carter continue.

  “Once we knew he wasn’t human,” Carter continued, “we cornered him on a rooftop. There was nowhere to run, and his back was to the edge. We told him we knew he wasn’t human… and we wanted the truth. There was a scuffle, and he surprised us…”

  My mouth felt dry. “So what happened?”

  Carter didn’t blink. “We shot a silver arrow straight through his heart.”

  My stomach flipped, shocked at the quick turn of the story. Then Carter doubled down on it.

  “He fell off the building,” Carter said. “Dropped like dead weight. Should’ve killed anything else human, vampire… anything. The one-two punch of silver to the heart and gravity smashing your skull after about a six to eight story drop should do the trick.” He paused. “But he didn’t die.”

  The room felt smaller at his words. This weird story was finally culminating into something now.

  “We thought he had,” Carter admitted. “In that moment… we believed it was over.”

  Frank let out a slow breath. “We were wrong.”

  Carter nodded once. “His body was gone when we got to the ground level, and we never found him. He disappeared… and we thought we’d never see him again… if he was still alive. But… he came back. And not just randomly; when we needed him most.”

  His gaze sharpened like he could see it all again.

  “Things were coming up from deep under St. Louis. Old, ancient things from a place monsters used to gather before the city ever formed into what it is now. They walked around in human form… hiding in plain sight. There were three of them… all different… all powerful in their own right. Something more than we had ever faced… and more than we were prepared for.”

  “And once they realized hunters were in their city?” Frank added grimly. “They came for us… all of us.”

  Carter’s voice tightened. “My wife was hurt… bad. We were outmatched… it wasn’t even a fight. We were stopped before the fight even started… and my wife, Eleanor, was dying; and then he showed up.”

  I felt something as he spoke. I couldn’t understand what it was, but something in my mind was trying to piece it together.

  “He tore through those ancient creatures like they were nothing,” Carter said, voice low and rough. “And after it was done… after he’d saved all of us… he did something else.” He hesitated. “Something that told me exactly who he was. Or at least… what he was.”

  There was a quiet stretch, thick and heavy.

  “So what was he?” I asked.

  Carter looked up at me, eyes weary but steady, “A friend.”

  Frank shook his head slightly. “More than that. He was already family. At least, he saw us that way. We just didn’t get how deep it ran… not until later.”

  I waited. I could feel it building again; there was more story coming.

  “This next part,” Carter warned softly, “isn’t easy to wrap your head around.” He swallowed, “My wife died.”

  The words hit like a punch. It was quick and absolute… and confused the shit out of me.

  “Huh?” was all I could muster.

  “She died,” he reiterated. “But… whatever he is… whatever rules he plays by… he knew something’ we didn’t. He did something that shouldn’t be possible.”

  My pulse hammered in my neck and ears as everything was unfolding with this story, and the reasons why he was telling me this.

  “He brought her back,” Carter said. “But it cost him big. He gave up something of his own… something we didn't fully understand… not until much later.”

  Frank’s voice was thick now. “We never asked him to do it. He didn’t owe us a damn thing… we attacked him… cornered him… drove him off. But… he came back.”

  Carter nodded slowly. “And that’s how we knew. Whatever he was… he wasn’t a monster. Not really. Not the kind we hunt.” His eyes softened, just barely. “After that, he wasn’t just some outsider we trained. He was family, blood or not. My wife treats him like he’s family… like her own son. We all do; anybody who says different can fuck off.”

  He leaned back, exhaling slowly as Frank looked at him and gave a nod that was the embodiment of hell yeah, brother!

  “He’s still a mystery… still keeps secrets, and we all know he still ain’t exactly human.” A faint, almost proud smile tugged at his mouth. “But he’s one of us. And since then… he’s done even more to keep our family together.”

  The weight of everything they’d said just sat on me. Heavy. The way they were all looking at me didn’t help either. It felt like there was still something they weren’t saying outright. Like this story wasn’t just background… it was connected. Maybe to the things in the city. Maybe to whatever killed my co-workers. Maybe to whatever hole had been dug into the earth like something crawled out of it.

  I didn’t know. But I needed it to make sense. So I lifted my head and looked into Carter’s seasoned, blue eyes.

  “Okay,” I said finally, rubbing a hand over my face. “Why are you telling me all this? I get that you’ve got a friend who isn’t exactly human anymore. I get that monsters are real. But what does that have to do with me? With this town? With what’s happening here?”

  Carter glanced at Frank. It was quick, but I caught it. Like he was checking something without words.

  Frank didn’t look back. He just stared at the floor, jaw tight. Jane was watching Frank, not me. It was subtle, but it felt coordinated, like they’d already agreed Carter would be the one to explain it.

  Carter took a slow breath and leaned forward a little, resting his forearms on his knees. When he spoke again, his tone shifted from less storytelling to more… teacher, explaining something complicated to someone just stepping into it.

  “I’m telling you,” he said calmly, “because you’re walking into a world that’s bigger than you think. And if you only see it as black and white, you’re going to make the wrong call.”

  I frowned. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” he continued, steady and patient, “just because something isn’t human doesn’t automatically mean it’s evil. Yeah… most of the time… power like that corrupts people. Nine times out of ten, if someone’s turned into something… they lose themselves. They become exactly what you’re picturing right now. Cold-blooded, merciless killers just looking to satiate a hunger not meant for our world.”

  He didn’t sugarcoat it.

  “But not always,” Frank spoke with a hopeful tone.

  I stayed quiet.

  “Our family’s been doing this a long time,” he went on. “We’ve seen people touched by this dark world in different ways. Some were cursed. Some were changed. Some were born into things they didn’t ask for… and every once in a while, someone comes out the other side still… themselves.”

  He let that sit for a second before continuing.

  “You’re looking at what’s happening in this town and seeing monsters, and you’re not wrong. There are monsters out there. Things that will tear a man apart without blinking. But there are also things in that same darkness that fight back.”

  “Like your friend,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Carter nodded. “He’s one of the most dangerous beings we’ve ever encountered. If he wanted to, he could do serious damage to a lot of innocent people. But he doesn’t. He chooses not to.”

  Frank finally spoke, his voice low. “He hunts the worst of them. A… killer of killers.”

  I felt a strange, yet powerful, chill roll down my spine and out across the entire surface of my body. Something like that sounded… fatal.

  Carter picked it back up smoothly. “The supernatural world’s not just chaos. It has its own predators and its own balance. There are things out there that don’t like the mindless killers any more than we do. Creatures that see the reckless, bloodthirsty types as bad for business… or just bad for existence in general.” He looked directly at me now. “You need to understand that before you decide how you’re going to handle what’s coming.”

  “What’s coming?” I asked quietly.

  Carter didn’t answer that part directly, and he looked like he intentionally slowed down his explanation before he continued. More slowly than before as he measured his next words.

  “What I’m saying,” he clarified, voice firm but not harsh, “is that you can’t afford to treat everything supernatural like it’s the same. Some of it is straight-up evil. Some of it belongs in the ground. And some of it… keeps the rest of it in the ground.”

  The room went still again.

  “And your friend?” I asked. “He’s the second kind?”

  Carter held my gaze.

  “He’s one of the things that makes sure the real monsters stay buried.”

  I was back in my own truck, sitting at the steering wheel, just staring into space. I was replaying everything we had talked about. All the information Carter, Frank, and Jane had dumped on me. At first, I didn’t know what to think, as all of them were intimidating as fuck. But now that I was away from them, alone with my thoughts, I wasn’t sure what to think.

  It was almost like I had watched a movie or something. Read a book, maybe. It was like I was back in the real world where none of that stuff existed, and part of me wanted it to be that way. To remain in the simple, safe world. But another part wanted to return to them and talk more about everything. I wanted to know more. It was weird, almost like I had two separate lives: the secret life I had just been wrapped up in with Carter, and my real life that I was about to go back to… back home to Shelly and the kids.

  I cranked the truck, listening to the throaty growl of the engine as it came to an idle. It grounded me back in the real world… made me feel normal again. I let out a deep breath as I gathered myself and tried to push the weirdness back down for the moment, and started to go home.

  Once back home and inside the kitchen, I let out a few long and slow breaths as I tried to calm myself. I could feel my heart beating hard as hell as I leaned my forehead against the cold metal of the stainless-steel refrigerator, as I thought more on everything I had just learned. Carter’s family was intertwined in things that shouldn’t exist. It was a lot of information, a lot of it I didn’t understand. Especially the last part about their friend. How could something like that exist? What would it look like? Whoever he was…

  I cracked a beer in the silence of the kitchen, trying to be quiet as the kids and Shelley were all in bed. I had texted her earlier and said work was running long today, so she wouldn’t be worried about where I was. I had to calm myself so she wouldn’t expect anything was wrong before I came to bed. I wanted to tell her everything I had just learned, but I couldn’t just dump all this shit on her. It almost felt like a virus, like if I told her, I'd infect her with this knowledge. Then she wouldn’t be able to go back to feeling normal ever again… like how I was feeling right now.

  I could feel the blood surging through my neck and ears, hammering with adrenaline, and I knew I didn’t want this for Shelly. I tried to focus on the cold glass of the beer bottle as I held it in my grip and placed it to my lips. I drained the beer quickly and then got another one, letting the bottlecap clatter across the countertop. As I sat in the kitchen now, slowly breathing to maintain the creeping calm that was finally inching over me, I noticed light coming through the front windows.

  I jumped the moment it registered in my eyes. It was instantly obvious what it was… two headlights burning through the front glass and illuminating the darkness of my front living room.

  I was immediately scared that somebody had followed me home, some kind of thing from that new dark world I had just learned about. But then I quickly calmed, realizing that these things Carter had told me about, gravemarrows, wouldn’t need to drive a truck to come and get my ass. Then, as I peered through the blinds, I realized it was my own truck. I felt like a dumbass.

  I was in such a state when I got back, I guess I forgot to turn the headlights off. It was weird, though, because they were automatic. But maybe I hit them or something in my stressed drive home. I had been talking with Carter, Frank, and Jane for hours about the supernatural and their experiences in it. I was kind of in a foggy state when I came home, so I probably left them on and didn’t even realize I’d have a dead battery in the morning if I didn’t shut them off.

  Even though I knew it was my own headlights I’d left on, I wasn’t taking any fucking chances. I picked up the .357 magnum my dad had given me years ago. I had hidden it on top of the cabinets in the kitchen, underneath a decorative bowl of fake fruit, Shelly swore was in style for house decor. It was loaded and ready to go; it was also a nice, cold, metal companion to come with me as I exposed myself to this dangerous world once more. I felt a little bit safer having it in my hand. Even though part of me felt like a little kid again, scared of the things that are out in the dark, even though I knew that this was just some normal, mundane thing. Well, I should have known that, but even though I just left on my headlights, I had a sinking feeling that there were things beyond the trees that I couldn’t see.

  With my keys in hand, I slowly unlocked the front door and walked outside… a little quicker than I’d like to admit. I got to the truck, and I opened the door really fast, seeing the culprit immediately. The dial underneath the left side of the steering wheel had been cranked to the manual “on” setting. Probably hit it with my knee in my rush to come home. I shifted it back to auto, and the lights cut out. I slammed the door shut and was taking the first step back to the house, and that’s when I heard it.

  My eyes flicked in the direction of what sounded like a snapping stick beneath someone’s heavy foot. The first thing I saw was something that was burned into my memory for the rest of my days. Standing about twenty feet away, right at the edge of the tree line, was a person. They were just barely bigger than me, cloaked in a dark hood, and it almost seemed like the world around them draped its shadows around their form, barely letting this person slip out to be seen as they stared in my direction. They were watching every move I made.

  I could feel the muscles in my right arm were sluggish, like I’d been bathing in cold water, and they were unresponsive. They felt like this every millisecond that I was trying to snatch the gun up and level it at this dark, shadowy figure that watched me from the woods. I was so close.

  The moment I had the gun levelled, and my finger was squeezing the trigger, this shadowy thing moved so fast that I couldn’t even see when it crossed the distance. One second, it was standing twenty feet away, cloaked in shadow. The next moment, it was in front of me, hands clenching my fists. The gun was nowhere to be seen… my hands felt like they were in metal vices locked down so absolutely that there was no hope to defend myself as this looming figure stared down at me. His face was cloaked behind a dark hood that allowed no details to escape.

  Then he said something that made me aware it was indeed a he and… that he knew me.

  “Seth…”