Oct. 9

Do you ever wake up and just sense something is wrong? The sun is shining, as usual, nothing seems out of the ordinary, but the day still feels wrong. That’s how I woke up.

The sunray sparkled through the cracks of my window blinds. I woke up tense from sleeping in an uncomfortable position, sprawled on top of my textbooks and laptop. I woke up wearing the clothes from yesterday, but that wasn’t the weird feeling. Finding myself passed out with school work on my bed was normal since I always did it in bed.

It finally made itself clear when I picked up my phone to the mess of calls and texts. I scrolled through the messages. With no hesitation, I yanked myself out of bed and ran out of the apartment. Each step ascending the stairs felt like a shot of adrenaline and worry. I felt an intense panic over my best friend. Stupid. I told Hunter if anything went wrong to text me immediately, but when he did I failed to answer. I just hope it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

I slammed on Caleb’s door. There was heavy rustling inside before anyone answered. On the other side, my friend Hunter’s deadbeat eyes drooped in fatigue. A frown fell sadly on his face. He didn’t say a word.

I sounded frantic, pushing my way into the apartment room. “Where’s Caleb!”

He moved sluggishly. “He’s recovering in his room. Lin is with him right now.” You could see from his face he had been awake all night, tending to his severely injured friend. His eyes were battered red and puffy like he’d been crying out of agony to the point he no longer had tears to shed.

I barged through the bedroom. There I saw him. Caleb was laying on his bed. He was wrapped in a mangle of bandages like a mummy from his torso all the way up to the right side of his face. Through the gauze I could see his body, It was charred red and black with burns. He was cooked, welts of skin forming on his body. He rested in discomfort, but he still had the audacity to smile as he saw me.

Lin was seated by his bedside. She was wearing already wearing her school uniform, a royal blue skirt with a button up and orange vest with Ms. Kimberley’s coat of arms on the left breast pocket. She stood up to meet me. We both looked at each other intensely.

I turned back to Hunter in anger. “What happened! I thought I told you about the demon!”

He winced at my tone, “I did. I saved him from the demon, but what happened next…” What happened next? In my dream, I saw dying to two black spears, but that was it.

“W-What happened?”

Lin intervened in the conversation. “It was the Cerberus.”

I gazed at her, “The what?”

“The Cerberus.” She took a pause as if the demon was revered, or feared. “Throughout the Hallowed Month, we have seen many different reincarnations of the witch’s wrath. But there have been three that have stood out as the most ruthless, most terrifying demons ever conceived. The witch, along with her two most loyal servants have claimed the lives of so many hunters.”

“Cerberus is one of the three?” She nodded her head in apathy. From what I remembered, the Cerberus was one of those Greek myths. A dog with three heads that watches over the underworld. Was that legend really a monster we had to face? “Did you take it out? What happened?”

He looked over to my severely burned friend. For once in my life, Caleb said nothing. It must’ve been too painful to speak. The silence was too weird to even comprehend.

Hunter took a sigh, trying to collect himself, “After it transformed, it tried to attack me. It opened its mouth to an inferno and… and I just froze. Then Caleb… he tackled me over, but he-” Lines started forming on his forehead in stress. “He took the hit.” He collapsed in the vacant seat next to the bed. “Afterwards, it just disappeared. Like smoke in the air.”

Lin put her fingers to her temple, “I was afraid you would say that. We’ll have to deal with it asap. Wherever it attacks next, we’ll have to be there on full guard.”

I picked my teeth, running my hand in my hair in frustration. “Will… Caleb be ok?”

They both looked at poor injured Caleb. He shuffled slowly, lifting his hand in a thumbs up. Lin bit her lips. “Maybe, We should let Caleb rest? Hunter?”

His hands were in his face. “I’m not going to leave his side.”

“Okay…” She tugged on my arm lightly, “Do you have any food at your place?” She took me down the stairwell of the complex and brought me back to my home. She made herself comfy very quickly, stealing one my mom’s slices of pizza then crashing on my loveseat. Her face looked tired from stress.

The clock on the tv read ‘9:04.’ Guess I was ditching school. I skid over to the couch, resting next to my guest. “Lin. Tell me honestly, will he be ok?”

Hesitation in her voice, “Yes Reyes, but it’s complicated…”

“What’s so complicated about it? He’s going to heal right?”

“It’ll take some time…” As immortal hunters, we can’t die. “He’s healing quicker then a normal person would. Even the fact that he’s stayed alive helps. But… his burns are very, very bad. He’s going to take a week, even more, to get back to normal, and it will be excruciatingly painful.”

I felt pained even thinking about his situation. The red blotches of skin trying to mend itself, how the slightest movement hurts him. “Oh.”

“It gets worse.” Her eyes stayed closed trying to calm down. “With him at this state, unable to talk or move… Caleb has the unique ability of sense. Without him... Without him, we’re lost. No one else can tell where the Cerberus or any other hunt will happen. We’re shooting in the dark…”

My throat felt dry like sand. Even in the light of the dangers last year, I had never felt so, blind. God, I hated it. I had to be reborn with future-death sight, not something useful for this situation. I clenched my mouth shut, thinking of a plan.

“I don’t want him to know the graveness we face. That’ll just put more stress on him. He luckily told me about two other hunts he sensed but after that- We just have to hope.” She strolled back into the kitchen and took the pizza box she opened earlier. “I better run this to Hunter. I don’t see him leaving anytime soon. Please, just stay calm, okay?”

I worried about Caleb and his pain. I worried about Hunter and the guilt that must be lingering in him. I even worried about my mom, and how she’d react when another box of her pizza was gone. In the shadows of all that worry, I knew I had to be strong. I had to smile, “Okay.”