I’d been at the clan for about four months when they had their first Hunt, traveling a couple hours to a small nearby town. They had no idea that I’d managed to leak information to Cynthia, who’d subtly alerted them without making it too obvious, so that when the Hunters arrived to kill what should have been just a family of fairies, the fairies had a bunch of supernatural friends over and the Hunter clan was vastly outnumbered by angry supernaturals. They – we – immediately beat a hasty retreat, suffering some damage along the way, but no casualties on either side.
When I knocked on Allen’s office door later that day, after the debacle, he was fuming.
“Of all the days for them to have a party,” he snapped when I got inside, “it had to be the day we show up. Rotten luck. Now we have to make sure we don’t head back to that area any time soon – they’ll be on alert for Hunters.”
I leaned against the wall casually. “It’s not an entire loss. We got out in one piece. Besides, these things happen.” I shrugged. “It’s not like we can predict the future, but next time we’ll bring some extras, just in case.”
Allen frowned, but sighed. “Yeah, they do happen, it’s just frustrating when they do. This would have been your first Hunt, and that new girl Opal’s, too.”
Opal was one of the Hunters I’d tagged for a possible second chance. She’d shown up before I had, apparently, angry and hurt over the loss of her family member from a shifter and thinking that the Hunters would provide protection and help to people like her. I’d seen her anger turn into unease and her hurt turn into concern as she started to realize that Hunters weren’t really about protecting humans at all. Sure, that was the theoretical job they provided, but to anyone who spent much time with Hunters, it became clear that for most of them, it wasn’t simply about protection. It was about exterminating all supernaturals. In theory, that could be to protect humans, but when Opal had asked about whether that really meant all supernaturals, like, even the children and elderly, it became clear to me that she was starting to question her place here.
I was kind of glad she’d missed having to watch the fairy family die. Fairies, from what I’d learned in the last 14 years or so, were generally peaceful and helpful to their community. A prime example of supernaturals that humans didn’t need protection from and shouldn’t, realistically speaking, ever be a Hunter target. Or almost never.
I shrugged again. “We’ll get another chance.” Well, not really. Not if I had anything to say about it. It might be harder next time to prevent the Hunt, because I couldn’t use the same tactics twice without starting to raise suspicions, but maybe we could just deal with this clan before that. Allen’s clan was mostly veterans, mostly people who were far past the point of a potential second chance. My assessment was going much faster than usual as a result. Opal, maybe Joey – at least he was idealistic and just wanted to protect people, which I couldn’t fault him for – and a kid with the unfortunate actual name of Hunter, who seemed more confused about why he was there than I was. I’d figured out he was there more because he’d just sort of ended up with the Hunters after he’d run away from an abusive home situation and he felt like he had nowhere to go. I made a mental note to try to set him up with something after this so he wouldn’t end up homeless or in the hands of someone else just as bad.
Despite my reassurances, Allen was in a bad mood the rest of the day. His mood cleared up a bit, though, when it got to be evening.
He motioned me off from the others. “Come here, I have something to show you.”
Curious, I trailed after him, still chewing on my supper.
“The good thing about our particular clan,” he told me as he unlocked the basement door, “is we don’t have to worry about resources. We have a, well, secret weapon, if you will. A way to ensure we can always fund our endeavors. Sure, we end up wasting a day and losing a couple weapons in the process, but they can be replaced easily enough. Even if we lost a couple Hunters, they could have been replaced. The only thing that can’t be replaced is it.”
He flipped on a small overhead light and stopped, looking down at a small pit in front of us.
There was someone in the pit, but I couldn’t tell if the person was male or female, young or old, or what kind of supernatural they were. The person was badly underweight, dirty, hair tangled, and clothes too large and filthy to really identify anything about the person underneath all that.
“Got a visitor for you,” Allen sneered at them. “Let’s show him your pretty trick.”
Allen had been carrying a bag with him, and now he turned it upside down, allowing the contents – several bricks – to drop down into the hole. I flinched internally as three of them hit the person, hoping they didn’t break any bones, but made sure I didn’t show a single emotion on my face – well, nothing other than idle curiosity, at least.
At first, the person in the pit didn’t move.
“Remember,” Allen smirked a bit, “you don’t give me what I want, you don’t get any food.” He unhooked his Hunter’s whip from his belt, letting it fall to his side – a clear threat in addition to the warning about food.
I felt sick. This person didn’t even look like they could stand, and he was threatening them with withholding food – something they clearly desperately needed – and on top of that, wanted to whip them if they didn’t cooperate. While my persona might be fine with all that, I myself was not. I wanted to take him by surprise and just snap his neck, be done with it, but – but I couldn’t. Not yet. We weren’t in position for that.
To my relief, the person in the pit slowly moved a bit then, reaching bony, frail-looking fingers towards one of the bricks. For a moment I wondered if they would throw the brick at us, but then, to my surprise, the brick beneath their fingers began to change. Where it had been normal clay or whatever bricks were made of, gold began to spread until the entire brick appeared to be solid gold.
I found it hard to hide my surprise when they completed this with all of the bricks, which Allen then collected before tossing her what looked like a few scraps of food, but at least my character could be expected to be surprised under the circumstances, so maybe it was fine.
He laughed and tossed me one of the now-gold bricks. “Handy, right? I normally wouldn’t want to keep one of these around but it’s got its uses. Neverending gold is not a gift you throw away lightly.” He seemed oddly cheerful now, like seeing the supernatural in that state was enough to make him happy. Probably it was – he got off on seeing people suffer, after all.
I turned the brick over, feeling the weight, before handing it back. “Didn’t know any of them could do something like that,” I admitted quite honestly.
“Seems to be a rare thing, from what I can tell,” Allen confirmed, leading the way back up from the basement and flicking off the light to leave utter darkness behind us. “When I realized what it could do, I decided I’d have to make an exception on killing it. ‘Course, we have to take precautions. Can’t let it touch us, can’t let it touch anything other than dirt unless we want it turned to gold. I used to try traditional bars, even a cage once – problem is, if it touches the bars, it turns them to gold. It took some trial and error to figure out that it can’t turn dirt, so any time we move facilities, we just dig a pit and throw it in. Transporting’s a little harder – we have to drug it, usually, or beat it into unconsciousness. Whatever works to get it unable to respond until we get it safely to its new home.”
I found myself annoyed that he was referring to the person as an “it,” like the supernatul wasn’t even an animal, but then, what did I expect from someone like him? “I take it this isn’t general knowledge within the clan.”
“Nope, not a chance.” We were back in his office by now, and Allen set the gold bricks out on his desk. “Some of the kids would probably try to get it to turn their own stuff to gold and get rich. I don’t particularly have a problem with that, but they’d get sloppy and lazy and some of them might get too greedy and try to steal it from us. Only the top few know – me, Dean, Fiona, Jeff, and now you.” He gave me a steely look. “You’d better not disappoint me now that I’ve let you in on our little secret.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not gonna pretend money doesn’t have its uses, but I’d have picked a different career if I was interested in that. Don’t worry, I’m not going to run off and tell all the Hunters or use its powers for myself.”
But I might tell my supernatural friends and try to get this poor supernatural creature free. Just maybe.
I kind of hoped that when we did, the supernatural would be able to see for themselves when Allen died. Not if they didn’t want to, of course, but I couldn’t imagine that someone held prisoner like that, for years on end, by a sadistic monster like Allen wouldn’t mind getting to see him get what he deserved. Or not entirely – we didn’t torture people to death – but at least we would ensure that he would never hurt them again.
Now that I’d had the chance to find out about the supernatural prisoner, though, I felt like we needed to move our timeline up. They looked like they were in bad shape to me, and while I wasn’t a doctor and I was pretty sure Allen wouldn’t want to risk his precious treasure trove actually dying, I also didn’t know just how long they could survive like this. Sure, supernaturals were often hardier than humans, but honestly…this supernatural just deserved a break. They deserved the chance to get out of that pit.
I needed to finish my assessment of these people ASAP so we could free them. This clan didn’t know it, but it was almost at its end.
~~~~~
I took a long chug of my beer, then leaned back in the booth and looked around the bar moodily. Opal was here, looking like she was thinking about making a run for it – honestly, if she just left on her own within the next day or so, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but either way, I was about to free her from this particular nightmare. She was with a couple of the other girls who seemed to be having more fun than she was. Joey was here, too, but he was arguing with one of the higher ups, Jeff, something about their principles that Joey couldn’t fully agree with while Jeff was just repeating over and over again that it didn’t matter, because supernaturals didn’t deserve rights.
We were close. Really close. In fact, it was time for me to collect the necessary ingredients from Cynthia and leave instructions for George and Jo. Normally I wouldn’t suggest doing this in some place like a bar heavily occupied by Hunters, but then, no one would suspect anything happening in a place like this, either, so there was that.
Technically, I wasn’t meeting my friends, anyway. I was meeting our other associate, the one who worked at the hospital. Gil, a stupidly rich human who was a doctor anyway because he liked helping people and owned the hospital we used – and thus could get away with reserving part of it for our particular use. If we had to have direct meetings during this time, we always made sure to use Gil instead of one of my friends just so Hunters wouldn’t notice supernaturals in the area and either get suspicious of me or try to kill them.
The danger of this was that some of our second chance targets, Opal and Joey, were here in the bar. We couldn’t risk them seeing Gil because they would still remember him when they woke up, unless we added his hair to the potion. We could, but it was simpler if he just used a disguise anyway and avoided being associated with my persona if anyone ever looked into what happened.
Unlike me, tonight Gil was wearing prosthetic makeup expertly applied by George. I was almost amused to see him stumbling across the bar. Gil enjoyed his chances to act – he’d been involved in his university’s theater company, as I recalled – and was fully leaning into his drunk homeless guy routine.
As he got near my table, supposedly on the way back from the bathroom, he stumbled and I just watched expressionlessly as he almost fell before catching himself on my table and half falling into the other side of the booth by “accident.”
“Gimme a dollar,” he whined at me.
“Go away,” I responded without empathy.
He grabbed at my beer and stole it before I could catch him, then whined again when I took it back. “Come on, just give me a dollar! I gotta have a drink!”
“Go away,” I repeated, with a little more annoyance this time. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Jeff was observing this, probably trying to figure out if he should intervene or I was going to kill a homeless human.
Gil got to his feet, but took a shaky step towards me before grabbing the front of my shirt. “Please, just a dollar,” he begged.
I shoved him backwards, knocking him onto the floor while standing up, looking extremely pissed off. He whined some about how mean I was being, but by then the bar staff had come over to escort him out – he wasn’t a paying customer, after all – and he turned his attention to them instead. His requests for a dollar could be heard by the entire bar the whole way out of the bar until they finally got him outside.
One of the bar staff came over to see if he’d bothered me and offered me a free drink when I expressed my annoyance, trying to calm me down, and then bar slowly went back to normal. From what most of them could tell, he’d just wandered in to use the bathroom and maybe get a drink, had made a nuisance of himself, and now everyone was free to return to their regularly scheduled programming. Even Jeff seemed to buy the act, the only one I was concerned about maybe noticing anything. In fact, he made a comment as he passed my table later about homeless drunks and joked about how maybe I should have pushed the guy a little harder so he couldn’t get up.
Distasteful jokes aside, I considered the evening a success. None of them realized that in our very brief contact, Gil had slipped me a tiny packet and I’d given him a slip of paper in return.
None of them realized that the final stages of our plan were set in motion.
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