ONE | BESTOWED

To fight is an honour. My Dads had always told me that, but, as I slammed the stake into her heart, it didn’t feel like one.

In the absence of my birth parents, I’d been brought up by Daddy and Papa – later Dad and Paps – and I’d been raised to be a warrior. A fighter. A hunter. There was shattered glass all around us, and I could see my own image fragmented all around me, all across the bloodstained oak floorboards. 

The grim line of my lips was hard and tight, but otherwise emotionless. That was the first lesson I’d had to learn: don’t give anything away, not even for a second. She was flailing, now, her body wilting around the entry point of the stake. I shoved it harder, adding an exit point to her back, and she cried out, her mouth twisting into an ugly snarl.

Supernatural creatures can’t feel pain – that was lesson number two. It was probably a lie, but they were monsters. Murderous creatures of the night didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, not when there were lives at stake. If anything, I wanted lesson number two to be fake, made up to encourage us to fight harder. I wanted them to feel everything I did to them.

My boots crunched over the broken glass as I stepped back, making sure to leave the stake in place. Take it out too soon, and they could heal. There were others to fight – others to kill – but this one had made me falter. She looked old, and, though my Dads would convince me it was a disguise, a way to lure in prey, it still felt wrong to stab a little old lady through the heart.

There was a sound behind me, a tiny whirring of air rushing past a fast-moving body. Almost without conscious thought I swung around, my leg raising effortlessly into a roundhouse kick. The vampire stumbled – it wasn’t often a human could catch them out – and I thrust my hand forward, the firm, gnarled wood of a fresh stake solid against my cool palm. Beneath the hem of my faux-leather jacket was a belt, and in that belt were a number of stakes, sheathed like bullets in a bandolier.

The process was simple: stake, wait, move on. Stake, retrieve the original stake, stash, move on. That was the third rule of hunting – keep it simple, stupid. My Paps had always ruffled my hair when he’d said, “stupid;” a mostly useless attempt at keeping my supernatural education as light as possible. My Dad would roll his eyes at Paps, but there would always be something lovesick in his gaze that had belied his respect, and his adoration, for my Paps’s desperation to keep my adolescence innocent.

As innocent as a hunter’s adolescence could be, anyway.

The vampire lurched towards me, his canines distended far below his lips and bared in a gruesome snarl. His dark face was scarred, the white lines stark against his brown skin, and I sidestepped his attack neatly. My boots crushed more glass beneath my feet, and then I was spinning through the air, swinging back towards the old lady vampire and retrieving my stake. In one clean, swift movement I yanked it free, and rammed it through the scarred vampire’s heart.

Stake, wait, move on.

I grinned to myself, relishing in the feeling of moving so freely, so competently. I could hear the other hunters around me, each involved in their own battles, and I was proud of us. We were fighting back against the scourge of the underworld, and, right now, we were winning.

Then a silver knife sliced down my face, and my skin ripped apart, flayed from my skull, and hot red blood filled my vision. I didn’t cry out, and I didn’t fall. I closed my right eye – it wasn’t hurt, it was set back into my face, and the cut had been lazy, sloppy, barely brushing the dark crescent of my eyelashes – and I took a calculated step backwards.

Lesson four: rely on each other, and help one another out. And, sure enough, Diamond took down my attacker, a pasty-white female vampire with blood-red lips – and it definitely wasn’t lipstick – whilst shooting me a wink. Her false eyelashes fluttered, and her dark skin flashed in the dim, shattered light, and I was again shot through with respect that she took so much time to get ready for a hunt, and especially for a bloodbath like tonight.

But my cut was burning, now, and my respect quickly turned to dismay. I needed to stem the blood flow. I was officially a liability, and that was not a position I enjoyed being in.

My dark hair brushed my shoulders as I looked up. My blood oozed down my chin, and dripped onto my neck. Every vampire in the room was looking at me, at the slim column of my throat. Then it hit me: I didn’t have to be a liability. I could be a distraction.

I tilted my head back, the bleached-blonde ends of my hair rippling over the black shoulders of my jacket. I glanced at Diamond, and at her girlfriend, Trigger, and they both raised their eyebrows at me. I nodded, almost infinitesimally, and then I took a step back.

Keeping my right eye closed, I grinned around the broken room at the last remaining vampires. There were three: one tall, dark, and would-be handsome (had he not been a murderous blood-sucker); one was short and stout and round, and I wondered how his pot belly and balding head helped him in acquiring a regular blood supply; the other was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, slim and dark, with a perfectly coifed afro and narrowed green eyes – save for the blood smeared around her sensually curved mouth.

I levelled my gaze at each of them in turn. I imagined how I looked to them: glittering in the light of what remained of the chandelier, with tiny shards of glass embedded in the sleeves of my jacket and the legs of my black jeans, dark skin dripping with blood, and dark eyes threatening, promising, and devious, all at once. I took another step back, and I spread my arms as wide as they would go. My homemade, adapted bandolier swung into focus as my jacket shifted back, the last of my stakes hugging my waist.

“Come and get it,” I grinned.