Dear Diary,
It’s been a while. Maybe too long. I’ve missed our little chats. I was listening to this motivation podcast where they said if you wrote down your thoughts in a journal every morning and night for thirty days, then you’d get some real clarity in your life, so here it goes.
The Hunters for Hire school is off to an amazing start. I learned that I’m a better owner than manager. People like Shannon and Deacon are the real experts in teaching. Maybe I’m too much of a lone wolf. Maybe the hybrid in me is too much of a doer. I like being out in the field, tracking down creatures that go bump in the night.
Frankie and I, well, things have been complicated. I wish…
Motion from the alley on my left caught my eye. I was sitting in my Mustang. A light drizzle that almost never touched LA sprinkled across my windshield. A blood bank had reported a series of thefts they couldn’t explain. No money was taken, just the blood.
What confused most, made perfect sense to me. It wasn’t high on the priority list of SOAP or the Court to take down a rogue vampire. I got it. They were dealing with much larger threats. But I also knew people needed this blood, and I knew I could do something about it.
Through the drizzle of rain, I saw a hunched dark figure make short work of the rear door of the blood bank. In a second, he was inside.
“Time to go to work,” I muttered to myself. I shrugged deeper into my peacoat. On instinct, my hand reached for the smaller version of Blood Rage bedside me on the passenger side seat.
A dark tendril of wispy smoke in the rearview mirror nearly gave me a heart attack.
Odin the hellhound appeared out of nowhere.
“Son of a-duchess!” I shouted, my butt tightening in panic.
Hellhounds, and especially Odin, had a knack for popping in and out of places at the worst times. I was beginning to think he was doing it on purpose.
Odin reverted from blood-red eyes and wispy smoky tendrils to a big black wolf dog. I swore he smiled at me.
“Odin,” I said, turning in my seat, “you know we talked about this. You’ve got to give me a warning, man. At least appear next to me and not behind me.”
Odin gave me another smile, then looked outside. “Sky leaking.”
Casey Grey, the head of our weapons and development department, had given Odin an experimental collar that was supposed to translate his words. It was still in the early stages but got his point across most times he talked.
“Yes,” I answered. “That’s a weird way to say it, but yes, it’s raining. Hey, I got to go stop a vampire. I’ll be right back.”
I opened the car door and stepped out into the cold, wet night. Odin joined me. It was late, and in this section of Los Angeles, away from the downtown bustle, that meant little traffic. One of the many tricks Blood Rage had was the ability to grow and shrink with a thought. I told it to show its true size now. The hammer from heaven obeyed, growing in size until it was a full-on warhammer, axe on one side and hammer on the other. Runes glowed red along the handle and metal blade, warning me evil was close.
Cold droplets touched my head and neck. I crossed the street and entered the alley at the same time our vampire was exiting the building.
He had a blood bag in his mouth, taking it down like a thirsty kid after a soccer game drinking a Capri Sun. Come to think of it, I could go for a Capri Sun right about now.
The vampire was about to scurry away, one blood bag dangling from his mouth, an armful of others hugged to his chest.
He was of average height and build. A hoody covered his head from the rain. He looked younger, but with vampires, you never knew. The fact that he would go for the low-hanging fruit and steal from a blood bank told me he was still new to all of this.
He stopped in his tracks and so did I. We just stared at each other for a moment, like two gunslingers waiting for the town churchbell to strike high noon.
“Put down the Capri Sun and no one gets hurt,” I told him. “We don’t have to do this the hard way. You can come in with me.”
The vampire looked to his right and left. There was nowhere to go. Brick walls from the buildings on either side penned him in. One side was the blood bank; the other was a boba bar.
He could turn and run, but that wasn’t really the nature of these vampires. They were cocky.
“Ahhh, I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” The vampire grinned, placing his blood bags beside him. His eyes turned black, his canines elongated. He looked at me like I was supposed to shudder in fear at this point.
“Was that the wicked witch from Wizard of Oz?” I asked, genuinely delighted. “It was, wasn’t it? Oh man, that was a great movie; pretty dark if you look into the production behind it, but still a classic.”
The vampire looked uncertain with my lack of fear. He took one step forward then stopped.
“You should do it again but cackle at the end this time,” I told him. “Come on, I used to be a model and had to take a few acting lessons. I can help you. Try it again, really get into character and make me believe it.”
The vampire was not amused. He was half confused and half pissed off.
Baring teeth, he lunged at me.
I stepped to the side, using Blood Rage’s handle end to swat him on the butt as he charged past. The vampire stumbled and then turned around for another run at me. He slashed this way and that, clawing at my face and neck.
But let’s not forget, boys and girls. I was a hybrid, and not only that, I had years of combat experience behind me. I dodged, anticipating his moves before he even threw them. One might even say I ducked, dipped and dove. He was a blur of motion. I was the blur anticipating his moves in perfect harmony.
After a few minutes of this—and let me tell you, a few minutes feels like an eternity when you’re in nonstop motion—the vampire halted his attack. “You’re, you’re not even trying, are you?”
“Not really. I just want you to feel good about yourself,” I told him, setting Blood Rage’s axe head on the ground in front of me and resting on the handle. “You seemed pretty confident a minute ago and I didn’t want to ruin that for you.”
“Who, who are you?”
“Just a guy staring at a vampire, asking you to turn yourself in so this doesn’t get messy.”
“You’re him, aren’t you?”
“That’s impossible for me to know.”
“You’re him, the, the hybrid from Hunters for Hire.”
“Well, in that case, yes,” I told him. “I am he. He is me. However that verbiage works. Now are you going to let me take you in to SOAP willingly? Or are we going to do this the other way?”
A moment stretched between us as the vampire considered his options. The sickening sound of licking reached both our ears. We glanced over to see Odin sitting down, one leg out, cleaning his no-no parts.
“Come on, man, we’ve talked about this,” I told Odin. “Can you do that later?”
“Prude,” Odin answered before going back to his work. And I’ll save you the details here, but he was really getting after it.
It seemed the vampire made up his mind. He thought my split attention was going to make me more of a target then it had. Betting wrong, he lunged for me again.
I kicked out with my right foot, not at the vampire, but at the hammer side of my warhammer resting on the ground. The axe blade swung up, Blood Rage’s thirsty honed blade meeting the underside of the vampire’s chin as he advanced.
The weapon from heaven bit deep. It sliced all the way through his face and skull, coming out of the top easier than a sharp knife biting through a piece of paper.
The vampire’s body wiggled, then fell on the ground in front of me.
“Gross,” Odin said, shaking his head.
“Gross,” I agreed.
I was going to say more, but my phone went off in my pocket. My ringtone was the original Super Mario theme song these days. I don’t know why, it just made me smile. The rain had lightened a little but still landed on my phone screen. The name was one I knew, but not one I ever remembered programming into my phone. That’s the deal with working with some of these supernatural types; weird stuff just happens.
My phone read “Baba Yaga.”
“Hello?” I asked, hitting the speaker button. “Baba, is that you?”
“Boy, boy, yes, it Baba,” the older woman said in her harsh Russian accent. “You good, boy? How’s life?”
“Uhhh, good?” I asked more than said. Baba and I were friends, but more like work friends. We weren’t exactly the call-each-other-to-check-in type. “How are you?”
“Oh you know, same old, same old, hex this person with boils, curse that person with rash,” Baba said without a hint of joking in her voice.
The awkward conversation came to a pause that lengthened. I could hear something like the tapping of fingers on a desk on the other side.
“Well, that sounds fun?” I asked. “Baba, is there something I can help you with?”
“Yes, small talk is over?” she asked, relieved.
“Yeah, we don’t have to do the small talk thing,” I reassured her. “We’re friends. What’s up? How can I help?”
“Oh, good,” Baba said with a sigh. “Baba hate small talk. Small talk for gypsies and furries.”
“You mean fairies?”
“No, those who dress up in animal costume,” Baba corrected.
“Oh, okay,” I said, going with the flow. “Well, what’s going on?”
“Baba have small issue, very sensitive. Perhaps come over. Would like to hire H4H for discreet services,” Baba said. The hesitancy in her voice told me all I needed to know. Baba Yaga was an extremely powerful supernatural being who had been around since, well, I don’t know, a very long time. She was also a friend. If she needed help, I was there for her.
“Let me call in a SOAP pickup and I’m on my way,” I told her. “Or I could call Shannon or Deacon, see if someone else is closer.”
“No, no, must be you, boy,” Baba said again with that hint of insistence in her voice that sent a cold chill down my spine. “Must be you.”
“Okay, give me a few minutes and I’m there,” I reassured her.
“Thank you, thank you, my boy,” Baba said.
I ended the call, looking at Odin with a question neither of us had an answer for. “What would have Baba Yaga so worried that she’d call me?”
Odin huffed something that his translator couldn’t pick up.
We walked back to the Mustang while I called SOAP.
SOAP was the government’s answer to the supernatural community on Earth. While plenty of supernatural beings chose to live peacefully with humans, like Baba Yaga and Odin, there were a good number who chose to work for the darkness instead of the light.
SOAP stood for Supernatural Observation And Policing. They offered bounties to hunters like me on the criminal element of the supernatural.
My friend Agent Bentall from SOAP was high up in the agency now, and he was one of the good ones. He answered on the first ring. “Jonny, you know what time it is?”
“I do, sorry about that,” I told him. “I caught that vampire who’s been knocking over blood banks. He’s in the alley behind the blood donation center on Olympic. You know the one?”
“I know the one. We’ll get it handled,” Agent Bentall said with that same pause in his voice Baba Yaga had. “Jonny, there’s—we’ve gotten word on a series of rather strange killings in your area. Tell your team to keep their heads on a swivel. Be careful out there.”
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