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Though it might’ve been a nice fucking break from the pain.

Even oxy had done nothing but dull the edges, and I reserved that for the worst of injuries. I could handle most physical discomfort with booze and Advil.

Mixing oxy with whiskey was probably not recommended, but it was the only way I could fall into a fitful sleep. Especially while Dante was probably stomping around the woods, wearing his new role as savior like a fucking bespoke suit. I’d never hear the end of it. Until one of us died. One could only hope his day would come soon.

When I woke, on the sofa in the room my parents were slain in, I felt like shit. Yet not nearly as bad as I should’ve. I shouldn’t have been able to breathe, let alone walk, after getting into a brawl with a wight. There was a reason hunters never engaged in hand-to-hand combat with monsters, a reason we traveled with a weapons armory. Because one rogue punch or kick from even the weakest of monsters could kill us.

They were physically stronger than us, always. All we had were brains and firepower.

And yet here I was. Feeling sore but able to get in the shower, inspect the mottling purple and black bruising on my chest. The same for my eye, the broken capillaries making it look particularly gnarly. I looked like a bit of a demon myself. And I didn’t hate it.

Though I was happy to be alive, I was confused as to how I was alive. Maybe the wight was sick. Dying. Starving. It was weakened with a silver bullet. I mused over this in my journal, making a whole new page for a forest wight—apparently now found in North America.

I was not a journal person, but it was a necessity of the job— collecting knowledge from other hunters and from time in the field. What monsters were, where they came from, what weakened them, and most importantly … what killed them.

My journal was not full of dribble about what I was grateful for or whatever the fuck millennials in my generation wrote about their vapid lives.

It was an instruction manual. The only thing that had kept me alive when I first started hunting. Given to me by Felix, my mentor—though he backhanded me for calling him that.

Tough love and abuse were definitely twins in that dynamic. I had been yearning for a male figure, for a man to save me—I was young and scared and fucking indoctrinated by small-town America. He set me straight. Thankfully. Trained me. Didn’t save me. Helped me outfit myself and learn the basics before letting me go it alone.

I heard he died three years ago. I drank a bottle of Jack in his honor.

Then I moved on.

Hunters die. Not getting attached was a motto to live by.

Which only made Dante’s concern from last night more perplexing. He was old-school, grew up in the game. He’d lost most of his family, from what I heard. Was friendly with everyone but not noble; he never risked himself to save another. Never got too close, excluding sex, since he fucked everything that moved.

I decided to simply push his expression, his concern, and the strange, finger-shaped bruises on my hips to the back of my mind.

Denial… my most effective coping mechanism. Thus far, anyway.

I thought of only practical things as I dressed, chewing more oxy as I trudged to my car, driving through town half expecting a ghoul to break through my windshield.

Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how you viewed it—none did. I made it to my destination unscathed.

Wincing as I got out of my car, I clutched the door to hoist myself up, my face hidden by large black sunglasses, my chest covered by a black turtleneck. Thankfully, the weather had dipped lower. Otherwise, I would’ve been sweating my tits off. I needed to cover as much of my injuries as possible. I was already the talk of the town; I didn’t need to add fuel to the fire.

Coffee was my first port of call. There was some fancy espresso machine at the house, but I had no fucking clue how to use that. I knew how to fill a coffee pot and turn on a microwave—that was about as much as I cooked these days.

My mother would’ve hated that. She loved cooking. We had done it together. Earlier, when I was young, spilling flour all over the counter as I tried to tip it into bowls. As I got older, she taught me more refined techniques. We made pasta from scratch, baked chocolate cake every birthday. The memories stung more than they should’ve, given the buffer of time. Then again, I’d consciously only thought about my parents in the manner of their death and the vengeance I would wreak, not taking trips down memory lane.

Again, I was literally parking on fucking Memory Lane. Reading in this fucking town felt like a fever dream.

“Oh my god, the rumors are true! Hadley Harris!” a high-pitched voice exclaimed as I got out of my car.

“Strike me down now.” I gazed upward, though there was nothing there. I had seen enough of this world to know that monsters might not have been fiction, but God certainly fucking was.

I pretended I didn’t hear the voice that I suspected I knew the owner of, since it hadn’t changed since high school.

“Hadley!” She sounded more urgent now and closer as I attempted to cross the street.

I smelled her perfume—cloying, floral, probably expensive but sickening. I took a calming breath which only served to agonize my injured ribs and forced me to taste the repugnant fragrance.

“Sarah.” I turned, having no other option but to greet her.

Sarah Ashley, my old best friend from high school. Best friend in the sense that we pretended we loved each other—maybe even told ourselves that—constantly bitched behind the backs of others, were always in competition with one another, and actually hated the other’s guts.