Oblivion's Kiss

Chapter One: Unearthed

Detroit, Michigan – The Human World.

I’d been waiting for the hunter the moment he stumbled into Duke’s Bar&Dine. It was a small and shabby night café crammed with people and thickly clouded with burnt tobacco. I could have said it had the perfect, jazzy setting, but I’d be lying. The middle-aged woman crooning on the microphone sounded like a duck being choked with a telephone cord and the place was a mess. There was beer cans and salt strewn on top of my table, and there was something sticky on the floor beneath my left boot. It was there since I got here, which was approximately an hour and forty-three minutes ago. The waitress was rude, the barman way too flirty and half the pub was staring at me, which, consisted of miserable and overworked drunk men.

It wasn’t exactly my finest pick, but this place would always crawl with hunters any given day of the week. Though Fridays that were supposed to be their favorite time to scavenge the streets for their next hit, this unusually chilly, early spring Friday evening, they were scarce. I supposed the word had gotten out that I was on to them. I pulled a thick lock of long, ashen hair dangling from my right shoulder and toyed with it between my fingers. Like they wouldn’t notice me coming, I thought solemnly. Just look out for the crazy pale chick with the white hair. Truth was, I loved the color. But it was hard to slay hunters at nighttime when they can spot you from a mile away in the dark. Wearing a cap was not an option and I had no intention of coloring it, either. Regardless, I was now getting a tad worried that the last sucker that had gotten away might have spread the word and they were now laying low. 

That might explain why this was the first hunter I have spotted since yesterday. 

I dropped my arm across the small, round, white linoleum-covered table and pretended to draw a line within the scratches at the edge of the table, carefully watching the hunter from the corner of my eye.

Not a single head turned when he staggered down the aisle past my table and straight towards the bar, virtually toppling over the stool on which he tried to sit.  The hunter’s skin was waxy and grey and his dark eyes were sunken and shadowed, though he appeared bronze-skinned with copper dreadlocks tied behind his head. He was as tall as he was bony. To every other person, he was handsome but I saw through the glamour. He was anything but appealing from where I sat. There was a black pulse being emitted from his skin, proving he’d had a drink recently—a few too many if anything.

And so we are clear: He was definitely not drunk from chugging too much alcohol. 

In fact, a hunter fed on life. 

It wasn’t until he sat down and tweaked up his potent glamour that a few female faces turned with interest, and a few male counterparts glared with distaste. The suckers had the gift of being able to control their glamour in order to lure innocent, unsuspecting victims into their claws.

I broke off a chunk of the delicious buttered bacon loaf in my hand and stuck it into my mouth. My eyes never once shifted from the hunter despite my urge to close them and fully indulge in heaven. I was starving. After surviving on whatever scraps had been tossed my way, or if I was lucky to pick up a penny or two a pack of crisps, it was a relief to know that tonight I would rest with a full stomach.

This was five-star dining in its finest form. Though some might whine that the crust was too dry or the butter too greasy, I was simply grateful to eat, and I was taking my sweet time until I finished every last morsel. My conscience could bite my ass later when I was fully fed and when I turned in for the night somewhere in an alley, curled up inside whatever offered shelter—likely a beaten-up or soggy box. I could have opted for one of the many abandoned buildings here on the urban-decaying side of Detroit but the truth was none of them was really abandoned. Members of gangs and cults were among those occupying the supposedly vacant spaces, but the worst were the hunters. It was inside one of those buildings, which I only had the nerve to enter during daylight, that I found the body of a hunter’s victim. I guess a good citizen would have phoned the police and reported the body before robbing the dead man’s mutilated corpse of his wallet.

It was only after I walked out of there twenty-seven dollars richer that guilt got the better of me and I reported the crime scene, which they would later file as only a robbery. No matter how many times I repeated “He’s dead”, “It’s not like he will need the money wherever he was going”, “Some druggy would have taken it anyway” and “I need to eat” to myself, I couldn’t help but feel the continuous stab of guilt in my gut. “I’m so sorry, Benjamin Todd Newberry,” I apologised repeatedly in my mind, recalling the name on the I.D. card I’d found in his wallet, which I’d had enough of a decency to leave behind for the police. “Hope you will understand…”

Lately, the police filed every case as a robbery, gang attack, cult body-sacrifice ritual or something similar, depending on the degree of the attack and the extent to which the hunter had mutilated his victim. Benjamin Todd Newberry had been one of the luckier ones. The police were assured that gangs and cults were the reason why Detroit had undergone such a dramatic population decline over the past few decades. Oh boy, were they in for a surprise. I hadn’t lived there long enough to witness the full extent of it, but I knew the real story behind it. I’d been scavenging in the Detroit streets for hunters, food and shelter for two months now. I had no intention of leaving either—not that I didn’t have anywhere to go. The thing is, I did. My family lived in the lap of luxury back in Manhattan, New York in full view of the lush gardens of Central Park. My dad, Peter, was one of the best lawyers in the country, and he owned his own law firm. My mom, Anne-Marie, was a celebrity psychiatrist. My eighteen-year-old sister, Angie, two years my junior, was on her way to the University of Performing Arts. So, no, money wasn’t a problem either. 

I was. The grief of losing my older sister had proven too much. My parents had dealt with her death the only way they knew how they could: by overworking and my mom turned to the bottle to drown her sorrows. Angie and Julia were never close, however, I could tell this was hard on Angie as well. She wasn’t as open and warm as she used to be.