Episode 8: The Hunter's Past
736 Words
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Hunter's Past
The note came at dusk.
Lila found it slipped beneath her door—a folded piece of paper, the ink dark and hurried. She opened it with hands that did not shake.
Meet me at the heath. There's something you need to know. Come alone.
It was not Elias's handwriting.
---
She walked the path to the oak tree slowly, her senses stretched. The fog had returned, thick and grey, muffling the sounds of the city. She could not see more than a few feet.
At the oak tree, she stopped.
Finnegan O'Connor stood beneath the branches, his broad shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his coat pockets. He looked older than she remembered.
"You came," he said.
"You asked."
He did not look at her. "I should have let you drown. In Brighton. I should have let you go."
She said nothing.
"I told myself it was mercy. That if I brought you back, he would be worse." He laughed, low and bitter. "But I was saving myself. I was too afraid to face him."
"Finnegan."
He turned to look at her. "He's going to find you. He knows about the hunter. He knows about the girl. He knows everything."
She stepped closer. "Then help me."
---
He stared at her. For a long moment, he did not speak.
"I can't. If he finds out—"
"He won't. Not if you're careful."
"You don't understand. There's no secret I can keep that he won't find."
She looked at his face. At the fear in his eyes. The same fear she had carried for a hundred years.
"Where does he go?" she asked. "When he's not at the house. Where does he hide?"
Finnegan's face went very still.
"Why?"
"Because if I'm going to stop him, I need to know where he's weakest."
He was silent for a long time. The fog moved around them.
"There's a place," he said finally. "An old church. St. Dunstan's. In the East End. He keeps it dark. He says it reminds him of home."
"St. Dunstan's."
"He goes there when he wants to be alone. There's something there. Something he's been keeping for three hundred years. I don't know what it is. But he guards it like it's the only thing that matters."
She met his eyes. "Why are you telling me this?"
He looked at her. In his face, she saw something she had never seen before. Regret. Or forgiveness.
"Because you did what I couldn't. You ran. You fought. You became something more than what he made." He paused. "And because I've been waiting a hundred years to be free."
---
She walked back to Church Row alone, the name repeating in her mind.
St. Dunstan's.
She did not know what she would find there. But she would find it. She would end this.
At her door, she stopped.
Elias was waiting for her. He stood in the shadow of the doorway, his coat dark against the stone.
"Where were you?" he asked.
She unlocked the door. "Come inside. There's something I need to tell you."
---
They sat in the dark of her flat, the fog pressing against the windows.
She told him everything. Finnegan's visit. St. Dunstan's. The thing that Cassius had been guarding for three hundred years.
When she finished, Elias was quiet for a long time.
"You trust him?" he asked. "Finnegan?"
She considered. "He let me fall into the sea. He could have caught me. He chose not to."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
Elias leaned back. "St. Dunstan's is abandoned. Has been for years."
"Then no one's been looking."
He nodded slowly. "When?"
"The night after tomorrow. Cassius will be recovering from the full moon. He'll be weaker. Alone."
"And if Finnegan is lying? If this is a trap?"
She met his eyes. "Then I'll face it."
He reached across and took her hand. "Then I'll be with you. Whatever's in that church, we face it together."
She looked at their hands. A hunter's hand, trained to kill her kind. Holding hers like she was something precious.
"Together," she said.
---
Outside, the fog thickened. The city slept. And somewhere in the East End, in the ruins of an old church, something waited in the dark.
Something that had been waiting for a very long time.
END OF CHAPTER EIGHT
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