The first hunter
930 Words
POV: Zara Lay
At midnight, the shadows moved.
I was still awake sitting cross-legged on my bed, back against the wall, every light in my room on.
The feather in my hand.
My notebook open to a page I hadn't written anything on.
I'd been listening for two hours.
The house was quiet.
Mum was asleep.
My brother was asleep.
The street had gone still in the particular way streets went still after one in the morning, a distant car, wind through cables, a neighbour's dog finding something to say about nothing.
I nearly missed it.
A sound beneath the sounds.
Less a noise than a pressure,. the way the air felt before lightning.
Charged and wrong.
The world pulling a breath it hadn't let out yet.
I looked at the window.
The shadows were gone from the front wall.
I had time to register that as significant before my bedroom door opened.
Not the way a door opened when someone pushed it.
It swung inward slowly, without contact, as if the air pressure on the other side had simply changed.
The hallway beyond
I'd left the landing light on
was dark.
The light was
gone.
Something stood in the doorway.
Later, when I tried to describe it, I couldn't.
Not because the memory was unclear, but because my mind kept sliding off it the way eyes slid off certain optical illusions, refusing to resolve the image into something recognisable.
I got pieces.
Height, too much of it.
A wrongness in the proportions.
Darkness that wasn't darkness so much as the idea of darkness given shape and dimension.
It had no face.
Where a face should have been, there was only a smooth continuation of the dark.
I didn't scream.
I think it was shock.
Or some primitive part of my nervous system understanding that sound wouldn't help me here.
I pressed back against the wall.
It moved into my room.
The temperature dropped so fast my breath fogged.
My lamp flickered once and held.
The feather in my hand burned suddenly, a flash of heat against my palm, and then went completely cold.
The thing paused.
It tilted its head.
Such an ordinary gesture.
So completely wrong on something with no face.
It turned toward me the way predators turned toward prey, not hurried, not anxious.
Patient.
It knew exactly where I was.
The window behind it shattered inward.
Drakar came through it the way I imagined falling looked from the inside, controlled, no hesitation, and landed between me and the creature in one fluid movement that shouldn't have been possible on a second-floor drop.
He didn't look at me.
His attention was entirely on the thing in the doorway, and his eyes had changed.
Silver.
Fully silver, no grey, no iris, no white.
As if someone had replaced them with light.
He raised one hand.
I didn't see what came out of it.
I saw the effect, a force that hit the creature like a wall, driving it backward through the doorway with something that wasn't quite a sound, a vibration I felt in my teeth and my sternum.
The hallway flared white.
Then dark.
Then my landing light was on again, pale and ordinary, and the hallway was empty and my door hung open against the wall and the cold was already lifting from the room.
Drakar stood at the threshold.
Looking outward.
A long moment.
Then he turned to me.
His eyes were grey again.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
My voice came out steady, which surprised me.
"No."
He scanned the room anyway.
The shattered window, glass across the floor, curtain blown inward at a wrong angle.
The feather, which had rolled off the bed and lay on the carpet, dark now, the silver completely gone from it.
"What was that?" I asked.
"A Hunter."
He said it the way you named a thing you'd named many times before.
"They track disruptions in the Veil.
You were easy to find."
You were easy to find.
His voice in the corridor, that afternoon.
Stay in crowded places.
Stay in the light.
"It came through my door," I said.
"My locked front door."
"They don't use doors."
"It used my door."
"It used the shape of your door,"
he said, and didn't elaborate.
He crossed to the window and looked out.
I watched him, the set of his shoulders, the unhurried scan of the street.
He wasn't breathing hard.
He'd come through a second-floor window at speed and fought something I still couldn't look at directly in my memory, and he wasn't breathing hard.
"There will be more," he said.
"Of those things?"
"Of everything."
He turned from the window.
"You shouldn't be alone."
"You could have mentioned that this morning."
Nothing.
Just the faintest shift in his expression, something that might have been an acknowledgement, pressed back before it could arrive.
I pushed myself off the wall and stood.
That was when I saw it.
My left wrist.
A line of marks running from my pulse point toward my inner elbow, not scratched, not bruised, but glowing, faintly and steadily gold-white, like letters in an alphabet I'd never seen written in light just beneath my skin.
I held my arm out and stared at it.
"Drakar."
He was beside me in two steps, faster than I registered him moving.
He took my wrist carefully and turned it toward the lamplight.
The expression that crossed his face then was the first one I'd seen on him that he hadn't controlled.
For just a moment, he looked afraid.
- Writer
