the illusion fades as soon as he’s sure nothing else wants to follow the first thing out of the car. seemed like one and one only. a solo creeper. something grim and… no longer human. and he honestly tries not to let his mind drift to who they might have been, how long they might have existed in that terrible wretched state. wonders if there was any sentience - cognisance left in a brain ( now spread in chunky lumps and thin smears across the cracked asphalt ) which was housed in nothing but animalistic feral instinct… or if there was simply nothing left of that person at all. he really hopes it’s the latter.
he’s leaning far back against the cool metal of the car. away from the open door bullets and the splatter. though there still is a lump or two rather close to the toe of his sneaker. though with visibility restored, he rather hopes that’s the end of it. ( well, not ‘the end’ - he does imagine that this will go on for some time, but at least in the immediate - maybe it’s over…. )
granted - ‘ew’ - isn’t exactly his usual over verbose, nor eloquent self. but it seems apt.
“i wonder what ‘truth’ that was rooted in.”
it’s a half mumbled question to himself. alligators in sewers aside ( and in this instance, maybe preferable - at least they were just creatures. big jawed, snapping creatures, but they still fell into the realm of ‘normality’ in what had come before ) … what fable or fairytale, what grimm story might have been spun out of the existence of such a sorry, tormented thing.
reality manages to settle in his brain rather sharply, ears still ringing slightly from the gunshots ( or maybe that was just the rattle of his own heartbeat thundering there with a juicy little adrenalin boost ), but he’s shuffling around the now corpse, little crablike sidesteps until he’s next to zoe once more - the crowbar-slash-magic wand ( fuck potter and his hornbeam unicorn hair bullshit - crowbars were better any damn day ) dangling from his fingers.
it hadn’t touched either of them. hadn’t attacked them. had rather just fallen there, the sorry thing, probably starving, slow… however, it wasn’t just about cuts or bruises. there were so many things that could make someone ‘not-okay’ that had nothing to do with physical harm. and as it is, the sight is a gory one, nasty. flies already buzzing around the warm exposed ‘meat’. one he still hasn’t gotten used to. for all of the hundreds of bodies he’s passed since the world wobbled of it’s axis of ‘normal’, there’s something so irrevocably striking about - the dead - that tends to leave more of a jarring impression. he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it. and he thinks that maybe anyone who says they are used to it - is probably a liar. so that question, that note of concern is for her. the zoe behind the gun.
‘Most people just weren’t in a position to recognize them for what they are until it’s right in front of them’
she’d just said that, and maybe this is just a rather poignant example of it. no, they wouldn’t recognise it. wouldn’t know that there was evil in their midst. because, for the most part – it looked just like them. it walked like them, talked like them, moved like them. even these things - left behind, the twisted remnants of an attack jae had been remarkably lucky to not succumb to - had been… just like them. even when it is right in front of them… it still… pretty much… is them. they were just, the unlucky ones. sure, sure… he’s dismissing the fangy vamps and the slenderman-piranha hybrids and the actual hell risen demons in this line of thinking. but most of the rest - they had been people at one point… maybe even the nastier things had been too - he’s not super hot on monster origin stories.
he doesn’t mention the gun. doesn’t compute that ‘sans zoe’ he might have been making more of an effort to club the thing over the head with his little crowbar. a rather more grisly and up close meeting than he might have preferred. it still doesn’t mean he wants one.
she hadn’t hesitated. once she was sure the thing was a ‘thing’ and not a ‘someone’. he might have. taking life… any life… was still a tricky concept. if it was a them or us situation then, yes, he’s always going to be on the side of ‘us’. but still…
“guess we should get a shift on, huh?”
he’s already edging away…
“how long have you been doing… this… that… y’know the whole… hunter thing?”
to have that zero hesitation. to make those choices in a split second, where others would flounder and possibly fail for their pause.
“i mean - it’s impressive… i guess it’s still hard to wrap the grey matter around the concept that people were doing this ‘before’. that those… things… were here… have been here… for a long time.”
It drops, but not without making a mess, and there’s a distant amusement at Jae’s succinct response of ‘ew’ at the splattering of bone and brains. By now she’s used to it, toeing what’s left slightly out of the way so she can shift a little closer. Head tilting, eyes scanning the inside of the car. But there’s nothing else, and little of interest. A bag in the back seat, ripped open and clothes scattered on the inside, emptied cans, seat shredded by sharpened nails. It paints a quick and tragic picture in her head; of someone bit, someone shutting themselves inside the stuffy vehicle hoping against hope that it wasn’t a death sentence.
The truth of it settling in, leaving nothing but a monster inside the car.
She doesn’t dwell on it long, because there’s simply no point. She might be speculating, it’s still probably true for countless others, and in the end there was nothing she could do about any of it. If it was a frustrating thought, practicality had always served her better, and right now could at least prove more useful with the survivors somewhere in the building behind her.
And the one next to her. She pulls back, glancing at Jae when she hears the quiet words, thought she can’t tell if he meant her to. It’s the question that takes her off guard, frowning slightly as Zoe casts a glance down at herself. Flannel flecked with blood wasn’t a new sight, just one more thing she’d have to make time for later. That only added to the sliver of confusion, because none of this was new, she wasn’t hurt, and if there was something endearing about the concern, it wasn’t anything she needed.
“I’m fine.” A quick, crooked smile accompanies the words, like it might offer more reassurance then the words themselves. “Are you okay?”
She steps away from the car after she asks, the safety flicked back onto the gun as it gets settled back in it’s holster. Close enough to draw quickly if she needs to, but the shotgun gets settled back in her hands instead as she resumes heading towards the building across the road. Paying a little more attention to the cars they pass in case there’s anything else waiting inside. Maybe something worse.
“The vampire kind, by the way. Those legends.”
She casts a glance over her shoulder at his face, trying to gauge whether it’s something he actually wanted an answer to. Maybe not, because the answer wasn’t anything kind. “They’re what happens when a vampire bites and kills someone but doesn’t finish turning them. They end up stuck in between. Not alive, not fully dead. Just a shell. They’re bound to their maker, but when the maker moves on... they’re just hungry.”
Which is likely an obvious thing. They’d come across enough by now, and it occurs to her that he might know these things already. But he might not, and she doesn’t resent sharing what she can. “It used to be rare to find this many. Sometimes you’d get a vampire who’d get ambitious, they’d go after whole towns, but those were few and far between. Now they don’t have to be careful.”
She feels another flicker of amusement at his next question, one she doesn’t bother to hide as she returns it. “How long have you been doing the whole witch thing?”
He might’ve answered before, she can’t recall if he offered those details the first time she watched him perform illusions in front of her. But her tone is just as devoid of judgement now as it was then, her moral line on the magic front nothing that wavers that. If anything it’s because of her answer, because she’s been doing this all her life.
Magic in the end was just a tool. A dangerous one in the wrong hands, but it was hard to think of his as the wrong hands at the moment.
After all, he wasn’t trying to summon demons. Just turning people invisible.
“I was born into this. Hunter is as much who I am as what I do.”
