Judson was dealt a crap hand from the moment he was born. His mother was only three days shy of sixteen, bright-eyed, and completely out of her depth. She was poor, pretty, and much too selfish to raise a child on her own. So she dumped the newborn Judson on her elderly grandmother’s stoop, ran off with a man she barely knew, and wound up dead in a ditch not two years later. Judson never mourned the loss of his mother. The way he figured it, he was better off without her. His gran was a kind woman, who smelt almost exclusively of peppermint. She did her best to raise Judson – clothing him, keeping his belly full, and making sure he went to school.
Everything changed when he was ten, however. His gran didn’t show up to pick him up from school. After a while of waiting, plopped down on the curb, he decided to walk home on his own. It took a while, but by the time he rounded the corner to his street, the sun had started to dip below the horizon. As he unlocked the door and stepped through the threshold, he knew immediately that something was wrong. It was eerily quiet; whereas his gran usually played soft jazz music, humming to the rhythm of it as she cooked him dinner.
Three steps later he would discover the reason for the silence.
His gran was dead, skin pale, her throat ripped out. It was a gruesome sight for a ten-year-old to behold. He let out a gasp, intent on rushing to his gran’s side, eyes wet with tears when he saw it... something moving in the corner. A man emerged, dressed impeccably, though blood adorned his suit in spades. What Judson remembered most were his eyes: they were crimson, like blood. He laughed softly, told Judson not to be afraid and that he, too, would have the honor of preserving his life.
Scared, Judson turned to run. He didn’t get very far, caught by the scary man covered in blood. He thought himself dead. But then, the shouting started, three men appearing out of nowhere. They wounded the creature, drove it off, and wrapped Judson securely in a blanket. He would later come to know them as hunters, a family of humans trained to take down the supernatural, like the creature who killed his gran.
They asked him if he had anywhere to go, to which Judson didn’t. The oldest, a giant of a man named Axel, took him on as his own son. He was a hardass, pushing Judson harder than any of his adopted brothers. After all, the Ashford name wasn’t something simply given; it was earned. By the time he was fifteen, he was proficient in most types of weaponry, as well as knowledgeable in the various ways each and every type of supernatural creature could be killed.
Living with the Ashfords, becoming one of them, ignited an anger in him -- and a hatred -- for anything that wasn’t human.
On the side, his family dealt in drugs, a way to get quick cash to fund their way of life. At eighteen, that landed Judson with a hefty ten-year prison sentence. No longer useful to his adoptive family, they abandoned him, and left him to rot in his 10x10 cell. He was twenty-six by the time he got out, two years early for good behavior.
He didn’t bother returning to his family. As far as he was concerned, he no longer had one. No, life found him traveling from place to place, using his skills as a mechanic to get by. However, there was something missing from his life -- the supernatural. He saw them where other humans were ignorant; watched them stalk and maim his own kind.
His hatred of them slowly burned back to life. Which is how he ended up in Fallhaven, a city renowned for it’s supernatural filth. Judson has no affiliation; doesn’t give a shit about other hunters. All he gives a damn about is protecting other humans, the ones dumb enough to trifle with that they don’t understand.
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