Fated (4 page)

'How do you know?' she asked, trying to squeeze the phone out from under his grip.

Victor didn't budge. 'What are you going to tell them? A Scorpio demon and a Mixen just jumped you in the parking lot?
Any distinguishing features?
Yes, Officer, he was six feet tall, brown hair, red eyes, oh and by the way he has a long tail with a razor-sharp edge. The girl? Well, she was about five eleven, wearing a pink dress and had green skin. Oh and you should wear a hazard suit when approaching her because her skin's kind of poisonous.'

Evie's hand dropped off the phone.

'A Scorpio demon . . . ?' Evie repeated his words.

'The one with the tail - that was a Scorpio demon. They have a different spectrum of vision - they're blind in this world without the sunglasses,' Victor said. 'The girl in the pink dress - the one who burnt your arm - she's a Mixen. She has a coating of acid on her skin. That's what burnt you.'

'
Acid?
' Evie swallowed.

He nodded.

'And a tail? It
was
a tail?'

Victor nodded again. More patiently this time.

'Demons?'

Victor shrugged. 'Well, that's one word for them. Though it's more common nowadays to call them Unhumans.'

'Unhumans?'

'Yes.' Victor nodded again.

Evie bit her lip, her head trying to analyse the words, trying to decipher them. 'I need to sit down,' she finally said.

She swayed and tripped her way into the diner and around the counter, until she made it to one of the booths in the back and collapsed.

Victor came and sat opposite her. He placed a jar of bicarbonate of soda on the table in front of her and studied her for a full minute without saying a word. She ignored both him and the jar and the pain in her arm, even though she figured she now knew what being flayed alive felt like.

'OK,' she said, finally looking up and focusing on Victor, who was sitting with his elbows resting on the table. 'I'm just trying to get my head around this - could you explain it to me in simple terms? What the hell are Unhumans?'

Victor took a deep breath. 'Basically anyone who doesn't have human DNA - Mixen, Scorpio, Thirsters--'

'Thirsters?' Evie cut in.

Victor sighed loudly. 'You know them as Vampires.'

'
Vampires?
' Evie smirked. Her head hit the leather cushion of the banquette behind her. 'Are you trying to tell me that that was Edward Cullen outside? Because, you know, I thought he was supposed to be hotter than that. And a whole lot more romantic'

Victor didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. He waited until her false laugh died away and then carried on. 'They've worked hard to glamorise themselves these past few decades - to build a cult following in this world. They're really quite vain. In the Unhuman world they're called Thirsters. The boy in the Nix cap, the one who was about to drain you - he's a Thirster. His name is Joshua. There are supposedly older Thirsters, ones that have been around for centuries, who are known as the Originals. But no one has ever seen one.' He hesitated. 'Or at any rate, lived to tell about it.'

Evie stared at him blankly. 'The Unhuman world?' she asked, shaking her head slowly. 'What are you talking about? This is not some Joss Whedon television show we're both starring in.' She became aware that she was on her feet. She had somehow pushed her way out of the booth and was now in front of Victor, yelling at him. 'Listen, you have to start making some sense. Please. Tell me something I can actually understand. And while you're at it, please explain who the hell you are and what you were doing out there in the first place!'

Evie saw Victor's eyes widen and suddenly remembered she was holding his gun. She had picked it up from the shelf in the storeroom when he'd put it down to reach for that jar. She hesitated for a moment, then decided to keep it pointed at Victor's head.

'Are you one of them? C'mon, start talking!'

Victor chewed his lip, eyeing the gun with irritation, whether at himself for leaving his gun lying around or at her she didn't know or care.

'Evie, give me the gun,' he said finally. 'You don't need to point it at me. I'm not the enemy.'

She made no move to lower the gun. Instead she rolled back the safety catch and watched his eyes flicker from the end of the barrel to her face. He definitely looked annoyed with her now.

'I don't want to have rescued you from the Brotherhood only to have you shoot me by accident,' he said.

She heard the growl in her voice as she answered. 'Oh, believe me, it would not be by accident. If you don't start talking right now I'm going to show you just how excellent my aim actually is. So, for the last time, who the hell are you?'

'I'm not one of them,' he said, his accent coming through thicker, his hands darting upwards in surrender. 'I'm fully human. My name is Victor, like I told you. I'm here to protect you.' He said the last bit with what sounded like more than a shred of regret. 'I'm a Hunter.'

'What's a Hunter?' Evie asked, anger and impatience snapping in her voice.

'Put the gun down and I'll tell you.'

Evie looked at him sitting there in his suit and frothing red silk tie, with his hands raised to the ceiling, and weighed him up. He didn't
look
Unhuman. At least, he didn't look as freaky as the others had - if you discounted the clothing. And he'd saved her when she'd really needed saving. She glanced down. He didn't have a tail or fangs or look like the Incredible Hulk, either.

Slowly she lowered the gun. Victor nodded at the seat opposite and she dropped into it. Her arm banged the table as she did so and she let out a cry.

'Here, use this,' Victor said, pushing the jar containing the bicarb towards her. She frowned as he got up and crossed to the counter and filled a glass with some water. He returned to the table and poured some of the powder into the glass to make a paste. 'Come on, try it. It'll take the sting out.'

She took the glass and, wincing in anticipation, poured it over her arm. At first it seemed to be making her skin sing with pain, but then the sting evaporated, taking most of the heat with it. She scraped off the gunk and was staring at the handprint-shaped burn on her arm when Victor started speaking again, quietly and quickly, as though he was worried she might jump up and fire the gun at him now that her arm was better and she could aim with two hands.

'I'm a Hunter. Our job is to keep Unhumans out of this world. We've been doing this for a very, very long time.'

'OK,' she said, 'I'm just going along with this for the sake of conversation.' She cleared her throat. 'So you're telling me you're like, what? Some kind of border control?'

Victor leant forward. He seemed to be chewing on his response. 'If you want to think of it like that, then yes,' he said, sighing under his breath. 'We keep this world safe from . . . well, you've seen what we keep it safe from. The reason we're safe now, the reason they won't come back just yet, is because they'll know more Hunters will be on the way.'

Evie frowned at him, waiting for further explanation.

Victor shrugged. 'Safety in numbers.'

'Where do they come from?' Evie asked, her voice shaking. 'These
Unhumans
? If they don't come from this world?'

'They come from other realms. There's a gateway - in LA. It's the link between this realm and the other six realms.'

Evie nodded slowly. 'Right,' she said, while surreptitiously scanning between the tables for what looked like the fastest route out of here. 'This is such bull,' she said at last. 'None of what you're telling me makes any sense. It's not real. It can't be.'

Victor smiled then. 'This world,' he said, 'the world you grew up in, Evie, this is the one that's not real. You just need to see it from our perspective.'

She opened her mouth ready to tell him where he could stick his perspective but he cut her off.

'It exists, yes. People are born, they work, they get married, they have babies. If they're lucky they live to grow old, see the next generation grow up, and then they die. But they do all that without ever knowing what's really happening around them - in the darkness, in the shadows. In the parking lot of their local diner.'

Evie felt herself suddenly go cold. She wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself tight. Was he right? Was this all possible? Her head was screaming no, but everything else, her instinct or whatever it was, was telling her that it was the truth.

'Humans love to fight. There are always wars in the human world,' Victor continued. 'Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Second World War, the Great War, the Crimea, the Crusades. And on and on. Wars that last a week or a year or even a decade. But the war between Humans and Unhumans has been going on for over a thousand years. Without pause and without reconciliation.'

'Why? What are you all fighting about?' Her voice sounded surprisingly together, considering the rest of her was slowly collapsing inwards like a star silently extinguishing itself.

'To keep our world safe,' he said. 'The Unhumans wish to possess all seven realms. Our world, the human world, is the seventh. The only realm they haven't been able to take control of.'

He waited a beat and then continued. 'We've fought in secret all that time. It's a tiny war in terms of numbers. There are only a few of us who are Hunters in each generation - our numbers are shrinking. But the outcome of this war is far greater, far more important, than any war ever fought among humans.'

He sat back in his seat, resting his gaze level with hers.

Evie finally cleared her voice. 'OK, thanks for the alternative history lesson and the apocalyptic vision of the future, which I'm still not sure that I'm buying, but you still haven't explained why they want
me.
What did I do?'

'You didn't do anything. It's what you
might
do. One day.'

Evie looked at him, confused. 'What might I do?'

He paused, pressing his lips together. 'You're a Hunter,' he said finally, 'and their job is to wipe out all Hunters.'

Evie bit her lip. Then stood up. 'So I'm a Hunter?'

Victor looked at her. 'Yes.'

'Don't I get a say in this?' she demanded. 'I don't
want
to be a Hunter. I just want to be a waitress,' she saw his sceptical look and hastened to finish her sentence, 'for now, anyway. Then I'm going to New York to study and I'm never coming back here as long as I live. I don't want to know about the world you're telling me about and I certainly don't want a career hunting down any of the psychos who came after me tonight. I do not have a death wish.'

Victor waited until she'd finished, his expression unmoved. 'I'm sorry, Evie,' he said. He didn't sound very sorry. 'You don't get to choose. None of us do. You're a Hunter. That's just how it is.'

'You can't tell me who I am.'

Victor hesitated. His voice dropped. 'But it's who you are. Your real name is Evie Hunter. It's the name your parents gave you. Your
real
parents, that is.'

Evie's mouth dropped open. Then, finally finding her voice, she said, 'My parents? You knew my parents?'

'I knew them, yes. We placed you with Monica and Ed Tremain when you were eighteen months old. They adopted you having no idea who you were.'

It was as if her heart rocketed through the atmosphere and then came crashing back to earth in a million little pieces. She'd never thought she'd know anything about her real parents. She'd just been abandoned as far as she knew and then adopted when she was tiny. But now she had a name. But why had Victor said he
knew
them? Why had he used the past tense?

'They died when you were about a year old,' Victor said, seeing the question rise on her lips.

It took the wind out of her.

'I was about twenty, I suppose,' he carried on. 'We - the other Hunters - tried to look after you for a while, but it didn't work. You can't fight Unhumans and make play dates at the same time. We found you a safe place to grow up. A normal home, with normal parents. Somewhere we thought they wouldn't find you.'

Evie was sitting again. She didn't remember sitting. How had she made her legs move? They were dead. Nothing else had registered after that.

'How did they die?' she whispered.

Victor held her gaze. 'The Brotherhood, of course. The Brotherhood killed them.'

4

Lucas was watching Caleb's tail swish back and forth and weighing up whether he was quick enough to sneak up on him, take his damn tail and wrap it around his neck, when Grace let out an audible sigh in his direction.

'You
are
quick enough but you'll still end up over there on the ground with one hand sliced open,' she said.

Lucas stared at her carefully and considered his options. He wasn't sure he wanted to risk spilling his blood with a Thirster in the room. He was half human so his blood might not be as appealing as a full Shadow Warrior's, but he didn't want to risk it. He knew the oath they'd all sworn might not stand up under such temptation. He crossed his arms over his chest and went back to leaning against the wall, his eyes on the clock.

'So, Grace, you manage to do your psychic routine here, now, but you can't haul it out of the bag when we're sneaking up on a Hunter?'

Lucas turned his head to look in the direction of the speaker. Shula was standing in front of Grace with her hands on her hips, letting everyone know, in her usual subtle way, exactly what she was feeling.

'I got
shot
because of you.'

'Hey, what about me?' Joshua's thin voice piped up. 'I got fried - look.' He held out his arm, which looked like it had been blended on high speed, and waved it in her face.

Shula ignored him. She'd showered the coffee grinds out of her hair and her arm was bandaged, but from the way she was waving it about, it didn't seem to be troubling her too much. Mixen always did heal well, Lucas thought with a frown. It was only then that he noticed the outfit she was wearing. She'd changed out of her pink dress and into a red silk dressing gown, which had slipped down over one shoulder - deliberately, Lucas hazarded a guess. In this light her skin was a gleaming brown, not green, and her black hair hung wet and carefully dishevelled down her back.