The rain was coming down hard tonight. But she was determined. Clutching her umbrella the young woman walked the alleys, her pace quick, not willing to waste even a second. She was so close; she had never been this close before. Just up ahead, and she prayed that the information she had worked so hard for was true. She prayed that he would be there tonight. The hunter who could help her get her revenge. She emerged from the darkness to a street lit up by the neon sign of a popular fast food chain, a safe haven in the night. She was here. Trying to look confident, she crossed the road and opened the door to Spooky Burger.
Sharla’s eyes snapped open and instantly she was upright and alert, her hand squeezing her revolver. She surveyed her bedroom, making sure nothing was amiss.
No, just the rain pounding against her window.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes, trying to shake the dream from her thoughts. It must have been the rain that reminded her of that day.
She threw on a pair of shorts and a torn up tank top and checked the clock. Just after 3am. Wondering if Cam was back by now, she wandered into the living room where she usually found him sleeping on the old couch and felt a pang of disappointment when she saw it empty. Come to think of it, since the incident at the park a week ago, Cam had been acting differently, leaving the apartment alone and refusing her requests to join him, and not returning until well after the sun had risen. That was also when the rain started, and it hadn’t let up since.
She grabbed her pack of cigarettes from the coffee table, opened the window just a touch, and set her pistol on the table, before sitting down and lighting one.
In the year that she and Cam had been together, she had been his apt pupil, his apprentice. He had taught her so much about the world they lived in now, the world she had been living in alone for months before she found him. She had seen walking corpses, she had seen ghosts, she had even seen real live vampires, and last week she saw a pack of werewolves.
What she had never seen was Cam scared. And that bothered her.
The Inquisitor had gotten to him. He had said it was an entity whose sole purpose was hunting only the most terrible of monsters, things, he said, that even other monsters fear. Things that the heavens themselves wanted to be rid of. Cam had said he had believed them to be legends, but finding out they were real was something he seemed to be having difficulty with. More so was the knowledge that if the Inquisitor was here, it must be hunting something. And that something would put anything they had faced so far to shame.
She took a deep breath and focused on her smoke for the time being. She wanted nothing more than to help Cam; after all he had done so much for her, and had asked for nothing in return. But until he was back to acting semi normal, she really didn’t know the first thing to do.
She hated it; it made her feel powerless, just like back then.
The apartment door opening jostled her from her thoughts, and even as her hand went to her gun, she knew it was him.
Cam gave her a brief smile before shedding the majority of his drenched clothing. He pulled a beer out of the fridge and sat beside her.
“I have good news, and bad news,” he said in between drinks.
“Okay.”
“The good news is I figured out what’s going on.”
“And the bad news?”
He sighed deeply.
“The bad news...is that she’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“The one the Inquisitor is hunting. The Girl With the Dead Eyes.”
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