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Ariel, my daughter in the flesh, so fucking beautiful she stole my breath away, faced down that atrocious fat man, Adrian, with a bravado and will of steel. It amazed me.
She was everything I had dreamed and hoped for her to be and so much more.
However, it wasn't my beautiful daughter or the obnoxiously bald man who'd belonged to the Council who held my attention. No, that went to the two young men who'd come in behind him. I'd recognize them anywhere, they looked exactly like their father had before he'd been murdered.
They were descendants of the Brothers of the Maidens. Their father had been the last of a very long line of guardians, protectors of the female race of witches. Most of them had died out or gone underground after the witch trials, and with good reason, because they'd failed miserably at their jobs. After that there were so few females that nobody bothered to join ranks with the Brothers of the Maidens and it just sort of fizzled out.
All except for one family. A family shrouded in tragedy and shame.
I couldn't believe the two living members were standing there with my daughter. It had been years since I'd seen them, but I knew they'd remember me. Just like I would never forget them.
The screams hit me first. Then the smell. Both meant something along the lines of death, carnage, and gore. I felt like I'd been here before.
I should have never picked up the phone and instead stayed home with my wife and baby girl.
Honor and loyalty were funny things, demanding I come at the desperate calls for help I'd received from a long-lost friend.
I regretted my noble actions as soon as I set foot through the door.
Hunters had come and they'd done what they did best—slaughtered.
All throughout the kitchen, which I'd walked into from the door at the back of the house, were mutilated bodies. Pieces garishly strewn across the room, clashing against the stark white cupboards and marble floor.
The smell of copper and raw meat assaulted my nose, almost enough to make me gag. There was no one left breathing in this room and, slumped on the floor against the refrigerator, I found the one who'd called me for help, the one I'd come here for.
His right arm had been severed from his body, sliced clean off. It lay in a pool of warm blood on the white marble beside him. His eyes were missing, which was typical. The hunters would take the eyes as some sort of sick trophy. All the bodies on the floor in this room would be forever sightless and not simply because they were dead.
A masculine scream of pain and horror rang out from farther in the house, demanding I follow the sound of it, almost like the call of a siren.
I left the room, leaving the body of my dead friend behind. I'd come back to it later to take care of his remains, to take care of the remains for all of them. I'd call my father in to help me with that mess, it was too big a job for one man.
As I moved through the house on silent feet the tattoos on my arms, the swirls of magic, breathed to life once again. There was a slight burning before twin, steel blades appeared in my hands. They were hand forged steel, beautifully crafted, and had been in my family for several generations, passed down from father to son. My wife couldn't have any more children so I would be breaking that tradition and one day passing them on to my beautiful daughter.
The door I came up to was partially open, I could see through the crack. A man stood with his back to me, a hood pulled up over his head. I knew from past experiences he'd have a mask on, covering his entire face, except for his eyes, from view. Head to toe, his body was covered in black. I knew from the wide set of the shoulders that it was a male I'd be facing down.
A flick of my wrist had a gentle stream of magic riding through the air, silently opening the door the rest of the way.
The sight before me had my heart lurching in my chest and my stomach dropping horribly.
The walls of the nursery were painted a pale yellow, the wallpaper that ran around the middle safari themed. I couldn't tell if it was meant for a boy or a girl, yellow seemed to be a neutral color when it came to babies.
A female, with a heavily pregnant belly, sat slumped forward in her chair, her throat slashed open, blood still raining down the front of her body.
The body of a young boy lay at her feet, part of his face and throat sliced open. His chest, thankfully, still moved, indicating he wasn't dead. Yet.
Another boy, younger than the one on the floor, let out another ear piercing scream as he launched himself at the hunter. I had missed him when I'd opened the door because he'd been crouched at the feet of the hunter.
That scream, filled with so much agony, a whole world of pain I would one day understand all on my own, would haunt me for many nights to come.
The boy never made it to the hunter because the hunter swiped out with a vicious looking blade, slicing the boy open from shoulder to elbow. The boy cried out before dropping to the ground, clutching at his arm.
I had been too slow to stop the hunter, but I was on him now. With brutal force and skill honed from many years of practice, I palmed my blades so they were angled just right before thrusting them both into the sides of the hunter’s neck. They ripped through the fabric of his mask and sunk deep into his flesh. His body jerked violently against mine as his hands went uselessly to his throat.
I pulled my blades out in one swift move and stepped back. The hunter dropped to his knees while clutching his throat and making grotesque gurgling noises from underneath his mask.
He'd be dead soon enough if I left him like that, but after seeing the carnage in this house, and I hadn't even seen the half of it yet, I wasn't willing to take any chances.
I kicked him in the back and sent him sailing forward. His arms left his throat to catch his fall before his face could slam into the carpeted floor.
