“They don’t. Before joining CEB, I was a human bounty hunter. And yes, right to my door. With a bow on the fuc—mm.” Severo made a nose as he cut off the swear word.
“He had a bow?” Seri's lips trembled, but he managed to hold the laugh back.
“They’d put a bow on his head and wrapped a banner around him that said ‘Congrats, baby boy, on your first job’. There was…something else about being proud of me. I don’t remember all the things it said. It was a long banner.”
He burst into giggles. Skya started to giggle too, even if she didn’t understand what was funny.
Severo groaned before chuckling. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. It’s hilarious looking back on it now, but horrifying just the same.”
“With your powers, I can’t imagine that job would be too difficult,” he drawled.
“Yeah, it was easy to build up money, but it got boring quickly.”
No doubt… All Severo would need to do is track them down and get close enough, then he’d have the person he was hunting without a fight. He frowned, thinking over what he knew now about what Severo could do. “Why didn’t you disguise yourself?”
“What?” the Dweller asked.
“To capture me…why didn’t you ever disguise yourself? You’d be able to handcuff me, without me ever being any wiser. I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was you. Why didn’t you use your powers on me at all?”
Severo sighed and took a seat next to him on the couch. “I suppose I could have, and should have…but I didn’t want to. I was already iffy about what I was doing…I felt bad about it. Heck, that was before I knew the full extent of what you were dealing with…the whole sciophobia thing.”
“Looked it up, didn’t you?”
“A little.”
“I’d say nyctophobia would be more accurate. Considering my issue is extreme fear of darkness.”
“I read up on that one too… I just couldn’t get past the irrational part mentioned in that definition… You have a good reason to be afraid of the shadows, and not a bit of it is irrational.”
He wasn’t so sure about that. In his mind, there were plenty parts of it that were entirely irrational…
Seri shrugged. “It is what it is… So did you have to go to school to bounty hunt?” he asked in response, instead of saying any of what he thought. As he didn’t really want to talk about it.
“There’s training and all that, but not much. I did have to get an actual degree to become a CEB field agent.”
“Did you?”
“Mmm...multiple…and then some. The Grimms are big on learning and adding on to our education.”
“Not necessarily a bad thing.”
“I suppose… You were going to college before all this, right?”
“Yes. I was working towards my PhD in Biochemical Engineering.”
Severo whistled. “PhD? So you are brainy, right? Like super smart and all that?”
Seri snorted. “That’s one way to put it.”
“What was your dissertation going to be on?”
“I was in a grant study focused on the advancement of Cryptid medicine. Though I was less on the treating side, and more on researching and trying to develop better ways to temporarily limit Cryptid abilities without causing physical harm. The current methods we use are often torturous for the individuals we used them on.”
“Yeah, they are pretty horrible. What Cryptid were you studying? Or was it multiple?”
Seri let out a bitter laugh. “Believe it or not…Shadow Dwellers.”
“Ah…”
