1
HECTOR
Isat myself on the edge of a stranger’s bed, counting down the minutes until I had to kill him.
Hunched over, I clutched the glass of stale water I’d poured into a dirty cup from the tap in his bathroom. I knew I was hesitating. Deep down I couldn’t dispute that I should’ve killed him hours ago, but regardless of if he was my enemy or not, I needed something from him before blood was spilled.
Until I got it, the air would remain in his lungs.
The well-known saying was ‘you should get under someone to get over someone else’. I smelled bullshit. I didn’t know who came up with that saying but fuck them. Tonight, I’d taken that advice, and now I was riddled with guilt and wanted nothing more than to burn my skin beneath the rush of boiling water.
It had been almost two months since Arwyn Morgan—actually ArwynHopkin—broke my heart. No, he didn’t just break my heart, that made it sound simple. He softened it first. Then Arwyn forced his way into it like a worm through an apple, until he burrowed so deep it slowly began to fracture. With one fell swoop, Arwyn’s final act as all the secrets he’d held from me spilled free, he caused my heart to shatter into a millionfractured shards with sharp edges. Now, every time I thought about him, those shards caused me pain.
I’d tried drinking until my memories were numb, but that didn’t work. To Romy’s displeasure, I even tried smoking weed but to no avail. Getting fucked by a stranger was my last resort. Every time I tried to rid myself of Arwyn’s haunting presence, the memory of him only shuddered the shards of my heart and caused me more agony.
In the weeks since the Witch Trials ended, the pain had mutated to something else. It had morphed and warped into a desperate fury.
Unfortunately for the man I just fucked, he was going to face the full wrath of it.
The room illuminated in flashing blue and red lights as the wail of a police siren sped past the dingy block of flats in East London. I half expected the man to wake up behind me, to groan and wonder why I wasn’t next to him or beckon me back for round two. To my relief, he stayed fast asleep. The sleeping spell I’d set upon him was working wonders and in theory, should only let up when I commanded it. Which would be mere seconds before his death finally greeted him.
I pushed off the bed, floorboards creaking underfoot. In nothing but yesterday’s boxers, I scrambled for the litter of my clothes that were scattered across the floor between the bed and the front door to his flat. Once dressed I got a nauseating rush of sickness at the scent of stale beer, dried vodka and what could only be a patch of burger sauce dried to my skinny black jeans. All signs that pointed to a good night, except in my case these were all signs that I played my part well, so well in fact that I deserved an Oscar.
Hector Briar wins Best Actor Award for portraying a desperately horny drunk twink in a club, seducing his enemy to get close enough to stick a knife in his back.
Myhuntstarted in one of London’s underground rave joints, the elusive kind of rave where you got texted about the location. Restricted and seedy—two of my favourite descriptive words in relation to a club. Personally, the rave wasn’t my cup of tea, but when intel pointed to a group of Witch Hunters attending the same rave for ‘casual drinks’ I knew I had to go. You see, I was anythingbuthalf-arsed. I would give the cause my full and undivided attention.
What cause, Hector?
Locating the now demon-possessed ex-lover Arwyn Hopkin and destroying him before he used Bahmet to alter the world as we knew it.
So, I’d hung out at the bar until one of the rats stumbled into my trap. I’d been hunting and killing my enemies longer than I even knew of Arwyn’s existence. It had been my bread and butter for years leading up to the Coven locating me and re-starting the Witch Trials, thus putting the world on a path of destruction for witch-kind.
I’d had my practice, you could say. And practice makes perfect after all.
I had no intention of ending up back in a Witch Hunter’s flat, body shivering from the after-sex and my breath tasting stale in my mouth. But alas, I didn’t get what I wanted from hanging out with them at the rave. Besides their mumblings of ‘work being exhausting’ and ‘promises of promotions’, any mundane person wouldn’t have thought much into the comments. For all people knew these Hunters were just a bunch of well-to-do dentists enjoying a night off.
Whereas I knewwhatthey really were—monsters. Because when you’ve spent so long looking in the mirror and seeing the very same thing, you get used to finding evil. After all, like calls to like.
A few drinks later, most of which I poured down the back of sticky plastic booths, I got invited back here by one of them. I knew what was coming when the sordid, hungry smile passed over the Hunter’s face, and if I’m honest, I had no desire to stop it.
Two months of thinking about Arwyn. Two months of nothing but the memory of his mouth, his hands, the way his smell infiltrated me. Two months of being haunted by the physical echo of him, and I’d had enough. So, instead of getting back to this flat, extracting the information required and then destroying the Witch Hunter, I allowed him to bend me over the bed and fuck me.
I’d at least hoped the sex would’ve been worth it, but it wasn’t. No orgasm, well, none but his own as he grunted like a pig, his sweaty body plastered to my back as he clung to me, groaning nonsense in my ear. To make matters worse, he pulled out and came across my back. There wasn’t even the offer to clean me down afterwards. Once I’d put him in his deep sleep, my first act of defiance was using his expensive-looking jacket to wipe the cum from my back, before finishing off the bird-bath in his pokey bathroom.
And now I was here, not bothering to be quiet as I searched every nook and cranny for information that would aid me.
I dragged a dusty and worn backpack from under his bed, the zipper half snapped already. Without care, I began stuffing anything I thought would be helpful into it. A laptop, his smart-phone and the burner phone that I found hidden in a pair of shoes by his front door. Unless the Witch Hunter doubled his time as a drug dealer, I had a feeling it would come in handy. His wallet was my next victim. I emptied anything useful into my pockets, taking the few notes out and promising myself a coffee to-go on the way home when this was done. I plucked out his card, almost taking it too when I remembered that it wouldonly incriminate me when the humans found him dead in the morning yet discovered money had been taken out of his bank after that fact. My thumbnail clicked over the embossed lettering of his name. A name I hadn’t bothered to ask up until now. Although I read it, my brain didn’t take it in.
On his small and rather unimpressive bookshelf I found books on the occult, but nothing that would point to him being a Witch Hunter. That was until I found a personal journal tucked into his bedside table between a used condom packet, a plastic baggy of white powder and a packet of old biscuits.Fucking gross.Opening it, I saw that it was full of handwritten prayers, notes on the different types of witches and his recounts of many interactions he’d had during his time as a Witch Hunter. One of the pages was just full of lines, each one representing a life that he had taken in the name of Father Tomin, the leader of the Witch Hunters.
Seeing that name, written in black ink, turned my fury dial up to a thousand. Then I totalled the tally marks to fifty-one. Fifty-one witches were killed just by this one man—someone who wasincapableof cleaning his flat or giving a person an orgasm. So those weren’t his only crimes. I wondered how many of these tally marks represented actual practitioners of magic, and how many were just innocent victims who died in the name of a world they didn’t even know existed.
Disgusted, I flipped through the rest of the book, coming to a natural stop at a piece of card that had been slipped into the back of the book. As I pulled it out, I heard a grumble coming from the rumpled bedsheets. My eyes snapped up and over to where the Witch Hunter had leant up on elbows, sleepy eyes blinking up at me with a look of confusion.
“What are you doing?” he slurred, voice muffled from exhaustion, tongue heavy from the dregs of my fading spell. “You should be in bed.”
How predictable.
