Legends and myths all have some base in truth and fact. For centuries now, they have been separated by lines of truth and fiction. It is now, when the two realms become twined and indistinguishable that many a brave man can’t sleep well at night.

I hunt these ambiguities.

It all began the day I was born. I didn’t know then; couldn’t have known. Neither did my parents know, and nor do they still. I intend to keep it that way.

Every few generations the genes for a hunter come together, by fate or destiny or random chance. Most of the time now, those few are discovered at a young age and trained by the believers of humanity's fictions to be all they can be.

I am a mistake.

My parents’ parents’ parents’ and so on can each be traced back to belonging to a specific pagan group that became the current trainers of the various hunters and huntresses that have cropped up over the years. It is entirely improbable that two people with such backgrounds that neither knew about would come together and have a child who would receive the necessary genes to become a hunter.

Well, huntress.

But it did happen. And I am discovering the greatest secret that we have always kept.

We don’t need training to follow our destiny.

	*		*		*		*		*		*

I am nineteen standard years old. I go to a university not awfully far from where I grew up and have a steady boyfriend whom I’ve been with for about 8 months. Up until I was twelve my life was comparatively normal, granted I was a tomboy with a wild streak and was the most intelligent kid in school. I could analyze and interpret the methods and reasoning of my teachers and parents and was correct many more times than I was wrong even at six years of age. By nine, I was outthinking them.

When I turned thirteen I first began to feel the lust.

It was faint though; only a stirring now and again. I knew there was evil in the world -could feel it- but I did not know my fate would tie me to it just yet.

I resisted the urges until I was fourteen. The first time I hunted I still don’t remember, and probably never will. But the second time I remember more. And then again, and again, until I could no longer tell myself it was all in my mind.

I began researching many of the myths you are probably acquainted with. It was my hope to become familiar with them so that I might puzzle out what I was…am...will always be. But my truth was not so simple.

No doubt you have heard of vampires, werewolves, witches and warlocks, demons and fairies. No doubt you have been told they are no more than myth, no more than stories, nothing that was true or could cause you harm.

I’m letting you know right now, in case you haven't already figured this out, that the people who told you these things were lying.

Several times through my fourteenth year I had woken up with blood on my body, and no discernable cuts it might have come from. The blood was not my own. So my first assumption was that I might be a vampire or some other kind of blood-drinker. But I was no vampire, not even a vampire hatchling, because sunlight did not cause me even mild discomfort.

I did notice I was able to see much better by moonlight than in the rays of the sun.

Next, I fancied myself as a werewolf, it being the next most popular true fiction of our time. But not all of the incidents of groggy memories and dried blood occurred on nights of a full moon.

And so on and so on, until I went through the rest of my accumulated lists. I found nothing that struck me as being my answer, and only things that I knew were not me.

It finally happened one time that I was fully conscious when I changed form.

I was fifteen. I had been feeling a blood lust of sorts for almost a year and had been waking up more times than I care to remember with blood on my hands. (Actually, it was probably only a half-dozen times or so, but it seemed like more.) The night that I remember we were playing jailbreak. It was probably sometime around 11 PM on a cool night in June. I was on the “cops” side, trying to find the “robbers” and catch them to throw them in “jail.” Where I was precisely was the neighborhood park.

It was rare that people would hide in such a wide open space, but something told me someone would be there and that I had to catch them. Little did I know why.

After I had entered the park, I sat quietly by the picnic tables since they were the best vantage point for the rest of the area. A few minutes had gone by without incident when, out of the edge of my peripheral vision I saw a shadow flit by. Quietly, I turned towards it, seeking out the hiding place my robber had dodged into. But I saw nothing.

Or did I?

My eyes narrowed as I considered the gaps between the branches of the pine trees that lined the edge of the fence. I didn’t move, refused to, knowing instinctively that to move would be a forfeit of the encounter. If I noticed that it seemed to be getting brighter the longer I stared, it was with a part of my mind that had already shifted conscious.

The robber was inhumanly still. By the time I could pick out his outline, I knew there was no way he was anyone of the friends that had come for the game. My first rational thoughts were that it was a random person who did not belong in the neighborhood, perhaps one of the petty thieves we’d been hearing reports of. But that seemed odd, since the burglaries had been reported to have taken place between 2 and 4 AM. So I waited. Only in the back of my mind did I realize that I was being just as still as my "robber" and that it should be considered just as odd.

As more time went by, the hairs on the back of my neck began standing up. Something felt wrong, and it wasn’t a pleasant sensation. I began to wonder if I had been imagining my adversary, and also to think it was odd that no one else had come into the park looking for me. Enough time had gone by that a few robbers had no doubt been caught or escaped and found new hiding places. Someone else should have come looking.

Most likely they had sensed the evil and simply stayed away. Humans do have an uncanny knack for self preservation.

Finally though, my patience paid off. The being between the branches moved, and at first I was relieved. I wasn’t crazy at all. But then I realized that its movement was far from a comfort.

I watched as it silently jumped up and over the trees and came at me with more speed than I thought even a cheetah could muster.

A hand snaked out too fast for me to see and grasped my throat, dragging me out from my shelter. I looked up into glowing eyes and knew without a doubt that this being was evil. And it meant to kill me.

“You…” Its voice was raspy, and I found myself surprised it could speak at all. Darkness (or maybe it was fur) covered its whole body. Its limbs were long but its torso short and I would swear it had two horns protruding from its angled forehead. The grip around my throat betrayed a strength that the creature should not have had. It was unnatural.

And it knew me.

“You have the smell of the Hunt on you.” He raised me higher into the air and brought me close to his face. The creature inhaled deeply. “But you are no Master.”

“I am my own Master.” The thought popped into my mind and was out of my mouth before I could even process what I was saying.

I dropped to the ground in a heap. Apparently my speech had startled the creature, which was something out of legend but so real it could not be an apparition.

“How is it you speak? Hatchlings cannot speak. You can’t speak.”

“What is a hatchling?”

The creature retreated a step. “One who has been claimed by a Master. All my hatchlings are dead. The Hunter killed them.” It dropped to the ground to sniff at me again. “Not a Master, not a Hatchling, has the smell of the Hunt…”

It words were confusing, but I thought I might know the conclusion to them. It seemed so clear. So I was not surprised when it said, “You are the Hunter.”

Before another word could be spoken, one of its arms shot outwards and raked my torso with its claws. The cuts were deep, and hurt more than I thought anything could ever hurt. But the pain brought clarity, brought my human instincts to the fore; my will to live. I felt the change.

First I felt the speed. I rolled up and over my shoulder, landing with precision on the balls of my feet. Before the creature had a chance to react, I was diving towards him in the air, no longer helpless on the ground.

Second was the strength. My hands –I looked down, they were more like claws— shot towards the creature and gripped his arms below his shoulders. I spun him around and wrapped him in an embrace that he could not break. “No!” Was that me or him?

My other conscious was the third change. I knew what he was, this demon. I knew that I had hunted his hatchlings for the past few months. Killed them, so that their family could not grow. This was the Master. He was mine.

His fur began to glow, or perhaps it was just his inner light. My lips locked onto its neck, but my teeth did not enter his body. I was no vampire. I was Huntress. And as a Huntress, I would eat what gave him his power.

I would consume his soul.

It was over quickly. He was a weak Master, and did not have much strength in him after the months of avoiding me. Yes, it was me that had been hunting him, I could remember that now. And here he just gave himself to me, thinking that I was a silly human girl he could corrupt and barter in his transactions with the Dark. The last of the glow disappeared now; I had stolen all his currency. Souls, after all, are the only money Evil ever wants.

What became of the creature, I do not know. After I consume their souls, the evil are free to do what they please, though they are no longer able to create more of their kind. They still owe favors to their Masters, however. And most of these can never be repaid after I take the one thing they owned that had value.

When they die, truly die, their Master must take such sweet vengeance on them. I have always hoped so, because I know one day I will join them. But that is another story.

Silently, I left the park. My hearing was excellent, my sight near perfect. Smells wrapped around me and carried tales of where I might find other beings of evil. But no demons. If I wished to hunt more that night, humans would have been my prey. Corrupt humans. The fact that I remembered their flavor disturbed me. I had eaten human souls before. This was something I would have to consider. Are corrupt humans truly evil?

Questions for another day. I became more focused on trying out my new powers from the latest soul I had absorbed. My speed seemed the same, so did my other senses… What was it that demon had been good at?

The image of him leaping over the trees popped into my mind. I smiled, gathered my feet beneath me, and jumped.

I landed on the roof of a single story house across the road.

This was good. A good ability. Worth the near death to get it. I glanced down at my cuts, glad to see they had closed and were no longer bleeding freely. The creature must have had a good healing power. Another useful trait. A good night.

Something moved down the street. My focus shifted, my mind trying to determine what might be milling about at 11:40 at night. Then I remembered. A game. My friends. They would be looking for me.

Lightly, I dropped to the ground. Thinking of my friends made it easy to focus on changing back into my human form. Luckily, my Huntress body was no larger, and my clothes were not shredded.

Actually, they were. I glanced down and squinted. Already I missed my better sight. But that wasn’t the problem now. I had to figure out what to do about my slashed and blood stained t-shirt. Couldn’t let the others see me like this.

Fortunately, I did not need to be in my other form to sneak by the various cops and robbers that littered the street. I was in my house, changed, and back outside before another five minutes had passed.

“Guys?”

A hand reached out from a shadow near the door as a voice yelled, “1-2-3-you’re-my-man-no-breaksies!”

I’d forgotten that based on the time that had gone by, my team would most likely now be the robbers. My chest heaved in a sigh. “You got me, you got me. Doesn’t someone want to come and save me?!” The last was ended in a shout to the rest of my team, but I knew that in this game there were few who liked to take risks to get their friends out of jail. Only the cops could work together. Not the robbers.

It was ironic then, that as a Huntress I was the only cop, to the unity of all the robbers out in the world. This was merely the beginning, but also it might be the end.