Arthur
Jones reached his arm out the window and signaled the troop carriers behind us to halt. We rolled to a silent stop. Ahead of us, mist slipped out of the trees, uncurling across the road like pale fingers.

In my deep green shadows, something toothy began to stir. A sudden shiver ran over my skin, electric, making my ears twitch and antlers tingle. Darkness blinked cat-slit eyes inside me. The world seemed to twist and shift, distorting, and the light turned odd and silvery.

No. Oh no. I know these signs.

Clamp down. Hold the line.

Readying a pistol, I opened the door of the Jeep and closed it silently behind me, gritting my teeth. In the back, Hassan started breathing too fast. I met her eyes and held them a second, until she calmed down. They went big and round, but she nodded and went still.

Fog billowed out of the woods. Something large shook the poplars as it passed them.

“A ghostland,” Jones muttered, disgusted, using hand signals to let the troops behind us know we’d found a cryptid. With silent efficiency, they began filing out of the transports, checking and readying their weapons. I scanned the trees while he and Hassan quietly got out of the Jeep and joined the rest of the troop, but some instinct knew exactly where the ghostland monster was. “Cryptid. Captain’s got a bead on it.”

I glimpsed the creature stalking between the trees towards us—bulky, solid, the rusty colors of old steel. It was huge. Incongruous purple flowers bloomed from vines trailing down its neck, their poison-sweet scent drifting on fog that seemed to diffuse from the beast’s very skin.

My green shadows rumbled again. Something silvery blurred across my vision, twisting, twining.

Hold on. Stay in the driver’s seat. Resist it.

The underbrush shuddered, and a hulking tank of a beast stepped onto the road. Similar in size and shape to a water buffalo, it had tusks as long as my forearm. Bulky muscles shifted under its heavy hide. It looked at me, looked at my troops, and a long string of drool oozed out its mouth and stretched towards the ground. It snarled and tensed, lowering its weight, and bellowed a challenge.

That thing is not an herbivore.

The green shadows inside me opened. That deep rumble became a purr that vibrated my bones, and a smilodon grin answered that challenge.

But it is prey. My prey.

No. No! Not now—I have to lead my troops!

“Shit, it’s happening agai…” I managed to choke out before the faery monster inside me surged out of its hiding place and took over. Silver vines grabbed me and pulled me down into darkness, shoving me into a backseat behind my own eyes. The world blinked, but for once, I didn’t completely lose consciousness. I just had absolutely no say or control over what my body was doing anymore. And every fae impulse and power I didn’t dare explore, the Hunter settled into, smooth as a driver slotting into a race car’s cockpit and bringing his high-performance vehicle fully online.

A sardonic thought intruded, almost my voice, yet… not.

Sucks, doesn’t it, to be trapped, forced to watch your own life like a helpless spectator?

Senses that weren’t mine coolly evaluated the monster: the heat rising from its chunky body, the tension rippling the air as it readied itself to charge. A silent pulse flowed out from me and over my troops—no, my pack, eager and joyous, an invitation.

WE HUNT.

Half a dozen soldiers stepped forward, pupils blowing out, grins as feral as mine stretching their mouths. As one, we discarded firearms and drew blades, following my lead as I unstrapped and placed my guns on the Jeep’s seat. Behind them, Birch gave clipped orders to the other troops, setting up backup lines of fire. My fingers flipped a combat knife in my hand, the movement inhumanly deft.

Cords of muscle tensed in the beast’s neck, telegraphing its charge and the direction it would take, an opening, an invitation written in flesh and momentum.

A silent, psychic shiver rippled out from me, but not me, and carrying pure intent.

My pack answered.

On my left, Jones’ bat ears swiveled forward, his breathing evening out. He passed his backup knife to Hassan as she stepped up next to him. The shivers leaving her body; the Hunt took her. Bastion stepped up behind them, and a deep growl rolled out of Roberts, my team’s wolfman, to his left. Sokolov from Birch’s team joined them, grabbing a spear out of the air as one of my men tossed it to him.

Don’t, Sokolov! I tried to scream through a mouth I couldn’t operate. Hold on to your humanity!

“I want in,” said a dark haired woman from Birch’s team who’d recently enlisted to escape an abusive home. Lopez had knives in both hands, her eyes fixed on the monster. My magic shivered against her mind. She bared her teeth, and her hungry bloodlust flooded the mental net as she joined us. My pack’s eyes, when they met mine, had pupils blown wide and dark, devoid of human fear. They didn’t see their captain. They saw their pack leader, the point hunter.

The cryptid roared, dropped its head, and charged. A living ton of horn and fury bore down on us.

Our bodies didn’t brace; they flowed, spreading out smoothly to contain and harry the beast. Only Bastion met the charge, grabbing a heavy horn, stepping sideways and dropping his weight at the last second. The creature lost its momentum in a disorienting spin, and staggered. Roberts and Lopez slashed its hind legs from the sides, claws and knives slicing for its hamstrings. Jones darted in, feinting at its eyes, leaving a long gouge on its neck. Hassan was right behind him. It fixed beady eyes on her, and she shimmered like a mirage and was simply elsewhere. A second later she was back, going for its jugular from the far side. Sokolov dove in with his spear, stabbing into a fold where the beast’s rear leg met its belly.

My pack nipped at the giant, coordinating their nuisance attacks, turning it away from the vehicles, distracting it, herding it.

It was a dance, my pack mates creating the opening I—he—needed.

There.

The Hunter flashed into speed, everything around me moving like slow motion molasses. Air whistled past my ears, and my feet hit the sloping trunk of a leaning pine tree and used the momentum to change direction and leap upwards. The move defied everything I knew of physics and my body’s limits. For a weightless, terrifying moment, I was airborne above the monster, the action a blur below me.

I landed, light and impossibly graceful, right where the beast’s shoulders met its neck. Its back heaved under me, and my left hand tangled in a matted clump of mane and flowering vines. My right stabbed the knife down, a surgeon’s precision strike. The tip found the exact seam it sought, directly between two massive cervical vertebrae, and sank home. There was a second of resistance, then a gratifying, terrible pop as the blade severed the spinal cord. Hot blood sprayed across my face. The entire attack was one smooth movement, horrifying and exquisite in its perfection.

The monster’s roar died in a wet sigh. It crashed to the dirt with thunderous finality. My body rode it down, and the bloodied Hunter rose, alive in a way I never felt. My pack dove in, stabbing to ensure the monster’s death, and dark blood seeped out into the weeds and broken asphalt. Lopez plunged her knives into the neck over and over, a raw, guttural cry tearing from her throat with each blow. It wasn’t mere violence; it was an exorcism. Her hungry bloodlust, which had flooded the net as a chaotic storm, now flowed into a single, purging river.

My pack. I take care of them, the Hunter thought. My mate sent us good prey. It would only be better if she were here hunting with me.

Pure satisfaction rumbled through my chest, the immense, alien pleasure of a perfect kill intoxicating the thing in the driver’s seat. But not me, never me. Whatever was piloting my body smirked, and pulled the knife out of the cryptid’s spine, held it up, and licked the blood flowing down the blade.

The Hunter’s gaze swept over the panting, bloodied pack. They had fought well. The prey was rich, its flesh steaming with potent Radiance. A final pulse went out, softer than the hunt-call, just as irresistible. 

Feed. Claim your strength. Make its power ours.

My body went to its knees, sliced open the monster’s chest, and dug clawed fingers into the hot cavity. They tore its heart free and raised it to my mouth. My pack dove in around me, insatiable, and wild light flared through their eyes. We lowered our heads and feasted.

NO! GOD, NO! STOP! I screamed into the void of my own mind, battering against the silver vines. You’re making them monsters! You’re turning them into things! 

I had failed, utterly. This was the final proof that I was not their protector; I was the source of the contagion. My mind collapsed under the weight of this evidence. There was no order here, only a spreading chaos that I had commanded. I squeezed my eyes shut, powerless. Pulling myself tight into a ball of nothingness, I retreated into the darkness I’d earlier evaded. Anything to hide from the overload of emotion and sensation flooding me.

“Captain. Captain! Stand down. It’s dead; finish up. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay. Put the knife down. Oh gods, don’t lick steel; you’ll burn yourself.”

Birch’s voice came to me as if echoing from miles away. I was… where was I? Down in darkness, bound, where writhing silver vines held me in place, holding me, gagging even my mouth. But also, not. Something delicious was on my lips, but iron burned my tongue. I stood up, and my body moved with clean, inhuman fluidity, lithe and elegant, explosively powerful.

“You want him back?” my voice asked, its timbre all wrong, smooth and amused. I caught a glimpse of Birch, two steps forward from our troops, jaw set, looking like he was staring down a demon. He nodded, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around, holding his ground.

Magic flickered out from me, reaching for his mind, and slid off strong mental shielding.

It wasn’t just his writing skills I valued Birch for.

“Please give us back our captain,” he repeated, extremely carefully, holding empty hands up. “The beast is dead. You’ve had your blood. The rest of us want dinner too, and we’ve gotta do biohazard removal before we can cook. Please.”

My shoulders lifted in a careless, elegant shrug, but I felt the stab of pain-the vast, frozen loneliness of the last hunter on an empty steppe.

“Oh, fine, he’s good enough at cleaning up messes,” my monster said, and suddenly the vines began flexing and tearing loose from my psyche. The world tipped as they violently expelled me, and I was yanked back into my gore-covered body. I went straight to my knees. A bloody knife dropped from my hand, skittering off the very efficiently dead beast in front of me.

Jones and a half dozen of my closest troops looked up around me, their movements still echoing a bloodied hunting pack, eyes glowing with feral magic. Purple vines trailed from Hassan’s mouth; blood shone crimson on all their chins. They all went completely still. Jones blinked and shook his head, and the others followed him.

“Ah, not this crap again,” he said, looking at the mess on his hands and trying to flick it away.

My knees hit the broken asphalt with a crunch. The knife fell from my numb fingers and clattered across the road to rest against the monster’s bleeding flank. Victory’s coppery taste curdled into bile. I pulled myself to the edge of the road and started heaving.