It was broad daylight, but I roamed the city streets like a normal man. My monster rested within me, just beneath my skin, waiting to be unleashed. The concept of Myordrakien and me, the two sides of the same entity, was still hard for my mind to fully grasp. I had moments of clarity, mostly in the midst of slaughter, but when things were calm… well, calm-ish, my human mind reverted to the struggle of trying to frame my monstrous life. Now was one of those times as I walked amongst other humans, trying to seem like them.
As I walked between the normal civilians of St. Louis, trying to seem as unassuming as possible, my sensory pulse surged out of me in all directions, unseen and unheard to all but myself. I saw, with my eyes, the people that moved across sidewalks and in and out of buildings, but with the amalgamation that seemed to be the blend of all my senses into a new thing to see the world, much more was illuminated. What I saw, smelt, and heard was all highlighted and overlaid with the information gathered by the pulse that echoed out from me, reaching as far as possible before retracting back, pulling in all sorts of sensations that heightened all of my perception. I did still see what was in front of me to a superhuman degree, but in my mind… there was so much more. I could sense massive portions of the city brimming with life, love, monotony, boredom, road rage, impatience, and all other things that filled the everyday life of normal humans.
The sun sat high in the sky with no clouds in sight. The winter wonderland that had been created by the icy storms was turning into a brown, slushy mess. That was the thing about St. Louis, at least that’s what I heard other people say. People from the area always said St. Louis could be completely dry and sunny one day and then ice cold and freezing the next during this time of year. I think I even saw a picture once showing the date at the top of two scenes and the drastic difference that only twenty-four hours had made. Usually, when people said this kind of thing, they smiled and laughed, but I didn’t find it funny or really care. I guess you had to be a local to get the joke.
The ice still clung to the streets; however, sidewalks and roads had started to reveal much of themselves that had been buried behind the white cold. People were still wearing coats throughout the city because the chill was still in the air. However, the sun was making a difference on the streets. It felt strange, almost supernatural, like the world itself was shining a light on the city, heating the place alongside the friction and intensity of what was boiling beneath the city. It was like the world could feel what I had done, and what I was going to do. I was going to kill another Primeval, and not just on their hidden plane, like the Unseen. I was going to kill Hunger… the one that still resided in the physical realm, buried beneath the earth.
Once I stopped looking at everyone else and focused on who I was looking for, Frank’s position bounced back from a pulse of my senses. Whatever he was doing to remain hidden from Jane and the rest of the Chasse family must not have worked on me. Much like silver and other things they used in their hunting life, Frank's camouflage didn’t mean shit when I came looking.
I shifted my momentum, turning left down a sidewalk and walking four blocks through downtown until I lined up on the street he was on. I turned left again to head towards him, using the streets like the grid pattern they were to line up directly on the building he inhabited. I didn’t run or even pick up my pace; I just continued steadily until I found the building. There was a tall structure that didn't look like anything special in its own right, but it did sit directly across from the City Hall building. It was made from mostly concrete but had windows evenly spaced and speckled across its entirety. I had never been inside, but I had seen it many times in my murderous hunts throughout St. Louis. Once I got close to the building, I saw a sign that read, Park Pacific Luxury Apartments. Frank’s position reverberated in my mind near the top of the building. I came to a stop outside the front entrance and focused my pulse sense, projecting it up throughout the building, taking in more details as I became more fine-tuned, and kept my pulse inside the building. There were countless people inside, all spaced out evenly, all in their own apartments, I figured. Frank was the only one who seemed out of place.
As I gripped the door handle and pulled it open, I felt a small hint of anger boiling up inside of me. The thought that Frank was here doing something other than helping Autumn started to eat at me. I tried to keep my head level and cool. I knew that Carter had told me everything about Frank's situation from his perspective, so that was all I knew. I knew Frank… and none of this made any sense. He would never just abandon his family when they were in need, so I had to talk to him. But… either way, I made a promise to Carter that I would bring him home. That’s exactly what I intended to do.
As I walked into the front lobby, I took stock of the area, seeing people who looked like they worked there but also people who were just transiting to elevators to get to their respective homes. A worker glanced at me with a look like she was going to walk over to question a stranger who didn’t belong. I could see it on her face and couldn’t blame her, because I had been repressing the ominous aura of killing intent that naturally oozed off of me. So to her, I was just some normal asshole who roamed in off the street. However, she backed away quickly when I let the monster rattle its cage a little, and I let slip just a touch of dread.
As the woman sauntered away, trying to keep her composure, I walked into an elevator right behind someone who had already hit the button. I think this man felt my presence as well because he backed into a corner, trying to press himself into the metal as hard as possible, as I reached over and hit the top floor. I could almost feel his relief when he saw me hit a floor that was not his own and then stepped back to my side of the elevator. We were on the fifth floor in just a matter of seconds; however, I’m sure that to the man looking at me from the corner of his eye, it felt like an eternity. Once the door closed, I began ascending toward Frank. As I got closer, I realized what I thought was the top floor was actually just the next one down, so I quickly tapped just below my original selection, and the elevator light lit up. In just a few short breaths, the doors open to the floor where Frank was hiding. I walked quietly down the hallway, passing between many doors, all identical in this large apartment building. I found myself aiming at the door; I could feel him behind. That pulse sense was slowing and tapering off as I didn’t need to find him anymore. I had arrived.
It felt strange hunting down Frank the same way I had hunted down many others before I even knew what this pulse sense was, or how to actively use it on my own free will. Placing him in this strange category was odd and wrong. But these were just the tools at my disposal. The way I was going to find Frank and get him home.
I knocked on the door, clacking my knuckles against the thick commercial wood door with stern force to get his attention. I could sense him shift sharply, his breath hitching as he questioned who the fuck could have found him. I felt him slowly moving through the apartment, collecting things on his way to the door; a silver blade in one hand and some sort of wooden metallic object that smelled of gunpowder. Probably an old shotgun or something. The silver blade I could feel easily because of the unmistakable signature of silver. Even though it couldn’t hurt or weaken me, I could sense the supernatural power behind it. That was actually a first. I had never really noticed it before; maybe it was just another new detail to add to this growing power within me. Maybe it was because I had received the portion of Annihilation that Hunger had kept hidden in her depths for so long.
I saw the faint light in the peephole dim as Frank looked through it, and then sighed with relief. I heard the sound of a door chain unlocking, the deadbolt turning over, and the doorknob twisting, one after the other, until Frank was staring me in the face. He was tired around the eyes, and his red hair was disheveled.
“Sam… it’s you,” Frank said, shocked and a little weary. “How did you find me?” He looked over my shoulder, waiting to see Jane or Carter.
I took a moment to assess the area and all the things I saw behind him. There was a small telescope that looked out the window, but it wasn’t pointed at the sky; it was pointed directly across a large open area towards the City Hall building. The windows were also covered with curtains and blinds to block out almost everything, but the small lens of the telescope. There were other things too: books, newspaper clippings, and journals that looked far older than the modern tone of this place. There were also books I didn’t recognize with names of people on the front that did not seem familiar to anything I’d read in Carter’s library.
I looked back at Frank, “What’s going on here?” I studied his eyes as I waited for his response.
“I’m… I’m looking into something,” Frank replied after a brief moment of hesitation. “It’s big, Sam. Something I’ve been looking into for a while now. Something that… I hate to admit, it has gotten me a little… fucked up,” Frank said those words strangely, like he was trying to find the right word to say, but also didn’t understand what he was saying. But then he came back with the same question, “How’d you find me?”
“I’m not sure how you were hiding from Jane, but remember… I’m not like the rest of them. Not much can hide from me.” I stared at him for a long moment and then adjusted my eyes to take in the room again. This didn't seem like the den of someone spiraling into drugs or some kind of supernatural steroid. This really did look like he was applying himself to finding something. Though I did see bags of the same plant he chewed up that night in his truck. It was Hunter’s Breath, stacked neatly in Ziplock bags in a small container.
“Why aren’t you with Carter? They need your help with Autumn… something’s wrong with her,” I said it with a little bit of emotion slipping through. I quickly got it under control, going numb to what I truly felt.
Frank had sensed that emotion and took notice, “I know, Carter told me about the suspicions you had. He told me about what you said you saw… and that he was going to confront Patrick about it, but I’m not so sure there’s anything I could do to help.” Frank’s tone shifted as he realized my words. He knew he had been radio silent and didn’t know the exact current events of the family. “What do you mean something’s wrong with her? What happened?” I could hear his teeth clench.
“That thing I saw, the vision that I told Carter about… it was real… and it's got a hold of her. Peter Grimwood laid out a curse for Patrick to use against Autumn. Patrick didn’t know what it was, or what he was doing, but it worked. I don’t understand all of it, but from what I know, it’s bad… dangerous even. He said they broke Patrick free of it, but it’s got its hooks in Autumn in a way that’s even deeper than Patrick. She’s… not herself,” it hurt me to say this. To know she was changed, and I wasn't there for her… was hard. I wanted to be… but, if I couldn’t be, Frank would. “He said they need you back… like now. Your uncle Chris and aunt Raven are at his house, trying to figure out a way to break her free from it.”
I quickly told him as much as I knew, hopefully he would realize the intensity of the reality around him and start sprinting out of this building and head to his brother’s house. However, that’s not what happened. Frank had a look in his eyes of true inner turmoil, like he was tearing himself up over not being there for Autumn. However, something else was tearing at him, something I didn’t know, but I could see in his eyes and his erratic heartbeat.
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“I need to… I just…” Frank was struggling to speak the words as he struggled with what to do.
“What is it, Frank? What the fuck are you doing here? Why are you hiding from everybody?”
Frank clenched his teeth as he let out a sigh of frustration. “I’ve found something that we can’t ignore. I haven’t told anyone else yet because… honestly, I’ve been hoping I was wrong. I started looking into this a little bit before the whole Peter situation took off… during the time you were gone for so long after we found out about you. When Jane and I first got back together…” he tried to define the timeline. “I have some friends… had some friends,” Frank corrected himself darkly. “They were hunters just like our family. I met them out in Montana, on a hunt I went on with my dad, back in my early twenties. They’re the Calhoun family, and they're damn strong hunters in their own right. I just pray there’s someone left in their line that can carry on their ways.” Frank took a moment without explaining more. Then he gathered himself. “Think of them just like us, except out in the open wilderness… more Wild West kind of shit than how we hunt the city. My dad, and the patriarch of their family, were tight back in the day, so our families got together every so often. They had about eight kids and a shitload of grandkids. One of the brothers, a guy named Rowdy, reached out to me back when we first met you. I was talking to him, trying to get answers about the thing we were hunting back then… you,” Frank said. “Before we knew it was you.”
I remember that time all too well, back when I was helping them hunt down the black-eyed monster. All they knew or had to go on was the fact that something had been killing a little too much in the area, and no one knew who or what it was, only the fact that it had claws longer than normal, and a surviving vampire had claimed it had pitch black eyes. I was the very monster they searched for. Now look at us all, just the best of friends.
"Rowdy was helping me try to find whatever we could when we were looking into what you were, but he was asking me for something in return. He wanted help trying to locate the origins of a symbol he came across. He said there was somebody in his area who was putting this symbol on a lot of things throughout their town. He said it was a few vampires and their familiars, but the symbol struck him weird. He did some digging and found it was related to something deep and ancient. He wanted some help looking into it on my end.” Then he turned around and shuffled some papers on a glass desk until he found the one he was looking for.
Frank spun around and lifted the paper to my face, pointing at this strange symbol. It was a sword with a golden handle with an evil-looking green eye as a pommel. The blade was jagged and was surrounded by little sharp points that almost looked like teeth or some sort of monstrous mouth lined like a shark's. There were other strange lines and symbols near it, but the symbol was the centerpiece. He grabbed other papers quickly, showing me the different variations of the symbol; however, the core of it was the same.
“This thing pops up everywhere,” Frank said, voice flat and jagged. “Secret societies, little cults, marks on doors, tattoos on lowlifes. It’s like a brand. It’s an identifier for something else… something darker. Rowdy couldn’t place it. He sent me what he could: books, photos, notes. I couldn’t take it all… couldn’t carry a library on my back, so I grabbed what mattered and got out. I left Jane because I was scared of bringing it to her. I left because the more I looked, the more it showed up.”
He leaned back, palms pressed to the glass of the desk like he was trying to stop the room from tilting. “It’s in our city, Sam: City Hall, shops, businesses, a bunch of graffiti you’d never expect to see. I found it in the margins of old books in the library, like some librarian scribbled it in while people weren’t looking. Names keep cropping up next to it… names of people who pull strings. People with suits and power. I know how it sounds, but when the same face keeps turning up beside the same mark, it stops being a coincidence.”
I watched him point at the window, hands trembling with a tired, awful energy. “Our mayor… St. Louis’s mayor shows up in the records linked to this. Her name appears in different variations over generations… but it's basically the same thing… like a joke so obvious that no one from the human world can see it. I didn’t want to throw a grenade in the middle of everything, so I kept quiet while I continued to dig. Then Rowdy stopped answering. Just a voicemail, then silence. I finally reached someone in Montana and…” his voice broke small and pained.
The look on his face was a strain that held back a wave of emotion… fear and grief for what he might have brought on his own family.
“They were gone. Rowdy’s immediate family… wiped out… kids, too. Sam, I thought… what if I brought that on them? What if this thing follows every paper, every scrap with this symbol on it? What if it found out Rowdy was looking… then killed him?” He swallowed like he was trying to keep a flood inside. “So I pulled away. I stayed out of sight. I doubled down on whatever kept me steady… what would give me the edge I needed if something came crawling out of the dark for us… Hunter’s Breath. I even thought Clive might be part of it when he showed up, looking to make Jane part of his pack. He’s all riddles and threats… warning of something dangerous coming, but that was…” Frank’s jaw tightened, “I was wrong about him… and I’m sorry I pulled you into that with me…”
Frank reached out and patted my shoulder. “But thank you for coming with me… You didn’t have to… and I’m sorry I put you in that position.” Frank pulled his hand away, “But he still smells like trouble. Maybe I wanted him to be the answer because that made it simpler. Easier to aim at a man I already have bad blood with. But I have to admit… maybe he smells what's coming… what I’m already onto.”
The room hummed; the fluorescent light above us flared and steadied like a failing heart. I could feel the distance he’d built between himself and everyone else as if it were a physical thing…. an absence that hummed in the air between my ribs. Frank’s eyes were hollow. He kept glancing at the pages spread across the desk as if the symbol might crawl off the paper and look back.
“Why not tell the family?” I asked, though the question sounded thin. He’d already said why. He looked at me like a man who’d buried something alive and now it clawed at his throat.
“Because telling them makes it real for them,” he said. “And once something’s real, it takes over our lives. They’ll get involved, we’ll all hunt this thing down. Then… if something is watching to cover its tracks… it will see us for sure.” He tapped the paper with a forefinger so hard the desk vibrated. “It’s already here, Sam. It has friends in places… high places. If it’s going to come for me… maybe if I’m isolated from them… it won’t come for my family…” A single tear escaped the death grip he had around his emotions. It slowly dripped to the floor. Frank stepped back and paced forward and back a few steps as fear gripped him.
His words sank into the room. Outside, a city siren wavered and died off somewhere down on the streets. I could almost hear the symbol… it was that quiet, that inevitable… all of the papers staring at us in that moment of quiet in the room. I wanted to tell him everything would be fine. Instead, I felt a cold hand close around the Chasse family… just a little bit. They had walked into something… brushed against another dangerous monster.
Frank folded his hands over the picture and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “If it’s in the mayor’s office,” he whispered, “it’s not just townsfolk and backwoods cults. It’s in the law… in the money. It’s men with clean shoes who answer to something worse than the human world. I don’t know if we can burn it out like some nest of vampires, Sam. But I know where it’s pointing.” Frank turned to face the window that looked out at City Hall.
He let that hang between us. The light buzzed again. On the top sheet of paper, ink glinted where someone had circled the eye on the pommel, as if to make sure you couldn’t miss it. I felt the room contract, the air folding in on itself until every shadow looked like a hand.
As he spoke, I focused my pulse sense at the window and launched it out towards City Hall. I didn’t know the mayor, nor did I even know her name. However, I sent the monstrous pulse in the direction of the building outside the window, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Frank continued to talk about his research and the symbols he’s come across in different locations as I scanned City Hall. My pulse echoed in and out of the building, singing in tune with the monstrous heart of Myordrakien as it beat in the dreaded fields of Death's domain; inside my core, and in another dimension, two hearts beat as one, pulsing surges of Primeval power out into the city. In a single breath, I was everywhere inside City Hall, the old-timey-looking building that was obviously built in a different era.
For the briefest of seconds, I felt something that snapped like a wire under pressure. Something resonated with my Primeval senses. But the moment I caught the faintest flicker, it was gone. I don’t know if it was physically gone but was still within the city, or if it had somehow vanished from this world and gone somewhere else, like the Unseen, hiding in another dimension. But it was in that moment that I knew… Frank was right. There was something else here in St. Louis. He didn’t know what it was, but I did. It was Primeval… but it was not me, and it was not Hunger.
I felt a chill roll across my skin like when you drag your fingernails through dry, compacted dirt. I didn’t know which one it was, but another Primeval lurked in the shadows of the city. It was here, in some form, or through an individual like Peter… maybe… but it was in City Hall. And from the sounds of it, it had hands out somewhere in Montana as well.
I hadn’t even realized that I had turned to face the window that overlooked City Hall. I shifted around back to Frank and stared at him intensely before barking, “Pack up all this shit, and get the fuck out of here!”
Frank was startled at my drastic shift. The way I leaned forward at him with my words and in the intensity that was rolling off me in waves. His large form shifted back a little, trying to figure out the drastic change in me.
“What is it?” He tried to get out through the nervousness and budding fear of my reaction. He could tell that I sensed something, and my actions were a result of it.
I lowered my voice to almost a whisper and replied, “Pack all this and leave. There is something over there, but it's not something you hunt…”
I’m not sure what exactly it was that made Frank take me so seriously, whether it was the palpable feeling that was rolling off of me, or the fear he already felt, only amplified by my verification that he was right. Whatever it was exactly, I was thankful, because Frank quickly packed up all the books, papers, and everything that held a link to this strange symbol. He moved like whatever loomed in City Hall was coming for him in that moment.
I never left Frank’s side as we left the apartment complex. I held some bags for him as we carried all of his things out to his truck. We couldn’t leave anything that could reveal his investigations, or lead someone… or something, back to the Chasse family. I kept my pulse sense rapidly rolling out of me, scanning the city in a very large radius for any hint of what I had just felt resonate inside the City Hall building. Frank spoke to me, but I didn’t hear his words. I was too focused on all the details I felt coming in from my Primeval sense. Before I knew it, my body had moved almost on its own, like my mind was split in two; one part watching the city, and the other moving my body on autopilot to guard Frank.
We made our way to his truck and got out of this small, confined parking garage. All the while, my pulse sense rippled across the city, waiting for the thing I felt to move again to step back inside my hunting grounds. But it never did. Frank’s old beat-up truck rattled onto the Interstate, taking us outside of the city and back to where his house rested in West County. I never felt the touch of that other Primeval again.
The feeling I had inside, though, was one of worry. I knew that whatever I had felt… it felt me. That’s why it vanished. It felt the power of Annihilation reaching out, and it fled in fear. If I was right, and it was another Primeval, it might have even felt the touch of the second destroyer that slowly came for them… the one they hid from… Death. I don’t know if I would ever know if it was gone for good, if it were a threat to Frank or the rest of my friends, but I was scared it would reach out and try to hurt them.
Frank turned off the Interstate many times, looping in and out of the area in strange patterns. He took weird roads that seemed redundant, just to get right back on the Interstate one exit forward, or sometimes even one or two exits back the way we came. I didn’t ask any questions because I knew what he was doing after a few turns. He was driving through the wards. Different parts of the city where CWT construction had built or restored buildings and placed different types of warded symbols and structures within to create fields of distortion or produce areas of effect. They could be used to shield, hide, or weaken, depending on what type of ward it was. I knew these were meant to conceal our trail. Unfortunately, if what we were running from was a Primeval, and it was anything like me, these wards wouldn’t mean jack shit. However, I didn’t tell Frank that.
This might be a small ritual he needed to feel safe. However, I knew the truth: I was what would protect them. The only thing that could stand between the family and a Primeval. One more question formed in my mind. Did Death know about this new threat? Was another Primeval on his radar, or did something in his plans change?
