13

T he box of beer dangled from my three fingers as I grabbed the two bags of food and kicked the door of the Bronco shut with my boot. I adjusted my grip on the box and stuck the bags between my teeth as I wandered toward the motel door.

A long stretch of doors spread across the two story, mint green motel on the side of the motorway. The bright vacancy sign flickered in red neon bursts that illuminated the wet parking lot and reflected off the rows of dirty windows.

I used my free hand and opened the door, pressing my back against the damp wood to spin into the cramped, musty room slamming it behind me.

“What the hell took you so long!” Koen was on his feet in seconds, all six feet of him moving toward me. His blond hair matted against his forehead, wet from a shower, and the cut on his cheek from the hunt hours before finally clean and looking less irritated. He snagged the food from my mouth so quickly I barely had the chance to unclench my teeth before I registered the sound of the bags ripping.

“Wow, yeh, thank you for the help,” I grumbled and set the beer down on the dresser before I grabbed his chin. He tried to tug away from me, mad that he couldn’t start digging in the bags, but I tightened my grip. “ Was it deep?” I asked him and he shook free of my grasp. The cut made his usually soft features look tired and sore.

“No,” he huffed and went back to digging in the bags for something to eat. “Are there onions on this?” He held up one of the burgers.

“What’s wrong with onions?” I scoffed and grabbed one, tossing it to Clay who sat at the table across the room.

He caught it without taking his focus off the newspaper he was reading and started to unwrap it with his teeth. His sweater was pushed up around his forearms, exposing the tattooed skin beneath that made him look less like a posh dork. His wavy dark hair was pushed back off his slender, sharp features and inquisitive, almond-shaped eyes were framed by a pair of glasses that sat on the bridge of his angled nose.

“He hates onions,” Clay piped up and sniffed the burger, his blue eyes lifting from the page to look at me. “Bring it here,” he instructed Koen, who stuck his tongue out at me and threw his burger to Clay.

“Sorry, I was a little busy cleaning up the decapitated body in my boot,” I groaned and dug into my burger as Clay picked the onions off Koen’s without fuss.

“Have you ever noticed that when there’s a body stinking up the vehicle and it's his turn to deal with it it’s ‘ my boot’ and whenever she needs gas or a wash or new tires all of a sudden it's our boot?” Koen joked through a mouthful of chips.

“What did you do with it?” Clay asked, ignoring the comment and sliding the tin foil toward Koen who started eating without a moment of nausea affecting him.

“Took it down the motorway and burned it in a field,” I said with my cheeks full of greasy burger. “That was the easy part. Someone didn’t wrap the tarp properly and it took me an hour to scrub skinwalker guts out of the upholstery.”

“Did you just refer to the twenty year old brown carpeted boot in the Bronco as upholstery?” Clay’s tongue darted out over his bottom lip as he tried to stifle his laughter.

“That’s what it is, and I like my truck more than I like both of you,” I grumbled, digging my boots into the ugly shag rug beneath me and setting my half eaten burger on the bed. I pushed up, shucked from my jacket and grabbed a beer for each of us from the box. The caps popped with a long hiss and I extended them out to Clay and Koen.

“I can feel you blaming me for the tarp but the problem is, I don’t give a fuck,” Koen leaned back in his chair with a smile and brought the bottle to his lips. “I did all the hard work last night anyways, it took me two showers to get the bodily fluids out of my hair and the stench off my skin. I had to throw out my favorite Queen shirt!”

“Boo hoo,” I laughed, crossing the room and settling down against the foot of the bed to finish my burger. “And you didn’t do anything. The reason you were covered in bodily fluids is because you were beneath the walker when Clay finally got his hands on it.”

“That’s not true, it was already bleeding by then!” Koen argued, his hands flying out in defense. “You know that’s not true!” He looked to Clay for backup.

Claylaughed and noncommittally shrugged his shoulders. “You did look pretty helpless.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his face with his hands before starting to work on his own burger. “This is disgusting.” He scowled after the first bite.

“It’s all the services had.” I shoved the last bite of burger into my mouth without concern.

“You got these from the services?” Koen gagged and set the burger down to look at me with disgust on his round face. “If the monsters don’t kill us, Wesley’s choice in dinner will always finish the job.”

“It’s not even the dodgiest place we’ve eaten from.” I stared at him with a blank expression, unsure why he was so outraged.

A pillow hurtled through the air and narrowly missed my head.

“Yeah? Well you get to shit in the street if the bathroom is occupied tonight because the burgers have torn through us. I call the toilet–Clay you can have the shower,” said Koen exasperatedly.

I picked the pillow up and threw it back at him, getting him square in the nose before he could duck.

“And that's why you lost your Queen shirt. You need to practice your aim, little brother.”

Koen bristled at my jab. “You aren’t considering all the facts. The odds were stacked against me. In any other scenario I would have won that fight!”

“Against the monster or the pillow, Koen?”

Laughter echoed from Clay behind his screen.

“It’s fine, luckily for me there’s always another monster to prove myself against.” Koen leaned back in the motel chair and the wood creaked and collapsed out beneath him. He tumbled to the floor in a clumsy mess of limbs, blond hair and chips, sending both Clay and I into a fit of laughter.

“Did the chair bite you?” I barked out, still chuckling as Koen grumbled and picked himself up from the floor .

Koen straightened himself out and lunged for me, his face pushed up against my stomach, arms wrapped around my waist, toppling the two of us over onto the dingy carpet. He wrestled with everything he had, tossing light-hearted punches to my stomach, but I flipped him over and pinned him to the ground.

Laughter filled the room as he fought against me, wiggling just enough to knock me off balance and against the foot of the bed. As I primed for another attack, Clay cleared his throat and the bugger lunged again, capitalizing on the interruption. His fist landed and a surprised cough was knocked out of me as I doubled over and he climbed on my back. His arm wrapped around my neck and pulled upward, locking my head between his bicep and forearm.

“Tap out!” He laughed, choking the air from my lungs.

I drove my elbow back and caught him in the side, loosening his hold on my throat just long enough to push him off when Clay played the sound of an airhorn from his laptop at full volume.

“Excuse me,” he scolded. “When you two are finished I have a case.”

We both rolled back in unison, I rested on my elbows out of breath as Koen fell to his back on the carpet and stared up at the water-stained ceiling.

“Another one?” Koen whined. “Dude, the body from the last one isn’t even cold yet! Literally.”

He stared up in silence for a moment, sulking, before he pulled himself up exaggeratedly into a sitting position with his legs kicked out in front of him, and leaned his back heavily against the dresser.

He was the youngest and it never showed more than when he sulked. His brow knitted together as he shot puppy dog eyes at Clay–the better target for that particular weapon between the two of us.

“We haven’t had a break in…” He paused for effect while he mimed out a long mathematical equation “...like a year!” He finished exasperatedly. “I haven’t had a smooch in months! Can’t we take a break? Meet some people who we aren’t trying to kill, or them us?”

“I distinctly remember a girl a few weeks ago… What was her name? Carmen?” Clay responded with a raised brow, poking holes in his argument. “And wasn’t there a Liam before that?”

“No before Carmen was Quinn, Liam was before Declan,” I corrected, laughing at the look of incredulousness that was forming on Koen’s face as we continued to name off his long list of conquests.

“God, Declan was an ass,” Clay said behind his laptop.

“And your opinion is moot because you just got with that pretty thing before the vampire case, Annabeth?” Koen pointed at me. “Clay’s really the only one here that is celibate.”

“Not by choice,” he scrunched his brows together. “It’s not my fault I put standards over needs,” he grumbled.

“All you have to do is ask.” Koen pouted at him and, even though Clay didn’t engage, his cheeks flushed pink. “Tell me what you need,” Koen purred.

The blurred lines between the two of them showed in a hazy vibration as Koen’s green eyes grew wide and flirtatious. Luckily Clay wouldn’t give in to whatever Koen was trying to cook up; flirting kept them satiated on the road and it kept everything else clean when we were held up for days with each other. I couldn’t be bothered by either. I enjoyed the company of a woman when she’d be so inclined to fall for my terrible flirting tactics and what I’d like to think was a charming smile. And Koen was my brother, blood or not.

I understood Koen’s gripe, it would be nice to slow down, to find more than just brief moments of human interaction outside of our circle. But for now, just the three of us would manage. I smiled at the two of them, grateful we were all still together.

It had been a long road, never as easy as I wished it could be.

When I was ten, my parents saved a group of people from a vampire den in Northern Ireland, outside of Donegal. A day burned into my memory as the worst day of my life. Koen was the only survivor and had no family left. At four, we had taken in the petrified, green-eyed spitfire and raised him like our own. I had no blood siblings, only Koen and Clay. But family didn’t end with blood. Not for Hunters.

Clayton had come later. The day I turned eighteen, my parents were investigating a string of fires in Chelsea. Turned out to be a wraith who was burning down the victims’ homes after consuming their brain fluids. Cruel, horrible monsters. Among the handfuls of monsters we have taken down, I held a special hatred for wraiths. They had no moral code, they were selfish, greedy monsters. It was that day I pulled an unconscious Clay from his bed and ever since we’d been inseparable.

Koen’s muffled complaints pulled me from my thoughts and I turned to find him ranting about how people need human connection to survive.

“One more hunt then we can take a break,” I laughed .

“It’s always one more hunt!” Koen’s groaned, his hopeful eyes trained on Clay, pleading for assistance but Clay’s gray eyes were focused on his laptop screen.

“I promise this time,” I nod, lying through my teeth. I couldn’t exactly explain it, but whenever we took too long of a break I’d get restless. If we relaxed for too long we’d get too comfortable, too soft. There were so many evils in the world and too few Hunters around anymore to deal with them.

There were more Clay’s and Koen’s out there needing people like us to help them. If we didn’t go, who else would? Stopping felt like accepting that the nightmares outnumbered us.Our home was with each other, on the road, if we stopped… What were we anymore?

“Shut up.” He looked back at me. “We’re exhausted.”

“You’re exhausted.” Clay corrected him.

“You are both exhausting,” I huffed.

“So it’s decided then, we’re taking a break?” Koen lifted his eyebrows at me but his mood quickly deflated when I told Clay to keep talking.

“No breaks,” I hushed him when he whined something under his breath. “People are dying Koen, and–”

“Yeah, yeah.” Koen shook his head but added as he turned his attention back to Clay, “they need our help.”

“Atta boy,” I said, handing him another beer in reward.

“Unfortunately so.” Clay turned the laptop in our direction and I pushed off the floor to get a closer look at the news article he had brought up. It was a nation wide alert. “Six kids dead, three more missing. Cops say they’re doing everything they can but it’s out of their hands. The only body that turned up was mangled. Coroner said it was as if something had feasted on the kid. There’s no leads, no warnings, parents all say they were taken in the middle of the night. It’s out of control and it just feels…”

Supernatural.

“My best guess? A ghoul.”

“Shit,” Koen was the first to express, with a sad huff of air as he listened to Clay spew the facts. The mood in the room instantly killed by the thought of dead children. Gone was the urge to goof around with my brother and Clay.

“I call first sleep.” Koen moved from the floor and started to shove his clothes back into his duffle bag.

“Let me shower first.” I rubbed my hand over my face. A cold shower would wake me enough to do the first driving shift. “Go get us some coffee.” I tossed the keys to Koen with a tight nod to Clay confirming that we were all on the same page over the urgency that surrounded the situation. “Map out where we’re going and find out if we can get in to see that body. We need to know without a doubt that ghouls are what we are dealing with. No room for error.”