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People in my small town stopped watching me so closely, ceased monitoring me to make sure I didn’t hang myself with the shower curtain or whatever. Even my dutiful, kind, protective boyfriend was no longer tracking my every movement.

Which gave me exactly what I needed. An opportunity to escape. To leave the small, Stepford town behind and go hunting.

Despite going through the pain of seeing both of my parents torn apart by a werewolf, I was far from street-smart. I was naïve. I had been spoiled, sheltered, pampered. Some part of me even romanticized what I was doing. The cheerleader hunting the werewolf. Heartbroken, intent on vengeance. There would be drama, some heroics on my part, then I’d come back to the life I’d left behind. I’d return as a heroine, get back together with Colton, get married, have kids, and maybe I’d hunt werewolves on the weekend or something. Or I’d repress all memory of my revenge and be happy with my simple, sickly sweet life.

That little notion was torn apart pretty fucking quickly.

Torn apart by the teeth of a wendigo, if you wanted to get specific. Wendigos were nothing like werewolves. In fact, they had eerily similar features to humans. Except they were much larger. The one that took a chunk out of me was twice my height yet starving and weak, which was how I survived. A green hunter up against a wendigo was normally a dead hunter. But I lucked out. Had a nasty scar on my shoulder to document my experience and remind me of the dangers of being fucking stupid and cocky, but I lived to tell the tale.

Thirteen years had passed since then, and I was far from a hero. The life I’d left behind could’ve been a fairy tale at this point. And the monster who killed my parents was still howling at the moon, as far as I knew.

The chorus for “Highway to Hell” brought me back from my introspective thoughts.

Very apt.

I nestled the phone in the crook of my shoulder, holding it there with my cheek as I continued with my task.

“Yep,” I greeted, my voice strained. There was only one person who had the number of the last remaining flip phone that was being used, unironically, in my generation.

“I’ve got one for you,” Donny said on an inhale. I could envision her sitting in her office, towers of books cluttering the space, surrounded by a cloud of smoke while flicking the cherry into an overflowing ashtray.

Donny was one of the last remaining women of our generation still smoking actual cigarettes, doing so for no other reason than she liked the fact that they might eventually kill her.

I yanked my knife from the throat of the draugr, the flesh squelching.

“Good, I just finished here,” I said, sprinkling salt over the corpse before striking a match.

Flames danced in front of my eyes, the heat creeping up my cheeks as I watched the creature wither away, screaming as it did.

Rookie mistake would’ve been to think it was dead after stabbing it with the silver blade. All the literature said that’s all it took. Silver to the neck and it was goodbye undead Norse zombie … better known as a draugr.

But the problem with contemporary literature—AKA a Google search—wasn’t that it mixed fact and myth, but it was diluted with the contemporary ideology that monsters didn’t exist. I had to sort fact from fiction in real time, and it had almost gotten me killed.

A whole bunch of times.

The scars, broken bones, and near misses told me that.

Garlic and crucifixes did fuck all to vampires aside from making them laugh. They didn’t sparkle, and they sure as shit weren’t fuckable.

Ghosts were not incorporeal. They could become solid—or solid-ish—for short periods of time, and during that time, they could drag you down to the underworld with them.

Witches were not old hags bent over cauldrons, nor were they radical feminists with kick-ass powers trying to topple the patriarchy. They were powerful, scary as fuck, and a death sentence if you got on the wrong side of one.

Demons did not have horns. They looked exactly like humans and could kill you in a heartbeat if you didn’t know how to spot them and send them back to hell.

Angels didn’t exist. No ethereal beings were watching over us, coming to save us, protect us. The only things watching us were creatures who saw us as prey, food, or entertainment.

I learned that all pretty quickly.

If you didn’t learn, in my line of work, you died. Those were the only two options.

So I had learned. Quickly. A lot of it was pure, dumb luck. I set out into the world hunting evil as an eighteen-year-old cheerleader without any combat experience. Back then, the closest I’d come to a fight was getting in an argument with my best friend over a pair of shoes.

In the early days, I often stumbled upon others like me. Hunters. Sentimental ones, I guessed, since not many cared too much about taking on a kid who was more a liability than anything else.

Now, over a decade had passed, and I still worked alone.

Donny had my number because she was the only person who knew me. The only person alive anyway. And she only knew the barest of details—that I liked whiskey, hated influencers, and excelled at killing monsters. I was also a great pool player.