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The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been

by Leah Ning

 

You find the dying woman-thing in an alley, breathing her final wet, rasping breaths in a heap of white trash bags that seems more like a throne.

Everything tells you to run: twenty-four years of instinct, the government monster information pamphlets, the hard, practical voice at the back of your head that sounds a lot like your monster hunter girlfriend.

And then the woman-thing looks up. Her dark, scaled cheek drags on the distended belly of plastic that makes her pillow. Her chapped lips part and she says, in a voice like acid and smoke: “Eiko.”

That should make you run, too. Things that know your name and shouldn’t are firmly in “get the hell out and don’t look back” territory. But something in her voice hooks into the bottom of your soul and tugs.

You walk into the alley and she reaches for you. Her fingers are too long, dusky and scaled like her face. You shiver when they rasp over your cheek, your hair. Your heart pounds. You should run. You should run now.

That tug in your soul, a deep ache like kinship, won’t let you.

Something passes from her rough palm into you: a jolt, warm and slimy and slipped between your skin and the muscle beneath. Your body goes soft, like puking and collapsing and passing out all at once, only you can’t do any of those, something won’t let you, and you have to shiver and listen to the last of the woman-thing’s clotted, choking breaths as she dies half-buried in trash.

You are left with a sour breeze, a hollow where that ache hooked into your soul, and the sudden, desperate certainty that you need Mia right fucking now.

---

She opens her apartment door for you in loose sweatpants and that white ribbed tank top you like. You don’t want to tell her — you know what it’ll do to her, and you’re so scared — but what else are you going to do? You don’t know what you’re doing. Mia hunts things like you saw in the alley for a living. If anyone can fix this, it’s her.

So you sit her down on her scruffy couch. There’s a catch in her breath when you say it, so small you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t looking for it.

But you are not a thing to kill. You are a thing that can be saved. When you reach for her hand, she leans into you, presses a kiss to your hairline.

“We can still save it,” she says. “It’s all right, girl, I got you. You stay with me until I get this fixed.”

There’s a hard burst of relief in your chest. “But I have to work —”

“Call out sick.” She squeezes your hands. “You can’t go in like this. We’ll get it fixed up and then you go back in and it won’t matter. Two days, okay? Tops.”

Or you won’t get it fixed up, and then you won’t go back in, and it still won’t matter. You try to shiver and can’t. The feeling sits in an unsteady pocket at your core.

---

Mia sits at her desk, one knee up, blond curls edged in blue laptop glow and books laid out across each other. You try not to pace and you pace anyway and you apologize at least once an hour.

“You do what you need,” Mia says, and slips an absent arm around your waist.

Your fingers ache to do something, so you peel away from her. You make coffee and set a mug on the edge of her desk, then flinch when she flips a few pages because someone’s replaced your nerves with razors.

“Thanks, love,” she murmurs, but you’re already halfway down the hall.

That feeling of cold-but-can’t-shiver trembles beneath your skin. You roll your shoulders as you pad into Mia’s room and it doesn’t help.

You pull the blanket from her bed: an aged blue quilt, faded but soft. You wrap it tight around yourself and it helps. Not all the way, but it helps.

You turn to go back out to Mia. Hesitate.

Too open, you think, and have no idea what you mean except that it rings true in that hollow place the dying woman-thing left in your soul.

You drop the quilt in the corner. You grab the pillows. Toss those in the corner.

You take a step toward it.

Hesitate. Some buried animal part of you sending up an inexorable negative. A pull toward the closet.

You go. More blankets there, towels. An extra pillow. You yank them out and it stills the wrongness in your chest.

Into the corner with the rest. A soft, warm pile, inviting, smelling of Mia’s fresh laundry detergent. Clean cotton.

You crawl in and wrap yourself up. And it’s good. So good. That shivering feeling fades back until it’s almost gone.

“Baby, I found — oh. Gods.”

Your head snaps up. Mia frozen in the doorway, her expression strained, yellow hallway light tracing the point of her jaw.

“Found what?” you say. Your voice rasps in your throat.

Her hand leaves the door frame, then braces there again. “You’re nesting.”

“Nesting.” You look down and suppose you could call it that. “What did you find?”

“This is bad,” Mia says softly. “The . . . nesting. It’s so fast —”

“Then we should start . . . whatever it is . . . soon. Right?” you ask. The whole thing feels like watching paper bounce off plexiglass. Your mouth feels like cold spitballs. “What did you find?”

She steps toward you. Stops. “I don’t . . . know if you’re dangerous.”

“Does it matter? If we —”

“Rot.”

“Hmm?”

“Rot. You found a dying rot goddess. She turned you.”

You press your back into the wall. “Why does it matter?”

“Because I don’t think I can stop it.”

Something falls out of the bottom of your stomach. It doesn’t feel like Mia looking at you anymore. It looks like a little girl with a silver knife backed into a corner.

“But you said we could,” you say.

“That was before I knew it was a goddess.”

That shivery feeling starts to come back to you. This place isn’t safe.

“Then what do I do?” you ask.

Mia’s mouth works. “I — stay here. Just stay here, and I’ll — I don’t know. If you’re not dangerous, I can just — but your work will — fuck, Eiko, I don’t know.”

She wants to keep you here. She wants to hold you here.

This place isn’t safe.

“Okay,” you say.

“I have to go,” she says. You realize she’s dressed up in her hunting gear, all black and packed with blades and herbs and guns.

“What are you hunting?” you ask quietly. “A goddess?”

She flinches.

“No,” she says. “A werewolf.”

So she’ll be a mess when she gets back.

She was starting to watch movies with you instead. She was starting to fall asleep on the couch with you. Starting to let you make her pancakes and coffee for breakfast instead of cramming down half an energy bar and a couple beers.

You wonder if she’ll ever touch you again as she locks you in behind her.

---

In a perfect world, you could’ve trusted her. You could’ve curled up in your nest until she came back in the morning, and she might’ve crept in to curl up with you.

You wouldn’t have thought to use one of her bobby pins to work on the lock until it sprang open with a satisfying snap. You wouldn’t have scanned her desk, heart skipping, for the books she used, and then decided to take all the open ones.

You could’ve read them together when Mia got back. Scoured them for something she missed, any hint of how to stop it, any whiff of whether you’d be dangerous.

You wouldn’t have had to fear that she’d be there when you slipped out the door. You wouldn’t have had to slip out at all.

---

You start to run home and can’t.

Every time you put a foot down, your skin slips — just a little — toward your heel, and every time you pick a foot up, your skin springs back into place. You trip over the first few running steps you take and almost eat tar, so you walk.

Quickly.

You still almost fall a few times, but you make it, and you lock yourself inside.

First things first: that shiver is back in your bones.

You don’t want to nest, because that is apparently bad news, but you can’t concentrate when it feels like your skin is trying to crawl off your body. You yank the duvet from your bed, the pillows, then all the soft stuff you can find, and throw it into a corner.

You hesitate. It isn’t quite right. But it’ll do for now. If you can prove you won’t be dangerous, maybe Mia will come back around. Maybe she won’t be so scared of you. Your body feels funny, but your mind feels fine. Mostly. Except that you need what amounts to a den instead of a bed now.

It doesn’t matter. A den doesn’t mean you’re dangerous.

You settle into your corner to read.

---

In a perfect world, the books would have told you more than half of what you could do. The goddess in the alley would have died curled in a home she dug with her own two hands, surrounded by candles and incense and attended by you.

You would have known that her name was Isabel. The sound of your own name on her tongue would have been comfort, not fear.

She would have taught you, as her days wound to a close, what would happen to your skin, how to care for your new scales, how to dig your own home, how that space would give you safety. Give you power.

You would have known what you could do. You would have learned how to rot, to feed dead things back to the world that needs them in that form as much as its living one.

You would have learned, too, that you could preserve. Keep a bouquet fresh, stop a wound from festering, hold wet, decaying wood together long enough to be replaced before it collapsed on whatever soul had the misfortune to be beneath it.

You could have done good. In a world that loved you, you could have done so much good.

---

But this is a world that will see your scales, your unearthed ribs, your skin sloughing from your face to slop onto the carpet and recoil. This is a world where creatures like you are called monsters, and hope doesn’t enter the equation.

This is a world where no one thinks to donate blood to vampires, hire doppelgangers as stunt doubles, lock werewolves away until the moon wanes.

This is a world where if a woman turns into a werewolf, there’s a silver knife in the house, and the only thing her ten-year-old daughter would know to do is use it.

And sixteen years later, as you listen to the deadbolt at your front door clunk back and watch that little girl walk in, still in her hunting garb, you prepare to run.

But, gods, you still want to hope.

---

There are two brief points in which things still might be good for you, for Mia.

In this point, she is standing in the doorway to your apartment, watching you shed your skin in one smooth shrug.

In this point, she doesn’t recoil from the glint of bone in the pale post-dawn light through the window.

She is reaching for you, palms upturned, face gentle, hair mussed and sleeves torn.

She doesn’t reach for anything sharp, anything loud or hurting. Just you.

She says, “Love, it’s okay.”

She says, “I found a way to stop it.”

It might be okay still. If she trusts you. If you trust her.

You go to her.

---

You shouldn’t have.

---

In the perfect world you’ll never find, Mia meant every word she said.

She didn’t pull a knife wound with bramble from the sheath at her back.

She didn’t whip it around her side so fast you might not have seen it if you were still human.

You did not, in your fear and your ignorance of your own power, put your arm up so fast that it tore hers off.

---

You didn’t mean to hurt her. You didn’t. But here she is bleeding into what used to be your carpet, gasping, making thin noises in the back of her throat with every breath.

You didn’t mean to hurt her.

You begin to back away. Stop. Start forward, scaled hands held up. Stop.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. But that won’t stop her bleeding. You have to stop the bleeding.

Mia sits down, hard, like she can’t do anything else. So heavy. Out of her own control. It catches at your heart and you go to her.

“Don’t,” she says, and scrambles, weakly, for the knife. You kick it aside. “Don’t —”

You lift her up. One arm under her back, the other under her knees.

“We can save it,” you say in your new voice, like acid and smoke. “I got you.”

You begin to run, and now, with your skin gone, you don’t trip. You don’t even come close.

---

In a perfect world, even though Mia couldn’t keep that promise, you could.

The slowing of the blood from her arm would’ve meant that her bleeding was stanched and not that her blood was simply running out.

The way she looked up at you, the fact that she could say, “You’re trying to save me,” would’ve meant that she was gaining her legs again, not that she was on the last they had left.

You would’ve been fast enough.

You wouldn’t have showed up at the hospital with a body in your arms.

You would’ve realized that laying the corpse of a hunter at the door of a hospital didn’t look like sorrow, like regret.

You would’ve realized that it looked like a challenge.

---

The first of them finds you at sunset the next day.

He must’ve tracked you by Mia’s blood, because you didn’t go to her apartment, and you didn’t go to yours. You ran until you found woods, somewhere outside the city, and you dug down into the dirt with your new scaled hands until you didn’t feel like collapsing-shivering-fainting anymore.

You don’t want to kill this hunter. You don’t want to kill anyone. But he’s trying to kill you, and it doesn’t matter what you say, he won’t stop, and eventually you do kill him.

He came to your home with a knife wrapped in bramble. What else were you supposed to do?

You don’t let the rot touch his body, thinking someone might like to bury him. The hunter that comes after him breathes something about unnatural bullshit and tries to kill you, too.

Your legend grows teeth, grows legs and starts to walk: many go to the goddess’s lair. None return. This will be the way until there is someone brave enough, strong enough, fast enough to put her down.

You leave their unrotted bodies among the trees. At first you hope someone will come for them, bury them, mourn them instead of trying to avenge them. When this doesn’t happen, you keep it up, hoping it will scare the rest away.

When this doesn’t happen, it’s so much a habit that you keep it up anyway, your silent standing army of the dead with their throats rent and their chests crushed and their guts swaying against their thighs.

---

At the final point where things might have been okay, there is a woman. She carries a lush bouquet, picking her way through your carefully preserved crop of enemies. You eye her from the dark beneath the dirt.

“You don’t let them rot,” the woman calls, casting her free hand at those who came before. “You could do something good with that magic. Couldn’t you?”

She’s not telling you anything you don’t know. Your home is lined with ageless flowers now, everlasting grass braids hanging from the ceiling.

The woman holds out her bouquet, velvety yellows and rich greens shot through with sunlight. “Will you do that for me?”

Oh, but you know this trick. You know all about gentle lies you wish like hell you could believe. About knives in cleverly hidden sheaths.

So you call to her. Invite her in.

And she comes to you.

---

She shouldn’t have.

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been” by Leah Ning, and if you enjoyed that then there are two other beautiful stories in our archive, both originals, that will tickle your fancy and break your heart in the same way this one likely just did: 679, Pull, about end of life care, and 768, The Consequences of Microwaving Styrofoam, about friendship and loss. Brace yourself for them, but if you can: strong recommendation from me. There’s more stories around the web, too, all conveniently linked from her website, leahning.com.

There’s a lot of parallels you can draw for this story: the othering, the self-fulfilling prophecy of pre-judgement, the way that empathy often sees you tarred with the same brush that the hateful use to paint their targets. The UK government’s ban on Palestine Action is a pretty obvious entry in that latter category; another parallel I’m thinking of right now is a local news story from just yesterday, that our new Regional Mayor wants to stop spending money on English lessons for immigrants, even as her party’s sole and entire pitch to the country is that immigrants don’t do enough to integrate. I suppose it would be short-sighted, self-defeating stupidity if that were really their position, but sadly I think it’s actually perfectly in line with their true belief, which is simply that they just don’t want immigration at all.

The story speaks to the emotions of all that perfectly well on its own, I think, and any attempt I make here to dissect it would only dilute its impact. I don’t know as there are answers for it, either: certainly the story isn’t arrogant enough to offer them, and instead has the good sense to just show the tragedy of the situation. Mind you, I was never accused of good sense, so here we go: the only way, the hardest way, is for the monsters to outnumber the hunters, certainly in the sense the story offers here where reaching out a hand is enough to make you one of “them”, in the heaviest air quotes you can imagine. Only when there are enough that the numbers can’t be ignored, when there has to be dialogue, when there can be a network of internal community support, when the hunters throwing themselves against that wall of solidarity are finally exhausted both individually and in their numbers.

Only by reaching out, over and over, to those struggling, suffering, ignored and deliberately misunderstood, othered and victimised, can they ever be protected at a systemic level. It will take stubbornness and energy and so much time, but the only way the hunters can win is if the rest of us surrender and let them.