Page 2 of Hunted on Halloween

“Mom, I’ll be here tomorrow night. Do you want to stay? We could have a sleepover.”

“Not this time, dear. I just need to know you’ll stay inside where you’re safe.”

“I swear.”

“Thank you. I brought your favorite meal for tomorrow night.”

“Thanks, Mom, you take care of me.” She reached out and kissed her.

***

“Hey!” Tia grabbed her phone. She was in the kitchen eating some of what her mom brought over.

“Girl, my mom just left. Have you heard the B.S. that’s being spouted around?” Brenna said.

Tia laughed; she couldn’t help it. Leave it to her best friend to say it like that.

“If your mom was like mine, it sounded convincing.”

She was. “Somehow, she made me pledge to stay home tomorrow night. You know I love Halloween. I was planning on hitting a couple of parties tomorrow.”

“You staying in?” Tia asked.

“I mean, I said I would. Shouldn’t these monsters be gone by midnight? Doesn’t the witching hour end by then?”

“How the heck am I supposed to know?” Tia kicked off one of her slippers. She was frustrated, and her mom added to it. “You ever have this feeling that something is about to happen?”

“You mean like this Halloween thing?”

“Darned if I know. I’ve been jittery for about a month now. I was going to ask my mom about it. You know she gets weird premonitions, but if you could have seen her. She was trying to act cool. Then she broke down, and then she was Mrs. Cool again. There was no way I was going to add to her burden. I guess I can ask the day after tomorrow.”

“This means we have to be home around four and spend the day in our places. Why don’t we go out tonight and celebrate Halloween a day early?”

“Perfect, I’ll meet you at our spot. I could use a drink.” Tia hung up, looking forward to spending some time with Brenna while they rated the men walking past.

***

Savage growls filled the air as the monsters around him got angrier. Tieran didn’t know why he kept his head every All Hallows'. He couldn’t imagine going berserk the way his people did.

“Hey, why are you hanging out up here?” Rylin asked.

Up here was the rooftop of the tallest building in the city of Montrea. No one knew what this city was originally called.

“Tomorrow is going to be ugly.” Tieran looked over at his people. The longer they stayed in this land that didn’t belong to them, the more they became lost, slavering beasts who forgot what it was like to have family and friends.

“These are your people,” Rylin said. “Hell, they are our people. How long do we have to wait, Tieran? I know you’re working to get our home back from the humans. The witches are working just as hard to keep it for themselves and to destroy us. Every year, they get closer to that one final coup de grâce. This is all we have left. Every thirty years, we can cross this malicious divide. They have set us up and kill as many as possible before we are pulled back to this hellhole at the witching hour.”

Tieran grunted; his friend and his second was right. They used that as proof that they were nothing but monsters. Soon, it wouldn’t matter because the way this world was imploding on itself, they would be dead. There were maybe three All Hallows' left after this one. Then they would fade away like a terrible memory.

It was times like these when he thought about his father sitting on the throne when an unknown human crossed the great divide. They had seemed so peaceful and wanted to negotiate with their people to get to know them. The humans and the monsters. That should have been his father’s first clue that humans weren’t altruistic or well-meaning.

There was no way he could have known that the humans had destroyed their world and were looking to take over his. Thewitches at one time may have been called scientists, but in their terror and greed, they started relying on black magic aligned with some scientific know-how.

Necrotechs was what the human witches called themselves. They leveled up because the witches of his people had never played with splitting the atom or discovering DNA or any of the other scientific mumbo jumbo that was prevalent in this world before they destroyed it. He looked out to see rotting buildings and small homes where he was sure things like stores used to be. They had done a lot to clean up this mess, but there were buildings that were toxic, and all they could do was place a bubble around them so what was in them couldn’t hurt the monsters that now lived there.

Now he was doing it — calling his people monsters. Today that noun was descriptive. Every thirty years on All Hallows' they became their base self. When it first happened, he’d been a little boy, too young to succumb to the dark magic the Necrotechs had used to curse his people. Maybe it was because he was so young that he was never affected, even as he grew.

He had no answers to those questions.

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