Template:MiniStory/8

Hunter is camping with his dad for most of the holidays. Claire wants to drag me out to do some training at night, but I get out of it for two reasons, first, I don’t want to go out in the night where I can’t run into the sun for protection and secondly, I seriously need to spend more time with Rose. She comes over almost every day, until the second Thursday when Claire has threatened that if I don’t come and do training with her she will personally kill me.

Training at night is scarier, and colder too. I don’t know why Claire insists on wearing midriff shirts when nobody is going to see her, unless the only clothes she owns are midriff tops and leather pants, although I’ve seen her at school mufti days wearing shirts which cover her abdomen, probably because the school rules require it. She’s walking and talking to me, explaining how not everything is as easy to kill as a vampire, but then she stops and tells me to stop moving. I follow her orders, then watch as she displays complete concentration, before turning around to face where I can now hear a rustle in the bushes. I tense up as Claire walks over, and then she picks it up, it’s a rabbit, but it’s hardly moving and we both struggle to find it’s heartbeat. Claire doesn’t know what to do with it until I look up and I see the same thing across the street that I saw on that morning show a few weeks ago, Sefira, the Deathbringer. I scream over at Claire to run, but she just looks at me dumbfounded, cradling the rabbit in her arms.

“Run!” I yell again, this time running over to her and towing her along by her arm as I sprint as far as we can before we’re both out of breath. I’m expecting Sefira to be standing right behind us as we collapse on the ground, but I look back to where we were standing and she’s walking out of the house behind the bushes with an empty quiver. I can’t move, and Claire just looks at me oddly, asking what happened, but we just sit where we are as the ambulance and police come whirring down the street, and later a stretcher with a blanket on top comes out. One odd thing we’ve noticed though, is that the rabbit is much livelier since Sefira left.

“What the hell was that about, Humphreys?” Claire asks once the chaos has dissipated. I start to wonder how many times she’s been standing right in front of Sefira without realising it.

“Sefira,” I say, still panting for breath, “she was there.” The way Claire looks at me I can tell she knows who I’m talking about.

“So you can,” she pauses, trying to collate it all, “you can see her.” I nod and she just takes in another breath. “Well this is just great, isn’t it?” she asks, sounding oddly non-patronising.

“What are we going to do with the rabbit?” I ask when she starts petting it.

“Well,” she begins, standing up as she speaks, “you and Hoppy seem to be good at detecting when murderous hell-beasts are nearby, so I think I’m gonna keep him.” I feel like saying something about what Sefira actually does, but I feel like Claire has a pretty good description of her, she just murdered that person, without any provocation, and then walked away as if nothing happened.

The next morning I’m watching the news when I find out about what happened. It was our town mayor, Stuart Barton and his representatives weren’t revealing anything about why he was at the house, just saying that he had a heart attack and that he would be dearly missed. Mayor Barton had always been one to attract controversy, with enough sexual harassment lawsuits thrown out the window that you’d have to wonder when he got time to actually do his job. I’d never really thought of Sefira doing anything other than just murdering innocent people – I mean, she killed an eight and a half year old kid, but I think back to the sleaze on the bus the other day and I wonder if that’s what my job is. I have to lure out the sleazes and the creeps and just leave them there for Sefira to do the dirty work. At least now I know where I can find another siren, and I decide to go visit her as soon as this mess has cleared up.

Hunter comes back on Saturday night and I spend the day with him on Sunday, with an even larger burn mark on his hand. I ask him about it, but he just says that he was trying to cook over an open fire and accidentally got his hand burnt. I can tell in his eyes that there’s something he’s not telling me, and when Anna wakes up, she takes a look at it and says that he must have been kept his hand in the fire for a while for it to burn that badly. Hunter shrugs it off and says that he’s just a really bad cook. Anna sits out on the couch with Byron watching an all-day marathon of some sitcom from the nineties so Hunter and I decide to stay out on the back deck, cuddling in the hammock as he tells me stories about his camping trip.

School comes back quicker than I want it to, but right now I’m just happy to keep my mind off Sefira and Mayor Barton and the little rabbit that got caught in the middle of it all. Claire officially adopted him too, announcing on Facebook with a gallery full of photos that she had decided to name him Hoppy, gaining a lot of criticism for her “original” name. I remember what Claire said about him being good at sensing hell-demons and I just hope she doesn’t plan on carrying him around with her when she goes hunting. Rose is practically dancing with joy at being able to stay in the loop of what’s happening once again, even if it does mean getting up early. The principal runs a welcome back assembly for the whole school and then we head off to our first class, which for me means PE. Hunter is in the grade above me, so he has a free period when I have PE and spends it sitting on the bleachers above the basketball court while I play against my class. Rose and I, as well as a few other girls in the class have always been disregarded as people who don’t put in effort in PE, but this time I’m determined to make an effort, and after accidentally elbowing Jackson Brown in the face I decide that it’s probably best if I don’t, so I stand next to Rose and she mocks me for my failed attempt at showing off.

Hunter drives me home after school, which feels unnecessary, seeing as it’s only a twenty minute walk if I dawdle, but I accept anyway. As he pulls into the driveway he says he has something to show me, but as soon as he notices Anna and Byron at the top of the driveway he nervously looks around and says that he’ll show me later. I wonder what he could want to show me so badly that he couldn’t show Anna, but I can’t question it now, so I kiss him goodbye then walk up the driveway where Anna and Byron are both trying to excitedly tell me that we’re going to this bed and breakfast out in the country. “We’re” in this case meaning the two of them, taking a weekend getaway in three weeks’ time. Byron tries to joke about me throwing a house party while they’re gone, but Anna and I both know the unlikeliness of that happening. I tell Rose about it, which is practically my way of telling her to spend the weekend over here, and she tells me that she’s downloaded this new movie which hasn’t even come out in America yet. I don’t know what the name of it is because she says it too fast when we’re talking, but it sounds sort of foreign.

As soon as I get to school on Tuesday, I search for Hunter and ask him what he wanted to show me yesterday, but he just smiles and says “Not here.” The burn mark on his hand looks bigger than it was before but I know he doesn’t like talking about them so I don’t mention it. I want to sit down and cuddle with him, but just as I start moving, the bell for first period rings and we’re forced our separate ways. I don’t see him again until after school on account of the fact that I volunteered to start tutoring year sevens at some point last term, so I have to spend first recess tracking up who it is I’m supposed to tutor, then second recess trying to find the organising teacher to try and get out of it to no avail, then at lunch, I spend the three quarters of an hour trying to find out what this little boy knows. He’s absolutely tiny and with every word he says he sounds like he’s bracing himself for me to yell at him. He can hardly choke out his name, Brendan, without sounding like he’s going to burst into tears. I try to explain to him that I’m only here to help him, and he tells me that he heard about me trying to get out of tutoring him, sounding so broken and depressed as he says it. I give him a few science questions, basic ones, and I watch as he answers them correctly, then looks up at me and rubs them out, telling me he doesn’t know how to do it. When he rushes out of the classroom at the end of lunch I’m almost in tears, seeing how terrified he was, and wondering how someone could be that scared of being wrong. What have people been teaching him to frighten him that much?

On Thursday night, Hunter has rugby training so I spend it with Claire again, because she tells me I have to do better than waiting for her to rescue me. We’re patrolling around the darker streets because Claire says that’s where people tend to get lost and we pass a few of them, the shoulders up, hands in pockets, staring at the ground sort of people who are too scared to even make eye contact, let alone verbal. She hears another rustle in the bushes and clutches for what I can assume is a stake in her duffle bag. I purposely wait until after the full moon to go hunting with Claire, but the next demon we encounter is nothing magical. Claire starts screaming as I’m grabbed from behind, the cold steel pressed against my head and a bony hand clamped across my mouth. He yells at her to shut up, his voice gruff and coarse, but he’s shaking as he threatens. He’s after drugs, I can tell. I’ve spent more than a few days in the emergency room as a kid watching drug addicts come in shaking. Claire pulls out a crossbow and he tells her not to bother, saying he’ll blow my brains out before she can even load it. For the first time ever, my instincts are telling me to sing, and I almost become possessed, singing in a sickly sweet voice,

Half a pound of tuppenny rice

Half a pound of treacle

He starts tensing up and digging his bony fingers into my cheek as I sing, but I continue anyway.

Mix it up and make it nice

''Pop! goes the weasel''

Claire starts screaming as he collapses to the ground, his arms seizing over his chest and his body falling into an awkward position where his legs have given out. I run over to her and I cover her mouth. We can’t be seen here, not like this. As I look up and away from the man on the ground I notice Sefira’s white gown in the distance with her platinum blonde hair resting halfway down it. Her quiver is empty, but I’m just as shaken as Claire. For the first time ever, I intentionally called Sefira to kill someone.