HELLSPAWN HUNTER

Chapter 1

# HELLSPAWN HUNTER

## Chapter 1: The Day the Gate Opened

The alarm sirens had been wailing for three minutes when Kael Draven realized he was probably going to die today.

He pressed his back against the concrete wall of Miller's Hardware Store, trying to make himself as small as possible while the thing that used to be Mrs. Henderson shuffled past the alley entrance. Her Sunday dress was torn and bloody, her gray hair matted with something that definitely wasn't hair gel, and her jaw had unhinged like a snake's to accommodate the rows of needle-sharp teeth that had sprouted from her gums.

"Well, shit," Kael whispered, because honestly, what else was there to say?

The Emergency Broadcasting System had called them "Extra-Dimensional Entities." The news anchors, in their final broadcast before the station went dark, had used clinical terms like "hostile biological anomalies" and "reality distortion events."

Kael preferred "hellspawn," because that's exactly what they looked like.

The thing that used to be Mrs. Henderson stopped sniffing the air. Her head swiveled toward the alley with an awful grinding sound, like rusty gears. One milky eye fixed on Kael's hiding spot.

"Oh, come on," he muttered. "You used to give me free candy on Halloween."

She opened her mouth and screamed—a sound like metal being torn apart. Then she charged.

Kael had exactly two seconds to realize that seventeen years of being the town's resident disappointment hadn't prepared him for this. No special training. No Hunter bloodline. No mysterious powers awakening at the perfect moment. Just a skinny kid with anger issues and a dead-end job at the gas station.

Mrs. Henderson's claws raked across his chest as he dove sideways, tearing through his work shirt like tissue paper. Pain exploded across his ribs. Blood splattered the alley wall.

"Kael!"

He looked up to see his neighbor, Mr. Chen, standing at the mouth of the alley with a shotgun. The old man's face was grim, his usually steady hands shaking.

"Don't move, son!"

The blast echoed off the brick walls. Mrs. Henderson's torso exploded in a shower of black ichor and writhing tentacles. But instead of falling, the remaining pieces began to crawl toward Kael with renewed purpose.

"What the hell?" Mr. Chen pumped another shell into the chamber.

"It's not working!" Kael scrambled backward, his sneakers slipping in the spreading pool of... whatever hellspawn bled. "They don't die like—"

The second shot took off what remained of Mrs. Henderson's head. The body finally stopped moving, but the damage was done. The sound of the shotgun had attracted attention. Lots of attention.

Howls and shrieks echoed from every direction. Windows shattered. Car alarms joined the cacophony. And beneath it all, a low thrumming sound that seemed to come from the earth itself.

"The Gate," Mr. Chen said, his voice barely audible over the chaos. "It's getting bigger."

Kael could see it now, rising above the rooftops like a wound in the sky. The thing that had appeared over Millbrook at exactly 3:47 PM, turning a quiet Tuesday into the end of the world. It pulsed with sickly purple light, and with each pulse, more nightmares poured out.

"We need to get to the evacuation center," Mr. Chen said, already moving. "Can you run?"

Kael looked down at his chest. The claw marks were deeper than he'd thought, and his shirt was soaked with blood. But he was alive, which was more than he could say for most of Millbrook.

"Yeah," he lied. "I can run."

They made it exactly two blocks before the pack found them.

Seven hellspawn, each one a different flavor of wrong. One looked like a giant spider made of human bones. Another resembled a melting businessman in a three-piece suit, except the suit was made of skin and the face kept shifting between different people Kael recognized. The third—

"Don't look at them too long," Mr. Chen warned. "It makes it worse."

The old man was right. The longer Kael stared, the more details his brain tried to process, and the more those details didn't make sense. His vision started to blur. His stomach churned.

"This way!" Mr. Chen grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the school. "The Hunter response team should be—"

The spider-thing landed on Mr. Chen's back with a wet crunch. The old man screamed once, then went silent as bone needles punched through his chest from behind.

Kael ran.

He ran through streets he'd known his whole life, past houses where he'd delivered newspapers and trick-or-treated and gotten his first kiss behind the Hendersons' rose bushes. But nothing looked familiar anymore. The hellspawn had changed everything, twisted reality into shapes that hurt to perceive.

The sky was the wrong color. The shadows moved independently of their sources. And the Gate—the Gate was growing.

By the time Kael reached the elementary school, his vision was graying at the edges and his legs felt like jelly. The claw marks on his chest had reopened, and he was leaving a trail of blood on the sidewalk.

The school was supposed to be safe. The emergency broadcast had said so. But as Kael stumbled through the front doors, he realized the evacuation center was nothing but corpses and silence.

"Hello?" His voice echoed in the empty hallway. "Is anyone—"

Something moved in the shadows at the far end of the corridor. Something big.

Kael's legs gave out. He slumped against the wall, pressing his hand to his chest. The blood was warm and sticky, and there was so much of it. Too much.

"Well," he said to the empty school, "this is about right."

The thing in the shadows was getting closer. Kael could hear it breathing—or maybe that was him. Hard to tell anymore.

He thought about his father, who'd died when Kael was twelve. Marcus Draven, who'd worked for some kind of private security company and traveled a lot. Who'd taught Kael to throw a punch and change a tire and never back down from a fight, even when you were outmatched.

"Especially when you're outmatched," Marcus had said. "That's when character shows."

Character. Right.

The thing stepped into the light, and Kael's sanity took another hit. It was shaped like a man, but it was wrong in every possible way. Too tall, too thin, with joints that bent in directions that didn't exist. Its face was a smooth expanse of pale flesh with a single eye in the center—an eye that held depths Kael couldn't fathom.

"Young one," it said, and its voice was like wind through a graveyard. "You are dying."

"Yeah," Kael managed. "I noticed."

"I can change that."

The thing knelt beside him, and Kael caught a whiff of something that smelled like ozone and burnt copper. Up close, he could see that its skin wasn't skin at all, but something that shifted and flowed like liquid metal.

"What are you?" Kael asked.

"I am what your kind would call a demon," it replied. "Though the term lacks nuance. I am Vex'thul, the Unbound. I am dying, just as you are."

"Then we're both screwed."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps we can help each other."

The demon's eye fixed on Kael's face. "I offer you a bargain, son of Marcus. Your life for my sanctuary. Your body for my refuge. Your strength for my knowledge."

Kael's vision was definitely graying now. The blood loss was getting to him. "What's... what's the catch?"

"The catch," Vex'thul said, "is that you will never be entirely human again. The catch is that you will see the world as it truly is—full of monsters wearing human faces. The catch is that you will become something your own kind may hunt."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you die here, alone, forgotten. Another casualty of the Gate War."

Kael closed his eyes. He thought about Mr. Chen, torn apart trying to save him. About Mrs. Henderson, transformed into something horrible. About his father, who'd died keeping secrets Kael was only now beginning to understand.

"If I do this," he said, "can I fight them? Can I make them pay?"

"Oh, young one," Vex'thul's voice carried something that might have been amusement. "You will do so much more than that. You will hunt them. You will become the thing they fear in the dark."

The demon extended one liquid metal hand. "Do we have an accord?"

Kael looked at the hand, then at the empty school around them, then at the growing Gate visible through the broken windows. The world had gone to hell. His neighbors were dead. His town was destroyed.

But he was still alive. Still angry. Still had a choice.

"Deal," he said, and took the demon's hand.

The pain was immediate and absolute. It felt like molten metal being poured into his veins, like his bones were being dissolved and reformed, like his very DNA was being rewritten one cell at a time. He screamed until his voice gave out, then kept screaming silently as his body convulsed and changed.

When it was over, Kael opened his eyes and saw the world with perfect clarity. He could see the energy patterns flowing through the walls. He could smell the fear-sweat of survivors hiding three blocks away. He could feel the pulse of the Gate like a second heartbeat.

And he could hear Vex'thul's voice in his head, as clear as his own thoughts.

*Welcome to the war, Kael Draven. Try not to die too quickly.*

Kael stood up, and the movement felt different—stronger, more fluid. The claw marks on his chest were gone, leaving only faint scars. His reflection in the broken window showed the same face, but his eyes now held flecks of silver that hadn't been there before.

"So," he said aloud, testing his voice. It sounded normal, but he could feel the power thrumming beneath the surface. "What now?"

*Now,* Vex'thul replied, *we go hunting.*

Outside, something roared. The Gate pulsed brighter, and more hellspawn poured into the world. But for the first time since the sirens started, Kael Draven smiled.

Let them come.