Chapter Fourteen: The First Game

  The night sky was only slightly cloudy, allowing the full moon and the bright stars to light up the inky black canvas above. With such pleasant weather conditions, it was no surprise that the first game of the season had been scheduled to hold tonight. By the twentieth hour of the day, Starlight Central Academy was just about ready to commence its first match against Providence University. The stands were packed with students from both colleges cheering and chanting their respective school mottos. There were of course several minor alterations between a few hotheads but those were quickly settled by selected security supervisors. There was still about a quarter of an hour until the match was to begin so the cheer squads of each team took to the fields to raise school spirits.

  Inside the main locker room for the home team, the coach of the Starlight Comets drilled the summarizations of the strategies and plays practiced over the past weeks into the heads of the burly boys in blue and silver. Coach Terrence Hoffman or 'Chief' as his players called him, was a man whose physique definitely told stories of a past run in heavy athletics. Although age and a slight increase in the lower abdomen had diminished that somewhat, his drive and commitment to the game had remained as strong as ever. It was no wonder then that the Comets had bagged four consecutive seasonal trophies and now they were returning to claim a fifth this year. 

  "There will be no half-assing things this year, you hear me boys?!" The man yelled loudly.

  "Sir yes sir!" Came the chorus.

  "Remember your positions! Remember your plays!" He turned to point at one of the larger players at the back, a tall boy with short dark hair. "Thompson you're the center of our defense! If that ball gets past you, we're through, you got that?!"

  "Ain't gonna happen coach," the boy replied confidently.

  "Excellent," Coach Terrence's drifted to the only white haired individual who wasn't in uniform in the room. "Shen, you sure you don't wanna play? 'Cause I've seen you in practice and you've got the skills to pay the bills."

  From where he leaned on the wall of metal lockers, Lee waved off the offer with a smirk. "Nah, I'm good coach. Besides," he reached out to pat Bryan Harrison on the shoulder. "I'm more of a planning guy. This here is your real star player. Right boys?!" 

  A chorus of appreciative shouts from the other players filled the large room. Hands ruffled Bryan's hair and slapped his padded back good-naturedly. 

  The coach raised his hands to calm them down. "Alright alright, settle down boys. You heard them Harrison. This whole game's counting on you. Don't let us down."

  "I'd say something but I think the trophy cabinet in your office more than says enough," Harrison said with a smile.

  The coach mirrored his grin with one of his own and clapped loudly. "That's right! So let's go win this!"

  Like a herd of excited bulls, the athletes all yelled "Starlight Comets" as one before stampeding their way out of the locker room and into the hallways. Lagging behind them lackadaisically, Lee made his way slowly towards the building's exit. 

  "That was a good thing to do."

  He turned to regard his coach out of the corner of his eyes and gave a little smile. "It's not really a matter of doing a good thing. Harrison's a good kid that's just had a lot of shit happen to him lately. He needs this far more than I do."

  Coach Terrence stared warmly at the young man before him. Despite Lee's slightly lean build, he knew it would be a terrible mistake to assume he had no strength in him. The memory was still clear to him. He had arrived unannounced one day at the academy field an hour before practice was set to begin and had walked into the scene of Lee absolutely bodying through the school team's best back liners. Like a shark seeking blood, the coach had gone after the Asian fervently to recruit him into the team and the many special athlete programs which were set apart for promising prodigies in the sport. Each and every single time without fail, Lee had declined, always directing the coach to focus on another skilled player on the team. 

  "Alright I'll stop pushing." Lee knew he was definitely going to ask the same thing next week but chose to simply accept it and move on. The moderately tall man clapped Lee on his shoulder twice and headed for the door. "But you better get your ass out there and cheer for your team."

  "You got it coach," Lee replied positively. "I'm just gonna wrap things up in here."

  The coach nodded and was gone within seconds. With a small chuckle at his own behavior, Lee set about organizing stuff in the locker room. It still surprised him just how smoothly he got along with these humans. Of all the Hunters save except maybe Jade, he was perhaps the most sociable member of their team. It made for great conversational skills when pursuing a particularly evasive target. Yet he knew that all of that was merely a façade, a false impression that his subconscious applied when he was exposed to such 'positive' emotions. 

  A true man was one knew the truth about himself and had come to terms with it. Lee agreed wholeheartedly with that phrase.

  Once he was done putting away everything, Lee went out and shut the half gate mesh doors. He took two steps into the hallway and paused. Then he closed his eyes and signed softly.

  "I can practically smell your fear, you know?"

  There was a little sound like a high pitched gasp in the empty hallway as a veil of bent light rays unfurled with a glimmer to reveal a shocked and slightly wary Mia Delgado.

  "H-how did you—"

  He tapped his nose lightly and smirked. "Werewolf senses remember? You'd be amazed by the amount of chemicals the body produces on a daily basis."

  The girl nodded a bit shakily. "Right, right...."

  "So, any major reason why you were stalking the boys' locker room? Or are you just a massive closet pervert?"

  She squeaked in embarrassed surprise and averted her gaze from his face and stammered out a rushed denial. Lee just chuckled, his hand moving to slide into his pocket when he caught sight of how the girl seemed to flinch slightly when his hand moved, her eyes carefully watching the moving limb. He noticed that she seemed far more guarded than he had ever seen her before. The cause for her strange behavior was obvious, at least to Lee. He could smell the lingering ether at her hands and wondered if the girl even knew that her mind had already subconsciously prepared her for a fight.

  "But seriously, why did you come here?" He asked.

  Mia took a couple of deep breaths to ground herself before she opened her mouth to ask him a question. "Did you really do it?"

  Lee gave her a weird look. "Did I do what?"

  "1988. Those vampires in London..." Her voice had already begun to waver, as if she had already known what he would say.

  Lee made an oh sound as he finally realized what the witch was talking about. "I remember that year," he said wistfully. "We had a lot of successful hunts that year. Gargoyles, demons and their idiotic rogue summoners, a whole lot of witches and so, so many vampires. But since you mentioned London, I'm guessing you're asking about The Four Months of Blood Rain."

  Her hand flew to her mouth and she stepped back unconsciously from the grinning Hunter. "Oh my god... All those people... You killed them..."

  Lee merely rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Oh please. They were vampires, not people. Bloodthirsty creatures of the night who had terrorized the city of London for decades."

  "Not all of them!" Mia yelled suddenly at him, causing a brief flicker of surprise to cross his features before it returned to his normal sickeningly amused expression. "There were innocent ones among them. Children who had not probably ever even touched their first human. Hundreds of thousands of them were murdered brutally..."

  Lee cut her off with a derisive snort. "See this is why I never liked people like you."

  Mia reeled back as if struck. "People like me?"

  "The young ones that everyone wants to protect. The naive little kids who think this world is a fairytale. The ones who always try to understand and make sense of everything. Who always try to find the good in people when sometimes it was never there!"

  Lee was yelling now but he couldn't care less. He had had just about enough of this.

  Caught off guard by the sudden outburst from the normally laid back Hunter, Mia could barely stammer out a defence. "I-I don't..."

  "Isn't that what you're trying to do?" Lee pressed on. "Getting close to Michael, to the rest of the Hunters? Trying to see what makes us tick, to understand why we do the things we do? So you can 'change' us for the 'better'? Even when you're all but lying to our face?"

  In that second, the blood drained from Mia's face as she considered the chances of the man before having deduced what had been the real intention behind the Arcane Circle placing her under Michael's care. But her flash of fear only lasted a moment before she dismissed it. While it was obvious now that he was far more intelligent and observant than she had pegged him to be, there was no way Lee could have figured that out. Otherwise, knowing the kind of person he was now, she would have been dead the moment he discovered her in the hallway. 

  Mia took a step back not out of fear this time but to put some space between her and the looming figure of the annoyed Asian. "You know what? You're right. I may be young and ignorant and naive. I might have this delusion that maybe one day, everything will work out and no one would have to kill or hunt down each other. But at least I can acknowledge my own fantasies and try my best to bring them to reality, no matter how delusional they may seem. 

  "I became friends with Michael because unlike you or Whitney or Veronica, I never had someone willing to go so far to look after me. That's why I try so hard to meet up with the rest of my peers. Because I know that though they may not show it to my face, everyone is either waiting for me to prove myself or waiting for me to fail completely."

  "And isn't that the end of the world for you?" Lee taunted scornfully. "You think that massacre was cruel don't you? You think that it was the work of an insane madman with way too much power. And yet you refuse to associate that evil picture with the kind and caring image you've come to regard Michael with."

  He laughed at her. It was a short one, filled with so much repressed pain and hate that it nearly made her flinch. "Well, at least that's one thing you and I have in common. When we arrived in London in 1988, it was a thriving buzz of prosperity, on her surface that is. But every night, those same vampires you called 'innocent' would kidnap dozens of people and throw them into the Epping Forest where they would proceed to hunt them like wolves on blind sheep. The corrupt city officials, held under the compulsion of those same creatures, turned a blind eye to every report that came their way."

  He leaned closer to Mia whose heart was beating so loudly that she could almost hear it over the raucous of the crowds outside the building. "If it were up to Michael, the entire city of London would have erased in one night. Instead I convinced him to let me take care of it.

  "Do not assume that I did it out of the kindness of my heart or any sappy shit like that. The main thing is, if he had wiped out the entire city, where was the fun in that? By letting me do things my way, everybody won. The humans got to live, Michael didn't have to bear such indignities happening in his presence and I got to spend four beautiful months hunting, catching and slaughtering every vampire in London."

  Backing up once again to prevent her heart from leaping out of her chest, Mia tried to put up a brave front to hide the fact that his words had shaken her to the core. "I won't claim to know what really happens inside your heads, but out of all the Hunters, you truly are the one I have never been able to understand even a little bit. You're so completely unreserved that it makes it impossible for you not to draw attention. Yet there's this feeling everyone gets whenever they're around you. It's as if they're sitting right next to a time bomb and no one knows who has the remote detonator. Every one approaches you but they're always on guard around you. You're nice and helpful one second, then you're spiteful and arrogant as hell the next. You save someone's life in one minute and in the next they're terrified thinking you're about to tear their throats out yourself. You say you're protecting us but you act like you just want to kill us—"

  "I'm just gonna stop you right there," Lee interrupted with a sly grin. "Do you really believe that? Do you really think I 'act' like I want to kill you?" He shook his head slowly in a cruel laughter. "Oh you naive little witch, had my alpha himself not ordered me to stay my hand, neither you nor that arrogant princess would have walked out of that forest this morning."

  A heavy pressure descended on Mia's shoulders, pinning her in place completely to the point that she could not even breath any more. Her throat suddenly felt extremely constricted and she struggled to even move her eyes. But when she finally shifted her gaze to meet that of the Hunters as he slowly leaned to whisper in her ear just like he had earlier in the day, she was stunned to see his eyes burning bright crimson.

  "In fact, be grateful that he specifically told me not to harm a hair on your pretty little head." His breath was warm on her skin but she could feel shivers run up and down her spine. "I would love nothing more than to plunge my heart into your chest so deep that you would feel my fingers squeezing around your squishy heart until it pops like a balloon."

  It would be close to twenty minutes later before Mia regained full control of the locomotive parts of her body when Veronica would come down to the left wing of the building looking for her, having had a precognitive ominous feeling regarding the young witch. When asked why she had been standing petrified in the hallway of the boys' locker room, Mia had dismissed it with a shaky wave and an unsteady smile that all was well. But false assurances could not fool a vampire's senses. Veronica Von Reize could still perceive the lingering scent of that despicable Hunter and wondered just what horrible thing he had done to the poor girl.