story often. Donnie only knew the highlights. I never sat him down and told him what happened, but he’d drawn the story out of me piecemeal over the last couple of months. Only Manuel knew the whole truth—presuming the old man was still alive and kicking down in Mexico. I hadn’t told the complete story to anyone else start-to-finish since.
It was one thing to tell someone the general facts. A monster abducted my wife on our honeymoon. That hurt plenty. The details were excruciating.
I took a deep breath and let my mind drift back to that night in Cabo.
Angi and I were on our honeymoon. Like newlyweds should be, we were beyond excited about our life together. I was a cop. She was a medical student. Everyone said she deserved better—and I never corrected them. They were right. I’d married up.
She was everything I’d ever hoped for in a partner. Beautiful, smart, and with a sense of humor that had a way of diffusing even the tensest of situations. I didn’t deserve her. I wasn’t a bad guy, but she could have married another future doctor, a lawyer maybe.
Instead, she chose me. A beat cop barely out of the academy.
We had a storybook wedding. None of the disaster stories you sometimes hear about on someone’s wedding day. No one lost any rings. No one was intoxicated—at least not before the wedding. No one spilled anything on Angi’s dress. No issues with her hair or makeup. No mother-in-law issues.
Everything went perfectly.
We were married in a Lutheran church. The pastor’s sermon was beautiful. We did all the things you’re supposed to do in an American wedding. My ten-year-old niece caught the bouquet. My best friend snagged the garter. We did all the traditional dances. Mother-son, father-daughter, couple’s first dance. We were nice with the cake. No one smashed it into anyone’s face. We shook our butts on the dance floor until the venue kicked us out.
As for the rest of our night? Use your imagination. It was incredible.
We flew to Cabo San Lucas first thing the next morning. If a demon had appeared to me and offered me the chance to stay on my honeymoon forever—at the low, low cost of my soul, of course—I might have considered it. What would I need an eternal soul for, anyway, if I could be with my soul-mate forever in paradise?
Not the most pious of thoughts, I admit. My faith was always a big part of my life. But like most people, while I believed demons existed, they were never more than a cringy idea. Something I was supposed to believe was lurking behind the scenes, dropping subtle temptations into my lap, pulling a few strings here or there to make life suck.
I guess you could say I believed in demons intellectually because they seemed real enough in the Bible. Practically speaking, though, I treated them like a fiction. Little more than a metaphor, or something I could blame, so I wouldn’t have to take full responsibility for the bad decisions I made.
The devil made me do it. Maybe I had a part of it. Sort of a 60/40 arrangement. I gave into temptation from time-to-time, sure, but it was that damn demon that knew all the strings to pull.
Total cop-out, really. Maybe demons had something to do with it, but if I listened to them, that was on me. Best fork it all over to God because he promised to forgive me if I had the balls to be honest about my failures.
Yeah, that would have been the brave thing to do. Holding onto all of that, and casting blame on some kind of supernatural entity, was a real weakness. I just didn’t see it that way. Maybe because I was young, or more probably, because I just hadn’t been through the kind of loss it would take to gain a mature spirituality.
If you think about it, the idea that sin and temptation were manifestations of spiritual warfare had a kind of manly appeal to it. It was a lot better than thinking I lacked self-control and discipline. I wasn’t weak. No, no, no. Couldn’t admit it if I was. I was at war with the Devil! I was a soldier for the Lord. And these sins of mine—well, I deserved a Purple Heart. The enemy wounded me, but I was still fighting.
Funny how easy it is to use a warped version of religion—not what I was taught, really, but what I chose to hear—to spin my failures into heroism. Yeah, I had wounds. But I thought of them as war wounds because I threw down with Satan himself.
Looking back at all of that now, how I used to see the universe, and how I played games with all that crap just to justify myself, to make myself feel a little better about my own problems… it was kind of ridiculous and pitiful.
Funny how talking about all of that stuff now is easier than talking about what really happened. I don’t know if I’m just stalling, but I think it all goes together. If you want to know why I am doing what I’m doing now, you have to know how what happened in Cabo changed me.
How part of me died that night in the hotel room. All because I went to get a little more ice.
Angi and I had a few glasses of champagne too many. We couldn’t let that bottle go to waste. Why not finish it off? No harm, no foul. We were honeymooners, after all.
Hangovers don’t take a vacation just because you’re honeymooning. So, I insisted we each drink a glass of ice water before bed. She tried to hold me there, told me she didn’t want me to leave her sight for even a second. It was sweet—but I knew we’d regret it if we didn’t hydrate.
I just didn’t want to waste a day in paradise with my love regretting how much we drank the night before. If a glass of ice water could help make tomorrow as magical as today…seemed like a no-brainer at the time.
But if I hadn’t left to get ice…
I kissed Angi on the cheek, grabbed the ice bucket, and stepped out of the room.
A small step, really. It’s crazy how much difference a single step can make in a person’s life. How a single step could change the course of history. But I wasn’t Neil Armstrong. I was just a guy, a cop, who thought he was the luckiest man ever, blessed to marry the most amazing woman in the world.
I filled the bucket. Another vacationer tried to make small talk at the ice machine. He was from Texas. Wanted to know where I was from. Los Angeles, I told him. He looked at me cynically—because, you know, if you’re from Texas, people from California are kind of like extraterrestrials. From another world, entirely.
At least, that’s what he assumed. We were probably a lot more alike than he knew—but I didn’t care enough to correct his biases. He was on his honeymoon, too. I got the impression he was trying to find an excuse for a moment away from his wife. All I wanted was to get back to mine.
I heard a scream. It was Angi. I knew her voice.
I dropped the ice at the stranger’s feet and ran. But I was too late.
The creature’s eyes were a fiery red, glowing like hot embers in the darkness. Its horns were twisted and jagged, reflecting the dim light from the hallway. Its tongue, forked and slithering, gave off an eerie luminescence.
The thing held Angi in one arm by the waist. She was out cold. I didn’t know how it happened. Had the monster injected her with a kind of venom, put her under hypnosis, or had she passed out from the sight of the creature?
How would you respond to something like that? I’d seen nothing even bordering on supernatural before. Demons, as I said, were little more than an idea that fit neatly into my religion. I believed ghosts might be real, but hadn’t seen one—and this thing was too corporeal to be a specter.
Seeing Angi in the grasp of that monstrous creature sent a surge of adrenaline through my veins, pushing me past the initial shock. My training kicked in, instincts honed from hours of repetition in the police academy. It was still fresh—but when we went to the mats, I was the best in my class.
I lunged after the monster, but the thing was like a brick. It didn’t even flinch at my strike—instead, with a single swipe, it tossed me across the room and into the minibar.
The creature hissed at me, its grip tightening on Angi’s unconscious form. “Who are you to intervene, mortal?” Its voice slithered through the air like a viper’s hiss, sending shivers down my spine. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, adrenaline coursing through me like a raging river.
“I’m her husband,” I growled, trying to sound braver than I felt. “Let her go.”
“Husband?” the monster laughed. “This one is not yours to claim.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I’ve considered a thousand possibilities over the years since. Did that mean she’d sold her soul to this thing at some point? Had she inherited a curse from some distant ancestor who’d gotten involved in things mortals never should?
“Like hell,” I muttered, but before I could get to my feet, the creature disappeared with my wife from our balcony. I stood at the edge of the balcony for what felt like minutes—it was probably only seconds—but I saw no evidence of where the thing took Angi.
I could barely walk. Something in my back went out when the monster tossed me across the room. But I waddled up and down the streets for hours, raving like a lunatic, while the local peddlers told me whatever they thought I’d want to hear. “Si, señor. I saw your wife and this thing you speak of. I tell you where they went. You like this, yes?” They didn’t know shit. They were just telling me whatever they thought my crazy ass wanted to hear, so I’d buy their crap. I bought every damned trinket they were selling, but no one had any genuine information.
Somehow, word of a crazed lunatic chasing a monster—me—reached Manuel. He found me later that night, drunk and passed out in an alley. He took me to his home. He lived by himself. His place was filled with all kinds of odd trinkets, things I didn’t know a damn thing about at the time. He also had weapons. Knives of every size and shape. Crossbows with bolts of silver, iron, and wood. He had swords you’d think more fitting of a Japanese samurai than an elderly Mexican man living alone.
He didn’t have anything normal people kept around. No pots or pans. Didn’t have a television. He didn’t even have a dresser for his clothes. He kept everything in garbage bags.
I wasn’t sure what to think—other than the surge of disappointment upon the realization that what happened the night before wasn’t a nightmare and that Angi was gone.
“Looking for your wife, amigo?” the man asked, his English broken but sufficient.
I said nothing. All I could figure—which he later confirmed—was that someone on the streets had heard me raving about the red-eyed and forked-tongued monster that stole my wife.
“Manuel Gonzalez.”
I tilted my head. “Huh?”
“Mi nombre es Manuel.”
“I don’t give a shit what your name is. I’m looking for my wife. Unless you know where she is, or what the hell took her, I’ll be on my way.”
Manuel chuckled, a deep rumble of amusement that seemed to echo in the small room. “Calm yourself, hombre. You think I’d bring you here if I didn’t know a thing or two about your predicament? Your wife...she’s not lost to you yet.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, my heart pounding with a mix of hope and skepticism. “What do you mean? Do you know where she is?”
Manuel’s gaze held a somber weight as he spoke. “The creature that took her. It’s no ordinary being.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“I am no Sherlock, amigo. I am a hunter.”
“I don’t give two shits what you are. Do you know what took Angi, or not?”
Manuel took a deep breath. “I do not know exactly. What you speak of, señor. I’ve only seen such a thing once and I cannot say what it was. But I hunt things like it. I will help you.”
I was incredulous. The creature tossed me across the room like I was a Raggedy Andy. This man was skin and bones, pushing seventy. “Not sure how much help you’ll be.”
“You will be my muscle, amigo.” He tapped his temple. “I will tell you where to go. Things like this, señor. Monsters. This is what I have done all my life.”
I snorted. “Monsters, eh?”
I don’t know why I didn’t want to believe him. I’d seen what I’d seen, but I didn’t want to admit the truth. Maybe someone had spiked my drink with a hallucinogenic. Maybe I’d straight up gone mad. I’d rather that be the case than think that my wife was in the hands of that…thing…
“Vampires are the biggest problem around here.” Manuel was speaking with such a matter-of-fact tone that it was surreal. Like he wasn’t just telling me that vampires were goddamn real. “If there’s anyone around here who knows what took your wife, that’s where I’d start.”
So that’s what we did. We hunted vampires. It proved a dead end—pun not intended. For months I was Manuel’s muscle, as he put it. I killed what he was too weak to deal with. Each time, though, he knew what to do. He told me about each creature’s weakness, how to dispatch with it. I got good at it, too.
But that didn’t last long. We weren’t getting any closer to finding what took Angi. I soon suspected he’d been using me to do what he no longer could—a way he could stay in the game even though he didn’t have the virility left to fight a Care Bear.
By the time Manuel told me the truth—that whatever took my wife was from a different dimension completely—I’d had enough. He didn’t know what the monster was—at least if he did, he didn’t tell me. He couldn’t make sense of what the monster told me—that Angi wasn’t mine to claim. But if the damned beast came from a different world, came and went through some kind of portal, it didn’t matter where I hunted it. What mattered was finding something—anything—that knew what it was and where I could find it.
Every time I tracked a monster, fueled by a desperate hope that it might lead me to the thing that took my wife, I pressed it for information. Nothing talked—so everything died.
That was my attitude. All monsters must die—until I find Angi again.
It was like a drug. The thrill of the kill provided a momentary solace—if only for a brief second—from the pain inside. Over the next few years, I felled more than a hundred creatures of different sorts. Vampires, werewolves, goblins, trans-dimensional what-the-fucks. Anything you might imagine, I’d slain.
But it wasn’t satisfying. I never gave up on Angi, but I also sensed I was changing. What kind of man would I be when I brought Angi home again? I wasn’t a cop any more. I was still dedicated to the hunt. At first I killed anything that wasn’t cataloged in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some Wikipedia monsters were fair game—because everything is on Wikipedia. I made a lot of mistakes. In my rage, innocent people got caught in the crossfire.
It took a toll. I wasn’t a murderer. I didn’t want to hurt people—I wanted to save people. But I was reckless, and people paid the price. Then, I discovered, not everything preternatural was as evil as I assumed. Some vampires exercised restraint—they minimized their casualties, and fought against greater evils than them. Most werewolves, though not all, were victims themselves. They were sick, but not innately evil.
I learned that some monsters weren’t really monsters at all.
Humans could be monsters, too—sometimes the worst sort. I’d sensed in my heart that’s what I was becoming. I had to make a change.
You see, it’s not what something is that makes them a monster. It’s what they do. So I resolved, maybe three years ago, to do things differently.
My views haven’t done me any favors in the hunter community. I’m the butt of more than a few jokes. No one mocks me to my face, of course. They respect my abilities even if they mock my code.
Truth is, they’re afraid of me. Most hunters aren’t much better than the things they kill. And if they’re the actual monsters—well, that makes them fair game. Especially if they know the truth.