Wings and Shadowthief by May Sage
The Hunter
The witch pissed him off like no one ever had. She shouldn’t be here, in the middle of a smoky battlefield, her hands stained red with the blood of friends and foes alike. She shouldn’t put herself in danger for anyone, let alone that drowsy mutt on the floor.
The creature inside Jack sneered.
He didn’t get this very often. Control over the body he shared with Jack. Nice, responsible, fair Jack, the leader, the heir of the huntsmen.
What a joke.
Jack was a lie, a mirage, and a coward. The creature despised him.
The creature despised almost everyone, but not her. Not that witch.
“I’m fine,” she told him, lifting her chin.
She dared lie to him, like he was an inconsequential pup she could control with pretty words. Like he was Jack.
The creature wasn’t Jack. He liked to call himself Hunter.
Dragging the length of his wings behind him took no effort. Jack hated the wings, hated that they had a will of their own. Hunter knew their language, their desires and their warnings. He could understand each flicker like they were whispers.
Hunter closed the distance separating him from the appealing little witch until he was close enough to breathe in her warm scent over the smell of burning wood, blood and corpses.
“Don’t lie to me, angel. You won’t like the consequences.” He meant every word. He never lied. He wasn’t Jack.
Defiance clouded the depths of her dark eyes, meeting his steel resolve with her iron will, challenging him like she had a right to. “Look, I don’t know what existential crisis you’re going through, and I don’t care.” This witch had a backbone. “Can we go back to pretending we don’t know each other?”
Jack was the pretender. Hunter never ignored her, although come to think of it, he hadn’t spoken to her until today either. He hadn’t needed to. She’d been efficient enough at taking care of herself. “You’re too tired to tackle wounded beasts.”
“So I should, what, let them die?”
Hunter shrugged. That option sounded reasonable to him. He knew Jack might have another opinion, but he couldn’t pretend to care.
There were few things Hunter cared for—and even fewer people. A handful of individuals sharing up to a quarter of his blood, some huntsmen who’d showed enough loyalty to retain some of his attention, and strangely enough, a vampire or two that he’d come to respect over the last few months.
He’d never liked the vampire race as a whole. They were too arrogant for a breed that objectively was the result of ingesting a divine drop of blood. According to them, they could rule Earth because of that legacy.
Jack Hunter was a half god, and he’d never be conceited enough to consider himself a candidate for world domination, though his pedigree was superior to any bloodsucker’s. Besides, ruling an entire planet filled with self-important, destructive, egocentric souls sounded way too masochistic for his taste.
Yet, he felt protective over some of them. Protective enough to still be here, although he didn’t have a logical reason to linger in Oldcrest. Jack did. Hunter? Not so much.
He could understand that Gwen was as protective over Oldcrest, for her own reasons. Still… “You’re no use to anyone dead.”
She rolled her eyes, and had the gall to turn her back, walking away from him without another word.
She’d dismissed him like she was queen and he, a peasant.
It shouldn’t have been this hot.
Amused, Hunter trailed after her. He might as well stick around for the next feral beast she planned to attack.
As they walked over corpses, he watched her scan each and every one of them, her eyes filling with more compassion than he possessed in his entire body. Even Jack wasn’t that affected by death. Perhaps because they were both used to it.
Jack Hunter was a huntsman, son of the leader of their order. He’d been born into death. He’s seen his first corpse while attached to his mother’s breast, and had killed his first enemy by age five. Back then, he’d just been one person—one whole, sane soul.
Then puberty had hit. It was a bitch for everyone, but most sups accessed some of their powers around that age. Born vampires got murdery, shifters got furry, witches got magicky. Naturally, Jack got godly.
That was to be expected, given his linage. His father was a pure-blooded Enlightened—one of the divine entities who’d shaped the development of humanity, along with most mortal races. Because Enik was considered weak among his divine peers, everyone had assumed that Jack would be a little stronger than a huntsman, but nothing to be worried about.
They’d been wrong. He was a lot stronger than planned—a lot stronger than his father had ever been.
The huntsmen and their allies hadn’t been able to cope with his power, not when he could lash out in the middle of the night and destroy entire buildings before he’d turned thirteen. If Enik had still been in touch with any of his friends, he would have asked for help, but pairing up with Becca Hunter had cost him most of his acquaintances, and all his family. Despite their estrangement, Hunter remembered hearing that his parents reached out to Enik’s family for help. None came.
In their wisdom, his parents had a witch clan lock his divine power away. They sealed it under as many spells as they could, in order to allow Jack to have a normal life.
It worked.
For a time.
Hunter had no clue why they hadn’t expected it, but when he hit twenty-five, the age of majority as far as the Enlightened were concerned, his already devastating powers increased exponentially.
The shields still in place meant that Jack remained in control, and didn’t gain access to most of his abilities, but they were still there, watching, waiting.
Hunter couldn’t exactly pinpoint the moment where he’d grown a consciousness. All he knew was that one day, he’d awoken, and he’d been something entirely different from Jack.
Typically, Jack only let him take over during battles he couldn’t win with his usual skillset—or sometimes in his unguarded sleep.
Hunter always remembered everything, every word Jack uttered, every dream and nightmare.
Jack never knew what Hunter was up to, probably because of the way the shields had been designed.
It wasn’t healthy, and it couldn’t go on forever. Hunter knew enough of magic—thanks to the teachings Jack ignored, stupidly not believing they were applicable to himself—to see the end coming. They were going to explode. They were going to destroy everything in their path, unless Jack, the entity in charge of this body, woke the fuck up and learned to control it.
Another problem for another time. For now, the only thing that mattered was to keep that pretty little witch safe from her own bleeding heart.