#hunter buckleys

"In a minute."

Their footsteps headed down the hall. The floor creaked as they came closer and closer, and Buck closed his eyes, cursing the fact that he hadn't thought to shut the damn closet door behind him. He was mostly hidden—thank fuck for the owner of this house having a lot of clothes, apparently—but Hen and Karen weren't stupid. Quite the opposite, in fact; they were some of the smartest people he'd ever met.

Unfortunately, that frequently led to Buck getting in trouble, and tonight was likely not going to be any different.

The door to the bedroom opened, and Buck tried to shrink back even farther. One of them moved farther into the room, then paused, and he began to hope they would move on, but—

The closet door blew open in a gust of wind, clothing flying off the hangers, and he came face to face with Karen Wilson.

"Buckley."

"Hey, ladies," he said, pasting on a smile that probably looked as fake as it felt. "Fancy seeing you here. That feels a little like cheating, though," he added, eyeing the glowing pendulum dangling from Karen's hand, pointing right at him.

"I should've known you two would be involved in this bullshit," Hen called from across the room. "Where's your better half, Buckaroo?"

"That Buckaroo shit wasn't cute when I was ten, it's definitely not cute now that I'm pushing thirty."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Buck sighed.

"We think this might be related to the demon," he admitted, cringing at the look of pity that they exchanged. "Same weather patterns as before our fire. We think the mom was...like me. The ages match up, and she's from Pennsylvania too."

"Oh, Buck—"

"Don't oh, Buck, me," he snapped. "I'm not a kid, I'm a goddamn hunter, and two people are dead and a kid is missing because I couldn't kill this asshole a year ago."

As soon as he stepped into the hall, the back of his neck prickled into goosebumps, and his breath billowed out in front of him like fog. The hall was dimly lit by a weird, reddish glow, which he followed towards the living room, the temperature dropping as he got closer.

The pictures Maddie had taken truly didn’t do the altar justice; it was huge. All the furniture had been shoved to the edges of the room, some right into the kitchen, and still the very edges of the circle were overlapped by chair and table legs in some places. The circle was etched right into the laminate boards, then filled in with a dark substance Buck hoped to god was paint.

He scraped up a sample anyway.

Right in the middle of the circle was a patch of bare floor, shaped suspiciously like a person, and around that were several large…cracks, was the only word coming to Buck’s mind now. He couldn’t tell how deep they were, but they were the source of the glow illuminating the room, which hadn’t been obvious in Maddie’s photos, taken through the window in the daylight. His initial thought was that they looked like scabs, and when he grabbed a spatula from the kitchen and poked at the weird glowing mass, it dimpled and moved much like skin would. He left it alone, fighting down a gag.

Eager to get out of there, he took photos of all the runes and symbols, in order, hoping he could decode them later. Heading back toward the hall, he froze when he heard tires crunching on the gravel outside, headlights sliding through the gaps in the curtains and landing directly on his face.