Z. Callen

The good sense to leave his place after her encounter with Sawyer King had been, perhaps, the singular thing in her favor today. Better to hide away in the confines of her own home than risk yet another interaction with a less friendly face. Heavy footfalls signaled the moment of truth and she met him at the kitchen holding less enthusiasm and mischievous intention than anticipated. “—Sawyer saw me.” Spitting the truth out ineloquently had always been their best method of communication. “At your place. He came over and I was still there…” @zcallxn

“Incredible. I come back to this hellhole right when everything’s literally on fire. The gypsy woman didn’t mention this in my last palm reading.”

“Do I look like I know what’s going on?” Kevin demanded, keeping his feet well off the floor. Apparently the only thing worse than being regular sick, was being imp sick. He was bad enough with his abilities as it was, this was a curveball he really didn’t need.

“Please just stop talking a moment. I’m famished and right now I feel like I could eat an entire town. I need some focus…” Raquelle’s eyes had darkened and seemed to make her look paler than usual. She had only finished eating an hour ago and yet she still felt like she was going to d i e of hunger if she didn’t guzzle twelve gallons of blood right that moment.

“Deal with it, before I do.” It was as sijmple a threat as any, Zeke not at all willing to stand by all much longer and watch her lose her shit, one way or another.

          “You’re the dumb ass shooting off a gun in fuckin’ public. Can’t you live your double life in private?”

The last thing Gisele had expected to find while ( snooping ) wandering around Salem’s Point was a battlefield. The stench of blood hung heavy in the air, and as she witnessed the last of the carnage, it took every ounce of her will power to not retch into the bushes she had ducked behind. What the hell had she just stumbled upon? Silently, Gisele cursed herself for not being quieter — she had just wasted an opportunity to film the entire…”exchange” on her phone. “And what’re you gonna do to me? Plant a bullet in my chest and bury me six feet deep?” Plan A: talk and buy time to think of a Plan B. Making plans had always been a weakness of hers.

He cast nothing more than a quick glance in the womans direction, enough to note that she wasn’t a local – Salem’s Point had been his home for years, no matter how many he’d been gone in the years between. Faces didn’t change, and newcomers only came, one by one, in line for their slaughter. “No.” His answer was blunt, though lacked a slight mock that it might have months before hand, “I wouldn’t bother to fucking bury you.”

It was hard not to hear the gunshot in the forest, ringing in his ears as he halted in his tracks. He’d been out on a run, intending to let off some of the stress weighing on his shoulders. The loss of the Gautier manor, the body count piling up in the small town, and the witch still capable of casting whatever spell she wanted was causing him more stress than he needed to deal with. So when he came upon the hunter, all too familiar for bringing the demise of werewolves within the outer perimeters of the town, Roman quite nearly snapped. There were no words from him, instead he was rushing forward, grabbing Zeke by the shoulders before he was bringing him to the ground. “And you picked the wrong night to kill a wolf.”

There would always be a sign, a shift in the air whenever an Original was around – much less one that was utterly pissed. The noted presence of the beta didn’t bother him, not like so many assumed it should. Unlike so many hunters before him, Zeke knew his own strengths and weaknesses, knew when to back down from a fight; but the fact of the matter was, he was quite literally built to go up against the oldest and strongest of beings. A hunters blessing placed them a cut above the rest, leveled the playing field and made this all the more sweeter when one of them snapped. The full force of Roman caught him, dragging both men to the ground, and just as he’d been trained over and over, he shirked from within the others hold, rolling away, only to rise enough to bring his knee up into the jaw of the other, “Maybe you should teach your mutts that it’s not fucking open season on humans.”

Cassius wagged his finger like he was speaking to a child. “So I see you haven’t missed the sudden string of fires Zeke. I suppose I shouldn’t have put that past your intelligence. But here’s a surprise for you, I have absolutely nothing to do with them Callen.” 

Zeke Callen. Hunter. Human. A man Cassius detested so much that death seemed too simple an answer. Cassius considered putting a bullet through him - nowhere fatal, just for the fun of it, but even the vampire knew that wouldn’t truly satisfy. He wanted to draw out the pain for this one in particular. So, instead, out came his pocket knife which Cassius opened with all the finesse of a butterfly blade. The gift of vampirism made him fast and the blessing of being an original meant he was unkillable. Till the moment the cold hands of the reaper closed themselves around the neck of this human, Cassius would dangle these two truths in front of him.

Eyes glinted something dark at the way the human spoke to him. Few other than his siblings could get away with talking to him as such and this scum of the earth was no where close to being one.

Cassius took a few steps forward, “Anyway, stop thinking about my panties and here –”

Like lightning, he struck. His hand with the blade lunged forward, let the knife sink into the other’s skin. Cassius left it there, embedded right below the man’s right clavicle. He continued, lightly, airly, as if nothing had happened.  

“Occupy yourself with that for a moment while I take a quick look around.”

He was already taking strides across the clearing. To inspect the ash. He called out to Callen casually.

“I’d find a witch too to heal that if I were you. Or hmmm - you probably prefer the old fashioned way don’t you? You humans - so goddamn fragile.”

Every original irked him, he saw no difference between any of the families. The details of their immortality meant nothing to him, he’d been in this war far too long for something so trivial to be of any worry. Nor every war could be won, and perhaps their battle with the Original families would be one of those, he had no intention of allowing them to remain such a way, eventually, something would give, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t there to witness the downfall of one such Cassius Valentine.  A perpetual thorn in his side, but so blinded by what he was to pay any real mind to who or what Zeke was, neither immortal nor unkillable, the hunter had gone against his fair share of immortals, and yet here he stood. While his blessing played a huge part in it, there was a much buried belief that his own resilience and aptitude for adaptation over the years had led him to lead a much more successful hunting career than so many fool hearty morons.  The glint of silver was nothing new to him, and while many might have missed it in the glimmer of moonlight, Zeke was all too trained of the eye after years of training, though the speed of a vampire blurred the lines of the weapon itself until it plunged into his shoulder. A long drawn out hiss shaping the hunters lips to a snarl as one hand curled around the hilt, while another dipped almost instinctively to the gun at his hip.  Pain was relative. People felt it – everyone felt it, the emotion that came with it was usually the downfall of those inflicted physically, and all too early in life, Zeke had learned how to deter himself from falling to that kind of pain. It hurt, like a fucking bitch, but a knife wound was naught within the bigger picture. “Don’t need a witch for shit.” He noted, as if the original had so easily forgotten that the playing field between the two species were not all that different. Bar the fangs, immortality and perhaps a fraction difference in speed, Zeke wasn’t all that disadvantaged.  Drawing the knife from within his flesh, it took only a moment before sinew, muscle and skin began to knit itself back together. “Spot fires aren’t nearly dramatic enough for me to think you had anything to do with this shit.” He said through grit teeth, toying with the weapon only to wipe his own blood from its edges. “Next fucking question, and don’t fucking quote me on this later, but I don’t suppose you and your fucking goon squad do know what’s going on, do you?”

He did not expect someone to be there other than him him. Cassius’s eyes narrowed as he approached the scene of the grime. The red tape was long gone and so were the victims. The police department had collected all the information they’d needed from the location, but Cassius found himself returning if simply to run through the events one more time to see if he’d missed anything. A mental exercise if nothing else. He’d expected some quite and solitary, the last thing he’d expected was to see anyone at this time. 

He finally spoke up when they were close enough for him to hear them. His tone was cool.

“ I do hope you’re not fucking with my crime scene.”

The undeniable sneer that flit across darkened features seemed almost a permanent fixture in the presence of any original, but Cassius Valentine would always rub him the wrong way. “You fucking crime scene is a load of shit and you fucking know it.” Because the chances were, in this town, that the culprits were either his own kind, leeches without an ounce of self control, or his better counterpart, a wolf. Either way, the crime scene and any investigation into it would do nothing for the victims; because who could rightly tell anyone their family were gone because of some fairytale creature that didn’t really exist. “Untwist your fucking panties, Valentine.” 

Yes, she had seen the posters – missing what a stupid word to put over someone’s photo. Not to mention that she was positive that people realized she was missing months later, so fuck them and their fake concern. Natalie was back in Salem – and god did she hate it. But alas there was nothing else to do but embrace the fuckingness that came into this town. Grabbing her microwave plate she sat down on one of the benches in front of the station, “What? you’ve never seen anyone eat on their lunch break?” 

                      “Holy shit.” Bishop stammered while backing away from the person who had caught him in a daze outside the police station. “ —- You’re kinda ninja quiet, you know that?” 

“I’m gone for a week and the whole town goes to shit.” Sometimes Clyde thought he had seen it all but then stuff like this happened. Harming his family. Something that wasn’t okay with him. Rage was bubbling inside his chest but he kept it below the surface until he could get out of town and let out some anger. “What did you guys do open the gates of hell?” He was kidding, well partially. Everyone was calling it hellfire but he wasn’t sure what he believed at this point.

After failing to get her landlord on the phone she hung up and took a glance her. She had been twenty dollars short off her rent – twenty bucks, and yet her landlord managed to lock her out till she got that money. Though this would be a great time to call Kali or Derek, she knew she couldn’t because of the lovely event that had taken over the ball. “Do you know of any local motels? That you know don’t charge a fee? Like a unicorn motel.”

Bolting upright in the bedsheets with an audible gasp, she clutched a slender palm to her chest in an attempt to slow the volatile thrumming of her heart as it threatened to overwhelm her ribcage. The nightmares had lessened significantly as of late and the majority of that she attributed to the presence of a warm bodied security blanket within arm’s reach. Even without the glock on the nightstand, his entire personhood was forever her sense of safety. Something about the Gautier mansion burning down the previous night triggered a sort of relapse, which she detected instantly as her free hand quivered before knotting itself in dark tresses. It seemed as though the lingering scent of smoke still clung to the fabric draped over two figures, permeating the air in the room until she felt paralyzed by the invisible torment— unable to breathe without ingesting faded memories. Pulling both knees to her chest as she always did when discomfort and emotional strain found her in life, Lenny attempted to exhale through her unwelcome flashback until the other side of the mattress shifted. @zcallxn