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This was what he was made for.
This was why he lived.
Ryan took a deep breath, and then sprang out. Knife in hand, coated accordingly with the dust of his last twenty kills, every muscle tensed and ready.
Golden, golden eyes glowed back at him. A man standing unthreateningly, tall and a bit strange-looking, watching him with guarded interest.
Ryan was frozen, now. Why? He was so ready a moment ago. Why?
“The dust thing,” The demon in a human’s body nodded at the knife. “It’s a myth.”
Then the demon turned around and walked back into the woods.
Ryan only unfroze when he was completely alone.
Not a lingering trace of the demon that possessed Shane Madej.
:::
“Are you sure?” asked Eugene for the fourth time. Ryan sighed and downed the rest of his whiskey, slamming it down on the bar somewhat angrily. Drunk-angrily.
“Yes. I am sure.” Ryan had relayed his story to Eugene, who had told him about the thing about the dust of previously killed hell-spawn being the only thing that could kill a demon. With a few tweaks, of course, because the truth was very humiliating. “It didn’t die. Shane Madej is still walking around with a demon in his blood.”
Maybe it was kind of mean, though, because it was possible that the dust thing did actually work. It wasn’t like Ryan had tested it out.
“Maybe you got the number wrong,” Eugene argued. “It definitely could -”
“Have you met Ryan Bergara, Yang?” asked the bartender, sliding up to refill Ryan and top off Eugene’s beer. Steven Lim had the brightest personality Ryan had ever seen on a hunter, tufty silver hair and a soft smile that both puzzled and irritated the older, more worn-down hunters. “This is the guy who drinks holy water nine times a day, because nine is the strongest number before the system reverts back to ones and zeros, and makes sure that it’s nine ounces each time. Do you have to pee a lot?” Steven directed the question at Ryan, who shrugged.
“Yeah, but the holy water is necessary. Never can be -”
“- Too careful, we know,” Eugene said, amused, as the guy who, contradictingly, has gotten drunk and killed four poltergeists just because. “Hey, Lim, have you seen Ilnyckyj lately?”
“Who, Andrew?” Steven said way too quickly, feigning confusion terribly. “No, I mean. Nope.”
“In his home country,” Ryan explained to Eugene, who was now laughing out loud at Steven’s intense blush. “Ukraine’s got a vampire craze.”
“Hmm, at least it’s not Lithuania this time,” Eugene said, relenting and giving Steven a pat on the shoulder. “I spent, like, literal years there.”
“Hey, where’s Zack, huh?” Steven asked, finally blustering with a comeback but failing at being unkind and sounding genuinely inquisitive, which he probably was.
Eugene knew what he was asking immediately and made a face. “We broke up.”
“What?” said Steven and Ryan together, astonished. “When?”
“Like, last week. You guys were away. It wasn’t that big,” Eugene’s face didn’t match his tone. Ryan filed this away for later, for when they were drunker and he could bring it up to a looser Eugene. The man definitely had problems with talking about his problems.
Later came pretty soon, since Eugene switched from beer to straight whiskey, like Ryan, while Steven tried his best to feed them water and fries so as to not murder them with alcohol poisoning.
“I just, I just miss him a lot, and I want to hug him, but he’s with this new girl and we agreed we’re better off apart and friends, since we were messing with the whole quartet dynamic, and Keith and Ned think it’s better too, but…” Eugene was face-down on the bar, talking with his hands, while Ryan, slumped in his seat, gave him a consoling slap to the back.
“When Ying left, it was like that, too,” Steven told him sympathetically. “We clearly weren’t better together, and it’s like the whole thing about the idea about her being what I want instead of actually her, but… it was still, you know?” He sighed. “It gets better. You… move on.”
Ryan listened to all of this with blurry eyes and ears. The golden eyes were stuck in his brain, now that his careful compartmentalization had come crashing down. It was all he could think of. Shane Madej, possessed, looking like what a demon’s idea of a human was. Did the demon convolute his body? That would be so fucked up.
Golden eyes.
Dark woods.
Ryan sighed and knocked back his whatever glass, not even looking up to know that it’d just be refilled.
:::
“This is getting repetitive,” said the demon, arms crossed and leaned against a rather tall headstone. “Have you really been tracking me?”
“That’s disrespectful,” Ryan finally managed to say, nodding at the headstone, knife trembling in his white-knuckled hands. “And it’s only the second time.”
“I asked Julia and she said it’s fine,” the demon said, almost impatient. “Why do you keep trying? Everyone else has stopped trying. I’m not doing anything. You just know I exist, and that’s enough to want to kill me?”
Ryan’s mind was being pulled apart, the rules of his world shifting uncomfortably. The rules, being: If monster, then find, then kill. “I… “
“Kinda racist, don’t you think?” the demon said, something like mirth playing behind the amusement on Shane’s face. “What if I’m, like, a human-friendly demon?”
His eyes were golden as ever.
Madej had been tracked as a possessed man for at least a year now.
Ryan wondered whether the facial hair was the demon’s choice or Shane’s, stupidly, before he started forward with his vial of holy water, with a spray nozzle attached.
“That is the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” the demon said to him, backing away all the same. “Aren’t you hunters supposed to look cool and intimidating?”
Ryan was resolving to not respond, but hesitated as a thousand rebukes came spluttering indignantly to the top of his mind.
“Oh my gosh, you’re offended,” the demon said, delighted, as it watched him. “I can’t believe this. You guys really do care about your intimidation factors. Okay, okay - can you calm down with that? Fuck -” It winced when Ryan sprayed it and dodged, only hitting his elbow.
Ryan watched in deattached fascination as the skin turned red and blister-y.
“Fine, I’m moving again,” said the demon, mockingly stern, wagging a long finger at Ryan. “But you’ll track me again, and then we can do this again. That good for you?” It paused. “See, the joke is that it’s like we’re making lunch plans, but it’s not actually, cause you just wanna kill me-”
“I get it,” Ryan snapped. It paused, then a big grin split Shane’s face. Ryan forced himself to focus on lunging.
“You’re funny, I like you,” it said right before a puff of holy water mist dissipated where it had been standing.
Ryan was left standing and cursing to himself in an empty yard, early 4AM mist swirling around him. Thinking about golden eyes.