Shadow Worlds and Chaos Lights

THE SUN shone through the window and illuminated the room with its warm light.

Owain Anaya, hunter of the first degree and the commander of the Liberty Creek Filial of Bellatores Luminis sat behind his great mahogany desk and went through some reports. His hair, that had the deep colour of golden chestnut, was pulled back into a ponytail to keep it from falling down into his face as he was reading, and his brown eyes were partially hidden behind a pair of reading glasses that made him look much older than his 23 years, the youngest commander ever in the history of Bellatores Luminis.

Owain wasn't vain, and he didn't care if the glasses made him look old or not, as long as they did their job. Well, to be frank, he really wasn't sure they did anything at all, but at least they didn't make things worse. The glasses weren't even his idea to begin with, but something the doctor had suggested he should try when Owain, during his yearly check-up at the hospital, had mentioned his constant migraine attacks.

The doctor had asked about his job and his lifestyle, and since Owain couldn't tell the truth, which was that he spent his days doing research and hunting and killing vampires together with some friends, he had instead settled for a half-truth and said that he had a really stressful desk job.

This had led the good doctor to the conclusion that since there had been nothing physically wrong with young Mr. Anaya, on the contrary he was in excellent shape, the migraines probably were caused by him straining his eyes too much during work and therefore, using reading glasses combined with healthy 15-minute-breaks once in a while might be a good thing for him.

So Owain had thought that it was worth a try and wore them like a good patient, following the doctor's orders even though he was quite sure that it was the nature of his work and not the way he was working that caused the migraines.

He sighed and let his gaze sweep over the enormous office. Once this house had been a regular apartment building with four flats on every floor, but the Bellatores Luminis had bought the whole house and transformed it into their headquarters. The whole top floor had been turned into one big office, and on the floors below were living quarters for the hunters and their staff of servants, several gym and training areas, a weapon storage room and the basement, which once had been used as a storeroom, was now transformed into cells.

Owain really didn't like it; in fact, it made him feel agoraphobic. It made him feel as if he were a king in front of a court, and it only served as a constant reminder that he was more important than he actually wanted to be – a fearless leader for a group of hunters.

His eyes fell on the painting of the four founders of the Bellatores Luminis that hung on the wall closest to him. The artist had painted the four standing on a green hill, completely illuminated by heavenly rays; the hunters had golden coronas around their heads to emphasize their holiness, and all of them were ready to fight. The two knights, Marcus and Edon, were dressed in shiny armour with swords drawn, the young Henry, still only a squire, armed with sharp pointed stakes, and Maria, Marcus' sister, a nun, was shooting arrows soaked in holy water from a crossbow.

A dark valley was painted below them, and the area was crowded with all sorts of beings that symbolised the evil the hunters were up against. There were tiny imps with razor-sharp claws and trolls as big as buildings, vampires with fangs dripping with blood and witches having orgies with horned demons. Hordes of succubi and incubi, seductive and breathtakingly beautiful reached for the hunters to lure them into temptation; there were animals with human heads, humans with animal heads, fallen angels with wings as black as the midnight sky, and all kinds of devious minions. Still not a trace of fear could be seen on the four's faces as they fought the forces of the devil, only determination and joy of doing God's will.

It looked so easy, but Owain knew it wasn't. The artist had gotten it all wrong. It wasn't a joyful job; it was messy and gory and horrible, not at all a flawless victory against evil, like something taken from a movie, where the hero always wins. No, in real life good people got injured or even killed.

Owain's own parents had, as the official report had stated, died in the line of duty five years ago, leaving Owain to take care of his then-14-year-old brother, not an easy task to do when he hardly had been a grown up himself, but he had done it. It was only after he got older that he first learned the whole truth about his parent's death; that they had been captured and turned into vampires and then sent back to the headquarters as mindless, bloodsucking monsters that killed everything in their way. Their squad-leader had had to give the hardest order of all; to execute their own friends to save themselves, and Owain was terrified that he one day would have to face the same situation.

And about a year ago, he had lost one of his own hunters in an ambush. It had been a simple, routine mission that turned into a bloodbath in a couple of seconds. The vampires had been everywhere, at least a hundred of them, and Morgan, who had been their scout and gone in first, had more or less been ripped to pieces before Owain even got a chance to yell, "It's a trap! Pull back!"

The hunters had fled for their lives, none of them escaping without injuries, and had had to call for backup from several of their affiliates just to bring Morgan's mutilated remains back for burial.

Something had broken inside him back then. As their leader, Owain had felt responsible for what had happened to Morgan and for the injuries all the others had sustained. He had lost his appetite, and his mood had darkened. His sleep had become plagued by nightmares, and during the day, he had started to suffer from tension-type headaches, that as time went by, evolved into full-grown migraine attacks.

And as if the threat from outside was not enough, there was another thing. To be a hunter, a warrior of light, a tool of God or whatever term you wanted to use, was to face evil every day. Not only the evil they were out to vanquish, but the evil inside one's own heart and soul. There was a fine line between merciful saviour and cold-blooded killer, and that line was too easy to cross. He knew that it had been crossed countless times before, even by his own hunters, and that there were hunters that enjoyed the killing so much that they turned fanatic, letting their lust for blood rule instead of their sense of justice.

He guessed that some of that bloodlust, and the insanity that came with it, could be caused by cases of inbreeding. The Bellatores Luminis were quite a small group of people. They lived together, worked together and hardly met any others, so it wasn't that strange that they also loved and married among their companions.

And the constant intimacy didn't make Owain's job any easier. Almost all the members in his group were related by blood or marriage, so it wasn't just anonymous soldiers he sent into danger and death; they were his family, and he cared deeply for all of them.

With another sigh, Owain pressed the palms of his hands against his face as if trying to physically smooth out the wrinkles of worry that had appeared there. He knew that if the commander seemed to hesitate, it affected the morale of the whole group. He needed to be strong, calm and fearless; he needed to look as if he was sure of himself and believed in their mission. To sum it up, he needed to be everything he wasn't.

He took some deep breaths, pressed the button on his intercom and called for his hunters, smiling in a way he hoped was confidence-inspiring and encouraging as they appeared one by one.

There was his younger brother Eoli, looking at him with his eyes filled with trust and even some admiration. In Eoli's heart and mind, there was no doubt that his older brother was always right and that he always knew what to do. This made Owain feel even worse about the whole situation. He wasn't worthy of such trust.

There was his closest friend Abraham, walking in with his long, russet hair dancing around his face and his green kind eyes sparkling with warmth. His face was, as usual, one big, always-happy, always-positive, sunshine-smile that not even the most desperate times or difficult situations could erase. He was the perfect contrast to Owain's nowadays, more or less constantly, gloomy mood, and Owain sometimes wondered if Abe wouldn't be a better leader than he was himself.

Next were the three Blackwell Siblings, Diana with her psychopathic, cold eyes, Phoebus with his lewd smile and the youngest brother Gabriel, who was considered only a trainee with his 16 years of age. Of all the members he had to deal with, these were the worst. Diana was constantly questioning his leadership, claiming that she had more right to the position than he had, and was disobeying his orders, with Phoebus following her every wink and command like a loyal dog.

As for young Gabriel, he was considered oversexed and a masochist and was usually wearing as little clothes as he could possibly bear without being indecent, as if the very feeling of fabric against his skin was tormenting him. The end result was that he looked like a male prostitute, except that the revealed skin bore signs of corporal mortification. Payment for sins he had committed, or at least thought he had. Owain had done what he could to stop the self-punishing acts, but to no avail. The boy kept torturing himself. At least he wasn't torturing others. It was a small comfort but, looking at Gabriel's older siblings, Owain was grateful that it wasn't worse than it was.

After them came Cross. He was a half-Japanese, half-American hunter that had been transferred from one of their affiliates last year to help out after Morgan's gruesome death, and for that Owain was thankful. He really needed all the help he could get, and Cross had turned out to be not only a skilled fighter but also a loyal friend.

He was quite short and somewhat slender; a trait from his Japanese heritage, but it wasn't wise to let his size fool you. His floor-length black hair was braided into tiny braids, each one with a small blade at the end, making his hair a deadly multi-weapon that he could combine with his martial arts skills; a weapon he, at the moment, was twisting around one of his fingers.

And last, there was Noah, the group's top tracker and weapons expert. He was an albino with white shoulder-length hair, and who had on a pair of sunglasses that covered his sensitive, red eyes. Noah wasn't raised as a hunter, as the other ones were, but as a victim saved from the clutches of an especially nasty vampire by the hunter squad Owain's parents had belonged to. Among the eight of them, Noah was probably the one that hated vampires the most, and he had the most valid reason for it– personal revenge.

Of course, all of them wanted some kind of revenge. They had all lost a friend or a family member during the battle against the forces of darkness, but that was just the point; it had been in battle, like soldiers fighting a war. The hunters had fought a war against the vampires. As a soldier, you knew that there was a chance that you wouldn't live to fight another day, and they had all chosen to be a part of it. Noah was different; he had been innocent, just a kid, a civilian wounded in the war between good and evil.

When young Noah had recovered from his nearly fatal injuries, he had told them that he was an orphan and had no other place to go than back to the streets that had almost claimed his life.

He had begged Abraham's mother, Rachel, who was the Squad leader of the hunter team that had saved him, to let him stay and learn the ways of the hunter, a chance to get revenge and to prevent others from facing death the same way he had. And out of the goodness of her heart, Rachel had let him stay, adopted him as her own child and trained him side by side with her son and the other young students.

Owain smiled towards his friends, but it was a joyless smile, and gave them a sign to sit down.

"My friends, I thank you for coming so quickly. We have work to do." He opened a folder that lay on the desk, and gave each member a couple of photos. The first picture was of a young woman, dressed in the uniform of a local fast-food restaurant, smiling happily towards the camera. The second one was a crime scene photo of the same woman's bloodless corpse.

"Carrie Simmons," Owain said. "Age 21, last seen alive Wednesday night having dinner with friends at the restaurant ‘Flavour Heaven'. Her boss reported her missing on Friday when she failed to show up for work for the second day in a row. Her body was found in a dumpster behind a hardware store called ‘The Toolbox' early Sunday morning."

"According to the coroner, she probably had been dead for several days, but it was hard to determine the exact time of death since her body had been totally drained of blood. The blood loss is considered to be the cause of death, and she had, and I quote: ‘Several bite marks from some kind of animal on her neck and throat.'"

He paused. "Of course, we know better than to blame it on an animal. There is at least one dangerous vampire haunting this town, and it's our job to find out who it is and to take care of him or her before it's too late, and we get another victim on our hands."

"No problem!" Noah said, a grim smile spreading over his face. "That sucker will soon be wiped from the face of the earth."

The others wholeheartedly agreed, and Abe smiled warmly. "Don't worry Owain. We'll get the job done."

Owain nodded, but no matter what they said, he was going to worry; he was going to be afraid and upset and wonder if he ever would see anyone of them again until they all were safely home. "Alright, you know what to do then. I want all of you back here tomorrow with reports. Be safe my friends, and may God give you strength. Dismissed!"

As the hunters started to leave the room, Owain spoke again. "Diana, Phoebus, you stay here."