They say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes in a series of images and thoughts. It's one of those things that you have no way of knowing if it's true or not, until you experience it for yourself.
She was twelve years old when social services took her away. Her father hadn't always been so angry, hadn't always drowned his sorrows in alcohol. Her mother had died from cancer the year before and he never got over it. It didn't help that she and her father never got along. He was always displeased with her and often the smallest disputes led to her getting a bloody lip. The bad ones sometimes ended with a bruised rib and once even a broken arm. She was into sports so it had been easy to make excuses for her injuries. It didn't help though that he was always calling her fat, jumping on her for her terrible grades, telling her how worthless she was. He wasn't the only one that lost someone. She had lost the only person she felt she could talk to when her mom died.
That last night was bad. While he had only blacked her eye, he had gone around the house destroying everything. Hitting photos with her baseball bat, tipping over cabinets and furniture. There wasn't much of a house left when the police rolled up and took him away. A neighbor had heard the disturbance and called the police. She spent a few hours at the police station before a woman from children services came and took her away.
She was in and out of foster homes for the next six years. She bounced from one home to the next, staying anywhere from three months to a year and a half at each residence. It made her distant, as every time she let her gaurd down and let a foster parent in, it seemed she was reshuffled to another home. Some foster parents were better than others, some were right down mean but never anything like her real father. She was cared for, fed, clothed and she even graduated high school before she was too old to continue in foster care.
It wasn't long after she was out on her own that she started seeing the shadows. The first one appeared as she was waiting for a bus late one night. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her but she started seeing them elsewhere as well, always varying in shape and size. She was recruited a few weeks later. It was so strange to her then and if she hadn't seen the shadows for herself, she wouldn't have believed such an organization could exist. She had nowhere else to go and being a part of something like this.. it was more than she ever had before. A chance to be a part of a new kind of family. A permanent one.
The next image that flashed through her mind was getting Silverfang. She had always found that to be the most interesting aspect of being a hunter; having a weapon choose you. When that day came she was flooded with mixed fillings. Silverfang was a simple machete with a silver blade and an even simpler black and red handle.He was so ordinary and a part of her resented it, growing jealous of the nicer weapons that other hunters seemed to have. He was so light, the handle fit in her hand just right and it felt like a piece of her that had been missing was filled with his energy. She spent the following days getting to know him. He had once been a vampire but hadn't gone by his original name in so long. He wouldn't even tell her what it was. He was simply Silverfang now.
The trained together, he was much like a drill sergeant, always pushing her to work harder. Over the years, he became her closest friend.
She loved being part of the sun division. She always felt most comfortable in a battle with Silverfang in her hand. Nothing gave her as much of a rush as putting her talents to use, being someone, being part of something big. Over the years, it seemed a mission seldom went by without a fatality. She had lost many friends, most of them from her own division.
She couldn't even recall which mission had been the one to break her heart as they all seemed to blur together. She remembered going back to her dorm and staring at herself in the mirror. It felt like so many precious lives were lost. Why had she survived? It felt like she cheated them. She could hear her father in the back of her head telling her how worthless she was. It was sad how even after a decade of being away from him, he still had a hold of her.
It was that moment that something compelled her to grab the scissors and cut off half her head. It looked uneven until she took a razor and shaved it off. The other half of her head still sported her long, chocolate brown hair. She kept her hair that way for the rest of her days as a hunter, a constant reminder that she was part soldier. It was then that she started wearing a cross, reading a bible and saying a prayer before bed each night. Every time another friend fell during a battle, his or her name would be added to the list.
The night before this last mission, it took her over five minutes to complete her prayer.
----
The present came flooding back to her, or perhaps it had never really passed. All she knew was that she was at peace. She would be with her mom soon. She knew the other hunters would be there as well. Everyone that she cared for and loved. There would be no father to haunt her, no shadows to fear, no abomination to hunt.
There would only be joy. Perhaps one day even Silverfang would join her and everything would be complete. In the meantime, she would wait and help watch over the hunters still alive. It was strange how one could live a lifetime but find something in death that had always been absent.
She was happy.
