There was an event horizon that encased the deadly arrow, and it was in that space outside of space that Mark suffered an eternity and a moment longer. His thoughts and memories spilled out instead of blood as Conquest’s arrow passed through him; they were projected on a screen in an empty theater, flickering in and out. A voice, his voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere, speaking the words his mouth never moved to complete, in an unbroken chain. Everything he saw was superimposed over a still image of Stacie Von Petra below him, surrounded by raindrops hanging in the air and glittering like a thousand stars.

Stacie.

Life Hunter Mark was born Marcus Myers, in some forgettable small town, to a mother who smoked and a father who drank, and three older brothers who took turns tormenting him over the childish fears he never grew out of - things lurking in the dark, moving in the shadows, crawling under the beds. He tried to put on a brave face, combat his fears with humor, but the comfort only lasted as long as he wasn’t alone. Mark would lie awake more nights than he could sleep, as someone in his family always made a point of stealng, hiding, and in some cases breaking any nightlight he could smuggle in. Forced to take matters into his own hands, Marcus slept with a kitchen knife under his pillow like a security blanked. At least, until his mother found it. After she finished screaming and his drunken father got tired of taking a belt to him, a decision was made over an ashtray and a glass of whiskey. They’d send him away. He’d be cured of all this nonsense and bad behavior. Eventually.

If we don’t make it out of this alive...

They came in the rain. The Hunters. Or one of them, at least. Marcus’s lying, deceitful ways had reached critical levels by the time they found him. He had inherited two addictions and no common sense. He still saw things, at night, in the dark, but that was why he drank, wasn’t it. To be too inebriated to give a damn. He would wake up in a pool of his own vomit, and reach for a smoke to calm himself down before he cleaned up his mess and go on with his day. And in typical teenager fashion he never stopped to consider where he was going, or if he was going anywhere at all.

The Hunters hadn’t come about his personal habits, his sass, or the fact that he smelled like malt liquor at 4 in the afternoon. Their only concern was the shadows. The ones they saw, the ones he saw. They offered him a better, if shorter life. He could come with them and learn to be someone, something important, a crusader against the collective nightmares of the earth. Or he could waste away here in this shithole of a school, of a life, a prisoner of his own fears.

Well, when they put it that way...

(and I don’t think that we will)

When he was a trainee he counted days on the calendar that was still pinned to the wall of his dorm when he had first arrived. The kind found in the bargain bin of a bookstore, marked down to a fraction of a penny. His was full of horses, galloping across picturesque landscapes, with a flowery scrawl next to all the chestnut-brown ones: James Dean. Even after its year had come and gone, Mark didn’t have the heart to take it down himself. It had belonged to someone, a Hunter who’d died so suddenly they hadn’t had a chance to make arrangements to clear out her things. Mark carried that forgotten Hunter with him in his own way, kept her alive, the same way he hoped that in death someone else would preserve his memory. He never lived long enough to inherit a FEAR weapon. Didn’t stop him from giving his battered old runic one a name, under the guise of a joke.

James Dean.

I just wanted you to know

Runic torches were poor excuses for a campfire. But Mark sat there across from his mission partner in the warm blue glow and shoveled cold, canned beans in his mouth like they were the greatest thing in the entire world. Which last meal was this, his fifth? Tenth? Twentieth? And she just picked up his torch and let it sear the bottom of her can black while she hummed the latest popular song to play on all the radio stations. She was just glad to finally have a partner who didn’t have a huge stick up their a**. Funny, so was he.

She was pretty. She was funny. She dressed like nothing he’d ever seen before, especially considering he’d spent far too much time in all boys Catholic boarding schools. He could have fallen in love with her on the spot. But he wasn’t in love with her. Armed with nothing but their wits and their weapons, they began to finish each others’ sentences to save time. They sparred not just for practice but just for the hell of it. Each of them had an array of scars to prove they’d taken the proverbial bullet for the other many a time before.

They weren’t lovers; they were siblings. Stacie Von Petra was the sister he never had, and always wanted.

I agree

Their hair was completely soaked from the rain that came down that night. But they were alive, if only for one more day. And they celebrated it the only way they knew how, the way they had time and time again as their paths crossed. Base instinct. He remembered kissing those lips, he remembered his fingers entwined in wet hair, the smell of blood and sweat and overpowering vanilla were her signature. They could have been anywhere in the world in that moment and neither would have givn a damn. Em was warm, she was vibrantly alive in ways he could only scratch the surface of. Mark was drawn to her ike a moth to a flame.

The film grew choppy, it was beginning to speed up. Someone was fast-forwarding through the rest of his shitty life because they’d grown bored with the parts he wanted to relive forever. People danced in and out of his life at random, the sun rose and set like like a ping pong ball bouncing behind the horizon. There was a sharp pain in his head, it was growing, it consumed the light of the theater until nothing remained but darkness, and soon, nothingness.

But he couldn’t let go without finishing his final thought:

Em’s got a real nice a**.