Hunter Session 27

Previous: Hunter Session 26

The week between the hunters' meeting with Saigow and the end of the pact was filled with activity. Everyone contacted their subordinate hunters in the network, letting them know about the defeat of Haji, the fact that four hunter code symbols had become compromised, and the end of the pact. For protection, the hunters offered the apartment building as a place to stay for anyone who wanted some extra security until things cooled down with the vampires. Charlotte, Melba, and Randy also resurrected two old projects that had been ignored in the rush to deal with Haji: the "hunter bible" and the search for Witness1. They made progress on both of them, particularly the search for Witness1; Melba narrowed his location down as far as knowing he was in the same town as a ski resort called Grouse Mountain Lodge. However, she didn't quite get to finding out exactly what town that was before the other hunters showed up on the night of the pact's end and required all of her attention.

As it turned out, 16 hunters and guardians took advantage of the group's offer of safe haven in the apartment building. (Charlie also spent the night there for protection, at the urging of Charlotte and Randy, though finding a place for him to stay was more complicated than anyone had originally thought and he ended up sleeping in Arie's closet.) From the bus, Steve, John, Pam, Natalie, and Pete and Pete made an appearance. Shirley, Oscar, and Cassius showed up, along with Kirby and two other hunters (an Avenger and a Judge) who worked with them. There were also four other hunters who showed up who no one had ever heard from: Bergs, Callway, Talker, and TeddyB. There were just enough apartments to accommodate all of the newcomers, and the other hunters helped get them organized and ready to stay in the building for the long haul if need be. Everyone seemed content to stay there and hope the vampires didn't get too close – everyone, that is, except Arie, who insisted on going out to make sure "nothing bad is going down." He went around the apartment building trying to recruit others to go along with him, but only convinced John and TeddyB (both fellow Martyrs). They spent most of the night driving around the city, but saw nothing out of the ordinary and finally returned to the apartment building, somewhat dejected by the night's uneventfulness.

All of this led to an incredibly awkward situation for Charlotte, who was planning to spend a quiet night in Arie's apartment with Charlie after they finished watching the guardian babies. What she didn't know was that in his rounds of the apartment building, Arie had invited Natalie, Steve, and the Judge and the Avenger from Shirley's group to watch movies in his apartment. So not only did Charlotte and Charlie walk into the room to discover it populated by four rather zealous hunters, those hunters were watching "Night Of The Living Dead, Part 2" and they had no choice but to sit down, watch the movie, and wait for everyone to leave. Luckily for Charlotte, the only person who realized that Charlie wasn't quite human was Steve, and when she talked to him about it the next day he seemed relatively unconcerned by the prospect of a hunter dating a vampire. Still, it was a rather alarming wake-up call for both Charlotte and Charlie. With all these new hunters around, they had to talk seriously about how public they were going to make their relationship. Ultimately, they decided to keep doing what they'd been doing all along – act the same as any other couple, without being secretive or publicizing themselves unduly, and dealing with problems as they arose.

The night the pact ended, the group had noted that Lisa was nowhere to be found, and had wondered where she was but decided not to get involved if she thought she was fine. Her absence became a somewhat larger concern, however, when Melba ran into Charles the werewolf at the University of Minnesota. When she asked him how things were, he said, "Terrible." As it turned out, a group of people including "a woman with a magic wand" had been menacing his family for seemingly no reason. His family was up in arms against the group and planning to attack them, since there was some talk of the group striking again. Certain Charles was referring to Lisa, Melba told him she would contact Lisa's group and try to talk them out of attacking the werewolves, as much for the safety of Lisa's own group as for Charles himself.

To compound all of these worries, Randy also reported some very strange goings-on in Powderhorn Park near where Haji was interred. He'd driven by the park a few days before to discover that his crossbow bolt had been removed from the ground and a small sapling planted in its place. Two days later, the sapling was a full-grown tree rooted exactly above Haji's resting place. When Randy looked at the tree with Discern, he discovered that not only was the tree most definitely supernatural, it seemed to be sucking some sort of corrupt energy out of the earth and either replacing it with something else or transforming it into a different kind of energy. This didn't sound to the group like anything hunters could do, and when they asked the guardians all of them denied involvement. No one could be sure who had done it, or whether it was a good or bad thing.

Randy had also seen something disconcerting in the newspaper that day – an article about construction workers dying or disappearing at a work site in downtown Minneapolis, with the hunter code symbol for "nest" incorporated into the text layout. This was especially worrisome because "nest" was one of the symbols that had been compromised to Haji. After Randy showed the paper to the rest of the group, Melba decided to contact the author by writing him a letter in the guise of a journalism student looking for more information on his stories, asking him to contact her at the vampire P.O., and incorporating the "allies" symbol into one corner of the page. She hoped to find out if the writer was a hunter or something else.

Uncertain what all these things meant, the hunters decided to deal with what seemed like the most pressing problem first and talk to Lisa about her plans to attack Charles. They went to meet her at her house in Eden Prairie, where she was hanging out with her three fellow hunters. Melba calmly explained the situation with Charles to Lisa, telling her that not only was Charles a recognized ally of the group, it would be suicidal for four hunters to take on an entire family of werewolves by themselves (since one werewolf alone had almost killed Charlotte and hurt other members of the party, and that was with Charles helping out). But Lisa refused to budge, calmly telling the group she had a secret weapon that would assure her victory. Realizing they weren't going to get anywhere, the hunters said goodbye to Lisa and prepared to leave. But on the way out, Randy noticed a fifth pair of shoes sitting by the door and heard a noise on the upstairs landing. When he looked up, he noticed a man listening in on the conversation. When Randy described the man to Melba, she recognized as Blak, the corrupt guardian the group had sworn to kill if he ever showed up in the Twin Cities again.

Meanwhile, back at the apartment building, some even-stranger-than-usual things were going on with Twitcher. The group returned to find him curled up in a corner of the nursery with the babies crying all around him – very strange behavior for someone who'd always been careful about the babies beforehand. Charlotte decided he needed a break from the apartment building and took him back to her house. On the way, she asked him if he was feeling okay, and he said he'd been a little upset lately because his mother wanted him to come home and set a good example for his sister (who was still there), but he didn't want to leave yet because he still had work to do here. Charlotte was confused, and only became more so when she looked at the book he'd accidentally left behind in the car. It seemed to be a typical paperback novel, but in the margins Twitcher had written one side of a conversation with "Mother" – almost as though he was talking to her through the book. Charlotte didn't know what to make of this, so she returned the book to Twitcher without mentioning it and simply filed this bizarre incident away to be thought about at a later date.

Next: Hunter Session 28