Thirteen

Hunters Headquarters, Valiant

“Okay, I'll do it.” Alex sighed as he walked up to mother who’d asked so desperately for help.

“Oh, thank you!” She wrapped her arms around him as they stood in front of the office he’d just left, grateful tears on her face. After a moment of hesitation, Alex patted her on her back, looking uncomfortable.

“No problem.” He pulled away to look down at her. “Now listen, Eloise right?” She nodded. “I’ve been given some files to look over. I'll do what I can to find your son. Do you have any way I can reach you?”

“Oh, right.” The woman wiped away her tears and reached into her handbag for a notebook and pen. “My friend, Jenny, she owns a courier service. She can get me a message.” She finished writing down the address and handed it to Alex. He took the paper, perused it, and then folded it into his pocket.

“The address… It’s on this side of the city.” He tried to say it delicately, but it was plain from the haunted look in her eyes that she knew where he was headed. “The Hunters hate non-humans. And your son is a half-Orc. So you were living here, with a half-Orc son, in a place where people hated him.”

“It wasn’t a big deal!” Elaine argued. “He doesn’t look like an Orc at all! He’s almost completely human looking, he just has a bit of green to his skin!”

Alex shook his head. “Look I have no problem with people of other species, that’s not why I’m asking this. If someone discovered his non-human heritage, they could have seen it as reason to hurt him. You understand what I’m saying? If someone found out, and decided that was reason enough to do this, then I can at least narrow down the suspects, track him down that much faster.”

“But I never told anyone!” The grieving mother said. “Not my friends, not my neighbors! And Jeremy would never tell anyone, I taught him better.”

Alex sighed sadly. Apparently she was convinced. “All right then. I’ll head out, start tracking whatever I can. You head home, and I’ll contact you once I find something.”

Eloise searched his face, as though she was checking him for a lie. Alex looked back at her kindly. After a long moment, she nodded.

“Okay…goodbye.” She turned and walked away unsteadily, leaving Alex holding his files under one arm.

------

Thinking carefully, Alex headed to find somewhere he could work in peace. He found a small back room, and immediately began pouring through the files he’d been given.

The Hunters, thankfully, had a very detailed filing system, with everything in its place, making digging through the files easy. They were based on the criminal records of old world police organizations.

The killer was marked down as the ‘unsub’ or unknown subject. Each murder had a file to it, and the unsub had its own file with what was known or speculated about it.

There had been seven murders so far on the Hunter’s side of Valiant, while V’neck, the non-human side, had apparently had a few similar killings of their own. However, because the Hunter’s had no interest in the killings of non-humans; especially ones not in their own territory, they had no information on those murders besides their locations.

Alex noted all the crime scene locations on a map, then placed it against a wall, using throwing needles as pins. Then he went back to the files.

Each kill had looked like the work of an animal. Claws had slashed into soft stomach to dig in at organs, and teeth marks similar to that of a sharks had been noted in the photos. Footsteps of an odd nature had been found at two of the scenes in dirt, with variations between each step, like the unsub had been shapeshifting as it moved.

The victims that the Hunters had focused on were young, fit, and all human. All came from families in poorer neighborhoods as well, and had been found near those neighborhoods. However, if one noted the non-humans killed in V’neck, the pattern shattered.

Those killings seemed random, focused on a different goal almost. They were focused on animalistic species, the werewolves, orcs, and others, and had been done in business districts, not neighborhoods like the humans. Overall it was hard to tell why the killer had such a different MO between humans and nonhumans.

Speculation on the unsubs species ranged. Alex soon found himself curling his lip. The investigators made sure to turn in their reports with a side of unprofessional level of racism towards the matter, calling out various species as possibilities no matter how illogical. One man, for example, had claimed it was obvious the unsub was a dwarf. Despite the fact dwarves had no claws, or teeth like the ones described in the reports, or anything else that could be responsible for the damage done to the victims.

After a while however, Alex had his own personal list of species for the unsub. Claws, teeth, shapeshifting, any species that had those features and lived in V'neck were on the list. Alex considered that the unsub could have been from outside the city, but discarded the idea after a moment. Serial killers hunted on familiar ground, and these killings had all the marks of a serial killer.

Werewolves were an obvious one. V’neck was ruled by them, and they had free

reign. However, they didn’t have the constantly shifting feature marked by the footsteps found, typically being very solid in their human or werewolf forms. He marked them down anyway.

Next were Fae. Fae had a strong presence in V-neck, and some could shift into animal forms. But Alex had noted at least two of the victims had been strong young men who had been in the vicinity of iron objects. Anyone with a brain knew of the Fae's weakness to iron. It was one of the first things they taught you in school, around the same time children would learn their alphabets and numbers. Yet, neither young man had even touched the objects.

A final option was demons. Ever since the portals had opened decades ago, demons of thousands of species had made a life on Earth. There were any number of them who could have been responsible for the murders. But the forensics on the scene hadn’t noted any of the magical signatures of the demons known to man. A demon could hide such things of course, but that required discipline, time, and someone who was sane, as opposed to the unsub.

An empathic consultant who’d worked on the locations had been able to divine certain details.

Empaths were very new to detective work. They could not only detect emotions from people in their direct vicinity, but also especially strong ones from objects and locations, allowing detectives to understand better the sort of mind they were dealing with.

The empath in question had apparently moved out of the city after the stress of the emotions brought on by the crime scene nearly drove him insane. Fortunately, he had gotten a read on each scene before that.

According to him, the unsub was a vicious, gleeful individual. They had taken pleasure in the kill, slashing into each body with intent to harm first and foremost. There had been no pity or remorse for the crime, only a sense of release and peace, like scratching an itch.

So the unsub was a vicious shapeshifter who could either only become an animal form, or preferred it. Alex looked over the notes once more, then looked at the map. Something was odd about the kills in V’neck. They seemed to follow a line of sorts…

He took the map and focused on the specific line. Taken together, they moved towards one direction. He marked it, then circled the location. It was like the creature, whatever it was was following the railroad tracks.

Alex pursed his lips and put the pen he was holding to his lips, deep in thought trying to remember something he'd heard about the tracks that might help him with the case. If he remembered correctly there was a trainyard that had once been used in Valiant. If he was correct and the creature was moving East then the creature seemed to be heading there.

But why? He asked himself, letting out a deep sigh. It was defunct now, only a scrapyard really, but it was still a prominent location. And a large number of the kills seemed to follow rails in V'neck, with two kills crossing into Valiant.

Once again, the pattern was shattered by the human murders. Those kills had no relation to any train rails, only neighborhoods. But if the killer had any kind of a focus on the trainyard…

------

An hour later, Alex was sitting in a truck next to a Hunter, rattling along towards the Wall. The truck was a transport type, to bring in multiple soldiers to hostile territory. Behind him he could hear the sound of guns being cleaned, and dark mumbling as the truck rolled along.

“I wanted to come alone.” He complained to the driver next to him.

The driver, a swarthy man with pink streaks in his hair, shook his head. “No chance sir. Not if you’re visiting the dogs.”

Alex quirked an eyebrow, then simply sighed and turned his head away. His new sword, made of bone, was on his back, digging in against him painfully as he was jostled around by the trucks motion. But he wasn’t going after the sort of creature that had made those cuts and slash without a weapon.

As the truck left the Hunter’s territory, Alex wondered what was coming next.