Ace moved first, stepping from the tangled, sucking darkness of the forest onto the unyielding solidity of cracked asphalt. The transition was jarring. One moment, the world was a breathing, pressing entity of shadow and threat. The next, it was just a poorly lit suburban backroad.
He kept the torchlight on, its beam cutting through the last few feet of undergrowth like a blade, slicing open pockets of clinging darkness with every determined step. Leaves and twigs crunched softly beneath his boots, the sound now strangely reassuring in its normalcy, though still too loud in his adrenaline-sharpened hearing. Liam followed so close behind that Ace could hear the boy's ragged, shallow breathing—the panicked, insufficient gasps of someone whose lungs hadn't gotten the memo that the immediate danger had passed. He heard Liam stumble, curse under his breath, and right himself without Ace having to turn.
Cedric was the rear guard. He moved with a silent, ingrained caution, his pistol no longer held at ready-arm but still raised, his finger resting along the frame, just outside the trigger guard. His eyes never stopped moving, scanning the tree line they were leaving behind, the deep shadows between houses, the empty spaces where something could be standing perfectly still. He didn't trust the quiet that had settled over the neighborhood. In his experience, quiet was never a gift; it was a pause.
The woods at their backs felt… wrong. Not alive with the sounds of the night, not dead with winter's stillness, but simply watching. A sentient, patient pressure slowly receding.
Liam flinched violently when a branch snapped somewhere deep in the forest, the sound carrying with unnatural clarity on the still air.
"Relax," Ace muttered, not turning his head, his voice low and flat. "If it was following us, we'd know. It's not subtle when it moves."
The words were meant to be comforting. They had the opposite effect. The confirmation that the thing could be followed, that its pursuit had recognizable qualities, made Liam's breath hitch again. He swallowed hard, his throat painfully dry. His hands trembled at his sides, and clenching them into white-knuckled fists did nothing to steady them. Every shadow cast by the streetlights now seemed to lean toward him, every silent, dark window in the houses they passed felt like a socket where a golden eye could ignite.
He hated this place. He hated the normalcy that now felt like a thin, painted screen over a nightmare.
Then—light.
Not the stark, probing beam of Ace's torch, but the dull, sulfurous yellow glow of aging streetlights. They flickered ahead, marking the turn onto a proper residential street. Civilization.
Liam nearly sobbed in relief. A weak, shaky sound escaped him. "Oh thank God," he breathed, the words a prayer. His shoulders sagged, as if an immense, invisible weight had finally slid from them. The simple, ugly glow of municipal lighting was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
Ace slowed his pace but didn't stop. Not yet. Hunters didn't celebrate early. Celebration lowered your guard. He gave the tree line one last, long look before finally clicking off his torch, pocketing it. The darkness that followed was comfortable, benign, held at bay by the lights above.
Cedric glanced back once more into the consuming black of the woods, his jaw tight, before finally lowering his gun, though he didn't holster it. He let it hang at his side, his grip still firm. "Yeah," he said quietly, more to himself than to them. "We're clear. For now."
The moment their shoes fully left the forest's loam and met only asphalt and concrete, the air itself changed.
It felt… normal. Boring. Unremarkable.
A cold, clean night breeze brushed against Liam's sweat-cooled face, carrying the faint, acrid smell of car exhaust and distant fireplace smoke instead of the sweet rot and damp earth of the woods. The steady, almost imperceptible hum of electricity from the power lines buzzed like a mechanical lullaby. Somewhere a few streets over, a dog barked, a lonely, domestic sound.
Normal sounds. A normal world. His world.
Liam bent forward, bracing his hands on his knees, and sucked in deep, whooping breaths of the blessedly unmagical air. "Holy shit," he muttered into the pavement. "I—I thought I was gonna die back there. I really did."
Ace watched him, his own posture slowly unlocking. The immediate, wire-tight vigilance began to bleed away, leaving behind a deep, granular fatigue. He looked at Liam—the pale, drawn face, the eyes still wide with residual terror, the expensive jacket torn and stained with leaf litter and mud. Still alive. They'd gotten him out.
"Where's your house?" Ace asked, his voice deliberately calm, almost casual, an attempt to anchor them both in the mundane.
Liam blinked. Once. Twice. He straightened up slowly, as if the question required physical effort to process. "It's… uh—" He lifted a trembling hand and pointed down the well-lit street. "Couple blocks that way. The white one with the blue shutters."
Ace nodded. "Alright. Go home. Lock your doors. Take a shower. You'll feel better."
Liam froze, the nascent relief on his face crystallizing into confusion, then alarm.
"…Wait," he said slowly, his eyes darting between Ace and Cedric. "You're just— you're just gonna leave me here? Alone?"
Cedric raised an eyebrow, clearly not expecting this level of post-traumatic clinginess. "You're safe now. That thing has a territory. It won't leave the woods. They almost never do."
"And it's injured," Ace added, his tone pragmatic. "It won't risk coming this close to populated streets. Light, noise, people… it's a predator. It prefers the edges."
Liam stared at them as if they'd just told him to walk back into the woods alone. The streetlights suddenly didn't feel like enough.
"You gotta be kidding me. After all that? You're just gonna send me off by myself?"
Ace sighed, a long, weary exhalation. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, the gesture betraying his own exhaustion. He and Cedric shared a brief, silent look—a negotiation. After a beat, Ace relented.
"…Alright," he said. "Fine. We'll walk you to your door."
The tension drained from Liam's shoulders so rapidly it was visible. He nodded, a quick, jerky motion. "Okay. Yeah. Thanks."
Cedric gestured down the road with his chin, a faint smirk touching his lips. "Lead the way, rich boy. Try not to faint."
Liam, for once, didn't have a retort.
They fell into step together, a ragged trio under the buzz and glow of the streetlights. Liam unconsciously positioned himself in the middle, placing Ace and Cedric between him and the dark voids of driveways and side yards. His head was on a swivel, his eyes scanning upper windows, rooftop silhouettes, the mouths of alleys—anywhere those familiar, hateful golden pinpricks might reappear.
Ace noticed the hyper-vigilance. He didn't comment. He understood it.
Cedric walked with his gun finally tucked back into its concealed holster inside his jacket, but his posture hadn't softened. His shoulders were still set, his movements economical. Hunters didn't really have an "off" switch; they just dialed the alertness down from a "10" to a wary, comfortable "7."
The night around them was quiet. Suburban quiet. The kind punctuated by the distant purr of a furnace or the faint murmur of a television through double-paned glass. To Liam, after the vacuum silence of the hunting woods, this quiet felt fragile, full of holes something could crawl through.
"So…" Liam finally broke the silence, his voice hesitant, as if speaking might summon back the nightmare. "You guys… do this a lot?"
Ace glanced at him sideways. "Do what?"
"This," Liam said, gesturing vaguely around them, back toward the woods. "Fight… things. Monsters. Goat-men. Whatever the hell that was."
Cedric snorted. "First rule, man—don't call it 'monster hunting.' Makes us sound like we fell out of a shitty RPG."
"Then what do you call it?"
"Work," Ace replied, his tone flat and final.
Liam let out a shaky, disbelieving laugh. "That's insane."
Cedric shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Welcome to our version of daily cardio. Less treadmill, more tactical sprints through haunted forests."
Liam shook his head slowly, trying to fit the concept into the shattered frame of his old reality. "So it's just you two? Like… this is your whole thing? Full-time… hunters?"
Ace hesitated. Just for a second. The truth was complicated.
"Well," he said, choosing his words with care, "we're still considered trainees. There's a… structure. An apprenticeship."
"Trainees?" Liam repeated, disbelief morphing into something like awe. "You just dragged me through a gauntlet of evil trees while being chased by actual a nightmare with horns. You shot at it. You hit it. If that's trainee work, what does graduation look like? Fighting dragons in a daily basis?"
Cedric smirked, the streetlight catching the amusement in his eyes. "Yeah. Trainees. We get the fun jobs like babysitting civilians who wander into active hunting grounds."
"That's terrifying," Liam stated bluntly.
"Correct," Cedric agreed, his smirk widening.
Liam let out a long, slow breath and scrubbed his hands over his face. "Okay. Okay. So who trains you? Because if you're the beginners, I don't even wanna imagine the veterans."
Cedric answered easily, as if discussing a normal after-school activity. "My mom."
Liam's steps faltered for a second. "Your mom?"
"Yep."
"Like… a soccer mom? Mini-van and orange slices?"
Cedric chuckled, a real, warm sound that seemed out of place. "More like a 'will critique your combat stance while making dinner and remind you that salt rounds are expensive, so stop missing' mom. She's retired from active field work. Now she teaches. And yells. Mostly yells."
Liam stared at him, his mind trying and failing to reconcile the image. "…I don't know whether to be impressed or scared."
"You should be both," Cedric confirmed cheerfully.
Ace had stayed quiet during this exchange, but now he added, his voice quieter, "For me, it's my clan."
The word hung in the air, heavier than "mom."
"Clan?" Liam echoed, the term sounding medieval and serious.
Cedric glanced at Ace, then decided to fill in the blanks, his tone shifting to one of mock reverence. "Yeah. The Eldren clan. Don't let the modest house fool you. Dude here comes from one of the oldest, biggest hunter lineages on the continent. Old money. Old blood. Old, old grudges. The whole gothic paperback trilogy."
Liam looked at Ace with entirely new eyes, as if seeing a hidden crest embroidered on his jacket. "No way. You're serious?"
Ace shrugged, a gesture meant to deflect the significance. "It's not as cool as it sounds. Mostly it's a lot of outdated traditions and people telling you what you're doing wrong."
"That," Liam said, pointing a finger at him, "is exactly what someone from a secret monster-hunting dynasty would say."
Cedric laughed. "Facts. He's hilariously bad at being humble about it."
Ace continued, his voice dropping, the words more for himself than for Liam. "My grandfather had a… falling out with the main family. Politics. Stupid stuff. We ended up here. We don't have much contact with them."
"So you still train with them?" Liam asked.
"Sometimes," Ace said vaguely. "Mostly, it was my dad."
Liam opened his mouth, a dozen more questions about absent hunter fathers on the tip of his tongue—then paused.
A strange sensation washed over him. A fuzziness at the edges of his thoughts, like static creeping in on a weak radio signal. The conversation, so vivid and shocking a moment ago, suddenly felt slippery. He knew it was important. He knew he should remember every word about clans and trainers and the hidden world. But the details—Cedric's mom's specific brand of yelling, the name "Eldren"—seemed to be blurring, losing their sharp edges even as he clutched at them.
Cedric noticed the change first. He saw Liam's eyes lose focus for a fraction of a second, his expression going slack with confusion.
Ace noticed a moment later.
Neither of them said a word. They just exchanged a brief, knowing glance over Liam's head. The Veil was doing its work. The great, gentle eraser of the normal world was already sweeping over the boy's mind.
Liam cleared his throat, forcing himself back to the present, a weak smile tugging at his lips. "So, uh… why did you guys let me walk off alone back there? In the woods, before… before it saw me?"
Cedric fielded this one, his tone losing its humor. "Because you wouldn't have believed us. No matter what we said, how we said it. You'd have thought we were crazy. Or dangerous. Or both. And you'd have walked off anyway, just to prove you could."
Ace added, his voice calm but unyielding, "Sometimes people have to see the teeth for themselves. No warning is ever enough."
Liam swallowed against the dry tightness in his throat. "Yeah, well… what if I died? What if it got me the second I was out of your sight?"
A beat of heavy silence passed between the three of them, filled only by the scuff of their shoes on the pavement.
Ace replied without a trace of emotion, as stating a simple fact: "You didn't."
"That's not the point!" Liam's voice rose slightly, frustration breaking through the fear.
"It is," Ace said, turning his head to meet Liam's gaze. The intensity there was startling. "We trusted our training. We trusted our ability to intervene if it came to that. We judged the risk. You're standing here, so we judged right."
Liam didn't know how to respond. A hot coil of anger twisted in his gut—anger at being used as bait, as a lesson. But beneath it, cold and uncomfortable, was the undeniable truth: they had saved him. They'd pulled him from the jaws of it. They had gambled with his life, yes, but they had also placed their own on the same bet. And they'd won.
It was a moral equation with no clean answer, and it left him feeling hollow and grateful in equal measure.
They reached a small, neatly kept house with a trimmed lawn and warm, buttery light glowing behind the blinds of the front window. It looked like a postcard for safe, uneventful living.
Liam pointed, his arm feeling heavy. "That's… that's mine."
Ace nodded. "Go inside. Lock your doors. Like I said."
Cedric added, his smirk returning, though it was tired at the edges, "And maybe take a break from amateur ghost-hunting. Leave it to the professionals next time."
Liam let out a short, breathy laugh that was almost a sob. "Yeah. No kidding. I think my curiosity is officially cured."
He hesitated at the latch of the wrought-iron gate, his hand on the cold metal. Then he turned back, looking at the two figures silhouetted against the streetlight—the tall, quiet one and the shorter, sharper one. They looked like regular kids. He knew they were anything but.
"Hey."
Ace and Cedric paused, looking back at him.
"…Thanks," Liam said, the word feeling inadequate for the debt he felt. "For not letting me die back there."
Ace gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
Cedric's smirk softened into something more genuine. "Try not to remember this too clearly, okay? It'll be easier."
Liam frowned, the fuzziness in his head pulsing. "What?"
But they were already turning, two shadows melting back into the pool of light between streetlamps, walking away without a backward glance.
And as Liam pushed open his front door, stepping into the overwhelming normalcy of his hallway—the smell of fabric softener, the hum of the refrigerator, the familiar worn carpet underfoot—something inside his mind made a final, soft click.
The terrifying clarity of the last hour—the golden eyes, the gunshots, the desperate run, the conversation about clans and trainees—began to soften at the edges. The vivid colors bled toward gray. The sharp terror dulled into a generalized, formless anxiety. It felt less like a memory and more like the fading, nonsensical afterimage of a very bad dream, the details dissolving even as he desperately tried to hold onto them.
***
Ace and Cedric walked in silence for a block after leaving Liam's gate. The quiet wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't tense either. It was the shared quiet of profound exhaustion, of an adrenaline crash settling deep into their bones. The suburban soundtrack—the low drone of a garage door opener, a late-night TV laugh track from an open window, the distant rush of a car on a bigger street—was a bland, sanitized noise after the predatory silence of the woods. It felt like emerging from a deep, cold ocean into warm, shallow water.
Ace exhaled slowly, the sound carrying the weight of the whole night. The air leaving his lungs felt like it had been held for hours.
"What a long-ass day," he murmured, more to the night itself than to Cedric.
Cedric let out a tired, genuine laugh, stretching his arms above his head until his shoulders popped. "Bro, it's not even midnight and I feel like I aged five years. My knees are yelling at me. Is this what being old feels like?"
Ace didn't answer. His thoughts were already turning from physical fatigue to domestic logistics. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen lit up his face, revealing the grimace that appeared as he saw the time and the cluster of notifications.
"…Shit."
Cedric glanced over, the streetlight catching the worry that flashed in Ace's eyes. "What? You forget to feed your Tamagotchi?"
"I forgot to call my mom," Ace said, already scrolling past the time to the list of missed calls. Three from "Mom." Two texts, the last one just a single question mark sent twenty minutes ago. His stomach tightened. "She's gonna lose her mind."
"Yeah," Cedric said, his tone shifting from joking to dry sympathy. He looked away, giving Ace a semblance of privacy on the empty sidewalk. "Good luck with that. I'll just… admire this exceptionally boring shrub."
Ace shot him a withering look that held no real heat and hit dial.
It rang once.
Twice.
She picked up before the third ring could complete.
"Ace?" Sophie's voice came through the speaker, sharp and tight, compressed with a fear she was trying to strangle into anger. "Where are you? Are you safe?"
The directness of the questions, the lack of preamble, was a punch to the gut. "I'm outside," Ace said quickly, forcing his voice to be steady. "Just dropped off a kid. I'm safe. We're all safe."
There was a pause on the line. He could almost hear her closing her eyes, taking one controlled breath. When she spoke again, the anger had won, layered thick over the terror.
"Don't do that," she snapped, each word clipped. "Don't say 'I'm safe' like it's nothing. Like it's a given. Do you have any idea what time it is?"
Ace winced, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I know. I'm sorry. Things got… complicated."
"I told you to call when you reached the location," she continued, the words tumbling out now, a litany of fear made verbal. "And then nothing. No call. No message. For hours. I sat here, Ace. I watched the clock. I thought—" Her voice hitched, faltered for just a second before she armored it again with fury. "I thought I was going to get a visit. I thought I was going to have to identify my son in the morgue because he couldn't be bothered to send a text."
Ace swallowed. The guilt was a cold, heavy stone in his chest. "Nothing happened. We handled it."
"That's a lie," she said immediately, her hunter's instinct cutting through his evasion. "Or at best, it's not the whole truth. Something always happens."
Ace didn't respond. He couldn't deny it. The silence stretched, filled with the staticky hum of the connection and the thousand things unsaid between them.
Sophie sighed on the other end, the sound weary and ancient. The anger bled out of it, leaving behind the raw, scared parent. "Did you find it?" she asked quietly, her voice now almost a whisper.
Ace hesitated. Just enough for her to know. "…Yeah. We found it."
"And?" The single word held volumes.
"It's a goatman. Big. Old. Territorial." He kept his report clinical, a debrief. "It's injured. Got a good shot on it. No one else got hurt. The civilian is home."
She didn't say good. She didn't say thank God.
Instead, she said, her voice dropping even lower, "You could've been. You could've been hurt. Or worse."
Ace closed his eyes against the streetlight's glare. "I know."
"You always know," she replied, and the frustration in her voice was for the universe, for the legacy his father left, for the impossible position she was in. "You say it every time. And one day, Ace, saying 'I know' isn't going to be enough. One day, it's just going to be what you said right before something terrible happened."
The words hit him with more force than the Goatman's charge, because they were true, and they came from the only person whose fear truly had power over him. He had no defense against it.
He softened his voice, the teenage boy peeking through the hunter's veneer. "I'm coming home now. I'm almost there."
A long silence. Then, a reluctant, exhausted acceptance. "…Okay," she said, the fight gone. "Lock the gate behind you. Come straight in. I'll be up."
"I will."
"And Ace?" she added, just before he could pull the phone away.
"Yeah?"
"Good luck for tomorrow."
Ace froze. A different kind of chill went through him. "…How did you—"
"I'm your mother," she said simply, as if that explained everything. And in their world, perhaps it did. "I know the patterns. I know what finding something like that means. The job's not done. You'll go back."
He let out a quiet breath, defeated. "Yeah. We will."
They hung up. Ace lowered the phone and stared at the dark, reflective screen for a long moment, seeing his own pale, strained face in the glass. The conversation had taken less than two minutes, but it had drained what little energy he had left.
Cedric, who had been studiously examining a perfectly ordinary azalea bush, turned back. His expression was uncharacteristically sober. "She mad?"
Ace scoffed, a hollow sound. "She's terrified. Which is worse."
Cedric nodded slowly, his own gaze drifting toward his house, a few streets over. "Same. My mom's probably cleaning her guns and pretending she's not waiting by the window. It's… a lot to carry."
"Yeah," Ace agreed. It was the most either of them would say about the weight their families bore because of them.
They started walking again, the distance to their own street shrinking. The familiarity of the surroundings—the crooked fence post, the streetlight that always flickered, the particular way the wind sounded in the power lines—was a comfort.
"So," Cedric said after a few steps, trying to wedge a note of normalcy back into the night. He rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck. "Goatman tomorrow, then? Full kit? No more 'observation only' bullshit?"
Ace nodded, his mind already shifting gears, pushing the emotional aftermath aside for the tactical problem. "Tomorrow. It's hurt, it'll be in its den, licking its wounds. That's when we can pin it down."
Cedric smirked, though it was strained. "Cool. Love starting my day by invading a cryptid's nest. Really gets the blood pumping."
Ace managed a faint, ghost of a smirk in return. "You'll be fine. You always are."
"Oh yeah?" Cedric shot back, the familiar rhythm of their banter a life raft. "You're the one with the fancy footwork. I'm the one who ends up as the distracting chew toy. Remember the bog hag? I still have a scar on my ass."
Ace's smirk grew a fraction. "Charming."
But then Ace stopped walking. They were at the corner of their own street now, the blue gate to his house visible down the block. He didn't look at it. He turned and looked back the way they'd come, toward the dark, amorphous blot of the woods on the horizon.
Cedric noticed and turned around, the joking fading from his face. "What?"
"I think," Ace cut in, his gaze snapping back to Cedric, hard and resolved, "that tomorrow, we don't just track it or drive it off. We end this. For good. Before it picks another house, another kid, another game."
Cedric nodded. No jokes now. No sarcasm. This was the core of it, the reason for all the fear, the training, the broken promises. The job wasn't about adventure; it was about making the world a fraction safer, one terrible thing at a time.
"Alright," Cedric said, his voice matching Ace's in its flat finality. "Tomorrow we hunt. For real."
Ace looked up at the sky. The moon, a pale sliver, was partly veiled by slow-drifting clouds. Stars were faint pinpricks in the light-polluted haze. Today had been long and brutal, a chaotic scramble of fear and reaction.
Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow would be planned. Purposeful.
He turned toward the blue gate, toward home and a few precious hours of restless sleep.
Today was bad.
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow was going to be worse. But they would be ready.
