Ace and Axl walked side by side, the only sound the scuff of their boots on the sidewalk and the distant, occasional bark of a dog.
It had been about thirty minutes since the group split up. They'd paused earlier at a lonely-looking vending machine outside a shuttered laundromat. Ace had fed in crumpled dollar bills and gotten a cold soda. He took a sip now as they moved, the sugar and caffeine doing little against the deep fatigue.
Cedric and Garath had the east side. They had the west. The neighborhood, under the flat wash of the occasional streetlight, was quiet. Polite. The kind of place where people probably washed their cars on Saturdays. A cool breeze slipped through the gaps between houses, carrying the scent of damp earth and cut grass. Ace liked the breeze. It was the only thing about the night that didn't feel like a waste of time.
Axl walked with a hunter's economy of movement, but his eyes weren't just scanning. They were listening, tasting the air. He'd been quiet for a long stretch. He glanced over at Ace, who was staring straight ahead, jaw tight.
"You've been quiet for half an hour," Axl said, his voice low. It wasn't an accusation. It was an observation. "The gears are turning. What's the question?"
Ace took another pull from his soda. The can hissed softly in the stillness. He didn't look over.
"How old are you again?"
It wasn't small talk. The words were measured, heavy. Axl smiled, but it was a thin, worn-out thing that didn't touch the rest of his face. He knew exactly what Ace was really asking.
"I'm almost twenty-one."
Silence followed, thicker than before. Ace swallowed, the soda suddenly tasting too sweet. He stopped walking, turning to face Axl properly under the orange glow of a streetlamp.
Priests.
The word was a joke. It suggested choirs and stained glass and something holy. The reality was dirtier. They were glitches. Breaks in the system. The only humans born with a connection not to anything divine, but to the grimy, leaking pipes of the world—the hidden machinery most people, even hunters, never had to see. You couldn't learn it. You couldn't earn it. It was a birth defect dressed up as a gift.
In hunter circles, calling someone "blessed" was an insult. It meant unstable. It meant you were a door that couldn't be fully closed, and things whispered through the crack. Priests weren't trusted with command. They were tools. Expensive, brittle tools you used only when the job was so ugly that breaking one was cheaper than losing a whole team.
And they broke. God, did they break.
The average life expectancy was twenty years. That wasn't a guess. It was a cold, statistical fact gathered over generations. It wasn't that demons targeted them first—though they often did. It was the work itself. Magic wasn't a free resource pulled from the air. It was a transaction. The universe demanded a calorie count, and the only currency it accepted was you.
Every time a priest felt for a "death echo" or pushed back against a creeping corruption, they were spending their own vitality. Their life force. Their soul, for the poetic types. It was like burning your nerves for light, or bleeding to turn a gear. The drain was physical, relentless. It aged you prematurely, not with wrinkles, but with a deep, cellular exhaustion. It left you cold in a warm room, hollowed out your appetite, stole the color from your world long before it killed you.
The end wasn't dramatic. No grand explosion of light. Priests just… faded. They grew weaker, quieter, thinner—like a glass of water left out in the sun, evaporating ounce by ounce until there was nothing left but a dry stain. Most died in beds, looking twenty years older than they were, their bodies simply used up. Some called it "The Fade." Others called it "going dry."
And the kicker? The power wasn't even that good. It wasn't fireballs or lightning. It was subtle, nasty stuff. Feeling psychic stains. Getting migraines when something unholy was near. Only some special blessed ones could use magic for combat . Most times it was detection, not destruction. For real fighting, you still needed a gun or a blade. The magic just told you where to point it, and made sure you paid for the information with pieces of your lifespan.
Axl was almost twenty-one. A year past the average. He was living on borrowed time, on bonus rounds. Every day was a defiance of a statistic.
The pleasant night breeze swept past them again, but now it carried a deeper chill, smelling of wet asphalt and the cold void of the hours before dawn. In the stark light, Ace noticed what he'd been avoiding looking at. As Axl rolled his shoulders, the sleeves of his jacket pulled back. Tracing up his forearms, visible even in the low light, were dark, intricate marks. They didn't look like tattoos. They looked like cracks in porcelain, or the dark, branching veins of a dead leaf—necrosis frozen in time. Permanent scars from channeling power, where his own vitality had burned back through his flesh.
Axl saw him looking and tugged his sleeve down, the gesture swift and final.
"Don't worry about it," he said, his voice flat, empty. He started walking again, his pace unchanged. "Keep your eyes on the street. Boredom is the point. Boring means we're winning."
Ace stood for a second longer, the empty soda can cold in his hand. The reality of it settled into him, not as a idea, but as a weight. He wasn't walking with a priest. He was walking with a lit fuse. He fell into step beside him, the quiet neighborhood feeling less safe and more like a waiting room. They continued their loop, two shadows guarding a safe, sleeping street, one of them already halfway to being a ghost.
***
The morning sun was a pale, hesitant smear on the horizon, bleeding light but offering no warmth. The group had reconvened at the RV, a silent, weary gathering.
Ace and Axl were already inside when the door groaned open. Cedric and Garath hauled themselves up the steps, bringing with them the scent of cold air and damp grass. They looked less like hunters and more like survivors of a minor disaster. Cedric's jacket was misbuttoned. Garath had a streak of dirt across his cheek where he'd likely leaned against something to rest his eyes.
Cedric collapsed onto the bench seat opposite Ace, letting out a long, theatrical groan that ended in a yawn. "You," he said, pointing a shaky finger at Ace without lifting his head. "You go with your brother from tomorrow. No way. No possible way I'm getting stuck with the human statue again."
Garath, methodically wiping his boots on the mat by the door, didn't look up. "Nothing happened. That was the objective."
"Nothing happened is the problem!" Cedric pushed himself upright, his fatigue giving way to fresh indignation. "Do you have any idea how boring it was? We walked the same three blocks. For six hours. In a circle. We passed the same stupid plastic gnome fourteen times. I named him Gerald. I started debating politics with him just to stay awake!"
"You were trying to make useless conversation," Garath stated, finally looking over. His eyes were red-rimmed but alert. "I was watching guard. Your job was to watch the other direction, not critique garden décor."
"Oh, please," Cedric shot back, running a hand through his hair. "My job was to die of terminal boredom while you practiced your impression of a brick wall. 'See anything?' 'No.' 'Hear anything?' 'No.' 'Think it'll rain?' 'Maybe.' It was like talking to a fortune cookie that only predicts bleak, uneventful nights! All because of a damn psychic!"
Axl, who had been at the RV's small galley, didn't turn from the coffee machine. The soft gurgle and drip filled the tense space. "You want to argue about that again?" His voice was calm, but it carried a note of finality that cut through the bickering.
Cedric opened his mouth, caught the tone, and slumped back. "Nope. I'm too tired. My will to argue has been Faded." He said the last word with a pointed glance around, letting the grim priestly term hang in the air for a moment before closing his eyes.
Axl finished preparing four mugs. He moved with the same weary precision he'd used on patrol. He handed Garath and Cedric identical mugs of black coffee, steam rising in faint wisps. He slid one across the small table to Ace—this one had a visible splash of milk in it, exactly how Ace took it. The small, unacknowledged kindness was as routine as loading a magazine. Finally, he took his own and leaned against the counter.
For a few minutes, there was no sound but sipping, the clink of ceramic, and the slow settling of exhausted bodies. The coffee was cheap and bitter, but it was heat and life, cutting through the deep chill that had seeped into their bones. It was a ritual. After the dark and the watching, this was the part where they proved they'd all made it back.
Axl watched them drink, his own mug cradled in his hands. The dark, cracked marks on his wrists were hidden again by his sleeves. When the mugs were half-empty, he set his down with a soft tap that drew their eyes.
He clapped his hands together once, a dry, sharp sound. "Alright. Listen up." His gaze swept over Cedric and Ace. "You two kiddos. You're going to school."
The sentence landed in the quiet RV like a thrown brick.
Ace, who had been staring blankly at the wood grain of the table, slowly lifted his head. His brain, fogged with fatigue, processed the words twice. "What do you mean, school?"
Axl's lips quirked, but it wasn't a real smile. It was the expression of someone delivering bad news with a side of sarcasm. "School. It's a place with desks. They give you books. Sometimes there's pizza for lunch—"
"Dumbass," Ace interrupted, his voice low and rough with sleep deprivation. "I didn't ask for the fucking dictionary definition. What do you mean, we're going to school?"
"I mean," Axl said, his tone shifting to flat practicality, "that as far as the state of Brelle is concerned, you are a student enrolled at Westhaven High. You have first-period Algebra in," he checked his phone, its screen blindingly bright in the dim RV, "one hour and twenty-two minutes. You need to be there."
Ace stared. He blinked. The information refused to mesh with the last twelve hours of his life—the psychic, the bad energy, the endless walking, the crushing weight of Axl's revealed reality. A laugh, harsh and utterly humorless, escaped him. "Fuck no. No. No way. Absolutely not." He leaned forward, his knuckles white where he gripped the table edge. "I spent the entire night walking around a neighborhood waiting for a monster or something to maybe show up, and now I have to go sit in a room and learn about... about—?"
"Yeah," Axl said, unfazed. "That's life, kid. You go to school in the morning. We work at night. Welcome to the double shift."
"Why?" The word burst out of Ace, louder now, frustration overriding exhaustion. "Since when do you give a single shit about my education? Since when does any of this"—he gestured wildly around the RV, at the weapons rack, the maps, the very concept of their lives—"Concern you?"
"I don't," Axl said, his voice dropping, all pretense of sarcasm gone. He reached for his phone again, swiped, and turned the screen to face Ace and Cedric. "But she does."
On the screen was a text message thread. The contact was saved as Sophie . The last message, timestamped 5:45 AM, read:
Sophie : Axl. They have first period at 8:10. If they are not in those seats, grounded for a month. No hunts. No arguments. You make it happen or I pull them off the team. I mean it.
Below it, a second message, sent two minutes later:
Sophie : And yes, that includes Cedric. Tell him his mother already knows. She agrees with me.
Ace read the words. Then he read them again. The fight drained out of him all at once, leaving behind a cold, hollow feeling. He looked from the phone's glaring screen to his own hands, which still smelled of the night's cold metal and his soda can. He looked at the gear piled in the corner—his jacket, his boots, the promise of the hunt.
The classroom or the hunt. His mother's ultimatum left no room for both.
Axl pulled the phone back. "You've got time to swing by home, change, and maybe choke down some toast. Your gear stays here." He finished his coffee in one long swallow. "Move it."