Death, the Last Great Adventure

“Shadows: Stories of a Hunter”, Part Five


Pain blurred the half-breed’s vision, causing the world around him to swirl in a kaleidoscope of lights and darkness. He knew what was happening to him, it had almost happened to him before.
Nick Shadow was dying.


~A few hours earlier…
Nick Shadow was not a stranger to Atlantia. He had roamed its desolate streets as a cop in what seemed a previous life. A dark night, two glowing eyes that burned like hot coals and two sharp fangs biting deep into his jugular vein had changed all of that.
After his encounter with the demon-spawn called Proteous, Nick had learned that, once you touch evil, or it touches you, you can never be the same. So he roamed the streets of Atlantia, not as a cop, but as a dark hunter of the night. A supernatural investigator whose weapons were his fierce wrath, and immortal strength.
He left for a few years, tracking a coven of vampirish demons to their ancestral home somewhere on the Scottish moorlands. Upon returning, he spent some time in Los Angeles, where he came upon another coven. He followed the small group of vampires back to Atlantia, and eliminated them.
Now he was after different game, werewolves. A strange man in the Lesser Sector had told him that they were the spirits of ancient Native American tribes looking for a return to their former power and glory. A villager in Britain, where werewolves supposedly originated from, claimed that they were simply the spirits of wolves born into human bodies. Nick really didn’t care, either way there was still one out there, and it was killing people.
Not all werewolves were bad. Griffang Shaw, a werewolf shop owner in the Lesser Sector, was a good friend of Nick’s. And Amelia, a werewolf Nick met on his adventure in Scotland, had saved Nick’s life on a few occasions. But, like humans, there were a few who seemed bent on murder and destruction.
At the moment, the estranged Mystic Hunter sat on a bench somewhere in Blackwood Park. There had been reports of a strange wolf-like creature stalking the park at night. A couple of homeless vagabonds had been found dead, with their guts torn out and heads removed, within the park limits. A child runaway had been mauled by something that the police said resembled a giant bear. But Nick knew the real story behind the attacks; Werewolf.
The clouds were slightly overcast and the sun just beginning its descent into darkness. In these last few hours, Nick would watch and plan. Not that he could really formulate much of a plan at this point, but he could strategize and prepare.
A mother and her son walked by him, the mother watching him with a wary glance. She took in his lean body, medium-length black hair and dark eyes. He stared back, not concerned with subtleties. He had done away with such concerns long ago.
“Come, Alan, lets go.”
The cautious mother led her son away, her eyes still fixed on him. Some maternal instinct had been aroused and marked the dark hunter as an imminent threat. Nick couldn’t help agreeing with the woman’s assessment; he was not a person you wanted to hang around, especially after the sun set.
Other people passed by him, a few old homeless men, a young musician with a guitar slung over his shoulder, an old woman come to feed the birds. Nick saw them come and go, and few, if any, noticed him. He was a Shadow in a world of shadows, a patch of darkness in a dark sky.
Finally, as the sun set lower, the park began to empty. The old men he had seen earlier sat on a bench a few yards away, apparently planning to spend the night there. Nick hadn’t moved for hours, he remained as still as stone and just as cold.
The Mystic Hunter’s internal clock told him when nine-o-clock came around, and he began to rouse himself. Even an almost-immortal got stiff after staying immobile for so long. After stretching his limbs and getting the kinks out of his neck, the hunter reached inside his black leather coat and checked his weapons.
An old revolver loaded with silver bullets rested in a holster against his left side, and against his right was a large knife. Upon a hunch, Nick rose and walked to the edge of the park where he had left his 1967 GTO parked against the curb. Opening the trunk, he withdrew a long sword in a scabbard. Forged of Spanish steel and encased in silver, the katana-style sword was designed specifically for hunting, and killing, werewolves.
Taking the sword with him, Nick returned to his park bench and resumed his vigil with the sheathed weapon across his lap. A slow smile spread across his thin lips, revealing his sharp upper canines. Purebred vampires have fangs on both the upper and lower set of teeth. Being a half-breed, Nick only had the one set. It actually worked for him; it was easier to explain away a set of unusually long canine teeth than it was to explain four long tearing-incisors.
It was nearly eleven when a long howl cut the cold night air. Nick had closed his eyes a while back, taking on the appearance of sleep, although he didn’t need rest of any kind. But now, like two burning comets, his eyes snapped open and scanned the park area. Tapping into his extra-acute senses, Nick turned his head in the direction of a set of heavy footsteps.
It was coming.
Nick got to his feet with a feline grace and, with a musical ringing sound, unsheathed the magnificent sword. It seemed to glow with its own inner fire, a wolf-killer that was unequaled in beauty and terrible power.
Leaving the scabbard on the bench, Nick went to meet the creature approaching through the bushes. The two old men watched him go, watched him disappear into the shadows like a wraith.

The battle was terrible but, less than ten minutes later…
It was over.

From their bench under the tall streetlamp, the two men stared into the unmoving darkness. Finally, gathering his courage, one slowly, stiffly, got to his feet and approached the place the dark man had disappeared to only minutes before.
What he found would stay with him until he died. Blood and gore stained the ground and nearby trees. The magnificent sword the stranger had been carrying when he disappeared into the darkness was lying on the ground, slick with blood and broken in half. The tip of the sword was nowhere to be seen.
Near the broken hilt of the sword lay a huge, furry figure. Nearly seven feet tall had it been standing, the werewolf was, even in death, a terrifying thing to behold. Huge ice-blue eyes, clouded in death, stared out from above the creature’s ghastly maw. Its ears were laid back against its brown-furred scalp; its fur was matted with blood.
The old man, taking slight courage from its vacant stare, approached the creature and caught the glimmer of the tip of the sword blade broken off in the monster’s chest. The hilt of a large combat-knife protruded out of the werewolf’s neck.
A rasping cough drew the man’s attention to the body of the stranger. He had managed to avoid taking any hits to the head, but his chest was torn open and the homeless man could see at least two ribs poking through the man’s flesh. One arm was bent grotesquely out of place, while the hand of the other was hanging by what seemed only a small portion of skin.
The old man hesitantly came to stand over the stranger and looked down into his dimly glowing eyes. The stranger stared back, unafraid to live or die.

Pain blurred Nick Shadow’s vision, causing the world around him to swirl in a kaleidoscope of lights and darkness. He knew what was happening to him, it had almost happened to him before; he was dying.


The homeless man and his friend pulled the almost dead stranger to the edge of the park and called 9-1-1. An ambulance arrived shortly to ferry the near lifeless body to the Atlantia Medical Hospital. A few minutes after that, a police car pulled up and two officers got out and questioned the two old men. They had them lead the officers to the scene of the battle and, after marking off the area with yellow tape and taking a number of pictures, they disappeared. Even later, two more Atlantia cop cars arrived along with a CSI van to take control of the scene.
By dinnertime the next day, the scene looked as if nothing had ever happened. When asked, the police said it was all just a training exercise to help break-in inexperienced CSI’s. And that was all they would ever say.

Three days after the park had been cleaned up and the public allowed back in, Nick Shadow woke up in a hospital bed somewhere in the Special Care section of Atlantia Medical. His black eyes flickered open and took in the white walls, the monitors that showed no vital signs, and the man sitting across from his bed.
Nick tried to sit up and instantly went rigid with pain. His whole body felt like it was on fire.
“Don’t move, you’ve been through the blender and it’s beyond even a miracle that you are still alive.”
Nick stared with cloudy eyes at the ceiling.
“Hello, Officer Wolvest.”
Josh Wolvest, Commander of the “Special Operations” team, jokingly called the “Supernatural Squad” by the other departments, smiled slightly at the Mystic Hunter.
“Hello, Nick, want to tell me what happened?”
Nick grinned humorously at the ceiling, “Oh, same old. I picked a fight I almost couldn’t handle.”
Wolvest nodded, “I assume you’re going to tell me that thing we found with your sword embedded in its heart is what’s been responsible for our park killings.”
Nick tried to shrug, but the pain was almost unbearable.
“Uh, yeah. Typical case of a werewolf going out of control and giving into its natural bloodlust.”
Wolvest pinch the bridge of his nose in exasperation.
“You know, I’m almost used to Justin giving me reports like that, but only almost.”
Justin Wulf, also known as Wildthing, was another one of Atlantia’s resident mystical guardians. He worked closely with Josh Wolvest’s team of specially trained agents, protecting Atlantia from werewolves, demons, vampires, rouge computer viruses, and whatever else goes bump in the night. He had even worked with Nick Shadow on a few occasions, most recently being to team up in tracking down Proteous, the vampire Prince who had tried taking over the city a few years back.
Wolvest got up to leave, “Well, seeing as this whole investigation was handed over to Special Operations, I can just write off another one of my paragraph-long case summaries and call it “case-closed”.”
Nick grinned, “Chief, you’re a Saint.”
Wolvest rolled his eyes at the Mystic hunter, “I think I lost my sainthood a long time ago.”
And, with that, he left the room.
Nick remained in the hospital the rest of the day and all of that night. The next morning, however, to the utter shock and horror of hospital staff, Nick checked himself out and went back to the park to claim his car. Then he cruised up and down the highway, windows down and radio blaring.
It was good to be alive.