Chapter 1 #2
Three men dead, all emptied out by the same predator. If the pattern held, there’d be another body by morning, unless I beat her to it.
The carnival was set up on the south edge of town, temporary as a fever dream. It was a nesting ground for gambling, booze, and enough horny desperation to fuel a small genocide. If I were a succubus, I couldn’t think of a better place to hunt. Throw in Halloween, and the bitch was in her element.
I leaned over and caught my reflection in the window.
I was a pale, scarred bastard with eyes a shade too light and nothing in them but heat.
For a second, I wondered what it looked like from the other side.
The chill on my arms told me one thing for sure, that the monsters weren’t going to hunt themselves.
I’m sorry, I’ve gotten way ahead of myself. My name is Daniel “Torch” Clark. When the club, the Royal Bastards Motorcycle Club, Lexington, Kentucky chapter, isn’t calling me Prospect, they call me Torch.
I was found in the Lexington Cemetery by Vin, the club’s president.
It was raining that night, the heavy, metallic sort, like a fistful of old nails thrown through a wood chipper.
I remember waking up in the mud, my tongue thick and my guts twisted sideways, like I’d spent all night gargling razorblades and bad tequila.
The cemetery gates loomed in the distance, blurred by tears or sweat or worse.
A statue of a grieving angel hunched over a headstone, wings broken and face melted from years of acid rain. I could relate.
I half-crawled, half-dragged myself to the fence line, not sure yet if I was alive.
I remember the hum of motorcycle engines punctuating the wet silence, the low growl familiar, almost comforting, even with my skull trying to split open.
It was Vin, standing astride his Triumph at the broken iron gate.
He didn’t say a word at first, just stared, letting the engine idle while I shivered in the dirt.
After a minute, he shut the bike off, stepped down and squatted beside me, boots leaving black smears in the mud.
His face was all angles and weather, eyes undercut by that constant, surgical intelligence.
He looked at my arms, at the glow beneath the grime, and he knew.
There’s a story out there about the Devil and bargains made in graveyards, but Vin didn’t seem surprised to see a dead man walk.
He just grinned, reached out a hand, and said, “You look like shit, brother.”
That’s how it started. No questions, no speeches, just me, hollowed out and wrung dry and sucking air on the outside of a hundred-year-old fence with a biker president looming over me like my own personal Grim Reaper.
I passed out twice on the ride back to the clubhouse.
Vin rode with one hand on the bars, the other ready to throttle my soul back into my corpse if I tried to slip away again.
The inside of the clubhouse reeked of cigarette ash, scorched leather, and a sweetness I would later realize was blood, half-mopped up from the tile.
It was a safe house for the damned, maybe, but it worked just fine for me.
They gave me water, whiskey, and space. I spent those first days watching the flicker of neon Bud Light behind the bar, piecing together how many parts of me were still in working order.
The MC brothers, the Royal Bastards, treated me like some contagious miracle.
They didn’t bother with welcome parties or awkward get-to-know-yous.
They measured you by how hard you clung to the bottom rung, and whether you knew how to keep your mouth shut. I had aced both before puberty.
Vin told me his friend in the coroner’s office had ID’d me off dental records and army tags, but there was no family, no contacts, nothing to explain why I’d been left in a cemetery looking like a bomb went off in my genetics.
Turns out, dying once takes all the fun out of genealogical research.
I had my name, my scars, and the nightmares.
The rest was muscle memory and borrowed time.
Vin kept me around, first as a courtesy, then as an experiment.
He set me up with a cot in the "recovery room," which was a janitor’s closet stinking of Pine-Sol and bleach, and started running me on probie jobs: graveyard shifts, cleanup after bar brawls, message delivery to the sort of people whose names you never wrote down. At night, he wanted me to read witchcraft manuals, MC protocol, case files on things that went bump in the night around the Bluegrass. Little by little, my new life sank fangs and claws into my old one until I couldn’t remember the difference.
Within a month, he trusted me enough to staff the door during lockdown nights, and by the six-week mark, I was running solo errands.
The RBMC was a strange outfit. Half outlaw bikers, half demon control force, they handled supernatural clean-up for the city, much like ex-military personnel with a side hustle in amateur exorcism.
Of all the things I had expected to be after coming back from Hell, “bouncer for monsters” wasn’t one of them.
Vin never said why he picked me, or how he knew what I’d been through; he just seemed to have an internal compass for the walking wounded. Maybe he saw himself in me. Or maybe I was just another tool in his kit, and it didn’t matter to either of us so long as the job got done.
I still had to shave my face every two days, and every time I caught my reflection, I saw something new that didn’t belong.
A twitch under the eyelid, a scar that hadn’t been there before, a brighter hardness in the set of my jaw.
Sometimes it just meant I was still alive.
Sometimes it meant the Hell part was catching up.I learned that every club member had returned from below.
Oh, there was Church, who said he'd OD'd in '04 and "played chess with the fuckin' Reaper," and Big Mike, who acted like he saw the Devil in his cereal every morning if the milk soured. But me, I wasn't selling stories for pity and free rounds. I’d died. Explorer’s badge, signed and stamped. I didn’t remember the trip in clean detail, just enough to know I’d left parts behind.
My job, as Vin pitched it, was simple. Kill anything that made a snack out of locals.
Succubi, incubi, bog-standard ghouls, the odd shape-shifter who forgot which calendar year this was.
Central Kentucky was crawling with enough old-world monsters to make the Vatican blush, but only the Royal Bastards worked the graveyard shift.
We were the last line of defense between the regular, TV-watching, mortgage-paying population and the stuff in the dark that wanted to chew through their intestines.
Sometimes, when I rode shotgun behind Vin, I thought about what it’d be like to be made of regular nightmares instead of the imported kind.
To get up, punch a clock, and bury your anxiety in football games and yard work.
But then the wind hit my face, or the stink of burning trash and spilled gasoline whipped up behind us, and I remembered—there’s no part of me built for normal. Never was.
The phone rang, sharp as a gunshot and twice as annoying. Most people these days didn’t bother to call; they just texted, or screamed at you in person if things were urgent. So when I saw Kane’s name strobing on the cracked screen, I knew it wasn’t about the weather.
“Kane,” I answered, voice flat. Didn’t see the need for hellos. You learn to conserve words when you spend your life hunting things that don’t care about them.
“Brother.” Kane sounded like gravel run through a blender, too many nights at the bottom of a bottle, and too many days chewing on the fact that his own kid once tried to eat his face. “You in?”
“Yeah.” I slotted another magazine into the 1911 and felt the weight settle. “What’s the word?”
“Shit’s heating up.” He paused, and I could picture the way his eyes darted, measuring each sentence.
“The carnival’s been drawing them in like fucking roadkill.
Two of the club’s psychics came in screaming last night.
Said the whole place is crawling, and there’s something big at the center.
Something that likes men with impulse control issues. ”
“Succubus.” I didn’t make it a question.
“Right.” Kane exhaled, a wet sound over the line. “But not the usual streetwalker. This one’s old. The psychics couldn’t get a look at her real face without blowing out their own sinuses. One’s still in the ER. The other’s talking in tongues, and you know how I feel about that.”
I grunted, then stood and crossed to the window.
Carlisle Carnival sprawled in the distance, its perimeter lit with cheap LEDs and the flickering pulse of old neon.
Even from four blocks away, I could sense the gravity well—thousands of people orbiting a single point, drawn by smells of sugar and rot, their weaknesses exposed and begging to be exploited.
“Any other casualties?” I asked, loading the revolver and spinning the cylinder. The metal purred.
“Nothing official. But the carny crew’s jumpier than a tweaker at a gun show.
Reports of lost time, guys wandering off, and waking up in the brush with no clue how they got there.
A couple of visitors called in, said they had nightmares so real they pissed themselves.
All after a run-in with a ‘smoking hot’ redhead at the Ring Toss. ” Kane didn’t laugh. “Sound familiar?”
“It’s her. The woman in the drawings.” My jaw locked down. The burn from my scars was back, a sullen pressure mounting under the skin. “I’ll handle it.”
There was a pause, a shared understanding that didn’t need words. Kane had seen the aftermath before; he knew I wouldn’t call in reinforcements unless the job needed body bags, plural. Still, he had to ask. “Need backup?”
“No.” I holstered the 1911, felt its weight, the warmth where it touched my skin. “If I’m not back by dawn, torch the place. Just make sure there’s no crowd.”
He exhaled again, softer this time. “Don’t make me clean up after you, Torch.”
I almost smiled, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I hung up and let the phone clatter to the desk.
The room felt smaller than ever, every inch compressed by the promise of violence.
I went through my pre-hunt checklist: vest, jacket, gloves, boots, smokes, flask (optional, but always appreciated after).
The jacket was patched with the RBMC skull and piston.
I buckled the chest strap, slid my hands into the fingerless gloves, and ran them down my arms. The scars buzzed, electric, as I did. Each movement was mechanical, a sequence drilled into muscle memory. It was almost peaceful, right up until I glanced at the evidence photos again.
They lay face-up on the desk, eyes locked on me in silent accusation. Grayson’s frozen grin, Vargas’s spaced-out bliss, Walters’s hollowed terror. They were reminders, not just of the job, but of what happened when you let a monster roam free.
I swept the files into a manila envelope and tucked it into the inside pocket of the jacket. No one else was going to join their little photo club if I had anything to say about it.
The final step was the blade. I kept it in a sheath behind my left hip, an old habit from my deployment days.
It was a combat knife, but modified, the tang inlaid with thin bands of silver, the edge sharp enough to shave skin from bone.
It had a name, but I never said it out loud. Didn’t want to give it ideas.
I grabbed the helmet, considered it, then left it on the desk. Tonight wasn’t about safety.
The city outside was shrouded in dying light, and the sound of distant laughter was audible. I locked the door behind me and walked down the stairwell, boots echoing off the concrete, each step a countdown.
At the street, I fired up the Harley and let the engine shatter the silence.
The wind stung my face, but I barely felt it.
The scars were singing now, brighter and hotter than ever.
By the time I reached the edge of the carnival, the blue-white lines on my arms were visible through the jacket, casting flickering shadows on the gas tank and my clenched fists.
I stopped a block short and killed the engine. The smell of popcorn and fryer grease mingled with something feral, something that curdled the air and made the back of my throat itch. I lit a cigarette with a flick of my fingers, flicked the ash, and stared down the carnival lights.
Tonight, I was the monster in the dark. And if the succubus wanted a dance, I’d make sure it was her last.
I rolled my shoulders, took a long drag, and started walking.
Let the hunt begin.