Anathema Pt. 01

Author's note:

Yes, I realize there are some major continuity discrepancies between this story and the rest of the inhuman universe I've posted so far. That's done on purpose as time doesn't really work in a linear fashion for a Predator who can travel to the Underworld. It's not the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff sort of timeline so much as the nature of the Predator makes it so their brain simply doesn't acknowledge the stuff trying to take up space there. So please, go in reading this knowing that humans are fully aware of the inhuman among them. Kaya just hasn't caught up to that fact yet.

This is still part of the Inhuman Universe, along with Bound and Reaped. There is no sex in this part of the story. I'm still actively working to get the end of this one right, so all I can really ask is patience.

As always, thank you for reading. Please vote and/or comment when you finish if you feel so inclined.

Sex in these stories happens if it works with the story. Just FYI.

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Loud banging on the door broke through the dream until all I was left with was a faint warmth and the memory of glowing green eyes. Every time I had that dream, it was interrupted. And every time I was left with an impression of heat and those eyes. The pounding came again, and I could hear the faint jingle of my phone ringing. Groaning, I rolled out of bed. I had fallen asleep in my clothes with my phone in my pocket, so at least I didn't risk flashing whoever was at the door.

Another pound on the door and I yelled, "You better fucking have coffee!"

Jerking the door open I growl at G, my keeper. Well, I guess he's technically my partner, but he's mostly my keeper. He holds up a big mug and I can hear ice rattling in it and beneath that is a box with the logo of my favorite breakfast taco place splashed across it. "I come begging forgiveness."

"I'll consider it," I take the coffee from him and move away from the door.

"You need to get dressed for the office, Kaya," he says, his voice careful. I can feel my hair shift at my annoyance and not for the first time I wish he couldn't see through the glamour that kept it appearing a boring blonde. I wasn't annoyed at G. I just hoped he knew that since he was the only one that stuck around through my bullshit.

"You're driving," I mutter.

I leave him at the little kitchen peninsula and head to my room. Office time meant they had a new assignment for me. Nevermind I had just finished tracking the last one and gotten home three hours ago, and they hadn't had a Feeder for me like they were supposed to. Bunch of assholes. So I stripped out of the jeans and tee I had fallen asleep in, took off the undies, and started concocting an outfit that would make them regret interrupting my sleep.

Clean undies because I never, ever wanted the chance that a paramedic would have to cut off my clothes and catch me in my period grannies, then tight black jeans, a bra with more criss-crossing straps than a BDSM harness, and a black racerback tank top that showed off all those straps. All of that and I pulled on my lace-up steel toe boots. If I was going to have to track anything today, the clothes were going to be comfy and the shoes would damn well be functional.

My hair got brushed out then left down because I just couldn't be bothered with the mess. The outfit would look like I straight disrespected every person in the office, but I could still go out in the field and do my job.

Any mundanes would see thick blond waves with streaks from various highlighting jobs, but the inhuman would see my tired gray hair beneath the glamour I wore constantly in the form of a pair of sud earrings. It wasn't a dye job.

Thanks to a vindictive aunt who hadn't liked me getting more than her in my grandmother's will, I had hair cursed to give away my every mood and emotion. She thought I had lied about what grandma left me and that the hair would prove I was lying. I hadn't been lying, but she hadn't undone the curse, either. Like the horse of a different color pulling the carriage in Oz, my hair would change on a whim. Right now I was dead tiredand more than a little annoyed, and my hair showed it.

Tracking was a soul sucking job. Literally. From a scrap of a person I could track their soul to the ends of the earth and had even gone to the Underworld more than a few times. Let me just say now, Charon doesn't like when I'm at his little dock. No, I don't try to Hercules souls up out of the Underworld. That shit is for the birds. But I do track them down and get answers out of them, up to and including where their body is so a medium can contact them in court. Even in death, there is no peace from the Bureau of Inhuman Affairs. Charon just didn't like me because I never brought him coffee, no matter how I explained that my bosses kept calling it a bribe. I could relate to his frustration.

I came out of my bedroom and G handed me the box of tacos and headed toward the door of my apartment. I grabbed my keys and badge and followed. G's truck was an old farm truck he had picked up for cheap, and it looked like it had been through hell. The front half was red and the back half was silver... on the right side. The left side of the truck was blue and green. The hood had a poorly spray painted skull and cross bones done in a neon turquoise. It was glorious, and loud, and he loved it. It also had more engine under the hood than any truck should rightfully have. I have to climb into the beast like it's a tree.

He starts the truck and pulls out into traffic, trusting that his truck is big enough to win any fights with the little hybrids around us. The office is downtown, near the county jail with all the boring architecture that implies. That means it's a good half hour drive from my place through traffic, so I have time to suck down spicy chorizo, fluffy eggs, and melty cheese wrapped in a homemade flour tortilla. Mana from Heaven.

I wonder for a minute if Heaven exists. I mean, I've met Charon on his little boat, ferrying the dead across the River Styx. I'm told the old gods of death and the Underworld get together on Tuesday nights to play cards, and I know for a fact Anubis is bad at poker. There should be a balance to that. Maybe the Christian God and Allah get together to bitch about their children.

My musings are cut short when we hit the ramp into a parking garage. I start paying attention because it never ceases to amaze me that G can park this damn truck in this tiny little garage. Hell, it impresses me that anyone in anything bigger than a roller skate can park in these. My own truck is not large, but I still prefer an open parking lot to this. Giving exacly zero fucks, G takes up two spaces and throws it in park.

"I don't know what's going on, but try not to piss too many people off this time, yeah?" He says.

"I never try to piss people off, G. It just happens."

"You know what I mean, Kaya." He gives me the keeper look. The look that says I'm being deliberately difficult.

"I can't help it if they don't like the look of me." I'm starting to get angry. I've had almost no sleep, not enough coffee, and they withheld my Feeder because why the fuck not? And I was being told not to piss them off? Fuck that noise.

G reaches over the console but I pull back. "Just feed, Kaya."

"I can't feed off of you and you know it. You feed your kid and don't have enough to spare for me. I'll be fine, but my emotions are going to be all over the place until I find a Feeder." His youngest daughter was a Predator, like me. The politically correct term was Tracker because we could hunt anything, but Predator was more accurate for what we really were.

G was a Feeder and had been my Feeder almost since I got conscripted into this line of work. But a Feeder could only feed one of us at a time, and I wasn't going to take food from his kid. Feeders were also a lot more common than Predators. His daughter hadn't even built up her feeding preferences yet. "You need to be reassigned, G."

"Not until they find you a Feeder you won't kill outright," he grumbles. "You'll be less grumpy after you feed."

"And you don't have enough to give me a snack," I reply. "Let's get this over with and see what shitshow they're sending me on this time. I'll try to obey the leash."

He shuts the truck off and we both get out and slam the doors. Mine bounces back open so I wiggle the handle and then lean into it when I try to shut it again, getting it to latch on the second try. We take the sky bridge across to the county jail, then the elevator down into the basement where a tunnel leads over to the Bureau offices.

The Inhuman Division doesn't technically exist, kind of like the Men in Black but not as cool. Parts of the government know we exist, most of the government does not. We're the black-out files, the ghosts, the spooks. Whatever they want to call us, we're an underfunded part of the US Government. So basically, we're like every other branch of the grovernment. People turn and watch us walk through, but they're really watching me. I'm still peeved from the conversation in the truck and I know my hair is flaming red.

My boots thump on the cheap carpet tiles of the offices as G walks us back to the big conference room that also doubles as a break room. The coffee sucks in these places. Believe me. There's a spot in Hell for the makers of coffee in government offices. Even Charon doesn't want this stuff. That thought makes me grin as we enter the room, and the lieutenant frowns at me. It's not usually a good thing that gets me smiling.

"Share the humor with the class, Jackson?" Lieutenant Mark Bower is a shrimpy little man. I'm pretty sure he was made fun of a lot as a kid so he worked his way up in the ranks here just to lord it over people. I can't say I blame him.

"I was just thinking even Charon doesn't want the coffee in this place." I take an empty seat next to G and put my feet up on the table, much to the offense of some prim woman I've never seen before.

Next to the priss, though, is a man I can't take my eyes off of. He's a Feeder, and unlike G he hasn't been feeding a growing toddler. My hunger hits hard and fast and I know my hair flashes black. I can feel my eyes go, too. Somebody is saying something, but all I can see is this man's soul.

Most souls sit in the centerline of the body. Call it whatever you want, chi, chakra... spinal column. Doesn't matter. Everybody's soul resides there, in their core. The majority of those souls are the same. The soul of a Predator is missing some small piece and we always hunger for that piece. Lucky for us, Mother Nature took pity and the balance to the missing piece of a Predator's soul is in the soul of a Feeder.

Feeders are those people who always seem to be so happy and perky that they beg to be smacked upside the head just to turn the sunshine off. Their souls are just bigger, for lack of a better way to describe it. Predators need that little bit of extra every so often. It doesn't hurt the Feeder, and the extra bit grows back after a few days or so. This guy's soul looked like it had never been touched and I was starving.

"Kaya!" G's voice finally breaks through, but it's more because he's touching me than talking to me. I'm on my stomach on the table, reaching for the new guy, and I don't remember how I got here. "Sit down. Now."

Even through my clothes I can feel G's soul reaching for me, begging for me to taste. I want to, but I can't feed from him. He needs what his body makes to feed his kid, but it's a struggle not to pull it into me. My hands squeak across the table as I slide back toward my chair.

"What the fuck is wrong with you people?" G glares at the lieutenant, who looks like he might shit himself.

I look down at my hands and can see my talons. I phased out in front of everyone. Fuck.

"If you can't control your charge, Agent Gantry, we will bring in someone who can," the prissy lady says from about six feet back from where she had been at the table. The man beside her, though, is leaning against the table like he had been reaching for me. It wouldn't surprise me.

"Try to take him from me," I turn my eyes on the woman. I can smell the witch on her and watch her soul shrink as her fear grows. I know my eyes are still black, with veins of black spreading across my face. My hair is the color of the night sky between the stars, so black it seems to absorb the light, and it floats and snarls around my shoulders. This hair color isn't part of the curse, either. My talons are still out. I'm still partially phased because I'm so fucking hungry and he's sitting right fucking there. "I'm going to guess you're the bitch that didn't have my Feeder ready after my last assignment."

"Kaya," G tries to console me, but he doesn't touch me again. He probably knows my control is hanging by a thread.

"No, G," I don't look at him. I look back at the man because the woman is going to set me off. I can feel it. "They don't get to starve me and then dangle him right fucking in front of me."

"Agent Jackson, we were told your handler was a Feeder," the prissy lady doesn't move back toward the table. "If you have a Feeder, you do not need to be provided one after a hunt."

I tear my gaze away from the new guy and look at the woman. Her soul is normal, but would still taste so good right now. I phase further and feel my fangs grow from top and bottom and I grin at her. G's daughter's status as a Predator is a known thing in the system. I can feel the drool sliding out of the corner of my mouth and the woman pales. Fear is such a nice spice, too, I almost thank her.

I have to speak slowly and enunciate or I have a tendency to mangle my words around my fangs, "I am not a monster to steal food from a child. The souls of those who wish harm on children are particularly tasty."

She faints, slumping in her chair. I didn't even touch her. The man she was with gets up from the table and walks around to kneel beside me.

"Now that you scared her senseless, please feed." His voice is soft, but low like he would sing bass if he tried.

I want to take his offer, but it seems too good to be true so I look at G and then the lieutenant. They both nod, so I turn back to the man at my knees and cup his face in my clawed hands.

If asked, I don't think I could adequately explain what it is that happens when I feed on another soul. My own soul opens up to take in that part of the Feeder's soul that is extra. His eyes close and he relaxes into my touch with a sigh. He's not a small man, either, so I curl up on the chair with my knees on either side of his body and just hold his head against my chest. I rest my cheek on the top of his head and slide my hands over the back of his neck. He tastes like honey, thick and dark like the stuff from the dead of winter when the bees make it good and concentrated.

The woman comes back to herself while I'm cuddled up with some man I don't know, my cheek pressed against the top of his head and my hands around his shoulders. When she starts sputtering, the lieutenant says something to shut her up, but I don't pay attention. I draw on the excess inside the man until I'm full, letting him go slowly and carefully and telling myself if I stop it won't hurt him and maybe he'll come back. Even G wasn't this sweet.

"G, can I keep him?" I ease back from the man a bit but he stays put, and likely will for a few more minutes. My fangs recede and I run my tongue around my mouth and then try to get the drool off my face.

"Yes," but the answer comes from the man in my lap, not from G at my back.

"You're terrible with pets, Kaya," G says, but I can hear the joke in his voice. He gets my humor. "I'm not cleaning his litter box."

"The brass know about your daughter, Agent Gantry," the man is still relaxed against me and I wonder how long it's been since he's fed anyone. I'm not the only Predator in the Bureau. "But her next assignment is going to take a while and you can't be gone that long again."

"Agent Billings," the witch on the other side of the table sounds exasperated, "this is not appropriate behavior. She is petting you."

Huh. I hadn't noticed myself running my fingers through the man's hair until she pointed it out. I hadn't had a Feeder that did this since my first week as a Tracker for the Bureau. It was actually kind of nice. G might have, but he had always been married and I respected the shit out of his wife just for putting up with him. Billings had that super soft hair guys always seemed to have and so many women wanted. He was also warm in my lap, like a space heater.

"Kind of the point of how a Predator and Feeder team are supposed to work, Lucy," he rolls his head so he can see her over top of the table. "It feels good for both of us, and she was starving or she wouldn't have phased that badly."

I look back over my shoulder at G and he nods, "Rita never would have understood, and I appreciate that it never went there for us. But he's not wrong, Kaya."

The woman, Lucy, gives a long-suffering sigh and slaps a folder on the table. Before she can get too self-righteous in how far she's been put out, I reach over and snatch the folder up and open it on top of Billings' head. I'm eventually going to have to learn his first name, but for now he can be a cuddly table. G is probably the only other person in this room I would have let touch me this much.

The photos in the folder cut through the warm fuzzies like a cold knife. I sit up a little in the seat and Billings gets up and takes the chair on the other side of me from G. Crime scene photos are always stark, blatant testaments to just how violent people can be, but this is one of the worst case files I've seen in a while.

The Bureau of Inhuman Affairs was new, in the grand scheme of things. The humans were still trying to get over themselves enough to understand that the inhuman are real and always have been. So for a case to be almost entirely under the jurisdiction of the new Inhuman Division meant there hadn't been any humans involved and the humans had thrown in the towel early.

"I'm not the first tracker assigned?" I see the little notations from another tracker months ago. Maybe they tried bringing one of us in early and it hadn't panned out. That happened sometimes.

"You're the second," Lucy's words are clipped like she doesn't like that I took the folder before she was ready for me to see it or something equally dumb. Oh, well. "The first one lost the trail."

"Bullshit," I say. Predators don't lose the trail once we've got a scrap of the soul. Humans have their DNA labs, and that's all fine and dandy, but the Bureau has us. Some hair, fluids, scrapings of skin from under a victim's nails. That's all we need to get the scent of a soul. The first tracker didn't lose the trail. The suspect likely died and the tracker couldn't follow to the Underworld. Not all of us could do that. "Why didn't you go to Nelda?"

"She refuses to work with Lucy," Billings says with no small amount of amusement in his voice.

I scan the dates and the reports in the file. This case is more than a year old. "Either you had the wrong suspect before and the killings have started again, or nobody who can go to the Underworld will work with you. I know where my money's at."

Lucy sniffs, but can't hold my gaze when I look at her. "The killings haven't started again."

"So you withheld my Feeder after my last case, which ended less than six hours ago, in order to try to force me to go to the Underworld because you messed up somewhere in your case?"

"Kaya," G warns at the same time lieutenant says, "Jackson."

I'm still reading through the file while Lucy sputters again. She doesn't deny any of it - either keeping my Feeder away or messing up on her case. I have no illusions as to what my job is for the Bureau. I am not an agent who solves cases. I am a tracker set loose to hunt down the suspects once the agents have done most of the leg work to figure out the whodunit.