* Author : Leah Ning
* Narrator : Amanda Ching
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published in Monster Lairs (Dark Matter INK, October 2023)


Rated PG-13
The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been
by Leah Ning
 
You find the dying woman-thing in an alley, breathing her final wet, rasping breaths in a heap of white trash bags that seems more like a throne.
Everything tells you to run: twenty-four years of instinct, the government monster information pamphlets, the hard, practical voice at the back of your head that sounds a lot like your monster hunter girlfriend.
And then the woman-thing looks up. Her dark, scaled cheek drags on the distended belly of plastic that makes her pillow. Her chapped lips part and she says, in a voice like acid and smoke: “Eiko.”
That should make you run, too. Things that know your name and shouldn’t are firmly in “get the hell out and don’t look back” territory. But something in her voice hooks into the bottom of your soul and tugs.
You walk into the alley and she reaches for you. Her fingers are too long, dusky and scaled like her face. You shiver when they rasp over your cheek, your hair. Your heart pounds. You should run. You should run now.
That tug in your soul, a deep ache like kinship, won’t let you.
Something passes from her rough palm into you: a jolt, warm and slimy and slipped between your skin and the muscle beneath. Your body goes soft, like puking and collapsing and passing out all at once, only you can’t do any of those, something won’t let you, and you have to shiver and listen to the last of the woman-thing’s clotted, choking breaths as she dies half-buried in trash.
You are left with a sour breeze, a hollow where that ache hooked into your soul, and the sudden, desperate certainty that you need Mia right fucking now.

She opens her apartment door for you in loose sweatpants and that white ribbed tank top you like. You don’t want to tell her — you know what it’ll do to her, and you’re so scared — but what else are you going to do? You don’t know what you’re doing. Mia hunts things like you saw in the alley for a living. If anyone can fix this, it’s her.
So you sit her down on her scruffy couch. There’s a catch in her breath when you say it, so small you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t looking for it.
But you are not a thing to kill. You are a thing that can be saved. When you reach for her hand, she leans into you, presses a kiss to your hairline.
“We can still save it,” she says. “It’s all right, girl, I got you. You stay with me until I get this fixed.”
There’s a hard burst of relief in your chest. “But I have to work —”
“Call out sick.” She squeezes your hands. “You can’t go in like this. We’ll get it fixed up and then you go back in and it won’t matter. Two days, okay? Tops.”
Or you won’t get it fixed up, and then you won’t go back in, and it still won’t matter. You try to shiver and can’t. The feeling sits in an unsteady pocket at your core.

Mia sits at her desk, one knee up, blond curls edged in blue laptop glow and books laid out across each other. You try not to pace and you pace anyway and you apologize at least once an hour.
“You do what you need,” Mia says, and slips an absent arm around your waist.
Your fingers ache to do something, so you peel away from her.