Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 Chapter 1

I ducked down just in time to avoid having my head clawed off, and the creature’s bony, rotted fingers instead raked five thin lines across the wooden planks of the cabin wall.

I didn’t want to think about what would’ve happened to my face and eyesight if I’d been too slow.

“You okay?” Carmen yelled to me as she grappled against her own adversary. Despite the fact it was missing one of its forearms, it was still putting up a pretty intense fight, and its teeth gnashed furiously as it tried to get a bite out of her shoulder.

“Fine!” I shouted back as I raised my foot and kicked the thing in the chest hard enough that it staggered back a few paces, far enough that it bumped into the back wall of the tiny cabin.

This place really was a box, a one-room wooden shed in the middle of a forest. There was a front door, a back door, and two windows, though only one of the windows still had glass in it, and the panes were warped and yellowish with age.

The silver knife I held in my hand was one I’d borrowed from Kylah, a badass half-faerie and my girlfriend, and the blade glittered in the light that shone through the holes in the cabin’s roof. This would have caught the creature’s attention if it had enough brain function left to notice anything other than ‘food,’ but it didn’t, so I slashed wide.

It would have been a clumsy move if I’d actually been trying to injure the creature, but I wasn’t. I was instead trying to corral it to the back door of the cabin so I would have some space to move.

“Leo, behind you!” Kegan suddenly yelled, and I whipped around just in time to see another creature lunging for me from behind. I stabbed the silver dagger into its stomach, deep enough to rupture something vital, and I realized my mistake a second later, when the thing didn’t so much as flinch.

They were called revenants, reanimated human corpses. They hadn’t been resurrected, because they had no mind or soul, nothing that would constitute real humanity. They were neither thinking, feeling creatures nor simple puppets, because no one was puppeting them. A necromancer, I’d learned, bound a soul to a body, and the soul became the strings by which the necromancer could control the body. But a revenant was, by definition, soulless.

I’d been a little uneasy and a lot shocked to learn necromancy was a real thing. It encompassed any kind of magic that interfered with the dead. Not the bodies, but the souls. So calling upon ghosts and spirits was necromancy, but creating a revenant was not.

All of this meant my learned attack patterns were useless here. I’d spent years in the army learning how to wound people in a variety of ways with a variety of weapons. I could take out an enemy both lethally and non-lethally, with my hands or a knife or a gun, but none of that was of any use here. A revenant didn’t feel pain, and the magic binding it together meant it would keep moving even if I split its limbs off from its body. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw as the disembodied forearm of Carmen’s revenant dragged itself across the floor, and I knew it was still bent on killing us all.

So my instinct to stab the second revenant in the stomach was useless, if not dangerous.

I yanked the knife back and out of the creature’s torso, and then I made a wide slash. Kylah’s daggers were so sharp, the blade cut cleanly through the leathery, blackened skin of the revenant’s neck, and its head literally rolled off its shoulders and onto the floor, where it snarled and gnashed its teeth at me furiously, but ultimately harmlessly.

I literally kicked it out of the way, punted it like a football, out of the back door and into what could generously be called the cabin’s ‘back garden.’

“Thanks, K!” I called out to Kegan, since he’d been the one to warn me of the revenant sneaking up on me from behind. As Kylah’s twin brother, he was also a badass half-faerie, and despite having been stabbed only three weeks previously, he was holding his own pretty well.

Unlike me, the blond man’s fight training had focused on non-traditional adversaries, ones that might not be able to be subdued by aiming for pressure points but instead needed to be literally dismembered. It was obvious in the way he moved and attacked the revenants he’d been trained to fight supernatural enemies, whereas my training focused on human ones.

Also three weeks previously, my own twin, Carmen, and I had asked to join the organization known as the Order of the Eye. Kegan and Kylah were raised in the Order, since half-fae were broadly disliked by other supernaturals, and they were thus some of the best-trained Eyes to have ever lived. But they’d left two weeks ago once it had become clear that, for all the Order liked to think of itself as a benevolent protector, there was something rotten at its center that neither of the fae siblings wanted anything to do with.

Now, barely a fortnight later, the four of us, plus our resident researcher and translator, Asami, found ourselves slap-bang in the middle of rural Oregon while hunting basically-zombies in the woods.

Kylah and Asami weren’t actually present with us at the moment, because this revenant problem wasn’t actually our main job. We’d sort of stumbled across it while investigating a completely separate job and figured we might as well help out while we were here. So, while Carmen, Kegan, and I attempted to clear this forest of reanimated corpses, Kylah and Asami were researching our primary job back at the motel.

I was willing to admit, though, I wouldn’t have minded Kylah being here at the moment. There were more revenants here than we’d anticipated, and since they needed to be split into pieces rather than dealt ‘fatal wounds’ that would incapacitate a living creature, it was a lot of work.

“Why are there so damn many?” Carmen demanded as she shoved back her revenant and ducked low to slash at its knee. Her knife, another dagger borrowed from Kylah, dug deep into the muscles and tendons, and the creature staggered sideways as its ability to walk was suddenly severely impaired. As it tried to approach Carmen again, it limped and shuffled so much that it looked like a Hollywood zombie.

Sadly, real-life zombies were a lot faster than what The Walking Dead would have people believe.

“There must have been a lot of people buried in this area,” Kegan said as he slashed at one revenant’s arm, and the arm literally dropped off its shoulder. “Whatever curse seeped into the land and poisoned it, it poisoned the bodies, too.”

I didn’t know a great deal about curses or poisonous magic yet, since my training had focused more on learning how to fight the various dangers of the supernatural world. Asami was the expert in magical theory, more so than Kegan and Kylah, because their own magical knowledge focused heavily on faerie magic, which Asami, Carmen, and myself couldn’t do.

“Yeah, but why would anyone bury people here if the land is cursed?” Carmen huffed as she went for her revenant’s other leg. It staggered again and this time fell to its knees as it was reduced to crawling. “There must be rumors or bad vibes or something.”

“Not everyone is a walking vibe-check, Monkey,” I pointed out as I returned my attention to my first revenant and continued trying to lead it out of the cabin’s back door and into a more open space.

Every supernatural creature had a magical affinity, some kind of magic that they were naturally a bit better at. Since we were humans with the second sight, Carmen and I were technically supernatural creatures, and her affinity was something we hadn’t quite figured out yet. As best we could tell, she possessed some sort of premonition ability and was able to sense danger, or a plea for help, or just general concepts about something. It had been her idea to even come out to this cabin to deal with the revenants, because she’d sensed something deeply wrong with the magic here, something cursed and twisted.

Evidently, cursed and twisted enough to raise the dead.

My own affinity was a broader mystery. I was somehow able to amplify other supernaturals’ auras, like some kind of battery that made their own magic a little bit stronger. Asami had explained to me how there were some scholars who believed someone’s personality was informed by their magical affinity, or maybe their affinity had an impact on their personality. If that was true, I guess it meant I was there to support my friends and have their backs, thereby making them stronger, and the group as a whole more likely to succeed.

That was one of the few things I’d actually really liked about the army-- the sense of camaraderie. The knowledge that no matter what, you had guys who would look out for you, and you would look out for them. I’d hated the endless orders, the rigid submission to all authority figures, but I’d liked that.

A sense of family.

I’d only realized a few weeks ago how I’d been craving a sense of family for a long, long time. I’d been trying to fill some void in my life or my heart or whatever without even realizing how the void really got there. When we’d been eight, Carmen and I had lost our parents in a house fire and been put into the foster system. I’d been trying to fill the hole left by my family ever since, but it had been deeper than that, because our parents also possessed the second sight, and they hadn’t gotten around to telling us about the supernatural world that lived just under the surface of the regular world.

So, for over half of my life, I’d desperately tried to find something to replace that, without even knowing what I was trying to replace. But once Carmen and I met Kylah and Kegan, once we’d been introduced to the Order and the supernatural world, it had all just clicked into place.

Now I found myself trying to kill something that was already dead in a shack in the middle of an Oregon national forest.

I’d almost managed to coerce the revenant out of the cabin’s back door when it decided to pounce on me. I hadn’t been anticipating such a direct line of attack, but since the bastard couldn’t feel pain and didn’t even have a self-preservation instinct, it made sense he would go for the risky moves.

Somehow, despite being mostly kind of rotted away, the revenant was pretty heavy, and I was caught off guard enough that I toppled backward and landed harshly on the floor. Then I drove Kylah’s dagger upward so the revenant couldn’t lower its head enough to bite me.

Contrary to what TV would have you believe, being bitten by a revenant would not turn you into a revenant. But it would definitely give you a really nasty infection that could poison or kill you, so I was eager to avoid getting bitten.

I managed to angle the dagger and pushed it forward so it pierced the revenant in the middle of its throat. But since it couldn’t feel pain, this just meant the shrieking sounds it kept making became weird, breathy wheezes that honestly sounded creepier.

“I hate these things!” I shouted to Kegan and Carmen. “They won’t fucking die!”

“They’re already dead, Pip!” Carmen shouted back, and then she let out a yelp as her revenant grabbed her by the shoulders and made to sink its teeth into the side of her neck like it was a vampire.

I barely had time to feel panic when a knife whizzed out from the side and embedded itself in the revenant’s skull with so much force its entire body was pulled sideways with the momentum, and it was pinned to the cabin wall by its head.

“Less talking, more dismembering,” Kegan told her as he kicked the revenant he’d just stabbed in the throat so its body was torn free from its head. The body slumped to the ground and began scrabbling blindly for a new target, so he stomped on that, too,until it was barely shuffling.

Meanwhile, I’d managed to wiggle my own dagger around enough to have made a sizable hole in the throat of the revenant trying to pin me down. I maneuvered my feet up under its torso as I reached up to grab its head with both of my hands, and then I kicked my legs outwards, which shoved the body back hard enough that I ripped its head right off its shoulders.

I threw the head to the side, where it just snapped at me uselessly like the other one had, but this was a temporary solution since the separated body parts were still very much a danger. We hadn’t hiked all the way out here to just tear these things to pieces and leave them shuffling around.

Since revenants were caused by cursed magic, the only way to actually get rid of them was to fix or destroy the cursed magic. Which meant figuring out the origin of the curse, which meant a whole lot of research.

When we’d arrived in Oregon for our main job two days ago, we’d come up to investigate a slew of killings and disappearances that had been plaguing the nearby forests. Since the mortal authorities attributed the deaths to animal attacks, the Order hadn’t bothered getting involved and outsourced the job to supernatural bounty hunters to get the local magical population to shut the hell up.

However, in our-- or, mainly Asami’s-- research, we’d found a separate set of killings had been occurring in another part of the forest. Every year, for the week around the Spring Equinox, which was around late March, there would be a rash of unexplained disappearances or even deaths in this small region. Unlike the case that brought us to Oregon, no bodies had ever been found in the Equinox disappearances, or at least, no intact bodies. And when Carmen saw old newspaper accounts of these deaths, her bad vibes radar had pinged like crazy, and we’d known this was something we needed to take care of, since it was obvious the Order wasn’t going to bother, and if mortals tried, they would certainly get themselves killed.

As the Boy Scouts liked to say: Be Prepared.

Asami eventually discovered a man by the name of Jonathan Rowe had built and lived in this cabin in the late eighteenth century. His wife, Olivia, and daughter, Prudence, were both killed by some sickness epidemic that had swept the local area and, heartbroken by the loss of his family, Jonathan buried them beneath a wizened old tree behind his cabin and then hanged himself from it. Since he’d been so far away from the rest of the village, and since the illness meant people weren’t really able to pay house calls, his body went undiscovered for several weeks.

Apparently, this kind of disregard for proper funeral rites, combined with an unjust death-- such as a suicide or a particularly violent murder-- was prime real estate for curses and curse magic. Which in turn were the most common ways to cause revenants.

The very land had become poisoned by Jonathan’s death and the fact he hadn’t received his proper rites, so now, every year, around the time of his death, any bodies buried around the tree became temporarily reanimated.

They couldn’t stray too far from the tree, the source of the curse, without the magic that held them together just breaking down, like a weak phone signal. This meant the danger was fairly self-contained. But if an unlucky set of hikers or campers came across this cabin at the wrong time of year, they became revenant chow, and the following year, they would join the horde, since their bodies would have been left on the cursed land, and they would not have received their own last rites.

I’d asked Asami about the significance of religious rites, and if this pointed to some kind of ‘One True God’ or not, but she’d explained how it was less about the truth or accuracy of the religion and more about the person who’d died. A violent death, or a suicide, or a death that was not properly marked according to the person’s cultural practices would lead to a restless spirit. And restless spirits could very easily poison land or create curses.

Kylah’s dagger had clattered to the floor when I’d beheaded the revenant, so now I snapped it up and turned my attention to the revenant’s shuffling body. Then I tried to emulate what I’d seen Kegan doing. I wasn’t trying to cause pain or subdue an enemy, I needed to literally take this thing to pieces if I wanted to win.

Or, scratch that, if I wanted to survive.

Having been at this ‘bounty hunting’ thing for a couple weeks now, I reckoned I better understood why the Council that ran the Order of the Eye had been so reluctant and ultimately refused to let Carmen and I join. I’d been confused because I had a decent amount of combat training from the military, and Carmen was plenty strong, since she worked as a mechanic, but now I understood.

It wasn’t so much that we were untrained, it was the fact we’d been trained wrong. Our instincts were totally off, because my opponents had always been other humans. I would need to unlearn a whole lot of stuff in order to be an effective Eye, and that was an investment in time they hadn’t been willing to make.

No, they were instead perfectly happy to pay Carmen and me to take care of exactly the same problems, just as ‘independent contractors’ rather than ‘employees.’ That way, if any of us got fucking killed, the Order couldn’t be blamed.

It was a total insurance scam, but it paid well, and it meant I didn’t have to take orders from anyone. Plus, with Kylah, Kegan, and Asami on our team, all of whom possessed extensive experience in both the supernatural world and the Order itself, Carmen and I had a pretty decent advantage.

I gripped Kylah’s dagger as I carefully edged toward the revenant’s shuffling body. It scratched at the walls of the cabin as it searched for a living target to dismember, but now that its head had been removed, it was a considerably lesser threat, so I lunged forward with enough force to knock it backward, like it did to me earlier, and I stabbed down hard into the joint of its shoulder.

It twitched horribly, not out of pain but because the knife was jerking around nerves and muscles, and I bit back the urge to gag a little at how it moved. But I didn’t let up, and I wiggled the blade back and forth until its right arm was fully severed. Now with no torso to anchor it, the arm flopped uselessly to the ground, with its fingers flexing around nothing, like an upturned turtle. I then turned my attention to the other shoulder and did the same.

By the time I was done, what was left of the revenant no longer had the means to even stand up. It was a pretty gruesome sight to behold, the combined handiwork of my twin sister, Kegan, and I, but since the bodies were all so old and dry, little more than skin stretched over bones, there was no blood.

In some ways, they really did look like cheap Hollywood zombies, the sort that couldn’t be too human, otherwise the movie would get too high an age rating.

“Wow, remind me to never get on your bad side,” Kegan remarked as he dug his own borrowed dagger into a revenant’s spine and twisted so its entire lower half suddenly stopped moving. It tried to crawl forward and drag itself on its hands, but he copied what I’d just done and severed its arms.

The cabin had already been small and cramped, but now there were several pieces of dismembered revenant on the floor, so we really needed to watch where we stepped. I kicked stray arms and heads out of the way, toward the back door, as I tried to get out there myself. That was where the tree was, where Jonathan hanged himself, and where most of the bodies originated.

Out here, it was a considerably less ‘goofy, cheap movie’ scene. Many of the revenants here were from recent years, not too deep under the ground. Some of them looked disturbingly still human, with modern clothes in bright colors and chunks of hair still matted to skulls. One of them even still had fairly intact eyes, and they bored into me with an animalistic intensity that looked so deeply wrong on a human’s face.

I felt a wash of pity even as my skin crawled. These people hadn’t done anything to deserve this. They’d just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. And it was the Order, whether by being overworked or not caring enough or a combination of both, that allowed these people to die.

I didn’t let myself think about it any longer as I got to work aiming for joints like hips and shoulders and knees and necks. Kegan and Carmen came out shortly behind me, and we congregated in a tight formation with our backs to one another as we worked as much to protect each other as ourselves. Carmen and I had a better sense of how to deal with the revenants now and were able to keep pace with Kegan, though I suspected this was as much to do with the fact he was still recovering from his stab wound as it was about my sister and I improving.

“It’s good we’re dealing with these things,” Carmen said eventually. “But this isn’t sustainable. They’re still alive. How do we get rid of them for good?”

“We have to find the source of the curse,” Kegan answered as he dragged his dagger across a revenant’s torso and severed it clean in two. The legs staggered for a few steps before they just tipped over, and the upper half of its body tried to drag its way toward us until I stomped on its head to crush its skull. It made a considerably wetter, squelchier sound than the revenants inside the cabin, and I tried not to think about what I would be cleaning off my boots later.

“If we destroy the source, the magic holding these things together will dissipate,” Kegan went on. “They’ll just crumble into bones and dust. They’ll be normal bodies again.”

“Do we need to give all of them their last rites?” I asked the blond man.

“Asami said that was an important part of this,” my sister added as she stabbed a revenant in the shoulder. Its head kept coming toward her, though, so with her knife occupied, she punched it in the face, and its nose slid off. “Ewwww!”

“I could give a small blessing to mark their deaths, but I don’t think we’d be able to give everybody a full rite,” Kegan said and ignored Carmen’s cry of disgust. “It wouldn’t work, anyway. Rites are more about being acknowledged than getting the details correct, but revenants don’t actually have souls. Their spirits are gone. It’s Jonathan Rowe’s spirit that’s doing this.”

“So, we find his body,” I said. “Burn it, or give him his rites, and they go away, right?”

“Normally, burning a body would be enough to sever the spirit’s connection with the mortal plane,” Kegan agreed. “The body is the anchor, and last rites are a way to sever that anchor without destroying the body. But Jonathan’s body has long-since rotted away entirely. So last rites won’t work anymore.”

“So, how do we get rid of his spirit?” Carmen asked. She surreptitiously tried to wipe her hand on my jacket sleeve, but I shot her a glare and dared her to just try wiping zombie snot on my clothes. She flushed with embarrassment and looked away. “It’s obviously still here, or these bastards wouldn’t be trying to eat us!”

“Something else must be his anchor,” Kegan said. “Maybe the house, or maybe a piece of jewelry, like a wedding wing. If we destroy that, we can sever the connection, and his spirit will be forced into the next life, where it can have proper peace.”

I stabbed an encroaching revenant in the throat and tried not to vomit as thick, black blood oozed out of the wound. Then I jerked the knife harshly to the side, which severed the head from the body and sent the revenant staggering sideways. As it did, I looked up, out across the tiny ‘back garden’ that wasn’t marked by any fence or wall, and at the ancient, gnarled tree with sparse leaves and brittle-looking branches.

“That tree’s dead,” I said. “Or dying. Look at it. It’s barely got any leaves.”

“That’s the tree Jonathan must have hanged himself from, then,” Kegan said.

“Yeah, I can sense death on it,” my sister added. “Its aura is so fucked. Bad vibes are off the charts, boys.”

I squinted a little harder at the tree when Carmen mentioned aura, and sure enough, the wispy, glowing lines that denoted the presence of magic were, in a word, fucked. They tangled around the base of the trunk, but something about how they moved just looked wrong. Sickly.

“That’s his anchor,” I said aloud. “The tree. That’s Jonathan’s anchor. He hanged himself from it, and after his body was gone, the spirit stayed tied to the tree.”

Actually, now that I’d said it aloud, it seemed kind of obvious, and I was a little embarrassed none of us had realized it earlier.

But, then again, we were all on a learning curve. Carmen and I had only known about this world for weeks, and Kegan’s first field mission was the night we’d met him and Kylah, which ended with him getting stabbed. So we all still had stuff to learn.

“Burn it, then!” Carmen cried out as she flailed a hand at the tree. “It looks dry enough to go up in smoke as it is.”

“She’s right,” Kegan grunted and dodged another swipe from a revenant. “We’ll cover you. Do you have matches? A lighter?”

“No, but I did enough wilderness training to know how to start a fire without ‘em,” I replied.

Truthfully, it had been a long time since I’d had to do something like that, but surely it was just like riding a bike, right?

I lurched forward when there was a gap in the onslaught of revenants. Most of them were more interested in Kegan and Carmen, but some came after me, and I beat them back with wide slashes of the dagger and well-aimed stabs when that wasn’t enough. More goopy, black blood sprayed everywhere, and I flinched when I felt something wet splatter across my cheek.

I’d never been squeamish with blood, but this was considerably more gross than an ordinary stab wound.

Luckily, I made it to the tree un-bitten, and I began searching around in the earth by the roots for a small stone and some kindling.

Flint-and-steel was an old bushcraft technique for starting fires that dated right back to the Iron Age. It was primitive, but it did work.

Since the old tree was already all dried out, I snapped a few twigs off a low-hanging branch and laid them against the base of the trunk, and then I began striking the dagger against the stone to produce sparks. I saw the tip of the blade became a little scratched with each blow, and, and I made silent apologies to Kylah in my head for damaging her beautiful knives.

I was confident she’d understand, though.

After a few attempts, I managed to get a spark going, and a tiny blaze started at the base of the tree. Since it was only small for now, I would have to be careful, and my objective went from making sure I didn’t get bitten to making sure none of the revenants accidentally extinguished the flame by landing on it or something. These revenants, the newer ones who weren’t entirely rotted yet, were far too damp from being under the earth to make good kindling.

I continued slashing and stabbing, with errant pieces of bodies flying this way and that, until I felt the oppressive, dry heat of a real fire behind my back, and I turned to see the ancient tree going up in smoke.

Was I imagining it, or could I hear a wailing? A second later, I realized I actually could hear wailing as the revenants all began to shriek and scream. They stopped trying to attack us as they trembled and threw their bony arms up into the air. Then, one by one, they fell to the ground, and they were twitching like they were the ones burning, even though there were no flames.

Carmen had been right, the old tree was dry as tinder and went up quickly. I was torn between watching the golden flames lick up the bark, slowly turn it to black, and make it crumble, and the morbidly fascinating sight of the revenants writhing and screaming until finally, all at once, they went still and silent.