SEHNSUCHT ⭒ PAUL LAHOTE ⭒ TWILIGHT

FOUR

⭒ ＦＯＵＲ ⭒

" Headaches when I'm coming home "

__________________

When Maria entered the motel, she was surprised to see both Lukas and her brother in the kitchen. Wondering if some miracle had happened and they had decided to make a meal for themselves, she quickly walked over and looked in between their shoulders. It was only then that she noticed that they were playing thumb war over who would get the last caramel. Seeing as neither of them was paying attention to her, she snatched it away quickly and popped it into her mouth.

"Yes, I definitely made the right choice picking those," she said, finally gaining the two men's attention. Grinning innocently, she showed the caramel between her front teeth and closed her mouth before Lukas would make an unpredictable move to make her spit it out. It wouldn't be the first time he tried that and Maria doubted it would be the last. "By the way, I bumped into some local on the beach and my medal started glowing."

Kristian looked at her for a moment, seemingly trying to decide if something was wrong, before he shrugged and walked to the coffee table to take a seat. "It is probably some tribal thing, we don't really meddle with that."

"Besides, nine out of ten times it's something spiritual," Lukas replied, appearing equally unbothered. He plopped down on his bed, the wooden frame squeaking loudly in protest and his feet hanging off the end.

"So you guys want to go after a bunch of vampires, which is like way above our paygrade, but looking into some tribal stuff is suddenly too little and less?" Maria asked, crossing her arms in front of her chest and raising a single eyebrow.

"Basically," Lukas said at the same time as her brother hummed a quiet "yes".

"Also," Kristian added, looking up from his notepad. "While you were out on your run, Lukas and I went to the police station in the city centre. Apparently, it all started about a year ago with the missing of some kid, they have posters all over about him. His name is Riley Biers. Since then there have been ten people missing and four found dead, and that's only the ones who had family or loved ones taking the effort to make a missing person notice."

Maria sat down on the chair opposite of her brother, taking the time to take in his words. She didn't bother to ask how he had gotten this information, knowing that she would likely disapprove of the chosen method. Leaning back on the creaking chair, her eyes flickered to Kristian. "What about the dead people?"

"They were all heavily maimed, sometimes beyond recognition," he said. Kristian had a soft voice and a relatively gentle character. He was also the only one out of the three of them who had lost his Danish accent entirely, never bothering to reply to Maria or Lukas whenever they asked something or conversed in their native language. "Three of them have been drained of their blood entirely, the fourth had some left, but still really low levels."

"So there is no doubt about the vampire part," Lukas concluded. He was busy on his phone, probably lost in one of his video games. "But now it's the question of how many there are, by whom they are ruled and with what purpose they are created."

Maria didn't like the tone of his voice at all. Though he was absorbed in the game on his phone, Lukas sounded excited and ready, as though the decision to stay had already been made. Maria fiercely hated vampires but after losing the bigger part of her family to them, she was hesitant to take on any jobs concerning them. It gave her a bitter taste in her mouth and an unsettling feeling in her stomach.

Kristian had been the first of all the hunter families to create a bullet that not only would explode in fire upon contact with the granite skin of vampires, but the bullets were also laced with vampire venom, the only thing that could penetrate their skin. That invention alone had settled them financially wise for the rest of their lives, but the fact remained that you needed to catch a vampire completely at unawares in order to hit them, because they were fast as hell. The bullets were mostly sold with the purpose of attacking other creatures of the supernatural, since vampire venom was poisonous to most.