memento vivere - supernatural & criminal minds

prologue

Prologue
Haunted

There are two types of monsters in the world. The first are the ones who lurk in the pages of myth and lore. They sink their fangs and claws into the nightmares of the young, thriving on anguish. They hide in the dampness of a sewer or the shadow of a tree branch against the window at night.

The others are worse. Their stories are in newspapers and police records, not horror movies. They don’t need fangs or claws, and they aren’t hiding. Not really. They’re in the next house over. They’re working at the elementary school down the road. They’re everywhere. 

They’re human.

For the first five years of Jude Wesson’s life, she - like any child - only ever worried about the first kind. When she told her mother that she was scared of the monster in her closet, Irene held her while her father pretended to fight the creatures off. Elliot wouldn’t know the bitter irony of this until 1985, when a ghoul slaughtered Irene in their bed. Jude hid in the same closet she used to fear while her father bashed its head in.

Hunting monsters became Elliot’s life. He did odd jobs on the road, just enough to keep them fed and afford motel rooms that were a step above seedy. Jude hunted as much as Elliot would allow her, although an incident on her first-ever hunt had made him cautious. Her education was his main priority, and whenever they rolled into a new town his first objective was to enroll her in public school. Jude jumped around for elementary and middle school, but through high school, she lived with a hunter friend of her dad’s to complete all four years in one place.

Elliot died in Jude’s junior year. It was supposed to be an easy hunt - a routine haunting in Minnesota. When Jude was brought in to identify the body, she realized that there hadn’t been any phantom or poltergeist. Her father had been killed by people.

Jude graduated from Sioux Falls High School in 1998 and got a scholarship to Penn State. She graduated  with a bachelor’s in psychology and a minor in religious studies. At twenty-four years old, Jude completed her training in the FBI academy and became a member of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. She hunted humans instead of beasts.

It was supposed to stay that way.