Holocaust - Rachel M Raithby Page 0,2

That’s all it would take for my mother to have you killed.” Every word came from the darkest reaches of her soul and for the time being, all that was good, all that was Lexia, vanished.

Maura left him discarded on her bathroom floor, his blood seeping around his head like a gruesome halo. How dare he cross her! She was Maura, a hunter; the hunter, she answered to no one.

After finding her assignment, Maura assembled a team. Escaping the compound before she saw her mother, Derrick wasn’t the only one who avoided her. Maura disliked her mother’s company just as much; the orders and lack of respect tested Maura’s patience. She knew it was only a matter of time before her temper slipped; it was best to just avoid her altogether.

As she drove out the gate, alone in the jeep because no one would travel with her, she sensed Derrick’s energy: a mass of black, with touches of grey, and the light at his core. He leapt onto the side of her truck, unlatching the door. Maura didn’t flinch as he climbed in with the speed only a hunter possessed and sat next to her.

“How’s the head?” She smiled.

“Depends who I’m talking too?” he grumbled.

“Pushing your luck today, Derrick.” Her tone dry, unamused, but still she couldn’t keep the slight smile from her lips.

They drove the rest of the way in silence as Maura made her way steadily through the forest. The compound was hidden deep within the Black Hills of South Dakota, and it took some time to reach the main road. The raid she was heading to was on a house where a small pack of shifters lived, according to the intel. It would only take thirty minutes before they arrived, once they hit the road. Thirty minutes for Lexia to claw her way through the darkness that was Maura. Thirty minutes to decide if she could go through with this. Was this the day? Was this the day she let Lexia out forever and turned her back on the hunters, on her mother?

The job was easy, too easy. It made her question Lucy’s intentions; her mother always had a reason for her actions. What was her reasoning here? Had Lucy noticed the hairline cracks, creeping over her façade? Was this a test?

As if Derrick read her mind, he interrupted the silence. “Hey, Lexia, are you going to be all right with this? It’s been a while since we’ve had a raid.”

You mean this is the first time you’ve been out on a raid with Lexia awake. She mentally pushed the errant thought away. She couldn’t be two people; that was impossible, two people within one head… Impossible.

She glanced at Derrick briefly. She had no idea how he knew her concerns, yet he was right. Uncertainty filled her every movement, her every thought. She wasn’t sure if she could do this; whether she could take the lives of shifters.

“I’m not sure. I have an uneasy feeling about this, Derrick. I can’t help but question why take them out? They’re not causing problems, so why send me for a job any other hunter could do?”

“These wolves, they’re messing with her head. Lucy’s not thinking rationally anymore. Stay in the car, Lex. I’ll go in with the others.”

“But… my mother… if she finds out… What if she’s testing me?”

“She won’t find out. I’ll make sure of it. Stay in the car. Leave this one to me.”

Maura sat in silence for a minute, the road ahead of her blurring into smudged color. Derrick must truly be her friend; he was always there, always fixing her problems.

“How do you do it, Derrick? How do you pretend not to care? Not that I do really,” she added as an afterthought.

For a while, he was silent, and she thought he’d decided to not answer her. She turned her mind back onto the road, trying to block out her thoughts, of the pack they were on their way to slaughter.

“I suppose I’ve been doing this so long that I no longer feel anything, but in the beginning, it killed me. Every morning when I woke, I wanted to die.”

“That’s not true. You still feel. I can see it.”

“You make me feel, Lex. It was you that day… a kitten in the lion’s den. You woke up something in me that I long ago buried to save my family, just as you buried, Lexia, to save, Lincoln.”

“Don’t say his name,” she whispered, forcing back the emotions