Zera’s stomach rumbled, and her nose caught the smell of blood as she set down the box and bag on the table. Her mouth watered, wanting to taste the flesh she just smelled, but she calmed herself and wrapped her arms around her stomach. She stared up and found Daniel’s curious eyes on her as he locked the door behind him, and her cheeks heated with embarrassment.
“You’re hungry,” he pointed out, not fussing about it.
“Yeah,” she nodded, her eyes weary as she stared at him.
“What do you want to eat?” he asked, picking up the bag on top of the box on the table and heading towards the kitchen.
The further he went with the bag, the less blood she smelt. “Meat,” she replied, and he halted and turned to her, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Just meat?”
“For now.” She answered. “Do you have that?”
“Yeah, I do; I got beef on my way home. It’s right here.” He nodded and raised the bag in his hand. “I never knew you had a thing for meat. Let me get it ready for you. In the meantime, make yourself feel at home.”
After thirty minutes in the kitchen, he walked out with a plate containing about four slices of steamed and spiced beef and set it down on the dining table. Her stomach rumbled at the sight as she got up from the couch and approached him. When she got there, she sat on the dining chair, picked one up with her hand, and took it to her mouth to eat.
“Careful, it’s still hot!” he raised the alarm.
She dropped the meat in her mouth at his words, but she didn’t feel the pain of being burned as she should have. The hunger must have made her forget how hot it was.
She also realised she had been doing a few things that were out of the ordinary as well, such as hearing sounds far away as if they were near. She noticed her abnormal strength when she flipped the heart monitor at the hospital. The owner of the restaurant confronted her earlier today, and she had lifted him off the ground as if he were nothing and had enough strength to choke the air out of his lungs. And now she had picked up a very hot piece, not feeling the sensation.
She wasn’t always like this. Something had happened to her, and it scared her to think about what it could be.
He grabbed her hand and stared at it to check the scar the heat had left on her hand, but he found nothing, and he stared at her with worried eyes.
“You don’t have any burn marks on your palms. How’s that possible?”
“It wasn’t that hot.” She laughed to cover up the suddenly quiet room.
“Oh, okay.” He let her go, and she quickly ate through the rest of the meat on the plate as if it were nothing.
“And you can’t remember much?” Daniel asked, handing her a glass of water when she finished eating.
She took it and gulped it down quickly before handing it back to him. “A few things, but my brain is all over the place, trying to recover what it can.”
“Oh, okay, I’m all ears.”
She spent an hour telling him everything she could remember since waking up at the hospital. The only details she left out were her conflict with the man at the restaurant and her unexplainable strength and sense of hearing.
“A few memories come back every hour.”
He nodded in agreement. “In no time, they will come back,” he assured her, and he picked up the plate from the kitchen.
She rose, and this time, she followed him. “Did I leave you for Aaron?”
She had many memories of Daniel, some of whom were of them as a couple, meaning they had once dated. But judging by the way Daniel reacted and treated her, she knew they were barely friends now, and she wanted to know the cause of it.
After waking up, she heard Aaron’s voice at the hospital. Putting everything together so far only meant he was somehow back in her life. If that was true, it meant he must have been the reason for their breakup.
He chuckled-a way to make the pain feel less. He quickly rinsed the plate, set it on the plate rack, and returned to the living room. “You left for yourself and Zion.”
She followed behind him. “Zion?” she repeated, staring at him, clueless about who or what he spoke about.
He gave her a pitiful look, and she wondered why.
In none of her narrations of the scattered memories she had, did she mention Zion? Zion was something important, something she wasn’t supposed to forget that quickly. But as she scanned her head, nothing came up, and she stared at him with eyes pleading for clarification.
“Zion is your son with Aaron,” Daniel answered, and still it didn’t ring a bell.
Why didn’t she have any memory of him? How could she have lost a memory as important as having a son?
Again, she tried to scramble through her brain and find out all those memories, but she came up short.
“I have a son,” she mumbled as she sat on the couch.
“Yes, you do, but you don’t remember.”
She shook her head, her voice coming up low. “No, I don’t remember.”
He sighed, “Okay. I will tell you everything I know and promise to be honest.”
She nodded and sat quietly, waiting to listen. And he took the seat next to her and narrated everything he could remember since he had known her for the last few years.
“We broke up almost a year ago, and though I couldn’t bear the thought of you not being a part of my life, I had to move on.”
Zera felt horrible for who she was. “I am sorry for hurting you the way I did.”
He stepped away from her and walked over to the box she had kept on the table earlier, opened it, and then pulled out an automatic rifle. “Don’t be. At least you stuck around and tried to be a good friend, even though I wasn’t having it. I was already moving on with someone else, Nicole, and when you told me and tried to warn me about her, I told you to stay off. I should have listened. I was nothing but a means to an end for her. And by the time I realised it, she had already killed my mother and left me for dead,” he answered in a pained voice.
Zera gasped, and a tear ran down her face. There was so much happening and so much she was learning, and she wanted to pause and breathe. “Daniel, you didn’t deserve what you went through or what we put you through.”
He picked up a small black box from inside the bigger box and set it on the table. He flipped it open, and in it were two dozen silver bullets. He adjusted the rifle in his hand and slid the bullets into it after opening the box.
“If I didn’t go through what I went through, I would never have realised there were supernatural beings amongst us who derive pleasure from our pain. If I hadn’t gone through the pain, I wouldn’t have found what I needed. I wouldn’t have been able to harness the pain, grief, and hatred into something powerful. I am not Daniel Spear, the naive, weak lecturer anymore.”
She rose to her feet, dreading the question she wanted to ask. “What are you now?”
He cocked the rifle and turned to look at me.
“I am a hunter, hunting supernatural beings and sending them off to their creator.”