Chapter 4 – Family secret
Slowly, Aniya opened her eyes. Her mother’s worried face was looking at her, next to her father.
Aniya sat with a jolt and frowned at the window. Her mother glanced at where her daughter was looking and asked, trying to disguise her nervousness, “What happened, dear? A bad dream? You screamed for so long that you woke up half the mansion!”
“Is someone dead? No one is missing?”
Violet Rossi bit her lower lip and forced a slight smile. “What are you talking about, dear? No one died, you just had a nightmare, that’s all.”
“Mother, I saw a naked man in the back garden covered in blood. When the moon appeared again, he turned into… I don’t know what that was. Some kind of beast came from inside of him and ripped him apart. The beast ate the remains and ran to the woods. I am sure he left footprints and there will be a few thorn trees as well!”
Violet Rossi turned pale and answered in a trembling voice, “That… is not possible, my dear… You dreamed, that’s all...”
Dan Rossi gently squeezed his wife’s shoulder, “Violet, it is time.”
Without waiting for an answer from the visibly shaken woman, he explained, “No one died except one horse. He was eaten by what we call a Werewolf. The man you saw was probably the one that killed and ate the horse when he turned because of the full moon. Come, I have something to show you. I hoped you could be away from our world for two more years, but it seems it is not possible anymore.”
Aniya got up with a frown and quickly put on her nightgown that was on the hanger near the wall, and followed her father, with her mother behind, still looking pale.
She thought that something was wrong, because normally her father was the quiet type at home, and her mother was always the one calling the shots and ordering him around.
Something was very serious in that situation because the roles were now reversed, and it looked weird.
They kept on walking along the main corridor until Dan Rossi stopped at his office door and unlocked it. He kept the door open for them and locked it again as soon as Violet entered.
He then went straight to the enormous fireplace in the right corner and pulled a loose brick on the left side, near the floor. He looked at the surprised Aniya before pulling the hidden lever there and saying, “Our family history starts in the 15th century in Switzerland, when one of our ancestors travelled from Italy in search of a better life. In the Middle Ages, life was hard for everyone, but at that time, my ancestor lost all his family to a beast when he was in another village working, so he travelled to Switzerland when he heard the news of another beast that was killing people in the night.”
With a few movements of the lever, the never-used fireplace floor slid to the front, and a ladder was there, going straight down to a dark hole.
With the flip of a switch near the hidden lever, lights turned on inside the hole. The big and muscular man put the brick in place again and went first, his broad shoulders nearly rubbing the rectangular opening as he went down the ladder.
Aniya followed him, puzzled by all that mystery. She knew the fireplace had never been used since she was a baby, but she never understood why.
Violet was the last one to enter the hole, and she pulled the lid back into its place, hiding once again the entrance to their family secret.
Three metres below, Aniya looked around. She was now inside a vast cave, with several ancient weapons leaned against the wall and a few guns.
Her father signalled her to approach, standing next to a desk with a lamp nearby and a huge, thick book on top of the desk. Aniya gasped as she noticed the carving on the big hard-cover book. A full moon on the top right side, and the nightmare beast she saw in the middle of the cover, looking at the moon.
“This is our family’s Hunter’s Diary. We are one of several Hunter families in the World, and our sacred mission is to find the ones that, by a weird fate of destiny, were born with a strange mutation in their family bloodline that causes a normal Human to turn into a flesh-eating Werewolf every first full moon of the month. Some families are cursed with the mutation, but several of their members never turn. The ones that do, have to be killed so that the mutation doesn’t spread to the next generation.”
Aniya opened the book and flipped the pages. There were hundreds of reports, questionings, and written proofs of people that were found out to be Werewolves, together with the number and identity of their victims, and the date of that Werewolf capture and execution.
Aniya kept on flipping the pages and checking the names of her family ancestors who killed every Werewolf in that book, and asked while trying to disguise her anger, “This means that our family is a bunch of cold-blooded killers… No one ever thought about trying to find out how these people turn into Werewolves to help them?”
Dan Rossi flipped the pages to one that had a marker in the corner and pointed at a list of names. “These are the names of our ancestors that tried to help Werewolves. They were all killed and eaten.”
He then flipped the pages to another marker. “These are the names of our ancestors that died while hunting and killing Werewolves. My father is the last name on this list.”
Aniya jolted at the familiar name. “But… Grandpa died during a ski accident in the Alps! How-“
“The true reason for a Hunter’s death in the line of duty must remain secret to everyone, except to the Hunter’s community. You must understand that a Human that turns into a Werewolf loses all reason. He becomes a beast, with the sole purpose of killing and eating everything alive. Be it babies, puppies, horses, or their mother or little baby daughter. Many of them take their own life the next day when they realise what they did, but others try to flee or enjoy too much, waking up covered in blood next to the half-eaten body of their most recent victim. Some of them became cannibals when Humans because they tasted some of the flesh of the dead that their wolf counterparts left behind.”
Aniya felt her heart breaking. How and why could that gorgeous green-eyed man be one of those mindless beasts? And he even said she was one of them! Aniya sat on the chair, visibly shaken by that thought, but pretended to be from her father’s explanation. She then flipped a few more pages and spoke, “All this sounds a bit too much. How can they be killed? Because that thing I saw in the garden was fast, and it seemed strong enough to tear a person apart. Not to mention those enormous claws and teeth!”
Dan went to a nearby wall and brought a sword, a dagger, a handgun, and one bullet, which he placed over the desk. “They can be killed with silver. Their blood when Human or a Werewolf gets poisoned, and even a slight wound can slow them down. Hitting the head or the heart is the safest way to kill them for good. In any other place, he just recovers over time. In their Human form, they are also faster and stronger than normal Humans, and all their senses are sharper.”
Aniya picked up the dagger and stared at the hilt. There was a Werewolf head carved into it, and it had a few lines on the side as if they meant the number of kills. One carved line, one Werewolf.
She quickly flipped the pages to the last one that was written, and saw a description of a tall man with wide shoulders and deep green eyes who was last seen in Ireland, living completely alone in a house in the middle of a small field, with a hidden hole underneath the house with a cage and chains inside, but escaped capture when a group of Hunters was sent to investigate the reason for the noise coming from that house every first full moon of the month.
Aniya did her best to remain calm, and her father didn’t seem to notice her worries because he was opening a drawer on the desk and taking a small wooden case from inside. He opened it, and Aniya saw a dried plant in there. The scent coming from it made her nose itch, probably because of how dusty and brittle it looked.
Her father pointed at it and explained, “This is the first wolf’s-bane plant that our first Hunter ancestor used. It doesn’t have a scent anymore, but fresh-caught plants are the best way to identify a person who has the Werewolf mutation in their blood. One small sniff of this, and they lose all reason. They don’t turn, but they become mindless beasts. Hunter’s groups were also able to make ammunition from distilled wolf’s-bane, thus increasing our options for hunting and killing those damned beasts.”
Aniya slowly nodded, recognising immediately the light blue plant that adorned their property in several well-thought-out spots, disguised among other plants of the same colour. She had been told since she was a baby that she couldn’t touch those plants because they were poisonous. Finally, she understood why. Her parents didn’t want her to destroy the protection they had placed around the mansion.
Aniya raised her eyes from the wooden box and stared at her mother, who was seated on the sofa on the left side of that large cave. “What is your role in all this, mother? Because you are awfully quiet, and that is unusual coming from you.”
“Regarding Hunters, your father is the authority. I am his mere assistant. I take care of all the administrative work, file reports, search for proof and give him the targets. Men do the fieldwork in a Hunter family, while women do the administrative work. It was always like this, and it should always be like this. Women are the ones that continue a Hunter’s bloodline. If the man dies, he can be replaced, and the bloodline continues. If the woman dies, the Hunter’s bloodline is lost forever.”
Aniya nodded with a serious face, and it took her only a split second to decide. She needed to know more. All that she heard until that point was just the crazy talk of extremists and xenophobes. She turned to look up at her father, who was still standing next to her, “So you are showing this to me just to tell me I already have a place waiting for me in the Hunter’s society, and I will be a mere secretary like mother, is that it?”
“Well, it must be like this. It is our sacred duty to-“
Aniya raised one open palm to interrupt him, “I am not a doormat, father. Or a dumb blond. If I do this, I do it all the way. I want access to everything related to the Hunters, all the suspicions about who is a Werewolf and who is not. I want to know who the Hunters’ families are because I want to be sure they are trustworthy. Some could use this sacred duty, as you called it, to get rid of their business rivals, and I don’t want to be shot in the back by one of them.”
“No, that is not possible, Aniya. Your mother already explained you have to continue our bloodline. We can’t risk-“
“Are you nuts? Continue our bloodline? Am I a breeding mule or what? I already told you what I wanted. You either make it happen, or I am out of this mess. Making me a secretary… How stupid is that? I trained in self-defence since I could walk because you always said a woman should be able to defend herself! I go every week to the shooting range, and no one can get near my numbers! I practise swordplay twice a week, and I can beat you in all this since I was eighteen! And you want me to be a secretary? What’s next? Are you going to find a boy from a Hunter’s family to make me marry him so that our ‘amazing bloodline’ continues?”
Aniya raised two fingers and signalled quotation marks as she said the last words, and then suddenly got up and closed the thick book with a loud bang that resonated in the cavern as she shouted, “Are you out of your mind? Me, a secretary, really? Me, a breeding mule? Get out of my face, you misogynistic old geezer, before I make you swallow your tongue!”
Aniya stormed in the direction of the ladder, kicking her mother’s feet during her walk. “You should be ashamed! You always said that we were proud and strong Valkyries! And now I find out you are a secretary for a misogynistic? I would rather kill myself than accept such a thing!”
Aniya climbed up the stairs, leaving two dumbfounded parents behind.