Salem by Abigail Livinghouse (nonfiction book recommendations txt) 📖

Prologue

The things of scary movies; the monsters and witches, all of those creatures that are supposed to be make believe, are real. I’ve seen them. And now, we hunt them for prize.

 

We call them the Supernatural, the beings that aren’t supposed to live but do. My name is Drake Roth, and I’m a Blood Hunter.

 

Supernatural blood is worth more than gold in my home of Salem. We hunt the Supernatural and use their blood for healing, bartering, and trade agreements with other nations. We need Supernatural blood to survive, or we die and they overpower us. It’s happened before, my grandfather has seen it. Us humans will always conquer the Supernatural, there’s simply no other way.

Chapter 1

 

I don’t believe it’s easy to explain life as we know it now and even harder to understand it. So, I’ll use an example.

         

When I was about four, my dad told me to make sure not to leave the house after dark. I was curious and like any other four-year-old boy, I didn’t listen.

 

One day, I was playing outside with my friends when the sun began to set. Their parents called them in of course, and so did my mom. I promised her I’d be in soon, and my parents very much trusted me. I never broke the rules and I always listened to them. I figured abusing that trust just a little wouldn’t hurt anyone.

 

The sun was completely down now and darkness fell like a blanket upon the town. Lights in houses went out just like they were supposed to, while I sat frozen in my front yard. I could feel someone watching me as I held onto my plastic yellow tow truck for dear life. I was shaking so hard that my teeth chattered.

 

Slowly, I turned around to face a man standing just outside the fence that circled our yard. He was wearing black clothes, so he all but vanished into the night. But his crimson red eyes nearly glowed as they bared down hungrily on me. He opened his mouth, and a set of white fangs flashed with ferocity.

 

I screamed and ducked down, throwing my arms over my head as the man leapt towards me.

 

My father burst from our house and tackled the man to the ground. My attacker hissed and went to sink his teeth into my dad’s neck, but my dad was quicker than him.

 

He drove some sort of weapon through the man’s chest, halting him in his actions. My father jumped up as the man let out a shriek of agony before falling limp and silent.

 

I was shaking even harder than before and tears streamed down my face. My dad turned around and jogged towards me, scooping me up in his arms and tossing me into the house where my mom waited with fright.

 

My dad called a few men over who dragged the man’s body away. After that, my dad came back in the house and took me in his open arms. I shoved my face in his chest as I cried and begged him to know what that person was. I’d never seen anything like it before.

 

My dad sighed, holding me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye. “That Drake, was a Supernatural. A vampire. Now you know why you’re never to go out at night. Understand?”

 

I nodded furiously and apologized for disobeying him and my mom. He said it was alright, but it absolutely couldn’t happen again. I’d gotten lucky this time.

 

“They’re not people. You have to remember that, Drake. They may look like us, they may look normal, but they’re not. They’re Supernaturals, they’re evil soulless beings who only want to kill us humans. Don’t even let them get the chance.” My dad warned me.

 

He retired from Blood Hunting when I was sixteen, old enough to start my training to become a professional Blood Hunter. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Blood Hunting was the job I wanted to spend my life doing. My grandfather was the founder of the trade, and I intended to carry on my family’s good name after my father retired.

 

In the town where I lived called Salem, kids were to attend school until they were sixteen years old. Then, their training for whatever profession they seemed fit for began. Usually the person in question picked their career based off of their most valuable attributes that could be brought to that specific job. Other times if someone were ob

viously fit for something different, then they would be trained for that career for the better.

Our education really only helped us regarding common sense and necessary knowledge we would require in our daily lives. Even though I hated going to school, I had been extremely excited to start my training apprenticeship with my dad. Even though he had retired from Blood Hunting, he took it up again for the two years of training I would need.

 

My dad had been the best Blood Hunter in Salem. He could spot and kill a Supernatural within a mile of town. He’d bring back the body, determine their blood type, and collect his payment. He was the best of the best. Everyone knew it, except he was very humble about his talents.

 

My dad never bragged or took his fame for granted. We lived in a modest two story colonial that my mother had picked out when she and my father had been married. I was an only child because once a couple has already given birth to a son to pass on their family name, there’s no need to have any more kids. Unless they wanted to of course, but most stopped if they had already had a boy.

 

Anyway, the house was quaint and cozy and had always meant home to me. I’d loved living there, except I knew that come my eighteenth birthday, just a month later I would have to find my own home.

 

Houses were cheap and manageable in Salem depending on which one a person chose. I would have my parents accompany me on the day I bought my first home, but that was still a few ways away and I wasn’t worried about that.

 

Today, my dad was taking me on a real Blood Hunt, nothing practiced or staged. He had his belt of weapons: stakes silver and wooden, a gun with silver bullets, and a large rifle stocked with regular bullets slung around his shoulder. We didn’t waste silver bullets on any other Supernatural aside from the wolf types. Silver was expensive and took a while to manufacture into bullets, so we tried to keep our use of them few and far between; unless it was absolutely necessary.

 

I had a belt too, but only with beginner’s gear. A small wooden stake and a little shotgun with every other bullet inside silver. Beginner’s tended to fire at small creatures that we never hunted for prize like rabbits or squirrels, but because being beginner’s we get spooked easily. So, our silver bullets were given only when we were one hundred percent ready for them.

 

“Alright”, my dad whispered.

 

I swore my dad looked the same to me now as he did fourteen years ago when he took down the vampire outside our house. The only difference was that his black hair was dusted with silver, and there were some wrinkles around his blue eyes. But other than that, he could still be the nimble hunter he was over a decade ago.

 

Except what others didn’t know that only my mother and I did, was that my father suffered from severe seizures and often lost his short term memory. We gave him the finest medication Salem could offer because we were able to afford it with our insurance, and they made the seizures disappear. Except, his memory was still weak at best. My father refused to acknowledge the fact that he was aging and didn’t want to think of himself as handicapped. A big part of recovering from an illness is actively trying, and my dad didn’t even want to think that there was anything wrong with him.

 

My mother was terrified of losing him; he was her husband and the only man she’d ever love. Not only that, but my father was the breadwinner of the house as Salem tradition would have it. Lose my dad and we lose the house, because even though my eighteenth birthday was just a few weeks away, I wasn’t completely ready to call myself a full blown Blood Hunter.

 

“Alright Drake, now the key to finding one is to be especially quiet. Their hearing is much better than ours, so odds are they’ll hear us before we hear them.” My dad cautioned.

 

The majority of Supernatural beings that we hunted tended to be vampires or wolves that wandered into Salem by accident. Vampires and werewolves were extremely venereal beings; they procreated very often and very quickly.

They were hypersensitive and could smell a human over a mile away, which was why we always had to be on high alert to keep them from getting us before we could get them.

 

“There”, my dad breathed, pointing his stake in the direction of an overly wolfish animal sniffing at the ground.

 

It was fairly easy to distinguish a werewolf from an ordinary wild animal. Supernatural wolves were enormous compared to a wolf. They stood seven feet tall on their hind legs and their biceps close to bursting from their furry skin. When in “human” form, they were abnormally tall, muscled, and hairy. I’ve never seen a werewolf mimicking a human, but my father has and he’s described it to me on multiple occasions. Another thing about Supernatural beings were their eyes: always an abnormal color like red or gold.

 

If one sees a human that is very large and has gold eyes, then they are most definitely a werewolf.

 

My dad swapped out his wooden stake for silver, taking aim at the wolf. Usually we got close enough to the Supernatural to take them down and tried to spare our silver bullets unless it was an emergency. I could see that my father was planning on a surprise attack on the beast, and I could feel my heart pounding in excitement.

 

I had never seen my dad in action before; I’d never even seen an immortal taken down in person. I was nearly jumping up and down anxiously waiting for my dad to strike.

Like a snake coiled and ready for its prey, my dad suddenly leapt forward and mounted the beast like a bull. The wolf howled in protest and tried to buck my father off, but it was no use. My dad jammed the silver stake into the its shoulder, and the next howl that escaped from the beast was one of pain.

 

“No! Please stop!”

 

I froze, wondering if I had really just heard the wolf talk. I blinked and nearly missed the transformation. Instead of an angry bucking werewolf, a naked man laid shuddering on the ground; the silver stake protruding from his back causing a gush of blood to seep from its body.

 

My dad turned the wolf over and ripped