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Teresa Juliet Slaughter was very, very happy to be Teresa Juliet Slaughter instead of Teresa Juliet Birch. TJ Birch’s parents scolded her for abbreviating her name and grounded her when she found roadkill too interesting. TJ Slaughter could call herself whatever she liked as long as she was a Slaughter, and her reward for good behavior was an afternoon in the morgue studying how monster hunters died. When TJ was a little girl, she wanted to be a trauma surgeon – that was before the monster came to summer camp and killed most of the children in her cabin.
When the red-headed man and woman and their friends arrived, armed to the teeth of their white masks, TJ saw her chance. There was a boy who was alive and could stay that way if she ran in to perform first aid on his lacerated leg, so she went as soon as the masked grown-ups began to fight the monster. She didn’t wait until they actually killed it, and the grown-ups were very impressed by that, so they asked her if she wanted to go home with them and learn how to hunt monsters, too.
TJ glared at them the same way she glared at her parents when they suggested she be a lawyer or a teacher, or at least a less yucky kind of doctor. “I’m going to be a trauma surgeon when I grow up,” she growled.
The red-headed woman gestured to her own face then, and TJ noticed that one of her eyes was glass and surrounded by streaks of scar tissue. A monster hunter must have torn out her eye! “Monster hunters get hurt a lot.” Several other hunters lifted shirts and rolled up sleeves to show their own scars. “Having a trauma surgeon in our pack sure would be helpful. If you come with us, and let us teach you how to hunt monsters, then we’ll pay for you to go to any medical school you like when you’re old enough. Does that sound good?”
TJ considered this. “Will there be other kids?”
“Lots!” chirped the red-headed man. “We’ve got about two dozen students and apprentices right now.”
That… might be a dealbreaker. “Are they gonna bully me because I like to look at dead stuff?”
One of the younger hunters, a tween with candy-green hair perked up. “I like dead stuff too! Check out my totem, her name is Salem!” She pulled a mangy, scrunched-looking stuffed guinea pig from her pocket. “She’s kind of ugly, but that’s just cause she was my first try making taxidermy,” she explained, stroking its black and white fur.
TJ gasped in wonder. “Can I pet her?!”
And the rest was history.
That was four years ago, and now TJ Slaughter was eleven years old and she rocked back and forth on her heels as she waited for the rest of her pack to finish their bathroom trips. In half an hour, TJ and a dozen other white-masked hunters from the top-secret Order of Saint George would board a plane to Prince Edward Island, where they would slay a monster. This was her very first real hunt since she earned her teeth, so Sylvie Slaughter – who had blue hair now – took TJ on a secret trip to get her ears pierced. They went to a real piercing parlor in downtown Chicago, the kind that took a little tube of flesh out of your earlobes instead of just stabbing them.
Cecilia, the leader of the white masks and the oldest, scariest hunter in the House of Slaughter, didn’t approve. She told TJ that if she was old enough to go sneaking out to get her ears pierced, she was old enough to take proper care of them, and she would be on her own if they got infected.
TJ thought that this was imminently reasonable and she diligently followed the piercer’s aftercare instructions. Right now, she clasped her hands behind her back and looked around the terminal at O’Hare, to distract from the urge to mess with her new studs.
“Teresa?”
TJ wrinkled her nose and looked over to ask if she was in trouble and – oh beans. “Um, do I know you?” she asked in a too-shaky voice. She did know the man who’d said her name: that was Arthur Birch, her father’s brother, who was under the impression that she had been eaten by rabid coyotes at summer camp.
No-longer-Uncle Arthur approached her. “Teresa Juliet, that is you, isn’t it? I’m your Uncle Arthur, do you remember me?”
TJ stepped back as he reached for her. “N-no, I don’t think I know you. My – um,” oh bother, she had forgotten her cover story, even though the white masks always made up their cover stories together specifically so the stories would be easier to remember. She was panicking, and panicking was bad. Calm hunters live, panicked hunters die.
“The police told us you were too – you must have run away, why didn’t you come back? Ted and Martha will be thrilled!”
He grabbed her arm, and one sliver of training punctured her bubble of fear: if a civilian grown-up starts asking questions you can’t answer, the Stranger Danger card will make other grown-ups chase them away. TJ took a deep breath, tilted her head back, and bellowed, “UNCLE TYBALT! AUNTIE PARIS! THIS WEIRD GUY IS TRYING TO MAKE ME GO WITH HIM!”
Immediately, two women got out of their seats at the gate and approached with looks of concern and anger.
“Teresa Birch, what do you think you’re doing?” Arthur hissed.
A second later, Paris charged out of the bathroom and pushed him away from TJ. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she snarled. She was tall and imposing with her muscles and glass eye, and held TJ’s hand firmly. Her hand was still wet from washing, that’s how fast she came to save her.
“I’m that girl’s uncle, and I’m taking her back to her parents where she belongs!”
“Actually, I’m her uncle,” Tybalt growled as he stalked out of the men’s bathroom.
“That’s a lie!” Arthur shouted. “You may have tricked my niece into Stockholm syndrome, but I won’t fall for your tricks! I’m a lawyer, you know!”
TJ literally bit her tongue to avoid pointing out that he was a small-time ambulance chaser.
“I don’t care if you’re the pope, buddy, if you like your face the way it is you need to back the fuck off,” Tybalt warned. He started to put himself between Arthur and TJ, so Arthur lunged for TJ. (For all that a middle-aged ambulance chaser could be said to lunge.)
So Tybalt punched him in the face.
TJ winced in satisfaction at the crunch sound Arthur’s nose made under Tybalt’s fist. He wasn’t the best boxer in the pack (that was Maxine), but he was good enough. Arthur fell on his butt, sputtering in outrage and failing to stop his nose from bleeding.
One of the women who had started to intervene looked Tybalt up and down. “Wow.” Both women were about his age and made faces that suggested they wanted to date him. (They would change their minds if they knew about his prissy hair care routine and dorky twin maneuvers with Paris.) Tybalt smiled back at them like he was open to this.
“Your fly is down,” Paris deadpanned. She was still holding TJ’s hand. TJ didn’t let go; Paris would know the strategically optimal amount of hand-holding to convince people they were related.
Tybalt glared at her.
“Did you even finish washing your hands?”
He didn’t blush, but his face twisted into a lemon-eating grimace and he trudged back to the men’s bathroom. “Forgive me for rushing to the rescue when I was called,” he drawled.
Paris and TJ glanced at each other and giggled… and then airport security showed up. TJ had made a scene, and now she, Paris, and Tybalt were going to have to explain that scene, and hopefully their stories would all line up. Beans. Bother. Crap.
…
Shit.
A TSA agent with a warm smile and a blue hijab took TJ to an interview-slash-interrogation room and introduced herself as Aisha. “Would you like a lollipop?” she asked, opening up a desk drawer and rummaging in it. “What’s your favorite color? Mine is azure.”
TJ stiffened and reassessed the woman, taking in the unusually golden shade of her knowing hazel eyes and the specific shade of blue she wore around her head. It was the exact same as the azure masks who lived in the House of Slaughter and kept hunters exploits from getting on social media. TJ gasped in delight; she had never gotten to meet an azure field agent before! “You’re one of us!”
“You’re not supposed to point it out aloud, but yes.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Aisha smiled again. “That’s what training is for, it’s why the twins and I made sure to line up your flight with my shift. I’ll make this go away, but I’m still going to interview you like a normal agent so you can practice talking your way out of scrutiny. What kind of lollipop would you like?”
“Um, grape, please. Can I ask you a question first?”
“Shoot.” Aisha passed TJ a grape lollipop and unwrapped a pineapple one for herself.
“How can you be Muslim and be part of the Order of Saint George? Aren’t saints a Catholic thing?”
Aisha raised one eyebrow. “Have they ever actually taken you to Mass?”
“...Touche.”
They did the practice interview, and then Aisha spent some time coaching TJ on how to talk to civilian authorities, and then she was released to join Tybalt and Paris for a later flight. The three of them wound up arriving in Prince Edward Island about an hour and a half later than the rest of the pack, but Tybalt said her acting was “A+ realistic,” so she wasn’t completely mortified. She hadn’t even really felt like she was acting when she called for the twins.
-----
Paris laid awake in her bed at the hotel, staring at the ceiling. TJ called her auntie. That was their usual cover, of course, she and Tybalt would pretend to be her aunt and uncle, because their names all went together.
But auntie had a different ring to it than aunt.
Did it? Maybe she was finally going batshit insane, as older hunters were wont to do. Cecilia wouldn’t approve of this sentimental crap, never mind that she cried at Jessica’s funeral. (Like, one tear, but Paris saw it.) And she stressed herself out over Erica and Aaron’s performance as black masks like a crazy little league mom. Paris snorted at that mental image; Cecilia Slaughter was the least maternal woman she’d ever met.
Cecilia did save her and Tybalt, though. After the foster system in South Dakota (accurately) assessed that Paris and Tybalt were bad influences on each other and put them in separate homes, Cecilia brought them back together. The very first time Paris and Cecilia were alone together, Paris was six years old and she shoved a kitchen knife in the woman’s face, threatening to kill her if Tybalt didn’t get to join the monster hunting club too. Cecilia obliged. In hindsight, the House of Slaughter probably planned to recruit both of them anyway, but Cecilia could have stuck to her guns about being a pack, not a family, and shipped one of them off to the Order’s Maison du Boucher in New Orleans.
(TJ hated when white masks described their leaders as “alphas”. She would rant and rave about how that’s not really how wolves work, that study was retracted by the guy who wrote it, and alphas were just alphas because they were parents. According to her, Cecilia wasn’t the alpha because she was scariest, though it helped, but because she was “everybody’s grandma.” Paris was sure the woman would have an aneurysm on the spot if she heard that.)
Sometimes, when Paris was both sober and alone with her thoughts (a state she avoided at all costs), she could see how someone might make the mistake of seeing Cecilia somewhere, vaguely, in the neighborhood, of a stern, distant mother figure, if they squinted really hard.
“I’m gonna go get a drink!” Paris announced to nobody in particular. She swung herself out of bed and headed down to the hotel bar.