Breaking Emma (Divisa #2.5)
J. L. Weil
Chapter 1
I am a hunter.
It is in my blood, flowing from generation to generation.
So I’m told.
We aren’t the usual mill of hunters. No deer, elk, wild turkeys, or caribou for my family or the others like us. That would be too normal, and my family is as abnormal as the things we hunt.
Demons.
Hellhounds.
Any ugly thing that shows its head from Hell.
And of course its offspring. Divisa—half human, half demon.
You would be surprised at the number of these half-breeds that live among us, or how common it is for demons to leave a human impregnated. Hell will often kill their young, kind of like a wolf spider, but more often a Divisa finds a way to avoid its heritage and survive. Then it falls to us to take care of the problem.
Leave it to the underworld to make us clean up its messes.
Before I realized what a crockpot of shit the world was, and before I was molded into a ruthless hunter, I was a dancer…
A great dancer.
Talk about yin from yang.
But God I loved dancing. It was like breathing. Nothing gave me the rush that dancing did, or the immense satisfaction, an outstanding sense of achievement. I always assumed that was what I would be. A professional dancer—the big leagues, but how quickly those dreams of twirling in the Big Apple or the Windy City disappeared. Poof. Like dust, they were gone.
And so was I.
Except in my case, magic had nothing to do with it. I never got the chance to say good-bye to the friends I’d made in Spring Valley. I never got the chance to decide if this was what I wanted. And most importantly, I never got the chance to see Travis one last time. If only…
Maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe he would have been able to save me from what I’d become. It didn’t really matter in the end, because what-if’s were not going to change what had already come to pass. Dwelling on what could have been was for the weak, and I was anything but.
My instructor saw to that.
The night I was taken, I’d actually been on my way to see Travis, but someone had gotten to me first. Black mask, bright green eyes, and a familiar face greeted me that night on the abandoned road. I was told that I fainted, but I had a hard time believing that. Fainted? Never had I swooned in my life, but I guess being abducted can have an odd effect on people.
When I awoke, I was in a room that looked like a sad excuse for a college dorm. The walls were sterile white and the carpet was dull grey. Not an ounce of color touched the room, and I so loved color. Bright. Bold. Eye-popping. The brightest thing in the room was my strawberry-blonde hair. It stood out against the bleached walls.
Disorientated, I rubbed my eyes, attempting to push aside the workings of a migraine. At first I thought that this was surely a dream or a very bad joke. How could this possibly be real? Slowly memories began to trickle. What I couldn’t shake or make sense of was my dad.
Why had he been with those men?
Who were those men cloaked in the night?
And what did they want with little me?
You can imagine the vivid and disturbing images that came to mind. I couldn’t help but associate a kidnapping with rape and beatings, yet I just couldn’t see my dad being mixed up with that kind of thing. Sure, I guess he didn’t have a stellar background. He had been weirder than usual. Coming and going at ungodly hours. Running around dressed like some kind of ninja with knives strapped to his pants.
Okay, so my dad wasn’t what he seemed.
That much I got.
But what exactly was he mixed up in? Underground street gangs? Alien experimentation? CIA? And why had he gone to such extremes to bring me here? I still didn’t have the foggiest clue where here was?
As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The door to my new accommodations opened and in walked the man who would become my instructor. A man I thought I knew. The one man in my life who I’d always thought would protect me, guide me, and watch out for me.
It sucked ass to be so wrong.
I’d wanted to blame what I thought I had seen that night, however I couldn’t deny what was standing in front of my very own frightened eyes. I’d never really been afraid of him before. It was a feeling I was unaccustomed to. My first instinct when he had stepped through the door had been relief. I had wanted to throw myself into his arms, but something held me back. It was that one memory right before everything went fuzzy and black.
The one that was on repeat in my brain: He could have a part in all this. That thought ran rampant in my pounding head as I stood up and stared teary-eyed into emerald eyes just like mine.
“Dad?” I squeaked.