Chapter 3

     "Let's get back to having a trial."
     Mama ran her hand through her hair and looked at the ground. She shut her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath in.
     "Yes," she said quietly before opening her eyes. "We have to get back to a proper trial."
     I should also explain trials. Trials used to mean that the accused were innocent until proven guilty. They had a right to a jury of their peers to decide their fate. They had the right to legal representation. It used to be that trials meant you had a chance to go to jail and live your life behind bars or maybe you would go to death row before getting the electric chair or a lethal injection. But at least you got to live for a little while after your trial. You could get your last meal.
     Our trials are much different. If you have a trial, you are already guilty. There is no jury. There is no judge. You do not have a lawyer. Death row isn't even an option. If you have a trial, you are going to die, most likely in the most painful way you can imagine. But trials are your last chance.
    Trials are like the last confession before the gallows. You can tell us your life story and we will listen and we will show you kindness. You can wear whatever it is you want, after being patted down for weapons, and your trial ends when you're done telling your life story, with limits to length of time your story takes of course. But that's the point of trials. Trials are your chance to tell your story and actually be listened to. Trials are a common courtesy by us Vampires to the Humans. Yes, we will kill them, but we will at least let them get everything off their chest first. Yes, we are Vampires, but we were all once humans, not capitalized. Yes, we aren't going to show them mercy, but we can at least show them a bit of respect and give them the illusion of peace before they die.
    That's why Mama was so frustrated with herself. We aren't supposed to make the accused feel scared. We were supposed to keep our cool and be considerate of the almost dead. We were supposed to give them the common courtesy and decency to just listen to them instead of scaring the living hell out of them.
     It was already bad enough that we had to bind them up and gag them. We used to just lead them into the conference room in handcuffs and have them sit and tell us their life story. That all changed because of this one Hunter we captured back in 2082. He was probably crazy, now that I think back on it. But he was smart and he also had piles of money to fund his Hunting days.
     Part of the outfit he chose to wear for his trial was a bracelet. It didn't look like much at the time. It just looked like string wrapped around his wrist with a straw tied to it. He said his kid gave it to him. His report said that he never had kids, but he was going to die, so it really didn't matter what he said or what he lied about.
     He must have swallowed pellets of serum, similar to paint balls. It was unheard of at the time. Inside the serum pellets was also a different kind of serum. Instead of having to be injected into the skin, it was naturally absorbed into the skin, like cyanide without the smell of almonds and twice as deadly.
     More than likely, he was crazy. Because in the middle of him talking about his childhood, filled with jet-pack rides and genetically engineered pets, he starts choking and gagging. The next thing we know, he's holding his stupid bracelet straw up to his lips and is spitting the serum pellets at us. We lost two Vampires because he could do something I had seen kids do when I was in elementary school.
     Mama used some sort of power on him to bind his arms to his side. Unfortunately, she couldn't bind his mouth shut. As we took that crazy Hunter to the same place we torture the unaccomplished, he was prattling on even more about his life story.
     Right before they started the surgical mutilation part of the torture, he looked at the scalpel and actually laughed.
     "I guess this is what I get for spending my diaper days in a mansion built where a church with a graveyard used to be, and spending the late afternoons riding through the backyard on my crossbreed of a horse and a cheetah. Maybe I should've been more on the edge instead of using my money to get what I want. You know, live one of the sharpest lives instead of the life of the elite." He looked directly at the surgical Vampire and said, "Let me tell you from experience, man. Mark my words, the jetset life is gonna kill you." The first thing they cut out were his vocal chords. Yeah. He was definitely crazy.
     Maybe that was why Vlad had been, for lack of a better phrase, freaked out when Helena spit on him. Oh well. It's not like I care about that good-for-nothing kiss up.
     Getting back to trials, we now bind them with rope. I know it's vulgar and uncivilized and barbaric, but it was our last choice, really. It wasn't much of an improvement, but it kept the crazy Hunters from doing anything too outrageous. And as usual, we asked the Hunters a few questions before we got to their life story. I could have answered all of these questions for Helena.
     "What is your name?" Mama asked Helena, her voice as kind and calm as she could make it.
     Helena Lee Rush.
     "Helena Lee Rush," Helena answered.
     "When and where were you born?"
     October 9th, 2069. Mercy Hospital in Monroeville.
     "October 9th, 2069. Mercy Hospital in Monroeville," Helena replied. She added, "I was born at…" The precise moment the sun went out. "…the precise moment the sun went out."
     "How would you like to be buried?" Mama asked.
     She wants to be buried in black, next to her grandfather.
     "Bury me in black," she said plainly. "I want my grave to be right next to my grandfather's." So maybe I couldn't answer the questions exactly as she would.
     "Why are you wearing this outfit to your trial? It's an interesting fashion statement." Mama's voice sounded tired of these questions like they didn't matter. And to be honest, they didn't. But it was just a way to get the people to talk.
     She always wanted to be a ballerina.
     "It's not a fashion statement, it's a deathwish."
     And there it was. There was the proof that Helena and I had grown apart. I couldn't answer for her anymore because I didn't know her anymore. She wasn't that innocent five-year Hunter I met back in 2092. It took her seven years from my meeting her to become the greatest Hunter of all time. In seven years, she killed enough Vampires to make those Humans that killed a thousand light-affected beings look like children stomping on ants. She was a complete stranger to me now.
     "Why did you become a Hunter, my dear?" Mama was slowly trying to regain her usual composure and demeanor.
     I really didn't know the answer to that question. All I really knew was that her grandfather was killed by some kind of disease and it had something to do with Vampires. Her grandfather's death had always been a touchy subject with Helena.
     "I didn't want to sit all day in the cubicles, just clocking in, doing the same meaningless work over and over again, and then clocking out." Mama got her to talk, even if Helena was lying. "I wanted to add some adventure into my life and I thought Hunting would be a blast." The way Helena said it, with such nonchalance and blatant disregard for what anyone thought. That's the way she would talk to me whenever I brought up her grandfather's death.
     "Now what's the real reason?" Mama reminded me of those parents that could always see through their child's ruse. I suppose that it is appropriate that we call her Mama.
     Helena smiled slyly at Mama. It was as if she hadn't been completely terrified of Mama just a few minutes before and she and Mama had known each other their entire lives. She chuckled and looked down at the conference table before looking up and meeting Mama's eyes.
     One word spilled out of her mouth. "Cancer."
     And it all came back to me. Helena had already told me this story that she was now telling to all of the Vampires in the conference room.
     Helena was born in Mercy Hospital in Monroeville. Her mother died shortly thereafter from complications with the birth. She never knew her father because, according to her grandparents, he died trying to kill off the Werewolves in Monroeville. In my opinion, it serves him right, but this is Helena's story and not mine.
     So Helena had lived with her grandparents all her childhood. There was nothing wrong with that because her grandparents gave her the kind of unconditional love that everyone wishes they had gotten from their parents. They never pressured her to do well in school or to practice ballet more. They just told her that she would be great and they reminded her that she was already great. They would encourage her, but they wouldn't acknowledge her failures, not that she had any.
     They were the kind of grandparents that reminded me of my grandmother. She was always supportive of me and she was the one that got me started in art and acting and music and singing and… Well. It doesn't matter much anymore. She has been dead since before I was even a Vampire.
     Anyways, one day when Helena was sixteen, her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. It was the kind of cancer that you couldn't get better from, even after days and days of intense chemotherapy and weeks and weeks of the chemo side effects thereafter. But the doctors gave them hope. They had told Helena and her grandfather that there was a slim chance that the venom from an acute Vampire bite could overpower the cancer and make her all better with minimal side effects. Of course, Helena's grandfather would stop at nothing to have his wife back instead of the pale, shrunken, sickly woman that had replaced her.
     The night before Helena's seventeenth birthday, her grandfather snuck out into the night to find Vampires and beseech them to help him. He must have found them, because the next morning, Helena woke up to her grandmother's coughing and crying. Her grandmother was talking to the police that were at the door, and a body bag was sitting on the front porch. The body had been maimed and ripped to shreds, but the face remained intact. It was her grandfather's face frozen to reflect the horror in his heart in his final moments.
     A few days after burying her grandfather, or at least what was left of him, under the tree in her grandparents' front yard, her grandmother died and was buried next to her grandfather. The next day, social services took Helena to an orphanage where she was never adopted because she was too old. Distraught and fully pissed off at the cards the world had dealt her, Helena broke out of the orphanage nearly every night and started training with a Hunter training organization two blocks from the orphanage. As soon as Helena turned eighteen, the one-year anniversary of her grandfather's death, she became a Hunter. A few days later, the one-year anniversary of her grandmother's death, she brought down her first Vampire.
     "Don't get me wrong," Helena explained, bound with rope, from the center of the conference room table, "I felt bad every time I killed one of you. But when I did feel bad, I pictured my grandfather's…" she took a sharp inhale and shut her eyes before saying the next word, "nightmarish face attached to that cut up body, and I remembered why I was Hunting." Helena opened her wide green eyes and looked at Mama. "You think you took away my grandparents, but you took away my best friends." Mama returned Helena's stare and I could see Mama's chest rise as she took a deep breath in.
     Mama shrugged. "It's our job, my dear. This war has made it hard on everybody." The sincerity in Mama's voice as she had said that, it proved to Helena that this truly was a traumatizing experience for all of us to go through.
     "There isn't one birthday that goes by that I don't remember exactly what happened that day in 2086," she managed to say as she started shaking with tears and anger. "I didn't care whether or not the Vampire I was killing had a part in my grandfathers' murder—" she spat out the word, "—I just wanted to kill all of them to increase my odds of finding the ones that did kill him. For all I know, I've already killed all the ones that tore him apart. But I won't know until I kill every last one of you."  She said those last few sentences with clenched teeth.
     Helena was crying now. What she had said didn't have much effect on me. She could have said that she was murdering small children, and I would still want to hold her. She closed her eyes and tears rolled down her cheek. She took a shuddering breath in and let it out slowly.
     "No," she apologized with a sniffle. "I don't mean that. I really don't. I know that you guys are just like me. You want an end to this war, but the only way that you can really see an end to it is with revenge. I don't blame you guys for trying to kill us. Humans started the war, and we all know it. And you guys aren't all bad, just that one that went and killed five hundred Humans."
     The entire conference room was silent. No Hunter had ever said anything like that. There were some that said that they didn't want to die and then they would be repentant and try to make up for what they did by praising Vampires or disparaging Humans. Some even said that we weren't all bad and used Helena's same line that the only bad Vampire was the one that killed five hundred Humans. And there were some that even tried to join our side right before their execution. But no one, no one had ever admitted that Humans started the war. Not even Vampires admitted that Humans started the war.
     The only sound in the room was Helena's sniffles until Mama tried to get her talking again.
     "You were born in 2069, and all the history books were destroyed in the Great Fire. How would you know that the Humans started the war, my dear?"
     She took a few more shuddering breaths and let a few more tears slide down before answering, "My grandfather told me. He was born on December 23, 2012. I guess our family just has a knack for being born on days of tragedy." She let out a weak laugh but started crying again. "He was eleven when Dr. Acula was murdered. And he was twelve when all of those Vampires and Werewolves were killed. He would tell me stories of all of the Humans using the serum against the light-affected beings. He told me how he would see Humans stabbing Werewolves with serum left and right in the daylight, and at night he would hear the sounds of Humans and Vampires fighting for their lives."
     She took another deep, shuddering breath before continuing, "He always told me that it was our fault. He told me that Hunters shouldn't be proud." She was sobbing now.
     "And I'm not proud. But his trust in Vampires got him killed. And I pray every night that he died peacefully." She paused here, and I could see anger rising to the surface. "But every night when I close my eyes all I see is his face of horror and I know that he died scared and must have had no peace at all." In her bonds, her body shook and her face scrunched together as she let her tears flow. "He didn't deserve to be killed by Vampires. And that's why I became a Hunter. I should be praying for his forgiveness because he never wanted his family to have anything to do with Hunters. But I don't. I pray that he was okay in his final moments. I don't care about what my grandfather thinks about me. I just want him back."
     We all watched as Helena cried. Here she was, the greatest Hunter of all time, crying, bound, and defeated. The greatest Hunter of all time, and she used to be my girlfriend, not just my mission.