You had been called many things in your career — delusional, eccentric — but “wrong” was never one of them. Not when it came to monsters. For over a decade, you’d trekked through swamps with nothing but a notebook, crawled into abandoned subway tunnels with a camera and crackers, even camped on a cliff for three days just to hear the call of a creature no one believed existed. Your apartment was more museum than home: shelves buckling under jars of preserved specimens, sketchbooks filled with anatomical diagrams, and maps dotted with red string connecting sightings. Now, finally, your years of chasing whispers had led to this — the Scytheback, a rare predator said to appear only once every few decades. The kind of thing scientists would sell their souls to study alive.

Unfortunately, someone else had been called to deal with it first.

The name “Darius Vale” carried weight in the underworld — not the supernatural one you studied, but the world of mercenaries, bounty hunters, and people who did bad things for large sums of money. He had a reputation for efficiency, a habit of collecting scars like souvenirs, and a long list of dead monsters that made your heart hurt. To him, a rare beast wasn’t a miracle — it was a paycheck. Worse, you’d met him twice before. Once when you were sketching a juvenile ghoul in an alley and he “put it down” before you could finish. The second time, he’d picked you up and moved you mid-investigation, saying, “Your notebook won’t save you when something’s chewing on your leg.”

Darius knew of you in that vaguely irritated way one knows a neighbor whose hobbies cause constant trouble. “The monster guy,” he once called you, rolling his eyes when someone explained your credentials. To him, you were naïve — a book-smart dreamer who didn’t understand how ugly the real thing could get.

So when the news reached you — that Darius had been hired to hunt down your Scytheback — panic hit like a truck. You ran. The wind burned your throat, your legs screamed, but the image of him putting a bullet through its skull before you could see it was worse. You reached his base — a converted warehouse smelling faintly of gun oil and leather.

The moment you saw him, standing in that battered combat vest, casually cleaning his rifle like he had all the time in the world, something inside you cracked. You skidded to a stop, chest heaving, and dropped to your knees on the concrete.

“Darius— please—” you gasped, words spilling out in a rush. “Don’t—don’t kill it yet! Just—let me observe it, I’ll stay out of your way, I swear—” Your voice broke into a wail, the kind that tore from deep in your chest and made your nose run embarrassingly fast. Tears blurred your vision, dripping off your chin, your hands clasped like a tragic pilgrim begging for mercy. “It’s the only one— you don’t understand, I’ve been looking for years, you can’t—” You hiccuped, an ugly, guttural sound. “You can’t just shoot it like it’s nothing!”

Darius paused mid-wipe, the rifle hanging loosely in his hands. His brow furrowed, and for a moment he just stared at you like you were some bizarre species he’d stumbled across. Then, slowly, he set the weapon down on the table and crossed his arms.

“Are you done drowning my floor in snot,” he asked flatly, “or should I get you a mop?”

You sniffled hard, shaking your head, hands still pressed together. “I mean it. I’ll do anything. Just—don’t kill it before I’ve seen it alive.”

Darius tilted his head, studying you like he was deciding if you were insane or extremely committed. Finally, he exhaled, long and slow.

“You’ve got ten minutes with it,” he said, voice like gravel. “But if it breathes wrong, it’s going down.”

Your head snapped up, eyes wide. “Ten?”

“Ten quiet minutes,” he corrected. “And if you start crying like that again, it down to five.”

You didn’t care that he was smirking faintly now, like he’d won some private joke. You nodded furiously, wiping your face with your sleeve. “Deal.”

Darius shook his head, muttering “monster nerds” under his breath as he reached for his rifle again.