The Muse, K. Sumner [suggested reading TXT] 📗

The rain pitter-pattered against the window as we drove into Elko, South Carolina. I looked at the little droplets of rain in wonder. It was official: I was bored as hell.
    This is the third school I have attended in the first two months of my senior year. The amount of friends I've made are... Well, almost non-existent. I was seventeen, almost eighteen years old, and I had not had a boyfriend since Dominique, my first boyfriend. Of course – you know how it goes – girl falls for boy, boy pretends to fall for girl, girl catches boy cheating on her, girl cries, boy moves on without a second glance. I'm not hung up on the guy – who, by the way, Azrael gave a pretty good beating to after I came home crying that day – but ever since then I've wanted to be “normal”. I wanted to go to prom, fall in love again – even though it sucked majorly the first time - have friends that I don't have to worry about leaving and missing, etc., etc. In general, I wanted to stay in one place for more than a month.
    Azrael was the oldest at the age of 29, and not to mention, the most protective of me. He's kind of like how I would have expected Dad to be if he were still with us. Azrael was the one driving and, as usual, singing along to some old classic rock song from the 80s or some hip-hop or rap music from the 90s. Azrael was the type of guy who didn't follow the rules, who didn't even know what a rule was. In other words, he was a classic "bad boy". With that quality along with the strong body that came with monster hunting, Azrael tended to go for a lot of one-night stands, which, in turn, scarred me for life. Time and again.
   Briley, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. He's 24, and about three years ago he had to leave college to help us find Mom – who, we later found out, was taken by a demon and brutally murdered, in case you were curious. Briley always followed the rules, listened to opera and classical music instead of classic rock. Standing at about 6' 11" and having the brains of a genius, he also attracted a lot of women, but he never really did anything about it; he's still in love with his old girlfriend, Ella. She died not too long after he left with us for the whole hunting thing. Briley was in the passenger seat, listening to music from his Ipod. He wasn't normally into Rae's songs.
    We were constantly moving around from one town to the next, looking for demons to kill. I remember when I was younger how my brothers and father were so determined to keep me out of “the family business”. When I turned 14, I kind of wanted to be a hunter; that desire was crushed when I met Dominique, though.
    "Hey, Ash, you okay? You wanna stop somewhere?" asked Rae. Like I said, over-protective. That's how things are with this man. He doesn't have a care in the world, except when it comes to me. When it comes to me, it's a totally different story. If I'm too quiet for a certain amount of time - today, I basically didn't say much to anyone - he would end up thinking I was sick or something.
    "Rae, calm down. Take a breather; listen to the island breeze. I'm just getting tired - that's all," I said. It wasn't a lie, either. I hated traveling. It always made me incredibly sleepy - especially after 10 hours of it, with occasional stops, of course.
   "Are you sure? Because we can stop somewhere if you're getting hungry. I'm sure there's a diner somewhere around here..." He trailed off. It was twelve o'clock in the morning in one of the smallest towns in America. Nightlife is not one of the features around these parts, except for maybe a sports bar with half-frozen food and drunk, busted chicks. Azrael would probably get dogpiled in an instant, unwillingly.
   I just shut up, knowing that Azrael was probably thinking along the same lines that I was. He wasn't stopping until we got to the motel.

*******

    I woke up and went to the bathroom with the clothes that I wanted to wear wrapped up in my arms. I turned on the shower and glanced in the mirror. Green eyes with flecks of purple – my favorite feature about me – hooded by my black eyebrows; I had a smallish, straight nose and lips that weren't amazing but weren't horrible. My hair was a blue-black color, which normally gave me no problems in the morning – surprising, because it's kind of wavy and should be at least a little harder to straighten, but whatever. Then there comes my new-found curves; at first, it was weird, and kind of sudden, but I don't even notice them anymore. Looks like it's time for another shopping trip, I thought to myself.
     When I finished my shower I started my normal routine: dressing, brushing my teeth and hair, straightening, little bit of make-up, then waking up Briley and Azrael. It's always harder to wake up Briley than it is Azrael; Azrael, in everyday situations, tends to be a little more stubborn and set in his ways, but Briley is more willing to try new things – he has more of an open mind. Once it comes to waking up, their personalities seem to switch up a little.
     Normally, I wouldn't go with them on their hunting trip, but they were kind of short on hands. On a normal trip, they could manage by themselves, but this time it's different. The pattern of the missing people and killings seemed a little more complex and confusing, which is something that Briley almost never admits. This is the fifth time that I'd be accompanying them. Of course, my father's father was in the military, and after he retired officially, he taught my father a little bit. I don't think you're actually allowed to do that, but damn if he didn't. So, being the over-protective man that my father was, he passed this knowledge on to my brothers, but to me as well; this "knowledge" consisted of how to break almost every single bone in the human anatomy with the flick of a wrist, how to use a gun, and martial arts along with some boxing and wrestling. He wasn't really intending on me using it for this purpose - considering the fact that he wasn't planning on dying so soon - but with Rick on the other side of the country and him dead, things happen and drastic measures needed to be taken.
     By the time Azrael and I were finished eating breakfast, Briley had just stepped out of the shower. I grabbed his laptop and started looking up the information we needed: stuff like the patterns - which Briley had conviniently documented on his computer, which also had discriptions of the missing children and how they were stolen, along with potential suspects and family members that have been killed and the ones that are currently alive- as well as the possible types of monsters that could have done these things. Briley had pretty much already taken some notes on that subject, but I added some of my own. After Briley finished his breakfast, he took a glance at what I came up with.
     "I don't know; I think you're just trying to think up any monster that does that kind of stuff. You can't just list random things. Really, less tends to be more. You have to be able to narrow things down. If you have a list of random monsters that do similar things, you'll never know what to do and how to stop it."
     "Yeah, Briley's right," Rae jumped in. "You can't just list random monsters that have similar actions. You have to know. There are sometimes two similar monsters, but you never really get more than that. Normally, the hardest thing is actually getting rid of the monster."
     Yeah, I guess that's true, I thought. Dad always knew what he was going into; of course, his research skills were even better than Briley's, but he did do it for almost 30 years. And he did it without the Internet, most of the time.
     "A changeling is definitely the monster we're hunting. Which means that we have to find the fairy mother and burn the bitch," said Azrael. I nodded at him, and we headed for the door. Time to go kill some fae.

    We walked up to the door of the pretty yellow house - the color shone through the moonlight. The house reminded me of something I wouldn't mind living in one day. The door was painted white, the trim a pale blue. The porch was wooden, and it was decorated with boxes of flowers and piles of toys. There was a sun window on the second floor, right in the middle; the other windows were placed symmetrically on either side of that window. The house itself wasn't very large, but it was bigger and nicer than a cheap motel room.  
     Although the house was beautiful, what happened inside couldn't even be described as ugly - which would be a very large understatement. The changelings are very interesting creatures. They look like the children that the fairy mother replaces them with, but they kill the parents of those children; in case you were curious on the how, they tend to eat them. They're disgusting, I know, but that's life. C'est la vie.
     We walked into an empty foyer, but of course, we could hear some scuffling and whatnot - signaling that there was some sort of life in the house. Azrael and Briley immediately walked toward the noise. Me? I stayed back, trying to avoid as much unpleasantness as possible. Of course, that doesn't always go down the way I want it too; I mean, I'm not gonna be a complete wuss.
     Of course, the first step to every changeling case is to find the fairy mother. Once we find the bitch, we have to figure out where the actual kids are, then burn her. When the fairy mother goes down, all her little spawns go down with her. This saves the children and we get to move on to the next city.
     But of course, you don't actually think I'm gonna give you the low down and not give you the details, right?
     So I finally gather enough courage to walk in with my brothers. As soon as I catch sight of them, a crazy changeling pops out of nowhere and starts trying to gnaw on Briley's neck. Before I even have time to react,