The Hunter (Mistress & Master of Restraint) (2 page)

Cortez Abernathy
: Present
-Chapter One-

             
The blinking cursor of death.

             
|

             
I’m not used to this insanity. Well, I’m used to actual insanity, as in the kind in actuality. What I’m not used to is… Ugh, I can’t even think it.

             
Writer’s Block.

             
I suffer from the dreaded writer’s block. I’ve been suffering for almost a year. It was a big joke between Ezra and me when I wrote my first shitty book. I wrote it on purpose. I wanted to see how Katya would react, whether or not she’d do her job versus falling for my charms.

             
Kitten did her damned job, alright!

             
The book I gave my wife was a shit-fest. I deliberately messed it all up. It was a test, or so I told myself as Ezra maniacally laughed at my plight. I was able to resurrect the horrid creation, and it hit number five on the New York Times best seller’s list. It stayed there for many weeks in fact… and then life got in the way. I lost track of the days that I didn’t write, when previously it was unfathomable that I’d go a few hours without putting words to page.

             
In the past, writing was as essential as breathing, an involuntary compulsion. I had to create to release the pent-up pressure inside my mind- the emotions, the thoughts, the sensations that choke the very life out of me. For me, writing was an emotional pressure release valve. I grin and charm my way into people’s lives. I smile when inside I feel raw, an open wound that will never heal.

             
First, life got in the way: relationships, family obligations, mystery illegitimate children, secrets and lies and betrayals of the deepest kind, marriages, and threats. Then the emotions came and rolled me under: Fear, jealousy, friendship, love, betrayal, fear, jealousy, betrayal, bitterness, and love. These emotions were so strong that no words could be uttered. My mind was a blank canvas without its usual colorful imagination. I was a black hole, devoid of anything but an infinite stretch of silent pain.

The first stirring appeared after I felt safe, the tingling at the back of my mind. It’s a slight sensation, rather pleasant and titillating. It
was my muse awakening from a long slumber. She… and I have no idea why as a male I have a female muse, a muse I refuse to name. She stretched and yawned, and then she smiled at me, the smile of an angel. I blinked back tears, realizing that her visage is that of my long dead mother- but we all have our issues, mine just happen to be of the mommy kind.

             
I was elated. I was sitting on the sofa watching a movie with my family. I burst up from my seat, knocking poor Kitten off of my lap. I’d frightened Diane to the point that she gasped, a huge reaction for the ultra-controlled women. Marcus knew. I could tell by the mischievous sparkling in Marc’s eye and the hearty laugh bubbling up from his chest as he gazed at me in wonder. I’d shouted, “I’ve got to write. Disturb me and I’ll hurt you.” I ran to my office and sat down to write. Laptop booted up, a carafe of coffee, the whirr of the air purifier singing its song of contentment. Hell, the air temperature was perfect. I was at peace, the pressure ready to be relieved.

             
… And then I checked my messages. All one-thousand-four-hundred of them.

             
A while back, I’d joked about
Bitch-Slaps through the laptop screen
. It is a turn of phrase I created as Grant and I commiserated over the horrors of being a published author. Grant and I have long discussions about how reader interactions make us feel- the inspiration, the anxiety, the fear. The majority of the interactions are life-changing, friendship-building, inspiring. A scant few are like cancer, they bleed into your creativity and deplete your motivation, hell, your will to live even. Demands, ridicule, people speaking to you as if you are not a human being, but just a source of their unlimited entertainment- a puppet that’s strings get pulled for the price of your book.

             
I was in Hell- I burst into flame. I incinerated in my horror as my muse shriveled up and died within that special place she dwells at the base of my spine. My angel, my muse, the unnamed inspiration that I refuse to admit is Celeste Hunter. My mother died again for me that day, and I haven’t written a word since, not even a grocery list.

             
The demanding hands came through the laptop screen and choked me- they had me by the throat. The screams were deafening in their silence. Words of malice formed perfectly placed plunges into my heart. It was the game reawakening and ruining the only thing I had left to call my own. Ezra isn’t mine. Faith isn’t mine. Katya isn’t mine. Ava and Baby Ez belong to Ezra and Katya. Zane belongs to Ezra and Faith. Azriel is mine by genetics, but she belongs to all of us. I’m not even mine. I’d freely give myself to Ezra in all ways, but the game owns me. I have no rights to anything. I thought my passion was something that couldn’t be taken from me.

             
… And I was wrong. My passion was torn from my soul- ashes of who I used to be, who I should have become.

             
I paid the penance for whatever tantrum Ezra had thrown within the bounds of the game, and the payment of that consequence was my life’s blood- my life’s work.

             
Thousands upon thousands of emails, comments on my websites, Facebook and Twitter were blowing up with malice… and then the reviews started. Reviews are the bane of my existence. Perfect, five-star reviews manage to hurt my injured psyche. I think to myself,
what did they really mean by that? Was the tone insulting?
You never know, but the mind always sees it as a slight. I don’t read reviews on principal, but how can you not when you are inundated with thousands overnight? 

The mean reviews, bashing, personal attacks,
suck the life from your soul. You would think because someone received my book for free, or as an ARC, or for Lord’s sake, pirated the cocksucker that that gives them the rights to taint your name. Line-by-line, they shred your story, and you try not to take offense, but how can you not? You created every word, you breathed life from nothing. While it may just be a book to them, a few minutes to snicker as they taunt like schoolyard bullies, it was thousands of hours of your life put into word form. Each and every book is remembered within your mind. Just the title itself will ping memories and emotions of how you felt as you birthed your story.

The worst are the reviews when you know they didn’t even read the dang book. They take apart a few chapters, totally annihilate your work, all the while getting it wrong because they didn’t even read it. But you can’t defend, you can’t even respond, you can’t even speak out in your own private medium on your own websites. You will be scorned for life.
Stoned in the way of social networking. The scarlet letter, but in this case the
A
stands for
Author
.

I was ruined.

Ordinarily it would have washed over my back as soon as I began writing again, or read a book, or hugged my children. Any sort of positive interaction to remove the darkness that smudges my soul. But over a thousand is not a handful, and the reason for the well-placed strike was another mini-death- the betrayal.

Ezra’s betrayal.

Doesn’t everything in my life boil down to Ezra and his many explicit betrayals? I was distraught, raw. It felt as if Ezra personally attacked me. Hell, at the time, I figured he had. But I knew that if Ezra hadn’t betrayed me, then it was Faith, which was just as bad. Worse actually, Faith using me to hurt Ezra, and Ezra allowing me to take his consequences- it’s a double fist to the ass.

For months I pretended to write, which is with great difficulty when you live with your editor and your boss. Breakfast conversation was tense to say the least, especially when asked how my work in progress was coming along.
Yeah, thanks for the advance, but I ain’t got shit on paper. Unless you want me to take a crap and wipe my ass and hand it in as a manuscript. I might at least be able to do that by the rapidly approaching deadline- I hope.

Finally, after questioning concerns and plenty of razzing, they all realized I had a real problem. So instead of indulging in writing, my soul cleanser, I ignored my issues and became the best father on the planet.
Never having a father myself, I took all the qualities I respected in Marcus, and all the mistakes everyone was making around me, and tweaked it to how I thought a father should react.

I’m paralyzed by fear, by suffocating emotions that have no outlet for release, by the life I’ve chosen to lead but curiously believe it’s the wrong path. This isn’t how I saw myself. I’m living in our allies’ estate with my family and children, seeking refuge from the shit-storm Ezra rained down upon our heads. I feel immense guilt as I withhold everything from the ones I love. Our hosts are being tormented by the ones they house. It’s wrong, and my mother raised me better than that, and I should be raising my children better than that. 

“Daddy,” Baby Ez’s tender voice flows as he paws at my thighs, and just like that, Celeste Hunter takes the first real breath she’s had in over a year. Not the resurrected breath of rebirth, but the dawn of a new life. My muse, my mother, she croons in my mind.
If you can’t live with it, don’t accept it. Change!

… And like a lightning strike, I take a deep breath and my fingers fly along the keys. In order to be reborn, one must start at the beginning…

The Hunter: Past
-Chapter Two-

“Wait up!” I shout at Ez’s
retreating back as he silently slips between the dense trees in ShadowHaven’s large forest.

This summer, Ezra is obsessed with hide and seek.
We take turns seeking each other. Once caught, we go back to the center of the lawn, and begin again. Ezra tirelessly makes us do this from dusk ‘til dawn- every single day, rain or shine. I just want to hang around the pool with Divina and Aaron, reading books and listening to music. I want to play and goof off and eat. After all, we worked all year at school, and that’s what summer vacation is for. But Ezra stares me down and says,
no, you’re not sitting on your lazy ass and watching it grow. Do as I say
.

It’s Ezra… I always do as he says because it’s not worth the fight.

In the past month, we’ve expanded our game to almost a hundred square acres. Now we use compasses, and we’re working up to the seven hundred acres surrounding ShadowHaven. Ezra expects it by the time school starts. I learned forever ago, just give Ez what he wants.

We play
The Hunter
, as Ez likes to call it, and he won’t tell me why. He just mumbles,
it’s what you do, isn’t it? You hunt your prey, don’t you?
I try to tell Ezra that I meant: why do we play it, not why is it called The Hunter? But he always ignores me.

I can tell Ezra i
s holding something back from me, he’s distancing himself. He knows something I don’t and it hurts me that he’s keeping secrets. I’d asked my mom about it because Ezra was getting obsessed with hide and seek… Mom didn’t say anything, and she didn’t need to. Her petrified expression said it all. Now I wish I hadn’t said anything, because Mom and Diane keep looking at us like we’re going to turn into freaks or some shit. The little brat, Aaron, tattles on us every time we do something that they think is
nature versus nurture
- whatever the hell that means.

An old dude keeps coming around and trying to chat us up. After several times, I figured o
ut that he was a headcase quack. He’s stopped talking to me. But four times a week, Ez and the Doc lock themselves in our bedroom for two hours at a clip. Ezra threw a temper tantrum, so now the shrink only comes after dark. Dr. Weiss was cutting into
The Hunter
time.

It’s days like today that I
get jealous. Ez is only a month older than me, but he’s huge. Ezra is all long arms and legs, which eat up the distance of our hunt. It takes me twice as long to do our route. Ezra hated it when I used to call him lollypop, and I hated it when he’d poke my belly and make the Pillsbury Doughboy sound. Ezra is no longer a lollypop, but I’m still chubby. All this hunting has beefed him up. I try not to notice, but it’s impossible with him constantly strutting around naked. It’s like he wants me to see that he’s manlier than me and it makes me feel badly about myself. Divina has seen all of Ezra, too. Ezra just laughs and looks you in the eyes, daring you to look lower- pervert.

Ezra i
s a good four inches taller than me now. After twelve years of being nearly identical in all ways, I’m pissed. I still look like a pudgy kid and Ez is running around with hair on his body. I try not to compare us, but it’s difficult not to when everyone else does. We used to get a lot of sidelong looks and people calling us twins. I don’t know why, but it annoyed Ezra so much that he’d get confrontational. I’ve never told Ezra that it hurts my feelings when he goes on the attack. Our lives have always been parallel: no fathers, raised as brothers by our single mothers, we even look alike. Why would Ezra be ashamed to be my brother? I guess he just doesn’t like my skin color. He teases me about being half Hispanic all the time. I’m too tan for Ezra’s white, rich world.

“Don’t be a twit,”
Ez taunts, running backwards on his muscular legs-
show off
. “You’ll never catch me.” Ez whips around and lopes off into the woods, sinister laugh fading in his wake.

“You’ll regret making me chase you,” I shout
, already out of breath and covered in sweat. “Someday, you’ll be the one eating my dust!” Ez’s answer is his creepy laugh. After a heartbeat of hurt because Ezra left me behind, I go after him.

Pumping my arms and
legs as fast as I can go, digging the treads of my sneakers into the ground, I try to gain on Ezra but it’s pointless. I slow to yank off my t-shirt and swab my face dry. It’s so humid you can practically see the moisture in the air. It’s ninety-three degrees today with the sun directly overhead. The canopy of the woods isn’t offering any relief. It’s just moist, hot, and muggy.

I’d rather be in the pool, casting looks at Divina’s bikini top. Ez would throw a fit, though. Last week he beat me for looking at her tit
ties. I told Ezra Divina wasn’t my cousin, so I can look all I want. I was just curious. I ended up with a black eye and Ezra had Dr. Weiss for extra sessions.

One advantage of being shorter, the limbs aren’t whipping me in the face. Ez keeps cursing every time he gets lashed. I snicker as he calls a spruce a cocksucker.

“You can’t hide if you keep bitching at inanimate objects,” I sing. “Defeats the purpose of hide and seek.”

“
So does chasing me, dumbass,” Ezra shouts at me from somewhere deep in the woods. “The whole point is learning to track… which you suck at.”

“If you’d shut up, I’d look for you. You might as well throw up a flare, since your chatty ass won’t zip it.” Truthfully, every time I
’ve found Ezra was because he was bitching at himself or a tree, sometimes a leaf or a bug. He’s silent in the woods. His feet barely touch the ground. Ezra stalks like a perfect predator. I never even hear him breathe. It’s these random outbursts that betray his position- without fail. I know he’s not… right in the head. He’s just Ez.