Arjun scraped the last of the dal from the steel plate, set it aside, and wiped his hands on his jeans.
The voice came again, warm and patient inside his skull.
"Before I tell you my story, Arjun… I want to hear yours."
Arjun almost laughed. He had never spoken his life out loud to anyone, not even to the mirror. But the memory of the tall man in the white shirt that morning, the calm eyes, the gentle handshake that never quite happened, loosened something in his chest.
So he talked.
He told the invisible hunter about the red Splendor that coughed every morning, about his father's swollen legs and the dialysis machine that cost twelve thousand rupees a session, about his mother stitching clothes till her fingers bled so his sisters could go to school, about the sister in 12th who still believed her bhaiya would become an engineer and buy them a real house one day. He told him how his own dreams had quietly died somewhere between hospital bills and failed campus placements, how all that was left was the single thought: *keep them alive, keep them safe, keep them hoping*.
When he finished, the cabin was silent except for the creak of the fan.
Then the voice returned, softer than before.
"Thank you. For sharing your story with me.
Now listen to mine as well."
And Vikramaditya began.
He spoke of a bloodline that started two hundred years ago, when his great-great-great-grandfather, a simple merchant, watched a werewolf tear his entire family apart under a full moon in satpura. The man survived by blind luck and spent the next twenty years hunting that same creature across forests and mountains until he drove silver through its heart. That night a hunter was born, and a promise was made: never again would the dark walk free.
From then on the Shinde family joined the other hunters of the old, some were traditional families who had been hunters for hundreds of years, and together they hunted what ordinary men could not even name.
Kings sent gold. Merchants sent weapons. Zamindars sent horses. The hunters never needed to plough fields or sell chai; their only work was the night's work. At their peak, thousands of informants and hundreds of hunters covered the subcontinent like a secret army against the unseen.
"I loved it," Vikramaditya said, and Arjun could hear the smile in the voice. "We rode together, Anirudh, Karthikeyan, sometimes five or six of us, sometimes alone. We burned rakshasas in Rajasthan deserts, drowned vetalas in Bengal rivers, buried chudails under banyan roots in Kerala. Those were the best years of my life."
Then came the last hunt.
A witch in Kerala. Centuries old. Sacrificed newborns, drank blood under new moons, vanished whenever hunters came close. Six of us went: Vikramaditya, Anirudh, Karthikeyan, and three others whose names he spoke with quiet respect. They tracked her for two months.
They never saw the betrayal coming.
The witch had once been a hunter herself. Her entire family, seven strong, famous names in the old circles, had turned to the dark. The six loyal hunters walked into an ambush. Silver chains, cursed blades, rituals that peeled the soul from the body. All six died screaming.
"Except me," Vikramaditya said quietly. "My grandfather had given me an amulet, a single-use thing, meant to cheat death once. I thought it would heal a fatal wound. Instead it chained me to the world as a spirit. For fifty-two years I have wandered, unable to touch, unable to speak to the living, watching the country Change. I stayed away from other hunters; I do not know how deep the rot goes. Seven betrayed us that night, but were there more? I couldn't risk exorcism before the truth was known."
A pause. The fan kept creaking.
"Then you came, Arjun Jadhav. You opened my door. You touched my books. And for the first time since 1973, someone heard me."
The voice grew heavier, as though the air itself was listening.
"The vault recognises you now. The duty recognizes you. And so do I."
Arjun sat very still on the cot, plate forgotten, heart beating slow and hard.
Outside, a lone truck rumbled past on the highway, headlight sweeping across the glass walls like a searchlight.
Inside, the hunter's voice dropped to a whisper that filled the whole room.
The fan creaked once more, and the cabin fell eerily silent.
But Arjun knew the silence was only waiting.