The slam of the upstairs door seemed to echo forever in the sudden, bruised silence of the house. Simon and Samuel had finally wrestled Sunny back inside, his boots scraping a pathetic, hollow rhythm against the floorboards as they dragged him toward the stairs. The front gate now stood shut, a metal barrier against the ugly scene, but it couldn't block out the shame that had seeped into the very air.
Ace stayed where he was, a shadow by the side door.
For a long moment, he didn't move at all. The night air felt wrong—too calm, too ordinary. Somewhere down the road, a dog barked at a passing car. A streetlight at the corner flickered, its buzz the only sound. The neighborhood carried on as if nothing had happened, as if a grown man hadn't just torn his own dignity to shreds on the pavement, as if blood hadn't been smeared across a stranger's knuckles for reasons that had nothing to do with survival or hidden worlds.
Ace swallowed, the taste of the night bitter in his mouth.
This is the normal world, he thought, the realization settling like a cold stone in his gut. This is what they fight to protect. It was sloppy. Ugly. Embarrassingly, humanly pathetic.
The fight replayed behind his eyes—not as a hunter would see it, but as a witness to a tragedy. The wild, telegraphed swings. The clumsy footwork, tripping over the curb more than any clever maneuver. The raw, unfocused rage that made them both slower, weaker. No technique. No tactical awareness. Just pure, messy emotion spilling out with nowhere useful to go.
If either of them had faced what he and Cedric faced in the woods… Ace didn't need to finish the thought. The answer was a flat, certain line in his mind.
They'd die. And they wouldn't even understand what killed them.
From inside the house, Sunny's voice erupted again, shattering the fragile quiet.
"LET GO OF ME!" The roar was cracked, hoarse, stripped of any authority, leaving only raw, wounded fury. "You think you can grab me like that? Who do you think you are?! You think you're better than me?!"
By now, the entire household had been drawn to the foyer like moths to a grim flame. Rose stood framed in the doorway to her room, wrapped in a thick shawl that seemed to swallow her frail frame. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with a hurt that went deeper than surprise. Sophie stood rigidly beside her, one hand hovering near Rose's elbow, not quite touching, a silent pillar of support. Behind them, Simon's wife, Maya, and Samuel's wife, Lina, stood close together, their expressions frozen somewhere between fear and weary resignation. Carl was conspicuously absent.
Sunny jerked violently, his drunken strength unpredictable. He broke free from Simon's grip just long enough to lunge forward and snatch a fistful of Simon's shirt, yanking him close so their faces were inches apart.
"You fucking piece of shit," Sunny spat, the words rancid with alcohol. "How dare you touch me? Huh? How dare you?"
"Sunny," Simon said, his voice a tight wire of forced calm. He kept his hands raised, open, non-threatening. "You're drunk. You need to sleep. We can talk in the morning."
"No." Sunny laughed—a sharp, hollow sound that held no warmth. "No, fuck that. You don't get to play the calm, reasonable one. Not after everything."
Simon didn't respond. He just held his brother's wild gaze, his silence a wall.
That silence seemed to detonate something in Sunny. His face twisted, the anger melting into something more pathetic, more pained.
"You know why my life is like this?" he continued, jabbing a trembling finger into Simon's chest with each word. "You. Because of you. You borrowed money from me. For that bullshit stock tip. 'It's safe, Sunny,' you said. 'It's a guarantee.' A guarantee." He spat the word like poison.
Simon's jaw clenched. A muscle ticked in his cheek. But he said nothing. He took the accusation, and the guilt in his eyes made it clear there was truth buried in the drunken vitriol.
That silent admission was the final trigger.
Sunny's face crumpled, then hardened again. He pulled Simon closer, his body coiling. "You ruined me."
And he swung.
It wasn't a good punch. It was off-balance, fueled by grief as much as rage. It glanced off Simon's shoulder, more a shove than a strike. But it was a line crossed.
Samuel moved then, surging forward not with anger, but with a desperate, pragmatic force. He wrapped his arms around Sunny from behind in a firm lock, pinning his arms to his sides. "Enough!" Samuel yelled, his usual easy charm gone, replaced by a command that brooked no argument. "That's enough, Sunny! Stop! Calm yourself down!"
Sunny thrashed against the hold, a wild animal caught in a trap of his own making. He laughed again, the sound cracking into something like a sob. "Calm down? You want me to calm down? Look at my life! Just look at it!"
His frantic gaze darted around the foyer, landing on each horrified face before skittering away. Until it stopped. Slowly. Deliberately.
It landed on Rose.
Ace felt his own breath catch, his fists tightening at his sides.
"This," Sunny slurred, pointing a shaky, accusatory finger at his own mother. "This is your fault, too. If you weren't always sick… if you didn't need help all the damn time… maybe Sophie wouldn't be here playing the saint. Maybe things… maybe everything would've been different."
The air in the hallway died. It was as if all the sound had been sucked into a vacuum.
Rose opened her mouth, but no sound emerged. Her hand, clutching the shawl, trembled violently.
Sophie moved before anyone else could blink.
She stepped forward, placing herself physically between her mother and her brother. "That's enough," she said, her voice a blade, sharp and shaking with a fury Ace rarely heard. "Don't you dare talk to her like that. You don't get to blame her for your choices."
Sunny's bloodshot eyes swiveled to her. He laughed again, louder, uglier. "Oh, here we go. The favorite. The perfect daughter. Always cleaning up the mess. Always the good one."
"Stop it," Sophie snapped, her composure cracking. "You're drunk and you're cruel. You're hurting everyone."
"Hurting people?" Sunny scoffed, his voice breaking. "You think I don't hurt? You think this," he gestured vaguely at his own torn shirt, his disheveled state, "feels good?"
No one answered him. The silence was a heavy, suffocating blanket. Maya looked down at her slippers. Lina pressed her lips into a thin, white line. Simon stared at the floor, his shoulders slumped. No one stepped forward. No one knew what script to follow for this.
Ace stood rooted in the doorway to the kitchen, every hunter's instinct screaming at him to move, to intervene, to end the threat. But this wasn't a creature he could flank. This wasn't a weak point he could exploit with a relic. This was a sickness. A deep, festering rot in the heart of a family. And there was no enchantment, no sigil, no amount of training that could purge it.
Sunny's rant continued, dissolving into slurred, looping accusations—against his ex-wife, his job, the world, his own reflection—until Samuel, with Simon's help, finally managed to steer his dead weight toward the staircase. Sunny's protests faded into incoherent, wet mutters as they hauled him up, step by miserable step.
A door slammed upstairs. A lock clicked.
Then, silence.
Not relief. Not peace.
Just a thick, exhausted, shame-filled silence that settled over the house like dust.
Ace finally exhaled, a long, slow breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. His knuckles ached from how tightly he'd been clenching his fists.
Whatever this house was, whatever safety it was supposed to represent… it was an illusion. The real danger wasn't outside the gates. It was festering in the bedrooms, in the unspoken resentments, in the poison of a broken man. And the most terrifying part? No one here even had the vocabulary to name the monster. They just lived with it.
***
Morning came late, and it arrived softly, carefully, as if afraid to wake the lingering disgrace from the night before. Ace woke to the faint, muffled sounds of life continuing downstairs—the careful clink of a spoon in a teacup, the hushed murmur of voices, the soft creak of a floorboard under cautious feet. It was the sound of a household tiptoeing around a sleeping bomb.
He lay on his thin mattress for a while, staring at the crack in the ceiling, the events of the night replaying on a loop. The raw sound of Sunny's voice. The shattered look on Rose's face. The way his own mother's strength had visibly trembled.
Eventually, he pushed himself up. A shower did little to wash off the grim feeling. The house still felt tense, the air thick with things unsaid. He found Sophie in Rose's room, speaking in low tones as she straightened the bedsheets. Her smile when she saw him was brief, brittle, and didn't reach her eyes.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning," he replied.
Nothing else needed to be said about it. The subject was a landmine they were both avoiding.
With nothing to do and the weight of the quiet pressing on him, Ace found himself drifting upstairs. His feet carried him without conscious decision. There was only one person in this house he felt a pull toward, not out of family duty, but out of a dawning, grim understanding.
He stopped in front of Carl's door. He hesitated, his knuckle an inch from the wood. Was this crossing a line? Invading the one sanctuary the kid might have?
Then he remembered the sound of Sunny's shouting echoing through the halls. He remembered Carl's absence from the scene downstairs. He knocked.
No answer.
He waited, then knocked again, softer this time.
After a long moment, the door opened just a crack. Carl stood there, backlit by the weak morning light from his window. His hair was a mess, his eyes rimmed with the kind of tiredness that comes from lying awake all night, listening. He looked younger than fifteen.
"Oh… hey," Carl said, his voice a quiet scratch.
"Hey," Ace replied, keeping his own tone neutral, easy. "Can I come in?"
Carl hesitated, his eyes flickering over Ace's shoulder as if checking for observers. Then he gave a small nod and stepped back, opening the door just wide enough. "Yeah… sure."
Ace entered slowly, careful not to seem like he was surveying the territory. The room was small, almost monastic. A single bed was pushed into the corner, the blanket neatly made. A desk was piled high with textbooks and notebooks, their edges worn. A simple wooden chair. A narrow wardrobe. But as Ace's eyes adjusted, the room's true character emerged.
On the wall above the bed, a constellation of posters was plastered in a chaotic, passionate collage. Not sports stars or movie heroes. Bands. The logos were jagged, aggressive, Gothic fonts spelling out names Ace only vaguely recognized from someone's occasional rants: Coffins, Mortuous, Spectral Voice. Dark, intricate artwork depicted forests of bones and cosmic despair. It was a stark, violent contrast to the room's otherwise muted order.
Ace let out a low, appreciative whistle. "Whoa. Didn't expect that."
Carl stiffened slightly by the door, a defensive hunch in his shoulders. "What?"
"The posters," Ace said, nodding toward them. "You're into death metal? That's hardcore."
Carl's shoulders relaxed a fraction. He nodded, a shy, almost imperceptible movement. "Yeah… I guess."
"That's sick," Ace said, and he meant it. It was a piece of identity, a flag planted in silent rebellion. "What's your favorite?"
Carl thought for a second, his eyes drifting to a particularly grim poster of a crumbling cathedral. "Coffins. They're… Doom-death."
Ace raised his eyebrows, impressed. "That's deep cut. Is it underground?"
"Yeah," Carl replied, a flicker of pride touching his tired eyes. "Most people haven't heard of them."
Ace smiled faintly. "Figures."
A short, not-uncomfortable pause settled between them. Then Carl, in a quiet voice that held a hint of curiosity, asked, "You… listen to metal too?"
Ace blinked, then shook his head. "Me? Nah. I mean, I know about it. I know a certain someone who's a total metalhead. Death metal, black metal, the more chaotic the better. He's tried to convert me for years."
"Oh," Carl said, and the single syllable held a world of understanding. His eyes lit up, just a little. "That's cool."
"I'm more of a '90s grunge guy," Ace offered with a shrug, leaning casually against the edge of the desk. "But hey—music's music. It's all just noise that means something to someone, right?"
Carl nodded, a more definite motion this time. "Yeah… not many people here get that." The 'here' hung in the air, heavy with meaning.
Ace let the silence sit for a beat before he gently steered the ship toward the reason he'd come. He kept his posture relaxed, his voice light. "So… how are you holding up?"
Carl froze. The slight openness that had been on his face vanished, replaced by the familiar, guarded blankness. "…What?"
Ace shrugged, as if it were the most natural question in the world. "I heard your dad last night. Sounded pretty intense. Just wanted to check in. See if you're okay."
Carl looked away, his gaze fixing on a scuff mark on the floorboard. For a long moment, he didn't answer. The only sound was the distant hum of the house.
Then, so quietly Ace almost missed it, he said, "I'm fine."
Ace didn't push. He didn't probe. He just waited, a silent, patient presence in the room.
Carl sighed, a sound that seemed to deflate him. "He does that a lot. The yelling, I mean."
"A lot?" Ace repeated, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
"Yeah," Carl said, shrugging as if discussing the weather. "Pretty much every day. Some days are worse. Some days it's just… background noise. Depends on his shift, or… other stuff."
The casual acceptance in his tone hit Ace harder than any physical blow. It was the sound of a soul that had been eroded, day by day, into a state of bleak normalcy.
"Every day?" Ace said, the words coming out softer than he intended.
Carl just nodded, not meeting his eyes.
Ace straightened up from the desk. The casual lean was gone. "Carl… that's not normal. That's not okay."
Carl gave a small, awkward, heartbreaking smile. "Guess I'm used to it."
"Being used to something," Ace said, his voice low and firm, "doesn't make it right. It just means you've survived it for too long."
Carl finally looked up at him. Really looked at him, searching his face for dishonesty, for pity, and finding neither. "…You think so?"
Ace held his gaze, letting him see the absolute certainty there. "Yeah. I know so."
The room was quiet again, but this silence was different. It was no longer empty. It was full of an awful truth, finally spoken aloud.
Carl swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Most people… my teachers, even Mom before she left… they just tell me to ignore it. To stay out of his way. To be quiet."
"Yeah, well," Ace said, a flicker of his own anger surfacing, controlled but present, "most people are idiots. And cowards."
That earned a reaction—a small, startled huff of air that was almost a laugh. The first genuine sound Ace had heard from him.
Ace offered a small, reassuring smile. "Listen. You're not weak for feeling messed up about it. You're not wrong for wanting it to stop. And you're sure as hell not alone, even if it feels like it in this house."
Carl nodded slowly, the motion deliberate, as if absorbing a new and fragile idea. "…Thanks," he whispered.
"Anytime." Ace pushed himself away from the desk. "And hey—if you ever wanna talk, or just… I dunno, listen to music without someone screaming in the next room…" He gestured vaguely between them. "I'm around. For a bit, anyway."
Carl hesitated, then nodded again, more firmly this time. A tiny spark of something—hope? connection?—glimmered in his tired eyes. "I'd… I'd like that."
Ace's smile felt more real this time. "Cool."
He gave a final nod and turned to leave, pulling the door shut softly behind him. As he stood alone in the quiet hallway, the polished wood and family portraits seeming to mock him, one thought crystallized in his mind, cold and sharp as his relic blade:
Monsters didn't always have horns or haunt wooded hills.
Sometimes, they just lived in the room next door. And sometimes, the bravest hunt was just listening, and telling someone the chaos they lived in wasn't their fault.