Having a depressed parent isn’t easy. Especially when said parent is the alpha werewolf of your pack and controls every minute detail of your life.

You don’t love your father. You don’t think you ever have, or maybe it’s just been so long that any feelings have faded. Sure, you feel responsible for him, you feel some kind of bond, but love? It’s hard to love someone who’s depressed. Especially when you’re depressed yourself, and you struggle to start every day with a smile. And him? Nothing. He wallows in it. He likes his position of power, manipulating everyone from the bottom of his dark hole.

“You didn’t answer my howls,” he said this morning, his joints creaking from the recent full moon.

You wanted to reply: can you blame me? But you apologized instead. “I was really busy.”

“With your boyfriend?” He stuck his nose in your direction and sniffed the air, a tantrum already brewing.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

He just scoffed. “Everyone has a boyfriend. No one thinks about me. No one cares. I’m the alpha of this pack but I may as well be the omega.”

There was nothing to say. You stared down at your toast and counted the crumbs.

“You’re a whore,” he said from the doorway, leaning against the frame as if gravity had somehow abandoned him. “Just like your mother.”

It’s a familiar rant, one you desperately try to block out. You can’t even remember a time when your father was nice. You look at old photos of your parents, grinning happily together, young and fresh-faced, and it is like looking at two strangers. The couple in the photos have all these hopes and dreams and haven’t yet become disillusioned by life, jaded and weary of the day-to-day tedium, of the monthly forced changes, of the shedding fur and aching backs.

Now all your father cares about is himself. And your mother does too, to a lesser extent. Both wrapped up in their little pity parties, no longer interested in watching their children grow.

Oh, they ask you questions. How was school? What did you do today? They don’t listen to the answers. Sometimes you wish they were all dead. Dead, dead, dead. And things would be better, or at the very least different.

On good days, it amuses you to think you have taken after them, and are an expert pity partier yourself. On bad days, you lock yourself in the upstairs bathroom with a silver spoon in your gloved hands, and burn ovals into the inside of your thighs. The fur there when you change is getting patchy, but no one has thought to look or to ask, which fills you with a sick, shameful pride.

That morning, when your father left the kitchen, you bit your tongue to push down the well of emotion, but it wasn’t enough, it’s never enough. So now you hold your breath and place the silver spoon just next to the freckle on your left thigh, the smoke curling up and singeing your nostrils. The smell of burning makes you smile.

A knock on the door. “You’re going to be late for school!”

“Just a minute,” you call out. A minute is all it takes for a new scar to form. And if you can handle this, you can handle anything.

I remember once one of my colleagues asked me how it felt to be a hired assassin, shortly after I was promoted for the fourth time. I replied, “It’s just like any other job; you need a cool head, fast reflexes, and the determination to get the job done.” Maybe I even believed the words at the time. But I never would’ve guessed that those words would be flung back in my face several years later by someone I loved.

I met Alex shortly after my 26th birthday. He was the manager of a telecommunications company, and I told him I was a vet, an alias I often used since I had a soft spot for animals.

“A vet? Really?” He ran a hand through his baby-white hair, grinned lopsidedly. “You don’t look like you could handle blood.”

“I’ve got a good stomach,” I said. I thought of the banker I’d shot in the back of the head just that morning, and smiled. “A really good stomach.”

We hit it off then and there, at my best friend’s Cuban-themed house warming. He was everything I wished I was: intense, imaginative, yet simultaneously down to earth. The kind of person whose life burns unapologetically bright, like a shooting star streaking across the sky.

It’s tough to find a knight in shining armour when you know how to kill a man thirty-six different ways just using your bare hands. Somehow, Alex made me forget it all, made me feel ladylike. On holiday in Prague, when a teenager stole my purse, it was Alex who ran after him and rugby-tackled him to the floor.

He brought the kid out in me, too. I remember our first Christmas together, living in the same house. We had planned a quiet dinner on Christmas Eve, and were impatient for the juicy turkey in the oven to finish cooking. Neither of us could sit still, so we decided to go out for a short walk. As I was taking a photo of the snow-capped trees, Alex snuck up behind me and smeared a snowball into my face. I returned the favour, with interest.

We returned home several hours later to a frantic fire alarm. All that was left of our meal was black unrecognizable lumps and enough smoke to get high off of. We ordered pizza, and it was perfect. Our hips brushed as we washed up together, and I remember thinking: this is love.

What I’d pushed to the back of my mind was my mentor John’s favourite saying. He’d rub the swirl of white hair on the side of his head, chewing on a toothpick, and say, “There’s no room for humanity in a job like ours, kiddo,” except each time he’d say it he’d replace ‘humanity’ with a different word: love, hate, distractions, error…. The list went on.

John’s lesson only really sank in after my first victim. Nevermind that it was a mercy killing, that the woman on the hospital bed was begging to die. In the end, when her body lay limp and still on the tangled sheets, she looked so damn vulnerable that I was sick in the plant pot. All the honor and adventure that had so interested me in the job disappeared. There was nothing else left for me to do. I kept working.

The second killing was easier. By the time I killed my fifth victim, I didn’t even dream about it. I’d learnt not to let them get to me. I’d learnt not to ever, ever let anyone in. Everyone except Alex. He wasn’t the most good-looking man I’d ever met, but I felt comfortable with him. I felt safe and human and alive.

We’d been together two years when Alex came home one evening, pulled out a gun, and levelled it at my head. “Sorry, love,” he said, not looking sorry at all. “It’s just a job.” The words were a smack in the face, made all the more bitter by the fact that I had said them myself years earlier. I remember looking at his face, so calm and serious as he held the gun pointed towards my heart, and realizing he was ready to kill me.

No room for distractions. I pushed aside the pain, leant against the kitchen counter, feeling behind me for the bread knife. “So much for working in telecomm.”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “So much for being a vet.”

That shrug saved my life. I threw myself to the side, heard the roar of the gun and the shattering of glass.

I rolled under the kitchen table, leapt to my feet and launched the bread knife. The heavy metal blade was sharp enough to tear right into his head. He dropped down to the ground — dead, dying, it didn’t matter — and I called in a few favours to get the body removed.

Being an assassin was just a job like any other, but Alex ruined it, made it personal. I’ll never forgive him for that.

An entire hour passed without Evan Pyre moving so much as an inch from his perch amidst the gothic spires of the Duomo. Beneath him, just as immobile, was one of the cathedral’s gargoyles, a duck-like creature with a serpent’s tail and teeth worthy of a predator. Chance — or perhaps destiny? — had made fools out of them both, and Evan could not help but feel kinship towards a creature so outwardly hideous and inwardly harmless as himself.

Dawn was fast-approaching; the horizon was a line of pale pink light amidst the darkness. Evan could already feel his skin prickling in warning, every hair on his arm standing on end, and he had to swallow back the urge to retreat into the crypts, back to his coffin.

Fido—the gargoyle—sniffed the air, then began getting into position, his neck outstretched, his tail curled around his lower half.  “Good weather coming today,” he grunted.  “Hot.”

“I hope so,” Evan said, for the stronger and brighter the sun, the faster his death, and the end of years of torment. Just then, the thought struck him that he should have done this years earlier, and saved himself a lot of trouble. Killed himself with daylight, and consequences be damned. Let the consequences take care of themselves.

Minutes crawled by, the light on the horizon stretching upwards, pale and weak at first but with increasing vigour, until the edge of the sun made its appearance. Night, all of a sudden, had been passed over for day, and Evan stood dumbstruck as he saw the sun for the first time in three hundred years. Ominous crackling filled the air; he thought it was his skin burning at first, but no — his skin was unmarked — it was Fido solidifying into granite. Perplexed, Evan examined his hand, awash in the morning light.

Quietly at first, and then with increasing urgency, Evan began to mumble one word: no, repeated over and over again.  Rays of light struck his skin without leaving the faintest mark, without burning or igniting or anything they were supposed to do.  Supposed to do, he thought numbly, almost choking on the irony of it all.

Throughout the years, Evan had come to learn that nothing else worked: not stakes nor crosses nor garlic.  Unless struck by light or flame, he and his kind were immortal, so he had placed all his hopes for peace on the morning sun. Vampires were only unmourned souls, and not sinners; surely they deserved to rest in peace eventually?

Why some were cursed and not others remained a mystery.  Xero the Elder claimed it was the work of God, but only destiny could be cruel enough to make Evan a vampire when he had committed no crimes. Yet there was Fido, a truly cursed soul, and even he was allowed the luxury of sleep that Evan was denied.

 Zealously, awash in the growing morning light, Evan bowed his head and prayed for another way to die.