#i am not immune to the big muscled elf

[pastelhellion]

Halsin's romance scenes/lines have me kicking my feet and giggling

[qm-vox]

Hunter: the Vigil - Left-Beef Deliveries

There is a Domino's Pizza in Lenawee County, Michigan, that is open for 24 hours. They don’t get a lot of business after 1 AM or so, though of course you’ve got the stoners and the late-shifters, the early-shifters up before they have to be or the drunks up past when they oughta be the fuck down, but what this joint does get is a lot of calls just like this one:

“I need a none pizza with left beef at Needle Lane Farms.” The voice - a young man’s - is shaking, cut up with ragged breathing and forced into the kind of low, insistent volume one does not associate with shitposting in real life. “M-mind the dogs. They’re loose. Please, we need it right away!”

Our Heroine here at the Domino’s is a thirty-four-year-old lass by the name of Cheryl. Her voice isn’t right for this sorta call either; when she answers it’s in a calm, steady tone, full of compassion and surety: “You kids need to stop with these prank calls. Someone’s gonna do something about it.”

Then Cheryl hangs up the store phone, having put in no order (and how could she, with no payment information) and does two things at the same time: hit a contact on her cell, and call up the address information for Needle Lane Farms in the company’s system. Did you know that a pizza place can often find addresses that 911 dispatch centers can’t? Cheryl certainly does. It’s why she works the graveyard shift.

The person on the other end of the cell call picks up on the second ring. “Deliveries,” they answer, their voice clipped and sure.

“Needle Lane Farms,” Cheryl replies immediately. “Load for wolves and wounded. Standby for directions.”

At a country house far from town (as the natives think of it) and also right next to it (as the map thinks of it), four other people haul themselves out of bed while the woman on the phone with Cheryl writes down a set of directions. They grab shotguns and pistols, ammunition for both, flares, first-aid kits, airhorns, and flashbangs of the kind civilians are not supposed to have, pile into a dented van, and go tearing off into the night. There’s a little Domino’s logo parked on top of the van, a sign to the ticket-hungry cops prowling the dead shifts that if they want to keep their discounts friendly, they need to keep their mitts off the people inside.

*    *    *    *

Needle Lane Farms is a fairly successful, family-owned farm in Lenawee County. They’re big supporters of local farmer’s markets, and their owners and employees can often be found as guest speakers in various high schools around the county, talking about ethically-sourced food and the complex moral choices involved in one’s choice to be vegan, vegetarian, or not. None of that is relevant to the events that follow except insofar as no one involved quite did anything to deserve this. Needle Lane rather unfortunately entered the sight of a group of eco-fascists from Canada that migrated across the lakes to stake a new claim after being...

...Evicted, let’s say...

From their previous arrangements. When they made their displeasure known in the form of slaughtered livestock and destroyed tools, fences, and vehicles, and the cops rather suspiciously turned up nothing, Needle Lane turned to the Lower Michigan Paranormal Investigation Society, three young men and one young woman with a camera who See The Unseen(tm).

One of those young men is currently dead, or at least he’d better be. His head is in the fork of a tree branch, a good thirteen feet from his body, which has deep claw wounds ripping it up just in case decapitation stopped killing humans in the last forty-five seconds.

Our eco-fascists, currently exhibiting the latest fall fashion line from Things That Should Not Be by being eight-and-a-half-foot wolf-men with, say, man-shredding and head-throwing claws, are quite enjoying their introduction to the LMPIS, which is going swimmingly for them. The young woman (Alicia) is proving somewhat troublesome; she’s in the loft of a barn with a seemingly unlimited supply of pepper spray. One of the young men (James) is in the house, on the phone, but the police won’t come here, not after the problems the owners started with the department last year. The last young man (Brad), a fifth-year senior who’s starting to think he should have been studying instead of looking into whatever ended up with him being stalked by god damn werewolves, is fleeing down the driveway towards the main road, shrieking in terror. One of the pack bounds after him, savoring the fear of his prey.

It is this werewolf who first greets Left-Beef Deliveries by getting hit by their van at sixty miles an hour. Bones and the front hood of the van crunch and crumple, and the werewolf goes flying under the old beater’s wheels to the tune of further breaks from being run over. The van skids to a halt, and the moment it’s slow enough the side doors open up and the four people kicked out of their bed by Cheryl’s call and their leader’s insistence go spilling out. Two run down the crushed werewolf as he tries to get up; one, a mousy young man whose ‘just pulled out of a locker’ vibe is being seriously impacted by the double-barrel in his hands, unloads into the werewolf’s center of mass.

Did you know that silver shot melts in sufficiently modern firearms, due to how hot the powder burns and how fast the rounds move? Our young man, Nathaniel Briggs, certainly does, which is why the antique piece of shit he’s using blows an absolute fucking crater in the werewolf instead of punching a neat hole like a better gun might. His battle-buddy next to him, Greta Miller, sweeps the road with a pistol and flashlight while Nathan double-taps the mass of fur and muscle he’s already killed.

In the barn, the sound of gunshots distracts the two werewolves who are trying to figure out how best to menace Alicia. This informs them of two valuable pieces of information. The first is that there are new enemies on the field, who are armed. The second is that Alicia seems to be wholly immune to the aura of maddening terror they usually use against humans; the moment their heads move aside, she pops out of hiding and nails both with a long stream of pepper spray from the canister she’s holding. They flee from the barn, howling in pain and terror, directly into the raised shotgun & pistol of Left Beef’s other sleep-deprived van members: Tess & Sally, the former a brick shithouse of a woman who catches the falling body of her prey in one hand without dropping her shotgun, the latter more resembling what happens when you try to make a Keebler elf edgy.

Two members of the pack remain standing, and when they see the fifth of Left-Beef’s crew - the older woman who took Cheryl’s call, and who is now lifting a bolt-action rifle to her shoulder - they flee into the night, howling in outrage.

After a moment, the van’s driver lowers her rifle and calls for a sweep-and-clear. She slings her weapon across her back, unholsters a pistol from her belt, and starts rounding up LMPIS’s survivors. Both of the young men are wounded, but will live; Alicia is unharmed, and vibrates with a barely-restrained and eminently inadvisable rage.

“W-we owe you one,” James stammers, as his rescuer examines the long, shallow claw marks down his back. “None of the owners even woke up...”

The older woman makes a noncomittal sound. “They do that. And wolves aren’t the only ones that do. I’m Elena, and we’ll all be talking after sunrise.”

Alicia perks her head up. “About?”

“The much more than ‘one’ you idiots owe me.”