Are demon real? Or vampires? Or werewolves? Sure, people write books about them all the time. Books lead to movies and movies are reality to many. If you want to know if these monsters are real, just ask any kid. If you truly want to know if they are real, ask your priest. He probably won't tell you, but he knows the truth. They all do.
Even the Church, and that's the Catholic Church, doesn't know the origin of monsters. They pre-date Christianity by several millennia but since the beginning of the Church every effort has been made to suppress the knowledge of these creatures and to stamp them out. They have only been successful in the former.
Through nearly two thousand years the Church has waged their war with the 'unnatural' and the result has been witch trials, the Inquisition, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, many innocent. When superstition is all there is to work with, tragic errors are bound to happen.
Enter science. In the closing years of the 19th century this superstition began to be replaced by actual study and by the later part of the 20th century those studies had begun to uncover far more than the Church ever expected. Vampires, demons, werewolves, elves, dryads, and such existed and while some were what tradition had described, not all were.
The first came in 1870, the Venator. He was a priest born and raised in Scotland, who took the cowl at age 18. He might have remained nothing but a simple priest if he'd not been called to Rome in 1869. From there he was sent into the Carpathian Mountains where he encountered the vampire. Many years later a Scottish author heard the tale from a dying priest and published the story as Dracula. The second Venator appeared in 1899 and this one was not a priest but a nun, the first Venatrix.
Now, over a century later, the last Venator is gone and a new one must be found.
It was not unusual to see a nun and priest on a Catholic hospital, nor would their standing before the glass wall of the nursery be thought odd. Very few, in fact, would recognized the fact that in the modern world a nun is a traditional black and white habit was becoming a rare thing. For many years the nursing nuns of hospitals around the world dressed little differently from their secular sisters but not even they gave a thought to the woman in black. They stood in such close proximity that their arms touched from shoulder to elbow and their heads where bent together in inaudible conversation.
"Are you certain, Mary," the priest whispered, staring into the nursery.
"It is my job to be certain, Shepherd," the nun replied.
The priest extracted a small notepad and pen, flipped it open and wrote the name affixed to the small bassinette. The blanket swaddling the tiny child was pink.
"At last," the nun breathed. "I was beginning to worry that I might not live to see this day."
"Nonsense," the priest said. He captured her hand and their eyes met.
"I am the longest lived ever, Shepherd," she said. "You know that better than anyone."
"Mary, you're not yet thirty."
"You know that my replacement is already in training," she said.
"She's only six and a long way from being ready to assume the mantle."
"It doesn't always work out that way. Most of the time the predecessor is gone before her replacement is ready. That's why we need her."
She nodded to the tiny figure.
Lt. Catherine Gilchrist, San Diego Police Department, Homicide Division, strode into the room, coming to a stop three steps from the door. Her eyes grew hard as she surveyed the carnage. Three bodies lay as if lifted by a hurricane and dropped at random about the room. One had landed inside the huge aquarium, bursting its sides, another was rolled into a ball behind a wet bar, the third had been impaled with some type of wooden pole and hung w
