The Anatomy of Terrible Things

Chapter I

Something woke Linnea Matisson from a dead sleep. A sleep that was rare, unplagued by frequented nightmares and the reaching, endless depth of the veil. Whatever woke her was nearly infernal, the sensation wicked and alive, raking at the utmost corners of her mind. Like a visitor at the door, impolitely waiting to be let in from the cold. Her temples ached faintly, the pressure like a continuous battering ram. A taste coated her tongue, steel and electricity. A sensation she had sworn she'd left behind in that murky, swampy mess in the United States months beforehand. She had been sure, when she'd boarded her first ever flight, shuddering with the knowledge she couldn't be followed across air so easily. She tilted her head, listening. Keen hearing picked up the change in tune outside. The night dwelling birds and few scant insects left over from a particularly warm summer were silent.

Witch Hunters? It couldn't be.

   Her little corner of the world, the sprawling townhouse she'd bought in Odense's “Hans Christian Anderssen” quarter had been peaceful. She had gotten a chance to study, to practice, to simply live for the first time in decades. No one bothered, no one invaded her space with inspection warrants and baying bloodhounds as they had that bloody, bitter night not so long ago.

   They'd burnt it. Her home. They'd burnt it to the ground with all of her belongings, her familiar inside. All of it, gone. All of it save the books, the candles, the trinkets and knives she'd never brought home to begin with. She'd known better than to give them evidence.

    Ah yes, the twenty-first century. Where Christian Priests and Pagan Zealots were forced to interact peacefully at the market and ride the same public transportation.

 Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

 It was all bullshit. The peace, the seeming treaty. Days before they'd burnt her childhood home to the ground, they'd tied a young girl to an old mill wheel at Tannehill and burnt her alive. The local news had claimed it the “unmarked work a budding serial killer”, but the truth of the matter was a shrieking clarity. Those fucking bible thumping hypocrites had murdered her in cold blood. Even the government in that wretched place covered for them.

    The familiar hollow thud of a boot on her front door snapped her attention back to the present. They were there, somehow. Those bastards had tracked her across continents. They had-

 No, the voice below demanding that she open her door was accented. It commanded her in her native tongue. It sneered at her in Danish. The hunters in the leaf ridden street below were Danish.

    “Kom ud, Kom ud. Heks Taeve!”

Come out, witch bitch.

     A thought and she was across the room, honed immortal speed carrying her soundlessly across worn wooden floorboards. She didn't sleep in pajamas, she never had. Though it was halfway unbuttoned, her buttoned shirt was still tucked into her belted leather pants. She'd fallen asleep in her clothes,  as she had every night since her boots had touched ground at Copenhagen International Airport. Gnarled, scarred fingers tipped in lethal coffin shaped nails curled around the hilt of her sword. Her nails scraped the crossguard, over the finished iron that made it. She whirled as the front door crashed in, the sound of wood splintering underneath boots breaching a snarl across blackened lips.

  “You can't hide forever, witch bitch!”

There were boots on the stairs now, a war cadence. She had half the nerve to fling herself onto the landing and meet them head on, but she knew better. There were six, half a dozen to one of her. Typically, they didn't send more than two. A hunter and a fallback, should the targeted witch manage to decimate the first. They had sent six.
     Ink, over one hundred years old yet unflawed, burnt at the back of her neck. A solar flare of pain before she slipped behind the door, fingers arranged in a parrying grip on her sword.

 They know what I am, let them come to me.

She counted the thudding footfalls. All the way until they stopped at the landing outside her bedroom door. Had she been younger, less experienced, she would've given into the fear curling in her gut. It wasn't her first run in with Witch Hunters, though on her home soil it felt much like betrayal. Then that faint sting turned to blinding rage.

  “Where have you ran, witch bitch? We'll find you, you know. No matter where you hide.”

 This had to be the ringleader. The one who kicked in her bedroom door and strode to the center of the room, leafing through the books on her desk and rifling through  her now unoccupied quilts.

   “Goddamnit! She was just here. She couldn't have gotten far! Spread out and search this rutting ancient crypt", he barked orders over the threshold.

   She waited, waited until he whirled back towards the door. Until he was almost certain he was alone, his target somewhere off in the night. She waited until he overlooked her once, twice.

  Then she stepped forward, into the faint bit of moonlight streaming in from outside.

   And lunged for the stricken man's throat with her bare hands.