Afterlife || irwin

[ 50 ] 2033

[ 50 ] 2033

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"I see our little hunter boy has woken up from his slumber. Welcome to your new home, sleeping beauty."

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It was well past midnight, the full moon hanging high above in the night sky, but the school year had ended in at St. Genevieve's Academy since last week and for the time being they did not need to worry about curfews. Not that his parents would have minded him being out so late anyway. They were currently out doing the exact same thing in other parts of the country or somewhere in the world. It was always hard to tell where they would be. One day they could be in Guadalajara, Mexico. While the next they could be in Seoul, South Korea.

Their family was special, different than most other families that they knew with talents that had either been given to them by the gods in Canada or the Aztec gods in Mexico. Like oil and water, fire and ice. Opposites, but also very much alike. And yet both species were sworn enemies to each other. Diego--who more commonly went by Dio ever since his younger brothers baptized him with the nickname as a kid--always knew that he would one day inherit the family business, being the eldest of five siblings, and therefore had to get involved in it as much as possible. That involved spending odd hours of the night hunting, as they liked to call it. And before that, he had trained in a place called the Garden for two years, away from his family and under the strict training of his grandfather Arthur Vega.

On this particular night, he had been sent out with his two younger brothers, the twins Giorno and Hiram. His youngest siblings, his sisters Narda and Liesl, were back home with a baby sitter. Narda was fourteen and already aching to join the family business. But their mother Harley had put it as her one condition that upon turning fifteen, each of her children could decide if they wanted to be hunters. The youngest of them, Liesl, was only twelve and still had a few years before she could go out and hunt with her siblings.

When it came to the boys though, all three were old enough to hunt by now. Diego was seventeen, a senior in high school, while the twins were sixteen and third years at St. Genevieve's. The three brothers were there to hunt down a dangerous group of shifters who were now murdering humans all over Sydney for a reason no one could determine other than it being for sport. The epidemic was getting worse by each passing day and the local police had asked Arthur Vega and his family of hunters to step in and get to the bottom of it. This is where the patriarch of the family regretted not having killed Hazel and Jack Quimby when he had the chance all those years ago. But Diego could not think of something so horrible. He could not even stomach the thought.

He couldn't imagine his uncle Michael without his aunt Hazel. She made him so happy and he absolutely adored her. And without her, he wouldn't have his cousins Daisy and Kristiane. They were Arthur's grandchildren as well and he loved them dearly. But he also thought that he would have avoided himself and the world so many problems if he had just killed the last two remaining originals when he had the chance. That would have rendered the shifters powerless and the hunters would be the only ones with super human abilities. But, as anything would have it, there had to be a balance in all things in nature. Getting rid of the shifters meant they had to get rid of the hunters as well. So it was instead decided that they would try to co-exist. Hazel and her brother Jack would rule as monarchs of the shifters. Their kingdom of ice. While Harley and Michael would be the ruling monarchs of the hunters, a kingdom of fire.

Diego and Giorno were scouting the perimeter of the abandoned building where the shifters were supposed to be gathered that night. It was an old warehouse that used to make furniture back in the 60s in the outskirts of the city, a place that no one paid attention to. Even after about forty years, it was still left empty. Each time the place was to be used for something useful, something always happened to stop that from happening. It was like the place was cursed. And the people of the Firestone suburb of Sydney definitely thought so anyway. Why else would a place like that be empty for so long?