The 1977 Impala slid off the two-lane like a shark easing into shallow water—windows down, radio up, four monsters inside laughing as if the night were a joke they’d already told.

 

Lucien, the vampire, practiced his smirk in the mirror that he absolutely did not need. “You know what I miss about the Renaissance?” he said. “Murder had style.”

 

Rex, the werewolf, cracked his knuckles and a beer with the same motion. “Style’s a condiment. I prefer flavor.”

 

Dax, the demon, shouldered a scarred camcorder and framed them as if he were directing a cologne commercial for Hell. “Tonight’s episode: Spirit Week Slaughter.”

 

“Please don’t title it that,” said Selene, the witch. “It gets us shadow-banned.”

 

Dax winked. “You don’t monetize, you fossilize.”

 

Lucien fluffed his lapels. “Dibs on the blonde.”

 

“You always call blonde,” Rex said.

 

Selene rolled her eyes and looked out into the dark, where gas-station fluorescence buzzed like trapped bees and a white SUV idled at pump three. Four college girls, cheerleader types, laughed under the lights, their selfies catching the Impala’s chrome like a shark fin in a vacation photo.

 

Dax breathed into the mic. “Four contestants enter… zero contestants leave.”

 

“Catchy,” Lucien said. “I’ll take the smiling one.”

 

“Again,” Rex muttered.

 

Selene said nothing. She stayed because of Lucien—because she believed, lately against her better judgment, that somewhere behind the ego and the velvet there was a man worth saving.

 

They stepped out in practiced formation: Lucien leading with couture menace; Rex broad and hungry; Dax panning for best light; Selene smoothing the edges, as always.

 

And then an old man’s voice cut across the lot. “You’re leaking.”

 

The girls turned. An older man in a sun-worn jacket and ball cap pointed at the SUV’s rear axle. “Brake fluid,” he said. “County Farm Road’s safer than Route 9 tonight. Deer sit in the dark there like they own it.”

 

The girls thanked him, genuine and unafraid, and drove off, laughter trailing behind the tail lights like a ribbon.

 

Silence where laughter had been.

 

Dax lowered the camera. “Grandpa just killed our cold open.”

 

Lucien’s smile went thin. “He didn’t kill anything. We’ll pivot. We’re artists.”

 

Rex’s growl had humor in it. “Let’s eat him instead.”

 

Selene’s stomach tightened. “Let it go.”

 

Dax zoomed in on her face. “Is that concern, or are you just bored?”

 

“Judgment,” she said, not looking at him. The old man watched them the way a man watches weather—then turned and started down the dirt road beside the station.

 

Lucien adjusted a cufflink that didn’t need adjusting. “New idea,” he purred. “Pranking Grandpa.”

 

Dax brightened. “Ratings.”

 

They laughed again, because laughter was armor, and followed.

 

 

—

 

County Farm Road

 

The old man walked with the unhurried stride of someone who could be late to nothing he cared about. His ’67 Chevy pickup trundled along the shoulder beside him, window down, engine noise comforting as a porch swing.

 

“Ugh,” Dax said, framing the truck with his lens. “Look at this relic.”

 

“Show some respect,” Selene said, surprising herself. “That’s a good year.”

 

Lucien smiled at her like she’d said something adorable. “We’re doing theater, dear heart. The truck’s set dressing.”

 

They didn’t want him to keep moving. They wanted a stage.

 

Selene flexed two fingers and whispered a word that tasted like peppermint and smoke. The Chevy answered with a soft bang—front tire blowing, rubber sighing, rim kissing gravel. The truck listed toward the ditch.

 

“There we go,” Dax said, delighted. “Motivation for our leading man to exit the scene.”

 

The old man eased the Chevy to a stop without swearing, which somehow annoyed Lucien more than swearing would have. He killed the engine, stepped out, and looked at the torn tire the way a carpenter looks at a bent nail.

 

He didn’t look back at them. He didn’t have to. He knew they were there.

 

“Bit on the nose,” Selene murmured to Dax. “We’re pranksters now.”

 

“We’re auteurs,” Dax corrected. “Watch and learn.”

 

They fanned out. Rex melted into brush with theatrical stealth. Dax killed the shoulder light with a fingertip flash, purely for the flourish. Lucien drifted nearer, the air cooling in his wake. Selene hung back, every nerve suddenly interested in the temperature of the night.

 

The old man popped the Chevy’s hood out of habit and then the toolbox behind the cab. He pulled a jack, a spare that had seen better seasons, and a tire iron that had outlived at least two trucks. The motions were clean, practiced. He could have done it blindfolded.

 

“Cold open,” Dax whispered. “Sprinklers, please.”

 

Selene flicked her wrist. The road glistened, a thin glamour of water shimmering under naked moon. The old man set the jack and the false wet slid off him like rain from oiled leather. He cranked. The Chevy rose, inch by patient inch.

 

“Jump scare,” Rex breathed from the trees.

 

“On my mark,” Lucien said, enjoying the taste of that phrase.

 

Dax planted the camcorder on his shoulder and gave himself goosebumps. “And… go.”

 

Rex exploded from the brush and caught his foot under the jack handle. The handle popped; the jack kicked; the werewolf vanished under a sudden physics lesson, rolling into the ditch with a pained, offended yelp.

 

The old man paused and looked into the ditch like a farmer checking fence line. “You all right, son?”

 

Rex came up with dignity in tatters and mud on his teeth. “Fine.”

 

“Good,” the old man said, and returned to the lug nuts.

 

“Take two,” Dax hissed, embarrassed. “Let’s try scent.”

 

Rex exhaled a blanket of copper and sugar that made the night taste hungry. The old man coughed once, the way a man coughs when carb cleaner catches the throat, and kept at the wheel.

 

Lucien drifted in, eyes warming to citrine. “May I?” he purred, voice airbrushed with predation.

 

The old man stepped back—not in fear; the way a man steps back to let somebody make their own mistake.

 

“Sound,” Dax whispered. “Give me a crying kid. Culvert reverb. Nice and awful.”

 

Lucien threw a child’s sob into the dark under the bridge fifty yards ahead. It echoed perfect as a trap. The old man picked up a pebble and flicked it into the culvert; the echo came back wrong, and Selene—against her will—admired the move.

 

“Okay,” Dax said, frustrated. “Visuals. Big.”

 

Selene traced a circle on the road—salt and shadow, old little geometry—and let sigils bloom in dull red under the Chevy’s frame. The old man squinted at them as if noticing a neighbor’s new porch light, then set the spare, tightened the last nut, and stepped across the line without tripping anything except their expectations.

 

Lucien’s smile got thinner. “I’m bored,” he said, and when Lucien was bored, someone bled.

 

He flashed to the old man’s side, eyes glowing properly now, pearly tip of fang showing—a perfect, elegant horror still life. “Evening,” he said. “You’ve interfered with our charity.”

 

The old man looked into the eyes and saw a man who had practiced being a god so long he’d forgotten how to stand like a person. “Evening,” he said back, equal parts greeting and diagnosis.

 

The Chevy’s spare settled onto the gravel. The jack eased. The old man put the tools away neatly, spared the blown tire a regretful glance, and set a small block of wood behind the wheel as if the road might try something when his back was turned.

 

He started walking toward the narrow bridge ahead, hands in jacket pockets, cap brim cutting the moonlight into a slice over his brow.

 

“Follow,” Lucien said, and the four of them moved as one.

 

 

—

 

The Bridge

 

The bridge was old steel and poured concrete, the kind built when men believed in infrastructure and ghosts. Guard rails threw ribbed shadows across the lane. Water slid silent below.

 

Dax cut the streetlight with showman’s flair. “Rolling.”

 

Rex crept onto the rail like a gargoyle considering cardio. “I pounce on three.”

 

Selene’s cigarette burned to the filter without her noticing. “He’s not what he looks like,” she said softly to no one who would listen.

 

Lucien stepped to the center, blocking the old man’s way. His voice dropped to stage velvet. “Name, grandfather. I like to know who I’m speaking to at funerals.”

 

The old man lifted his eyes. Night pooled in them kindly, like a well that never ran dry.

 

“John Merlin,” he said.

 

The laughter didn’t stop so much as leak out of them.

 

Selene grabbed Lucien’s sleeve. “Please. Walk away.”

 

Rex frowned, instincts late to meetings like always. “Who?”

 

Dax’s camera light died for the first time in its stubborn existence. He smacked it. It stayed dead.

 

Lucien smiled because that was the last thing he had left. “Coincidence,” he said. “A nice storybook name.”

 

John looked past him at the water, at the rail, at the night as if checking a familiar room for moved furniture. “You’re still breathing,” he said, not loud, not kind either. “That’s mercy. Not forgiveness.”

 

Lucien reached to take him by the shirt. The air between hand and cloth turned solid, the way air turns in a dream when you run and don’t move. Lucien pushed and felt his bones remember he had once been a boy who’d done something good. The memory dislocated his balance.

 

“What are you?” Rex asked. He hadn’t meant to.

 

“Old,” John said. “Tired. Patient.”

 

Dax lifted the camcorder like a talisman. “The world will see,” he said, and heard the plea in it.

 

“They won’t,” John said gently. “They never do.”

 

Selene raised both hands and shaped an older word. It fell out of her mouth and didn’t land anywhere.

 

“That’s not fair,” she whispered.

 

“Timing rarely is,” John said.

 

Rex lunged because that was his solution to math. He met a shadow that wasn’t where it had been a moment ago. Sparks jumped from claw to rail and died apologizing.

 

Lucien forced another inch and got a mile of nothing. He snarled because silence felt like losing.

 

“Enough riddles,” he spat. “Say what you are.”

 

John considered, then spared the truth he could afford. “I fix things,” he said. “Leaks. Loose axles. Bad stretches of road. People who laugh at the wrong time.”

 

He looked at each of them in turn, not counting, not judging, just weighing, and they felt it—the honest measure a farmer gives a sack of feed, a mechanic gives a noise under a hood, a father gives the first lie he ever hears from a child.

 

“You keep doing what you do,” he said. “Next time I won’t be this kind.”

 

He turned to go.

 

Selene stepped forward, voice raw. “Wait.”

 

He stopped.

 

“Take me with you,” she said. “Please. I don’t want to be… this.” She didn’t look at Lucien when she said it, which was its own answer.

 

John studied her, not with pity, never that, but with a tired man’s hope that the next hard thing might be worth doing. “You mean that?”

 

She nodded.

 

“All right,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride. I know somebody—an old friend. She can teach you what I can’t.”

 

“You’d help me?”

 

“No,” he said, already moving. “You’ll help you. I’m just the ride.”

 

A low whump of displaced air ruffled the pine tops. Sulfur threaded the breeze. Something vast and scaled slipped across the moon for a single heartbeat—then folded itself into a scruffy mutt with mismatched eyes at John’s heel.

 

John glanced down. “And where have you been, Matilda? You missed all the fun.”

 

The dog burped a smoke ring.

 

John sighed. “Ah. So a farmer’s going to wake up missing a couple cows.”

 

He tipped his cap to no one and everyone, and started back down the road toward his ’67 Chevy, now resting square on its spare.

 

Selene hesitated—looked at Lucien, who was staring at his reflection in the black water as if it might decide to leave him—then followed John.

 

Rex sat down on the bridge the way a dog sits when it’s rained all day. Dax rested the dead camera on the rail as if it were heavy with all the things he shouldn’t have filmed. Lucien put a hand to the air where the inch had been and found it ordinary again. It didn’t comfort him.

 

John opened the driver’s door of the Chevy. The truck greeted him with a low, grateful rumble. He climbed in. Matilda hopped up, tail thumping once. Selene slid into the passenger seat, hands tight in her lap.

 

John looked back over his shoulder at the trio on the bridge. “You’re still breathing,” he said one last time. “That’s mercy, not a pardon. Keep laughing, keep hunting… next time, I won’t be this kind.”

 

He put the truck in gear. Gravel whispered. Headlights cut a ribbon through the fog. The taillights dwindled and were gone.

 

For a long while, County Farm Road kept the quiet it had been owed.

 

 

—

 

Where Are They Now?

 

Somewhere, a battered cassette clicked. A guitar jangled something from a decade that never learned its lesson.

 

Narrator: “So… what became of the Outcasts?”

 

Rex ‘Fang’ Kitteridge, Werewolf — Returned to the woods. Locals still report hearing him argue with squirrels. None of them win.

 

Dax Inferno, Demon — Moved to Los Angeles. Now a horror producer. Crew says he’s a hell to work for; he takes it as a compliment.

 

Lucien de Vries, Vampire — Became the face of a luxury ‘blood-red’ cosmetics line. He insists it’s vegan.

 

Selene, Witch — Vanished for a time. Rumor says John Merlin introduced her to an old friend…

 

The music faded, leaving the road to its thoughts.

 

 

—

 

Selene’s Story Has Yet to Be Told

 

The Chevy eased to a stop in a clearing where the trees leaned in like patient old women. A cottage sat there—stone, ivy-stitched, windows warm with candlelight. Magic hummed around it like a remembered song.

 

Selene stepped out, knees suddenly weak with the weight of choosing. A white cat slid from under the porch, wound itself around her calves, and purred as if she’d been expected.

 

John walked her to the door. Before he could knock, it opened on its own hinges.

 

A tall woman with silver hair and eyes like moonwater stood in the frame, smiling faintly in a way that carried a thousand winters. “You must be the one he told me about,” she said.

 

Selene glanced back. John gave her a single, small nod—the kind men give at crossroads.

 

“Come in, child,” the woman said. “You’ve a lot to unlearn.”

 

Selene crossed the threshold. The door closed softly, as if not to wake the past.

 

Selene’s story has yet to be told.

 

The woods settled. The road exhaled.

 

The hunt always begins with laughter… and ends with silence.