After weeks of chasing down leads my quarry at long last stood trembling before me, pointlessly wasting its final moments before meeting its ultimate demise at my hands.  It had taken every bit of skill I had acquired… tracking, interrogating informants, bribery, even a little excessive violence applied liberally to find the one thing in Paris that had eluded me since I arrived in France… a decent cup of coffee.

 Yes, there were roadside bistros and outdoor cafes by the thousands that would offer you a latte-something or a cappa-whatsit but a simple, down-to-earth cup of coffee had become all but impossible to find in this world.  After two weeks of hunting, I thought I had finally found it.  Three different confirmed sources pointed me to this place and now all I had to do was ask.  Only when the waiter finally arrived, he placed a cup that looked more at home at a little girl’s tea party than at a restaurant.  Paris was many things to many people, a City of Mystery, City of Lights, City of Romance… but apparently, if you wanted to visit the City of Adult-Sized Portions then you would have to look elsewhere.

    “Sir,” I called the waiter back as he turned to leave.  “You seem to have made a mistake.  I ordered a grown-up size, not something off the kid‘s menu.”

    “Yes, sir,” the waiter looked at me with a barely hidden sneer.  “That is what you ordered, un café.”

    I took a sip of the drink, honestly, that was all there seemed to be of it before it was gone.  It wasn’t bad.  It was no gourmet Columbian blend but it was certainly as good as anything you would likely get at some all-night convenience store, maybe even slightly better.  

    “Fine… give me five more just like it.  I’ll be right back.”  I dropped some cash on the table for the drinks and headed inside to the small gift counter they had just for tourists.  The counter was filled with all the usual knick-knacks… model Eiffel towers, Mona Lisa postcards, and over a dozen different commemorative lighters to remember your trip to Paris by.  A few minutes later I returned to my table with a large novelty cup with the Eiffel Tower on it.  The waiter was waiting for me and glared in disgust as I poured out all the drinks into the cup.  I had just enough time to lift the cup to my lips and let the first few drops of pure caffeinated goodness pass over my lips when work showed up to ruin my night. 

    You see I wasn’t in France that night for the coffee, or at least not just for the coffee.  The ‘Ords’ may think two weeks in the city of lights would be the perfect vacation but I was there on a hunt.  It wasn’t your typical sit in the woods for hours drinking beer hoping some cute little fuzzy thing wanders in front of our bullets, either, no.  What I was hunting tonight could just as likely turn around and hunt you back.  There was something killing people in the city, had been doing so for months.  I was there to stop whatever was doing it.  Of course, I’m no hero, I wasn’t doing this for some altruistic reasons like justice or honor but because I expected to be paid a very large amount of money. 

    The distinctive sounds of engines echoed through the late-night streets.  Even now, past two in the morning, people were milling around.  Most of the other customers sitting outside at the café didn’t even look up as two cars; a silver Mosler Twin Turbo and a red Bugatti Veyron, both customized to the point where their designers might have difficulties recognizing them, pulled up.  A quick look over the vehicles with their bulletproofing, UV-enhanced headlights, and extra traction tires, not to mention the cost of getting law enforcement to turn a blind eye to the far less than street-legal cars, I guessed the pair cost upwards of four million dollars.  Likely they had bought them to celebrate making a few million on a job.  That wrapped up the Moretti Brothers in a nutshell, overextending, overspending, and always wondering why they found themselves neck-deep in debt.  Two men, boys really, stepped out of the cars.  They were the same age, roundabout twenty-two, and both stood about the same five and a half feet.  From there though, they became different as sides of a coin.  

    Standing next to the Bugatti was Antonio Moretti.  His face beamed with a huge smile that likely was infectious around crowds of people.  He had short-cropped blond hair and clear blue eyes that showed his excitement as plainly as if he were holding up a sign.  He was dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and shorts that went with his sunglasses to make him look like a tourist on a beach, all he was missing was the straw hat and some drink with an umbrella in it to complete the look.  His brother Salvatore, dressed in all-black leather as contrast to Antonio’s bright clothing, walked over to me.  His dark, brooding look that likely made him a hit with the ladies broke into a rare smile.  His thickly muscled arms came up to clap me on the shoulder and I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was he was on my side.  Normally I would have nothing to do with kids over a decade younger than me but we had fought beside each other before.  They kept their heads in a fight and you could never underestimate that in a comrade at arms even with their easy posture of a pair unconcerned with their mortality.  

    “Hunter!”  Salvatore exclaimed, his expression quickly returning to his normal grimace as he held out an American twenty-dollar bill.  “It looks like you were right, it’s a gargoyle, we tracked him out by Notre Dame.”

    “You can ride with me.”  Antonio nodded at the passenger side of his car.  “With a little luck, we can beat everyone to the punch and cash in on a mega-sized payday.”

    I threw the rest of the coffee back down my throat and winced a little at the heat.  Placing the cup back on the table I stood up and moved to get in the car.  This was my real job, this was my life… my name is Derek Hunter.  I kill monsters.

~  *  ~

    We pulled up to Notre Dame a few minutes later and got out of the cars.  The two brothers went and started pulling out various weapons and implements of devastation for the coming battle.  Their sports cars weren’t exactly world-renowned for their storage space but what little they had was packed to near overflowing.  They were considerably under-armed for a typical fight with the supernatural but with France’s strict weapons regulations, we had to make do with what we could get out of local contacts. However, many of the weapons looked like they were cobbled together out of spare parts.  Likely Salvatore’s work, he enjoyed tinkering with anything and everything that went boom.  In the distance, we could hear the sound of faint sirens approaching and knew we were on the clock.  The local police likely would just get slaughtered fighting a creature like this so we quickly made our way inside.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

    “No telling how long till we have company,”  I said, moving towards the entrance to the ancient church.  “We should hurry.”

    The three of us pushed our way through the doors, brushing past an adamant man insisting that they were closed.  We likely didn’t have the time for a lengthy explanation as to what was going on so I flashed him an official-looking badge hoping I picked one from my stash that at least looked local.  The brothers mumbled something about the suspect being spotted on the roof as they walked side by side to the south stairwell.

    We all began the climb to the tower at a dead run.  It didn’t take very long for the two brothers to outdistance me as the stairs seemed to extend on into eternity.  At the top of what must have been nearly four hundred stairs with the only place to rest being a closed gift shop, I paused a moment to catch my breath, leaning on the nine-hundred-year-old stones whose mere presence after all these years seemed to mock my frailty.  Apparently, age catches up to us all in time, and with thirty-seven years, twenty of which were on the job, it was catching up to me sooner than I liked.  Several accusing stares looked at me from the chimeras that were in the stairwell with me, their eyes telling me maybe I had been in the game too long.  I rubbed the bridge of my nose and told myself to stop giving voices to the inanimate objects that were most definitely not moving. When I heard shots from outside I realized my recovery time was being cut dreadfully short and had less time for my paranoid mind to play tricks on me than I had previously believed.

    I rushed through the door out onto the small caged-in walkway atop the south tower, pulling my shotgun out from under my coat as I went.  It seemed the brothers had flushed out our quarry and he was in a grumpy mood.  The gargoyle had Antonio trapped beneath him and was clawing at his chest.  His shirt lay in ribbons with wide gashes bleeding through tinting the claws of the beast red.  Salvatore was crumpled on the ground not far from his brother who was desperately trying to fend off the attacking creature.  Antonio’s flailing arms did nothing to block the barrage of slashing talons and his efforts were fast becoming weaker.  The gargoyle was eight feet tall if it was an inch with a wingspan nearly twice that.  Its skin was made completely from stone that matched the color of the cathedral we stood upon and its eyes shone bright with an unmatched fury.  

    The first round I launched out of my modified AA-12 at the beast and hit it square in the chest, exploding. The blast knocked it backward off Antonio who quickly retrieved his weapon, an H&K MP9, and unloaded it into the gargoyle’s face.  The incendiary rounds hit the creature with a great deal of flash but seemed to have little effect other than annoying him.  I continued to fire, unloading three more rounds into its side.

 Without the element of surprise on my side, I might as well have been firing into a wall.  Small flakes of stone shattered off the gargoyle where the frag rounds hit, but little else.  I started wondering if taking on this particular monster was the wisest of ways to spend this evening.

    With a growl, the thing turned towards me and began rapidly advancing.  I held down the trigger on the AA-12 unloading the remaining rounds into its snarling visage, barely slowing it down.  I quickly ejected the magazine, grabbing for a reload, and realized I didn’t have near enough time.  In desperation, I threw the shotgun at the monster and started to back off and pull another weapon.  The beast screamed with rage and lifted its claws to the sky as Antonio leaped on its back, stabbing desperately at the creature’s neck.  Seemingly more concerned with how heavy he was than any damage he could do, the gargoyle easily shrugged off its’ passenger.  Antonio fell to the ground pulling another gun from his coat.  He never got to use it as the thing grabbed him and tossed him from the roof as if he weighed nothing.  The screech of metal being rent as he passed through the safety bars was soon drowned out by Antonio’s panicked cry as he fell out of sight.  A wet thud echoed through the night before returning to the serene quiet of the cathedral.

    I had no time to check what had happened to Antonio, I was acting completely on instinct now.  I charged shoulder first into the beast’s chest, palming a small shaped charge from my jacket.  I usually used these to knock down walls or doors to get the upper hand on an adversary, but in this case, I attached it to the monster’s midsection.  A fist batted me away and I flew into the stonework behind me, fairly positive I heard something crack, not sure if it was the wall or me.  I smiled, though, watching through blood-tinted vision as a small red light on the charge flashed rapidly as it beeped twice.  With the third beep, I instinctively covered my eyes as the charge exploded outward in a blast of light, knocking the thing back to the edge of the roof. 

    That clearly was harder for him to shrug off.  A large chunk of rock had been chipped away from where I had planted the charge and a thick black ichor leaked out from numerous cracks in the thing’s skin.  It put a claw to the wound and almost appeared surprised when it came away wet.  It screamed again, so loud it felt like a hammer inside my skull.  I grabbed my head with both hands trying to block out the noise, my mouth opened in a silent scream but no relief came.  A coppery taste hit my tongue as I realized I was bleeding worse than I initially thought and the thing was still standing.  I searched my pockets for a weapon, any weapon I had left but all I came up with was a large, serrated bowie knife.  

    “Oh shit…”  I said as the beast started towards me.

    “Not so fast Fuzzy Lumpkins!”  I heard Salvatore’s voice from where he had gotten up from the stone roof.  That blow to the head must have rattled him more than I thought if he was quoting the classic cartoons he watched with his niece.  He lifted some sort of make-shift rocket launcher to his shoulder.  Explaining the heavy weaponry to the cops arriving downstairs was not going to be fun but that was a later problem.  For now, I dove frantically for cover.

    With that he fired, the grenade being propelled across the roof and knocking the gargoyle off it before exploding with a force that made my door-buster feel like a firecracker.  Salvatore flipped the creature off as he slumped back down to his knees, blood pooling on the stone beneath him. There were more cuts and claw marks than I could count in the time it had taken him to fire.  The gargoyle must have surprised them completely to have done so much damage in such a short time.  I stood and started crossing to him when I heard the sounds of flapping wings behind me.  I turned and saw the gargoyle; it was seriously fucked up, disfigured beyond what I thought it could survive, rise over the rooftop.  Its mouth foamed as it hissed at me in anger and pain and prepared to dive at me to finish what we had started.  For one brief second, my mind convinced me this thing was immortal, one of the demons depicted in so many paintings brought to life.

    Then, the beast stiffened as a jolt went through its body.  A panicked look passed through its face as its legs began turning to solid, non-living stone.  Even though dawn was hours away, the thing’s body was going into its hibernation state as a statue… in mid-air.  The rest of the creature’s body shifted back to cold granite followed, finally, by its wings.  Frozen in place the monster plunged to the earth, shattering on the ground below.

    “Dammit!”  I swore, livid.  “That was our collar.  Who the hell authorized serotonin bullets?  Now we got nothing to claim the bounty with!”  

    I looked around, no one in sight could have fired the shot that took out the gargoyle.  The only high ground I could spot was the Eiffel Tower.  Across the river and over two miles away would make it an incredible shot in a vacuum, let alone real-world conditions.  Little enough had proved impossible in the world of late, though.  Someone out there stole our kill and it looked like we were going home empty-handed.  Just when I thought the night couldn’t get any worse, dozens of officers burst out onto the roof to arrest us.