I encased the table in a methodically scribbled rectangle, drawing the nr. 2 pencil in sharp, sonorous strokes, and closed the old notebook. Encased in black faux-leather, well-worn and slightly crumbled from water damage, the elements, or the otherwise simple passage of time, this old thing had been an ever-present companion in my life for the past years.

  Data and numbers. Two things that I absolutely couldn't live without. As inherent and necessary to my continued survival as my... "food". Numbers and data were what gave sense to the world. With them, one could quantify the unquantifiable and give reason to the unthinkable.

  For the most part.

  There were of course exceptions. One couldn't quantify the nature of the divine. The inherent value of human life and love. Or the astronomical odds of how in the sweet, succulent hell someone like me could ever become a vampire.

  You know how vampires in media are always depicted as these young, handsome, walking manifestations of raw, animal sexuality? Hair made up in perfect, trendy cuts. Fashionable clothes strewn over men with the chiseled physiques of Adonis or women with the hourglass shape of Aphrodite?

  Every look shot through dusky eyes that murmur of decadent pleasures unknown to any but the immortal aristocracy of the night. Every whisper, a clarion call that would freeze any mortal, trapping them in the hedonistic pain-pleasure cycle of a thrall.

  Well, I sure as hell wasn't that guy.

  Five foot nine, broad shouldered and broad in general, owing to my Balkan heritage more than anything else, close-shaven scalp to hide the abysmally receding hairline of the early-onset alopecia I'd had as a mortal, I was the furthest thing from a pretty-boy that one could imagine.

  First being that I'd been turned at thirty-one. Ain't no one called me a "boy" in over a decade. I was a "grown-ass man". Second being that I wasn't what you would refer to as "pretty" or "handsome". By no means disfigured or anything to that extent, you wouldn't find a picture of me in the before-section of a plastic surgeon's catalogue. But it was going to be a really cold day in Hell before my mediocre looking ass would ever appear in the hot-guy section of a girl's magazine. Or whatever the hell it was that kids called those kinds of things these days?

  Wait, did kids even read magazines anymore? Shit, I'm getting old.

  Well... was getting old. Time and age don't mean nothing to my kind.

  Regardless, beyond my painfully average features, I simply was NOT the kind of guy you'd expect to become a vampire. Not in looks, and definitely not in personality traits. Vampires are depicted as suave and debonair, brimming with barely restrained charisma. Adventurous. Ambitious. So on and so forth.

  Definitely NOT some data-entry jagoff who's idea for the perfect Friday evening was an all-nighter playing MMOs.

  My life was singularly boring before being turned. And that was the perfect word for it. Boring. Average. Dime-a-dozen.

  I wasn't some edgy-boy with a dark and checkered past. I was born to a working-class family in Romania, raised in a neither-rich-nor-poor household, played in a halfway-decent neighborhood and went to public school. I went through my metalhead phase where I thought old-school heavy metal was God's gift to humanity. My weeb-phase where I thought anime and manga were God's other gifts to print and media.

  See? Boring. Half the kids I'd grown up with had gone through the same phases.

  Even my "career" was nothing to write home about. My love and penchant for numbers was enough to get me an underpaid grunt-level position in some mid-sized corporation that enjoyed the lower salaries they could pay Romanians. Not good enough for programming, but enough for data-entry and database editing. The midpoint between front-end and back-end.

  I made extra money by doing graphic design. Even there, it wasn't because I had any artistic bone in my body, but because the programs I used worked based on numbers and data. RGB levels that complement each other, CMYK values that work well for print, proportion and ratio principles for best paging and presentation. Purely technical.

  There it was. Joe-Schmo salaryman. Same as most of the population.

  Firmly lower-middle class? Check.

  String of failed relationships? Check.

  Increasing dread that AI was going to make my job obsolete and I was gonna have to restart my career in my thirties? Check.

  Not poor enough to struggle but not rich enough to snort crack off an expensive hooker's ass? Check and check.

  Hell, even the circumstances of my turning had been an accident. Some poor fledgling bastard, half-mad from starvation, rampaging in the Bucharest subway, smack-dab in the middle of rush-hour commute. On a weekday, no less. The nerve of that guy.

  Finding out that vampires were real and that there was an entirely supernatural world hidden beneath the thin veneer of normalcy was a Saturday thing. Not a Tuesday thing.

  Only reason I even "survived" was because I'd been at the other end of the subway car. By the time the monster had torn through the other passengers and clamped his jaws on my throat, we'd reached a station. Whereupon the ever-vigilant and considerate police had riddled both me and the vampire with enough bullets to turn a Jeep into a pile of rubble.

  Most likely some of his blood had seeped into my bullet holes while I was slowly bleeding out. By all rights, I should've died then and there. Instead I went catatonic for an entire day, until...

  "Frè, où qu’ta caché la bière, han?" The deep husky voice pulled me out of a particularly traumatic memory of having to pummel my way out of St. Radu's morgue drawer.

  "English Lucien. I can barely speak French, let alone understand Cajun French," I muttered back, raising my eyes to meet the always smiling, always genuine face of one of the only two "friends" I'd made since immigrating to the States.

  Though in all fairness, even had I not been sitting down, I'd still have to crane my neck to look him in the eye.

  At six foot eight, tall as a spruce and just as gangly, Lucien LeBeau was the poster-child of Louisiana's famous "Cajun gentleman". Long hair tied in a tight ponytail, sideburns trimmed to perfection and sporting the kind of rugged, untamed good-looks and charm that made women weak at the knees, he was the kind of charismatic guy that would've made for a great Vampire.

  But he wasn't. Lucien was a supernatural native to the Bayou. A Rougarou. A canid shapeshifter.

  And for some reason that I still couldn't understand, he'd been all chummy with me ever since I'd worked with him on a Ghoul-nest mission. That had been a good payday. Two grand for each of us. But it still didn't explain why someone as charismatic and extroverted as this guy with hang around with my boring self.

  Well. At the end of the day, it didn't much matter anyway. We worked well together and raked in the profits. It was good enough.

  "Ach, sorry brother, I ask where you hide the beer," Lucien said, perpetual chuckle lingering in his voice.

  I sighed, opening my battered old notebook to a purple bookmark and jotting down a 10. The latest in a list that was growing longer by the week. "Second drawer in the fridge, behind my blood bags. I'm putting it on your tab, by the by. The only reason I buy that pisswater is because you drink it."

  "Ach, common fre, we both know Lucien's a pleasure to be around only when he tipsy ouais, han? And don't call it pisswater, it's local." he added, snickering as he rummaged through my fridge and pulled out the six-pack of store-brand beer, taking care to rearrange the three blood bags I'd prepared for my "breakfast" in their proper place. I appreciated that. Lucien was an alcoholic and a bit of man-child, but the man showed respect for someone's home when he was a guest. Manners and all that.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  "I'm easter European, remember? Anything with under 7% alcohol is pisswater to me. Or. Y'know. It was, when I could drink the stuff" I deadpanned, flicking the notebook closed and checking the time on my phone. "Seven minutes until it starts, by the way."

  "Wait? You Eastern European? I couldn't tell under mon ami's dulcet New Yorker accent" Lucien grinned, popping open two cans and downing one in a single go.

  I couldn't help but smirk slightly. Even though quite a bit of time had passed since I'd left the old country, there was no mistaking my thick Balkan accent.

  "Har-har. Funny. Make sure you pay me back, da?" I sniped, putting a little extra umpf in my voice.

  There's was no enmity here, though. For the most part, I'd conducted myself in undeath as I had in life. Keept my head down, listened twice and spoke once. Easiest way to not piss people off is to keep quiet, after all. Don't make it your problem, what ain't yours.

  Lucien was the only person that could coax anything more than monosyllabic answers out of me. Well, Lucien and...

  "Tye-he-he, common Jacob, you know he not goanna pay you back. Man's no good for a buck, let alone a hundred" a sing-song voice trilled from under the piled up pillows of my sofa, a slender hand emerging to pull at the blanket.

  "Merde, you wound Lucien chere, and only booze can balm this hurt!" Lucien added, downing the second can in one swift go.

  "Your liver is crying and I can hear it. Five minutes!" I deadpanned as the pillows rustled and she emerged from her fort of comfort.

  I was built like a mastiff, short and stocky, Lucien, a tall and gangly greyhound. Colette Loulou, on the other hand, was bult like a chinchilla. And equally as adorable. Four foot five, willow-thin and a button-nosed face framed by long tresses of charcoal black hair, the odd braid held together by semi-precious stones and talismans, cascading down her shoulders.

  The twenty-two year old woman stretched, slithering off the couch and sauntered over to me. While she was gorgeous enough that the sway of her hips would've been hard to ignore, even at the best of times, her attire of short shorts and a tank top actively increased the difficulty by multiple increments. Especially because I knew what those curves looked like uncovered, quite well.

  Colette had formed a habit out of inviting either myself or Lucien to her bed.

  There was no romance involved. We were there. We were all "supernaturals". We were all in the same business. And thus, we were convenient. It was a mutually beneficial relationship on all sides. An itch that needed scratching. Which was all the reasoning I needed to understand why this woman that was so far out of my league she might as well be in the stratosphere, would want anything to do with some boring guy like me.

  Ironically enough, her attire and nightly proclivities with the two of us had erroneously painted her with a bit of a reputation among some of the others in the Hunter's Lodge. We had a name for those people.

  Organ donors.

  Because of the three of us, Colette Loulou was arguably the most dangerous.

  In the Balkans they're called Baba. In Mexico, Bruja. But here, in Louisiana, they had many names. Rootworker. Gris-Gris Woman. Swamp Witch. She wore the clothes she did, to feel the bayou's breath on her skin. She lay with us, because she took pride in her femininity and pleasure in the body she'd been born with. And she didn't care about what other Hunters said, because as a 7th generation sorceress, she didn't have a damn thing to prove to anyone.

  "And that's a mess I not goanna heal" she chuckled, moving close and leaning in to grab our work-tablet from the charge port, giving me an all too full view of her generous cleavage. And considering the way she was smiling and eyeballing me, the gorgeous woman knew damn well what she was doing.

  "How you doing, All-Night?" Colette asked with a suggestive smirk, using the pet name she'd decided for me after realizing that my infinite stamina had multiple applications, beyond just fighting.

  I pushed myself from the passenger seat, placing the notebook in the leg-pocket of my cargo pants. "Today no different than yesterday. Ready to make some money."

  She chuckled, most likely already used to how to-the-point I was. I just never bothered making small talk, because I was neither good at it, nor interesting enough. What could I talk about with her? That time where I two staplers in the office supply closet instead of one?

  "Alright then, let's make some money" Lucien smirked, quickly downing a fourth can of cheap beer and pushing away enough of the pillows off my couch to make room for all three of us.

  Having these "meetings" in my cramped trailer-bus would have seemed counter-productive by all logic, but the alternatives were Colette's cabin that was so deep in the bayou it didn't even have running water, or whatever lonely middle-aged woman's couch, and bed, Lucien was currently residing in. Credit where it was due, man knew how to save on rent.

  In lack of any other feasible options, my "home on wheels", vampire-modded with tinted windows that let no UV light in and fitted with exceptionally good satellite internet, seemed the best choice. It better damn well be. I'd invested almost all my Hunter earnings over the past year in this thing.

  The two of them sat down as I connected the tablet to my wall-mounted flatscreen and pulled out my Hunter-ID Card, phone in my other hand, ready to scan it at 7:00 PM sharp. The Lodge was notoriously strict about punctuality. About a lot of things.

  At 6:59 an old-timey jingle, straight out of Cold War-era recruitment reels, sang out, filling the cramped space with the sound of trumpets, marching drums and a booming baritone that may as well have been ripped from a black-and-white 50's anti-drug documentary.

  "Since Columbus first kicked up dirt on this blessed continent, Uncle Sam’s known the truth: the supernatural walk among us. Ghosts, ghouls, gremlins—you name it, we’ve filed it in triplicate.

  But here’s the deal, citizen: not all of your kind play nice. Some go bump in the night. That’s where you come in.

  As a registered Non-Standard National (NSN) Hunter, it is both your privilege and duty to serve this land. You’ll track down the troublemakers, the rule-breakers, the ones giving the rest of your kind a bad name—and maybe a few who gave Washington the stinkeye.

  Serve your country, earn your rights, and keep enjoying the little things—rights, a social security number, curtain protections against being discovered.

  Not a citizen? Immigrant NSN? The boy-howdy have I got good new for you. Service in the Hunter's Lodge guarantees you a work visa and fast-tracks you to registration as a full citizen, with all the rights, privileges and bells attached.

  Remember: Freedom isn’t free. But it can be revoked.

  Join the Hunter's Lodge. Be the good kind of monster. Be the model Non Standard Nation (NSN). P.S : Uncle Sam pays a hell of a lot better than your average 9 to 5"

  Colette chuckled and Lucien groaned, while I just sat there. Every time. For the past year, I'd heard this recruitment jingle over and over again. It was their calling card, apparently. You'd think they'd change it, but apparently no. Lucien was in his late forties and he'd told me it was the same thing they'd play when he just started out in this business, as a "young, spry, buck".

  It didn't bother me much either way. Not like there was an HR to complain to. Not like I would, even if there was. Kicking up dust wasn't a thing I did in life, why do it in unlife?

  All the more, I had zero other alternatives. I was one on a "work visa".

  The Carpathian Clan, the Steregoi of Romania, had not taken kindly to my turning. For the highly-reclusive, monumentally-exclusivist Bloodline, formed primarily of Order of the Dragon knights, the royal retainers of Vlad ?epe? himself, the addition of a "weak, millennial degenerate jagoff" - their words, not mine - had been tantamount to a slap to the face.

  As a show of cordiality for being of the same "blood" they'd sent an envoy with a simple message. "Face a champion of the Clan. Win and earn the right to be part of us. Lose and go to the hereafter with honor, by the bite of silvered sword. Or exile yourself from our forefather's land and bring no shame to our doorstep."

  It had all been quite pompous. And naturally, I'd left the same night. There was no way my sedentary, potato-chip loving, horror-movie binging, gamer behind could defeat a trained knight, Heaven knew how many centuries old, in single combat.

  The rest of Europe hadn't been any better. In the span of two months, l'd earned three things.

  One. Every country has it's distinct Vampire Bloodline or Clan.

  Two. They are all fiercely territorial.

  Three. America is the only place on the planet where "supernaturals" are regulated by the government and things like Clans don't matter. Thus, the only place where I wouldn't be chased, shot at, and risk getting chained to a large boulder and be left to burn under the Sun.

  As soon as I arrived on US soil via a cargo freighter, a National NCN Immigration Services was already waiting in port, with a very clear-cut choice.

  Join the Hunter Lodge for the next fifty years under a "work visa" and earn my NCN Citizenship, with all the rights, protections and privileges inherent thereof.

  Or be immediately extradited back home, where a "representative of my Clan would be waiting to pick me up at the airport".

  So, either work or get killed. Easy choice, right? Been a Hunter for over a year now.

  Well, at least it pays well. And I get to keep the money I make. Silver lining and all that. Even though the fatality rate for NCN Hunters is above fifty percent.

  "Please scan your Hunter ID" an artificial female voice sang out from the tablet and the three of us hurriedly complied, placing the bar codes of our IDs against the front camera.

  "Thank you. Redirecting video stream to Louisiana Lodge Branch. Please stand by. Assignment bidding will begin shortly"