Have you ever sat on your comfy sofa with prime time television making noise in the background and wondered what's really out there beyond the safety of your windows, doors, and safe little world? You should count your lucky stars for your blissful ignorance. Vampires, shifters, witches, it's all just the tip of the iceberg. My name is Jesse Tobias Archer and I know what's out there.
I came into the world in the usual way, but birth is pretty much where all the usual in my life stopped. My father, Bradley Tobias Archer, was a 'demon' hunter. No, really, it's true. I grew up on the darker side of fairy tales and let me tell you, Grimm certainly is fitting.
Dad wanted to do his best to protect me from it all, but at the same time, he wanted me to be prepared. Being prepared meant knowing, and training, and learning the 'ins and outs' of what normal people should never know so intimately. If it was 'less than human', I was taught how to kill it. Know how and desire to actually follow through on the knowing are two entirely different things. I'm not a killer, not deep down where it counts, and every death at my hands stays with me always. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I was two when it happened. Dad's hunting caught up to us. He took the unlife of a vampire, and in return her lover took a replacement; my mother. Rachelle Renee Archer nee Larkin became one of 'them', one of the things my father loathed. Some say it drove him insane. He threw himself into his desire for revenge. He and my mother crossed paths many times through the years, but for all his talk of setting her free from living as a monster, he could never drive the stake home. I think it was the fact that he still loved her that drove him over the edge more than anything else. How could he still love her? Knowing what she was, what she had become.
Insane or not, he was still my father and he needed me. Through the years, I stood by his side. I learned all there was to know about the 'less than human' . I blocked out the doubt I had in our cause. I had to, or it would be me going over the edge. I had to believe they were all evil, that we were doing the world a favor, lest my guilt eat me alive in the end of it. And then I met Devon.
Devon Saunders, a hunter just like us. We crossed paths for the first time in a lonely road side bar somewhere in Texas. I think it might have been Wacco. I was thirteen at the time. My visions had just started in the form of nightmares that began to come true within a few days of having them. I did my best to hide them from dad. I was so afraid he'd see me as one of 'them', less than human. Would he still love me? Would he spare me as he always had mom? Or would he do away with me as he did all the other monsters he crossed paths with? I was terrified, I was alone and there he was.
He was sixteen, three years my senior and in the month we spent tracking a group of rogue vampires with him and his father, we became instant friends. Before it was all over, I had revealed my secret to him and he had revealed his own to me. He was 'two-natured'. He was one of 'them', but there was nothing evil or monsterous about Devon. The seeds of doubt were planted during that fateful month.
When my visions started happening while I was awake, I could no longer keep my secret from my father. He said it didn't matter. He said I was still his son, he still loved me, this was a good thing, he said we could use it to our advantage. But things were different after he found out. I could feel it in the way he looked at me. I could feel his doubt and it hurt.
I swallowed it down, I lived with the hurt over the way he looked at me, and we continued on with our 'cause' for a number of years. Every vision I had felt like it would be the last. The pain that came with them was excruciating, but I endured and I stood beside the only family I had. Until I saw her death at his hands. Mom's death. Mom's final death. I couldn't let it happen. I couldn't have her blood on my hands. I had to warn her and I did. I also found that I could no longer live with my father's obsessive desire to destroy all things that were, as he put it, 'less than human'. Devon, Mom, weren't they living (or unliving) proof that not all of them were 'monsters'? My new outlook had me more confused and alone than ever before. I called Devon.
He was living in Dallas. It took every ounce of courage I had to leave my father, but in the end I felt I needed to save myself. I headed to Dallas alone, in the hopes that I wouldn't be alone any longer once I got there. My name is Jesse Tobias Archer and I know what's out there. I'm just not sure what the truth of it is anymore.
