I'm a Hunter. I can't bring myself to say, "I used to be a Hunter." I've been a hunter for so long it's a part of who I am; I was the first Hunter for the love of Pete! It's in my blood, literally, and that's the problem. That's the whole reason why I'm warming this barstool trying my damnedest to give myself a crapulous stomach. Strong drink and the sick feeling of overindulgence seems to be the only thing I can do to suppress these accursed urges.

I've never been a fan of irony; I don't see what's so great about it. It's not that it's wasted on me, I just don't appreciate the humour in it, unlike my fellow countrymen. Nonetheless it was not wasted on me when I realized I had become that which I hunt. I don't know how it happened. Usually it's a sudden change with all sorts of evidence, but in my case . . . nothing. No blackouts, no missing time, nothing to suggest they got me in my sleep. I know it sounds crazy but it's as if I've gradually become one of them, by mere association.

At first I couldn't accept it. So maybe the shrinks have one thing right, denial is a powerful state of mind. I kept at my work; I kept being a Hunter, tracking down those rare people who just aren't quite human anymore. Everything was fine, I could keep up my veil of denial, until that day I caught up with that old Gypsy woman I was hunting. I still get nightmares about that confrontation. She looked right at me, almost right through me, and in a calm and disconnected voice demanded to know why one like her was hunting her down. Then she did something I'd never seen any one of my prey do before; she made a certain gesture with her hands, tilted her head to one side, and muttered.

Her form shifted, yet it stayed the same. It was as if someone was projecting an alternate image of her on top of her body. When she spoke the lips of the image moved, but not the lips of her body. She beckoned me to look down at myself, and in that moment I could no longer maintain my denial. When I looked down at myself I saw the same thing as I saw in her, an image of myself, only altered, projected on my body. I had heard of this phenomenon before, in the records of our Order. There was a time when we used their kind as bloodhounds, and they would always look for this projection upon a body as a mark of one of their own.

That old Gypsy was the first prey I never captured. I let her go, I had to. We were one in the same now. It'll look bad on my part, but I figurer it's the least of my worries. Now that my ability to deny what I am has been shattered the urges have begun. I don't look at the humans around me the same way that I used to. Now I see them as something wholly different from me, and I feel compelled, urged, to prove my superiority over them. It's like I want to enslave them, consume them, enrapture them, dominate them.

I have a hunch, a sneaking suspicion as to the source of my corruption. When I was first made Hunter those many hundreds of years ago something was altered. I was given more than just the blessing of a long life and limitless endurance in that ritual; my very humanity must have been altered and now that fundamental change has brought about this nascent nature.

Does this mean those creatures which I hunted were once Hunters I as am? Am I but the first of the Hunters to have made this change? I may never know. Soon the Order will realize what I have become and send a Hunter after me. Who knows, maybe they already have.