Spare Me Your Alpha Nonsense - 1. Chapter 1

Listen, cheap rent comes with its own costs. I know you see that sub one thousand price tag for a place to rent on Craigslist and think; ‘hey, maybe I can actually exist with something resembling a budget if I don’t have to pay through my nose to keep a roof over my goddamn head.’ Don’t do it, it’s a trap. Don’t be like me, who has already been through so many of these nightmare scenarios with insane roommates that I’m just simultaneously numb and perpetually aggravated at this point.

You might be asking yourself, surely Hunter must be embellishing on how bad his various roommate situations have been. Why, you would go on to say, maybe you’ve had so many bad roommates because you yourself have been the bad roommate all along? Listen you armchair therapist piece of shit, you got no idea what I’ve had to deal with! In fact, why don’t we just take a look at my bathroom this morning!

See that? Now a normal person would look at that and think some disgusting asshat missed the toilet or something. NOnono, you see my roommate is “Scenting his territory.” His territory of course being my personal bathroom he’s not supposed to go inside. You might ask yourself, okay that’s gross but why would he do that?

Great question! Let's go ask him!

“DALE! GET IN HERE RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!”

“You do not address your Alpha in that way!” came the groggy growl from the hungover man currently half passed out on my goddamn couch that I paid good money for. I don’t think the jerks even touched his bed since he started living here, he’s always got to pass out on some other piece of furniture. Usually the furniture that I would like to use without getting a whiff of that musk of his.

He’s starting the alpha bullshit again, so of course I have a rolled up newspaper on hand as well as a spray bottle and I go to try to claim sanity back into this damn apartment again. I gotta admit it’s pretty satisfying seeing him sputter and blink awake when the water splashes into his face and wakes him up from his groggy hangover stupor.

Of course, because he’s hungover and on his Alpha bullshit, his eyes go gold and he starts sprouting fur and claws and shit. His body just starts throbbing with muscles as his bones start thickening and stretching as he tries to intimidate me. Yep, Dale’s on his shifter bullshit again. Oh yeah, full blown horror film transformation right in the living room; rippling flesh, morphing bones, sprouting fur and everything you expect to see out of these shifter ass hats.

You’d think I’d be scared but to tell the truth it just adds to his annoying qualities. He gets theatrical, growling and rumbling as his body grows and looms over me. I’m just glaring into his wolf eyes and craning my neck up as he keeps getting bigger. All the while my arms are crossed and my foot is tapping with annoyance at having to put up with this shit again this week.

I wait until just when his face shifts enough to get a canine nose before I pull out the rolled up newspaper and begin to just swat the shit out of it. It’s best to strike their canine nose when they’re in mid transformation cause they got all those sensitive nerve endings bunched in there that aren’t nearly as protected as they are when they’ve fully shifted.

‘My Alpha,’ as he so eloquently puts it lets out some high pitched yelps and his lovecraftian transformation reverts back to normal after a few well aimed swats from today’s news. As quickly as it erupted out of him all that extra mass went back to wherever the hell it came from as he flopped down on the couch in exhaustion. Shifter Transformations are exhausting once you turn back, and even more so if you fail to transform halfway through like Dale just did. I spray him in the face a few more times for good measure as I glower down at his infuriating shifter ass.

“What the fuck did I say about going in my bathroom?!”

“You are MY mate! It is my bathroom! I am your Alpha!” Even as he’s yelling that last part I’m spraying him in the face yet again with the water bottle and and my eyes rolling so hard and fast they could probably propel an airplane.

“Get this through your shifter skull you WerePieceOfShit, I am not, nor will I ever be, a slob like yours Mate. I’m already half tempted to ditch the roommate portion and just be homeless at this point cause you’re driving me up the goddamn wall. Now” I point towards my bathroom, “Get your sometimes hairy ass in my fucking bathroom and clean up that scenting bullshit you keep doing. And use the good shit, I don’t want that stink in there!”

A brief smell test of the couch after he lumbers into the bathroom to deal with his scenting crap tells me that the Pet Odor remover I keep using is trying its hardest to save the upholstery. Unfortunately it’s fighting a losing battle against one of the denizens of the night that has deludedly convinced himself is my ‘mate.’

“You will see one day My Mate!” My roommate calls from the bathroom, “I knew from smelling your scent for the first time that I met you we were destined to be together!”

“Destiny can kiss my ass then!” I call back and try my best to save my goddamn couch from this shifters musk nonsense. I swear he is squirting pheromones all over the goddamn place, it’s disgusting! For a brief moment I think I had an understanding as to why my ancestors hunted down werewolves and vampires and shit back in the day. They weren’t saving humanity from the forces of evil, they were just fuckin tired of their neighbor being fuckin weird!

Oh yeah, I think that’s part of why I keep running into these people wherever I try to rent an apartment or room anywhere. Especially a cheap one. Cheaper it is, the more likely it is that the universe itself is going to pair me up with some bloodsucker or werewolf or honest to goodness warlocks and shit like that. I’ve lived with entire cults before!

Yes! Actual Cults! Didn’t even know they were a cult cause my dumbass didn’t do a property walkthrough before I paid the first and last and hopped in there. In my defence, I was trying to get away from this vampire dick who kept wanting to turn me into one of him when my ass works a dayshift and actually enjoys getting a suntan now and again. Honestly I should have seen the warning signs when it was only a flat five hundred dollars a month with utilities included. That warning alarm should have been even louder when it was described in the ad as “Idyllic living.”

At the time though I just wanted to get out from under the clutches of Vlad McBadtouch the groping vampire asshole who wouldn’t take no for an answer no matter how many times I punched his lights out. I didn’t stake him he said, so therefore I must actually just be playing hard to get! Cops couldn’t do shit about it either cause they just saw it as some petty domestic dispute instead of, you know, someone trying to turn someone else into a vampire non consensually.

So I walked in the big ass compound with a beautiful wooded garden that had surprisingly cheap rent and on the walls were pictures of this spray tanned chick with blonde hair. I thought fuck yeah five hundred a month for this place? No more handsy vampire roommate trying to sink his fangs into me when I’m asleep? Score!

Turned out she was possessed by some five thousand year old demon and was amassing a throng of followers to make a mass sacrifice to open the pits of hell.

Of course I had to make some fuckin calls at that point cause you know the cops aren’t going to buy any of this shit. I try to avoid the family business as much as goddamn possible, but yeah the super powered apocalyptic death cult lady had to be handled pretty quick.

Now Hunter, you might be asking me, if you have so much disdain for the creatures of the night, then why are you avoiding being like your family and hunting those people down and killing them?! Listen here you psycho, I’ll paint a real simple picture for you to understand.

Vampires, shifters, all of them freaky ass people, they’re still people at the end of the day. Last I checked I’m not a murderer. Dale who is currently scrubbing my goddamn bathroom floor and mumbling to himself about how Alpha’s should be treated may be tempting to kill, but he’s still just a dude at the end of the day.

My Family is, shall we say, more traditional in their views on the creatures of the night. If they spot a werewolf, they kill a werewolf. There is no talking, there is no hey maybe we can all get along, they just get some silver bullets and they kill the poor bastard right on the spot. Didn’t matter if the people had a family, or if they weren’t actually hurting people, any shit like that. If you’re not a human, or if you are practicing magic, you’re dead. Pure and simple as that.

Which is the height of hypocrisy by the way, cause my family isn’t normal either! Oh yeah, don’t think a normal dude can yell down a werewolf and swat him with a newspaper to get him to stop transforming. I’m tougher than your average bloke, it takes a lot more to bruise me than the average asshole out there. Small round bullets hurt like bug bites from an insect who just isn’t in the mood that day. It usually takes up to a fifty cal at close range before I start to see some bruising. I’m not invulnerable, just any type of non magical damage to my body doesn’ do as much havoc to me as it should.

No, physical attacks from the denizens of the night don’t count as magical damage either. I mean actual magical attacks from enchanted weapons or magic spells. If it’s not one of those two things the brunt of the damage, if not all of it, is going to be absorbed into my passive non magical defenses.

Now what kind of mental image do you have of me right now? Big ol burly guy right? Big Mr. McMacho with domineering muscles and a masculine face? Maybe one of those eighties action heroes who dual wielded machine guns while simultaneously chugging testosterone down their over muscled throats?

Wrong! I’m a wafey Four foot eleven inch tall twenty eight year old with the babiest of baby faces with black hair and eyes. Also, I have all the muscular definition of a half starved runway model. You want to know WHY I have the muscular definition of a half starved runway model? Well think back a spell as to what I just told you earlier. I told you non magical damage doesn’t do nearly as much to me as it should. You know what you need to do to have muscles?

You need to damage them!

As in the thing you do when you do your Non Magical workout routine! Emphasis on the Non Magical part! Working out is literally just breaking down your muscles and letting them build back up again. Except there is no gym membership on the market that can break through my non magical defenses enough to do any lasting effects on these willowy limbs and, as some would describe it, ‘dainty’ body of mine. I can stack any one of those machines with all the weight I want and pump iron all day and the only thing that I will accomplish is agonizing boredom. Boredom and gawking stares from people who want to know how I could possibly be benching that much without even breathing hard.

Add on top of that that I age progressively slower than a normal ass human and you best believe I get carded every fucking place I go.

Heavens forbid I wear a baseball cap or a backpack, then I get cops thinking I’m some kinda runaway or some shit till they get a look at my world weary eyes that say how long I’ve actually been on this hellscape of a planet. Cannot tell you how many times I’ve had store clerks or some other asshole call over their manager just to be sure my Identification is accurate and not some convincing fake. Fucking annoying let me tell you.

The family has ways around this bullshit of course, but like I said, I avoid the family business as much as possible. You want to use the Family’s resources, then you have to participate in the family business. Which is just not happening. Maybe if we were back in the middle ages or some shit and werewolves and vampires would actually kill people that’d be one thing. Though honestly I severely doubt my family’s retelling of history considering how altruistic they make themselves out to be.

Bullshit.

They’re a bunch of cutthroats with a lot of money with a business that nobody will believe unless you're neck deep in this shit already. They don’t care that vampires can basically live perfectly normal lives nowadays for example. You want to suck someone's blood directly? Maybe just get some sent to your house? Maybe you want a dedicated human around to draw off of? With the advent of the internet all that is not only possible it can be entirely consensual now! Hell you can match your preferences and find your ideal vampire or human in your area to have a good time with.

See, now why do I need to put a stake through that guy's heart? All he’s doing is going online and looking for someone who actually wants to be fed on! Why do they want to be fed on? Who knows! Maybe they like the non lethal venom aphrodisiac Vampire bites have. Maybe it’s their kink. Maybe they got childhood trauma issues. The point is nobody is actually getting hurt in that arrangement. That right there is a lot of vampires nowadays, just normal ass people working their night shift job and just trying to get through this slog of an existence like everyone else. I just happen to get the creepy vamps who still want to act like its the Dracula days of old and wants to make people into unwilling slaves and shit. That’s not because he’s a vampire, it’s because he’s an asshole who happens to be a vampire. Just like Dale over there who’s scrubbing my bathroom tiles is a disgusting slob of a roommate who happens to be able to turn into an eight foot tall werewolf.

You show one of those websites to my family and you know what they’ll see? A Hit List they need to methodologically hunt down, stake, and behead. All the while not getting caught in the process because they are scary good at what they do and nobody believes you if you tell them anyway.

I mean that quite literally by the way. It’s not that normal humans are dumb, its just that there is this quite literal mental filter people have in the collective unconscious to ignore this shit going on. If you are a normal person living a normal life, chances are if you see a vampire your brain is just going to edit them into something that makes sense to you instead.

That guy didn’t turn into a werewolf, he was just really hairy and angrily drunk and got into one hell of a bar fight. That’s not a zombie risen by some necromancer, it’s just some homeless guy who smells really bad, maybe ate something dead recently. Coven of Witches? You mean those old ladies who bake cookies across the street? They’re sweet hearts!

Not exactly sure what happened or when, but sometime during all the witch burning and persecution of monsters and crap someone or some group with some impressive magical power behind them managed to get a hold of the collective unconscious. With the collective unconscious, they managed to hide the denizens of the night in plain sight, and nowadays most people think they never existed in the first place, much less still exist.

Now if you want to get someone to actually see this stuff happening you either have to turn them into one of those denizens or you have to present them with a scenario that no amount of rationalizing is going to make them not see the supernatural shit going on in front of their eyes.

You’d think this would be the end of the world right? Oh my god now people don’t know werewolves and vampires and shit like that are real! We’re all gonna die! No. You know what happened? Once People stopped hunting them the fuck down all the time the denizens of the night chilled out and started living like mostly normal ass people. Normal people with some strange allergies and dietary restrictions but over all normal people.

Along with some asshats like the ones I keep finding as roommates. You might ask yourself why, if I can tank most live ammunition and survive action movie levels of mayhem and destruction provided it’s non magical in nature, do I not use those abilities to make some actual money? Why am I working for meager wages at jobs I can’t seem to keep? Why is someone like me always having to turn to cheap rent with nightmarishly bad roommates?

For those of you paying attention, yes, yes it is my Family’s fault I’m living like this. See they do not want one of their own living like a normal person. They want me ‘fighting the good fight’ with my brothers, sisters, uncles and cousins as they kill people whose only crime is not being human or knowing how to do magic. I’ve tried to work my way up corporate ladders or get college educations, and my family always finds out and sabotages the shit out of my efforts to bring their wayward little Hunter back into the fold.

Fucking assholes don’t seem to get I do not want to breathe the same oxygen as their murdering selves most of the time, with the only exception being actual apocalyptic scenarios like the floating, eye laser blasting, demon possessed, poorly spray tanned, blondie cult leader I mentioned earlier. ‘Why don’t you fight them?’ You might ask me. To that I’d like to remind you we are talking about well funded, secretive, jingoistic zealots who, by the way, have those over muscular eighties action hero bodies I decried earlier. Like I said, they have workarounds for the drawbacks that have my body resembling a disgruntled, over this shit re-imagining of Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol.

Besides, I really do not want to try and out macho my family when it’s their own alpha masculine bullshit that’s not allowing them to see that shit’s changed in the world since the middle ages. They are like those WW2 or Vietnam soldiers who got lost behind enemy lines and never got the memo that the war ended. People found the poor bastards five to ten years later still fighting that good fight long after they stopped being needed.

My family’s business is like that. Except instead of a few years out of date, my oldest relatives still consider every single denizen of the night as an existential threat to all of humanity like they still work under a medieval feudal lord. Yeah like I said we aren’t exactly normal either.

“Dale, I’m going out!” I call out as I pocket my wallet and cellphone into my jeans. “I want this place Musk free by the time I get back or you and I are going to have problems!”

I don’t even wait for him to answer as I step out the door into the hallway. I’m not sure where I’m going, either literally or figuratively. I’m in this strange living purgatory right now. I can’t advance in the normal world without My Family sabotaging it cause they want me back in the fold. I don’t want to join the family business cause I find it repulsively wrong. Yet at the same time my interactions with the denizens of the night up till this point has been less than desirable to put it lightly.

What I need is to find something in life that my family cannot get their influence into and I can find some joy in. What I want is a goddamn boyfriend who isn’t a fuckin slob or tries to force me to quite literally change who I am for them. That’s one thing that’s always bothered me about denizens. They always want to change you. You can’t just be you with them, they got to turn you into something in order for them to want you. That hot vampire is still gonna want to turn you into a vampire like him eventually even if he doesn’t say that. Same thing with Shifters, especially ones like Dale that are hopped up on that social hierarchy nonsense.

Now I hear you over there, I know exactly what you’re thinking. Oh, Vlad McBadtouch and Dale the Unhousebroken Werewolf aren’t ‘roommates’ of mine, they’re ex boyfriends! To that I say no!

Followed by shut up!

See, maybe, just maybe these two examples might in some small respect be somewhat described as physically attractive. Maybe, just maybe, that physical attractiveness might have influenced my decision to take them in as roommates. However! Even under such a hypothetical scenario which I will neither confirm nor deny might be the case; it doesn’t change the fact they went from smokey mysterious creatures of the night to fucking god awful roommates in cheap ass apartments. I guess ‘you get what you pay for’ is the theme of my life huh?

Listen, I’ve tried to date normal gay dudes alright? You know what that gets me? Well let me draw your attention back to that passive non magical defense bullshit I have thanks to being what I am. I would like you to ask yourself something real hard right now.

You ready?

If I can take a fifty cal to the face and walk away with just some bruising to show for it, what makes you think a normal human’s cock is gonna do me any favors in the bedroom? Oh you didn’t think of that conundrum, huh?! Yeah I can go date some normal guy and he might be absolutely perfect in every other respect, but they cannot do absolutely anything back there for me no matter how many times I yell ‘harder daddy!’

So to recap: This secret world most of the human population has no idea exists consists of my crazy ass family who run around killing non humans and magic users cause they think they’re in a war that ended a long ass time ago. That same Family prevents me from making any headway in the normal world since they want their little black sheep back into their fold and they have the resources to pull off making my life miserable while I’m defying them. There are denizens of the night like Werewolves and Vampires that talk good shit and look hot, but when I actually start living with them in the only apartments I can afford, they turn out to be the asshole types of Denizens who still are into forcible transformations into their kinds and the same stupid alpha male bullshit my family is hopped up on.

Plus I have to be real concerned if I meet a denizen who I actually like as well. Cause if that gets serious and my Family gets a whiff of it, then you know they’re hopping into their privately owned military grade hummers and going on a cross country trip to wherever I’m living at. Which, let me tell you, is kind of a turn off for the usual Denizen of the night when they find out.

'Yeah Hunter you’re cute and all, but your uncles on the roof with a sniper rifle and silver ammunition so I think we should see other people. '

Why don’t you move to another country, you might ask me? First off, with what fucking money? I’m broke as hell and work nondescript usually under the table warehouse jobs cause they don’t leave a paper trail for my more meddlesome family members to sniff out. Secondly if you think my extended family isn’t operating on an international scale then boy do I have news for you. They’re, in their twisted logic, a secret society of monster slayers from centuries past who forsook their humanity. A sacrifice they performed so they could save the world from the clutches of evil.

Evil which nowadays consists of stinking up peoples apartments with their musk or not taking the rather forceful hint that you don’t want to turn into a denizen yourself. Irritating? Absolutely! A major turn off? You bet! Worthy of cracking out the monster hunting gear and hunting them down like a rabid animal? Fuck no.

I can already tell today’s just going to be one of those days. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a way out of this mess out there this time. I can dream right?