Chapter 1 - Agents of the Doorway

He knew why the crowd had first looked at him with disgust and why he now had an ample diameter of “safe zone” around him, it was just that Brian wished that he could get home another way. While the normal world could take a train, the subway, or an Uber without much hassle or notice; given his situation all of these would cause the same problem and same looks. The looks of disgust, fear, shame, and utter disdain. All of which had become something he had grown accustomed to being a demonic rectifier. A fancy and professional term for either killing or banishing demons and their kind back to where they came from.
This led to a daily spree of going out in his agency approved clothing, fresh and pressed, and watching them become coated in bile, blood, mud, dirt, and whatever it was that the demons would ooze when they were dealt any damage from his short-blade. The same blade which he can remember hanging on his family room wall as a kid. The same one he had been so happy to find wrapped up on his 18th birthday. The same blade which now was covered in viscera and unknown fluids by his side and weighed his body to be lopsided.
It has a proper name, the one which his family would rather call it by, Marbhaiche deamhain, but instead he simply called it Biorach. Neither one was an immediate give away for how much this weapon had come to be his worst enemy on the same day it was his greatest birthday gift. It was this birthday where a group of mad magickcasters who called themselves God’s Divine had chosen to try and bring his holiness into human form. They aimed the portal the wrong way and instead of a stairway to the silver city, they gave an elevator to the darkness and demons. It was this same day that the family secret of once being demon hunters had been told to him with the assumption that the last time a hell portal was open was in the late 1700’s and was immediately closed. That he should not fear that his blood would once more be called into action to stand against the creatures of darkness as his forefathers and kin had done for millennia.
But this was his luck, his really shitty luck. If they had done this highway to the depths a day before it would have been someone else’s problem. He would have been too young to take up his familiar arm and fight back those which were never meant to stand on this plane. But of course, the moment he opened the gift, it became his burden and no one else’s to do this.
Don’t get him wrong. It was a paying job, it did allow him to cancel his gym membership, and it has kept him busy for the past 10 years (give or take 2 years where he was forced to train with the weapon). So he had his own place in the city, he could afford all his bills, and he was in somewhat decent shape. On paper he worked for the “Agency of Demonic and Magick Regulation” but no one who knew what they did would ever consider them agents of anything. Instead to the public they were known as Hunters.
Sounds cool right? Being a Hunter? Most of the time being coated in different fluids whose properties are not completely known nor investigated and having to fight whichever entity was assigned to you. All done with a familiar weapon and in the agency approved uniform. A gray or black dress shirt, black pants with matching black mid-thigh army level leather boots, and a vest with the company emblem stitched into it. As if anyone would go against any of the beasts and beings the agency was sent after for fun.
What had started as a clean and well pressed gray dress shirt, was not a wrinkled, soaked, and discolored piece of fabric. While Brian had learned quickly to never have a “favorite” shirt, this was one of the more comfortable and light shirts which he had gotten his hands on from the agency. Emphasis on was. Once he returned the shirt would be handed over to the weaponry desk and incinerated to ensure that any diseases or hexes were not allowed to exist within the building. The person wearing the shirt was not incinerated no matter how badly and how often many of the agents had thought about just jumping into the pit instead of the chemical baths and unknown effects of whatever had already soaked into their skin. But Brian was all too aware that he would strip and lose the loose and light shirt to the fire pit, hand over a sword which seemed to always end up too unclean to be resheathed to be cleaned by the in-office staff, and be taken to the detox shower to be sprayed with chemicals and holy water. No one was sure if it was real holy water, but everyone would scream something about Jesus, Christ, Dear God, or Mother Mary; so for Hunter’s it was always called the holy water.
But there he stood in his invisible barrier bubble waiting for the train to come and pick him up and take him back to headquarters to go through the entire process. A ride he knew would go as followed:

• People would exit the train to get off, immediately to run or scurry as far as possible away from him.
  
• Those left would get up to move cabins and not be in the same place as him.
  
• He would enter his now private train car to be met by one of the attendants asking him to not sit or touch anything.
  
• They would then hand him a rubber glove to hold onto one of the bars jutting through the train. It only took one trip to realize why they did that, as when they started or stopped Brian had been thrown to the ground and fought to get up and then met with the angry looks of the people he knew would have to clean up the streak marks he left from falling around.
  
• No one would check if he had a ticket, so he simply stopped buying them since no one knew either way.
  
• He would get to his stop and be pushed very politely to get off and not come back.
  

This was a normal trip on the train after a long day of work for Brian McDowell. The same trip he had been having to take for the past 2 years after his transfer from the small town branch he had first joined. Well joined is not the term anyone would use, the term would be more drafted into. As it was only those with the ancestral blood of the ancient hunters who could face the higher level demons and actually banish or kill them. On the eastern side of the continent that came down to Brian (lucky him), Colin down in Maryland, Tucker in South Carolina, Kira in Massachusetts, Nicolette in South Jersey, and the oldest of the bunch Eugene in Idaho. Eugene was old enough that he was posted in a state where the number of demons and entities match the number of activities…0. He was still paid the same salary as Brian but did about 0% of the work besides “advising” on some cases.

Eugene’s advice was “You wanna kill the bitch” or “The goal is for it to die before you die” which everyone who had to take his calls always appreciated as they were about to fight something which would have scared even a veteran of this line of work. So while none of the in-field hunters would do or say anything against Eugene or belittle whatever work he had done in the past, none were all too welcoming of their phone’s ringing and the name popping up being his. As a rule throughout the entire agency, specifics and real details were never disclosed to anyone and were kept highly confidential.
So while there may be a message sent to all that a certain entity or portal was no longer considered active or had been removed from observation, the details were not included nor searchable. When these messages would be sent out, many would want to know the reason why, who had completed the task, the bounty or reward for the task, and if an agent had made the ultimate power move and taken both themselves and the target out. But the internal system which allowed for communication and research did little to allow anyone to know those types of details. With some obvious exceptions. One of those being Director Graeson, the head of the New York Office and the only person Brian had to answer to. He was allowed to see all documents without any redactions occurring and knew every detail of every event. It was for this reason that Brian did little to hide his disdain for his current employer.
Because he knew, if he even mumbled a word of it, somehow Graeson would come to find out about it; and it was Brian’s motto that it's better to have it said to your face then behind your back. He prepared for this discussion as the train came to a halt and he finally was able to go into a space where he would not be the center of attention and could possibly no longer feel the once warm and smooth fluid on his body now hardening and thick coat his body. Perhaps allowed to change into either a new uniform or back into his civilian clothes. He could finally have his wonderful weapon cleaned and disinfected by what the agency called professionals and he could go home.