This is a series of short stories, detailing the adventures of Chelsea Childling. You can start with her origin story or pick something from the index.
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They parked her car half a block from the preschool.  Cheslea watched, silent and tense, as Keegan pressed a strip of strange, clear tape over her license plate.

He caught her eye. “It’ll reflect light back at cameras, too bright to read your plate.”

“Thanks.” 

He shrugged. “Figured it might come in handy even after tonight.”

She nodded tersely and Jackson snickered from his perch on her hood. “You two are so serious.”

She sniffed. “Scratch or dent this car and you’ll see how serious I can get.”

Keegan chuckled as he stretched to his feet. “She’s just talking shit. She uses the car as a weapon all the time.”

“Not all the time,” she muttered. 

Keegan snaked an amused look at Jackson. “Just a few nightlings, that one reaver hunt, and Taku-He.”

Warmth spread across her face. “And Spring-heeled Jack.” 

Jackson laughed as he hopped off the hood. “So once we’re done here, we grab a six pack and you tell us about Spring-Hells or whatever his name was.”

“Deal.” She pulled the black mask over her face as the guys did the same. They’d gone over the plan enough times in the past day that they all moved in silent unison.

Keegan snipped the lock on the gate and Chelsea and Jackson slipped through the playground, quick and silent. As Jackson broke the window near the back doors, Keegan started the countdown on his phone, the beeps cold and mechanical in the dark. They had to be in and out before the police.

Sweet cedar branches at the ready, Chelsea followed Jackson into the school. A wave of old, rotten food hit her and she repressed the gag. Keegan had mentioned this too. They were getting close. 

Jack spun, startling her, and kicked open a door. A reeking, oozing mass greeted them. Chelsea jumped out of the way, slamming into Keegan. He yanked her back a step further. Across the purplish mess, Jackson drew his two axes. He danced on his toes, ready to dodge the tentacles of ooze now reaching for all of them. The bubbling mass was the monster’s main defense as well as its stomach. The reaching tentacles oozed a toxin that would freeze them and start digesting them immediately.

Chelsea shook off her surprise and smacked the smelly mess nearest Jack with her long cedar branch. The soft mass hardened for a moment. Jackson’s ax cut through it. 

The sound of something hard breaking on the floor unleashed both her and Keegan. They whacked the reaching arms with their sticks in a frenzy. Jackson hacked wherever they landed a blow. His axes reduced the monster to a much smaller mass of white, stretchy ligament-like strands. Somewhere in there, lay the monster’s brain.

Once they reduced the defenses of the creature to nothing, she pulled her ax and Keegan pulled a tiny, metal tube out of pocket. His staff sprang to life and he pinned the kindermord to the ground. She and Jackson dismembered the white strands as fast they could.

A blaring siren and red and blue lights coincided with Keegan’s alarm. He pulled a garbage bag out of his coat with his phone. They shoved the remains of the kindermord into the bag and ran for the open back door. The dust and shards of the broken tentacles would confuse the hell out of the police, but it would also slow them down. And they certainly didn’t have time to sweep anything.

Voices from the front of the school trickled into the playground as they sprinted to her car. Chelsea slid into the front seat with Jackson, removing their masks as they did. They tossed them to Keegan, who added them to the garbage bag with his own.

Chelsea pulled out into the street, praying she remembered the escape route. 

Keegan tried for casual as he buried the garbage bag under several blankets on the floor beside him, before settling the cooler on the whole pile. He waved to Chelsea, eyes on the flashing lights blaring around the building. “Keep going. But go slow.”

“Drive casual?” Her voice came out clipped and hard.

Jackson snickered. “Exactly, drive casual.”

Some of the tension left her and she giggled. Once they had gone a few blocks with no cops chasing them, all three took a deep breath. Keegan gave her more directions once they got out of town.

The desert swallowed her headlights, and nobody said much. Eventually, she pulled into a patch of dirt Keegan indicated on the side of the road.  A huge pit, black with ash and charcoaled pieces of wood, sat a short walk into the desert. 

Chelsea carried the blankets, and Keegan grabbed the cooler, while Jack hauled the remains of the kindermord to the pit and fought the night wind for a flame. Eventually a bright blaze flickered happily in the dark. And they dumped the monster into the fire. The ever present desert wind blew the greasy smoke away.

She found herself beaming at Jack and Keegan as she handed out beers from the cooler. “This was fun.”

Jackson nodded. “And easy.”

“Which was the fun part,” she said with a smack to his knee as she settled beside him.

Keegan snorted a laugh. “Nice try, but I’m not hunting anything else for a few years. This was an exception.”

She sighed. “Yeah, yeah. You and your daughter. I know.”

His dark eyes called her a liar from the other side of the fire.

She shrugged. It was worth a try.

Beside her, Jackson laughed. “Sick of me already?”

She shrugged again. “Just saying we all made a good team.”

Jack smiled at her as he rested his arm across her shoulders. “So Spring Hells Jack?”

“Spring-Heeled Jack.” She took a sip of beer. The vampire that haunted the desert of Tucumcari wasn’t a long story to tell. But Jack and Keegan had their own stories and the three of them traded tales long into the night. 

Chelsea didn’t know she was asleep until a blanket covered her and Jack said quietly, “So is this the part where you threaten me if I hurt her?”

Keegan snorted. “One: Chelsea is perfectly capable of making her own threats, and two: I don’t have to be that person with you, right?”

Jack shifted beside her. “Wish you’d tell everyone else.”

“Andy giving you hell?”

“And Florence, and Charlie.”

A bottle hit dirt as Keegan gaped. “Charlie from New York?”

“Dude pulled a knife on me.” Jackson shifted again. “I hooked up with his sister once or twice.”

Keegan snickered again. “Look man, I trust her and what she says, but you slept in a lot of beds over the years and now you have to lie in all of them.”

“That isn’t the saying.”

She could practically hear Keegan roll his eyes. “Is there a point here?”

“I dunno.” Jack’s voice came out very small. “I tell myself that is doesn’t matter, because she loves me, but it almost feels like everyone’s rooting for me to fuck this up.”

“Again.” Keegan’s voice came out hard and sharp. “Fuck this up, again.”

Jackson said nothing, and Chelsea suppressed the urge to punch Keegan in the face.

He sighed from across the fire. “Look man, I spent last winter trying to put her back together. So I know it wasn’t just you… and Amber, that fucked her up. She had shit from long before that. But I also know she never really gave up on you.”

“She did.”

“No, she didn’t.” Keegan’s laughter only had a touch of bitterness. “She ignored how she felt, until she could pretend it wasn’t there. But trust me, she never gave up on you.”

For a long while only the fire’s dying pops filled the air. Then Jackson said, voice limp and sad, “Is this the part where I threaten you?”

Keegan laughed again. “No.” The word was short but warm. “She and I are good right where we are. We get each other. So, I can be pissed at you… and Amber, and still want her to be with you. Because that’s what makes her happy.”

Affection and annoyance rose in her and she had to let the tears fall or the guys would know she wasn’t sleeping.

Jackson didn’t respond. He laid beside her and soon was snoring away.

Keegan, however, stretched. “He doesn’t even know when you’re fake sleeping.”

She sat up. “I tend to sleep well with him around.”

“Good.” He held out a hand and she sat beside him. “I meant it. I want you to be happy. I want this to work for you two… three.”

She nodded, resting her head on his shoulder. “I know. So does he.”

Keegan wrapped an arm around her, but said nothing.