The Unglamorous Life of Demon Hunters

Race survival is a ruthless instinct. It outbids any other instinct you have. Its only priority is to ensure that the species goes on. Period. It’s not just humans who have that instinct. Anthropologists and biologists have seen the same instinct in nearly every type of plant and animal on the planet.

It’s not a hard stretch to assume that any lifeform comes with the instinct for survival prepackaged into its genes. That would include any of the species and races we love to read about in our paranormal novels. Vampires, werewolves, demons, gargoyles, shapeshifters, fae, you name it. If it has DNA, it has a survival instinct.

In order for any race or species to survive, it will always develop strong social customs that allow its members to get along with each other without unnecessarily killing each other off. The social customs reduce the friction between individuals and groups to a minimum. They add oil to the daily business of survival.

As the species matures, someone always gets around to thinking it’s a smart idea to write the customs down so that everyone can refer to the same set of customs and minimize misunderstandings and disagreements.

Formation of Laws

And suddenly you have laws. The older a race is, the more laws it will have written down and the more convoluted they will have become, as provisos and exceptions will have occured to the race, and adaptions and developements have been written in. The race will have evolved culturally over time, also requiring more laws to have been written.

The writing of laws will also require that someone enforce the laws. While the laws were just social customs, the people themselves would use social pressure — peer pressure, in other words — to make their friends and relatives conform to social expectations. The modern human version of enforcement is police departments. Civilians are peaceful, leaving the police forces to do the enforcing and lawyers to interpret the laws themselves.

Other versions of enforcement from history have members of the community enforcing the laws for themselves, but leaving the final interpretations of the legalese and metting out of judgement to their chiefs. This model is what many fantasy species tend to follow, with a special category of enforcer: The executioner.

Self-Governance in Fantasy

Each race in fantasy abides by its own laws and most races self-govern and self-enforce. Vampires in a lot of fictional universes are unusually good at self-enforcing, for example. If they are keeping themselves hidden from humans, slips in discipline often come with a high price tag — risking exposure, or memory-wipe or unnecessary death of beloved humans, or worse.

Because fantasy races have special and extraordinary powers, they can develop quite god-like complexes. They have the potential to “go bad” with regular monotony. This is where the executioner comes along. In many forms of fantasy fiction, you find the term “demon hunter” loosely applied to these people. There’s other terms. Anita Blake in Laurell K. Hamilton’s books is simply called “The Executioner” and she has a narrow field of specialty: Vampires gone wrong. Although she has unofficially killed werewolves, shapeshifters and preternatural creatures she figured were worth the bullets, so her unofficial work is broader.

Sam and Dean from Supernatural started out in the very beginning of the series calling themselves demon hunters, but I’ve noticed now that the series has matured that they very carefully avoid calling themeselves anything at all. If they use a term at all, they say that what they do is called “hunting”, but they tend to avoid describing their work.

Across urban fantasy, there are all sorts of enforcers whose job it is to hunt individuals with deadly force who have broken the laws of their race and/or humans’ laws and been decreed outlaw. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll lump them all under the title “demon hunters.”

Demon Hunters Are Cool…Aren’t They?

Being a demon hunter sounds like a pretty cool job. Sam and Dean make it look like the fun-est job ever. Riding around in a hot car, playing with guns and exploding toys all the time. Personally, I’d want to be Sam, because then I’d get to ride shotgun next to Dean 24/7, plus I’d get to do all the really fun research, too. Hours of reading dusty old history books, which happens to really yank my chain for me. And I’d be the computer geek, too. Which I am. And I look good in an occassional suit, too. Plus I’d have all these adventures.

They talk about it sometimes, but what you don’t see, not really, is the truly miserable downside of that life. The serious lack of income. I mean, they have no income. None whatsoever. Stop and think about that. Know how they pay for all those seedy, cruddy motels they crash in episode after episode, and the gas for the car? They kinda side-slip it in the show, but they’re neck deep in credit card fraud. They’re stealing credit card numbers all the time, and running up credit card debt on other peoples’ cards. That’s why the FBI are so hot for their tails.

Plus, they never get to go home. They can’t. The FBI would leap on them the moment they got anywhere near their permanent address.

Then, there’s the paranoia….but I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Let’s shift away from Supernatural and onto demon hunters in general. I’ve written four books that feature demon hunters now. Actually, technically five, but Sera’s Gift barely counts, because Wyatt was only briefly in that one: Eva’s Last Dance, Mia’s Return, Carson’s Night, Beauty’s Beasts.

All my demon hunters have a pretty shitty life except for the vampire Nicholas Sherwood, and that’s because he was born a wealthy son of a lord in the 12th century, and he used the power of long term compound interest to make sure he stayed that way throughout the centuries. Demon hunting, for him, was an passionate avocation, rather than his means to make a living.

In Eva’s Last Dance, the Ryan’s jeans are out at the knees and it’s not a designer affectation. He’s lean and it’s not from working out and eating well. His coat is shabby.

In Mia’s Return, Wyatt Whitacker, demon hunter, is more or less living on the streets as he hunts the demons and nasties he’s found himself tracking. He’s on a mission. But in Sera’s Gift, his lover, Mia, has found a way to turn his hunting into an enterprise and life has turned 360 degrees for him….except in one respect. Even Wyatt still can’t avoid the wounds that desparate targets hand out.

And it is here that the underworld targets demon hunters stalk are a little bit different from those the police force and military personnel pursue, even the most deadly of those wanted in the world today. The preternatural creatures have powers and abililites that the hunters do not, putting them at an immediate disadvantage. Many of them are far older and more cunning than the average human. Stronger, quicker and their will to survive as powerful as any humans’. Some of them have mental powers the hunter has to contend with, too.

The risk of serious injury is incredibly high, yet most hunters in most fiction, amazingly, tend to work solo. Given the huge physical and mental risks, the stress of the job is incredible.

Add to that the paranoia the job must induce: Once a hunter’s reputation begins to build, the hunter will become a target himself. Bad elements among all the races and species in the underworld will consider it a good idea to get rid of him or her. The greater his reputation as a hunter the bigger a target they’ll become. The hunter’s paranoia will rise in direct proportion. Imagine spending your entire life looking over your shoulder, checking behind doors, and under the hood of your car every time you come back to it. And for some things preternatural, there is no protection. How do you guard against a mental attack or a magic spell?

It isn’t hard to imagine that the burn-out rate amongst good demon hunters would be very high indeed…if they survive that long.

Would you take the job?