Ever since she was young, Hua Jun has known that she has to be protected from something. Her
adoptive father and Jun spent her childhood as nomads, barely spending longer than a few months in a town or even a country before moving on as needed, spending so little time in various countries that Jun often
doesn't even get the chance to learn the language.
Along their way, Jun's father teaches her the art of the hunt - of capturing and killing the monsters and demons that plague the cities and the small
towns. He teaches Jun how to fight monsters, but he has always been careful to never let her learn
how to read or write - not hanzi, not pinyin, not hiragana, not kanji, not the Cyrillic or the Arabic alphabet, not the Latin alphabet. Nothing.
Jun doesn't even know how to draw. And she knows that there is a good reason for that. Art has a habit of coming to life around
her. Ink spirals off the page, paint peels away from canvas, the shapes and ideas imprinted on
the painting become real and dangerous and she has no control over it. She doesn't know how to manipulate her power so
she keeps it locked up inside of her.
But she does know how to manipulate people. She is magnetic, addictive - boys want her, and the more they are around her, the more they want her until they have become shades of their former selves, hollow shells with just one emotion to give - obsession. And Jun can't help it. It happens nearly
every time they move, and it justs means that they have to move again, but she keeps doing it. It is an addiction.
By her sixteenth birthday, she and her father are in Hong Kong,
staying with the only two people her father trusts - their fellow hunters, Alanso Hugh and his
apprentice Wakahisa Daichi. The amount of monsters is growing
every day, and they can't keep up with the growing demon population. To make things worse, the monsters have found
ways across the borders so that there are Aka Mantos in China and
phoenixes in Japan - the monsters are
adoptive father and Jun spent her childhood as nomads, barely spending longer than a few months in a town or even a country before moving on as needed, spending so little time in various countries that Jun often
doesn't even get the chance to learn the language.
Along their way, Jun's father teaches her the art of the hunt - of capturing and killing the monsters and demons that plague the cities and the small
towns. He teaches Jun how to fight monsters, but he has always been careful to never let her learn
how to read or write - not hanzi, not pinyin, not hiragana, not kanji, not the Cyrillic or the Arabic alphabet, not the Latin alphabet. Nothing.
Jun doesn't even know how to draw. And she knows that there is a good reason for that. Art has a habit of coming to life around
her. Ink spirals off the page, paint peels away from canvas, the shapes and ideas imprinted on
the painting become real and dangerous and she has no control over it. She doesn't know how to manipulate her power so
she keeps it locked up inside of her.
But she does know how to manipulate people. She is magnetic, addictive - boys want her, and the more they are around her, the more they want her until they have become shades of their former selves, hollow shells with just one emotion to give - obsession. And Jun can't help it. It happens nearly
every time they move, and it justs means that they have to move again, but she keeps doing it. It is an addiction.
By her sixteenth birthday, she and her father are in Hong Kong,
staying with the only two people her father trusts - their fellow hunters, Alanso Hugh and his
apprentice Wakahisa Daichi. The amount of monsters is growing
every day, and they can't keep up with the growing demon population. To make things worse, the monsters have found
ways across the borders so that there are Aka Mantos in China and
phoenixes in Japan - the monsters are