End of the month in February and it rains.

After he turns off the lights to the house, carefully closes the door behind him and walks over to the nondescript Chrysler parked under the awning, he gets in and closes his eyes.

Listening.

It doesn’t rain often in February – this is still the winter season, and even though the grip seems to have slacked off now, that won’t be the case forever.

He’s lived all over the world. He knows this is the case.

You can’t trust Nature, just like you can’t trust your ex-wife. (He smiles faintly when he thinks this, because either he made it up or he heard it on the television somewhere).

The street is quiet, lights flickering and buzzing dully. It’s eleven o’clock at night on a weekday, and everyone wants to sleep before morning rips off the covers with a blast of sunlight.

He thinks, briefly, that it’s sad that no one is up to enjoy this; no one is sitting in their rooms, or in chairs or cars parked at curbs just enjoying that steady, soothing tattoo of rain. It’s something that is so often missed in the winter, replaced by that eerie stillness of snow, that when there’s rain and it’s not freezing rain, no one’s here to hear it.

Even though...

And this time he makes the bad decision to look back at the house. It looks nice now -- a mix between something colonial and plantation, symmetrical but not quite, low-key but not quite, aloof but not yet arrogant. All the lights turned off, the ‘99 Honda Accord sitting calmly and dully in the driveway. Huge trees, naked and bare, in the front yard, with grass that should be emerald-green come spring.

Looks nice. But first-impressions can be a bitch.

There’s a lot of blood inside. On the walls, the bed, in the hallway.

He’d say that he caused it, but he knows that’s a lie.

It was the demon. Like it has been for the last three-hundred years, a faint blip on the radar that comes and goes like the threatening funnel of a tornado.

He hoped the last time he killed it, he actually killed it, like, successfully snuffed the piece-of-sulfur-shit out of existence for good.

But the problem is that Lucifer doesn’t want this waste of evil, and neither does any other Netherworld.

He tried -- that is something that no one can tell him he didn’t do. He went to every god-forsaken (literally), every filth-encrusted, blood-oozing, screams-of-agony hellhole in this universe and not one of them, not one, wanted that asshole demon back.

This wouldn’t be so bad for him, nor would it grate on him so deeply, if people didn’t die as frequently as they had the tendency to do when this thing decided to have its comeback party.

As always, he’ll come. He’ll sniff out its stench, its reek in the crime or the bizzarre occurances that shouldn’t happen but – for some irritating reason – do and he’ll hunt it down with a vengeance not commonly found on earth.

He’s good that way. He’s been good that way ever since it was brought down on him to hunt down the piece-of-shit that no one wants.

Philip Manescetti – piece-of-shit hunter extrodinaire. A man extremely displeased with his occupation since he hasn’t had vacation in the last three hundred years.

The rain pulls him out of his reverie briefly, tapping ever so softly on the roof and the windows, daring him to fall asleep and dream.

But Philip can’t, and probably won’t.

Because what happened in that house is engraved in his head.

...it's not every day that a message is written in A Positive Blood.

And it's not every day the message says: "Family."

...Philip Manescetti: Hunter of the ungodly who's getting too old for this shit.