Chance Walker's Beginnings

  Chance Walker wasn't born into the hunt—he was forged by it. In the late 1980s, he was just another twenty-something drifter in the rust-belt shadows of Detroit, working graveyard shifts at a steel mill and drinking to forget the kind of childhood that leaves scars deeper than skin. His father had been a mean drunk, his mother gone before Chance turned ten. No family lore, no secret grimoires passed down. Just bad luck and worse choices.It started with a girl named Mara. She worked the late shift at the all-night diner near the mill. Pale skin, sharp laugh, eyes that seemed to see right through the bullshit. They dated for a few months—nothing serious, or so Chance thought. Then one night she didn't show up for work. Chance went looking. Found her apartment door ajar, the place reeking of brimstone and blood. Mara lay on the floor, eyes wide open, body drained dry but no wounds. A symbol burned into the carpet: a jagged spiral with eyes at the center.Chance didn't call the cops. Something in him snapped instead. He sat there for hours staring at that mark until the smell made him gag. Then he started digging—old library books, whispered stories from long-haul truckers, underground occult forums on early dial-up BBS boards. What he found wasn't comforting. Demons weren't fairy tales. They were real, ranked like any army, and they fed on the world like ticks.He pieced together the hierarchy the hard way, trial and bloody error:At the top: Satan himself—or Lucifer, the Morningstar, the first rebel. Not some cartoon devil with horns and a pitchfork, but a fallen archangel of unimaginable power, the architect of the whole infernal machine. Chance learned early that you don't fight Satan directly unless you want to end up a smear on the pavement. He rules through proxies, rarely showing his face in the mortal world.

  Below him, the Watchers—the ancient fallen ones from the Book of Enoch days. These were the angels who descended, taught forbidden knowledge to humans, and fathered the Nephilim. Most were bound in chains under the earth after the Flood, but some slipped free or sent agents. They were patient, manipulative, working through visions and cults. Chance crossed one early—a Watcher-possessed televangelist—and barely walked away with his soul intact. They ranked high because they remembered Heaven and hated it still.

  Then the Demons proper: the bulk of Hell's forces. Fallen angels who followed Lucifer in the war, now organized like infernal nobility. Princes and dukes, tied to sins—Asmodeus for lust, Beelzebub for gluttony, Leviathan for envy. Some ruled legions, others possessed the powerful or whispered in the ears of kings. These were the ones hunters most often tangled with: strong, cunning, but killable if you knew the rites.

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  At the bottom: Imps. Small, vicious, servile. Little more than vermin with claws and bad attitudes. They ran errands, tormented the weak, swarmed like rats when a bigger demon wanted chaos. Easy to banish, but they multiplied fast and loved biting ankles when you weren't looking.

  Chance absorbed it all like a man drowning in gasoline, waiting for the spark. He wasn't the first hunter—not by a long shot. Legends whispered of older lines: Solomon binding spirits with his ring, medieval exorcists, Native shamans fighting skinwalkers, even a shadowy order of knights during the Crusades who hunted infernal incursions. But in the modern age, the "first" true hunter—the one who bridged old grimoires with street-level survival—was a man named Elias Crowe, back in the 1920s. Crowe had been a WWI vet who saw things in the trenches that weren't shell shock. He started the loose network of hunters, passing knowledge before a high demon tore him apart in New Orleans. Chance found Crowe's battered journal in a pawn shop, pages stained with blood and holy water. That journal became his bible.Armed with salt, iron, stolen Latin, and a growing collection of scars, Chance took his first real hunt at twenty-three. A pack of imps had infested an abandoned factory, luring runaways for sport. He walked in with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with rock salt and a knife he'd consecrated with motor oil and desperation. He killed three, banished the rest, and puked in the corner afterward. But he walked out alive.That was the spark. The hunt became everything. He traveled—Chicago, New Orleans, backroads towns where people vanished and no one asked why. He learned to spot the signs: sulfur after rain, mirrors that didn't reflect right, people blinking out of sync. He built a reputation among the shadows. Other hunters started nodding when his name came up. "Chance Walker. The one who doesn't quit."Years later, in a dusty bar outside Tulsa, he met Elena—Angel's mother. She was a waitress with a quiet strength and a secret of her own: her grandmother had been a bruja who knew how to bind spirits. Elena didn't flinch when Chance showed her the claw marks on his arm. She just poured him coffee and asked if he needed help stitching them. That was the beginning of something human in his life. But the hunt never stopped calling.Chance kept going, even after Angel was born. He taught her pieces—the salt lines, the names to avoid saying aloud—because he knew the darkness wouldn't wait until she was ready. He hoped she'd never need it. He was wrong.But that's how Chance Walker became the hunter everyone feared. Not born to it. Just a man who refused to look away.