Instinct

The Unlikeliest Places By John G. Hartness

I THOUGHT I HAD THE VAMPIRE right where I wanted him. He thought he had me right where he wanted me. I was pretty sure I was more right than he was. Then a tornado of tiny knives attacked my right calf with the kind of speed and viciousness I’ve only found in some of the upper Circles of Hell.

Yes, that Hell. Yes, I went there. Yes, I came back. And yes, the seven pounds of matted gray fur and rage doing its level best to chew through my hamstring was causing more pain than all the demons on the top three Circles ever managed.

I looked down to see a very bedraggled and angry cat with all four legs wrapped around mine, and its teeth buried in my flesh. My jeans did nothing to stop the cat’s claws, and it had jumped high enough to clear the top of my Doc Martens before it latched on, so I was getting its whole body weight on four feet’s worth of claw, plus what felt like about a thousand needle-sharp teeth.

“Ow, goddammit!” I yelled, shaking one leg. Of course, the second I shifted my weight onto one foot was the precise moment the vampire dove at me, bearing me down to the concrete floor and driving all the air from my lungs. My head hit the floor and stars filled my vision, disorienting me enough that I barely got an arm up before the vamp latched onto my carotid.

Okay, time to focus on the real threat. The cat was hurting my leg, but this undead assclown was going to legit kill me if I didn’t stop screwing around. His fangs dug deep into my forearm and one knee pressed on my balls, but despite the growing ball of nausea in my gut and my inability to draw a full breath, I managed to focus my concentration and gasp out, “Fragor!”

I hurled my will into the vamp’s face, and it went off like a watermelon dropped off a skyscraper. I closed my eyes against the rain of gore and sagged back against the floor as the pressure on my nuts decreased slightly. More like shifted, as the vampire wasn’t trying to injure me anymore, he was just dead weight. And soon to be a pile of dissolving goo, so I flung him off me and pulled myself up into a sitting position.

“Mrow?” came from beside me, and I turned to see one of the most disgusting things I’d ever laid eyes on. The fluffy ninja assassin that tried valiantly to cripple me moments before stood glaring at me, covered in vampire brains, blood, and vitreous humor. There were even a couple of shards of fang sprinkled across its fur like confetti.

“Wow,” I said to the kitty. “You look like shit.”

The cat just hissed at me. I didn’t blame it. I probably looked at least as gross, and maybe worse. “So, what are you doing here, puss? This isn’t exactly a safe place for man nor cat.”

The cat sat down on its haunches and started licking a forepaw, and I swear it somehow managed to extend its middle claw/finger in my direction. Its eyes never left me, though, just stayed locked on me as if waiting for another chance to try and tear my leg to ribbons.

“Purgatio,” I murmured, letting my will shape the currents of energy that flow through every space and every creature. The minor spell coursed over me and the cat, cleansing us of the gore and body parts. The cat stood up, turned around in a circle as if confused, then sat back down and resumed grooming, without the rude gesture this time, real or imagined.

Now that I wasn’t dripping brains with every shake of my head, I took a quick personal inventory. Nothing broken in the fight, just a few bruises, a bump on the head, and a couple little holes in my forearm. I rolled up my jeans to examine my leg and wasn’t surprised to see I was right—the little fuzzbucket did a lot more damage than the vampire. My calf looked like somebody pumped a load of birdshot into it and drops of blood welled up from twenty perfectly spaced puncture wounds.

“It’s a good thing I’m pretty much immune to infection,” I said to the kitty, who seemed to give not a single shit what I was or was not immune to. “Because if I got gangrene from a cat scratch, Luke would never let me live that down.”

My legendary uncle hadn’t been in a mood to give me shit about much of anything for the past few months, but I had hope he’d eventually pull out of his grief and get back to his normal, entirely too buttoned-up self.

“Okay, kitty,” I said, heaving myself to my feet. “It’s been fun chatting, but I’ve got more bad guys to kill, and I’m sure you’ve got some vitally important cat business to take care of. So…nice meeting you and all that, and you take care of yourself.”

The cat just stared at me through this whole monologue, its yellow gaze unwavering and a little unnerving, if I’m being honest. But I couldn’t just sit there all night chatting with a stray cat. There were at least another five vampires somewhere in the building, and with all the noise I’d made, the element of surprise was right out the window.

I stood up and patted my belt and pockets to make sure I still had my gear. Pair of silver-edged daggers on my hips—check. Glock 19 in a shoulder holster under my black motorcycle jacket—check. Awesome vintage “I Broke Wahoo’s Leg” T-shirt I found on eBay—check. Plenty of magical mojo and a bad attitude—check.

I was a little bruised, a little bloody, and grumpy as shit after having that much trouble dealing with one middling vamp. So my mind was right, my gear was right, and I had plenty of magic stored up to take on a nest this size. “Let’s do this,” I said, and started across the expansive lobby to a door marked “Stairs.”

And almost fell over as something heavy slammed into my waist. I barely held in a curse as a small, knife-wielding psychopath climbed straight up my back to perch on my shoulder. I looked to the left and saw a pair of yellow eyes framed in a face covered in long, now clean, gray fur. “Mrow.”

Looked like I had a helper. Whether I wanted one or not. So I kept heading toward the stairs, adjusting my stride to accommodate my passenger, and ducked my head as the little furball leaned forward and started nuzzling my ear.

Cute cat but distracting as hell. I tried to brush him off a couple times, but that just resulted in holes in my jacket and more rending of my flesh, and there were about to be plenty of opportunities for that, right downstairs.

I’d come to this warehouse in an industrial park on Highway 74 in Marshville, about an hour east of Charlotte, because the workers at a local chicken processing plant had reported monsters attacking them on the night shift for about three weeks. It took a while for the report to make it onto the desk of anyone who would actually give it any credence, then wend its way through the various local law enforcement agencies, up the food chain to the Department of Homeland Security’s Paranormal Division, and then back down to my fiancée, Deputy Director Rebecca Gail Flynn, who headed up the Mid-Atlantic Division, covering the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.

I would have expected the main office in D.C. to cover the states surrounding the nation’s capital, but I’m not a lifelong bureaucrat, so God only knows where the logic came from. Probably because the paper-pushers in Washington wouldn’t know what end of stake goes into the vampire, which is pretty accurate from most of the ones I’ve met.

So, I got the case of the chicken plant monsters, and after a couple nights of observation, I’d determined that there were indeed monsters of some flavor. The part that sealed it for me was watching a five-foot-tall, ninety-pound woman reach into the back of a cargo van, drag out a carpet-wrapped, human-shaped bundle that must have been at least a foot longer than she was tall, throw it over one shoulder, and walk into the warehouse like she was carrying a sack of potatoes. Either that was the world’s most securely wrapped mannequin, or she was way stronger than her frame should allow. So definitely some type of supernatural creature.

It took another day and night of investigation, but I finally figured out what was going on. There were at least four or five vampires living in the warehouse, and they would spend a couple days driving around to local cities and towns, collecting undocumented laborers, unhoused people, sex workers, criminals, runaways, and other folks who typically had fewer and weaker ties to their community, then they’d bundle them up and bring them back to this little patch of gravel and dirt outside Monroe, North Carolina and either feed on them, use them as thralls, or if they met their recruitment criteria, turn them.

It was that last bit that really grated on me. There were already plenty of vamps in the world, we didn’t need any new ones. And Uncle Luke had decreed a couple centuries ago that anyone creating new vampires without his permission, which he never granted, was to be destroyed without a second chance.

Yeah, my uncle is kinda king of the vampires. Luke is short for Lucas Card, the name he’s been going by most of the last fifty years. A dramatic improvement over the name he used with my dad, which was Mr. Alucard. I always thought that story seemed ridiculous, because who couldn’t see that it was just “Dracula” spelled backward? But Dad said people were more trusting in the Victorian era.

Oh, did I forget to mention? My uncle is Count Vlad Tepes, better known as Vlad the Impaler, and way better known as Count Dracula. And my dad? Yeah, he was kinda famous, too. Jonathan Harker? Used to work for my uncle? That’s my lineage—the world’s most famous vampire and the world’s most famous vampire chew toy.

Not to mention my mom, Mina Murray Harker, who my uncle kinda had a thing for, but not in a West Virginia way, since he isn’t really my uncle. And me? I’m an experiment in supernatural genetics, proving that when two people who vampires nibble on marry and have kids, their kids get a little extra oomph in the genetic lottery.

I’m Quincy Harker, and I’m a part-vampire magic-wielding smartass who’s been alive for a century and a quarter and counting. Although if I didn’t focus on my surroundings and not let this ball of fur and fury on my shoulder distract me, I might be able to stop counting momentarily.

Me and my passenger reached the top of the stairs, really just an open rectangle in the floor where a stairwell used to be, and I peered down into the darkness. I couldn’t see shit. I looked over at the kitty. “You see anything scary, puss?”

The cat jumped off my shoulder, stuck its head down in the hole, and looked back at me. “Mrr-rrr.”

Now, I don’t speak cat. I didn’t know if that weird little chirping sound meant “Coast is clear, tall human,” or “You’re so screwed. If you go down there, you’re gonna get served up with fava beans and a nice Chianti.” Probably the latter. In my experience, cats draw a lot of inspiration from the teachings of the great Dr. Lecter.

“Well, kitty, I don’t know what that means, so I guess I’m just gonna have to find out for myself.” I called up a little sliver of power and shaped it to my will. “Lumos,” I whispered, and a sphere of blazing white light flickered into life above my head, illuminating an area at least fifty feet around me.

Now that I looked like a beacon of absolute goddamn hope and glory shining away in the dark of night, I took one step forward, tucked my elbows into my side, and dropped down into the hole in the floor.

The basement level was obviously the vampires’ main lair, and it smelled just like you’d expect an abandoned warehouse turned into a haven for bloodsucking parasites would smell—like shit. The stench of rot and waste hit me like a hammer, rolling over me and making me take a wobbly step back wiping my eyes.

“Quincy Harker,” a creaky voice said from behind me. “We’ve been expecting you.”

I opened my mouth to say something rude and probably only about half as witty as it would sound in my head, but that’s when Graybeard the Furry Nutjob decided to jump down into the hole with me. Right onto my head.

My teeth clicked together painfully, and I stood there for a moment trying to shake the cat off my head, which apparently was hilarious to the vamps in the room, because I heard laughter coming from all sides.

Good. Laugh it up. The more they’re laughing, the less they’re coordinating an attack. The cat shifted position to sit on the back of my neck, with its back legs draped over my left shoulder and its face and front paws reaching over my right.

“How adorable,” a female voice called out from my right shoulder. “The snack brought a pet!”

I didn’t even look over at her, just raised my right arm straight out from the shoulder and shouted “Fuego!” Fire streamed from my palm, engulfing the vampire who stood about ten feet from me laughing and pointing. Well, laughing and pointing until she was burning and screaming, anyway. She went up like a tinderbox, and five seconds later, there was nothing left but a husk of steaming vampire, which would slowly dissolve into a viscous goo. One down.

I turned around to look at the first voice, the one that knew my name. This was almost certainly the leader, the oldest vampire, the most powerful, and the one who should have known that it was forbidden to make new vampires. He was pretty much the whole reason I was there. Well, him and his whole little nest of kidnapping, murdering assholes. But he was the head asshole.

And he looked the part, too. Most vampires dress normally. Their styles might be a little dated, but they generally make at least a token effort to blend in. The image in popular culture of a vampire sitting on a throne in a tuxedo with a red cummerbund, hair slicked back over a skeletal face, and a cape in the sartorial mix somewhere is a complete Hollywood fabrication.

Except to this guy. He seriously had a throne atop a wooden dais painted to look like marble, and he was wearing the whole outfit, down to that oddball medal Lugosi wore in the movie. I asked Luke once what that was supposed to be, and he just shrugged, saying something about wearing lots of medals through the years. He was a pretty accomplished general, after all.

Well, at least feared, if not all that accomplished. But this dude looked like the version of Dracula that stands out on Hollywood Boulevard and panhandles for tourist photos. Or maybe Grandpa Munster.

The self-styled master vampire, and I was convinced that he probably made everyone in the room refer to his as “Master,” rose from his throne, which I now saw was a big office chair with what looked a lot like human bones tied to the arms and back to make it…creepier, I suppose? For a bunch of undead scourges of the night who are supposed to stay hidden, this guy spent a lot of time focusing on his presentation.

I had to wonder who he thought was going to see this shit. I also wondered exactly how intimidated I was supposed to be when his throne creaked and rolled back a couple of inches when he rose.

“Quincy Harker, you have trespassed upon our home, murdered two of my children, and brought vermin into our presence. For these crimes—”

“Wait a second,” I said, holding up a hand, palm toward the Dracula cosplayer. “First, I didn’t bring the cat here, the cat was already here. And second, I’m pretty sure that the definition of vermin doesn’t include cats.”

Lugosi Light stood there frozen, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. He’d had a movie in his mind of how this meeting was going to go down, and I’d just derailed his whole train of thought.

“Cat got your tongue?” I asked. I felt a paw thump against the side of my head, but it was worth it. “Then I’ll talk. You all know that making new vampires is forbidden, on the orders of Dracula himself. You also know that you’ve been…indiscreet in your hunting. And grotesquely ostentatious in your decorating.” I gestured at the bone throne.

I turned around in a circle, locking eyes with each of the six vampires surrounding me. “So, here’s the deal. I’m going to kill your boss vampire here, because he’s the one who made all of you. If you run away while I’m busy killing him, and you behave yourselves from here on out, I won’t feel much need to go looking for you. But if you interfere in our little dance, I’m going to turn you all into smears on the bottom of my boot before the sun comes up, then I’m gonna go to Denny’s and have myself a Grand Slam breakfast while your souls scream in Hell.”

Turning like that not only drove my point home, although I’m sure my presentation was made somewhat less intimidating by the presence of a massive housecat sitting on my shoulder, but it also gave me a chance to assess the forces arrayed against me.

They weren’t much, as far as an array of forces went—half a dozen college-aged girls, all pretty, all blond, all wearing pretty typical walking around town or campus garb. It looked like my wannabe Nosferatu was more than just a vampire, he was a perv as well. I mean, let’s be real. When the age gap between you and your girlfriend is measured in centuries, it gets a little creepy. And yes, I realize the irony of that statement, given that I’m engaged to a human woman who was born close to a hundred years after I first emerged kicking and squalling into the light. But she’s almost a century younger than me, so I’ll take the tiniest sliver of moral high ground here.

“What do you say, kids? You gonna get the hell out, or am I gonna send you to Hell?”

When the first one leapt at me I knew that my negotiating skills were still in top form. The first vampire, a fledgling from the slavering, half-insane look on her face, clad in a faux-vintage Iron Maiden hoodie and artfully shredded jeans, blond hair flying out behind her like greasy streamers, charged me with her hands outstretched to rip my throat out. That didn’t go well for her.

Fledgling vampires aren’t really all that powerful. They can take out a normal human easily enough, but I think we’ve pretty well established that I’m not normal, if I’m human at all. But baby vamps only have a little more speed and strength than they did as humans, and while the young woman currently shrieking as she ran at me was apparently pretty athletic in life, she hadn’t been dead long enough to get good at the whole vampire thing. And she wasn’t going to get any better.

I sidestepped her charge, spun clockwise as I drew one of the big silver-edged daggers from my belt, and slashed through the back of her neck as she passed. I pushed a little extra energy into my strike, because spines are hard to cut through, and I felt her vertebrae part like the Red Sea. It did nothing to halt her momentum, so her body kept running past me for a couple steps even after her head fell to the ground and rolled a few feet to the side. But eventually all things must come to an end, and her torso and limbs collapsed to the concrete.

The rest of the vampires froze in mid-step, stunned at the almost instant death of one of their own. I’ve seen this a lot over the decades; humans gain some power and decide they’re not just strong but immortal. Until someone stronger and closer to actual immortality comes along and instructs them on the realities of their situation—they can still be killed, and if the opponent is strong enough, or skilled enough, it can happen in the blink of an eye. Or even faster, if the open glassy eyes of the dead blond vampire staring up at me from the skull at my feet were any indication.

“Kill him!” the master shrieked, and the remaining five vampires charged me all at once. I wasn’t really all that concerned with five fledglings. That I could handle on any given Tuesday. But I did need to keep an eye on the boss to make sure he didn’t run for the hills the first chance he got, and I had this fuzzy counterweight throwing my balance off, so it was a little more trouble than I expected. My saving grace was that not only had none of them ever learned how to fight together, odds were pretty good they’d never been in a fight before at all, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to die. Unless the damn cat opened up my carotid while trying to hang onto its perch.

“Hey kitty, you wanna grab onto my shirt, or even the top of my head instead of the side of my neck?” I asked, thrusting my leg out and cracking several ribs on the nearest vamp.

Damned if the fuzzy freeloader didn’t adjust his grip to latch onto my scalp when I asked. It didn’t feel any better than him clawing my neck, but at least it reduced the chances of me bleeding to death from cat scratches. Slightly.

The next vamp to get to me had a length of two by four in her hands, a good call since she wasn’t strong enough to beat me without caving my head in. But since she obviously wasn’t a home run hitter in life, she lacked the coordination to actually connect with the lumber. I snatched it out of her hands, broke it over my knee, and shoved half of it through her chest. Then I swore under my breath, because while I’m definitely strong enough to break a two by four over my leg, and durable enough not to suffer any serious injuries because of it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like a son of a bitch. I swear I felt the claws in my scalp dig in a little more, like the little bastard was punishing me more for hurting myself.

There were four baby vamps left, and these women were taking their time, spreading out so I couldn’t engage more than one of them at a time, at least as far as they knew. Two charged me from the front, and I called up power into my hands, shrouding them in bright purple spheres of pure magical energy. There was no real “spell” involved, just me channeling the raw power of the earth and all its creatures into twin blasts of pure purple power.

No good reason it had to be purple. I just thought it looked cool. Luke scolds me about being ostentatious, but if the flashiest thing I did in that fight was purple magical bolts, then it would go down in the record books as one of my most subtle encounters ever. Flashes of blinding purple light streaked from the palm of each hand, straight through the chest of each vampire, leaving a softball-sized hole in each young woman’s torso. I actually took half a second to bend at the waist and wave at the “master” through one of the holes, just to be a dick.

And of course, that’s when things went sideways.

I heard a thunderclap just as I felt a sledgehammer slam into my left kidney. I dropped to one knee, one hand reaching around behind me to feel for holes. No blood, so the Kevlar lining in my biker jacket did its job, but I was going to have one mother of a bruise, and probably a cracked rib or two. I looked behind me and saw the vampire I’d kicked in the ribs grinning at me with a smoking double-barrel shotgun in her hands.

“Now that’s not fair,” I said when I could draw a deep enough breath to speak. “The critters with the fangs and super-speed aren’t supposed to use guns. Those are for us mere mortals.” Then I reached under my left arm, drew my pistol, and shot her in the forehead. She dropped like a piano in a Warner Brothers cartoon, and the shotgun clattered to the floor. Three down, one to go.

The last vamp standing was literally shaking in her shoes. I could see it from where I was kneeling. “Last chance,” I said. “Run away now, learn to feed without killing people, and never make another vampire, and I won’t turn you into a puddle of goo. Stay, and you’re never seeing another moonrise.”

Her gaze flickered from me to Bone Throne Boy, and I could read the indecision like yesterday’s headlines. She stood there, frozen by indecision and fear, until I raised my left hand and made it glow purple again. That made up her mind for her, and she sprinted for the shaft of moonlight streaking in from the hole in the ceiling, leapt up to the first floor, and vanished. I heard the slap-slap-slap of her Chuck Taylor high-tops as she hauled ass out of there, hopefully never to be seen by me or mine again.

I don’t have anything against vampires, really. I don’t even begrudge them their need to feed. I mean, people make more blood, so it’s just like donating to the Red Cross. Only a little more directly.

I turned to the throne, smiling at the “master.”

“Okay, buddy. Down to you and me. You gonna make it easy on me and just cut your own head off, or are we gonna have to dance?”

Poseur Vamp just smiled at me, like he knew something I didn’t. Which he probably did, it being his lair and all. There had already been more vampires here than I knew about, and I wouldn’t put it past him to—OWWWW!

“Goddammit, cat, what the—”

My words died in my throat as I turned to see what had inspired my furry passenger to dig all its claws deep into my shoulder, spring up on top of my head, then leave bloody furrows in my scalp as it launched itself off my head like a high dive board. I was ready to blast that furball into a stole when I saw it latched onto the face of a vamp five feet behind me. It had its teeth clamped onto the vampire’s nose, its forepaws digging into the vampire’s ears, and its back claws ripping and tearing at the monster’s throat like it was digging for gold.

Kinda hard to be mad at the little monster that just saved your life.

This vampire was a big one, obviously strong in life, and the only other male I’d seen except for the boss. He stood several inches taller than me, and carried at least fifty more pounds of muscle, now augmented by its supernatural strength. But none of that mattered when a tiny Tasmanian devil was pulling a Mike Tyson on both ears.

I chuckled, took two steps forward, drew my silver daggers, and drove the blades deep into the creature’s chest, I felt the ribs separate, but the vampire didn’t die. No, I intentionally missed the heart with both strikes, so I could pry the sneaky bastard’s chest open with my blades, plant my right-hand knife in his guts, and reach into his chest. I ripped his heart out with my bare hand and turned to face the “master.”

I tossed the heart to land at his feet with a splat. “He won’t be needing this anymore, so if you’re feeling peckish, we could call it your last meal.”

Master Mimicry let out an ear-splitting screech and flung himself off the dais in my direction. He covered most of the fifteen yards between us in a single bound, giving testimony to his strength and cementing my knowledge that he was definitely old enough to know better. I let the knife fall from my left hand, caught the oncoming vamp by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket (yes, I’m serious, the dumb bastard wore a tuxedo to a fight), and rolled back onto the floor, planting my feet in the vamp’s gut and straightening my legs. He flew back over my head, and I rolled to my feet.

I’ve tried to do the whole thing where you roll back onto your shoulders and pop your hips to spring up, but it doesn’t always go well, and there was a lot of slippery goo on the floor. The last thing I needed was to bust my ass in front of the master vampire. And the cat. Because the cat had a much higher life expectancy than the vampire.

Master Moron slammed into the concrete but was on his feet in a blink. He did the whole nip up thing, because he gave a shit what people thought of him.

I shoved power through the palms of my outstretched hands and yelled, “DELEO!”

This was a new one. I usually focused my energy into fire, or an explosion, or sometimes even a manifested sword. But using the Latin word for “destroy” was one I hadn’t tried before. It was effective. Devastatingly so. The master vampire didn’t explode, per se, but he definitely fell to the ground in a collection of really disgusting component parts. It was kinda like all the things holding him together into a defined form suddenly gave up the ghost, all at the same time. For a couple seconds, it just rained vampire soup. Disgusting, but really effective. I filed that one away for future use.

With the nest cleared out, I pulled out my cell phone and typed a message. “All clear.” Seconds later there was a rush of motors and tires crunching in the warehouse’s gravel parking lot, and within a minute a ladder descended into the basement and my boss and fiancée, Deputy Director Rebecca Gail Flynn, walked carefully across the gore-splattered concrete to stand before me.

“Well, this is a hell of a mess,” she said, looking around. There was still a glowing sphere hovering over my head, so the basement was as bright as noon, showing all the body parts strewn all over the floor, the walls, and a couple of really gross patches of ceiling. “You let one get away.”

“Nah, she took Door Number One,” I replied.

“Door Number One?”

“Go forth and sin no more,” I said. “I gave all of them but the boss a chance to leave, and if they behave themselves, they can live out the rest of their nights without worrying about me hunting them down.”

“Wow,” Becks said. “Mercy from the man they call the Reaper? You getting soft on me, Harker?”

“Not bloody likely,” I replied. I gave her a hug and a quick kiss, then winced as my newest partner climbed up my back, digging his back paws into my injured ribs along the way. “Dammit, kitty, that hurts!”

Becks laughed and stepped back, looking at the furry psycho currently draping itself over the back of my head with one paw on each shoulder, and its front paws hanging down over my forehead. “Harker, did you…rescue a cat while fighting a nest of vampires?”

I glanced up, the tips of ten little claws and some long gray paw hairs the only part of the cat in my field of view, and heaved a resigned sigh. “No, I think actually he kinda rescued me. I mean, he certainly did more damage to me in the fight than any of the vampires, but he also kept me from getting ambushed by the biggest one. So, I guess he’s my cat now.”

Becks smiled, a knowing grin that twitched up one side of her mouth. “No, Harker. I’m pretty sure now you’re his person. Because if you’ve ever had experience with cats, you’ll know that they own people, not the other way around. Good luck, lover. I have a feeling you’re in for an interesting ride with that one.”

I didn’t bother asking what she meant, because just then the damn cat leaned down and licked my right ear, then bit me, then licked me again, and purred in my ear. Yeah, I guess I was his person now.

What the hell was I going to name a cat?

John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the award-winning author of the urban fantasy series The Black Knight Chronicles, the Bubba the Monster Hunter comedic horror series, the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter dark fantasy series, and many other projects. He is also a cast member of the role-playing podcast Authors & Dragons, where a group of comedy, fantasy, and horror writers play Dungeons & Dragons. Very poorly.

In 2016, John teamed up with several other publishing industry professionals to create Falstaff Books, a small press dedicated to publishing the best of genre fiction’s “misfit toys.” Falstaff Books has since published over 150 titles with authors ranging from first-timers to New York Times bestsellers, with no signs of slowing down any time soon. In February 2019, Falstaff Books launched Con-Tagion, which has very quickly morphed into SAGA — THE Professional Development Conference for Genre Fiction Writers, held in Charlotte, NC every year.

In his copious free time John enjoys long walks on the beach, rescuing kittens from trees and playing Magic: the Gathering. John’s pronouns are he/him.

Connect with John at: https://johnhartness.com/