Monster Hunter Vendetta

Earl shook his head. "I don't believe so."

"Yeah…yeah I do." Dad was positive. "But it can't be. You're too young. Was your father in Vietnam?"

Earl paused for a long moment. "No," he said calmly.

"You wouldn't happen to be related to some guy who worked for the CIA, went by the name…what was it…Mr. Wolf?"

Mr. Wolf? If that was one of his pseudonyms, it was pretty damn lame.

Earl frowned slightly. "Never heard of him."

"Good, because he was a real jerk-off. But damn if you're not like his twin. Good thing you're not, 'cause me and him have a disagreement to settle." Dad was obviously suspicious. Mosh, Julie, Mom, helicopters, compounds, assassination attempts, everything else was forgotten as Dad focused in like a laser beam on Earl. "What's your name, buddy?"

"Harbinger. Earl Harbinger. Your son works for me." He stuck out his hand to shake. My father took the smaller hand in his catcher's-mitt-sized paw and I knew that Dad was going to try and crush him.

"Auhangamea Pitt," Dad said as he squeezed. "This is my wife, Ilyana."

Earl smiled slightly and squeezed back. Dad's brow furrowed and I could tell that he wanted to cringe. Most normal men would have. Earl let go and nodded. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Pitt. I'm sure you've got a lot of questions for your boy that I'm sure he's just itchin' to answer. I can assure you this inconvenience will be temporary. We'll find you a room and get you settled in for your stay. Welcome to Monster Hunter International."

The best available room at the compound was on the first floor of the main building, near the stairs to the basement and the archives. It had been set up for clients and VIPs, but since visits like that were extremely rare, the room, though nicely furnished, smelled a little musty.

"Beats a hotel," I suggested helpfully as I put Dad's suitcase on the bed. I still stunk of gas and had quite a bit of my own blood dried on my clothing. Dad just glowered at me.

Mosh was getting cleaned up. It had been about fifteen years since we had last been forced to share a room, but it was either bunk with me, or sleep in the barracks with the Newbies. He'd dealt with enough weirdness so far that the last thing I wanted to do was stick him with a bunch of really gung-ho, brand-new Hunters.

Julie had tagged along. My mom hadn't stopped talking to her since she'd gotten off the chopper. Julie had dropped her vest and rifle behind Dorcas' desk, so now she only had her form-fitting and, in my opinion, very flattering, Under Armor shirt on. Julie was nodding her head patiently as Mom continued to ramble on about her day's adventure as she carried more bags through the door. She gave me a patient look that basically said you weren't kidding about your parents.

Dad waited until all four of us were present. His deep voice indicated that he wasn't messing around. "All right then, I want some answers, and I want them now. There's some strange business going on here. First off-"

"How did you two meet?" Mom asked, clapping her hands together excitedly. Dad rolled his eyes and groaned.

Julie gestured toward me. "Well, we had a contrived story to tell you, but I guess we can tell you the truth now. We work together. The first time Owen and I met was when I interviewed him for this job."

Mom covered her mouth, like me dating the boss' great-granddaughter was the most scandalous thing ever. Hell, like Mom even knew what I did for a living. "You're his supervisor?"

"Technically, yes, but he doesn't take well to supervision," Julie laughed. Mom laughed. Mom began to ask Julie for details. They both plopped down on the edge of the bed. Dad and I exchanged glances. He signaled for me to pull up a chair to the side so we could address man business.

Mom was so personable that when she entered a room, she created her own gravity field that dominated everything. Once free from Mom's sphere of influence, my father turned stern. "I killed four people today. I haven't done that for a while. I'd like to know why."

"So the last guy died too?" I had really been hoping that the Feds could have gotten something out of him.

Dad shrugged. "Looked like a liver hit. I'd be amazed if they got him to the hospital before he croaked. I'm getting sloppy in my old age. Mozambiqued the other assholes. Don't dodge my question, boy." He glanced at his watch. "I'm missing a fishing trip today because of this."

"Okay…" I had thought about this moment, and the best way to convey it, for a long time, but all of my practiced lines were forgotten under the stare of those hard eyes. My entire life, this man hadn't ever really approved of me. He had always been gruff and cold. The closest we had ever come to bonding was him teaching me to kill stuff. Well, when all else fails, go for brevity. "I'll get right to it. Monsters are real. I'm one of the people who hunts them."

Dad nodded slowly. "Pay good?"

"Pay's awesome."

"Monsters?" Dad took off his hat and set it on the small table between us. He scratched his bald spot. "All right then. I'm glad we got this all cleared up."

That's it? He showed no emotion. That wasn't one of the outcomes that I had imagined. "Uh…cool. Any questions?"

He intertwined his fingers, put his elbows on the table, and studied me silently. I never could read him, and now was no different. It was like being under an electron microscope as he stared right through my façade of confidence. This man could read me like a teleprompter. "Oh, I got questions-lots." Then he went back to glaring at me. It was extremely awkward. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

I've died twice, traveled through time, stopped an alien invasion, and battled just about every terrible being that hell could puke onto the surface of the Earth, but despite those facts, this man could still make me feel like a pathetic fat kid. It really pissed me off. My entire life I had striven to make him proud. I had failed every step of the way. No matter what I did, I would never measure up to his impossible ideals of what it meant to be a real man.

But no more. I knew what I was. And I didn't have to take his shit anymore. I was going to make him understand. He was on my turf now. "Listen, Dad," I said as I reached across the table and grabbed him by the arm. "I-"

Black energy crackled inside my skull.

"Damn it, boys. That was pathetic," I shouted at my sons as I threw my own pack down. Personally, I was exhausted, but I wasn't about to let them know it. They could never see weakness as an option. The boys were big and strong for their ages, but I had overloaded their bags on purpose. I knew that they had to be hurting bad by now. "That was slow." I made a big show of looking at my dive watch. "We only averaged thirteen minutes a mile. Thirteen!"

"It was straight uphill!" Owen protested. He had to pause, pull out his asthma inhaler and take a deep puff. He didn't use it nearly as much as he had when he was younger, but we were several thousand feet higher in elevation than he was used to.

"And the ground was all loose," David whined. "My feet hurt."

Damn right their feet hurt. My feet were killing me, and I had done forced marches most of my life. They were only fourteen and eleven. Their pack straps had probably abraded right through the skin of their shoulders by now. "You think if the enemy were right behind us they'd be complaining? Hell no, they would've chased us down, raped us to death, then cut us into steaks and eaten us."

"But ‘the enemy' aren't chasing us, Dad. This was supposed to be a camping trip." My oldest gestured around the mountainside. He had always been a smartass. The kid was incapable of knowing when to shut up. Despite how I was always farming him out to the neighbors for adult-level manual labor, and he was strong as hell, the boy was still pudgy. He paused to wipe the sweat off his face with his tee shirt, not that it would do much good, since his shirt was already totally saturated.

David started crying. "I can smell Mom's cooking. Camp's right there. Can I go sit down now?"

"Yeah, go," I jerked a thumb back toward camp. I could smell it too, and my stomach rumbled. "And don't be such a baby." I felt like a complete asshole as I said it, but I had started having the dream again, at least once a week now. Some nights I couldn't sleep at all, even when the dream didn't come, just because I couldn't get it out of my mind. I didn't pretend to understand the dream, but I knew it was true. My children couldn't afford to be weak.

"Dude, drop your pack. I'll take it," Owen offered to his brother as he glared at me. Yeah, the boy may be chunky, but he'd inherited my mean streak. Good. Let him be angry. It gave him something to focus on. David shrugged out of the pack and handed it to his big brother. Owen cradled it in his arms as David ran for our campsite.

"This was supposed to be a fun weekend," he said.

"Fun is relative," I answered. "Having the strength and the knowledge to survive anything the world throws at you isn't supposed to be fun. But it makes you a man. So man up and quit your crying."

"You don't always have to be such a jerk." Owen spat as he walked away.

If only you knew, boy…if only you knew.

I took my time following them into camp. The forest was actually very peaceful as sunset approached. He was right. This was supposed to have been a vacation. I had retired from the Army a few years ago, and was now working as a bookkeeper, of all the idiotic things…So it wasn't like I got to spend a lot of time in the great outdoors anymore.

My wife was waiting for me, arms folded, scowling, her blonde hair pulled up underneath a handkerchief. She smelled like wood smoke.

"Keeping the home fires burning, huh?" I joked.

She didn't think I was funny. "Ten miles? You made them walk ten miles, and after skipping lunch?" She had grown up in a home where they often went hungry because of Communist ineptitude. To my wife, missing a meal as an American was a serious offense, because this was the Land of the Free, damn it.

"I have to do stuff like this…You know it."

God bless her, she at least believed me. "You've been distant lately. The dream again?"

"It's been bad." The sound of an acoustic guitar started back at the tent. It was actually rather good. David certainly had a gift for that silly thing.

Ilyana nodded slowly, understanding. She was as pretty as the day I had first seen her, sneaking her dissident family over from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. "You know that I trust you, but what if you're mistaken? Your children think you're a beast, you know. You push them too hard. And what if you're wrong?"

"I pray every day that I'm wrong." I bit my lip. Saying this made my voice tremble and break, and tears welled up involuntarily in my eyes. "But I know I'm not. I hear the war drums. Some day one of those boys will be known as the god slayer and that's before it even gets really rough."

No father should have to know that it is his son's job to die saving the world.

Dad can cry?

I was back in the room, still clutching Dad's arm. I let go, shocked by how hard I had been squeezing. There was an imprint on his forearm and he looked at me, stunned.

"Son, what's wrong?"

It was the same thing that had happened a few days ago with Agent Myers. Somehow I was seeing other people's memories. I shook my head. Only a few seconds had passed. I was nauseous and dizzy. When I closed my eyes hard I could still see the lightning shapes moving in the corners. They slowly dissipated. Stupid artifact. This vision brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Forces of Evil.

One of his sons had to save the world? I already had. Mordechai had told me that I had been picked before I was born for that job. How had Dad known so long ago? "You had a dream?" I asked. "What's this dream show you?"

Dad was confused. "What are you talking about?"

I began to babble. "All these years, the way you treated us, the stuff you taught us. The shooting, the fighting, the survival skills, it was all because of a dream? God slayer?"

My normally imperturbable old man suddenly looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. "How do you know about that?" he demanded.

"Tell me!" I shouted. This startled Mom and Julie.

Dad shoved himself back from the table and stood. "No!" he bellowed. "You can't know about that. You can never know."

"Calm down, dear, remember your condition," Mom scolded.

My father began to pace like a caged bear. It was almost like he was nervous. But that was impossible. "I kept it from you, because…I was scared." He had never said that phrase ever before. Auhangamea Pitt was scared of nothing, or at least that's what I had told myself my entire life. "I was scared for you, even before you were born. I didn't want to believe the promise. It was just too terrible, but in the back of my mind, it was always there, so I tried to get you ready. That was my duty. The dream taught me what I had to do. Preparing you boys was my calling. That's why I've done what I've done. That's why I got so mad at David when he ran away. I was so fixated on this that I chased my own son away, and when that happened, I swore that I would forget about the damn dream and never talk about it again. You were grown, and I'd done my best, so my job was finished."

I placed my hands on the table to steady myself. "Dad, listen, it doesn't matter now, but I need to find out what you've seen."

He shook his head. "I'm…I'm not ready."

It was my turn to be the bossy one for once. "Well, you damn well better get ready then, because some serious shit is going down."

"Don't cuss," Mom snapped automatically.

Dad quit pacing, returned to the table, and slowly sank into the chair. He seemed to shrink. That scared me. "I've had this dream for decades. In it, one of my sons has to die to save the world from something terrible…" He sounded tired as he revealed his burden.

This whole thing was so damn shocking that I actually laughed out loud. "Dad, it's okay! The stuff you taught me paid off. I've already saved the world. It's okay. We beat the terrible thing last summer, and I'm still alive."

"No," he stated solemnly, like a man who knew his torment wasn't yet over.

"Mr. Pitt, really, it's okay," Julie said soothingly. It was weird to hear her call my father "Mister," but it wasn't like she knew him at all, and she still didn't know how to pronounce his first name properly anyway. Too many vowels. "Owen's telling you the truth. I was there. He did what he was supposed to, and we all lived."

"No." Dad shook his head. He looked like he was going to cry. I had never seen that before. It was making me very uncomfortable. "What I've seen hasn't happened yet. What you've seen so far is nothing. There are still a few signs left."

"What are you talking about?" I had done my job. I had stopped the Cursed One. What else did they want from me? "Signs?"

My father began to speak, but there was a commotion out in the hall, and a sudden banging on the door. The door flew open, revealing Trip Jones. He was really excited, and his appearance indicated that he had run here. He must have just gotten back from exterminating trolls. "Sorry to interrupt, but you guys need to come with me right now. Z, Julie, you've got to see this. It's really important."

"Damn it…" I muttered. Mom scowled. "Sorry." I stood and pointed at my father. "We'll talk later."

Dad pushed away from the table. "Owen, son…" And then he surprised me. He grabbed me awkwardly by the shoulders, pulled me close, and gave me a hug. He had never actually done that before. I was 25 years old, and had never actually been hugged by my father that I could remember. I was too shocked to respond. Finally I patted him on the back.

"Ahh…how nice," Mom said.

After a brief moment, he let go. "Give me time to think, then we'll talk. I didn't know if this time would ever really come. I'll tell you everything."

Trip jerked his thumb down the hall. "We've got to get to Milo's workshop."

Chapter 10

Apparently Trip really did believe it was important, because he full on sprinted across the entire compound to Milo's workshop. Trip had played college football and could run unbelievably fast. I, on the other hand, am a sluggish brute, and preferred only to run when something was chasing me. But apparently this was a big deal, so I hauled butt, yelling hoarsely for various Newbies and Hunters to get out of my way. Unfortunately, Milo's workshop was set out by itself, most likely isolated to protect everyone else in case one of his inventions went horribly wrong and turned our gear man and his shop into vaporized atoms.

By the time Julie and I got there, Trip was already inside, and I was panting. Julie looked fine. "You should do more cardio," she said patiently as she opened the door for me.

"Punching bag's cardio," I gasped.

"Only when you do it for more than a minute."

"If I have to punch something for more than a minute"-panting-"it's time to go to guns."

"Wait." She grabbed me by the arm. "This business with your dad…"

"I don't know, but I intend to find out. Come on."

The inside of Milo's shop was a mess of machinery of every type: welders, lathes, mills, drill presses, and things that I didn't even recognize. Miscellaneous guns were piled in every corner and on every shelf. There was even a rocket launcher of some type dangling from a strap hung over the antlers of the crocodile head mounted on the wall.

We stepped past the biggest harpoon gun that I had ever seen. It was the size of a riding lawn mower, all stainless steel with a spool of cable thick enough for high-power lines, loaded with a spear as big around as a fence post, and painted on the side was a picture of a creature with a shark's head ending in squid tentacles with a big slash through it, Ghostbusters' style. So that's where Milo's discretionary budget had gone lately. If I wasn't in such a hurry, I would have stopped and admired the monstrosity.

Milo saw me looking at his invention. "Yeah, it is pretty freaking cool. I'm done messing around with stupid luskas. Next time we have to hunt shark-krakens, we do it in style. This sucker could harpoon Godzilla! The guys in Miami are going to love this baby. I call it Leviathan." He had been waiting for us, pacing, his long red beard bouncing with each step. He had undone the beard braids and the entire thing was in a giant puffy mass that extended halfway down his chest. "Well, anyways, you aren't going to believe this, but I think I've found a way to track down the Condition." He gestured for us to follow as he headed for the back of the workshop.

There was a roll-up door, and an MHI Crown Vic was parked in one of the few open spaces. Holly was standing near the rear, casually holding her.308 Vepr carbine pointed at the trunk. She smiled when she saw us. "Z, you're all sweaty. Did we interrupt you two at something?"

I was too out of breath to respond, so I flipped her the bird. She winked. Trip appeared with a ring of keys and moved to the trunk. "Ready?" he asked Holly.

"Born ready," she said as she planted the big AK against her shoulder and took aim. "Open it."

"Slow down," Milo urged. The short man paused to push his glasses back up his nose before getting down to business "You guys have no sense of presentation. Young Hunters are so excitable. You can't just spring it on them. You've got to work up to it. It's all about the presentation."

Julie groaned. Milo's ideas were often good, sometimes bad, usually weird, but always with the best intentions. He was constantly thinking outside the box. Way outside the box. "I swear if there's Powerpoint involved, someone's getting shot."

I was a little impatient, considering that my father had been about to tell me something that was probably really important concerning my destiny and all that jazz. "Come on, Milo. Spill it. How are we going to find the Condition?"

Milo smiled broadly. "You sent the three of us out to shake down the elves to see if we could find out anything-"

"Useless as usual," Holly interjected. "Though the Elf Queen asked how the Dreamer was doing. I think she's got a crush on you, Z. She's kinda cute for a four-hundred-pounder."

"But then we get the call to head over to Bessamer for a troll infestation. You guys had to bail, so we took care of it on our own," Milo said proudly. "How much do you know about trolls?"

"I've killed…" Julie paused, thinking, "five of them on two separate cases. They're rubbery, super resilient, heal fast, are very vulnerable to fire, eat anything, but prefer children, and they're smarter than they look. It's always best to engage them from a distance, then when they're down, burn them."

"Yes, yes," Milo steepled his fingers, looking briefly like he was teaching elementary school, obviously leading up to the payoff. "All true, but more important…what do they do for fun?"

"Hang out under bridges and harass goats?" I asked.

Julie hesitated, flustered. "Well…I…I don't actually know."

"Aha!" Milo shouted, grabbing a bunch of printouts off a nearby table. He shoved the papers into her hands. Julie glanced at them, frowning, then started to pass them off to me.

"Hot stock tips? Free iPods? Discount Viagra? Enlarge your- What the hell?" I asked, as Julie handed printed e-mails to me.

Dear Sir, I am Barrister Kojima Loima of Nigeria and I must approach you concerning an opportunity of extreme urgency. My client former Prime Minister Katanga has requested that I safely move his fortune from our country to the U.S. in secrecy. I must transfer a sum of sixty-two million dollars to your bank account- It just went on and on.

"What is this?"

"Spam," Milo said solemnly.

"Trolls are spammers?" Julie asked.

"Oh, and so much more!" Milo exclaimed. "Open it, Trip."

Holly tightened up on her rifle. Trip turned the key and popped the lid. The trunk appeared to be filled with a bunch of greasy rubber hoses. Suddenly, the pile moved, revealing it to be one solid mass curled into an uncomfortable fetal position. Giant clawed hands and feet had been chained together and padlocked. Two round yellow eyes opened and blinked at us. It had a pointy nose, hooked over a mouth full of dingy blunt teeth.

"You are the suck!" the creature hissed. It started to rise. Trip moved forward, cocked one fist back and slugged the monster right in its massive mouth. The creature winced back.

I looked at Trip in surprise. He was normally the nicest person I knew. "I hate spammers," he explained as he shook his aching hand.

"Milo?" Julie asked slowly. "Why is there a troll in your trunk?"

The little man was really excited now. "When we hit the target, we were expecting a bunch of these things, and instead only found this one. He'd fallen asleep with his head sitting on a desk with a bunch of computers running on it."

"There was a pile a foot deep of empty energy-drink cans and Ho-Ho wrappers on the floor," Holly added. "He'd been playing online games, arguing with random people on like fifty different internet forums, writing spam. It was really pathetic. Most of it was totally incoherent."

"And the punctuation…" Trip muttered, obviously offended. "According to his MySpace page, he's a sixteen-year-old girl named Brittany who likes to post pictures of herself in her underwear."

The thing in the trunk stirred, glaring at each of us angrily. It was an intimidating beast, lean, with limbs that even though they were crammed into the trunk, were obviously too long. "So internet trolls…are really trolls?"

Julie folded her arms. "No, Milo. You can't keep him as a pet."

Milo was indignant. "Of course not; I remember what happened when I tried to raise that sasquatch. How was I supposed to know it was going to eat Sam's dog? Poor Squeaky…" I didn't know if that was the name of Milo Anderson's bigfoot or Sam Haven's deceased pooch. Milo lifted one last bunch of papers. "Anyway, this is why I brought him back."

The logo on this e-mail was the same sky squid as the Condition handout Myers had presented to us. I took it from him and read. The message was brief.

Attention creatures of the darkness, the Shadow Lord, High Priest of the Sanctified Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition, extends his benevolent hand in friendship. Join our mighty legion. No longer must you live in secret beneath the blighted cancer of humanity. A new age is coming. A dark new dawn breaks.

It was an invitation. It was dated several weeks ago.

The troll continued to glare at me and gnash its dirty teeth. "Are you a member of the Condition?" I asked.

"No," it hissed. "Condition is not to be trusted." The troll's voice was wheezy, like its lungs were filled with cobwebs and its vocal cords were coated in rust.

I distrusted it immediately. This thing was just plain icky. "What's your name? And I know it isn't Brittany."

Air escaped from its mouth in a series of puffs. Laughter. "Tell you nothing, human."

Holly leaned forward and jammed the muzzle of her AK into the side of his head. "Start talking, spam-boy, or I'm going to let out some pent-up aggression on your face!"

That got its attention. "Okay…okay. Don't let the pretty one hurt me!"

"Aw…he likes you," Trip said.

"Melvin, humans call me Melvin," the troll said quickly, raising one chained hand to protect his face. The dirty claws extended from the end of each fingertip at least half an inch. "My pack joined Condition, but Melvin stayed. Not trust Condition."

"Where's your pack now?" Julie asked.

"They go to join army. But trolls are lazy. He not want lazy servants. Dead servants never lazy. So he made them all dead. Now Melvin is alone. All alone…"

That almost made me sad. Almost. "Do you know where to find them?"

He shook his head. "Let me go free. I tell you, then you kill poor Melvin."

Poor Melvin was an eight-foot-tall, carnivorous killing machine. Letting him go wasn't really an option. But I needed him to talk. Maybe if I treated him with a little respect, he might open up. If that didn't work, we could always let Holly have a crack at him. She seemed the least morally adverse to beating the truth out of something. "Let him out."

"What, Z?" Trip asked. "Serious?" Julie looked at me like I was nuts, but didn't say anything. She drew her.45 from her holster and held it low by her side.

Milo stepped off to the side and retrieved a Mossberg shotgun from one of the many racks. He pumped a shell into the chamber. "Don't trust him, Owen. I'm a moderator on a forum. You can't ever trust a troll."

"Listen, Melvin. We're going to let you out of the car. If you try anything stupid, we're going to shoot your arms and legs off and then we're going to burn you to ashes. Got it?"

"Melvin play nice," the troll promised. He began to slowly unfold himself out of the trunk. First one long leg came out, chains clanking, until claws clicked on the concrete floor, then it took a minute to get his spindly torso out of the narrow space. Finally the troll stood, all twisted and gangly, wrists chained together in front of its narrow chest. His flesh really did look like row after row of dirty garden hose stacked into a rough humanoid shape. I had to crane my neck to look him in the eye. There was a mass of stringy black hair matted together on his head. The other Hunters kept their guns trained as I stepped closer.

"Okay, Melvin. I'm going to level with you. I really need to know how to find the Condition. Help me avenge your pack's murder."

He laughed again. "Not care about rest of pack. Pack was stupid. Got turned into zombies. Now they not hog Melvin's bandwidth." His breath stank of stale Red Bull and his teeth hadn't been cleaned lately, if ever. "They are the Fail. No, Hunter. You let Melvin go. Then I tell you where pack went."

I was afraid of that, but I had an idea. Twice in the last few days I had been able to live somebody else's memories: Myers', and only a few minutes ago, my father's. Susan had exposed me to that cursed artifact so that I would have the ability to fight this Condition. If it worked on people, maybe it would work on monsters. If he wouldn't tell me what I needed to know, then maybe I could just take it. It was worth a shot. I extended one hand slowly toward Melvin's clawed hand.

"What are you doing?" Julie asked.

"Trust me."

The troll regarded me suspiciously. Finally I touched his hand. He felt warm and squishy. Nothing happened. No black magic lightning. Nada.

Melvin screamed. "It burns! It burns!" I jerked my hand away. The other Hunters took an involuntary step back. The troll smiled, showing off row after row of rotten teeth. "I kid. I kid." Then he head-butted me.

His rubbery skull rebounded off mine, flaring pain through my brain, sending me flailing back, blocking Julie's shot. He moved with surprising speed for his size. One fist swung out, slamming into Holly's stomach and knocking her to the ground. Milo blasted him in the back, the buckshot sending chunks of green meat in every direction. Melvin didn't seem to notice. He surged forward, grabbed Trip by the shirt and tossed him headfirst into the trunk of the Crown Vic. Then Melvin slammed it shut.

My eyes were watering as I stumbled out of Julie's way. She opened fire on Melvin, her bullets tearing into the troll. I swear he giggled as he reached past Milo, grabbing onto a huge shelf of tools, guns, machinery, assorted widgets, and pulled. The heavy shelf teetered for a second before falling over.

"Move!" Julie shouted as all of us dove for cover. The shelf came crashing down, bits and pieces flying in every direction. I rolled out of the way as a chainsaw spiraled past. Milo cried out as something landed on him.

Ankles chained together, Melvin hopped for the open roll-up door and the freedom of the forest. Trolls were amazingly fast. "Ha ha. You got pwned, bitches!" He laughed as he cleared the exit. Milo was trapped underneath the shelf and thrashing about. Julie was cursing and reloading her 1911. Holly had the wind knocked out of her and was gasping for breath. Trip was beating on the inside of the trunk. I drew my STI.45, wiped my watering eyes, and started after the escaping troll.

"Witness my perfection, newbs!" Melvin shouted as he hopped down the pavement. If he reached the fence, we were going to lose him.

Suddenly a figure appeared around the corner of Milo's workshop and intercepted the bouncing troll. With his back toward me, I couldn't tell who it was. A boot smashed into Melvin's knobby knees as a large hand grabbed him by the neck. The troll went down with a screech, "No fair!" as the man wrapped his other hand around Melvin's head.

"Wait!" I shouted, but I was too late. With a brutal twist, the troll's neck snapped, and Melvin flopped twitching to the pavement.

The figure stood, dusted himself off, and nonchalantly turned around. The big man was wearing a black suit, black sunglasses, and black strangler gloves. I gasped.

Agent Franks nodded slightly in return.

The Goon Squad rushed around the corner and joined him. Torres, Archer, and Herzog looked exhausted. They'd apparently had a long night. "Burn it," Franks ordered as he strode forward, gesturing back at the troll.

"How? But you…" I stammered.

Franks stopped in front of me. "Mornin'…sunshine," which was exactly how I had sarcastically greeted him every morning since he'd been here. I think he was enjoying my discomfort.

Julie pulled the shelf off Milo. He was flustered, but okay. Holly had gotten unsteadily to her feet. Trip was still banging on the inside of the trunk and shouting. "Would one of you guys let him out?" I asked.

"Trip's got the keys," Holly responded.

Archer, who struck me as the most efficient of the Feds, entered the workshop and spied an acetylene torch. "Mind if I borrow this?"

"Be my guest," Milo responded. Archer wheeled out the torch, turned on the gas, and ignited it with a striker that was chained to the dolly.

"Who's pwned now, punk?" Holly asked rhetorically as she rubbed her bruised stomach. "Aww, hell, that didn't work out like we imagined."

Milo shrugged. "Capturing him seemed like a good idea at the time."

Trip yelled something unintelligible from inside the trunk.

"Good idea. Hold on," Julie shouted at Archer. "Trolls regenerate. Let's haul him down to the basement and lock him up. We can still interrogate him later." Archer looked disappointed as he twisted the knobs and closed off the torch. It made a popping noise.

Franks glanced around at the destruction. "I can't leave you alone, can I?"

I had always suspected that there was more to Franks than met the eye. He was unbelievably tough. Despite my background as a fighter, he had beaten me soundly and had taken inhuman amounts of damage at Natchy Bottom before going down, but that proved nothing. The fact that he was standing here now, after I had seen some of his bones sticking out twelve hours ago, indicated that he was definitely not human. "What are you?" I asked.

Franks' face was emotionless behind those tinted sunglasses. "Hungry. Let's get lunch."

Franks, showing no indication that he should have been dead, ate about 7,000 calories worth of MHI's food, while his men wandered back to the barracks to get some sleep. Apparently, threatening as many witnesses as there were during a Level 5 Containment was hard work. I was feeling it myself. I had slept for less than one hour in the last thirty, and I had met with the shadow man during part of that, so I was nearing a terminal crash, and was damn loopy at this point.

I moved the ice pack to a different spot on my face. I had a nasty bruise. "So, Franks, seriously, your arm was hanging off in pieces last night. And now you're sitting here, all fat and happy." I've had a werewolf for a boss, twice, and had seen some really bizarre stuff over the last year, so I was flexible, but I was also curious. "What the hell are you, really?"

Franks chewed his fifth microwave jumbo burrito. MHI's stockpile of cafeteria food wasn't exactly gourmet dining. He still hadn't removed his sunglasses or gloves, even though we were indoors. "I'm a representative of the United States Government, here to protect you."

"Yeah, whatever, but you aren’t normal."

He chewed with his mouth open. "Don't be such a racist."

I slammed my fist into the table and left. If he possessed any emotions at all, I knew he was doing this just to tweak me. Franks grabbed his last few burritos and followed.

I needed to get some rest, but Harbinger had wanted to discuss strategy first, and had called another meeting since the arrival of my parents had blown away our original plan. Julie and Earl were already there when I arrived. Milo, Holly, and Trip arrived once they succeeded in picking the lock on the trunk lid. Because the three of them had been on the way to Bessemer for the troll hunt, and nobody had ever notified them about my leaving the compound to go after Mosh until afterward, there was no way that any of them could be the spy. Which was great, because right about now I needed all the friends I could get. I had ditched my uncommunicative bodyguard at the base of the stairs and headed for the conference room. I wanted to make this quick, because I still wanted to talk to my father. I had a lot of questions, but first things first. I had to figure out a way to hit back at these cultists.

"What happened to your face?" Earl asked as we sat down.

"Head-butted by a troll," I grumbled.

Earl laughed at me. "I heard. I see Franks is back."

"I thought you said he was dead," Julie said.

"His arm was almost torn off and that's before he got punted across the freeway, so you tell me." I turned to Earl. "Is he like you?"

"No. I'd smell that," he answered.

"So, what does he smell like?" Maybe Earl's supernatural senses could give us a clue.

"Old Spice." Earl shrugged. I put my face in my hands and groaned. "What? He does."

"He's scary is what he is," Trip said. "Honestly, that man gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's something about him that's just not…" He trailed off, looking for the right word.

"Human?" Holly interjected. "He's nominally on our side, and we're stuck with him, so we might as well just ignore him. But yeah, I agree with you. He gives off a bad vibe. Too bad he broke Melvin's neck before we could make him talk."

"Because that was going so well…" My face really hurt.

"The troll will wake up eventually, though he'll probably be useless." Julie got us back on track. "So you spoke with the leader of the Condition?" I filled them in on the conversation, down to every detail I could remember, ducks and all. Earl frowned when I got to the part about how the Englishman seemed to know him personally.

He stood and walked to the wall, where the sketch artist's rendition of our enemy was tacked. "I honestly don't know this guy."

I kept on. Right now it was our only lead. "It was like he slipped up. Like he knew you, Ray, Susan, even Myers. You all used to work together. Did any of you work with somebody from England?"

"Yeah, lots. We've worked cases over there and we've worked alongside Commonwealth teams like the Van Helsing Institute and even their governmental units, but I can't think of anybody in particular." Earl was quiet for a really long time as he studied that picture, running his hands through his thin hair. He started to speak, then shook his head, as if the idea was just too stupid to contemplate. He grew frustrated and turned away. "Hell if I know."

"Well, what's the plan then?" Julie asked.

"I don't have one!" Earl snapped, which surprised me. He never raised his voice at any of us, let alone his great-granddaughter. That was really out of character. He immediately apologized. "Sorry, I'm just tired is all." He reached into his ancient leather jacket and pulled out his cigarettes, once again breaking his normal self-prohibition on smoking inside the main building. "This whole thing is pissing me off, and tomorrow's a big day."

"What's tomorrow?" I was too tired to remember.

"Newbie class graduation," Julie answered. "Esmeralda says they're ready to go. Most of our team leads and whoever else can get off are flying in to interview and pick which ones they want." Even as busy as our teams were right now, the leaders were going to make the time to come, because if they didn't pick their own Newbies, then they got the leftover ones, and nobody wanted to be that team.

"Well, that'll be fun," I suggested.

"Too bad one of them is probably a spy," Earl spat. That was probably what was eating him up. The very idea that one of his Hunters was working for the bad guys was blatantly offensive. In a group like this, we had to have total trust in each other. Hunters depended on their team, and by extension their whole organization, to have their backs.

"What did that oni thing tell you again?" Milo asked.

"She said that the Shadow Lord's minion had reported that I'd left the compound in a hurry to go there. So take that for what it's worth."

Milo stroked his beard contemplatively. "Maybe they just have somebody hiding out in the forest with binoculars." The idea of having a spy obviously seemed farfetched to him. He had lost his family at a young age, and had practically been raised by MHI. "Well, except that Skippy's people hunt the forest, and they'd spot anybody who hid out there for very long."

"We have to assume the worst," Julie stated. "We've got to think about who the possible leaks are."

"All the Newbies," Trip supplied. "How many of them saw you leave, or heard about it after you left?" Going through that group seemed daunting.

"Esmeralda's team. She and Cooper were with us, and one of them could have made a call when we weren't looking," Earl added. I noted that he didn't mention Julie's brother, Nate, because that was family, and therefore impossible to him, despite Nate's father's record for betrayal. "But I've known Esmeralda forever, and I just don't see that. Cooper seems like a good kid, but he's only been with us for a year."

"Dorcas," I said. Then all of us laughed. Not very likely.

"What about Grant and Albert?" Holly said. "They were right behind you."

"Al? I don't see it." Just because I held myself responsible for Lee's injury didn't mean he held any grudge. He was too honest a guy to fall in with the likes of the Condition. I paused. On the other hand, Grant had been gone for some time after leaving the company, only to come back just when this craziness started. "What was Grant up to all those months?" I asked.

Julie shook her head. "No way. He's a lot of things, but he's no cultist."

But it was obvious. Grant was our prime suspect. "Think about it. He's perfect. The timing just fits. Why else would he come back when he did?"

"A fat paycheck, for one thing," Holly suggested. "Man, I wish I had been along for that stupid oni instead of a lame troll."

"It'll be a cold day in hell before Grant Jefferson has to worry about money. His folks own, like, Delaware or something," Milo pointed out.

"You sure you're not letting your personal feelings get in the way of being objective?" Trip asked. "He did save you from the monster that was trying to kidnap you, which would make him a pretty lousy double agent."

"Or a really good one!" I insisted.

"You just hate his guts. It can't be Grant," Julie responded.

"And why are you defending him?" I shot back, and then immediately regretted saying it. Julie glared at me.

"Well, it's somebody," Earl stated. "And until we find them, we're not safe. Eventually this shadow freak is gonna lose his patience and just have the spy shoot Owen in the back."

"And if I leave, then he'll find me with magic and throw an army of undead at me. Great. At least here I'm safe from the dead."

"On the bright side, if it's a Newbie, then we'll farm them out to somebody else in the next couple of days," Holly offered helpfully.

"Unless I pick the spy for one of our vacancies. I'm a team lead too, and I'm still short since I sent Sam off to form Team Haven out in Colorado," Earl muttered.

"I do miss the big lug," Holly admitted.

"And then what about the next class, and the one after that? No, we can't risk filling MHI with a bunch of nut jobs. Not with the kinds of things that we're running up against all the time. Our people have access to every evil widget that comes down the pike. We have to end this now."

As if on cue, a small figure popped into existence, standing in the middle of the conference room table. The gnome tilted his pointy red hat at Earl. " 'Sup, dawg. G-Nome, reportin' for duty."

Julie, startled, went for her gun, but I grabbed her arm. "He's cool," I said.

"Damn right, I’m cool. Cool as ice," he said. His face was badly bruised, and he was wearing a few Band-Aids. I had at least given as good as I had gotten. The gnome turned his attention to Holly, leering down her tank top. "Hey, baby. Lookin' fine. I do like them blonde human chicks."

"Who the hell are you," she demanded, before adding, "Shorty?"

"Hey now, baby. It's all good. I'm G-Nome, out of B'ham."

Holly was just confused now. "Genome?"

"No…G hyphen Nome, straight-up gnome killa from the North Side." He flashed a gang sign, then folded his arms. "Yeah, that's right. I'm Tony Montana, baby."

Julie pulled off her glasses, cleaned the lenses on her shirt, and then put them back on. Nope. He was still there. She glanced at me, and I gave her the I'll explain later look.

"You were only supposed to appear to me or Owen, remember?"

G-Nome shrugged. "Y'all didn't seem to mind sharin' no secrets with these."

"You find anything yet?" Earl demanded.

"I'm just gettin' the lay of the land, know what I'm sayin'? Seein' the sights. Speakin' of…" He looked back at Holly and raised his eyebrows up and down quickly. "You know, they say once you go gnome, you'll never go home."

"Ewww," she responded, too grossed out to come up with one of her usual rebuttals.

"Back off, stubby," Trip said.

"Oh, you want to go, homie? Thinkin' you all bad?" G-Nome said, puffing his chest out.

"Don't go there, Trip," I warned. "Trust me on this one, man."

"Get back to work. Report in when you've got something," Earl ordered.

"Peace." And he was just gone. It was really unnerving.

"So, that's the secret weapon you were telling me about? One of the guys from the Rice Krispies, only psychotic," Julie muttered. "What's this place coming to?"

Milo harrumphed. "And you made fun of me for bringing home a troll," he said with a great deal of indignation.

Earl tried to placate his people. "He'll find the spy. Gnomes are sneaky. In the meantime, I'm going to bump up our security here. That attack on the concert was too brazen, too crazy. Monsters don't normally operate in the open like that. It brings down too much heat, but those just didn't seem to care."

"Undead and transdimensionals can't enter the compound because of the warding, but he may try to attack us with his human followers or other types of monsters," Julie said. "Obviously it doesn't work on lycanthropes…" She waved at Earl. "It probably won't stop anything that was born on Earth."

"So something direct from the Old Ones couldn't come here either?" I asked, thinking of the swarm of Christmas Party monsters we'd fought in Natchy Bottom.

"As far as I understand how the ward works, it's basically a focus point for our reality. Like a magnifying glass under the sun. Undead are an unnatural thing in this world, so it just blasts them. Things from outside this reality can't take the heat," she explained. "Its part magic, part physics, and way over my head."

"Groovy," Trip said. He loved the magic stuff. It came from being a fantasy geek.

"We've got the security room in the basement. The whole perimeter is wired with cameras and motion detectors, but we hardly ever man it," Julie suggested. "That should give us plenty of early warning."

Earl nodded. "I want somebody in there, around the clock."

"I'll make up a schedule," she answered. "I'll have to cycle through the Newbies too, which means some of them will have to get limited basement access."

"Just keep them away from my personal space. Well, that's it for now then. Let's get some rest. I know none of us did last night." My boss yawned as he said it. Hunters tended to work really weird hours, but even we had our limits.

I raised my hand. "We're not done yet, Mr. Wolf."

He groaned. "I didn't get to pick the name. I thought it was goofy as hell. Hey, let's name the lycanthrope Mr. Wolf, because nobody will ever see through that. The government spooks love naming supernatural assets like that. I knew this one poor weredolphin in the Pacific that got coerced into working for the OSS doing naval recon back in '44. They designated the poor girl Ms. Fish."

"Dolphins are mammals," Milo pointed out helpfully.

"Exactly. And yes, Z, I have met your dad. I didn't ever know his real name either, so I never knew you were related, though I can see the resemblance now."

"You actually worked for the CIA?" It sounded surreal in a black-helicopter, conspiracy-theory kind of way.

"I'm the only non-PUFF-applicable werewolf in the world. They didn't grant that status for kicks. I've been called up to serve my country twice, three times if you count back to when I was just a poor human kid. People like me got to earn PUFF exemption, and sometimes earning it means working the occasional odd job for the Man, like you have to go somewhere nobody else can and eat a specific bad guy's face. Got it?"

"You were an assassin?" Trip asked in disbelief.

"It's hard to run a guerilla war when there's a werewolf sharing your jungle," Earl sighed. "I did what I had to do. Y'all would've done the same. I'm just not proud when I have to let the beast run free. Maybe that's why I've been such an effective Hunter. I understand both sides, real good."

That gave me pause. The Englishman had said Harbinger was a liar and a murderer. That put the murder part into new perspective. I let it go though. I was too tired to exercise any critical thinking skills right about now. "Sorry, Earl. None of my business."

Chapter 11

Grant had to be the spy.

Maybe I was biased. We had butted heads ever since I had been recruited. I had never liked him and the feeling had been mutual. The fact that I'd had a crush on his girlfriend hadn't helped things, and then when he'd screwed up on the Antoine-Henri, it had pretty well sealed the deal. I had learned later that he had regretted his call to abandon me so much that it had made him doubt his abilities as a Hunter. That, coupled with the brutality of his time being a captive of the Seven, had led to him leaving.

Just because I was biased didn't make me wrong.

Grant Jefferson was staying in the barracks temporarily. He would be assigned to another team within a few days. I'd told the others that I was going to bed, but had immediately gone for a stroll. I figured it wouldn't hurt to go talk to him first. I mentally justified the lie, as Earl Harbinger had put me in charge of rooting out the mole, after all.

I was just going to talk to him and see if his story made sense, nothing more than that. If he slipped up and said something suspicious, I would just take it back to Earl. The fact that I had stopped long enough to sling Abomination over my shoulder was just a coincidence. It wasn't like everybody around here wasn't always armed to the teeth anyway. This was just a friendly little social call.

As usual, Franks had tailed me. I still didn't know how the hell he was alive, but I didn't really have the energy to dwell on it. This conversation was none of his business.

The main room of the barracks was filled with Newbies taking a break. The recreation room was actually a rather nice facility, complete with a pool table, big screen TVs, and lots of video games. We were a paramilitary organization, but we certainly weren't into that whole Spartan thing. Dawn, the Newbie who had spoken with me yesterday, was playing a game of pool. She perked right up when she saw me. That girl's default setting was flirt. She batted her eyes. "Hey, Z. Care to join me?"

Oh, so it was "Z" now? "Naw, I'm on business. Have you seen Grant?"

Her expression changed when she saw the hulking form of Franks fill the doorway behind me. For a second, she actually looked frightened. Maybe Franks had paid her a visit after her first monster encounter too. "No, haven't seen him," she answered quickly. "I've got to go." She tossed the pool cue on the table and walked away.

Some Newbies playing a game of Guitar Hero pointed me toward the correct room. Too bad I was a man on a mission, because I was the reigning company champ on that game. And to think that everybody thought my brother had inherited all the musical talent. The Newbies got really quiet when they saw that I had Agent Franks with me. I couldn't say that I blamed them. He just had a kind of dampening effect on people.

"Yo, Franks," I said. "You mind hanging out here for a minute?" He just stared at me blankly. "Private matter." He didn't even bother to respond. I leaned in closer so that the Newbies wouldn't hear. "I need to talk to somebody, alone."

Franks looked at me like I was an imbecile. I couldn't tell him that I thought Grant was the spy, since there was no way in the world he was going to leave me alone with somebody who might be a member of the cult he was supposed to be protecting me from. Franks glanced around the room, studying the inhabitants. He seemed awkward in a place dedicated to recreation.

"I've got to talk to Grant Jefferson. He…saved my life last night. I need to thank him. And I need to apologize for being a jerk to him." Franks raised an eyebrow. The concept of saying "thank you" or "I'm sorry" probably did not compute, but for whatever reason, he nodded. "One minute." Leaving Franks to watch the Newbies try to beat Arterial Black on "Hard," I went down the hallway and knocked on Grant's door.

"Yes," came the voice on the other side. "Who is it?"

"It's Owen Pitt."

There was a long pause and the noise of a drawer closing. Finally the door opened. Grant's black armor was hanging in the closet behind him, and he was wearing normal clothing for once. "Is there a mission?" he asked hopefully. I shook my head in the negative. "Does Harbinger need me?"

"Naw, man, I…uh…I just wanted to…talk."

That confounded him. "Talk?"

"Yeah, about…stuff. Can I come in?"

"I guess." Grant stepped out of my way. Harbinger had at least given him one of the private rooms so that he wouldn't have to share with a Newbie. There was a desk and I pulled out the chair and sat, casually letting my shotgun dangle at my side. Grant, puzzled at what I was doing here, closed the door and sat on the bed. "What can I do for you?"

I hadn't really thought through my plan. Planning's not the kind of thing you do when you're exhausted and just got beat up by gnomes. Might as well try to be nice, lower his defenses. If that didn't work, I would probably just start punching him in the face until he talked. "I just wanted to say thank you for saving my brother's life. That was a good shot."

"Yes, it was," Grant replied. "And?"

And?"Well, I just wanted to tell you I appreciate it." I paused. "And I wanted to welcome you back," I lied. "We never really got along before. I wanted to get us off on the right foot this time."

Grant was smart enough not to buy that. "That's nice. I'm glad to be back."

"Yeah, about that…why?"

"Why?"

He knew damn good and well what I was asking about. "Why'd you come back? I heard you'd moved out to Hollywood, and were living large, hanging out with movie stars and all that. Hell, I've been told that you're already worth a fortune. Your family are like billionaires. Why give up the sunshine and the babes and come back to this?" I gestured around the rather plain little room. He didn't respond, so I continued. "Slogging through the blood and the guts, risking life and limb. Most of us are doing this to make the kind of money that you've always had. Why risk that?"

"True, I've been financially blessed, just a happy circumstance." He regarded me suspiciously. "But Hunting was never about money."

"Why then? Why'd you come back?"

There was quite a bit of hesitation. Got you sucker, you were coerced into it by a giant squid cult. Admit it. Finally, Grant cleared his throat. "It isn't any of your business."

"I think it is," I answered, then corrected myself. "Not just for me, but for everybody in the company. You're going to get asked eventually, so what are you going to tell them?"

"I'll tell them what I just told you. That it is none of their damn business…So, is this an official visit or personal? Did Harbinger send you to check on my level of commitment or is this because you don't like having me around Julie. Are you worried about something?"

What?"That's just stupid."

"Is it?"

"Epic stupid. She has nothing to do with this."

Grant smiled. Holly had told me that he had a disarming smile. I found it rather patronizing. "You know what I did before I was a Hunter?" I shrugged. Julie had said that he'd gone to Harvard. "I was a new attorney at a very prestigious firm. I'd won every single case that I'd had, and some of them were rather impressive. You know why?"

"Because you're just that good?"

"Yes, that and because I can always tell when someone is lying to me, and you, Pitt, are a terrible liar. You're worried that your future wife "-he practically spat the word-"still has feelings for me. Before you came along, we were close. We had a real future together. You screwed that up. You feel inadequate, and now you're scared that I'm back-"

I cut him off. "Don't flatter yourself, dude."

"Well, don't worry about it. I'm done with her. I don't know if she had an aneurism or what to distort her judgment enough to fall for somebody like you, but it doesn't matter. Damaged goods now. If you think that I came back to MHI like some lovesick puppy, then you're a fool."

This was certainly spiraling in a direction that I had not expected. Might as well run with it. "Why'd you come back then, Grant? What pushed you to swallow your pride? Was it that hard to admit that you were wrong?"

Grant stood. "Wrong?" he shouted. "I was a snack for a nest of vampires. Do you have any idea what that's like? Quitting wasn't a mistake. It was what any sane person would do."

"So you quit because you were scared?"

He went to the door and jerked it open. "Get out."

I slowly stood. I had two options. Continue to push it, or let it go for now, and I hesitated, undecided. If I was wrong, I couldn't just start kicking the crap out of another Hunter in the barracks, but if he was the spy, then the longer he was free, the greater the danger to everyone. I split the difference. Stopping in the doorway, just inches away, I asked one final time. "I just wanted to know the real reason why. That's all. I'll never bug you again."

Grant was seriously angry. His face had turned a shade of red I'd not seen before. Something must have snapped. "I came back because I've never failed at anything. I don't know how to fail. Of course I was scared; only idiots like you are immune to fear. But I let the fear win, and I ran away, and I hated myself for it. Every single day, I'd read the papers. I'd recognize the cover stories. The missing persons, the obvious tricks to hide monster attacks, and the anger just filled me."

"Hunting's in your blood," I answered slowly.

"That's Shackleford myth," he hissed. "There's no such thing as a born Hunter. The only thing in my blood now is the curse of the vampire, and when I die I've got to get my head sawed off because of it. Nailing supermodels and going to all-night parties is great, but every morning I got to look at a failure in the mirror. I'm here for one reason and one reason only. I'm the best at everything I decide to do, and I can't quit until I prove I'm the best at this too…I can't quit until I beat this. I will be the most effective Hunter in the world or I'll die trying. Do you have a problem with that?"

Damn it. He was telling me the truth. I could see it in his eyes. This was a man who was just as driven as I was. No wonder we never got along. "No," I answered. I walked out the door and he slammed it shut behind me. I gave a long sigh. "Welcome back, Grant," I muttered to myself.

"Owen, I'm glad to see you," Mom said as she answered the guest room door. "I'm afraid you woke us up. I know it's the middle of the afternoon, but we didn't sleep a wink last night."

"Sorry, Mom, but I need to talk to Dad. It's really important."

"What happened to your face?"

"Sucker-punched by a troll…Really, I need to ask him some questions."

Mom looked me over. I really wasn't in a state of grooming that was up to her usual standards. I was actually impressed that she didn't whip out a cloth, spit on it, and start rubbing my face. She had gained some self-control over the years. "Why do you have that big gun on?" She pointed at Abomination.

"Protection," I shrugged. I had been ready to shoot Grant with it, but that was too long of a story. Now that it looked like he was just another emotionally deranged Hunter, I was back to square one. "I use this for work. You know, my real work."

"Ooohhh, that must be your Abominator. Julie talked about it."

"Mom…" Leave it to your parents to screw up even the coolest stuff. "It's Abomination. And quit stalling, I need to see Dad."

She turned and looked back into the darkened room. I could hear Dad snoring. She moved out into the hallway, barefoot and in a borrowed bathrobe. She closed the door softly behind her. "He needs his rest."

"But-"

"No, you But. Your father needs his rest. He's been sick."

I had no idea what she was talking about. "Sick?"

"Oh, hello, young man. I didn't see you there." Mom smiled politely at Agent Franks, who as usual, was following me around. "I'm Ilyana Pitt. You must be one of Owen's friends."

I snorted. Friend…

"Ma'am," Franks nodded.

I cut her off before she could start to harass Franks. I knew even the most stoic man I'd ever met couldn't withstand her, and within moments she would beat his life story out of him and probably enroll him in her book club or something, but I didn't have time for that. "I've got to talk to him right now." I put my hand on the door and started to push.

One surprisingly firm hand landed on my chest. "Oh, no you don't, mister." Mom shoved me back. She was angry now. "You can talk to him when he's rested. I've been listening to this magic prophecy dream business for the last twenty-five years and I've had to put up with all sorts of strangeness and nonsense, and stockpiles of guns cluttering up my basement, and you two fighting and being obnoxious to each other that whole time. The very least you can do is come back later."

"But, Mom, it's important!" I'm afraid I whined; parents can do that to you.

"And it'll still be important in a few hours when we're not all cranky and stressed. Now go before I get mad."

I couldn't believe this. We're talking about the end of the world, and I was getting kicked out by my mother. This was embarrassing. If I hadn't been exhausted and injured, I probably would have pushed it, but as it stood, all I wanted to do was flop into bed and not get beaten up by oni, trolls, gnomes, or zombies for a while. "Fine," I muttered.

She actually patted me on the cheek. "Good. See you later. Love you." Then she slipped back inside the guest room and closed the door.

I groaned. Franks' emotionless mask almost appeared to be smirking. "Your mom seems nice," he said.

I sank onto my bed, frustrated, exhausted, and with no clear idea of what the hell I was going to do about the problems facing us. We had a spy, this shadow cult had shown they were willing to pull out all the stops, my family was now involved, and I was once again experiencing strange, Old One-related abilities. Normally I would have just lain there, too spun up to sleep, but I had gained a roommate.

"Okay, so what was the weird chick in the ninja outfit that put that smelly grease on my cuts?" Mosh asked. He wouldn't know just how effective that "grease" was until morning. "With the tusks?" He had been asking me monster-related questions for the last hour.

"Orc. They're distantly related to humans. Most of them never speak. They always wear masks, but even then they're painfully awkward. Each one has some sort of gift that they're magically good at. Gretchen is a healer. Skippy is the best pilot in the world."

Mosh was nodding thoughtfully in the dark. "So that explains the Stig."

"Who?"

"Never mind…" Mosh muttered. "I thought orcs were the bad guys and elves were good."

"It's complicated. This particular tribe is good."

"Are there elves then?"

"Yes, the local ones live in a magic trailer park. Go to sleep, Mosh."

I had killed the lights, but I could sense the shifting on the cot on the other side of the room. It was quiet for a long time.

"So, the reason Dad's always been a jackass is because of a dream? And because he's been afraid?"

I sighed. I still hadn't really absorbed that yet. All these years I'd just assumed my father was a paranoid jerk by default, and now it turns out that he had reasons. "I suppose so, but I don't know yet."

"I can't believe he told you that…Dad only ever told me stories about murdering communists. It's not like he ever talked about his feelings. Hell, I didn't know he even had feelings…So it turns out that Dad was right the whole time?"

"Huh?"

"You don't get it, do you? Ever since we were little, he's put us through Pitt boot camp and treated us like crap, and we hated him for it because we thought he was crazy…But now you're some sort of top secret badass fighting evil death cults, and you're using the exact kind of skills that Dad tried to beat into us. Hell, if it wasn't for Dad being such a dick, we'd probably be dead. So I guess that means that he was right all along…That's some mind-blowing shit right there. I'm going to have to tell my therapist about this one."

Crap. Mosh was right. Talk about a paradigm shift. It can be really difficult to admit that you've had such a fundamental misunderstanding about someone. "Well, he's still been a jerk about it," I muttered.

"A prophetic jerk, though…Man, I can't believe Dad actually told you any of that."

I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. "He didn't tell me. I read his mind."

Mosh grunted. "You read minds?"

"It's a long story."

It was quiet for almost ten seconds that time. "Okay, what am I thinking right now?" my brother asked.

He was probably thinking that I had ruined his life. I still don't think he grasped the full implications of what was going on here yet. "You're thinking about how you're finally going to get that operation you've always wanted, and how you'll be a lot more comfortable as a girl, and not having to live a terrible lie, and how you can't wait to get a pretty blue sundress to go along with your new spring wardrobe. Now go the hell to sleep already."

"Blue isn't my color… Night, bro."

My brain finally gave up. I finally started to drift off. Tomorrow we would figure out something. There had to be a way to defeat the Condition.

"So…are dragons real?"

We need to talk.

The whisper startled me awake. I blinked the heavy sleep from my eyes. My alarm clock display read 3:00 a.m. on the dot. For a long moment I lay there, trying to decide if I had been dreaming or if somebody had actually spoken. There was an unfamiliar shape on the cot on the other side of my room, and it took me a moment to remember that my brother was crashing here too.

My whole body ached despite Gretchen's efforts. I had been physically abused over the last few days and I was feeling it right now. Every muscle protested as I sat up. Stupid monsters. There was nobody else in my room, so I must have been dreaming. I needed to get up and use the bathroom anyway.

I walked barefoot into the hall and headed for the bathroom. It was quiet. The other doors were closed. I took care of business and headed back to bed.

We need to talk.

I froze, positive that I had heard that. Scanning both ways, I couldn't see anyone. I was alone in the hallway. It had been a woman's voice, I was sure.

Meet me at the front gate. Neutral ground.

What the hell? I was definitely hearing a voice, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. This was weird, and weird was usually bad. I flipped on my light, causing Mosh to snort, grunt, and roll over, pulling his blanket back over his shaved head. I picked up Abomination off my dresser and waited. I was wide awake now.

It's telepathy, stupid. I'm trying to send you a discreet message.

"Susan…" I said slowly, tightening my grip on my weapon.

Yeah. Now pay attention. Broadcasting is hard work. Meet me at the front gate. Come alone. We need to talk. If I wanted to kill you, there are lots of easier ways to do it.

"Bullshit," I stated. I didn't know vampires could do this kind of thing, but I guess it went back to the whole foggy night, hypnotize the victim, and have them walk outside kind of bad Dracula movie thing. This certainly wasn't nearly as smooth as the movies made it look.

You have my word. I need to talk with you, not murder you. It's about our mutual enemy. Time's getting short.

"You can say what you've got to say just fine like this."

"Dude, shut up and kill the light." Mosh muttered. "You're having a bad dream."

I'm trying to help you, moron.

I laughed. "Maybe I don't want your help?"

Oh, so that's how it's going to be. Fine, be stubborn. Don't come alone then. Let me wake up somebody with half a brain and see what they say…

Then the voice was gone. I sat there, my shotgun cradled in my lap, waiting, but nothing else came. "Damn it," I muttered, realizing that if Susan really was at the front gate, then I needed to sound the alarm.

Mosh sat up, finally awake, and obviously frustrated. "Man, you're pissing me off. You've always talked in your sleep and-" He stopped when he saw I had Abomination ready. "Whoa…"

"Naw, it's cool. Stay here." I stood up and stuffed my big feet into my sandals.

"What now?" he asked, rubbing his eyes, suddenly worried.

"Nothing. Go back to sleep," I ordered as I opened my door.

"Oh, yeah, because that'll be easy," my brother responded.

Further down the hall, another door creaked open and Earl stepped out, tugging his leather jacket on over a shirt, Thompson subgun dangling in one hand. He saw me.

"Susan?" I asked.

"Yep," he responded.

"Plan?" I closed my door behind me.

"See what she's got to say, I reckon."

"And what if it's a trap?"

His eyes seemed unnaturally golden in the dim light. "Then I tear her apart."

Earl Harbinger and I moved hastily to the back stairs. We were assuming that Franks was camped out at his usual position and wanted to avoid him. My boss stopped me with a raised hand while he listened down the stairwell. "All clear," he said before padding down. I hadn't realized that Earl was barefoot.

Rather than stopping on the main floor, we continued to the basement. I had no idea where he was leading me. Earl walked quickly through the lower floor, past various storage rooms and the entrance to the archives before turning a corner and heading back into the deepest area of the basement, where I had never really explored. The building really was vast, and I just never really had the time to screw around in the dusty, unused sections. I knew that down here somewhere was Earl's cell for full moons. He finally paused before a closet door.

"What're you doing?" I whispered.

He didn't respond, just unlocked the door with one key from a fat key chain and went straight to the back of the room. He walked to a shelf of cleaning chemicals and shoved it aside. It was on casters and rolled smoothly out of the way to reveal a heavy iron door. He unlocked a padlock, then had to tug the door a few times to get it to open. It creaked on rusty hinges.

Stone stairs led into the darkness.

"You've got to be kidding me…"

"This whole place is riddled with secret passages," he responded. "Every major building in the compound is connected. This will take us right up to the gate. Come on." He started down the stairs.

"Why don't we just walk out the front door and across the parking lot?" I asked, as I examined the cobwebbed rock walls. "That'd be a lot faster."And less creepy, but I left that unsaid, because I didn't want to sound like a wimp. I really didn't like being underground.

"If we do have a spy, I don't want them seeing us meeting with a vampire," he said simply. He had a point. The less the Condition knew, the better off we were.

The tunnel was pitch black. I turned on Abomination's attached Surefire flashlight and the brilliant beam flooded ahead of us. Dust swirled through the light as we disturbed the ground underfoot. The tunnel was at least seven feet tall and four feet wide. "I didn't know about any secret passages."

"There's lots of stuff you don't know yet," my boss replied. "No offense, but you're still new at this."

"Relatively speaking," I responded as we walked. "What's to keep undead from using these to sneak in here?"

He shook his head. "The warding extends underground and into the air above us. It's kind of like a bubble in all directions. That's why I've got it hidden dead center in the middle of the compound for maximum coverage."

"Why don't we just take it with us whenever we go on a case? We could be blowing up undead left and right. That'd be sweet."

"Like I said, you've got a lot to learn. Wards aren't mobile. You can take them someplace and turn them on, but you can only do that so many times before they're worn out, which would be a waste. You've got to tune them for a location, but lots of important places get warded: the White House, the Vatican, NORAD, that kind of thing. But they're rare and expensive. The science of making them has been lost for hundreds of years. There's probably only a dozen ward stones in private hands in the world. I picked ours up off a guy that didn't need his anymore."

We turned a corner. There was an intersection that branched off in different directions. There were a surprising number of tunnels. I was totally disoriented but could tell we were trending upward. "Where'd you get ours from?"

"I looted it from Adolf Hitler's bunker…Ah, here we go." He gestured at a rusty metal ladder sunk into the wall with heavy bolts. He immediately started up, not leaving me a chance to ask if he was pulling my leg or not. "Kill the light."

I shut down my Surefire, dropping us back into darkness. I was blind. There was a scraping noise from above as Earl moved some sort of cover out of the way. A small bit of light cascaded down the hole. It was blocked momentarily as Earl climbed through the gap. I followed.

It felt good to be in the open air. Crickets were chirping everywhere. It took my eyes a minute to adjust. We were just inside the chain-link fence, twenty feet from the front gate and main road. Earl was squatting to the side. He touched my arm and signaled for me to stay low. We were surrounded by kudzu. I sat in the slightly damp vines and waited. The nearest light came from the fat bulbs over the gate, hazy behind visible humidity. Swarms of miscellaneous insects buzzed around the lights, casting hundreds of tiny dot shadows.

"Where is she?" I whispered.

"Shhhh," Earl hissed.

Then the crickets stopped chirping. I realized the temperature was dropping. Suddenly it was abnormally cold and prickles of discomfort moved across my sweat-damp body. A feeling of dread and discomfort settled into my bowels. She was here. "About time." Susan's voice came from somewhere inside the shadowed forest. I scanned the trees but couldn't make out anything. "It's good to see you again, Earl."

"Hey, Granddad," Ray said. "Been a long time." I couldn't spot him either but I kept scanning.

"Make it quick," Earl responded, his voice sounding strangled. This was very hard for him.

"You don't have to be such a prick," Susan responded. "I'm trying to do you a favor. We were family once."

Earl stiffened. "No. A human being named Susan Miner married my grandson, Ray. They were good people. I loved them. But they're dead and gone. You're just an empty shell with no soul and all their memories. So cut the bullshit, and say what you've got to say, you worthless monsters."

Red eyes winked into existence through the fence. They were coming right at us. "You don't want to hear what I've got to say, old man," Ray was mad. "You left me to rot in Appleton for something that wasn't even my fault. You've got more blood on your hands than a legion of vampires. Which one of us is the real monster?"

Harbinger stood. "Well, why don't you just come across this fence and show me what's up then, boy?"

"I would," Ray spat. The red eyes stopped, hovering a stone's throw away. "But I don't feel like dying once and for all. Remember, I know all about your magic rock. Why don't you come over here and we'll finish up some family business."

"Knock it off," Susan ordered. She sounded just like Julie when she said that. "We're not here to fight. I offered a truce, and I'm standing by it."

"You've got your truce for now, but mark my words: I'm going to end your miserable non-lives eventually," Earl vowed. "You threatened my family, so you have to die."

Susan was livid. "I promised I would leave Julie alone."

"We'll see…"

"What do you want?" I asked, speaking up for the first time.

A second pair of eyes approached, swaying through the trees. She stepped from the shadows, an eerie mirror image of Julie, wearing the same dress that she had in Mexico. Her white teeth cut a razor line through the darkness. She was hauntingly beautiful as the humidity turned into swirling fog around her legs. "I want this necromancer gone. He knows I've helped you, and now he's trying to destroy me."

"Help?" I spat. "You can't call anything tainted from the Old Ones help."

"What's it done to you?" Ray asked eagerly. "What did it unlock?"

"Don't answer him," Earl ordered. "Ray talks a big game but he sucks at black magic. Damn near tore an interdimensional hole out Alabama's backside. Caused the death of his own son. He always let his pride blind him to danger."

"I told you that wasn't my fault!" Ray shouted. "I did the best I could."

"And little Ray got his guts torn out for it, as well as over a hundred and twenty other innocent people, including ninety-seven of my Hunters. Appleton was too good for you. I should have left you in that rift with those Old Ones you love so much."

"I was lied to," Ray insisted. "The spell should have worked."

"You can't blame anyone for that but yourself. Nobody lied to you. You dabbled in things no man should, and we all paid for it. If I had known what you were doing, I would have taken you out myself, blood or not. The only person lying here is you. You even set the archives on fire to keep us from finding a way to close your precious gate. You knew exactly what you were doing."

Ray laughed. It was an angry, bitter sound. "I didn't torch the archives, you old fool. I was at Gulf Shores getting ready for the party when that bomb was set. I got suckered, just like you, just like everybody else."

Earl hesitated. I could tell he was angry, itching to fight, but that had thrown him for a loop. I realized with a shock that this was the first time the two had actually spoken since the Christmas party that had almost ended everything. "We always thought you were working on your own."

"I promised Owen I'd tell him as soon as I knew for sure. The same man, or used to be man, that we're fighting now arranged it all…" Susan said. "My poor, distraught husband did what he did out of love. He just wanted to bring me back. If only he had known I was a vampire, and being kept as a slave, unable to contact him- No, Earl, save that anger. Ray was used. This damn necromancer preyed on his weakness, his mourning for me, and twisted it to his advantage, used him in an attempt to establish a bridge to the other side. That's your real enemy, and he's been your real enemy all along. He hates MHI for what it stands for, and he hates you personally, as he has for years."

"No," Earl stated. "Enough of your lies. Don't make excuses for Ray's bad decisions."

"What? You can't handle the truth? You don't want to hear that you punished your grieving grandson, when he was only trying to do the right thing? You don't want to hear that you've been wrong all this time? Well, too damn bad," Susan said. "You screwed up. The real bad guy was under the nose of the mighty Earl Harbinger for years."

"Who then?" he demanded.

"The man who arranged for me to be enslaved in '90. My death was part of his plan. Oh yeah, he was thinking that far ahead. He needed Ray broken and searching for something. The man who orchestrated the destruction of your company and the deaths of all your Hunters in '95, and when you stopped him there, the government completed his job and shut you down anyway. But it goes back even further, and you were too stupid and guilt-ridden to see it. You lost an entire team of Hunters to him before that, simply because one of them knew too much."

"Give…me…a…name.…" Earl said through clenched teeth. His eyes were bright gold now, and he was barely containing his rage. I honestly thought he was going to hop that fence and go toe to toe with both of the vampires.

"What's the matter?" Susan chuckled. "Losing your cool?"

The forest suddenly ignited with light. A red parachute flare was drifting through the sky. The vampires were both clearly visible now. The alarm began to sound, an old-school air raid horn blaring one harsh note across the entire compound.

"It's a trap!" Ray shouted as he moved back into the darkness.

"Damn you," Susan said as she melted away. "I was trying to help."

"No! Give me a name!"

But the vampires were gone.

"What did you do?" I shouted.

"Nothing," he replied. "Somebody must have picked us up on camera. I've got to go after them."

"You'll never catch them. They're way too fast."

"Watch me." He dropped his Tommy gun on the ground and shrugged out of his jacket. "A human couldn't track them, but I can."

"You're going to change?" And not on the full moon? That was insanity. He never did that. It was utter and reckless stupidity.

But Earl was desperate. "I've got to catch them. They're too damn evil to live." One impossibly strong hand grabbed me by the shoulder. The hair on his arms was now carpet thick and his fingernails were abnormally long. "Don't let anybody follow. Get them inside the main building. It's too dangerous out here."

"We can take Susan."

"No." He smiled beneath glowing eyes. All of his teeth were razor sharp and pointy now and his words were slurred and hard to understand. "Because of me." He took three steps, leapt effortlessly over the eight-foot fence and disappeared into the forest.

"I want everybody evacuated from the barracks and into the main building, now!" I shouted at the approaching Hunters. Esmeralda's man Cooper was in the lead. He had his FAL shouldered, was fully geared up, and was sweeping his rifle from side to side. Behind him were a couple of real Newbies, one of the Haight brothers from Utah, Dawn the beauty queen, and one make-believe Newbie, Herzog, still trying to be incognito.

"What's going on?" Cooper asked.

"Doesn't matter. I want everybody inside. Button the place up. This isn't a drill." I must have looked kind of weird, since I was just wearing shorts, a tee shirt, and sandals, but carrying Abomination in one hand and a Thompson in the other. I had tossed Earl's leather jacket over one shoulder, figuring that if he didn't end up committing any atrocities out there tonight while he was shape-shifted and insane, he'd probably want his stuff back in good shape.

All of us started back across the parking lot to the main entrance. Cooper was excited. "Yesterday Julie started having us take turns, working in pairs, monitoring the security system. She told us to be ready for anything. We caught a couple of figures on thermal and went to check it out. We were just getting off shift and these guys were coming on. When we saw the undead we sounded the alarm."

"How'd you know they were vampires?"

"I had two on thermal, but four on night vision," Cooper explained. "No body heat. Dude, that was like an ‘oh shit' moment."

I bit my tongue. He had done exactly what he was supposed to have done. The timing had sucked, but it was what it was. "You did good. Head that way and clear out the barracks. And no word about vampires to anyone, got it?"

"Sure thing." Cooper ran off with the two Newbies in tow. Dawn hesitated, like she wanted to talk to me, but I had to hand it to her, she followed orders. Herzog, on the other hand, didn't give a damn about my MHI seniority and stayed with me.

"You better go keep up appearances."

"Shut up, punk," the undercover MCB agent snapped. "What were you doing outside without coverage?"

"Taking a stroll," I replied. "I do love spring nights." In the distance there was a terrible noise. A wolf's howl, but it was unbelievably loud and the pitch sounded too human. I had to remember that Earl wasn't just a werewolf. He was the friggin’ king of werewolves, the ultimate alpha male.

Herzog almost leapt out of her boots. "What the hell was that?"

I was terrified of werewolves myself because of personal experience, but I didn't let it show. "That there is why I want everyone inside. For an agent, you sure are jumpy."

The noise startled the stocky woman from her usual hard-core façade. "Screw that. I'm no field agent! I'm not used to this crap. Let's go." She took off, moving with the speed of somebody who figured they were about to be monster chow, stubby legs pumping.

Not a field agent? I frowned. That didn't make any sense. She'd been assigned to protect me. Myers had said they were some of his best men…handpicked. We were about a hundred feet from the front door and Hunters were piling out, throwing on weapons and gear in response to the alarm. I caught the short woman in a couple of steps, let Abomination hang by the sling, grabbed Herzog around her bicep, and spun her back to face me.

"Hey!" she shouted.

"Not a field agent? What are you?" I demanded.

She began to stammer something. I squeezed harder. "I'm a clerk!" she squealed. "Admin clerk. But…but I'm a fully sworn agent. I've been through MCB school. Let go."

"A clerk?" I released her arm.

Her face fell. "I was at the IRS and I came across some top-secret returns about PUFF. I did some poking around and that's how I found out about monsters. I've never actually seen one. Even the MCB needs somebody to shuffle paper, so they offered me a job and sent me through the academy." Harbinger howled again. He was fully transformed now and he sounded relatively close. "Please, let's get inside!"

"Why are you on a protective detail?" This didn't make any sense at all.

"I don't know. Agent Myers assigned me to Agent Franks' command for this mission." Her beady eyes darted around nervously. She was really freaked out.

"What about Torres and Archer?"

"Oh no, Anthony's a full-on pro. He's been on all sorts of missions. But Henry's more like me. He's a crypto-commo geek. That's what he did in the Army. But he's cool and he's actually been on a few missions with real monsters, but I don't know if he's actually ever killed any. Please, let's get out of here, before whatever that is comes and gets us."

She sure had been a lot tougher when she had been threatening me with a gun. "Go." I nodded toward the door. Something was fishy. Franks was a one-man wrecking crew, but the Goon Squad weren't the hardened killers that I had been led to believe they were. Torres had been by far the nicest of the bunch but he was the only one who had actually seen the elephant.

I would have to think about it later. A bunch of Hunters were fanned out, covering the entrance, weapons pointing outward in a rough semicircle of potential destruction. I had to remember that only the old-timers and the ones wearing Happy Face team patches knew about Earl's little secret. The alarm died off and two giant spotlights ignited on the roof, sweeping randomly across the perimeter.

It was a relief to see Julie come trotting out, brutal M14 in her lovely hands. "What's going on? Are you okay?" Herzog's stocky form pushed past Julie and retreated inside the relative safety of the fortress.

"I'm fine. Your parents are here."

"Damn them!" she shouted. Several other hunters jumped at that.

"And…" I raised Earl's empty jacket. She knew right away what had happened.

"Everybody inside now!" Julie ordered. "Move! Move! Where's Dorcas?"

Our receptionist was leaning in the doorway in a flowery, old-lady nightgown. Her hair was up in curlers. The reason she was leaning was because she hadn't had a chance to attach her artificial leg yet. It was tucked under one arm. A massive stainless-steel revolver hung loose in her hand. "Yep?"

"Once everybody's in, I want a full head count. We've got a Code Silver." She gestured at Earl's leather jacket.

"Aw shit. Not this again," Dorcas muttered. "Let's go, kiddies." She pushed off from the doorframe and hopped out of sight.

I stayed with Julie at the entrance until the last of the Newbies was roused from the barracks and herded inside. She glanced around, careful to make sure that there was nobody close enough to overhear us. "Why'd he do it? The full moon was a week ago. He didn't have to change."

"He did it on purpose. He was going after your folks," I whispered. "I think he was dead set on not letting them get away."

"That was stupid." Julie shook her head. She hadn't had a chance to tie her hair back, and it was so dark and shiny that it reflected the spotlights. "Well, at least he should have some judgment right now. The closer to the full moon, the more out of control it is. He shouldn't wander into town and eat anyone. Sometimes I'm really glad we're in the middle of nowhere."

"What about Skippy's village?"

"They know to get inside when they hear the alarm. Skip knows what to do and they've all got silver bullets. Earl goes in there and they'll shoot him. Nothing personal, that's just how it is, and Earl would understand. Their wargs will give them plenty of early warning. Let's get inside."

The two of us were the last ones in. We pulled the massive doors closed behind us and threw down the bar. There were a bunch of really confused, half-asleep, heavily-armed, almost-graduated Newbies wandering around the reception area. The Hunters experienced enough to know about Code Silver were busy getting everybody calmed down and oriented. Julie rested her head on my shoulder briefly so she could whisper, affording us a tiny bit of affection amid the chaos. "I hope he catches them…"

Wrapping my arms around her, I squeezed her tight. It would be really nice to have the curse of Susan and Ray removed once and for all. "Me too." Damn it, we had almost had a name. I had been right. The shadow man was somebody from MHI's past. If we knew who he was, we could find and destroy him, but that was assuming Susan was even telling the truth to begin with.

I let go of Julie so she could get back to damage control. Monster Hunters by their nature are not an easily riled bunch, but they were also intensely curious, and with Earl out running naked and hairy through the woods chasing vampires, that left Julie as the de facto head of operations. She needed to get everyone taken care of.

Dorcas had finished taking a quick roll and reported in. "Your grandfather's upstairs, has his hearing aids out, so slept through the alarm. Milo's in Cazador at his house. Everyone else who should be here is accounted for." She added the next bit with extra volume for anyone listening. "Oh, and Earl Harbinger is in Montgomery on business."

I noticed my folks standing near the wall of memorial plaques; they'd apparently been woken up by the alarm. Mosh was coming down the stairs. So I had some explaining to do myself. I started toward my parents and was almost there when a whisper filtered through my mind.

This message from Susan was weaker than the others. She was either further away, or hopefully busy getting her arms pulled off by an angry werewolf. It was a single word.

…Hood…

That sounded familiar. I paused, turning slowly. The wall of plaques stretched before me under the Latin Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. My hand automatically flew to the silver surfaces, passing quickly through them, each cool to the touch. I found the one I was looking for within seconds.

A. Martin Hood

1/14/1960-10/17/1986

Chapter 12

3:45 A.M. Back in the conference room, with the only people who I knew I could trust: Julie, Trip, Holly, and the absent Milo on the speaker phone.

"Do you remember this guy, Hood?" I asked. "Supposedly he died in '86."

Julie shook her head. "Kind of, but I was too young. I know I met him, but I couldn't tell you anything about him. Milo?"

"You sound funny on speaker. You aren't that high-pitched in real life, Julie," he replied. "He was the one who made the balloon animals at your birthday party a couple of years. He was really good at that."

"Oh! Dad's pudgy friend."

"Yeah, Marty Hood. The fat funny guy. He was on Earl's team when I first joined up. Couldn't ask for a nicer Hunter. I was a really young Newbie and he was always helpful. He had a reputation of being smart. One of the nerdy, brainy types, rather than the kick-in-the-door-and-blast-everything kind of Hunter. No offense, Z." That made me smile. I had a bit of a reputation. "Julie-him, your dad, and Myers were good friends, like brothers. Earl loved him like a son. I didn't know him that well, but I really liked him. He died not too long after I came aboard."

That didn't sound at all like the hyper-intense religious fanatic I had met.

Holly cut in. "Yeah, he was man of the year, but was he British?"

Milo answered immediately. "Yes, he was. I remember that. I thought it was funny, because he was from Birmingham, only the England one, not the Alabama one."

Holly sat back in her chair, looking smug. "Bingo."

"Looks like we've got our wizard," Trip replied. "He must have faked his own death."

The speaker-phone box was a triangular plastic thing and the noise that came through it had to have been Milo Anderson clearing his throat. "Uh…that's not real likely, Trip."

"So you had a body?" I asked.

"Well…we had most of a body. But it was obviously him. And we gave him a Hunter's Funeral, so there's no way you can fake that." Milo had a point. A Hunter's Funeral featured a decapitation. When you had to deal with the icky, contagious things that refused to die as often as we did, beheading and cremating your dead was a good habit to get into. "I saw the body, so did a bunch of others. No, Marty Hood died, and it was really horrible, and permanent…and messy."

Holly was nonplussed. "Magic."

Trip shook his head. "Real magic isn't just where you can wiggle your fingers and say some words and then break all the laws of physics. There's got to be another explanation."

"Yes, there is," Julie added. "My mother's a liar, and she picked a random dead British Hunter to make us waste our time." The hate in her voice was obvious. "We can't trust her." That explanation was plausible. Susan's motives were murky at best and only a fool would trust the dead. Julie unconsciously rubbed the mark on her neck, reminding me again of how Susan had said that the mark was eventually going to kill the love of my life. I needed to believe that Susan was a liar.

"So how did he die then?" Trip asked. It took my tired brain a moment to remember that Trip hadn't been there when Harbinger had admitted to killing Hood by accident, thereby earning Myers' eternal animosity.

The phone was quiet for a real long time. Finally, and with obvious reluctance, Milo began to speak. "I don't know if I should be telling you this. It's probably something that you need to talk to Earl about, not me. I wasn't there when it went down. I just helped clean up."

"Earl's a little busy and can't come to the phone right now," Holly said. "You know, blood-lust rampage…"

"It was an accident," I added, prompting Milo to go on. "It was Earl's fault." The others looked at each other in confusion.

"You know already?" Milo asked, sounding relieved. "Well, in that case, yeah, it was a terrible accident. I got there too late to help. Dorcas had already been taken to the hospital. Ray had gotten it under control and barricaded the door while he regenerated."

"Huh?" Julie asked. "While who regenerated?"

"Earl," Milo responded like this was the most obvious thing in the world. "Dwayne wanted to finish him off, go in there with a 12-gauge and some silver double-aught, but Ray pulled a gun on him. They got into a big fight. Dwayne was really mad."

Milo's stories tended to jump around a lot. "Dwayne?" Trip asked.

"Myers…" I responded. "Back when he was with MHI. Right?"

"Yeah, he was going nuts. Wanted to go in there and take Earl out, walked right up to the door with a shotgun, only Ray just laid him out cold, then stuck a.45 in his face. Hood's blood was everywhere. It was really intense."

"Okay, you need to back up a whole bunch," Holly suggested. "You lost me a while ago."

"Just like tonight. It was a Code Silver," Milo said.

There was a hard knock on the door. It immediately opened and Dorcas, still wearing her flowered nightgown, was standing there, out of breath. She had finally gotten the chance to strap her leg on. The old lady slammed the door behind her, seething, hobbled right up to the table, pulled up a chair next to me and flopped into it with a grunt.

The four of us exchanged glances. Dorcas didn't speak, she was breathing too hard. I suspected that she had actually run up the stairs. Her face was red beneath her white hair and pink curlers. "What? Who's that?" Milo asked.

"I caught part of your call when I picked up my phone downstairs," the crotchety old lady said. "Y'all need to remember to use the secure line if you're gonna be talking about secret stuff." She gave us all a withering death glare. "Spies and whatnot all around this place, and you use an unencrypted line?"

"Sorry," Julie responded, looking embarrassed. In the rush she had just called Milo directly. Even somebody like Julie could slip up when in a hurry at three in the morning. She started fiddling with the phone.

"Milo, you've got no business sharing this story. It ain't your story to share. You weren't there until the end."

"No, ma'am," Milo automatically replied. His response to cranky, scary old ladies was exactly the same as mine. "But they need to know."

"Damn right, they do," she answered. "But let somebody who was there tell it. I earned that much." Dorcas leaned way back in her chair, reached under her nightgown and pulled on a couple of straps. Her plastic leg popped right off. She tossed the prosthetic on the table with a clang. It had a fire-breathing warthog engraved on it and there was a pink slipper on the foot. "I earned it."

"Yes, ma'am. Yes, you did."

"That's right, that's why I'm gonna tell it." Dorcas gestured at Holly. "Get me some coffee, girl. Black. Move." Even Holly knew better than to argue with that. Then Dorcas turned to me. "You, what did I tell you about werewolves when we first met?" She stabbed one bony finger at me like an angry question mark.

"That you used to kill them yourself…before one took your leg."

"That's right, Z, my boy. Those of us who've got torn up by those things understand. Only you got all cured up by those Old Ones and lost your scars. Well, I got to keep mine. I earned my scars." She reached over and poked me in the forehead, right where my big scar had been.

The conference room disappeared.

What's that ruckus? It was coming from the old slave quarters. I sat up in bed and listened. Earl was unnaturally agitated. Hell, he sounded right crazy. My watch said it was just shy of two in the morning. I got out of bed. The guestroom of the Shackleford place was real nice, but there was no rug in here, and the wood was October cold under my feet. I winced a little. Wide awake now, I pulled the curtain open and looked outside.

The little building that they kept Earl locked up in during the full moon was right under my window. The old slave quarters they called it. Damned bunch of scratched-up rocks I called it. The moon was bright and there weren't no clouds in front of it right then, so I could see somebody standing outside the door of that little prison fiddling with the chains. Damn idiot. What was he trying to do? Let loose a werewolf? Best put a stop to this nonsense real fast. My armor was sitting on an old chair by the bed, but I didn't have time for that. My team patch, Sparky the Warthog, was on the sleeve, but I probably wouldn't need ol' Sparky. Probably just some stupid country kid trying to figure out what kind of animal the crazy old Shackleford family kept locked in that little outbuilding. I stopped to get hold of my Ruger Redhawk and my flashlight, because my momma didn't raise no fools, and nobody ever said that Dorcas Peabody was a fool.

I hurried downstairs. I always was a fast runner. Even though I was starting to feel the age and the pains and whatnot, I could still show up those youngster hotshot Hunters. There were a bunch of us staying at the old Shackleford place tonight, Hunters from all over the damn place. Big case just got wrapped up, and it was nearing Halloween, which was always our busy season, so we'd celebrated, and I had drunk a little too much with dinner. It had been good to see so many old friends. I suppose I had probably drunk less than some of the other Hunters, though, which was probably why I was the first one to get my ass downstairs and out the back porch.

The soles of my feet were hard as leather. Where I grew up in Tuscumbia on the Tennessee River, shoes were for church and that was about it. Even though I could afford real nice shoes now, I still had country feet. I didn't even notice what was under them as I walked to the old slave quarters. All I was thinking about was somebody messing with Earl's door and how nobody was fool enough to let loose a werewolf.

A big cloud moved in front of the moon, making it dark. Looks like rain. I turned on the flashlight and pointed it at the slave quarters twenty paces away, lighting up the man by the door. I’ll be damned. It's a Hunter. It was that dumpy limey kid, the one that Dwayne trained, and from what I'd heard, he was supposed to be smart enough to know better than to screw with Earl in this state. The kid had just got moved to Carlos' team back east, what the devil was his name again?

"Hood?" I asked. "What in the hell are you doing with that lock?"

He turned, looking at me, and he had a real funny look on his moon face. "I can't stop it." He had a ring of keys in his stubby fingers and I noticed that all the chains to Earl's door had been unlocked and were laying in a big mess at his feet. Werewolf Earl was just plain crazy, slamming into the door, sensing meat and blood right on the other side, just taunting him into a frenzy. The only thing keeping the door closed now was the big block of wood barred across it. "I can't stop it," he said again, sounding all sorts of crazy.

"Boy, you gone nuts? Get back from that door!"

"He's in my head!" His big eyes blinked at me, real stupid, like there was something wrong in his head. He was scared, and damn well he should be, because werewolves were some scary shit! He was bawling and tears were pouring down his face. "I can't stop it." Earl slammed into the door, hard enough to shake the entire building. But the Shacklefords had reinforced the door with bands of iron years ago. It would hold, unless Hood lifted that bar.

"You open that door, and Earl's gonna put a stop to you, right quick," I said, not even thinking about the.45 Long Colt in my hand. This was a fellow Hunter. No way he could be stupid enough to open that door. That'd be suicide.

Hood committed suicide.

The fat kid turned around, hooked his fists under that big old bar and lifted it real hard. It popped out and fell on the ground.

I was surprised. Hood stepped back. "It's done," he said, smiling, then started to say something else, but that's when the door flew open with a bang, and there was just this bunch of pale fur and golden eyes flashing 'round under the moon. Hood started to scream as claws lit into him. He got opened up. Guts spilling out, flying all over, and then he went down, the werewolf on top of him, arms and legs just a-kicking, blood spraying. He just kept screaming for what seemed like forever, but probably was only a couple seconds, before Earl sunk his teeth into Hood's throat and went to town.

"Oh, no," I said. I was pointing my big old.45 right between those golden eyes. We had talked about this. Everybody that knew about Earl's condition knew what to do. We weren't supposed to hesitate, just shoot him. That's what Earl wanted.

I hesitated. The werewolf was squatting on the body, just ripping and eating and tearing. Hood was sprayed all over as sure as somebody had stuffed a grenade in him. Blood and snot was just pouring off Earl's teeth and dripping all over Hood's face. The kid's eyes were open. His neck was gone and blood was all over the ground. Earl looked right at me, then took a slow step off the body, coming closer. Then he took another step. And another.

I had killed more werewolves than any other Hunter ever. I thumb-cocked the hammer. Kill him!

But I didn't. For the first time in my life, I didn't have the guts to do what needed to be done. I had known Earl for thirty years, met him clear back when I had been a pretty young thing. I had loved him once, but I had kept on getting older while he had stayed the same, and that kind of thing could never work right. He'd known that. He'd convinced me, a silly girl with a crush, of that. But I just couldn't shoot Earl.

"Earl, it's me. Dorcas. You listen up. You stop right there."

Another step.

"Don't make me kill you. Listen to me. Stop-"

Those eyes were glued to me. He moved so fast…

Earl hit me in the chest. I was flying through the air, then I landed on my face. A big old claw landed on my foot and pulled me back to him, filling my mouth with dirt. Then he flipped me over. My gun came up for shooting, but he knocked it out of my hand. One claw slammed my thigh to the ground while the other one lifted my foot right straight up. My knee broke and I hollered.

It came right off. My leg tore right off! He just pulled so hard in both directions at one time that the muscle just ripped apart. It hurt so bad, Christ Almighty, it hurt bad. I must have passed out for a second, because next thing I knew, I was crawling, squirting blood all over, and Earl was back there, squatting, holding my leg in his hands and eating it. The son of a bitch was eating my leg, just chewing away. Where’d my gun go?

Then he tossed my leg over his shoulder and came at me on all fours. This time I knew he was gonna eat my guts and for the first time in forever, I was scared, damn scared, piss your pants, know you're gonna die scared. He stopped, and those yellow eyes got all scrunched up, and then I heard the gunshots. Earl turned to see who was shooting him, but a big old chunk of meat flew out of his chest, and he went down. Silver bullet.

"Dorcas! Are you okay? How'd Earl get out? Oh shit! Your leg!"

It was Dwayne Myers. I tried to tell him what happened, but my head hurt too bad and the words wouldn't come out. I had this damn ringing in my ears and I felt real cold.

Somebody else grabbed hold of me and I felt something hard twist around my leg. Hunters were here and they were all jabbering now. I wanted them to shut the hell up so I could close my eyes, but I knew that was probably just the blood loss talking. I started to come in and out. Black and then moonlight, stuff happening, all confusing, then back to black. Ray, always so damn brave, grabbed one of Earl's hairy arms and dragged him back inside the slave quarters, then came back out and slammed the door shut. Black. Dwayne was crying now, holding what was left of Hood in his arms and rocking back and forth. Dwayne was all covered in blood.

I finally managed to say something, but I wasn't sure who I was talking to. "Don't kill Earl. It ain't his fault."

Black.

Black.

I opened my eyes. I was myself again, Owen Zastava Pitt. This magic stuff was one bad trip. I had just lived for a moment as a middle-aged woman, and experienced having my leg torn clean off by a vicious beast. My knee hurt with a phantom pain from over twenty years ago. Glancing around, conference room, same people, Dorcas was talking, but it was just a background buzz. I had just lived the story as she'd brought the memory up. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was a much younger Agent Myers, kneeling, with half of a torso in his lap, exposed ribs in mangled flesh, and a flopping, nearly decapitated head cradled in his arms, his white shirt soaked red, as he cursed Earl Harbinger to hell.

The other Hunters were enthralled as Dorcas told her story. Gradually the humming in my ears tapered off, and the black flashes inside my eyes died down. I could hear words again.

"So that damn fool, Hood, lifted the bar, and Earl flew out and tore him apart. I went for my gun, but Earl came over and ripped my leg off. Then Myers came out and shot Earl a couple of times with silver bullets."

"I never knew…" Julie said. "That's horrible."

"Why didn't you shoot him?" Holly asked.

"He was just too damn fast, and I was sleepy and not paying attention," Dorcas lied.

"No," I said without thinking. "You didn't want to shoot him…" My head was still really clouded.

Dorcas glared at me, eyes like dangerous little pinpricks. "What was that, boy?"

"Nothing, ma'am," I responded quickly.

"Thought so," she snapped. "If you're ever close to him on the full moon, remember, he ain't got no control then. A real Hunter don't hesitate. You put him down. Put him down hard. Got that?"

"Yes, ma'am," all of us responded in unison. Dorcas continued to eye me suspiciously. Maybe she wasn't really lying. Maybe she had told this story enough times that she honestly didn't remember about how as a young woman she had once been so in love with Earl Harbinger that she had almost let him murder her decades later.

Either way…none of my business.

"Are you positive that it really was him?" Holly demanded.

"Yeah, I'm positive. Everybody was positive. Earl near tore his head off. That's hard to fake. Now where the hell's my coffee?"

"Sorry…" Holly murmured and returned to the coffeepot.

"That doesn't make any sense," Trip said contemplatively. "Did he say anything?"

"The whole thing was kind of fuzzy," Dorcas answered. She had undergone an intense trauma, so that was understandable. "He said he couldn't stop. Like he had no choice, like he had to open that door. It don't make no sense to me, but that's what he said."

"Why'd he do it? Did you guys investigate?" I asked.

Milo chimed in. "Of course. But we never found anything. He was totally normal one minute, then he did something monumentally stupid. It was like he was trying to kill himself, but he never gave any indication beforehand. His teammates were more surprised than anybody. Hood wasn't the suicidal type."

"He was on Carlos' team. Is he still around?"

"How'd you know that?" Dorcas asked. She had been suspicious before, and that had just confirmed it.

"Don't matter," I replied quickly, and I could tell she didn't like that one bit. Well, I didn't like being telepathic either, so too damn bad. There wasn't time to be polite. "Can we talk to this Carlos? Maybe a Hunter from that team will know something about this shadow man."

Dorcas shook her head. "Carlos Alhambra's team was lost." She thought about it for a moment. "Probably about three years after Hood got eaten. Like '89, I figure."

"A year before my mom disappeared," Julie added.

"How do you lose a team of Hunters?" Holly asked slowly.

Dorcas made a motion with her hands like a magician doing a trick. "Poof. Just gone. They were working a case and they just never came back. Five good men missing."

"Carlos was the only survivor," Julie said. "I remember because I was young and it terrified me. All I could think was that could have been one of my parents lost like that. They found him wandering through the forest weeks later, dazed, half-dead from exposure, his mind totally gone. No sign was ever found of his team."

"I've heard that story before somewhere," I said.

Julie nodded. "You met him. He's still a patient at Appleton."

"That's right." Dr. Nelson had showed me on the tour. Carlos had been in the wing of the Appleton Asylum reserved for the seriously damaged cases. That wing of the place had haunted me, noises of gibbering madness coming from behind every steel door while the good doctor had lectured me about the dangers a Hunter's mind could be exposed to. "Susan just said that Hood had taken out a team of Hunters and we had never even suspected…She said that they had learned too much."

"We've got to go talk to him," Trip said.

"Carlos hasn't said a word to anybody since they found him…All he does is sit there and hum children's songs and shit himself. His brain turned to mush. Whatever he saw messed him up something fierce," Dorcas said sadly. "He was a good man."

"Too bad," Holly muttered as she shoved coffee to Dorcas. "If he could talk, he'd probably lead us right to this shadow freak."

There might be a way. I glanced at Julie. She must have known exactly what I was thinking, because she shook her head. I didn't need psychic powers to know that she thought it was stupid and dangerous. We had no idea how these weird powers worked or what side effects they might have. All I knew was that anything that came from the other side had to come with a price. And dredging through the memories of a madman was probably not the best idea anyway.

"Don't you even think it," Julie said. "I'm putting my foot down."

"What?" I asked with feigned innocence.

"Huh?" Trip asked.

"Nothing," Julie responded. "Owen was just thinking of doing something asinine."

"What'd I miss?" Milo asked.

"Nothing. Sleep on it, and we'll see you in the morning." Julie stabbed the button and ended the call. "Dorcas, would you mind going back downstairs and checking on the Newbies? It isn't safe to send them back to the barracks yet, so we'll probably need to think up a story. I'll be down in a minute."

The old lady grumbled as she pulled her leg off the table and strapped it back on. She was the only one here who didn't know about what I was experiencing. Dorcas stood with a wobble, snatched up her Styrofoam cup, and headed for the door.

"Hey, Dorcas," I stopped her. "Thanks for telling us about that."

The old lady gave us a bitter smile. "There's always been too damn many secrets around this place," she said, knowing full well she was getting left out of something. She was on the list of potential spies, though personally I really doubted that. It would be a cold day in hell before I could imagine that woman signing up with a death cult. "Do what you gotta do, kids. I'd do the same if I were you." Then, in a flash of pastel bathrobe and the slam of the door, she was gone.

"Well, now we know why she's MHI's little cup of sunshine," Holly said.

"Like you've got room to talk," Trip responded. "That's you in a few years."

Holly reached over and punched him in the arm. Trip flinched.

This whole thing sucked. Earl had been right from the beginning. The very idea that a fellow Hunter could be betraying us was painful and damaging. I swore to myself that I was going to catch the son of a bitch so we could get back to normal. But first things first…Julie didn't waste any time. She turned to me. "You can't try to read Carlos' mind. That's suicide."

"You got a better idea?"

She paused, rubbing her neck. "Not really. But you don't know what you're doing. Do you honestly think you can control it?"

"Sure I can," I said with false confidence. "Compared to time travel, it'll be a walk in the park.

Holly laughed. "Then you're an idiot. You just had an episode when Dorcas was talking, didn't you? You got all glassy eyed and stupid for a second. I thought you were going to drool on the table."

"Again?" Julie asked with alarm. "How many more times has this happened?"

"Just a couple little ones," I lied.

"I don't like it, man. You're messing with things you don't understand," Trip said. "There's got to be another way. We've got his name."

"The Feds have more resources," Holly added. "They can probably find him better than we can. Like with secret databases and the Patriot Act or something."

"Do you really think the Patriot Act has a clause for necromancers?" I asked pointedly.

"You know what I mean. We should tell Franks, and let them handle it. It's not like we're getting paid for this."

Julie agreed with Holly. "They're right. It's too dangerous."

I didn't say anything, but my friends knew me far too well, surely understanding that I'd had enough. They continued to come up with reasons why I should just stay safe. But I was tired of waiting. Screw it. I stood, placed my palms on the table, and raised my voice. "These assholes have tried to kill me and my entire family. As long as they're out there, everybody I love is in danger, and that includes you guys. Sitting around powerless is pissing me off. You want to sic the Feds on him, fine, whatever, but this is my fight. This is personal. So now it looks like my enemy is this Hood guy and we've got a lead. Yeah, it's a pretty iffy lead, but it's what we've got. So I'm going to Appleton, and I'm going to find out what those missing Hunters learned, even if I have to rip it right out of his brain."

The others were quiet after my outburst. Finally, Julie broke the silence. She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. "You're the most stubborn man I've ever known."

"And that's why you love me. Look, I'll just sneak out. Nobody will even know I'm gone. You guys cover for me, tell everyone I'm asleep in my room or something. If the Condition thinks I'm here, then they won't even know to grab me."

"You're not going anywhere alone," Trip said. "I've got your back, Z."

That wasn't a surprise. Trip was probably the single most honestly noble person I had ever known. He typified all that was heroic about Monster Hunters.

"We’ve got your back," Holly added.

"I thought you didn't want to get involved if you weren't getting paid for it?" I asked, knowing that Holly talked a big game about being the hard-ass, but deep down, she was just as loyal as Trip.

"Don't be such a douche bag."

If I told them it was too dangerous, then I suppose that would make me a hypocrite. Trying to talk them out of it would be as futile as them trying to talk me down. So I said what I could. "Thanks. You guys up for a field trip to the insane asylum?"

After changing into street clothes, concealing some guns, and grabbing our gear bags for a worst-case scenario, Trip, Holly, and I snuck down the back stairs. In theory, if nobody saw us leave, then we wouldn't have to worry about the spy. Unfortunately for Julie, with Earl currently indisposed, she was in charge, and in a couple of hours most of the MHI team leads from around the country would be arriving to sort through and pick out their favorite Newbies, so she was stuck here being managerial. For the rest of us, our absences wouldn't be missed, but no Julie would be glaringly obvious. She didn't like it much either.

There was no sign of Franks or the other Feds. There was no way that he would let me go, short of me beating him unconscious, and from I'd seen, I didn't even know if that was possible. The front area was still packed with Newbies. Some had found spots to go back to sleep, but most of them were still milling around because of the excitement and the fact that they were still guessing about why they had been rousted out of the barracks. Julie was just going to have to deal with that problem.

I made eye contact with Grant as we were leaving. He'd been on Harbinger's team and knew the drill. He went back to feeding some line of bull to the Newbies. The three of us just kept walking. He was still a jackass, but it was nice having another experienced man on hand.

We gathered by the back door. The coast was clear. The plan was to discreetly grab a car from the lot and head for Appleton. It wasn't that far a drive, and we should be able to get there before sunrise. Hopefully Earl was still chasing vampires, so we wouldn't run into him. Julie was supposed to be covering for us right now and taking care of whoever was manning the security room. With luck, the Condition would never even know I was gone.

I hoped.

"You ready?" I asked, heavy bag shouldered, hand on the latch.

"Let's get out of here," Holly said. Trip gave me a thumbs-up. I patted my pocket to make sure I had the car keys. Still there. Good to go. A hundred yards to the car, and we were gone. I shoved open the heavy door and stepped into the night, only to immediately come to an abrupt stop. "Aw hell…"

Agent Franks was sitting on the concrete steps directly in front of the back exit. His face was emotionless behind his sunglasses as he fiddled with his fancy PDA. His gloved thumbs moved across the keypad. He was a surprisingly fast texter for a man with such large digits. "You think I'm stupid?" he asked, not bothering to look up.

"Is that a rhetorical question?" Holly responded.

"What are you doing out here, Franks?" I growled. I didn't have time for this nonsense.

"Checking my e-mail," he said. He finished what he was doing, closed the device and dropped it into a suit pocket. Now he turned his head slightly to study me. I could see my reflection in his shades. I had no idea why he was wearing them in the dark. It took him an infuriatingly long time to phrase his next question. "Going somewhere?"

"No," I answered, giant canvas bag large enough to hide a dead body slung over my shoulder, proving me an obvious liar. This was really making me angry. I was tired of this oppressive jerk getting in my way, because regardless of whatever the hell he really was, man or monster, Franks was above all a pain in my ass. "Didn't you hear there's a werewolf out? There's safer places for you to hang out while you download porn."

"You probably shouldn't do that on a government computer anyway," Trip pointed out. "That's a misuse of taxpayer funds."

Holly's voice was flat. "Naw, I'm cool with it. The more time federal agents spend masturbating, the less time they have to screw around with us."

The muscular Fed slowly stood, drawing himself to his full height, nonchalantly dusted his pants off, and then got right up in my face. He was remarkably intimidating, but I didn't blink. A giant vein pulsed in his forehead. "Where are you going?"

I'd had enough of this clown. If he wanted to throw down, now was as good a time as any, and I wasn't going to go out as easy as the last time we had tangled. I dropped my gear bag on the concrete at Franks' feet. "Wherever I damn well feel like."

"Is that so?" Franks responded slowly.

Always the peacemaker, Trip stepped forward. "Listen, Agent Franks, we've got a tip about the Condition. This is our chance to find out what's going on. Let us go take care of business. Anything we learn helps your mission just as much as it does ours." Leave it to Trip Jones to resort to reason when I was all ready to get my violence on.

"A tip?"

"The kind that only I can access," I responded. The silent jerk wasn't going to let us pass, there was no way. But I would be damned if I was going to be his prisoner in my own home while a gang of psychotic cultists plotted against my family. My pulse quickened. If I sucker-punched him I'd have a chance… Right in the nose, then push him down the stairs, kick him while he was down, and run for the car. Franks probably wouldn't shoot me since he was tasked with protecting me. Probably. "The kind of tip that leads us right to the shadow man."

Franks appeared to think about it, wheels ponderously turning. "You aren't going anywhere-" Decision made, my right hand flew up, fingers tightening into a fist the split second before impact, three hundred pounds of muscle driven by righteous fury and years of mixed martial arts experience, in a brilliant sneak attack maneuver-

Blocked.

Not just blocked, but somehow Franks actually raised his hand and caught my fist an inch from his shades. He shut me down so hard that it was like a kindergartener trying to fight back against a fifth-grade bully. He twisted, using my leverage against me, tendons crying in protest, as he bore down on my joints. I squealed like a little girl and went automatically to my knees. His other hand flew under his suit coat and came out with a Glock that he promptly stuck in Holly's face. She stopped doing whatever it was that she was doing, probably reaching for a weapon, and calmly raised her hands.

"Ow ow ow ow…" I said, my elbow touching my forehead and my wrist bent at an impossible angle somewhere behind my neck. The pain was unbelievable. For a second, Franks seemed to ponder what would happen if he just tossed me face first down the stairs, but then the pressure let up.

He kept the Glock on Holly, which was probably wise. "As I was saying, you aren't going anywhere…" He let go of my wrist and tingly nerve fire shot down my arm. I fell on my butt. Franks lowered his gun. "…without me."

Trip extended one hand to help me up. "Really?"

I groaned as my friend assisted me off the stairs. How embarrassing. Franks had read me like an open book. "You're letting us go?"

He nodded once, keeping one eye on Holly, as if waiting for her to attempt something nefarious. She tried to look innocent. "This better be good," Franks muttered as he turned his back and started down the steps. A werewolf howl reverberated across the compound. "You drive. My truck's in the shop."

Chapter 13

It was a long, hushed drive to Appleton. Trip drove and I rode up front, with Holly and Satan's G-man in the back seat of the MHI Crown Vic. Since the last time I had gone anywhere with Franks I had actually shoved a.45 in his ear, I could understand why he chose to sit directly behind me. The mood was unnaturally somber as Franks' presence had a stifling effect on our normal conversation. I bet he was just a blast at parties.

I had asked him at one point if he was going to contact his superiors or the rest of his protective detail to notify them of our destination. He had responded with a single raised eyebrow, which indicated to me a big negative on that idea. Because not only would he get ordered to turn around, he didn't like his current assignment any more than I did, and the sooner he could wrap this case up, the better. It was kind of frightening that I got that from a single eyebrow, and indicated to me that I was spending way too much quality time around Franks.

"Does anybody have the Nelsons in their address book?" I asked as we neared Camden. The good doctors probably deserved a warning about our visit. The last time I had been here to see a patient, gargoyles had destroyed half the place, smashed a few patients into mush, and given the husband of the Nelson team a heart attack.

Holly responded. "I do. I'll call them."

I had no idea that she even knew them, though it made sense. The Nelsons were former old-school MHI members, one psychologist and one psychiatrist, who specialized in helping the victims of monster violence. Of all of us, Holly Newcastle had experienced the most brutal and unforgiving introduction to the real world of any Hunter I knew, as a captive in a vampire feeding pit. Even after all this time, she had still never confided her whole story to even her closest friends.

I caught Trip glancing at the rearview mirror to sneak a look at Holly. He was probably thinking the exact same thing I was. Was she getting counseling or something? If so, good for her. This stuff was brutally hard on the brain and I would never fault anybody for wanting to talk to a professional about it, especially somebody that actually got it, like the Nelsons. "Have you been visiting Appleton?" Trip asked. Even Hunters had days off, and it wasn't like we didn't have personal lives that the rest of the team didn't know about.

"Yeah…that offend you?"

"No. Of course not." He quickly snapped his eyes back to the road to avoid Holly's ire. I chuckled to myself.

"What?" Holly asked me suspiciously with her phone against one ear.

"Nothing," I replied quickly. I was saved when somebody picked up on the other end. Apparently the Nelsons, whichever one she had reached at least, were early risers. She warned them that some Hunters were coming on business, but didn't want to give any specifics over the phone. She thanked them and hung up.

Twenty minutes later, we were there.

The front gate of Appleton was new, made up of freshly painted iron bars riding on smooth hydraulics. Julie had driven a van through the old one. Trip braked at the intercom, hit the button, and stated that we were MHI. A moment later we were heading down the lane. The sun was rising over the gothic spires of the asylum, a gray hulking shadow of carved stone and bleak walls. It looked really terrible considering the good work that went on inside. The Appleton Asylum was the home to many survivors of monster attacks, shunned and considered delusional by the rest of the medical community, but welcomed with open arms here. We parked in the nearly empty lot. It was early enough that the day shift employees hadn't yet arrived.

There were new doors installed at the entrance, and it was obvious, since the stonework didn't quite match, that repairs had been conducted here as well. Stupid gargoyles. Both of the Nelsons were waiting for us.

Lucius was portly, short, with wispy gray hair in a halo around his mostly bald head, and suspenders keeping his pants up over his belly. Joan was taller than her husband, thin, gangly, and brought to mind a stork or other long-legged bird. Both were in their sixties, and both were wearing absurdly thick glasses. I loved the Nelsons.

We piled out of the car. "Hello, everyone!" Lucius bellowed with a voice that belied his age. It was rare for Hunters to come visit and we were always greeted with some enthusiasm. Apparently, those of us who made it as Hunters tended to find this place, and its residents, kind of unnerving. There was a fine line between a survivor who became a Hunter and a survivor who lost their marbles. "Good morning!." He came down the stairs remarkably fast and intercepted me with a hearty handshake. "Well, Owen, my boy, it's been a long time," he said, which made me feel even guiltier for not visiting.

"Holly, it's wonderful to see you," Joan exclaimed excitedly as she virtually tackled Holly in a hug. "And this young man must be…" She turned to Trip. "Jones. Let's see, James, no, John. It was something biblical."

Trip smiled and extended his hand. "They call me Trip, ma'am." She grabbed his hand and pumped vigorously.

The male Dr. Nelson let go of me and surged toward Trip. "Ah, yes. I've heard about you. Read your file, zombie attack survivor out of Florida. You were the school teacher who was forced to dispatch all his students with a sledgehammer!"

"Pickax," Trip corrected, slightly embarrassed.

"Marvelous! That must have been very distressing…" The Nelsons were looking him over excitedly, just sensing that he had to have all sorts of angst and trauma that they could write a paper on. They couldn't help themselves. They had done that to me the first time I had met them too. "Really, you need to sit down and have a chat with us…time permitting, of course." They simultaneously glanced over as the car door slammed. Franks had gotten out and was adjusting his clip-on tie. Lucius was flummoxed. "It can't be…"

"What's he doing here?" Joan demanded, pointing at the Fed. She raised her voice. "I want him off our property immediately!" Franks approached, scowling. She increased in volume and pitch. "Get him out of here before any patients see him."

"Doctors," Franks stated coldly, "I'm here on official business."

Both Nelsons were clearly agitated at his presence. "Your official business can kiss my old white ass, you simpering feculent, no good, hell-spawn fascist!" Lucius shouted. "You have no business here."

"I see you guys have met…" I said.

"You disgusting pig. You filthy murdering bastard!" Joan shook her fist in the air. "I'm calling security."

"Forget security. I'm getting my rifle," Lucius shouted, turning back into the asylum. "Jackbooted Nazi!"

"We gonna do this the hard way?" Franks asked.

I had no doubt that he wouldn't hesitate to pummel two senior citizens just for kicks. "Whoa!" I shouted loud enough to scare some birds out of a nearby tree. The Nelsons stopped yelling. "Everybody calm down. What's the problem?"

"He's the problem!" Joan shrieked.

"Yes, I caught that part. I already know he's an asshole, but specifically."

Lucius was enraged. "Half our patients wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for this man and the others like him. The MCB intimidates witnesses and survivors. They murder anybody who dares spill the beans about their little secret. Monster victims need love, and support, and therapy, so they can return to their lives. But the MCB takes survivors and punishes them instead."

Joan cut in. "The last thing these people need is for their own government to come along and tell them they're insane, that they imagined the whole thing, or if there's any forensic evidence, they cajole the victims into silence. Do you have any idea what kind of damage that does to people?"

"It's like locking up a rape victim because she might make the town look bad!" Lucius sputtered. "It's preposterous. It's absurd!"

"It's policy," Franks answered.

"That didn't work at Nuremburg and it won't work for you," Joan spat. "I may not know everything, Agent Franks, but one thing I do know for certain is that you're going to burn in hell."

Franks nodded, ever so slightly. "Been there. It's overrated."

"Enough," I said. "Lucius, Joan, please. I know this sucks, but we really need your help. I need to speak with somebody in your care. I'm stuck with Franks."

"It's really serious," Holly said apologetically. "We wouldn't ever had brought him if we had realized."

Joan shook her head. "I know you didn't realize what you were doing, because you're far smarter than that, Holly. I have patients inside, patients whose loved ones this man has actually murdered. I took an oath not to do any harm. I can't let him inside my facility." She was adamant.

This was getting nowhere, and I had to get to Carlos. "Franks, I need you to stay in the car."

"No."

I knew better than to waste my time arguing with him. Cutting down a redwood tree with my teeth would be more productive, and probably faster. "Doctor, please, we'll go fast. Your patients will never even know we're here."

"He's not coming in here without a warrant," Lucius stated.

"I don't need a warrant," Franks responded.

"Why you rotten-"

"Okay!" Holly jumped in. "How about this? While we're sitting out here making a scene, some of these patients you're worried about are going to come and see what's going on, and they're going to see this scumbag," she jerked her thumb at Franks, "and they're going to freak out. So how about we go someplace else, with no witnesses, and you bring out the one patient we need to speak to? Everybody's happy."

The Nelsons looked at each other, obviously not happy.

"It isn't to help the government," I said. "It's to help me, personally. A Hunter named Martin Hood has returned from the grave. He's already tried to kill my entire family and he will not stop until he gets me too."

That confused them. "Marty?" Lucius said. "Marty Hood? There's no way. He was one of the good ones. He was a great kid. You must be mistaken."

"Well, that's what we need to find out. This might be for nothing, but I have to know the truth. Please help me."

Joan sighed, exchanging glances with her husband. Lucius adjusted his mighty suspenders. They had been married for forty-plus years, and had reached that point where a lot of communication was unspoken. Lucius responded for them both. "Very well, Owen. We'll bring the patient outside. Whom do you need to speak to?"

"Carlos Alhambra."

Joan crossed her arms. "Then I'm afraid you're wasting your time. Carlos hasn't spoken to anyone in decades."

"He'll speak to me."

The spot that the Nelsons picked for our use was a gazebo on the far side of the lawn. None of the patients would be outside this early, and if any patients were at the windows, we would be far enough from the building that they wouldn't get a clear look at us. Franks would be just a random big dude in a bad suit, not the man who personally murdered their fellow survivors who couldn't keep their mouths shut.

A morning mist was rising from Alabama River. Separating it from us was a wrought iron fence. Most of the patients at Appleton were here voluntarily, but there were a few who weren't, and there were others screwed up enough to decide that the river was a great place to take a header into. Tall trees, draped in Spanish moss, surrounded us. It was actually a very peaceful moment and I took the time to savor it, because what was coming next was probably going to suck.

"So, how have you been?" Lucius Nelson asked.

"Other than the whole death cult thing, pretty good actually." The two of us were sitting on a bench inside the gazebo. Franks was wandering through the trees, probably checking the perimeter. Holly was fifty feet away, throwing rocks over the fence into the river to watch them splash. Joan had left to retrieve Carlos, and Trip had gone with her. "You guys are coming to the wedding, right?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I've known Julie since she was a baby. We wouldn't miss it for the world. We're rather fond of her, you know. And I would probably be dead if it weren't for you."

That was embarrassing and I felt that it was mostly untrue. "I didn't do anything that any Hunter wouldn't have done."

"Exactly," he smiled, then gestured toward Holly. "And how has she been? We haven't seen her in months."

"Holly? Well, as far as I know, she's okay…I didn't know she was getting professional help. I know you probably can't talk about it, doctor-patient privilege, and all that, but if there's ever anything that I can do to help her, just let me know. She's my teammate and my friend, and finding out that she's still hurting, still needing help…is just terrible," I said truthfully. "Though after what she went through, who could blame her?" I added quickly, not wanting to offend the good doctor over the importance of his counseling.

He laughed. "Getting help? Son, she is the help."

"Huh?"

"That young lady is a volunteer on her days off. She comes in and helps out with the patients, visits, listens to them talk, plays Ping-Pong and checkers. She's especially good with the little children. She's wonderful, really brightens everyone's day, and we've been sad that she's been too busy lately, but such is the life of a Hunter. She understands these people, and they love her for it."

"Holly? Really?" That was a new one on me. It sure didn't fit the image that she tried to cultivate. I wondered why she never told us.

"Oh, here they come," Lucius pointed back toward the asylum. Joan was leading the way, and Trip was pushing someone in a wheelchair. "Now don't be disappointed when this doesn't work. If Carlos actually communicates I'll be absolutely shocked. He's been in a total stupor for decades."

"How bad is it?"

Lucius shook his head. "In layman's terms, he's checked out, toasted, brain turned off, a borderline vegetable. All he has done for years now is hum simple children's songs. Carlos was one of the smartest, bravest men I've ever known. I was proud to consider him a friend. And then one day, this happened. No medical explanation for it, no brain damage, no serious physical trauma, nothing."

"No idea what caused this?"

"No. He went on a mission, but only his body came back. I don't…I…" He lifted his glasses and wiped under his eyes. "Sorry."

"I understand."

Trip pushed the wheelchair up the ramp and into the gazebo. Carlos was wearing a red bathrobe over a white gown. He was frail, with atrophied muscles, hands so thin that you could see bones through the papery skin, and hair that was buzzed short on his pale skull, probably for ease of maintenance by the staff. His head was lolling slowly from side to side as he stared at his lap. He was humming but I did not recognize the tune.

Doctor Joan took a cloth from the back of the chair and wiped the drool from his chin. His blank eyes gave no indication that he was aware of any of this. I got off the bench and squatted in front of the wheelchair.

"Hello, Carlos. My name's Owen Pitt. I'm a Hunter too. We need to talk." No response, obviously. "I need to talk to you about Martin Hood. I believe that he's the one who did this to you and I need your help."

"I don't think he can even hear you, dear," Joan suggested gently. "He's shown zero reaction to stimuli since he's been here. We've run every test you can think of."

I reached out my hand to touch his, but hesitated. I had talked about ripping the memories right out of his head, but now that I was in his presence, I didn't feel so confident in my rightness. It seemed awkward and invasive. This was a man, a fellow Hunter, and I had no clue what I was doing.

"You think this is a good idea?" Trip asked, sensing my hesitation.

"No, not really," I snapped. "You got a better idea?"

He shrugged. "Well, if you're going to do it, do it before Franks comes back." Trip was right. I didn't want the government to know that I had inherited any abilities from the artifact.

"Do what?" Doctor Joan asked, concerned for her patient.

"Owen can read minds," Trip said, then held his finger in front of his lips to indicate that it was a secret.

"Really?" Lucius was fascinated, probably sensing another paper.

"I don't know how it works. It isn't every time I touch somebody. It seems to be a combination of when they're thinking about a particularly strong memory while I'm also interested in that same memory. I think…I picked this up from the Old Ones somehow."

"Well, scientifically, that sounds like a crock of shit," Joan said.

"But we've seen some weird things," Lucius added. That was the beauty of working with former Hunters-very flexible minds. "Is it dangerous?"

"I have no idea."

"If they need to be remembering, how's that supposed to work with somebody who doesn't think about anything?" Joan asked sensibly.

I didn't really know that either. Maybe if I wanted that memory enough for both of us…

"Franks is coming back," Trip said.

Aw hell. I touched Carlos' skeletal hand.

Well, this is certainly different.

The world was vast, only there was no world. Just a void. An infinite space of nothingness. The void had no boundaries, no beginning, no end. There was no light, no dark, no color. Infinity stretched on forever.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Owen," I answered. "With MHI. Who are you?"

"I don't remember," the voice was male. "What are you doing here?"

"Where is here?"

"I don't remember that either…" the voice answered, confused. "But I'm not alone. It lives here too."

"Carlos, is that you?"

But then that first voice was gone. And something hideous took its place. This voice was different, screeching like bagpipes made out of rotten entrails and filled with broken glass. My mind rebelled against the unnatural force.

THIS IS MY SHELL. FIND YOUR OWN.

"What are you?" I challenged.

No answer.

Talk about weird, but I didn't have time for this. I needed to find information on Hood. Just having that thought seemed to cause the world to change. "I know that name," said the first voice. "I know Hood."

Now I could see; there was light, space, dimensions and gravity, as a blurry scene unfolded before me. A group of people, obviously Hunters, though their gear was outdated and their team patch was unfamiliar. There was no sound, but the scene was obviously one of welcome, as the group greeted a new member. The extraneous details of the scene were fuzzy gray blotches. The Hunters' faces were just…blank. Pasty blurs of flesh where their features should have been. Only one of the men was clearly visible, the new guy, and the scene focused in on him. He was an overweight young man, with a mop of curly hair, wearing a vest that barely fit over his stomach. His attitude was jovial as he smiled and laughed with the others. The scene slowed, the Hunters' movements became sluggish, until they quit moving entirely.

I had a physical form again. I walked between the frozen Hunters, a three-dimensional snapshot from time. Stopping in front of Hood, I studied him. I recognized him from Dorcas' memory. He had acne scars and looked nothing like the tough guy who had attacked me. In fact he didn't look like much at all, just a fat, goofy dude about my age.

"I remember this…" said the voice, and this time it came from directly behind me. I turned. One of the Hunters in the scene was speaking. Unlike the others, he still had details. His armor was olive drab, crisscrossed with leather bandoleers of shotgun shells. He was fit, strong, with a skinny beard and a thick head of dark hair just peppered with gray. Hispanic, probably about forty, he was a handsome man, but his eyes were sunken, haunted. I could only barely recognize him as the fragile person who I had met in the real world. "I remember this. It hasn't taken them all away."

"What hasn't taken them?"

"Feeder," he answered, as if that were obvious. "Are you here to help me?"

"Yes," I answered, not having any clue how I was supposed to do that. "Where is this Feeder?" Carlos held one finger up and placed it against his temple. I nodded.

"Don't worry. It'll come for us soon. Whenever I remember something, it comes and eats it. I have almost nothing left."

"It eats your memories?"

"More like it consumes, partially digests, and then pukes them back in pieces all over my brain. I've only saved a few. I've forced myself not to think about them, but I know they're there. When I remember something, it's gone forever. All the happy ones are gone." He held up his left hand, indicating a wedding ring. "I was married, I think, but I don't remember her. He destroyed those early, since they were the first ones I thought of when I was trapped. Once those were gone, then he took the regular ones. I couldn't fight him. He's too strong. He's always hungry."

I could only listen, horrified, wondering if my own were in danger while I was here.

Carlos stepped between the frozen bits of memory. His whole body was trembling. "I don't remember any of my life. I know what things are, and what words mean. I guess he can eat the meat, but not the bones. I don't remember ever experiencing anything. I know what food is, but I don't know how it tastes, you know what I mean? I've got almost nothing."

"How'd you save this one?"

"Oh, he let me keep the bad ones, the ones to taunt me, to laugh at my failure. Everything else I've ever experienced is all twisted and broken, but not these. I can relive the mistakes leading up to the end of my life whenever I want. In fact, that's the only thing that I can do. This thing living in my head is a malevolent motherfucker, that's for sure. If I could take any joy out of the ones he's left me, then I'm sure they'd be consumed along with all the rest."

"Once he takes everything, what'll happen to you?"

"Maybe then he'd just let me die…" he said wistfully.

This poor man's mind was being devoured, but the thing doing it was leaving the memories about this one particular Hunter for a reason. "Martin Hood did this to you, didn't he?"

He walked past me, through the crowd of distorted figures, and stopped, staring into the frozen eyes of young Mr. Hood. "Will you help me?"

"What can I do?" I asked.

"I'll show you these scraps, these things that Feeder's left to toy with me. In exchange, I want two things. I won't help you until you swear you'll help me."

"Name them." I expected for him to ask me to free him, to destroy this demon in his head, but not what came next.

"Kill me."

I was shocked. That's not why I was here. I couldn't do that. I started to respond, but choked. The frozen Hunters surrounded me, their faces scratched out of existence like a pencil drawing brutally scrubbed with an eraser until the paper tore. All happiness had been blotted from this man's existence, his body was nearly a lifeless husk…No. I understood the request.

I nodded. "And the second?"

He glared at the jolly, fat Hunter so long that I started to think I was another forgotten memory.

"Avenge me."

This was different than the other times that I had lived through others' memories. This time I didn't see through his eyes or feel with his senses, because those were long since muted and passed. Carlos no longer knew what it was like to experience such things.

Rather it was like I was a bystander as a partial scene unfolded in front of me. Details were few, sounds were painful and flat. The colors had bled into grays and shadows as even simple things like that had been stolen from him. What a horrible way to exist and this was all that he'd had since 1989. I was watching the welcoming of the new Hunter. Hood smiled and laughed as Carlos' team greeted him, slapped him on the shoulder, and shook his hand. The only two who had faces were my host and his future nemesis.

"He came highly recommended. A good friend of mine said that he was talented, that he would be an asset to our team," Carlos spoke to me, even as he shook phantom hands with Hood. "My friend was a man named Harbinger."

"I know him," I said.

Carlos shook his head. "I don't. I only remember what little bit is connected to these few things. That's all. But I hate him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm."

Then we were in an unknown place, an intersection of two streets. A team of Hunters had taken up position around a few cars and were firing into a crowd of shambling zombies. There were hundreds of undead. It was a huge outbreak. Carlos and I walked between the flying bullets and the crowd of rotting undead. He gestured to where his mirror image was leaning over the hood of a car and blasting round after round of buckshot into the approaching mass. "Business was really good. I didn't realize at first that it was a little too good."

A zombie made it over the hood of the first car and Hood took it apart in a spray of machine-gun fire. "It had been kind of slow. We didn't really have much to do, and my team was getting the least business of any team in the country. Just bad luck I suppose. But then, within a few weeks of Hood's arrival, we were getting undead outbreaks constantly. Suddenly my team was raking in the dough. We were the stars of the company."

A zombie hit Memory Carlos from behind, taking him hard to the pavement. The nearby faceless Hunters were in no position to help and it looked like certain death. But the zombie froze, an inch from taking a bite out of Carlos' neck. It stayed there for a moment until Carlos could roll over, draw his.45 and put a round into the creature's brain. The splattered team leader caught a brief glance of Hood, hand extended, two fingers pointing at the frozen zombie. Hood went back to the action as if nothing had happened.

My host shook his head sadly. "That was my first clue, but in the excitement, I missed it. It went on. Every time we had nothing going on, more undead would pop up somewhere in our region. I was thinking that we had some hardcore necromancer living in the neighborhood, but he was always one step ahead of us. I was too stupid to realize that I saw him every day."

More scenes flashed by. Several months had passed since these Hunters had started working together. "By that time, I was a wealthy man, not that I can remember what I did with it. He's let me remember that I was like a damn superhero to the other Hunters, just to rub it in. Really, I was just a chump. Hood came across as a nice kid, a real joker, a bookworm, an intellectual, and a dork. Everybody loved him. It was a lie, an act. We didn't realize what he was fixated on." There was a vision of the two men, sitting on a bench on an ocean pier, drinking and telling stories, unwinding after a long day at work. "It turned out that Hood's parents were killed when he was just a boy. They were occultists, and had been messing around with the Old Ones back in England. He confided this to me one night. That's why he became a Hunter. He wanted to fight those things. He was obsessed with them."

"Why'd he tell you?"

My host laughed. "You'll see…"

Hood took a long draw from a cigarette before flicking the butt into the ocean. "See, boss, that's what got me thinking…" It was obvious that he'd had too much to drink. "There's a lot of information about the Elder Things floating around. Why not, and this is just a hypothetical, use their own weapons against them? Harnessing magic is no different than harnessing electricity."

Carlos openly scoffed. "That's insane."

"No. Hear me out, mate. You're a smart chap. It's like the war, the big one. My grandmother lived through the Battle of Britain and she told me what those V rockets sounded like when they flew over. Pure terror. Evil stuff, right? But as soon as the war was over, bam, the Allies grabbed up every German scientist they could, right? That's how we put a man on the moon."

Carlos took a long drink. "I suppose."

"This is the same thing. Just because knowledge originates from a bad use, doesn't make it bad. It's still knowledge. We owe it to ourselves to study the Old Ones, not just shun them. Think of what we could do." Hood grew somber. "Imagine if a group of us, people like me and you, who knew what was really out there, worked together and harnessed that power…We could banish death itself!"

"That's not how it works. Anything those things touch is tainted. Stay away from it, Marty." The Carlos of memory tossed his now-empty bottle out into the waves and stood to leave. "You're drunk and talking stupid. I'll call you a cab. Go home and get some rest, man."

"I thought maybe you would understand…" Hood muttered to himself as Carlos walked away.

Carlos continued his narration as the pier dissolved. "I figured it out eventually. Hood had found something in the archives back at headquarters. Some old book, picked up from who knows where." The next scene was in a room filled with many shelves, lined with row after row of books. At first I thought we'd come to a library, but then I realized that it was a small apartment, literally packed with books. The titles on the spines were all blurry and forgotten. Hood was sitting at a table, giant tome open before him, a single small bulb providing light enough to read by. The book must have been etched into Carlos' memory, because it was crystal clear. A massive, leather-bound thing, the pages ancient and covered in symbols and geometries that suggested madness in whoever inked it in blood millennia before.

"Hey, Marty. Nobody's been able to get a hold of you. I was getting worried so I had your landlord let me in. Are you okay?" Carlos called as he entered the room, only to jerk to a halt when he saw the open book. "Is that- What are you doing with that thing?"

"Learning…" Hood mumbled as if he was in a trance, not looking up as he traced his hands over the words. The crazed scribbling seemed to move. There was a drawing of the monstrous alien tree, branches like twitching cricket legs. A black smear had been rubbed onto the page above it, like a cloud rising from the tree.

"Damn it!" Carlos shouted as he shoved the book off the table and onto the floor. The pieces had finally clicked into place for him. The book landed with a thump, open to a page with a picture of a giant squid thing that I knew all too well. He reached across the table and grabbed Hood by the shirt and jerked him forward. "It's you! You're behind these outbreaks, aren't you? Answer me, you son of a bitch!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Hood stammered. Then Carlos slugged him in the face, brutally hard. He grabbed the fat kid by his curly hair, yanked him out of his chair and shoved his face down against the open book. Blood dripped onto the pages.

"Liar!" Carlos shouted, enraged.

"All right, all right!" Hood cried. Carlos jerked him up and brutally shoved him back into one of the shelves. Books crashed to the floor. "Let go of me, please," he sobbed.

"It was you all along. I can't believe this!" Carlos released him and stepped away, hurt and disbelief obvious in his voice. "Why? Why'd you do it?"

"I had to! You don't understand what's at stake. We have to learn the mysteries or we're doomed."

"You're doomed all right. How many innocent people have died because of you? You know what the Feds are going to do when they discover you've been raising the dead? You're going to prison for the rest of your life."

Suddenly Hood went from simpering to in command. The change was shocking, like somebody had flipped a switch and another personality stepped forward. "Oh, that's where you're wrong, mate. You won't tell the Feds a word." Blood ran down his nose and dripped down the crease of his double chin but he didn't wipe it away. His eyes burned with the fervor of a true believer and for the first time I saw the man who would become the Shadow Lord. "Because you're going down with me if you do. I'll say that you ordered me to raise those zombies for the PUFF bounties."

"Oh, I am, huh?" Carlos responded as he pulled his pistol from inside his waistband. "We'll see about that."

"You won't shoot me," Hood stated flatly. "If I die, then I've left evidence for the authorities that not only did I create those undead, but that I did it on behalf of not just you, but all of MHI. The government will destroy you all for that. You love this company too much."

"Bastard!" The angry Hunter raised the gun and pushed it into Hood's cheek.

"Do it. I dare you," Hood snapped. "Kill your teammate. Murder your friend. Then explain that to the authorities. Explain that to the others while you try to convince them I wasn't making enough zombies to make you a millionaire."

Carlos hesitated, doubt creasing his features. "Damn!" he shoved the fat kid to the floor and stomped away, trapped. He paced back and forth for a moment. "You idiot. What've you done?"

"I'm fulfilling my destiny. I'm going to stop the Old Ones, once and for all." He finally paused to wipe his nose. "The bounties are funding my research. Animating the dead is letting me hone my skills. This is just the beginning of an epic work. You'll see."

Carlos shoved his pistol back into its holster before grabbing Hood by the neck and dragging him toward the door. "No. You're coming with me. We're going to see Harbinger. He'll know what to do."

We were back in the original void. Darkness in every direction.

"I didn't know what else to do. He was my responsibility and I failed. I turned to the one man who I knew would have the answers. We left that night, me, Hood, and that infernal book, and caught the first flight. I remember that he came along willingly, telling me the whole time about how he was right and how he would persuade Harbinger to see. I think he wanted me to dwell on his argument…When we arrived, there were a bunch of Hunters there, and unfortunately, it was the full moon. I had been too preoccupied to even realize that, so we weren't able to speak to him."

The night Hood died, I thought to myself.

"Exactly," he answered. There was a terrible, rending sonic wail. It came from the distant void. "Feeder's coming. I have to finish this."

We were standing on the edge of a circle of chaos. The little stone shack, the old slave quarters of the Shackleford family estate, was before us. Hunters were milling around. There was blood everywhere, stark red against the black and white of the rest of the world. Hood's dismembered body was at the entrance. A faceless Hunter was holding the body, trying in vain to help. I knew that the erased man was Myers. Other unknowns attended to a second injured person. A leg, severed at the knee, lay half chewed off to the side.

"He committed suicide."

"So I thought. Nobody but me knew about Hood's crimes. I felt terrible. I blamed myself for his death and the whole situation. I had failed."

I walked through the carnage. Hood was obviously dead, literally torn apart. There was now a struggle, a fight, between Myers and someone else who could only have been Ray Shackleford. The words were erased, but I knew that Myers wanted nothing more than to avenge his friend's death. "You never told the others."

"No. I didn't. I thought that Hood had killed himself out of guilt. Everyone loved him. What good would tarnishing his memory serve? Plus, I was afraid…somehow I could have done something different, somehow it was my fault. No, it was my secret to bear. No evidence ever arose after his death, so Hood must have been bluffing about that, so I just left it alone. I hid his stupid book."

"You didn't destroy it?"

"I couldn't. It wouldn't burn. I should have tried harder."

Suddenly, something rose over the Shackleford ancestral home, above the slave quarters, a shadow as big as the house, only shaped like an earwig. The sonic wail tripled in intensity as the shadow of pincers covered the full moon.

FOOD. The scream slammed through my skull.

"Holy shit!"

"Feeder's here," Carlos said nonchalantly. "Good. I won't miss this one anyway. Come on, I've got one more. Three years later."

A new place, a large older house in a pine forest, on the top of a hill. A team of Hunters were moving quickly through the darkened trees, weapons hot. They were sweaty, panting, a few of them had sustained injuries. This memory was the clearest of all. The others even had faces.

Carlos must be reading my mind. "Yeah, Feeder hasn't touched this one. This is the worst of all. I couldn't tell you who any of these people are, but it likes to let me watch them die, again and again."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. This is now the only memory I have left of my entire life. Well, there's actually one other. I can remember mi madre singing nursery songs to me when I was little. I think that's the oldest one I've got. For some reason, Feeder has left that one alone. I think he likes the music…Please, don't forget your promise."

"I won't."

"Good," he said. "Watch."

There were six of them. They were coming up on the house in three pairs, moving fast. They stopped in the trees just outside the yard. I focused in on their leader as he tried his radio, frustration was plain on Carlos' face. "We lost radio contact as soon as we arrived. Then we were cut off, surrounded, driven through the forest by undead. It wasn't until later that I realized we'd been herded to this place. He wanted it that way. He wanted us on our own at the end. He knew our methods, our procedures, he knew exactly what we'd do."

The Hunters hit the house. One pair on the back door, one on the front, the final held the perimeter. The teams cleared the Victorian-style house, finding it empty, boarded-up, furniture sitting under tarps, covered in dust. The first pair discovered the stairs to the basement.

"He lured us in. We were surrounded, no comms. The case was supposed to have been straightforward, basic monsters on the property, not that I can remember what they were supposed to be at this point, or where this even is, but we sure weren't prepared for what we found."

The basement was utterly normal, except for one concrete wall where the foundation had been chipped away to reveal a hole. The ancient tunnel winded down into the earth. The Hunters prepared to check it out.

"No escape, so I decided to try the tunnel. It might have led to a way out, or it might have led to whatever was controlling the monsters attacking us. I was such a fool. I let my ego cloud my judgment. I remember that I only made three big mistakes in my career. First was ever trusting Hood. Keeping his secret was number two. Going down that hole was my last."

Time passed as the Hunters went steadily downward, their unease growing at each step, noise of the undead trailing behind them a constant companion. They set ambushes, slowed their pursuers, but there were always more. At the end, the tunnel opened into a large, artificial room. Creatures-impossible creations of mismatched body parts from various animals, armor-plated monstrosities-rose up around them and cut through the Hunters with ease. They put up an amazing fight but were finally overrun. The memory was allowed to linger on the final suffering of each individual, chopped to bits at the ends of meat-cleaver arms or lacerated by serrated-steel teeth.

Carlos awoke a short while later, bound to a table with leather straps, someone calling his name. I recognized who was speaking immediately. The shadow man's appearance in the memory was the same as in the present. He hadn't even aged. This time he was wearing a white rubber butcher's apron, splattered with blood. He smiled broadly at Carlos.

"Hey, mate. How have you been?"

"Where are my men?"

"Recruited into my army." The necromancer paused to pull a sheet off of another operating table. Carlos screamed when he saw the bodies of two of his team in the process of being stitched back together into something else. The Hunter thrashed against his bonds in vain. "I'm improving on God's creation."

Carlos continued to struggle, insane at the sight of his friends. "I'll kill you! I'll kill you! You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"

"Please…You didn't have the stomach to do it before and that's what brings us here today, I'm afraid. It pains me to do this, but I gave you an opportunity to see my side of things, only you wouldn't listen. You had to be self-righteous and stubborn. So now, the time has come for you to pay for your mistakes. But take comfort, your sacrifice will not have been in vain."

"Who are you?" Carlos demanded, still straining to free himself, wanting nothing more than to rip the man before him limb from limb with his bare hands.

"Come on, Carlos." The shadow man shook his head. "Do I really look that different now? The old body was so soft…It was a liability. When you forced my hand, I had to go with one of my contingency plans. The spell had already been prepared, but it was something that I had lacked the courage to implement on my own. There are many things that can go wrong when you swap bodies. Really, I should thank you. I found a way to trade up to something better, switch places if you will. I took this body from a poor addled nitwit, an easily manipulated man-child. I moved in and the poor sod got my old body. Lucky for him, he only had to put up with it for a few minutes before Earl ate him!"

"M-M-Marty?"

Hood pointed at his chest with both hands and smiled. "In the flesh! And the ladies love this body a lot more than the old one, I'll tell you that."

Painful realization hit. "But…but you're dead!"

"See?" Hood laughed. "I've conquered death, just like I told you I would, all those years ago. You shouldn't have mocked me…Nobody should have mocked me."

Carlos screamed. It was pure, primal hate. It went on for a long time as he struggled, futilely trying to break his bonds. Finally, rationality returned. "Marty, you worthless sack of shit, those were your friends." He jerked his head painfully toward the other table. "We were your family!"

Hood spread his arms wide. For the first time Carlos noticed the rotting things standing in neat rows behind his captor. The creatures had been spliced together, bones screwed to steel plates, bolts and wires crisscrossed, ivory, muscle, and iron conglomerated into a grotesque parody of life. "This is my family now."

Rage turned to fear. "You're insane!"

"That's a matter of perspective. I'm rather sure that I'm the only sane one here. See, things have changed. I was naïve. I thought I could beat the Old Ones at their own game. But I realized the truth. They can’t lose. So I cut a deal to benefit us all. And now you're going to help me help them."

Carlos' eyes flicked back and forth across the line of slavering monstrosities. "What do you want from me?"

Hood chuckled. "After I ‘died,' " he made quote marks with his fingers, "you kept something of mine. I need my book back. It holds information that will allow me to open a portal to the other side."

"You can't do that!"

"Actually, you're correct. Very few people have the potential to unlock that kind of mystery. Sadly, I'm not one of them. I'm going to arrange for it to fall into the hands of someone who can. He's not even aware that he's helping me yet. He needs to be broken first, but I've already arranged for that."

Devious bastard…It all made sense. Hood was behind what had happened at the Christmas party. He was responsible for Susan's turning. He'd tricked Ray into opening that rift.

Hood leaned in close, stopping his face inches from his old leader. Carlos remembered it so clearly that he could smell Hood's aftershave. "So, where did you hide my book?" he whispered.

Carlos spit in his face. "I'll never tell you anything!"

The shadow man nodded slightly, not noticing the saliva in his eyes. "And I wouldn't have expected anything less from you. So once again, we'll do this the hard way."

"You going to torture me, pendejo?" Carlos demanded in typical MHI style defiance. "Bring it!"

"You wish. Torture would be easy. See, working for the Old Ones does grant you a few perks, a few abilities, if you will. They've sent some friends to…how should I say…live with me. Sure, I could torture you, knives, hot pokers, electric shocks, all that nonsense, but that would take time, and I don't have the stomach for such things." He gestured at the operating table full of mismatched body parts. "I'm a creator, not a destroyer. Rather, I'm going to send something to root around inside your brain and take what I need. So to answer your question, no torture. This is going to be much, much worse."

"What are you talking about?"

"Good-bye, Carlos. I learned so much from you, and really enjoyed our times together. You were one of my best friends. It really was a pleasure." His neck swelled as something crawled up from inside his torso. Hood opened his mouth. It was like staring down a deep well. Two tiny red eyes opened and blinked in the inky blackness. Miniscule pincers extended past Hood's lips. Carlos began to scream.

The tiny creature latched onto the Hunter's face, soft, black ooze crawling into his eyes, up his nose, down his throat. The screaming turned into choking and convulsing. I had to look away.

The scene went black. We were back in the void.

"It was a little thing at first. Like a headache. But it grew, and grew, and grew. The more it ate, the fatter it got. Everything I thought of, destroyed, torn apart. Just bits and pieces of me. It found what it was looking for, but it didn't stop there. No…it's just been taking ever since."

I had narrowly avoided the same fate in Mexico. I shuddered. The bagpipe howl arose as the mind demon approached.

"You better go now. Please, keep your promise. I'm begging you. Finish this."

Feeder surrounded us, a bloated, disgusting thing. Slobbering, chewing, tearing and flinging, as the last few visions of a mortal life were rendered into nothing.

"And this is the way the world ends…" my host said.

Back in the real world, I gasped and jerked my hand away from the wheelchair. Carlos' head was still rolling around weakly from side to side as a puddle of drool collected on his robe. He was humming softly.

"What happened?" Lucius Nelson demanded, concerned for his patient.

Glancing around, the doctors and Trip were still in the same spots in the gazebo as when I had left. Franks was approaching up the path at a brisk walk.

"How long was I gone?" I asked.

"You didn't go anywhere," Joan replied.

"Five seconds, tops," Trip answered quickly. "Did it work?"

"Yeah, kind of." I stood. "Doctors, we have to let Carlos die."

"What?" both of them responded simultaneously.

"Please, believe me. There's something terrible living inside his head. It's devouring him, piece by piece. He made me promise to kill him."

"Owen, that's ridiculous."

The wheelchair began to vibrate. I looked down. Carlos was going into some sort of seizure. It stopped. He was no longer humming. That too had been taken from him. His final memory was erased. The shaking ceased.

Joan knelt beside the chair and placed her fingers on Carlos' neck. "I think he's dead."

Suddenly the patient's head snapped up. His eyes opened, revealing blood red orbs. One thin hand locked around Joan's wrist with bone-crushing force. He jerked her to her knees.

My STI came out of the holster so fast that it practically materialized in my hand. I clicked the safety off as the front sight landed between those red eyes. "Let her go!"

"Noooo," the thing inhabiting Carlos' body hissed. Joan cried out as it squeezed her arm. "Feast is over…Need new shell to live in."

"What's going on?" Lucius cried out. "Carlos, let her go. We've been trying to help you."

"That ain't him, Doc. This thing is from the other side. Isn't that right, Feeder?"

The body wheezed. "Not true name. Name given by weak fleshling." The voice was raspy, not used to creating speech. "So hungry. Must feed." His other hand reached toward Joan's face, as if to caress it. Nostrils flared as it drank in her smell. "So many memories in this one…to feeeaaassst."

His wife in danger, Lucius Nelson's reaction was a split second faster than mine. Carlos' head jerked one way and then back as our bullets crossed an X through his skull. Joan fell. I stepped forward and booted the frail body in the chest, sending the wheelchair rolling back down the ramp and into the sunlight. The chair toppled over.

Even with the back of his skull missing, the animated body tried to rise, atrophied muscles driving forward, in search of another host. The movements were jerky, awkward, painful to watch. "Feeeaaassst…"

Trip had drawn his Springfield XD.45. Doctor Lucius stood at my side, stubby Colt Officer's model at the ready. The three of us looked at each other, knowing what had to be done, then we opened fire. Dozens of bullets tore through Carlos. A few seconds later, our slides were locked back empty, my ears were ringing, and the riddled body was absolutely still, blood pouring into the grass.

"What the hell!" Holly shouted as she ran toward the gazebo. She paused long enough to pull her STI Ranger and train it on the blood-soaked mess on the lawn like the rest of us. "Everybody okay?"

"We're fine," Joan answered calmly. "I think my wrist is broken though." The birdlike woman had pulled herself onto a bench. From somewhere she had produced a.380 PPK and was holding it shakily in her left hand, her right resting awkwardly in her lap. She saw me looking at her. "Old-school MHI, kids. Shock is nature's anesthetic. Give me five minutes and I'll be crying like a baby."

I dropped my spent mag, slammed a new one in the gun, and dropped the slide. "See to your wife," I ordered Lucius. "Trip, Holly, on me." I approached Carlos' body slowly. The three of us covered him, pistols ready, but there was no movement.

The Hunter was dead, freed from his torment at last.

Agent Franks nonchalantly joined us a moment later. The big man studied the three of us, guns hovering over the ventilated corpse and his wheelchair. He shrugged, removed a candy from his pocket, unwrapped it, tossed it in his mouth, and threw the wrapper on the lawn. "Brutal…even by my standards," he said, chewing loudly as he walked away.

"What's that?" Trip asked, gesturing with his gun. "On the sidewalk?"

A tiny, black, glistening, earwig-slug thing was oozing away from the shattered skull. I moved so that my shadow wasn't protecting it. The tiny beast rolled over, revealing a pair of red eyes and a mouth with hooked teeth. It screeched in pain when the sunlight hit it.

I raised my size 15 boot. "Good-bye, Feeder." It smashed with a sickening wet pop. I ground it in. Black smoke hissed from the pavement.

First promise kept.

"You know, you're no longer allowed to visit here, Owen," Lucius advised me. We were in the Appleton parking lot, getting ready to leave. "Every time you do, we lose patients. At this rate you'll put us out of business in no time."

"I'm really sorry…"

"I'm seriously thinking of having a restraining order drawn up," the doctor said with grave sternness. I suddenly felt like I was going to puke. He thumped me on the arm. "Ha. I'm just kidding, boy. Relax. It comes with the business."

Joan shook her head. "Forgive my husband. His idea of humor's a little skewed." Her sprained wrist had already been wrapped. She held it up. "But then again, I just took some Lortabs, so everything seems a little funny."

"Seriously, I wish we would have known about poor Carlos sooner. We kept him alive for all these years, when all we were doing was prolonging his suffering."

"You did the best you could," I responded. "There's no way you could have known."

"No medical textbook I know of has an entry for what crawled out of his head, I'm afraid," Lucius answered, "unless we write it ourselves. Maybe now you understand why when it comes to interviewing survivors, Joan and I can be a little…"

"Pushy?" I interjected.

"One way to look at it, I suppose," he chuckled. "Listen, I do want to help you. When Marty Hood first joined MHI, I did one of those pushy interviews. Here's the file. Maybe something in there will come in handy."

I took it from him. "Isn't this like privileged information?"

He smiled. "My Hippocratic Oath goes out the window when you sign up to help the Old Ones. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire."

Holly joined us. "We're ready to go. We took the body down to the basement like you asked. None of the other patients saw us."

"Good, good…" Joan said. "Thank you, dear."

Lucius smiled sadly. "This place was built eighty years ago to house tuberculosis patients. We have an excellent crematorium. Morbid, yet so very effective. Necessary, given the things that poor man was exposed to. Don't worry, we'll say a few words over him."

"Thank you for your help," I told them sincerely.

"We're always here to help, and we only ask one thing…" Joan said. Agent Franks, apparently tired of our good-byes, began to honk the horn. She groaned. "Don't ever bring that man onto our property, ever again."

"Deal. I don't like him, don't trust him, and the sooner we're done with this, the sooner I can get rid of him."

"Hmm…Franks is obnoxious. How many people can you fit in that crematorium at one time?" Holly batted her eyes innocently. We all looked at her. "What?"

"Anything helpful?" Holly asked.

I handed the file across to the back seat so she could see it. "Well, Doctor Nelson figured Hood was driven, obsessed with success, and couldn't tolerate failure. As a boy, he was deeply traumatized by watching his parents' deaths, and was fixated on preventing that kind of thing from happening to others."

"Sounds like a pretty typical Hunter," Trip said.

"Yeah, I suppose." Fanatical and traumatized by something and doing their best to protect the world. "Hell, I bet he fit right in."

"Except for this part where Doc says that Hood had a genius-level intellect. No offense, but I'd say most of us don't set the bar that high," Holly pointed out.

Trip responded. "I went to college."

"I took an IQ test once. It said I'm all sorts of smartified," I joked.

"Okay, so Trip got through school by catching footballs and you beat up some nerds for a certificate. But according to this file, this Hood guy's brain is wired like Stephen Hawking…Like an evil Albert Einstein or something. This is one smart dude we're talking about, with real obsession problems, and now he's locked onto you."

"He's smart, but I'm no slouch," I said. Franks snorted. Man, I hate him.

"Just because nobody will play against you in Trivial Pursuit anymore doesn't mean you're a match for this guy, Z," Holly pointed out.

"That's just because Julie's always on his team, and she knows all the artsy questions," Trip muttered.

Holly continued. "What I'm getting at is that we've underestimated this guy. When we first learned about him, we thought we were just facing another bad guy, another monster. But this one's different. He's a former Hunter, so he already knows how we roll. He's patient enough to fake his death and plot craziness for decades. This man outwitted Earl Harbinger and all the Shacklefords, all while right under their noses the whole time. We already knew about the cult, but we've underestimated their leader. The idea of a spy inside MHI seemed stupid to me at first, but this Hood's some sort of chess master, and he's thinking ahead. This man will not stop and he'll pull out all the stops. We've got a lot bigger problem on our hands than we thought."

She was right. The car was quiet while I mulled that over.

"What do you think, Franks?" Holly asked. I was surprised that she would actually try to involve him.

Franks had to have realized by now that I had somehow read Carlos' mind, but he didn't indicate that he cared one way or the other. He was quiet for a long time, shaded eyes staring out the window. "I'm not paid to think."

"Helpful, ain't he?"

Franks turned forward. "But…I doubt you're ruthless enough to survive." He went back to the window.

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

Chapter 14

It was well after noon when we pulled into the compound. There were several extra vehicles in the lot, some rental cars from the airport and a few other MHI vehicles from the team leads who were stationed close enough to drive.

"I wonder if Earl's back?" Trip asked.

"We need to talk to him. And keep this on the down low. If the Condition's infiltrated headquarters, then they might have gotten people onto the other teams too." Hell, Hood had actually approached Carlos about working together. Who knew if he had tried that with anybody else?

"That really pisses me off," Holly said. "I hate traitors."

Franks actually murmured agreement as we got out of the car. "Me too." He held back as the rest of us got our gear bags out of the trunk, then walked up the stairs. Could Franks sense just how unwelcome he was going to be inside a building packed with the most experienced Hunters in the country? Doubtful. He probably had some other nefarious, inexplicable reason. It wasn't like Franks cared if he was welcome or not.

The office building was busier than it had been since last summer. There were Hunters everywhere. Dorcas was at her desk, angrily answering questions and shuffling papers. She was surrounded by Newbies filling out requisition forms so they could take equipment with them or harassing her for their last training paycheck. They were out of here, ready to start life as real Hunters, and the atmosphere was kind of like the last day of high school before summer vacation. It was downright festive.

"Z!" somebody shouted. Suddenly I was engulfed in a rib-crushing bear hug, which smashed my arms to my sides, jerked my feet off the floor, and popped my vertebrae. The man was a little shorter than me but strong as an ox. He bounced me around for a moment, knocking his black cowboy hat off; his giant mustache tickled, and I could smell the Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Sam Haven was home.

"Hey, Sam." He dropped me back to the ground. Our old teammate then turned his attention to Trip and Holly. They got the same enthusiastic treatment. "How's Colorado?"

Sam grinned. "The finest warriors in history trained me to fight from the sea. I'm a master of maritime mayhem, a Son of Poseidon," he loudly proclaimed. Sam had been a Navy SEAL. He paused to pick up his hat and smashed it back onto his mullet. "So of course, Earl puts me in charge of a team stationed five thousand feet above sea level in the middle of the damned country. Denver's lousy with hippies. I mean, they’re everywhere. But the women are smoking hot and there are some good local beers. So overall, it's a wash." He turned his shoulder so we could see the patch on his armor. "Check it out. Pretty cool, huh?" The Team Haven patch was a walrus with a banjo. "Maybe you kids will get your own someday. Holly could have a stripper on a pole. That'd be sweet."

"I'll save you a copy," Holly patted him on the back. She'd missed him too.

"That looks great." It really did. The walrus just kind of suited him I suppose. "Sam, listen, it's urgent. Is Earl back?"

He leaned in conspiratorially, glancing from side to side to make sure nobody else was listening. "He wandered in this morning. That skank-whore, Susan, got away."

"Figures."

"Don't worry, one of these days, we'll take them down. And I just hope that it's one of us old-timers. It should be our job, our responsibility." Sam had served with Ray and Susan when he had been a young Hunter and he had been on the team when Susan had disappeared. For Sam, having one of his team end up playing for the other side was a personal insult. "Come on. Earl's downstairs recuperating." Sam bulled his way through the crowd. Other leads intercepted us, greeting, visiting, all of them exceedingly friendly. I knew most of them from last summer or from Milo's wedding. It was kind of weird, but amongst all of these more experienced Hunters, I was sort of famous. I noted that Sam was the only commander wearing his full uniform. He was just that proud of his new patch that he had to show everybody. "We've been interviewing Newbies all morning, and after lunch we get to fight over who gets who. But I get the first-round draft pick."

"Because you're the newest team?"

"No, because I'm that awesome. Boone thinks he gets first pick, since he says he's short-handed. Hell, I've got the same number of men he does. We'll have to wrestle for it." Still being relatively new to the ways of MHI, it wouldn't have shocked me to discover that feats of strength were a recognized method of solving human resource issues. "I'd whup his ass."

"Hmm…Maybe I would make a good team lead," I muttered. I had, after all, beaten people up for money for a few years. Between that and the fact that I could actually do a budget, I might be able to get myself a promotion. As we approached the cafeteria, I heard the sound of an acoustic guitar. Glancing inside, I noticed my brother sitting at one end of the room, borrowed guitar in hand, as he cranked through something familiar. Several of the single female Newbies were sitting at the next table batting their eyes at him, as well as half a dozen masked and hooded orcs who were just happy to be in the presence of greatness. It was rare for any of the orcs to want to be around humans, even us, but they made an exception for our celebrity guest. "He always did get all the chicks."

Holly listened for a moment as Mosh's fingers flew back and forth. "Damn, he's really good."

"Some say the best in the world. We are a talented family."

"His talent's cooler though."

I shook my head. "Fine, don't come crying to me when you need help with your taxes next year."

Mosh saw us standing in the doorway, stopped playing mid-lyric, dropped the guitar, jumped up, and started toward me. The orcish contingent immediately began to boo loudly. He ignored them and focused in on me with an unnerving intensity. He must have picked that up from Dad. "There you are. We need to talk. Have you seen the news?"

"Been too busy."

"The official story is that I caused all the crazy stuff at Buzzard Island! Out-of-control special effects and lame-ass shit like that. When can I get out of here?"

"Dude, chill. I'm working on it." I raised my hand defensively. "I'm taking care of this as fast as I can."

"Not fast enough. Mom keeps trying to talk to me. I don't have any of my stuff. We've already had to cancel some shows, and if I don't get out of here soon, we're going to have to screw the whole tour. You know how pissed the fans are going to be when I have to refund ten sold-out concerts? I've got bills to pay."

"Aw man, you might have to sell that Ferrari you just bought," I said.

Mosh snorted as if I had just given him a grave insult. "It was an Aston Martin."

"Whatever. Look, it just isn't safe yet. You go out in public, and you might as well strap a big target to your forehead."

"I can get security."

"Now you're being stupid. Bodyguards aren't up to this gig."

Sam raised his hand. "Hey, if I can butt in, I know a little company that can pull security…" Mosh and I both scowled at him. "Oh, fine. Just trying to scare up some business. Alrighty then, I'll be waiting downstairs when you drama queens are done having your slap fight." He spun on his boot and left. Trip looked uncomfortable. Holly appeared to be enjoying the show.

Mosh moved in closer and poked me in the chest. I was certain he remembered just how much that bugged me. "Listen, people are already starting to talk. The fan sites are saying that I had to check into rehab. And one of those government guys was on the news saying that the big explosion was because I personally wrecked the tour bus into that gas tanker. He didn't come out and say it, but he was trying to make it sound like I was totally wasted or something. It was the one who looks like an English teacher, the dirty, rotten, lying, sack of shit."

"Oh, you mean Agent Myers. Yeah, that's what he does for a living. He makes monster attacks go away." I steered his hand away from me. "Look, I feel your pain, and I'm sure this will all make a great episode of Behind the Music someday, but in the meantime, you're stuck."

"I should so kick your ass." Mosh was ticked. "Am I supposed to be a prisoner here or something?"

"No, feel free to walk out that front gate and let me know what kind of monster manages to eat your brain first. See if I care."

"Damn it!" he shouted. "This is really screwing up my career."

"You think a bunch of fanatics and their squid god give a crap about your career? Quit being such a baby."

Holly stepped gently between us. "Okay, guys, calm down. Yes, this is all Z's fault." She gave me a look, indicating that I had just better shut it. "And I'm sure he’s really sorry. But we're resolving this situation as quickly as possible."

Mosh stepped back, still huffy. He turned his attention to Holly for the first time. "And who are you?"

She stuck out her hand. "Holly Newcastle. Monster Hunter. I'm on your brother's team."