The Monster Hunters

  Stark’s eyes narrowed. “You . . . You’re threatening me?”

  “Well, I ain’t asking you to the prom,” Harbinger answered impatiently. “What’s it gonna be, Agent? Let me do my job, or we gonna have us a problem?”

  Stark was shocked that Harbinger had the audacity to threaten him. The MCB agent had been intimidating people for so long, and never the other way around, that it took the words a moment to sink in. “Who do you think you are?” he sputtered.

  Harbinger moved faster than Stark could possibly react. He smacked the gun aside. His other hand wrapped around Stark’s thick neck and slammed him hard into the wall. Stark’s shoes left the floor as Harbinger hoisted him into the air.

  “Who do I think I am?” the Hunter snapped as he yanked the Glock away. He held two hundred and fifty pounds of Stark several inches off the ground without so much as a muscle tremor. “I’ve been kicking monster ass longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve eaten men that would make you look like a pussy on your best day. I’m Earl Harbinger, motherfucker.” Stark gasped for air. Harbinger let go of his neck, dropping the MCB agent. Harbinger released the mag from Stark’s pistol, racked the slide to eject the chambered round, and then tossed the pistol down the hall with a clatter. “And you damn well better not forget it.”

  Stark went to his knees. Harbinger had absolutely manhandled him. There were a few things that Special Agent Doug Stark of the Monster Control Bureau just couldn’t handle, and one of them was being pushed around. He was far more angry than afraid. “You just signed your death warrant,” he rasped.

  Water was pouring down Harbinger’s face as he growled at the agent. “Take it up with Myers.” He spun on his boot and walked away through the forming puddles. “Just keep out of my way. This one is way out of your league.”

  By the time the half-blind Mosher found Stark sitting on the floor, cursing in the sprinklers and rubbing his bruised throat, Harbinger was gone.

  There was no cellular signal and no dial tone at the hospital, so Earl had started back for his truck. Originally he’d planned on playing this alone, figuring that it was just his old nemesis Nikolai here for some personal business, but this was something entirely different. Earl prided himself on being stubborn, but he wasn’t stupid—well, except for when his temper got the better of him around bullies. Something strange was afoot, but a man had to know his limitations, and a whole pack of werewolves and some sort of dark magic certainly fell into that category. He’d use the satellite phone to contact Julie. She could have the closest teams rolling in no time, and knowing her, the Cazador team wouldn’t be far behind.

  Stark would probably have the place crawling in MCB as well now.

  They’d been especially jumpy since the photos of the Arbmunep incident had hit the Internet. That, combined with the Five Minutes, had really shaken up the status quo. Lucky for the MCB, most of the conspiracy types were saying that the Arbmunep had been an alien spaceship, and it was old hat for the government to make the UFO people sound crazy. But there were cracks in the wall now. It seemed like it was getting harder every year for them to keep the lid on the secrets. Earl didn’t mind that at all. If the truth actually got out, it would make his job that much easier. Just imagine how much business MHI could do if they were actually allowed to advertise? As a bonus, maybe Dwayne Myers would have a heart attack from the stress.

  Earl understood the MCB. That didn’t make him hate them any less, but he could see the reason behind their tactics. They were utterly ruthless when it came to protecting the country. For example, that cute deputy that he’d tried to help, Kerkonen, she was as good as dead. She’d be found by MCB and exterminated. Nothing he could do about that. He’d failed her by underestimating that young werewolf, though he knew there was no way he could have guessed that he’d be immune to silver, but he’d do his best to protect everyone else.

  The storm had grown in intensity. Visibility was down to a few feet. Ice crystals in the wind rubbed his skin like frozen sandpaper. It was enough to put a chill on even a werewolf’s hyper metabolism. He’d heard that this part of the country had terrible winters but suspected that this particular storm was related to the strange phenomenon from earlier. His suspicions were confirmed when he tried the sat phone in his truck and couldn’t get anything on it. Earl had paid top dollar for that unit. It had been developed for Delta Force and should have been able to pick up a satellite from the dark side of the moon. The regular radio turned up nothing, either. He was on his own.

  Earl sat in the cab and listened to the blizzard pound the windows and rock the truck around. He could now safely add the power outage and communications blackout to the list of oddness. Nikolai had really opened up a can of worms this time. Without reinforcements, that meant that he needed to stick with his original plan. Find Nikolai and kill the shit out of him.

  But where to start? He took the wolfsbane from his pocket, sealed it back into a plastic bag, and put it in the center console. It would make him a bigger target for Nikolai, but he had to take the risk. His own senses needed to be uninhibited—well, besides the smokes, obviously. He wasn’t about to give those up. Earl rolled down the window and was instantly pelted with stinging ice. He breathed deeply, taking in the smells of the town.

  Blood’s been spilled.

  It wasn’t from the hospital, either, but it was close. Earl put the truck into four-wheel drive and set out after the scent of death.

  Chapter 9

  I told time by the strength of the Hum.

  No one knows why the phase of the moon has the effect on us, but it does. We can hear it. It is always there. When it becomes too much, we change.

  When I change while the Hum is weak, I still possess some measure of control over my actions. But when the Hum becomes too strong, I’m at its mercy. It is like there is another thing that lives inside me, a whole different being, and on the full moon, it takes charge. During the nights of the full moon, I become something else. I become the animal.

  Every month spent on the island, I got a little better, a little stronger. I missed my wife. I missed my children. I dreamed about them every night. I wondered if they’d moved on. Part of me wished for their sake that they had, but the selfish part of me hoped that they were waiting for me. I promised that I would do this for them, so that I would return as the man they’d loved.

  It sounds crazy, but I’d hurt myself on purpose, exposing my body to ever greater stress, until even the most unbearable pain wasn’t enough to force a change. I flung myself from the cliffs, over and over, to land on the rocks below. A werewolf can fall pretty far and live. The worst part was that regeneration uses up calories, which meant I spent a lot of time hungry. I ate so damn much fish that I couldn’t stand the sight of one for about thirty years afterward.

  Santiago was as reliable as the tides. Every month he would come with supplies and stay on the island for a few days. Mostly he taught me the things he’d learned from the libraries that he missed so much. He was well read and extremely well educated. I had only three years of schooling, but I did know how to read. I was relatively uneducated, but that didn’t mean I was stupid. Quite the contrary. It was just that most of my education had been on the finer points of monster killing.

  I was terrible at chess, but Santiago was worse at checkers. I think I seriously unnerved him the time that I showed I could drive a filet knife through the palm of my hand and out the other side, held it up, and said, “See? Not even twitching.” He was a crafty one, though. I noted that he’d kept that last silver bullet, just in case I turned out to be a failed experiment.

  Santiago had not been able to take the old scrolls and books with him when he left Europe, but it didn’t matter. If he didn’t have a photographic memory, then it was damn close enough. He had learned every story pertaining to lycanthropy there was, and he passed on that knowledge to me.

  We started at the beginning. No one knew for sure where the curse had begun. There were theories, some of them branching i
nto the downright absurd. There were myths and legends, half of which I knew to be false just from personal experience. From Romans eating their own kids to deals with the devil, it was all a bunch of bunk.

  But there were some nuggets of truth in the old stories. I found out how Santiago had managed to avoid detection in Havana as he’d followed me. A small bit of wolfsbane worn on your person can mask your scent from a lycanthrope. You can smell the wolfsbane, but it distorts everything else around it. I’d learned that he’d been told of my presence by a Haitian diviner who knew of Santiago’s past life. Apparently a diviner with actual talent could sense when one of my kind was near. This was information that would prove useful many times over the ensuing years.

  One day the two of us were in the shack, perched over a game of checkers. I was beating him soundly, but he’d gotten better over the last year. He was telling me about how in any given region there was always a supreme lycanthrope.

  “Well, I ain’t met him yet.”

  “How do you know it is a male?”

  “It just is,” I answered truthfully.

  “Interesting . . .” he said, pondering on my answer. “We know there is a hierarchy. There is an order. This is something that we’ve learned over time. Anywhere there are many lycanthropes, they will naturally form groups—packs, if you will. One will always become the leader. And yes, every time this has been encountered, it has been a male.”

  “The most dangerous will be in charge,” I said, not knowing why.

  “Apparently. But there are others, like the men that I’ve told you about, like Sir Cabral, or Monsignor Ratton. They, too, shared the curse, but by not giving into their beastly natures, they were packless, lone wolves. Often they were attacked by other lycanthropes. They are despised with that special hatred reserved for traitors. When you return to the real world, you must be prepared for this. You will be on your own, and therefore, you will be a threat.”

  * * *

  “Power must be out.” Kelley stated the obvious from the back of the Caddy. “Place looks like a ghost town.”

  It was true. The emptiness of the roads was expected, since it was nearing midnight and snowing like crazy, but all the street lights were dark. Even the businesses’ signs were dead. Everything was coated in white. Drifts had piled up on nearly every wall. When it snowed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it really snowed.

  “Anybody with any sense is going to be inside trying to stay warm,” Lins said. “Like we should be.”

  “Yoopers don’t feel cold.” Jo Ann snorted when she laughed. “They’re too dumb.”

  Horst had to wonder about the chick with the strongest Wisconsin accent he’d ever heard insulting the locals from one region over, but he was a city boy. They all seemed backwoods to him. “Everybody zip it,” he ordered. “You’re giving me a headache. Where’s this stupid hospital, already?”

  “I don’t know. The GPS lost signal a few miles ago,” Lins said, reaching over to tap the box that was showing nothing but a blue screen.

  Horst swore under his breath. He’d disabled the OnStar, so they couldn’t even fall back on that. He hadn’t liked the idea of the government being able to listen in on his conversations whenever they felt like it—or shutting the engine off, for that matter. His cousin was serving some serious time after the FBI had gotten a warrant and used his OnStar to listen in while he’d been having a conversation about dumping a body in a Jersey landfill.

  Horst reasoned that if he ever did anything that would cause him to float to the FBI’s attention, they should at least have to do the work of putting an actual bug on his car. Not that he had to worry about that anymore, since he was a fully legitimate businessman now, which was sort of hilarious since he’d never had this kind of hardware when he’d been running errands for his uncle. And by errands, he meant putting a bullet in someone’s ear or hitting them with a bat until they were smart enough to not want to blab to the authorities anymore.

  “There,” Loco said softly. That made Horst do a double take. It was the first time he could recall that the big man had spoken since they’d left Chicago. The hospital had lights, the only sign of life since they’d hit the city limits. There were emergency vehicles in the parking lot, including a single fire truck, its red flashers barely visible through the caked-on slush.

  Lins visibly hesitated when he saw a parked police car, barely even visible under the collected snow, but then he relaxed. Instinct would’ve told him to avoid the police when driving around with a car full of machine guns, but it was like Horst said. It was hard to come to terms with the idea that this kind of awesome shit was actually legal. They slid to a stop behind the fire truck that had copper county volunteer fire department painted on it in big letters. A few windows on the top floor of the hospital were broken and blackened, like there’d been a fire.

  “I think we might be a little late,” Jo Ann said. “Too bad Larry drove so slow.”

  Lins turned around. “You better shut your mouth, Jo, or I’ll shut it for you.”

  Horst scowled. “You guys stay here. I’m gonna check it out.” He zipped his coat up to his throat and got out, leaving his crew free to yell at each other. If he was lucky, nobody would get stabbed or shot while he was gone.

  It was so unbelievably cold that he almost jumped back inside. Ice crystals instantly flowed up his sleeves, down his neck, and cut right through his jeans. He was shocked that anyone was tough or crazy enough to live here. This made the Windy City feel like Maui. Horst hurried for the front door, but slipped on some ice and fell on his side. Getting up and dusting himself off, he glanced back toward the Caddy, because if he saw anybody laughing at his expense, he was going to cut their face off. Lucky for them, nobody was laughing.

  It appeared that everyone in the hospital had been evacuated to the lobby. Most of them were dressed like they were patients, in bathrobes or wrapped in blankets. Some, in scrubs or sweaters, looked like they worked here, and there were a couple of guys in black-and-yellow rubber fireman’s coats. Two men stood right in the entrance, like they were trying not to be overheard by everyone else. One of the firemen was arguing with a tough-looking, big, bald man, dripping wet, in a suit and tie. Horst came through the door partway through the disagreement.

  The fireman noted Horst’s arrival. The sudden blast of freezing air was hard to miss. He turned back and continued his argument. “I’m not moving those bodies anywhere until the sheriff says so.”

  The dude in the dirty suit poked the fireman in the chest with one meaty finger. “Listen very carefully, asswipe. See this?” He pointed at the ID pinned to his lapel. “That says Department of Homeland Security, and we’ve got ourselves a terrorist incident. I am the law, and I say I want all those bodies stacked in one room. I want the door locked, and nobody messes with them until my people get here, or I will make it my personal mission in life to ruin you in ways that your little brain can’t even comprehend. You hearing me, dickhead?”

  The fireman was obviously ticked off, but also unsure of himself. “I want to talk to somebody from the sheriff’s department first.”

  “Well, feel free to try and find one,” the government man answered. “They aren’t exactly picking up the phone. Until then, get your ass up there and start stacking bodies, and I want all the pieces kept together, too. I don’t want so much as a toenail missing or I’ll toss you headfirst in a jail so deep and dark that your lawyer will need a spelunking expedition just to find you. You will not talk to anyone about what you see. You say one word about anything, and I will descend down on your head with the full weight and authority of a giant government that fully does not give a shit and will crush you like a bug. Capisce?”

  Defeated, the fireman stomped off toward the stairs. Looking smug, the dude in the suit turned to Horst. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  Horst put on his most professional business-type smile, crossed the distance, and stuck out his hand. It was all about authority and presentation, or at leas
t that’s what the self-help books said. “Agent Stark, I presume? Ryan Horst, Briarwood Eradication Services.”

  Stark nodded, looking at the proffered hand, but didn’t extend his own. “You’re late.”

  “Better late than never.” Horst kept his hand out, still smiling. The Fed was annoyed, but grudgingly shook Horst’s hand anyway. Stark had hands the size of boxing gloves, but Horst wasn’t the type that was intimidated about such things.

  Agent Stark released Horst’s hand and glanced over to make sure the firemen had gone upstairs like he’d ordered. “Somebody saw the explosion and ran over and woke them up. Local PD is missing. Some of them are dead upstairs, and it wasn’t like they had too many to begin with.”

  “What’ve we got here?” Horst asked, because that sounded like the logical thing for a professional monster hunter to ask.

  “A real mess. Multiple casualties, infected running free, no comms, no idea where the creature that started all this is, and . . .” His head swiveled on his pot-roast neck, checking for listeners. “I’ve got another issue you might be able to help me with. I’d prefer for my partner not to know you’re here. It’s a sensitive issue. Walk with me, Mr. Horst.”

  Horst followed Stark to a side room, which turned out to be a large storage closet. Stark closed the door behind them. Horst realized that the lights must be on emergency juice, because the lone lightbulb in the narrow space was remarkably dim. Stark was sweating. “How high up are you in Briarwood, Mr. Horst?”

  I own it, stupid, he thought, but Stark didn’t need to know how small they were. “Management. I’m a team commander. I’m authorized to make any necessary decisions or business arrangements, if that’s what you’re wondering.”