that.'
'Holly! Canteen.' I snapped my fingers. 'This is a medical emergency.'
'Going to have a medical emergency when I shoot your ass,' she answered as she tossed me a canteen. I unscrewed the lid and poured the cool water down my face. It felt good to scrub off the disgusting dried mess. I wiped my face on my arm.
'Okay, now I'm kissable.'
'Whoa.' Julie's eyes betrayed her shock.
Holly leaned over to see. 'Holy shit!'
I raised my hands to my face. What was so surprising?
'What? Let me see!' Trip said.
My skin was smooth. It felt normal. Too normal. My scars were gone. The thick ridge of tissue that had stretched from the top of my head to the side of my nose was gone. I poured some of the water on my chest. All of the scars from my battle with the werewolf Huffman had disappeared. The still-healing road rash on my arms was gone. I probed my molars with my tongue. The missing teeth had returned. My body had been totally repaired.
'The Old Ones… When they fixed me so that I could fight and sacrifice Lord Machado…' I did not know what to say. I had grown used to the scars and injuries. They were all fixed. It was amazing.
'Wow… It's like ancient evil ultimate makeover,' Holly said.
Julie caressed the side of my face, then she leaned in and kissed me passionately. Her lips were soft, and it felt good to be alive. Thankfully the others refrained from any snide comments.
When we had come up for air, I had to ask. 'I thought chicks dig scars?'
'Right now, I could care less. I'm just glad we're still alive.'
'Me too.'
We cleared out the rest of the wounded. Between the chaos of the mighty storm and the undead-inflicted carnage across the state, most of the hospitals from here to Birmingham were working around the clock. We still had a lot of cleaning up to do, but for today, MHI was done.
Gretchen had ridden up on the back of a mighty warg. She had taken one look at the back of my head and pronounced me something incomprehensible. I did not know if it was good or bad, but the other orcs had laughed at me, so I took that to be a good thing.
Harbinger was still missing, so Julie and her grandfather had effectively taken control of the chaos. Her brother Nate stood protectively nearby. I barely knew the kid, but he was not going to let any of his remaining family out of his sight. I could respect that. Once the wounded were safely gone, the rest of the gear was packed into the surviving vehicles, and then finally the dead. It was a somber duty, but we were not going to leave our dead in the hands of the local authorities.
I helped to lift one of the shrouded bodies into the back of a van. It was Chuck Mead. He had fought hard, and died bravely. But in the end, even the bravest of us would eventually buy it. We had trained together, and I was going to miss the big, simple Ranger. He had been a good man.
Priest said prayers over the bodies of our fallen. He stepped around the corpses, one arm coated in dried blood and slung to his chest. He ignored it. He had work to do. Our comrades would be taken back to the compound where we could perform a proper Hunter's funeral. It was grisly business, but in our line of work, having your friends cut your head off was the final sign of respect.
'It seems bad, but considering what we were up against,' the senior Shackleford stated, 'we did good. We did very good.'
'Grandpa, has anyone seen Earl since last night?' Julie asked.
' 'Fraid not, dear,' he answered quietly. 'Some of VanZant's boys saw him go past the mortar emplacement after he killed that Master. They said he looked mighty tore up. He was heading into the woods.'
'I hope he's okay,' she said softly.
'Um…' I was sorry to intrude on the family moment, but I had to know. 'So Earl's a werewolf. I mean, I'm cool with that. It isn't the first time I've had a werewolf boss, you know.'
'Yes. He's a werewolf,' the Boss answered, using his hook to tap me on the chest for emphasis, 'and that information doesn't go outside of MHI. When that bastard Myers quit and joined the Feds, they found out about him, and he had all manner of trouble. The Feds wanted to kill him.'
'And it was only through a whole lot of legal wrangling that he was given a special status,' Julie said. 'Earl is the only non-PUFF applicable lycanthrope in the world. And even then he is kind of on probation.'
'But I thought werewolves were crazy, and violent, and just killed people at the drop of a hat,' I said. I unconsciously rubbed my hand on my face, only to realize that my scar was no longer there. I lowered my hand, feeling stupid. 'But he seems so in control.' It all made sense though. The way he had defeated Darne so easily on the freighter. The way that he had fought in Natchy Bottom.
'Well… he's had a lot of time to work on it,' the Boss said. 'He has more control over his abilities than any other one that we know about. On the full moon, he still has to lock himself up, because he ain't got no choice but to change then. On the full moon, he just loses it, and it's all animal. He tears the hell out of things, but by morning he's fine. We got us a concrete room with a steel door in the basement of the compound. Built just for him.'
'On holidays Milo throws a cow in the cell with him,' Nate added helpfully, 'kind of like a special Christmas dinner. In the morning we just hose it down.'
'He used to lock himself up at the family estate. We had a little building out by the old slave quarters,' the Boss said. 'Had to build the new cell when he started to wear it out. He didn't want to get loose and hurt somebody when he wasn't in full control.'
I knew exactly which little building he was talking about. It had given me the creeps at the time. All of those marks that I had thought had been made by a tool, they had been frustrated claw marks. 'But there were millions of scratches in there,' I blurted. 'It had to have taken hundreds of hours to do all of that.'
The three Shacklefords looked at each other, trying to decide what exactly to say. Finally Julie started to speak.
'Not hundreds of hours, but almost that many years.'
'Huh?'
'Julie!' Nate said, looking over his shoulder to make sure the other Hunters were not in earshot. 'You can't tell him about… that.'
'Sorry, bro. In the last few days Owen has almost destroyed the universe twice to save me. I'm guessing that he can know about the family secret,' she said politely. The Boss nodded for her to proceed.
'Earl isn't just a special case. He is the special case. As far as we know, he is the oldest living lycanthrope in the world. He is, quite literally, the king of werewolves. He was bitten back in the 1920s. Over the last eighty years, he has aged maybe twenty years. It took him a real long time to get the hang of it, and to keep from flipping out and killing people like a regular werewolf. That's probably why he smokes so much. When he doesn't get his cigarettes, he gets cranky. When he gets cranky, people get eaten.'
'Gives a whole new meaning to nicotine fit,' Nate quipped. His grandfather groaned. It probably wasn't the first time that joke had been made in the family.
'He changes his name every generation, always trying to keep his secret safe. Only a handful of us know who he really is. My family has protected him the whole time.'
I thought back to the Shackleford family estate, and more importantly the wall of family portraits. There had been only one missing, conspicuous by its absence.
'Raymond Shackleford the Second,' I said slowly.
'Yep. You're pretty quick for a bean counter. I like this young man, Julie, much better than your last boyfriend, but I digress. I was only a young man when he was bit, but we stood by my daddy,' the Boss said. 'Shacklefords take care of their own.' The other two nodded. He pointed toward the road where some other vehicles were arriving. 'Well, looks like we got some company. Come on, Nate, let's give these two a moment.' He shuffled away, grandson in tow.
'So let me get this straight.' I took Julie by the hand. 'You hang out with your great-grandfather, who's some sort of mutant super werewolf. Your mother is a vampire. Your father was a mad genius who almost destroyed the world. Your grandfather is a half-crazed Monster Hunter with one eye and a stainless steel hook for a hand, and he's the normal one of the bunch.' I took a deep breath. 'Is that about it? Is there any other family weirdness that I
