THE HUNTERS:
MONSTER HUNTING 101
Richard A. Bamberg
Text Copyright © 2015 Richard A Bamberg
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author No werewolves were harmed in the writing of this novel.
Cover art by RAVVEN (www.ravven.com)
ISBN-13: 978-0692572955 (Verdandi Press)
ISBN-10: 0692572953
9876543210:
DEDICATION
This novel, like all of them, is dedicated to my friends and family.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1 – Crawling Back to You
Chapter 2 – Once Bitten
Chapter 3 – Monster Hunting 101
Chapter 4 – No Spooning
Chapter 5 – A Patient Man
Chapter 6 – Leather and Lace
Chapter 7 – Cabin in the Woods
Chapter 8 – Uninvited Guests
Chapter 9 – Moonset
Chapter 10 – A Bolt Thrown Home
Chapter 11 – Moonrise
Chapter 12 – New Work
Chapter 13 – Old Flame
Chapter 14 – Specter
Chapter 15 – Flashback
Chapter 16 – Planning Session
Chapter 17 – Sex and Bracelets
Chapter 18 – Exorcism
Chapter 19 – Trinity Tattoo
Chapter 20 – Lion’s Den
Chapter 21 – Dinner Guests
Chapter 22 – The Change
Chapter 23 – Rings and Bracelets
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With grateful thanks to Rene’, Robert, Del, and DeAnna.
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Chapter 1 – Crawling Back to You
Have you ever made a decision that you knew would come back to haunt you? Yeah? Well, me too and tonight was certainly going to be one of those. I was driving down a misbegotten excuse for a gravel road on a muggy Alabama night in late May with the radio blaring. Overhead, a full moon cast a pale glow that lit the road ahead farther than the reach of my truck’s high beams. My taillights cast a ruddy glow on the clouds of dust spinning out behind my Dodge Ram and gravel pinged off the undercarriage with a staccato beat.
The satellite station switched songs and Daughtry’s “Crawling Back to You” blared from multiple speakers in the cab. How apropos, I thought, and then I slammed my fist against the steering wheel and shook my head. That was not what I was doing. Sure Gail Drexler was an old flame, but I wasn’t crawling back to her. Uh-uh, nope, not crawling, I was doing better than fifty on a road that was unsafe at forty.
A little less than an hour had passed since Gail’s call. Six years ago, she disappeared from my life and tonight she called—with no fanfare, no preamble—and said she needed my help. Sure, she was an old flame and we’d parted on excellent terms. A smile crept across my face at the thought. The last time I’d seen her had been the night before I enlisted in the Army. She had made sure I’d never forget that night or her.
When she called, I tried to put her off. I was studying for the last final of my sophomore year at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. The exam was important, more important than running out in the middle of the night to meet an old girlfriend. Okay, I hadn’t actually said that to her, but that’s what my head kept telling me. I said I could meet her after the exam, but she was insistent. Tomorrow would be too late; she had to see me now, tonight. Okay, I said, figuring I could meet her, move a piece of furniture or fix a leaking pipe and still be back in time to finish studying before catching a few hours’ sleep.
Then she asked me to meet her at Sardis and hung up.
I had stared at my phone’s display for a full minute. Sardis was nearly forty miles from my apartment in Huntsville. I called up her number and rang her back, but the call went straight to voicemail. I should have asked how she got my number, but she probably reached my parents, they had had the same number for at least thirty years.
Back when my Grandparents were children, Sardis had a fair-sized congregation. It was hardly a church anymore. They still had annual homecomings and an occasional revival, but the remainder of the year, the church, and its one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old cemetery were alone except for the groundskeeper. He didn’t show up except when the weeds needed whacking.
I jammed on the brakes and took a left onto another nameless gravel road. The truck shuddered across washboard ruts until I thought a tooth filling was coming loose. The rear end fishtailed, but I had learned to drive on these roads and this was nothing new. I pressed down on the accelerator until all four wheels bit in and powered out of the skid. My rear wheels dug into the soft, weed-choked gravel at the edge of the ditch, but then the truck straightened out. Daughtry got tired of singing “Crawling Back to You” and in the pause there was just the rumble of the Dodge’s Hemi and the gravel pinging off the skid plates.
My pickup bounced onto the wood planks of an old bridge. I glanced upstream toward a beaver dam that had been there for almost as long as the bridge. The moon reflected brightly from its waters. Something large and furry ran across the dam, something much larger than a beaver, a coyote maybe. The truck’s tires lost traction again as I hit the gravel on the far side of the bridge. I snapped my eyes back ahead and again fought to stay out of the ditch.
I eased off the gas and slowed to a more sane speed. Sardis was only a couple more miles and there was no sense in risking a wreck just to save a minute or two.
I smiled again at the thought of seeing Gail. She had been
