CHAPTER 1
Take it from someone who grew up in this business. You should never, ever, ever hunt vampires in a dark basement as the sun is going down.
Crash.
Something broke in the dark basement where I was hunting vampires at sunset.
Yes, I know. My grandpa would have hit me upside the head for even considering this job, but I had my reasons. Sometimes a girl’s got to do what she’s got to do, and I had ignorant college kids to protect.
My fellow students lived in a kind of dream world, filled with comforting lies and pretty fairy tales. I’d grown up in the real world, where monsters exist and are out to destroy humanity. My youth was spent in shoot houses and eavesdropping on autopsies. My first monster kill was when I was ten, and I’d been a member of the family business ever since. My classmates, if they thought of monsters at all, thought of them as sexy, or tragic and misunderstood. Personally, I’d found there were few misunderstandings that couldn’t be cured with a sufficient quantity of silver delivered at a high enough velocity. I’d been to way too many murder scenes to buy into any of that pro-monster propaganda nonsense. Monsters were evil, and evil needs killing.
Which was how I’d ended up alone in the creepy basement of the science building, armed to the teeth, and surrounded by vampires. The high narrow windows meant that there was still a little light getting in, but despite that, some of the vamps were already awake and moving. Retreat would’ve been the smart thing to do.
Only the infestation could not be allowed to go on, not even for one more night. No more innocents would die. Not on my watch.
Technically, it wasn’t my watch anymore. This wasn’t supposed to be my responsibility. Private monster hunting had been banned. Both tactically and legally speaking, being down here was stupid.
Only none of that matters when monster hunting is in your blood.
It’s what I do.
* * *
It had started in the library where I was studying with my friend Cynthia Anne Aiken. Well, sort of my friend. She was younger than me, naïve, having trouble adapting to college, and she sort of clung to me like a bird with a broken wing. We sat at a table with a pile of art books between us. I was a grad student in anthropology, but I was picking up an art history degree while I was here too. When you’ve worked as hard a job as I’d had, going back to school was a piece of cake.
“No, I don’t think vampires are romantic,” I told her, as I had many times.
Cynthia Anne sighed. “You’re no fun.”
I shoved some books aside and looked at her. Really looked. She was just a baby. Granted, I was older than most other students in my classes—education gets delayed when you’ve already got a good paying job—but Cynthia Anne Aiken was just a round-faced little freshman with big blue eyes and wispy blonde hair. She wore a blue headband and little flower earrings, and had He listened, like we dream of others listening tattooed in fancy script around her wrist. She reminded me a bit of the youngest Hunters who’d ever shown up for our training classes, meaning those who’d had their first supernatural encounters when they were just kids but had to wait until they were adults to join. Only without their cynicism. Or guts. Or perspective. Or, you know, the scars of having survived an encounter with homicidal monsters.
I’d noticed she was reading Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned and had to comment. “Vampires aren’t sexy, or cute, Cynthers. They want to eat you, and not in a good way.”
She had stared at me, mouth open like a guppy. She hadn’t said vampires don’t exist. That should have been my first clue. Instead, she muttered something in a tumble about the tragedy of living forever and not having anyone to understand or love you because people would think you were a monster.
“That’s because they are monsters, evil spirits animating the soulless undead husk of a human.” I started to tell her the truth, but then her wide-open eyes told me I was out of step again, unable to communicate with people who hadn’t grown up like I had, or seen the things I’d seen. Regular people can be so exasperating at times.
For a hundred years, my family’s business had been eradicating the things most people didn’t think existed. For generations, we had killed vampires, werewolves, and weirder. We’d kept people safe and collected the bounties—quite good bounties—until the government had decided to shut us down. Okay, the government had a reason, and I’d been there for that event, but I still didn’t like to dwell on it.
After I’d been put out of work, I’d come to Auburn to study and to be normal. Not to think of the Christmas Party or dwell on my dead brother or insane father. I failed at that a lot. I constantly had to remind myself about that being normal thing. A normal person had no reason to blow up little Cynthers’ illusions. The Monster Control Bureau was still keeping tabs on all of the former employees of MHI, and they’d love to throw the book at a Shackleford for violating the Unearthly Forces Secrecy Act. It was illegal for someone like me to speak frankly to someone like her. If she started blabbing about how crazy Julie Shackleford believed vampires were real, the MCB wouldn’t hesitate to further ruin my life. They really weren’t messing around right now, not after the Christmas Party. Nobody was getting let off with a warning nowadays. I’d be looking at prison time minimum, or more likely a bullet to the head and a fake suicide note.
Besides, if she wanted to dream of vampires as fairy princes, that was innocuous. After all, odds were most humans would never run into a vampire.
So I chickened out, shrugged and said, “Whatever” and “Aren’t you going to study for the test?”
She shoved the novel aside with a sigh and allowed me to share my flash cards with her. We drilled each other on art history and the ability to recognize different styles from just a portion of the painting.
I left the library at five p.m. to go to another class. She stayed behind. It was the last time I saw Cynthia alive.
* * *
She didn’t show up for the test the next morning.
I didn’t think anything bad had happened to her either, really. I thought I’d just pushed her too hard studying and she’d finally lost it and driven back home to Mommy and Daddy. In fact, her little sporty red Mercedes, which she’d told me had been her eighteenth birthday gift, was gone from the parking in front of her dorm. Mom and Dad must be talking her out of the dismals right now.
Because that’s the sort of conclusion a normal person would come to.
I didn’t have to be normal. It’s not like I didn’t keep getting job offers to join teams operating in other countries. Despite my dad’s screwups, I still had a good reputation. It’s not like I couldn’t have left the US and made a bit of money. But after losing so much, I’d just wanted to walk away. I’d lost my brother. I’d lost my best friends. Talking to the ones who were still alive just reminded me of the dead. So I’d cut myself off and moved on.
Even though I was actively trying my hardest not to think like a Hunter, I couldn’t help but keep my ears open. Another girl had gone missing recently, but she was one of those types where disappearing for weeks to “find herself” wasn’t odd. Then the day after Cynthia, another girl didn’t show up to class, and the next day, another.
That was when people began to panic. Photos of the missing girls got plastered all around campus. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing, no witnesses, and no bodies had been found, but the police had started talking about a possible serial killer operating around the Auburn campus. Like a good normal, I told myself they were probably right and all the disappearances were because of a run-of-the-mill psycho killer and, trust me, by my jaded standards those were practically cuddly, they were so nonthreatening. They were also not my problem, so I could leave it to the police.
Still, I felt prickles of discomfort about Cynthers almost immediately, but I kept telling myself not to be paranoid. She was deluded about vampires, but that wasn’t uncommon. Half the girls on campus were crazy for stupid, fake, sexy movie vampires.
But as the number of disappearances rose, it got harder and harder not to think like a Hunter.
Since I was the last person who’d seen Cynthia, I was interviewed by the local police. They weren’t read in on the supernatural, so I couldn’t even risk warning them what they might be up against. They’d just think I was crazy.
While the locals formed search parties to walk through the woods looking for dump sites, I was a good citizen and called the MCB to report my suspicions. That wasn’t a number that was listed in the phone book, so they took all their tips seriously. However, after I gave them my last name, they said they’d look into it, and then promptly hung up on me.
A few days after Cynthia went missing, I stayed at the library late, studying for a linguistics test. Linguistics is kind of like math without any numbers, and you need to dislocate your mind to fit it. That’s the best I can describe it, and back then I was still having some trouble with it. I loved it, but it just took some effort. Afterwards I ended up having to cross the whole campus after dark.
Maybe subconsciously I was looking for trouble, I don’t know.
Auburn has all these tall brick buildings that look like they were built by homesick Englishmen. Between them, the lush vegetation of Alabama grows rampant. There was this trimmed area with topiaries, but it had to be trimmed constantly because one thing Alabama vegetation doesn’t do is “restrained” or “civilized.” The path home wound past the topiary garden and through an area with really thick trees.
With the serial killer scare, there weren’t very many people out after dark, and those who were traveled in groups. That was smart. I was alone but wasn’t worried about getting kidnapped. I’m not really the victim type. If we did have a serial killer, I’d just drop him and consider it a community service.
I confess I wasn’t even thinking about that at the time. I was thinking of the set changes that had taken Middle English to modern English. I needed to translate “Our Father” from modern English into some defined century of the past. It’s harder than it sounds, and because you were required to explain the transformations, just memorizing the thing wouldn’t solve it. So I was doing it in my head, and had got to the fourteenth century with Oure fadir that art in heuenes when someone slid out of the trees onto the path in front of me and started in my direction.
It was Cynthia.
The light was bad here, but it was definitely her. A normal person would have reacted with joy, probably just thinking she was coming back with her tail between her legs, wanting to know if I’d help her sweet-talk the art history teacher into letting her take the test late. Like Professor Clark would listen to me any more than to her…but the Hunter part of me read things differently.
In that second, I noticed several things. Like, if she’d gone home, why was she still wearing the same yellow top and artistically torn jeans she’d worn last time I’d seen her at the university? I’m a good observer and those weren’t just similar clothes—they were the same. Also, she was walking differently, like she had a lot more self-confidence all of a sudden. Maybe she’d found a boyfriend and had been shacked up with him for a few days. It has that effect on some women. Hell, maybe she was just on painkillers or something.
But since I’ve already said that the library was the last time I saw Cynthia Anne Aiken alive, you know how this is going to go.
I said, “Cynthers, you’re back,” friendly as could be, as I moved my hand to my gun.
Of course I was armed. I’d never understood why most universities banned concealed carry. I mean, if they wanted to provide targets for killers, couldn’t they buy some clay pigeons? You can hide a Colt Officer’s Model .45 inside a waistband holster beneath a baggy War Eagle sweatshirt really well.
She didn’t say anything, just smiled, as she kept closing distance. I could feel something coming off her, as if she were trying to send thoughts my way, suggesting she was inoffensive. Vampires do that thing where they project right against your mind. I always hated that feeling.
Normal people would tell themselves that they were imagining things, that they were being fanciful. But it turns out I wasn’t normal, no matter how much I’d tried to pretend I was.
Cynthers charged and I was sure. No human could move that fast.
I shot her in the face.
She jumped back, startled, blinking, as if she hadn’t expected me to resist.
I’d been a little off. That’s what I got for being out of practice. I lined up the night sights and immediately put my second bullet through her eye socket.
Sadly, guns aren’t the best thing for killing vampires, which was pretty obvious since shooting her twice through the brain only made her stumble.
She might not have been alone. There could have been more vampires hiding in the bushes. I should have run away, but honestly that thought never even crossed my mind. Cynthia was hissing and squirting blood. When I saw her remaining eye glowing red and a sneer that revealed sharp fangs, I was committed. This monster was going down, no matter what.
The night had been still so the whole campus must have heard the noise. People or vampires were sure to come running, but I didn’t think about that as I dumped the rest of my magazine into her.
My slide locked back as I fired my last round.
Cynthia had a bunch of new holes in her, but the instant the gunfire let up, she lurched in my direction.
I wished I had a flamethrower. And body armor. If you don’t have something belt-fed or explosive, stakes and decapitation work best. I swung my book bag around, ripped open the side pocket, got ahold of my big knife, and yanked it from the sheath.
Milo Anderson had made this blade, hammering it from a truck’s leaf spring over an open fire, just to teach himself how, and given it to me for Christmas. I intended to take her head off with it.
Cynthia was wounded and pissed. She also had super vampire strength, but like most new vampires, she was too stupid and clumsy to use it well. The bullet wounds had screwed her up, so I might have a chance.
She leapt at me.
In my head was the story of how the Maasai hunt lions with just a sharpened stick. They crouch when the lion jumps, then run out of the way when the lion falls, preferably on the stick. No-longer-Cynthers was the lion, and a Milo-forged blade was a whole lot better than any stick.
She tackled me. Cynthia wasn’t very big and Milo’s knife was huge. We landed hard, her on top of the knife, and I split her wide open. It was a mess. With my free hand I pushed against her face to keep her snapping fangs away from my neck. With my other, I just kept twisting and sawing, aiming for her heart. She shrieked and snapped, nothing but an undead animal. Thick black blood was gushing everywhere.
She smelled like road-kill death.
We rolled until I somehow wound up on top. I jerked the knife out of her torso and slashed it hard against her neck. Fluid sprayed out like a geyser. That took the fight out of her.
Vampires are incredibly tough, and if you give them any time at all, they’ll heal. So I hacked her head off.
It wasn’t pretty. Everything was slick, and I’d let myself get out of shape. My arms were on fire. It took me several tries to remove her head.
At the time I felt nothing. My friend was gone. This was just evil animated meat.
The overgrown area was quiet again. There was a bunch of noise and commotion around the rest of campus, but my gunshots had been so rapid that they must have been hard to pinpoint. The whole fight had taken like thirty seconds, but I was breathing hard, pulse pounding, sitting on top of a headless corpse whose flesh immediately started softening into black goo. I knew that pretty soon all that would be left were bones covered in ooze, but some idiot might stick the head back together with the body, and that would be bad. So I picked Cynthia’s head up by the hair and carried it back to my book bag. I shoved her in on top of my expensive textbooks… Well, those were certainly ruined now.
No, you don’t need to know how I disposed of it. Suffice it to say no one ever found her head.
I got out of there fast, before whatever vampire had turned Cynthia came to feed—or worse. I’d get caught by the cops covered in blood with a severed head in my bag. That would be tough to explain. I avoided the arriving police cars and hurried home off campus.
My place was the top floor of a Victorian. I’d bought the house with my savings left from the bounties I’d collected. The bottom floor was two apartments, which paid a good portion of my tuition. The top floor was all mine, with a secret addition where I stored a bunch of my old equipment. It was well hidden. I could even have friends over for parties—not that I ever had parties—and they’d never have guessed that room was there. The first thing I did was open up the safe room to pull out some real hardware in case I’d been followed.
Then I stripped off my blood-soaked clothing. While I showered was when the guilt really hit me. I could have saved Cynthers. I could have warned her, told her the whole truth…something. It was my duty to protect the lambs who couldn’t recognize a wolf. Really, I had barely known her, but I cried more right then than I had when my brother Ray had died, because at least with Ray, I had tried to save him.
Grieving over my family and friends had made me selfish. Being normal was a foolish dream. It was too late for her, but not too late for the rest. The Feds be damned, it was time to go back to work.
Normally when a vampire moves into an area, it takes victims and then stashes them, bleeding them slow, feeding over a period of time. That kept the number of disappearances low enough to not attract the attention of Hunters. When their helpless blood bags eventually died, the vamp would usually rip their heads off to keep them from coming back; less mouths to feed that way. Only this one was actively creating new vampires. That kind of escalating behavior was extremely dangerous. They’d still need a place to sleep during the day. That’s where I would find them and kill them.
Solo hunting is stupid. It’s reserved for people with a death wish or nothing to lose. I didn’t think about that. This was personal. Nothing makes you dumber than anger or guilt, and right then I was feeling plenty of both.
I spent the rest of the night preparing. I had a ton of guns, but with the MCB breathing down my neck, I was actually trying to obey the law, so I didn’t have any explosives. So I made up some Molotov cocktails in my kitchen. They would have to do. While I worked I kept asking myself where, on or near campus, was a place where vampires could hide from the sun without anyone seeing them?
I came up with a few ideas and made a list. I had lockpicks, bolt cutters, and a crowbar. The minute the sun came up I got busy breaking and entering.
I burned way too much daylight before I found my winner. The old science building was the fifth place I checked that day. It had a deep basement that had been closed off years ago. Theoretically, some people had keys for it, but nobody ever went down there, something about exposed asbestos. There had been articles in the student paper about all the stuff abandoned, including decaying books and science instruments long out of date. There were jokes about the philosopher’s stone forgotten in some cardboard box down there.
I had put loose clothing on over my armor and stuck my equipment into a duffle bag, just enough of a disguise that someone seeing me on campus wouldn’t wonder when Auburn had added a Commando 101 course. I expected someone to challenge my right to go into the science building basement, but no one did. Since it was closed, there wouldn’t be any innocent people getting in my way.
As soon as I found a bunch of dried bloody handprints and scratches where they’d dragged some poor struggling victim down the stairs, I knew I’d found the right place.
* * *
There were a lot more of them than I’d expected. This dirtbag had been building an army.
Young vampires are sluggish during the day, but they’re not entirely helpless. So every time I found one, I’d slam a stake through their heart to paralyze them, then immediately go to work chopping their heads off. Surprise them one at a time like that and they’re not too bad.
The hard part is they like to hide. Vampires can sleep in the weirdest cramped conditions. In those cases, I’d toss a rope over whatever was sticking out, then drag them into the open to stake them. It’s time-consuming work.
These were all weak, barely more than incoherent ghouls. They might have survived if Cynthers hadn’t gone off the reservation. A couple tried to fight me when I woke them up, but I’d shot those with a suppressed carbine until they were practically Swiss cheese. Then I dragged them out and finished the job. New vampires can hardly talk, but one tried to beg for mercy. I didn’t have any to give her.
Vampires have a stink to them. Decay and blood. Their presence makes your skin crawl. They suck the warmth out of a room. They leave all that stuff out of the romance novels.
I killed vampires all afternoon. They’d been collecting here for a while. There had probably just been one to start. That was the one I was really worried about. The longer vampires live, the tougher and smarter they get until the old ones are practically a nightmare.
I never found him, but I found where he’d kept his captives: chained to a toilet in an old bathroom. He’d probably picked that room because it had a drain in the floor. But as the people he’d fed on died, he’d let them come back, and their numbers had grown. I really wanted to make him pay.
As the sun went down, I knew the rest would wake up and swarm me. There was no way I’d make it out alive. Then the surviving vamps would escape to inflict this same horror on some other unsuspecting place. I was angry, guilty, and really tired, but I’m not dumb.
So I lit my Molotov cocktails and burned that whole son of a bitch to the ground.
My name is Julie Shackleford. My family have been Monster Hunters for over a hundred years. My job is to keep the sweet little idiots who don’t believe in monsters safe.
And I’m okay with that.