She stared off into space, reunited once more with the memories of her fallen family and comrades. I did not speak.
"Three quarters of us were dead. And some who had been too close to that rift just walked away and never came back. Ninety-seven dead Hunters and forty dead guests and resort staff. Within a few days an executive order was issued and we were shut down. The Feds took my dad away. The news reported that an oil tanker had run aground and caught fire. I went to a lot of funerals."
"Julie. I don't know what to say."
She put her head down and cried softly. I put my arm around her and waited for her to stop. She sobbed a few times as she was temporarily overcome with emotion.
"I'm okay." She raised her head, sniffed, but then pushed away and stood proudly. "And now you know about us. You know the whole story. And you know why I don't give a shit if that son of a bitch who claims to be my father lives or dies. It would be better for a whole lot of people if his damned black heart quit beating, but if he lives, I think that Appleton is far too nice a place to hold him. If I had my way I would have left him in that rift. He's caused too much pain. He isn't my father. He's nothing but a monster. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let him be taken to help some other monster unleash that kind of terror on my world again."
"I know."
"Good." She stopped. "I loved my brother. I miss him still. And I lost friends, people I've known since I was a kid. I hold him responsible for this. So that's why I've been acting the way I have. I'm sorry if I've been harsh, but I'll kill him before I let him go free."
"If anything, I think you've shown remarkable restraint. Thanks for telling me the story." She was an interesting woman to say the least. I was still curious. "What did you do next?"
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"After the company was shut down, until we started back up. What did you do?"
"Well…" She sat back down next to me with a creak of plastic. I don't think that she had expected to continue her story. "I went back to school. Finished up my degrees. I tried to be normal for a while."
"Normal?" I had been struggling with the concept myself, doubting myself, my choices, and my abilities. It was strange to hear Julie, super Monster Hunter Julie Shackleford, say the same thing. Strange, but comforting.
"You know. Not a crazed monster killer. I didn't fight evil. I didn't do anything like that. I went to college. I went on dates. I got a job. I didn't really need the money, but I wanted to be like everybody else. I started working on this house as a hobby. I painted."
"You paint?"
"A little," she answered sheepishly.
"Can I see them?" I asked.
"They're not very good. Maybe another time."
"I bet they're fine," I assured her. "Another time then."
"Earl kept hunting. Only now he had to work out of the country and had to compete against established companies, with more assets and the backing of their respective governments. Milo and Sam and the others like them kept hunting free-lance overseas. They would contact me, invite me to come work with them, but I always turned them down. I wanted to pretend that world never existed."
"I can see why."
"Grandpa got sick. The shock of what his son had done almost killed him. He actually came and lived here for a while with a nurse. You can imagine how well he did without Hunters to boss around. I tried to help him, but even he encouraged me to go work with Earl and the other survivors. I turned him down too, and I think it made him even sicker. I vowed that the family legacy was going to die with me. No more Shacklefords were going to hunt monsters ever again."
"So what happened?" I asked. I could not imagine having gone through the things that she had. It made me put my own family relationships in perspective. Nobody in my family had ever summoned any demons. At least as far as I was aware.
"I was in school. Students started disappearing on campus. Young girls. The police said that it was a serial killer. The whole community was scared to death. But I knew what it really was. I could recognize the signs. I ignored it at first. It was somebody else's problem. That world didn't exist for me anymore. I was just a grad student working on my thesis. I pretended that it was just a normal human killer, and that the authorities would handle it."
"It didn't work out did it?"
"It never does… A friend of mine was next. Got nailed while coming out of the library late one night. They never found her head. She was a nice kid. Freshman, from a little town in Illinois if I remember right. That one was my fault, don't try to disagree, you of all people understand, Owen. I tracked the vampires down. I found their lair. They were sloppy new creations. Weak, stupid and hungry. I went in alone, first time I've ever hunted solo. I spent the whole day staking and chopping. Going from one coffin or hole to the next. Finally I thought that I was going to run out of daylight before I had found them all, so I used some of those homemade Molotovs and burned the science building down. The killings stopped and the cops figured that their imaginary serial killer had moved on. Police never caught the arsonist." She smiled weakly. "I finished my dissertation the next week, boarded up this house, and joined Earl and the others on a case in Uruguay. A few years later, we're back in business. I've never looked back."
"Are you glad?"
"What do you think?" She snorted. "I was deluding myself in school. Normal is an illusion. Normalcy doesn't exist." She gestured at the wall of paintings. "That is normal. These people are real. All that stuff I told you back at your apartment, when we were trying to recruit you. Yes. I do actually believe that. I believe in what we do. It's more than just the job. It's more than the PUFF check."
"It's a calling," I said.
We sat in silence beneath the pictures. We had an understanding.
"You have another brother?" I asked, pointing at the last picture. He looked more like Julie.
"Nate," she laughed. "He wants to kill monsters so bad he can taste it."
"Where's he at now?"
"Seattle. He went through the last class of Newbies. He's doing okay from what I hear. I made sure that he's with a great team who'll keep him alive long enough that his enthusiasm gets tempered with experience. He's nineteen. You'll like him. He's just insane enough to be entertaining…" She put her hand on my knee. I could not tell if she had done it on purpose or if she had done it without thinking. Either one was fine with me. "Well, that's pretty much the tour. Sorry I got all blubbery and emotional on you."
"Julie. If you didn't get emotional about that, then you wouldn't be human. Thanks for the tour. I can tell you love this house."
"I can't say why, but I do. One of these days I'm going to get it all fixed up. I could probably hire professionals to do it and just get it over with, but that doesn't seem right. There are a lot of memories here…" She suddenly snapped her fingers. "Wait a second, I've got something for you." She jumped up, and walked quickly to the door. "I'll be back in a minute, I've just got to find it."
I sat on the plastic covered couch and waited. After a few minutes I grew restless and decided to check out the portraits more closely. The Shacklefords were one interesting group-heroes, villains and everything in between. I stood close to the wall and examined the intricate paintings. Julie's grandfather had been a handsome man before he had lost his eye and been so disfigured. I could see the resemblance to his son, and they both looked slightly like Earl Harbinger. I was not exactly sure how he was related, but there was no picture of him on the wall, and there were no Harbingers listed at all. Looking at the other pictures, I decided that Julie was very lucky that she took after her mother. Besides the lack of glasses and the slightly outdated hairstyle, they could have been the same person. I would imagine that a historian would be able to compile quite the entertaining book about this family. Of course the government would probably end up sending somebody like Agent Franks to the author's home to shoot him in the brain.