Groaning, I flipped through the stack. My heart just wasn't in it today. I was too preoccupied with a death cult to get any work done. In my heart, I knew I should be out there, doing something useful. There were some framed pictures on my desk: me and Julie after hiking to the top of Mt. Cheaha together, the Amazing Newbie Squad posed with Friendly Fernando when we'd gone back to visit DeSoya Caverns as tourists rather than exterminators, and the only picture I had of Mordechai Byreika.
It was the black and white photo that Lee had found last summer from Mordechai's old journal, with the Hunter posed in front of something giant, scaled, and dead. I picked it up and sighed. It wasn't that I missed having a cryptic ghost hanging out inside my brain, but Mordechai would have known what to do. He'd always had the right answers, even when he was keeping them from me for my own protection. He couldn't have told me what to do, because I would've rushed to do it, and inadvertently opened the gate in the process. It had been a fine line to walk, but he'd been wise, careful, and thoughtful, all things that I sucked at. Mordechai died decades before I had been born, but he would always be my mentor.
"I wish you were around, Old Man," I said. "I could use some good advice right about now…" I didn't want to be special, but as Mordechai had said, I'd drawn the universe's short straw and been the one to decide the fate of worlds. Now I was paying for it.
I put the picture down and glared at the stack of invoices.
Screw it. The paperwork could wait.
At least I got paid to shoot, which, as a lifelong gun nut, is kind of a dream come true. From ten until noon I worked on marksmanship and manipulation with the Newbies. At this point they had already been here for two months, and this was the final week of training, so the dumb and dangerous had long since been rooted out and sent home with fat severance checks.
The remaining Newbies were pretty sharp. As usual, all of them were themselves survivors of brutal supernatural attacks. This particular class had a soldier who'd taken out an Akkadian storm beast in Iraq; a cabby who'd given a ride to a vampire (not only had it tried to eat him, it had been a lousy tipper); two brothers whose foundation business, Haight Brothers Construction, had unearthed a skinwalker; an archeologist who discovered that some things were best left undiscovered; and even a kid just out of high school who'd had a blood fiend climb in the drive-through window at the Arby's he'd been working at. And yes, it turns out that you can actually kill a blood fiend by shoving its face into the fry cooker and holding it there until it quits kicking.
I'd been tasked with helping on the range, but I had to admit that most of the Newbies were already proficient shots. One of Esmeralda's guys, a fellow hardcore shooter named Cooper, had done a good job getting them up to speed. But Cooper was primarily an explosives guy, a rifleman second, and I was able to contribute quite a bit of knowledge to teaching the Newbies how to improve with the shotguns and pistols. Not meaning to boast, but as far as I knew, nobody at MHI was as good as I was with a shotgun. Being good at something, and being a good teacher were not necessarily the same thing, and I could only hope that I would do half as good a job as Sam Haven had done for my Newbie class. Now, he had been one hell of a great instructor.
Grant was working with those chosen to be the sharpshooters. I hated to admit it, but he did know more about long-range precision shooting than I did-though in my opinion, he was a perfect example of a knowledgeable but lousy teacher, but then again, I was biased.
This was the largest Newbie class that had ever gone through training, and under Esmeralda's patient tutelage, it was also looking like it was going to have the highest graduation rate. She had better be careful. If she did too good a job, Earl would probably try to draft her to run every training class, and I doubted any of the experienced Hunters would want that as a full-time gig.
I walked back and forth behind the firing line of Hunters. I had approximately half of them today. Each Newbie was paired up, with one serving as coach and the other shooting. Today I was drilling them on transitions, running their primary long gun dry, then slinging it quickly to draw their pistols. Most of them were actually looking pretty damn good. Franks' Goon Squad had integrated seamlessly into the class. I had to hand it to the MCB agents. They were professionals. As far as the other Newbies and Esmeralda's team knew, they had been part of the last Newbie class but had pulled out early due to various training injuries. That also explained their above-average skills and knowledge. Watching them on the range, I learned that Torres was damn good, Archer was well-trained and methodical, and Herzog was decently proficient, but made up for it with maliciousness.
My protective detail hadn't liked me walking around a bunch of potential Condition assassins with guns, but I still thought they were full of crap. The undercover agents kept glancing my way, waiting for something terrible to happen. Sadly for them, nothing did. After transitions, shooting on the move, and shooting from various cover positions, we took a break to hydrate, snack, and reload magazines before moving onto the next series of more complicated exercises. Grant immediately began to tell most of the willing-to-listen about some story where he was the hero. He had lots of those. There was a tin roof set up for shade over the firing line, and I plopped down onto a concrete bench to suck down a Gatorade, seeking solitude away from the Newbies for a moment. Even spring in Alabama is hot when you're standing in the sun carrying a full combat load and wearing a Kevlar suit. My shadow, Franks, wandered off momentarily to answer a phone call.
One young woman broke away from the crowd and approached. She had to have been one of the youngest in the class, an attractive girl in a bouncy cheerleader kind of way, blonde and perky. "Mind if I sit here?"
"Sure," I gestured at the bench across from me. She flopped down, armor pouches banging. I noted Torres, Archer, and Herzog scanning her for threats and assessing if they needed to come over and protect me. I shook my head slightly. The agents went back to their snacks.
The Newbie held out a granola bar. "Want one?"
"No thanks." I mentally ran down the roll call of names. I had always sucked with remembering names. "Dawn, right?"
"Yeah," she smiled, then looked around to see if anyone else was listening. "Do you mind if I pick your brain for a second?" She had a cute Texas accent. I knew that one well from having lived in Dallas. I'd struck out with a lot of girls who sounded like that.
"Brain-picking. That's what I'm here for," I answered. I was, after all, supposed to be the experienced role model. "What can I do for you?"
She looked around to see if anyone was listening. I noted that a couple of other Newbies were watching, like they had dared her to come over here. Dawn leaned in conspiratorially. "You're the guy that destroyed Lord Machado last year, right?"
It wasn't exactly a secret, but it wasn't something I liked to talk about. Way too many things had occurred that night that I preferred to keep secret. "Where'd you hear about that?"
"Are you kidding?" She laughed. "Esmeralda told us about it during monster-lore class yesterday. That fight was the biggest bounty ever collected in MHI history! And you were the primary on the PUFF. One Master vamp by yourself, assists on a couple of others, and a solo takedown of a one-of-a-kind mega-bounty monster."