Summary

Shaun Sullivan thrives on recklessness, from his vicarious and tawdry sex life to his budding alcoholism. Those activities don't mix well with his calling as a hunter for the enigmatic Kresnik Industries, roaming the city of Portland at night, hunting down the monsters that prey on humanity. Shaun is two steps from hitting rock bottom when a seemingly random attack changes everything he's ever known about his world, and puts his life in jeopardy.

Lindsay Cranford is a therian, a shapeshifter with an animal form, by birth, and she's not about to make any apologies for it, to anyone. Sweet and reserved, but with a stubborn streak and a razor-quick wit, Lindsay is happy with her almost ordinary life, which revolves around her beloved job and her marriage to a human man. Yet, Lindsay can't seem to ignore the problems plaguing her people from within as well from outside threats, even though she isn't strong enough to do anything about it.

The last thing Lindsay needs in her life is an arrogant, womanizing wreck of a hunter to take care of. And the last thing Shaun wants is a married, insecure ice queen with a very sharp set of claws and an even sharper tongue. Unfortunately, fate throws them together when Shaun finds himself infected with the therian virus. He knows the attack on his life wasn't random and wasn't an act of vengeance for the therian lives Shaun has taken as a hunter. It's part of a cover-up to discredit him with the Kresnik. The only thing he doesn't know is who wants him out of the way, or why. Lindsay couldn't care less about the affairs and conspiracies of the organization that has hunted down her people for centuries, but in Shaun's remarkably strong will and blossoming powers she sees a way to free her people from oppression. Yet, the more Lindsay and Shaun help each other the more they discovers that their problems are intertwined and reach farther than either of them could have ever imagined, and the stakes could be catastrophic.

I don't really like this summary because it makes the entire story sound like some sort of romance novel, which it isn't. There's some romance, but not that much and it isn't the central theme of the story. Ah well, I haven't got anything better as of now. As I said, reviews are always returned and appreciated, you might want to check out my review policy on my profile though, so you know what you're getting into.

The Trickster's Menagerie

Chapter One

Old Stories and Fresh Blood

My father used to tell me the old legends when he drank. They were never complete stories, just confused snippets and tarnished phrases he mixed at random from his mother's Tlingit and Nez Perce cultures. He even threw in a few of his father's Irish myths whenever he hit the whiskey, but he usually seemed to prefer Coyote to Cuchulainn. Those legends were always an obscure, neglected part of my heritage, only expressed in my perpetual tan, my inability to grow chest hair, and the politically incorrect college nickname Tonto. Yet, despite their fractured delivery and slurred morals, I got the big picture. I knew that they emphasized the unity of all life, that ancient, dimly prehistoric belief that humanity was not particularly special in the eyes of the Creator, or the grand scheme of the world. We were just another animal.

In my father's stories, animals, the real four-legged beast of the field ones, spoke and often possessed human form beneath their furs and feathers or scales. They lived, loved, married, fought, laughed and fucked up, just like those of us with two legs still do. There was a reverence in those stories—even if it was unintentional on my father's part—that was lost in all other aspects of my world. There was also a very biting and latent irony in those stories. Maybe the first bit of irony was that those stories were probably the only real, good memories I have of my father after my brother's suicide. I used to sit by the fire, listening to the squeak of his old, half-busted rocking chair and his fingers tapping out a tattoo against a bottle before he started to tell me all the old legends. The tales of heroes, monsters and all of that good shit kids love, you know, before the real world creeps up behind them and starts to make a very perverse sort of sense. At least, that's the way it is for most kids. For me, most of that folklore and fairytale stuff, the knights in shining armor, damsels in distress and happily ever afters, were revealed as shams or, at best, veiled metaphors for more routine things, just like they were for everyone else. Yet there was just one part of those old stories that refused to die with the rest.

Monsters.

It's a good word, monster. Very versatile, and it never really loses its sparkle, its…pizzazz. We start off life with the fairytale monsters and the monsters in the closet or under the bed, and as we get older they change shape and evolve. By adulthood it's all monstrous mortgages and loans and ex-wives. The real monsters reveal themselves to be all too human, whether it's the egomaniacal boss in his corner office or the dictator across the world with genocidal tendencies. Later, we might even finish out our lives ravaged by the monsters of cancer and illness and age, betrayed by our own bodies and time. It really is a good word, universal even, but there's an unshakeable core there.

The only problem was that my monsters never really changed their shapes, never evolved from hideous creatures lurking in the shadows to the everyday woes of ordinary life. I was twenty-five and still facing the monsters most of us leave in childhood, still fighting them in the shadows so the rest of the world could move on and worry about the monsters that haunt normality. Like it or not, I was just about the closest thing the real world had to that good old fairytale vision of the knight in shining armor. And if there wasn't a pinch of irony in that, then it didn't exist at all.

Of course, there weren't many fire-breathing dragons left in our postmodern electronic world, especially in the Pacific Northwest, but we had plenty of other things, especially vampires. Hell, the entire world had plenty of vampires. They were preternatural evolution at its finest, one rank up on the food chain from their humans progenitors, able to reproduce quickly and often, completely bypassing the stages of life that would have required them to birth and rear their offspring and become vulnerable like other mammals.

Hunting always brought out the biologist in me. I looked down at the creature bleeding on the blacktop of a park basketball court and felt a bit like Charles Darwin, or at least Steve Irwin. Facts and statistics regarding vampires rattled through my head, gluing me to the spot. People believed a lot incorrect things about vampires, pop culture regurgitated over the last century. Quite a lot of it could actually be traced back to Bram Stoker and Dracula. I always imagined that at the time Stoker must have thought he was being pretty original, and now he's the father of vampiric clichés. Needless to say, Anne Rice is the mother, with her sensually nihilistic creatures of the night, always brooding and falling in love. Meanwhile Darwin actually came closest to the truth, as usual. In the end, all of the magic and moral ambiguity and clichés boiled down to the same things as the rest of the universe, atoms, molecules, instincts, genes and natural selection.

Nevertheless, I had to wonder if Darwin would have approved of the fact that I'd just shot the creature I was now observing? Ah well, I'd only been a biology minor in college. I'd been a psychology major, and the unconscious mind and ego know what to fear, and what to do about that fear. The gun was still in my hand because I hadn't killed the vampire. My first shot had clipped him in the shoulder rather than the head and my second had hit him in the stomach, again, not what I'd been aiming for, but it had gotten the vampire to the ground. Aside from the kneecap, the stomach is one of the most painful places to get hit with a bullet, even if you're undead.

The vampire on the ground was twitching and jerking, curled around its wound in a fetal position. Blood was pooling outward from the body. It was thinner and more watery than human blood and even in the dim light I could tell it was a very pale red, almost pinkish. That wasn't normal. If I remembered right, it had something to do with certain species of vampires having a lower number of platelets or something weird going on with the clotting factors in the blood. It was something akin to hemophilia or thrombocytopenia in humans. At least that's what Helios told me. It wasn't all that common in vampires and only appeared in three of the eleven species, but it tended to be fatal. With blood like that the vampire I'd shot probably wouldn't live more than another few minutes, maybe less since the bullet was silver and had a cross etched into its surface. Silver was deadly to most preternatural creatures, including all species of vampires, and holy symbols only sped up the process.

I raised the gun and aimed it at the vampire. Alas, the damned thing chose that moment to uncurl and look up at me. He looked like a kid, and with the way he bled he probably wasn't much older than he looked. Probably some dumb goth or emo kid with his head so full of modern vampire stories and a bone to pick with the rest of society that he thought becoming a real vampire would be fun. Immortality is a powerful lure, especially in our society where death had lost much of its sacred nature and its mystery. But he still looked like a kid in his baggy jeans and t-shirt. The look on his face was full of pain and helplessness. It's always hard to pull the trigger when they look like that, even if I could see a flash of fang at the corner of his mouth.

Fortunately I didn't have to. There was a barely audible click and the vampire's head jerked forward and gore splattered the blacktop all the way to the free-throw line. I had to jump back to avoid being covered in it. "Jesus, Gabriel, don't fucking do that to me!" I snapped.

My partner flashed me a grin full of dark humor from across the basketball court as he shoved his gun back into a shoulder holster beneath his brown trench coat. At six and a half feet, all of it muscle, I don't know how Gabriel managed to be so damn sneaky, but he always did. "I had to do something since you looked like you were off in Neverland," Gabriel said as he crossed the blacktop to join me, making certain to skirt the vampire's body and all of the blood. "What were you doing exactly, Shaun?"

"Philosophizing," I said with a shrug.

"Great timing," Gabriel snorted as he stared back down at the dead vampire. "Nice aim too."

"Kiss my ass," I spat back, not exactly original, but it worked. Gabriel just smiled and pulled out his cell phone, probably to dial for a clean-up crew.

Best friends were a funny thing. Gabriel Harker had been mine since second grade and he still was. In middle school our interests and personalities began to diverge, even becoming contradictory in some aspects, but that had never made a difference where our friendship was concerned. We might as well have been brothers, which was exactly why the Kresnik had been hesitant to make us hunting partners. You were supposed to care about your partner in the field, just not so much that it might jeopardize your mission. Things had worked out in the end though and we'd somehow managed to rank among the Kresnik's top hunters, both in skills and in body counts. It wasn't exactly a prestige I'd sought out, but neither was I going to start complaining.

"Ten minutes," Gabriel said as he flipped his phone shut and shoved it back in his pocket. I nodded and finally put my gun back in its hip holster. The holster was half visible beneath the bottom of my leather motorcycle jacket but I wasn't particularly fond of shoulder holsters, they tended to chafe. I had a concealed carry permit anyways, unlike Gabriel. He had a concealed carry permit too, it just wasn't applicable for the gun he was carrying. There was no such thing as a permit for a Type IV Semi-Automatic Acheron, as the gun and its sisters didn't exist outside of hunter circles.

That was the Kresnik's specialty. As well being the preternatural police force for most of the western world, they were also the world's largest arms manufacturers. It was sort of like killing two…whatevers with one bullet. Making weapons paid the bills and paid for the organization's hunting activities, as well as creating job opportunities for many hunters. They had military defense contracts galore as well as being the supplier for most police departments and private citizens who chose to exercise their right to bear arms. Gabriel's Acheron handgun was part of a line made exclusively for the Kresnik's hunters, all five of which were named for the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology. Acheron was the river of woe and the others were the Styx, the Cocytus, the Phlegethon, and the Lethe, which was actually a tranq gun. The entire line of guns was revolutionary, beyond anything even the military had; they were also specialized to take out preternatural targets discretely in urban environments.

"I think this whole thing calls for a drink," I mumbled and leaned back against the metal pole of the basketball hoop and shoved my dark hair away from my face. The sky was turning gray in the east as dawn approached. It was going to be another cloudy, gray day in Portland, Oregon, but what was new. From late September to May the City of Roses was often bleak and almost always wet.

Gabriel laughed but it didn't reach his glass-green eyes. "What doesn't call for a drink in your book, Shaun?" Good old Gabriel, my ever reluctant enabler. I'd started drinking when I was seventeen, the same day my dad died in a car crash while drunk behind the wheel. Twisted, I know, but drowning his sorrows in booze had always worked for my dad, so I gave it a try. I'd been drinking steadily and at an increasing rate ever since. Gabriel had always been there and he'd always disapproved, especially after he went dry himself. But our friendship was nothing if not equally destructive, and Gabriel had his problems too. They were actually why he'd stopped drinking, because when Gabriel drank he started to see things he wasn't supposed to see, things no hunter was supposed to see. Being a teetotaler didn't solve the problem, nothing could, but it did keep him in control, and that was important to Gabriel. But that's not my secret to tell, or my problem to solve. "Besides," Gabriel continued, "it's just after five in the morning; I don't believe it's sociably acceptable to start drinking until five in the evening."

"True, but it's been a long, bloody night, and I might as well get started for tonight." I had to shudder at the thought, not of the vampires I'd spent the night killing, but of the evening I was going to spend eating dinner with my mother, stepfather and half-brother. It was supposed to be a monthly event, one my mom started after my own car crash three years earlier. I would come over to the mansion she shared with Dave, the man she'd left my father for, and eat dinner. It was Mom's way of trying to reach out to me and let me know she cared. Sadly, she couldn't have picked a more painful way to say "I love you" if she'd burned the words into my skin with acid. Dave resented me and I returned the favor with zeal and my half-brother, Dylan…Well, he might not be so bad if someone kicked the shit out of him once in a while, or if his father stopped giving him everything his moody little teenage heart desired. That house and those people, the entire lifestyle, it was a hostile and alien world to me, having spent most of my childhood with my dad, branding cattle, doing housework and playing with deadly weapons. Yet I was supposed to act like it was home or it broke Mom's heart.

I used to volunteer Gabriel and myself for extra hours in the field on Family Dinner nights, but Mom had caught onto that one and used her charm and connections within the Kresnik to ensure that I would always have the second Saturday evening of every month off. I had yet to come up with another excuse to weasel my way out of the whole thing, but I was working on it.

We stood in silence for the next few minutes, gazing off at the rest of the park or the sky, watching for the clean up crew or civilians who weren't supposed to see any of this. It was a comfortable silence and I enjoyed it, Gabriel was one of only a few people I felt comfortable with even when no one was talking and nothing was really happening. Even then I could only stand the quiet for so long. "I've decided to sell the Farm," I finally said.

"Really?" Gabriel looked away from the maple trees, still naked from the winter months, to pin me with curious green eyes. I nodded like it was no big deal.

"It's been a long time coming. Now I just have to find myself a real estate agent." I laughed at that, I wasn't entirely sure why, but there was just something innately funny about real estate agents. The Farm wasn't really a farm, but my dad had called it the Farm and the name still stuck years later. It was the house I'd grown up in, up in the low hills between the suburbs of Sherwood and the one-horse dot of Dundee. My dad had been a country boy at heart and wanted to raise my brother Sam and me with room to run and fresh air, even if he did have to commute into Portland for work every day. He'd bought up a big patch of land, most of it still covered in trees. He designed and built the big modern house himself, rebuilt the barn and even bought a handful of cattle and a pair of quarter horses. I'd inherited it all after his death, but I hadn't been back since I'd packed up my stuff and reluctantly moved in with my mom and Dave for my last year of high school. I rarely thought about it until it came time to pay my taxes every year and I was reminded of the expensive waste I still owned.

Just because I avoided the place like avian flu didn't mean that selling wouldn't be hard. I was going to sell all of my memories with that house, good and bad alike. I'd spent seventeen years of my life in that same house, in the same bedroom. My brother had died there, my mother had stormed out of there and back to the city and her wealthy lover, and my father slowly drank his soul away there. "With all of the vineyards popping up out there I can probably get a really good price," I added. Gabriel nodded slightly and his eyes drifted back to the trees.

The clean-up van showed up a minute later and took away the body of the vampire, as well as the three others Gabriel and I had killed throughout the park. They cleaned away the blood and left no trace of our hunt. Secrecy was law within our world. As the sun dawned behind a wall of watery gray clouds the van pulled away to deal with its macabre load and Gabriel and I parted ways until our next hunt Sunday evening. He went home to sleep, call his fiancée and probably catch up on paperwork. True to form, I went for that drink at the only bar I knew that never closed its doors, even at six o'clock in the morning.