Born to Be Wild: A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella by John G. Hartness

Author:John G. Hartness [Hartness, John G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Falstaff Books
Published: 2019-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

9

The girl on the couch now looked familiar. Too familiar. “Geri, I…” I sat there with my mouth hanging open. I didn’t know what to say. What the hell could I say? She blamed me for her sister’s death, and she was right. My father killed her sister. Murdered her right in front of my eyes because my kid brother was a murderous psychopath who wanted nothing more than to make me suffer. Well, eventually he wanted to destroy most of humanity and turn the world into a playground for supernatural monsters and burn our mother at the stake. But in the beginning, he just wanted to hurt me, and he killed Brittany to do it.

“Where’s your smart remarks now? Or did you actually think that I was excited to meet you because you got lucky and took down a few cryptids? You seemed a lot smarter when I was seven.” The sneer she aimed at me made me feel bad for her parents through her teen years. The Geri I remembered was a bright, sunny child with pigtails and training wheels on her bike.

But that was before I got her sister killed. Before I was responsible for her world exploding. Before I left her and her family to pick up the pieces with no better explanation than “a bear attack” because that was the best thing I could think of between my grandfather dying on my watch, my girlfriend dying in my arms, and me shooting my werewolf father full of silver buckshot in a creek behind my house. To say I wasn’t at my best was putting things mildly.

I felt bad that I never spoke to Brittany’s family again after she died. I couldn’t stand to look in her mama’s eyes. Every time I did, I saw nothing but my failure there. She didn’t know what really happened, but she knew the truth of it: I failed to protect her daughter. I got Brittany killed. Now, fifteen years later, it looked like the last loose threads of that day were tying themselves around my neck, in the form of a furious twenty-something brunette sitting in my best friend’s living room.

I took a deep breath and convinced myself that I was a better man now than I was when Britt died. “I’m sorry.”

Geri just looked at me, hatred in her eyes. “Sorry for what, asshole?”

“I got Britt killed. It was my fault.”

“Yeah, I figured. When I got to UGA, I read up on you in old college papers. Then I went online and read more. The stuff I found after college was a lot more interesting. When I found the bit about your father turning werewolf around the same time a bear killed my sister, I put two and two together. When Director Shaw recruited me, he gave me DEMON’s file on you, and I got the whole story. You’re kind of a fuckup, you know that?”

I looked over at Amy. “DEMON’s file?”

My fiancée held up her hands. “Sorry. You were part of the job for a long time, babe.

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