Monster Hunter Alpha-ARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

really walloped the guy for it. Pow! Right in the face! That how you guys did it in the big city?” Heather didn’t respond to his idiotic grin, so he quit smiling and tried to be professional. “Didn’t mean anything by it. I’ve just heard you’ve got a reputation is all…Keeping it together when the shit gets real.”
    Heather shrugged noncommittally. “I just did what I was trained to do.”
    “Whatever. I heard about—”
    “Kid needed protecting. I was the only one around to do it. No big deal.” One crazy case involving a sex-slavery ring could get you quite a rep. One sloppy gunfight later, she’d been publically cited for bravery, privately reprimanded for stupidity, and been on the fast track to a promotion to detective until her family’s health issues had brought her back to her hometown. It didn’t matter now. Copper Lake was a much quieter place than Minneapolis. She made sure to change the subject so obviously that Temple would know better than to bring it up again. “We got an ID on our biter yet?”
    “Every time we ask for a name, he just stares off into space and mumbles about something humming. Still no idea who he is yet, but we’re still checking.”
    One of her friends had just been eviscerated. She wasn’t in the mood for dealing with random stinky lunatics, but the U.P. was virtually the edge of the world. Lots of crazy people ended up here for some reason. It’s like they wandered out of Chicago or Minneapolis and walked through the woods until they hit Lake Superior, where they became her problem. “Anything else going on?”
    “Those hikers down in Baraga are still lost.”
    “Probably eaten by the same bear,” she muttered. Lost hikers weren’t any sort of surprise. Except for a few clusters of small townships and farms, northern Michigan was thickly forested hills. It was easy to get turned around if you got off the trails. The locals loved the tourists’ dollars, but finding lost suburbanites got old quick.
    “Other than that, well, some federal agent called from Washington, wanting to know about the bear attack.”
    “Who?” Heather asked. That was fast. The Department of Natural Resources guy must have passed it up the chain to whoever it was he’d been talking to the sheriff about.
    “I don’t know. The guy was named something Jefferson, real snooty type, but I kicked it over to the sheriff. They were asking if there had been any other animal attacks or any unexplained disappearances, that kind of thing. They said they wanted to send some people to interview Buckley if”—he corrected himself—“ when he wakes up. I told him he better hurry if the weather reports are accurate. Huge storm coming in tonight. He was real adamant that we call if anything else unusual happens.”
    Unusual? The little black bears that were native to the area normally stuck to knocking over trash cans, not smashing their way through car windows to eat healthy, armed men. Unusual was an understatement.
    * * *
    Agent Doug Stark of the Monster Control Bureau of the US Department of Homeland Security answered the ringing phone on his desk. He had already had a busy day, seizing a camera and video files from some teenagers who’d blundered into a Type 2 Unnatural devouring a homeless guy at the bottom of a drainage culvert. Stark didn’t necessarily enjoy the part of his job where he intimidated witnesses and survivors into keeping their stupid mouths shut, but he was extremely good at it. “Agent Stark,” he answered sharply.
    “Hello, Doug,” said the voice at the other end, and he recognized it immediately. Washington was calling. Damn it. Washington only called when something was wrong, and he had been hoping to get off early so he could catch his daughter’s trumpet recital. “This is Grant Jefferson.”
    Stark didn’t like the new guy—he was too smooth—but Director Myers thought Jefferson walked on water, had taken him under-wing, and had delegated all sorts of