Minda Webber - Bustin'

To my sister Marilyn, beloved friend,

the best of aunts to my son Jake and a wonderful

creative writing partner. Without her I wouldn't have

gotten to do Saturday morning cartoons. I thank

you for your advice and making me laugh. Also,

for putting up with my eerie habit of hexing

all mechanical or technological machines.

Thanks for fixing them for me.

I want to thank Chuck Baltzell and Brian McDaniel for computer help; Beverly E, Christine D. and Mary Alice C. for reading this book when it was a mere second draft; Mary Jane M. for bringing the teddy bear babies to visit; my son for letting me drag him to every sci-fi movie since he was knee-high to a very tall grasshopper; Jeff G. and Steve C. for waltzing across Texas in my younger years (in reality, the Texas Panhandle); my cousin, Willie, for loving one of the best scary, funny movies, and running around saying, "Who you gonna call?" for six months after viewing the film; and last but not least in memory of my grandma Vick, for knowing how to tell a scary story better than anybody, like her potato story. Generally a potato story shouldn't be scary, but when my grandma told it—watch out!

Vermont, 2007

Bustin' wasn't an easy business to be in. Courage, agility and expertise were required by those involved. Paranormalbusters, as those in the industry were called, had to be quick and skilled in all methods of capturing, communicating with, and moving all manner of supernatural creatures. One of the best Busters in the business was Samantha Hammett, known as Sam to friends and enemies alike. She was a hard-working, hard-fighting and soft-playing-the-piano kind of gal.

Tonight, Sam had been hired by the Lady in Red to clear out the old warehouse on the outskirts of town. It was due to be renovated in a couple of weeks, made into apartments, but first a nest of gargoyles had to be removed.

The routine clean-up job should have been just like any other, but something this time felt different. Trouble was brewing; Sam could feel it in her bones. But then, trouble was nothing new to her—not after working as she did for the family business. The Paranormalbustin' Pest Pursuers—Triple-P—had been founded in 1925 by Sam's great-grandfather. Those were the Roaring Twenties, the decade so named for the werewolves, vampires and werelions who first burst onto the mortal scene, howling, roaring and snarling. It was an era of bathtub gin and tubby goblins, flappers and flapping gargoyles. Jazzy blues played and blue ogres danced in speakeasies across the country, while speaking spectrals began haunting people everywhere. Triple-P should have been an instant success—and it was.

Originally the company dealt only with ghosts, but later grew by leaps and bounds to handle werewolves, wererabbits, vampires, and a whole new catalogue of fiends, monsters and otherworldly creatures. The werewolves or vampires they dealt with were usually rogue, exiled from their principalities if they were vampires or packs if they were werewolves. Otherwise, those two species tried to fit in. Usually, they did a good job.

In the supernatural world, vampires were tops. They had their own feudal system, and a king ruled over each continent. Princes and princesses helped maintain discipline and paid tribute. Werewolves had their own hierarchy, each with six or seven packs forming something they called a clanship. In each clanship, the king's rule was absolute. The location of each pack and the large number of pack members, however, meant that those packs each needed a chancellor. Each chancellor ruled over one or two packs with the help of blood kin, who were usually also some form of royalty. Packs even had knights, which were called gellogs , who helped keep the wolves in line and hunted down and destroyed any rogues. Sam had run afoul of a gellog a time or two in her career, but fortunately the encounters had only left her with a few scars. Those blended in nicely with the other scars she'd received from the rest of the otherworldly creatures she had helped capture and relocate.

Just as Sam's family business had evolved, so had the term Paranormalbustin'—Bustin'—which had become a generalization for anyone extracting and removing paranormal pests.

Yes, these days the company dealt with everything; some nights, fire-breathing demons or runaway dragons. Other nights, Triple-P might be chasing a gruff weredog who wanted to put the bite into crime, or a rogue vampire looking to devour Mr. Whistler's grandmother. And at holidays, Sam could always count on the grinches. They were a hard-drinking, rowdy bunch; indulging in too much spiked eggnog, they would put on their red Santa caps and start stealing Christmas presents. They were in the Hoo's Who of paranormal pests.

Occasionally Sam ran into some really nasty poltergeists, like the Amityville Horror. Other times she captured grouchy gremlins—all cute and fuzzy when they had full stomachs. When hungry they'd go after your body parts. Then there were card-carrying witches and warlocks who might turn a person into a frog as soon as look at them.

A few times she'd run into nice, normal ghosts, like the Captain and Mrs. Muir—a lovely older couple who loved to sail around the world in once sunken ghost ships. Or Casper; he was always a friendly face.

But tonight there would be no friendly faces. As she now listened to the gargoyles crunching away inside the dilapidated old warehouse, she tossed her younger brother his safety helmet, complete with its large nightlight attached to the front. She turned her own light on. "Here's looking at you, kid," she said, quoting the movie Casablanca .

"You're starting to sound cliché," her brother teased.

"You're one to talk," Sam replied. Both of them had been bottle-fed on film noir; from the time they were born they'd lived in a home where dogma, dress and dialogue from 1940s movies was commonplace.

"Now rig up tight, Bogie," she reminded him. "You know these guys would just love to snatch you bald."

Gargoyles were notorious for plucking hair and using it to feather their nests back at the buildings to which they were so often attached. It was a particularly vile tactic in Sam's opinion, as she had always secretly longed to be a hairdresser. But then her family business would have gone down the drain.

Glancing over at Bogart, she shook her head in regret. "Jeez, they wouldn't have far to go." Her brother had cut his long brown hair last summer, tired of her poking and prodding him with scissors and curling irons. Now he wore a military style, a buzz cut. At least he still let her highlight his hair, but there wasn't much challenge in highlighting hair that was less than an inch long.

Even with the military cut, her little brother was a good-looking man, one who had girls on the brain and other strategic places. These pesky females called him at all hours of the night and day. Some even pretended to have ghosts in their homes so that Bogie would come by and scope out the situation… and them. More often they had bats in the belfry.

The last lust-driven girl had donned a white sheet. After she'd jumped out shouting "Boo," Bogie had told Sam, he'd whipped off the sheet to discover the lady naked as the day she'd been born. How Bogie handled that particular paranormal pest was anybody's guess.

Every once in a while, Sam wished she were half as attractive to the opposite sex as her brother. Instead she was perky cute in a girl-next-door sort of way—if the girl next door happened to bust ghosts and other things that went bump and howl in the night. No, she would never be able to compete, and that • was driven home to her every day with the drop-dead gorgeous female vampires she sometimes ran into while working, or with the sexy femme fatales of the werewolf and werecat world. It might have bothered Sam more, but her philosophy was that when life gave you lemons, you learned to like things sour.