I got into a small sedan with Carter. It was just a black four-door car that had nothing of note about it, except the fact that it stuck out like a sore thumb here. The outside of the day-drinkers' haven was haphazardly littered with rusted-out work trucks and daily drivers that looked like they’d survived a nuclear bomb. The nice, obvious rental car was all anyone needed to figure out that this guy wasn’t from around here. Not that anyone inside would have given Carter shit. He had that similar way about him that the other two did… the scarier ones, just more tamped down.

  We rode in silence for the first few minutes, both of us trying to figure out what to say next after the abrupt change in scenery. Well… I was. I think Carter was just waiting to get to where we were going before unleashing whatever he had cocked and loaded.

  We slowed and veered down a small two-track road that led to a pretty isolated-looking area. The trees split open, and the car came to a stop in an opening surrounded by trees. Carter got out, and I froze for a minute. Fears cropped up that this wasn’t what it seemed. What if he wasn’t what he said, and he was going to kill me out in the middle of nowhere?

  I got out, ready to swing at this mother fuckers head, just in case. I could probably knock him on his ass if I caught him by surprise. I started sizing him up a little differently as I eyed him. Thankfully, he started talking.

  “This is another site like the one your guys found,” Carter said as he pointed across a short distance of loosely grouped trees to a four-foot-wide hole in the dirt. It was just like the one from the other night. As we got closer, and the image became clearer, I felt a cold chill crawl over my back along with sweat that formed almost instantly from the stress.

  Right out on flat ground, amidst the loose pine needles, pinecones, and random leaves, was the freshly disturbed dirt hole that created an entrance to the dark world beneath our feet. I could smell it again… that bloody soil… the muddy carnage. Images of the blood and that empty shoe appeared in my mind like I was looking at it again. Massacre flashed behind my eyes… and my heart started hammering. I could almost see the blood appearing out of thin air as I looked at this hole.

  Carter placed an arm on my shoulder, “It’s alright, Seth. Take your time. It's a lot for anyone to deal with when they're first beginning to understand.”

  I breathed through the cold sweat as my mind focused and cleared. I was thankful for his steady grip as I hadn’t noticed how wobbly I had gotten. “Are we safe… to be standing here?” I felt a bead of sweat run down my back like a water hose had just creaked open slightly.

  “We’re safe,” Carter assured confidently.

  “What is it?” I asked as I stepped one step closer to the hole. I moved cautiously, like it could cave in and swallow me with it at a moment’s notice.

  This one was clean, with only dirt and rocks surrounding its circumference. The blood and gore I had imagined were gone now, and my heart rate was slowing. Still fast… but slowing.

  “They’re burrows… chupacabra burrows…” Carter said it as clearly as he could, with extra emphasis on the strange word.

  “Chupacabras?” I trailed off, trying to place a word I knew I had heard before. My mind scrambled. Then I remembered something from an old movie. “Goat suckers?”

  Carter chuckled lightly and then answered, “That is the direct translation from the Spanish name. It’s the most common name these things go by… here at least. They’re known by many other names across the world. We’ve got records of them from over a century ago in Norway under a different name… Beineter. Some smaller encounters my family had down in Louisiana called them,” Carter tried to pronounce something with a bad Creole accent. “Bwè mwèl zo. Something like that. But they all have the same thing in common… they eat bones. More specifically… the marrow. My ancestors called them Gravemarrows.”

  It felt weird when he said this, like I should be more disturbed by it. But I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, but part of me thought it was because I just didn’t really believe him. Not yet. Even though I was staring at the hole in the ground, just like the other, I was trying to convince myself that my fear was just ramping up and getting out of control. I was struggling on the inside… but Carter continued.

  “What you probably don’t know is that the central hub of that void your guys unearthed was packed to the gills with bones. They were packed into the floor, the ceiling, the walls, everywhere. These bones had all been hollowed out, the marrow taken out clean, bones busted and snapped open to lick out every nook and cranny before using them to support the burrowing as the nest gets larger.”

  My mind was stuck on something. “Why Gravemarrows?” All the names he threw at me were one of the reasons I started to not take him so seriously. It just seemed… I don’t know. I was skeptical, like he was reading all of this out of some fucking book.

  Carter looked at me with a weird side eye, like I should have had a different reaction to what he just told me.

  “Uh…” he thought for just a split second. “The recording left by my family called them that after killing a nest of them in London… around 1888. They burrowed under cemeteries, plucking bodies from underneath fresh graves. People only found out once large sections of the local graveyards started collapsing and tunnels of bones were discovered. Then… the living started going missing. That’s when my family came to find them.”

  “Your family…” I said, trying to gather all of this into a more logical sense.

  “My family’s hunted monsters long before they came to America. We keep records, pass them down to the next generation so they can continue the hunt. But these things… no matter what you call them, are just a drop in the bucket. They are one monster in a sea of creatures roaming the world.”

  I shook my head, half wondering why I came out here in the first place. The more we talked, the more I started to think that I was stupid as fuck for letting my mind wander and letting this dude get the better of me. I knew things didn’t make sense about what happened with Sam, but hearing this dude talk so casually about fairytale shit like this… I was starting to doubt myself. I wanted to believe him… to find answers, but here in broad daylight talking about this… I was starting to have second thoughts.

  “Yeah, man… I don’t know…” I could hear the hesitation in my own breath. “I didn’t see any of that. I just saw the hole… and the blood. It could have just been…”

  He could feel the hesitation and the shift in my attitude. Maybe it was the beer wearing off from my mind and voice, but he sensed what I was feeling before I even trailed off on my rickety-ass excuse.

  “Think back to what you said… the deer that was in your brother's shed,” he offered.

  That stung a little as he talked like he had seen it. But… I still did as he said.

  “They claimed it was a wolf at one point… then a bear… I think I even read a report that talked about a possible zoo animal getting loose. All bullshit to try to connect dots that aren’t there, or the dots that just don’t make sense. Why do you think that is?” Carter asked me, getting so serious that it almost seemed like he was getting frustrated or something.

  I shook my head, “I don’t know…” I wanted to believe him… but standing here, now, it just seemed so far away.

  Carter pulled his phone out of his pocket and started texting someone while he kept speaking. “It’s just like I was saying before, Seth. It’s easier for people to want to go back to pretending nothing is out of the ordinary. It’s easier to say these things aren’t true… it affects us all at times… even me… even you.”

  “Look, I want to know the truth about my brother… but all this…” I felt the shift, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  I don’t know what it was that changed. Well… that was a lie. It was the beer that had faded, and my logical mind was trying to rationalize everything that he was trying to say to me; and I also knew that I had put myself in a very strange and vulnerable position with a stranger who had openly just told me he was impersonating a federal agent. Basically, I was starting to try to find a way out of this.

  Fucking Horrigs… if that idiot had checked this dude’s credentials, I wouldn’t have ever met this guy. That asshole needs to retire.

  A loud rumble pulled onto the two-track behind us, and a large black truck rolled right up the small trail and came to a stop just behind Carter’s little car. After the two front doors popped open, two familiar faces appeared from behind them. It was the massive, strongman-looking dude, and the dark-haired woman, still rocking her resting-bitch-face.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked quickly. “Who are they… really?” I felt my pulse quickening for some unknown reason. It wasn’t something I could understand. It felt like my body was just reacting. It reminded me of a time when I was younger, and I got chased by this mean-ass dog from down the road. The moment I saw it, I knew I was fucked. I felt the same thing when I looked at them. Well… It wasn’t the red-haired man… it was the woman. It didn’t make any sense… but I felt it.

  “Seth… let me introduce you to my brother Frank,” Carter motioned towards the big man who was walking straight up to me, but his steps slowed once he was within about ten feet of me.

  This Frank character looked almost… cautious, like he was walking up on a deer or some kind of skittish animal. But there was something else in his eyes… something that almost looked like… recognition.

  “Frank is my older brother… a hunter, just like me,” Carter added as the bid man closed the distance.

  I was a big enough guy, I worked out, did physical work, and tried to eat right, but standing in front of this guy… he was huge. Not overly fat or anything, but like one of those guys that looks like, if he really decided to turn it on… he could probably ball you up and toss you in the trash.

  Frank stepped up to me and stuck out his hand. He had a look on his face that was… confusing. It was oddly… emotional…

  “Francis Chasse… you can call me Frank…” he said as he gripped my hand.

  I didn’t even remember sticking it out to shake; I think it was just muscle memory taking over while my mind was looking for an escape hatch from this weird situation. His grip wasn’t overly tight, but I could tell that if he clamped down, he could probably shatter all the bones in my hand. He honestly seemed… nice.

  The tall, dark-haired woman walked up silently beside him. She didn’t say a word at first; she just stood there beside Frank as Carter introduced her. Her black tank top and skinny jeans were almost trying to make her seem normal… but something in her eyes couldn’t be contained. This mundane outfit couldn’t cover up something specific.

  “This is Jane Talbot. She is a friend of the family and… for all intents and purposes, my sister-in-law,” Carter said.

  Frank patted my hand with his free one and laughed, “Not officially… keeping my options open.” His words were followed by a bellowing laugh that echoed back from the trees around us.

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  The quiet, tall woman calmly looked over at Frank and, quicker than I could register, jabbed him in the back with a fist. He barked out in true pain for just a moment before he was all jokes and apologies. She still held her very serious demeanor, but there was a crack in her RBF for just a second that told me this was not unusual for them.

  For just a minute, I felt like I was meeting friends of the family or something… or like I was the friend. It was weird. This didn’t really feel like an interrogation or an explanation of what I came here for at that moment. The look in Frank, Carter, and even at times, Jane’s eyes was something that I didn’t understand. But I saw it in all of them. They were all looking at me in a way like they were waiting for something… or trying to gauge something as we all met.

  “I apologize,” Carter said, getting us back on track. “Frank and Jane are here for a reason. They came with me to meet you just in case,” he made a motion with his hands like he was trying to gesture uncertainty, “just in case you needed extra persuasion.”

  I cocked my head back slightly, “What do you mean? You say that like you didn’t come here to hunt those chupacabras,” I air quoted like I still didn’t believe him about these supposed creatures. “You sound like you came here for…”

  “For you,” the menacing Jane said as she looked right at me. Her voice was deeper than I expected, still feminine, but laced with something else. It was… unsettling.

  I stopped in my tracks, not saying another word as I realized the reality of my situation. These three knew something about me, or something I was tied to, and came here for me specifically. My mind started racing, and my heart started pumping. I could feel the adrenaline surging through me in an instant as my primal survival sense took over and tried to figure out a way out of this.

  “Be calm, Seth. There’s no reason for panic.” Jane’s RBF disappeared, and she actually seemed genuinely concerned for me. “You don’t need to run or fight us. We’re just here to talk.”

  “What?” I barely got out. How did she know… I hadn’t made a move yet. “What are you… how…”

  “Your heart is going a hundred miles an hour. Just calm yourself. We’re friends,” Jane said to me with her calm, neutral face. She meant it.

  My heart was pounding… faster and faster… harder and harder. It was all I could hear for a moment until Carter’s voice came through.

  “You don’t believe me… I understand. It’s a lot to take in… especially if you haven’t seen it for yourself. You saw the aftereffects of them… of what they did to the excavation site and crew. You didn’t even see a body. But… seeing is believing.” Carter nodded in a reluctant but approving nod towards Frank and Jane.

  I looked over quickly at them to see what that meant. Frank was standing still, a look of preparedness on his face as if I ran, he was going to chase me down and keep me there. Jane had a different look on her face. She had a slight look of concentration.

  She was staring straight at me. Her neutral expression shifting to focused intent, like she was trying to make something happen… or take a shit or something. That’s the only thing that popped into my head that reminded me of the face she was making.

  Then, before I could even panic or register what had happened, Jane’s eyes pulsed. It was a weird surge from her pupils, almost like they flipped inside out from the central black dot, turning over from the normal-sized brown iris to an engorged, feral-looking, yellowish-orange color I couldn’t quite name. It happened so fast that I couldn’t tell exactly the mechanics of it. One minute she was normal, the next she was… stranger. Something happened with her mouth, too, that I couldn’t understand. She didn’t open her mouth, so I couldn’t see why, but her mouth looked flexed and protruding in some way that was still hidden behind her sealed lips. However, another detail made me want to shit my own pants right there on the spot. Her hands were different now, too… twisted… crooked and warped at the joints. Each finger was thicker and reinforced beneath the skin with extra bone; somehow, all of the changes necessary to strengthen her bestial claws that erupted from each digit as her arms hung at her sides. They were thick, brownish-clear protrusions that looked jagged, but wickedly sharp and strong.

  One minute, an imposing, though strikingly beautiful, powerhouse of a woman stood in front of me… the next… something… supernatural was standing in her place. When I connected eyes with her… all my fears came true. The thoughts that Sam had run into something like her that night in the woods behind his house were all verified. She was real… standing right in front of me. I thought I could almost hear some kind of sound coming from her in my slow-motion panic. It wasn’t a growl from her mouth, but like a reverberation from her chest… like a beast was inside of her and it wanted out. In that moment… whatever was inside of her… I was certain that it wanted to kill me.

  I stumbled back a few steps and tripped over something on the ground. I didn’t know what it was, but I panicked… badly. I just had to get out of there… run and hope I could make it to safety. I started to flop over in the pine needle-covered ground to try and make a move, but it was no use. A hand gripped me so tight that I couldn’t even resist the pull. Carter snatched me back up to my feet and pointed back toward Jane.

  “Look…” he urged, moving my head with his own hands to force me to look at this monstrous woman. “She’s not what you think,” he maintained control of my fleeing body somehow and got my head oriented to look at her.

  I watched helplessly as Jane stood there like a changing beast straight out of some horror movie, only showing the first signs of something much more powerful. But then… the details, the claws, the mouth and jaw that were clearly different, and those frightening feral eyes… they all faded back to how she looked just moments ago.

  One minute… a creature stood before me, staring into my soul like I was a meal. Then the next… the original woman was back. She quickly stepped away to give me some breathing room. She walked back to the jacked-up, black truck and got inside the passenger seat up front. As soon as the door clicked shut, Carter let me go.

  I stumbled away for a minute, completely aware of everything in my surroundings now. It was funny how fear and panic can do that; make your mind take in every detail that you would otherwise overlook once you are in a state of panic and terror. I guess fight or flight did things you didn’t even think about. I tripped over that stick initially because I hadn’t known it was there, but once my brain chose flight, it was like I had a mental map of my immediate surroundings. I knew my path of escape now, but… I just stood still.

  None of this made any sense, and I was trying to soothe myself to think for a second. They came to me… not to just kill some kind of monster that killed the guys from work. They came to meet me. They came to teach me about what was out there. Carter brought Jane… a monster… or something… I don’t know what she was… but they had her here to show me the truth.

  I had only one question: Why?

  I just couldn’t ask it, as I was in the middle of a panic attack.

  “Okay… you can turn it off,” I said to Jane, not sure of the right lingo.

  She stopped showing me her weird transformation again, for the third time, and shifted back to completely human-looking. She was holding back a small smirk at my words.

  I slowly nodded to myself as they all gathered around me. I had calmed a lot since the first showing of Jane’s… other side. I still wasn’t sure what to call it. They had all been pretty calm and quiet, letting me take this in without much input. They only had one goal. They wanted me to see the truth… that everything Carter had been saying was true.

  Once I realized that they were not trying to harm me in any way, and just repeatedly showed and told me the truth… I calmed substantially. For someone or something like Jane to do this over and over, for some flailing dipshit like I was probably acting like, it spoke volumes once my mind cleared. They came here for me… for a reason.

  “So… it's real,” I said, nodding to myself. “The chupacabras, the thing that took Sam, what she is,” I said, pointing at Jane a little harsher than I meant it, almost like I was grouping her in with all monsters. I didn’t mean that, I was more pointing at the figurative situation than the woman herself. “It’s all real?”

  Carter nodded, “It is.”

  Frank and Jane remained silent, just watching me, waiting to see if they’d need to catch me again like the first time. I almost tried to run off into the trees after regaining some bodily control once Jane got back into the truck after her first reveal.

  I shook my head, “Fuck! Fuck dude… how does nobody know about this shit?” I couldn’t believe it. Everyone needed to know about this. “We gotta tell people. Let them know what's out there. We have to…”

  “No one will believe you,” Frank said coldly, interrupting my thought.

  I looked at him hesitantly, wary that I might have just pissed him off by suggesting that we tell the world about his girlfriend… fiancé… or whatever she was to him.

  “There’s a reason people don’t know. Look at yourself ten minutes ago. You came here with Carter so quickly for answers, but the moment he started laying things out for you… You wanted out. That’s how it is for everyone until you come face-to-face with it and can't look away,” Jane said calmly and practiced.

  “We think it’s a defense mechanism for normal humans. It's easier to survive the normal world and ignore the things too big, and too unknown, for your own power to handle.” Then Frank looked to Jane, caressed her hand as they all sat on the tailgate of the black truck. “Plus… there are other reasons you can't just go screaming from the rooftops.”

  Carter nodded, “He's right. Another thing you need to know is that there are very old, very powerful supernatural entities in the world. Their main goal is to stay in the shadows. To remain myths and legends. That is how they maintain their own survival. If everyone knew… the world would mobilize against a common enemy… a threat. It could wipe out the existence of some of these creatures.”

  I was confused, “But wouldn’t that be exactly what you’d want? Being a hunter and all?”

  “Even if it was that simple, do you think you could survive long enough to convince the population that it's real… before something from the shadows notices you… and sees you as a threat to their world. You’d disappear before you ever knew you were being followed.” Carter’s voice was straight up fact, and he wasn’t sugarcoating it. “We hunt the way we do, in secret, to try and maintain some form of balance. We kill what we can, save who we can, but this is the world. We can’t save everyone.”

  Then Frank started talking, looking more off in the distant trees, like he was remembering something. “Not only that… but not all things in this dark world are monsters. Sometimes… people get taken from you… changed… cursed. Things happen that change lives… entire families… and there is nothing you can do about it.” Frank ran a large hand over his head and down the back of his old-school, shaved mullet. “But just because you are something other than human… doesn’t mean you’re a monster.”

  Jane looked at him with something in her eyes that I could only see as a deep love forged over many trials; love for Frank, and something between them that I was not privy to at the moment. Frank looked up at her, and they both nodded, understanding something.

  “Seth, this world is hard. Things happen… things change, but our actions are what determine our lives. Jane is a werewolf… her family was cursed generations ago by someone who was so fucked up as a human being that they were worse than some monsters we have come across. Jane and her family, over the generations, have learned to use what they are to help my family hunt down true monsters. Jane and her family… they aren’t the only ones. Others share a similar fate. Our own family has multiple members who have crossed the border between strictly human and… other things. But… we keep what we can… while we can. Because none of us know how much time we have left.”

  The atmosphere of the area settled into a heavy blanket that felt almost too heavy and personal for me. I felt like they were bearing their souls in front of me, even though they were leaving out a lot of details. A long few moments passed as they all were silent, and I was waiting for more explanation.

  After I couldn’t wait any longer, I asked, “Why tell me all of this. I get it, a threat is in the area… chupacabras, but why come to me? Sure, you know something happened to my brother, but why tell me all of this?

  Carter, Frank, and Jane all took a long, hard look at each other before any of them answered me. I saw Frank sigh with fearful reluctance, Jane pat his back, and give him a nudge of assurance. Then Carter nodded in affirmation.

  “When we heard about what happened to Sam… your brother,” Carter added, “we knew we had to come down here. The details are sparse, but after you’ve already had another encounter with something else… we thought this approach would be best.”

  “Who do you mean, ‘we’?” I asked, feeling a deeper meaning than just the three of them.

  Carter took a long and deep breath, exhaling as he stood up and motioned for me to sit on the tailgate where he was sitting. Jane and Frank immediately got up and took to leaning against a tree just a few feet away from where they had parked. They didn’t go far, but just far enough so that they wouldn’t interfere with what Carter was about to dive into.

  “My family… my whole family, we try to help anyone we can that is affected by this world… and now that’s you,” Carter explained simply. “But… to really explain it all… let me start by telling you a story. After knowing details about your brother’s disappearance, and finally meeting you… I think this will be helpful.”

  I felt the wind shift, and it started blowing just a little colder… or maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was the ultimate finality of the situation, knowing that they might have the keys to the understanding that I craved for so long. I might be about to find out what took my brother… and maybe how to find it… and kill it.

  “A few years ago… Frank and I were on a hunt. It was just supposed to be three vampires…” he couldn’t finish as I cut him off.

  “Vampires!?” I asked incredulously. There was absolutely no fucking way!

  I looked around frantically, connecting eyes with Jane, the only creature I currently knew at the moment. She slowly nodded with assurance, making sure that I knew what she was getting at; vampires were real. But… more importantly… to pay attention to the story.

  “Yes… very much so. But that’s not the point of this story. Frank and I were on a hunt… with our brother-in-law, Wayland, and something happened. Something none of us were prepared for…” Carter trailed off for a moment as he prepared his next words, deeply thinking on what he was about to say. “We met a stranger…”