"That I can do. And by the way, I never said thanks for saving my life from that gargoyle. That was a little too close." She absently touched the bandage on the side of her head.

"No big deal. That was some pretty good driving."

"If that jackass in the truck would have just let us pass, I could have lost them."

"Jerk," I agreed.

"Tour?" she asked.

"Gladly."

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

The Shackleford ancestral home was an imposing structure. Once one of the finest of the great antebellum homes of the Old South, it was the crown jewel of a once-massive plantation. Ages ago it had been the center of thousands of acres of timber and farming cut out of the woods of Alabama. The original builder's heirs had sold the home and the property to the first Raymond Shackleford nearly a hundred years before.

"You can see out this window where the slave quarters used to be, the kind of empty spot right there. You can still make out the foundations. They were pretty rickety and busted up by the time I was a kid." Julie pointed out the back windows off of the main corridor. "I burned them down when I was twelve."

"Why? Some sort of protest against the injustice? A young girl trying to right the wrongs of the past?" I asked.

"Nothing so noble. Me and my brothers were learning how to make homemade napalm. Styrofoam packing peanuts dissolved into a bottle of gasoline. They make the best Molotov cocktails. I let one of mine get away from me. I'm just lucky that it didn't spread and burn the house down… Those were the days."

"I can understand. I did something similar once when I was a kid. My brother and I built a pipe bomb. Big thing. We smuggled powder out of my father's reloading room for almost a year so he wouldn't notice. Mixed it with a whole bunch of other ingredients. Detonated it in the backyard when my folks weren't home. It was a little bit bigger boom than expected though, dug a four-foot trench in the yard, cut the gas main and forced the neighborhood to evacuate."

"No wonder the ATF has your name on file," she said. "I wonder if all future Monster Hunters blow stuff up as kids?"

"Probably. The ones that live that long at least." I shrugged. "Hey, I was an upstanding citizen until I met you guys."

"I bet… Anyway, I was sad when the old slave quarters burned down. I was just a little girl. I hadn't really understood what they stood for. I mean, I knew what they were, but not why they were important."

"Lot of history in the South," I stated.