I repeated that. “Wait a second, can you send her that recording of Stricken talking about maybe murdering Franks?” Management seemed to perk up at that idea and nodded his horns vigorously. “Okay, Holly. I’m sending you a recording you might be able to use as leverage. Stricken’s ruthless. He’ll kill you if he catches you. Do what you can, but be careful.” I had just asked the one member of my team that was in a position of relative safety to go do something incredibly dangerous, but if we could learn what Dr. Blish knew, it might give the rest of us a fighting chance. Sometimes this job just wasn’t easy.

“End.” The dragon watched me with his huge black eyes. “You can gain the measure of a man by the nature of the friends he keeps. I have studied all of the ICMHP attendees. The courage of this fair maiden friend of yours speaks volumes about your character, Mr. Pitt. I’m certain she will succeed in this endeavor.”

“Calling her a maiden might be a stretch, but yeah, Holly will get the job done, no matter what.”

“If it is not presumptuous of me, I know that you have some other members of your stalwart company out there, and I would be willing to send this same message to them as well.”

I’d heard that some of the Las Vegas team had stayed up north just in case anything else popped up in the aftermath of the spider problem. “That would be great.”

“Very well. I will do so. There is one last order of business, Mr. Pitt. A subject that I am most loath to broach. We have already established that the nature of our current adversary is a mystery, but another question remains. What, or rather, who, woke it up? Display original images.”

The screens changed, and now all of them were showing different still pictures, and though they were all different images, from diverse times and places, they were all of the same subject. Some were carved in stone, others were scratched in the dirt, a few were spray painted like graffiti, and one was scrawled in blood on the other side of crime scene tape. My throat was suddenly dry. It was the mysterious symbol first shown to me by my father, since seen by Hunters around the world, and most recently on the ceiling of the containment unit at Dugway.

“You know about this?”

The dragon nodded his head, and it was like having a car jangled above you by a crane. “Of course I do. Word had reached me from many sources about his sign appearing again. I’m afraid the time of his return is upon us.”