I’d managed to gather several other Hunters who hadn’t been too distracted by the pretty flashing lights and promises of loose slots to forget dinner. The Haight brothers were from Team Haven out of Colorado, and though Sam was dead and Priest had been promoted to be their leader, they would always be called Team Haven. Cooper and my brother-in-law, Nate Shackleford, were from Paxton’s team out of Seattle. Gregorius was from Atlanta, and since the last time I’d seen him he’d decided to ditch his old military grooming standards, and I had to compliment him on the quality of his lumberjack beard. My old buddy Albert Lee was stationed at headquarters in Alabama and he was always fun to hang out with. VanZant was a team lead out of California and Green was one of his guys. I’d worked with all of them at one point or another, either from Newbie training, battling Lord Machado’s minions at DeSoya caverns, or fighting under the alien insect branches of the Arbmunep.

The Last Dragon’s buffet was in a large, circular glass enclosure inside the casino’s shopping mall. The whole place slowly rotated so that the view out the windows was constantly changing murals, gardens, and fountains. The diners got to watch as one story below us, hundreds of consumers blew all their money on overpriced merchandise. It was kind of neat if you liked people-watching as much as I did. Inside the restaurant there were even ice sculptures and five different kinds of chocolate fountains.

After heaping food on our plates, we took our seats. It had been a while since I’d seen most of these particular coworkers, and in short order my arm had been twisted into talking about the case we had wrapped up just that morning. In fact, my team hadn’t even thought we’d be able to attend ICMHP at all, because we’d spent two fruitless weeks trolling the crappiest parts of Jackson, Mississippi looking for our monster. It was January, and we’d gotten rained on the whole time. Bagging that aswang at the last minute had been a stroke of luck, giving us an excuse to pack right up and hightail it to Las Vegas where we could be much warmer and dry for a bit. I like telling stories, but whenever I started exaggerating to make the monster even more disgusting, Trip would correct me. He always was good at keeping me honest. Besides, since the damned thing had been an imported mutant Filipino vampire with a proboscis, you didn’t need much hyperbole to make it gross. This was not the sort of dinner conversation that you would have with polite company.