The mood at ICMHP had changed drastically over the last few hours. Earlier it had been a sort of festive environment. Now half the crowd was somber, as they realized that they weren’t alone and things were messed up all over the rest of the world too, and the other half was really excited, because they’d come to the same conclusion and were now figuring out how they could make money off the situation by blowing things up. Hunters are proactive like that.

I caught a couple of the panels that sounded interesting, where the topics were about the technical end of Hunting. It turned out that the German, Lindemann, was a former member of the elite German counter-terrorism unit GSG-9, and a walking encyclopedia of how to kill dangerous fey. That panel alone was worth the price of admission. Sure, he had insulted me earlier, but at least I had been insulted by the best. Then I went to one of the boring policy ones, but my wife was on the panel so I had no choice. She spent most of it arguing with some idiot professor who was advocating fair trials for intelligent undead. After that was another one on PUFF filing and how to get timely payments from the Treasury, but I snuck out after fifteen minutes of listening to information that I already knew about.

The conversations in the halls were different than before. Stupid Hunters didn’t live long, and we worked in a business that fostered a healthy sense of paranoia. The guests knew that something was up, and many of them had come to the same conclusions that we had. The conference was rigged. The timing was too suspicious. The official policy makers hadn’t wanted the world’s Hunters to know what was going on, but someone else with sufficient pull had arranged to put us all together where the subject would surely arise, but they weren’t direct enough to simply come out and say it.

The keynote address was next. When I had read the description earlier, and it said that it was going to be the MCB director discussing policy, I hadn’t expected there to be much turnout. But now with all of the fresh new conspiracy theories floating around, there was already a crowd formed outside the banquet-hall doors waiting for the keynote to begin. Unfortunately, some of the men loitering around the hall were PT douchebags, which meant that I needed to hang back in order to not violate the restraining order. But since I really wanted to hear what Stark was going to say, I’d just waited until the lights went down before sneaking in. The room was packed, so I didn’t think anyone would notice me. John VanZant, who was also named on the restraining order, was standing in back too. Agent Franks was the last one in, and he just stood there, glowering.