The Secret Guard of the Blessed Order of St. Hubert the Protector was the oldest Monster Hunting organization in the world. Their best historians believed that the patron saint of Hunters had gotten his start freeing the Merovingian countryside of werewolves in 682 AD. Their official charter dated back to the twelfth century. Even most of the other Monster Hunters in the world had never heard of them. There weren’t that many of them left, their occasional heavy lifting was done by the Swiss Guard, and it was rare that one of them ended up working in America. The Secret Guard tended to work in the places that the rest of the civilized world ignored or forgot, but the less fortunate needed protection just as much as the wealthy.

However, this was Franks they were talking about, who was a very special case, which meant the Vatican’s best problem solver got to return to his home country.

This was as close as he was going to get to last night’s fight without being spotted by the MCB, so it would have to do. He pulled the holy relic out of his coat. A regular St. Hubert’s Key was simply a metal bar that could be heated up and used to cauterize wounds, usually as a treatment for rabies in the days before germ theory. This one was special. This one was the first Key, forged by Hubertus himself, and it had been used to cauterize bites from things a whole lot worse than rabid dogs. It was said that the legendary Bartolomeu Zarco Cabral had driven this very Key through Baal’s eye at the battle of Cordoba, but he figured that was just the archivists messing with the new guys so they wouldn’t lose any of the sacred relics they signed out of the vaults.

He extended his hand, palm up, letting the iron bar rest there. The early Hunters had been forced to deal with all the same horrors they still faced today, only those poor bastards hadn’t had access to good explosives or modern firearms. They’d had to improvise, adapt, and survive. The Key was a leftover from those days, but it was still pretty handy for things like this.

The bar slowly turned. The porous old metal grated across his skin. Normally it would pick a direction and stay there, pointing toward an unholy being the same way a compass would point at magnetic north, but here, the Key was being tugged in a few different directions. He was used to minor things like imps or lesser demons screwing things up, but these pulls were all strong, so strong that they could be confused for Franks.

Gutterres swallowed hard. That was very bad. He was going to need to send for reinforcements.

“Show me the eldest.”