"Or perhaps we're of sound mind and you're barking mad," James said. "Still, I suppose even that has its advantages, especially in your line of work. It makes you stronger, more reckless and unafraid of the horrors you face."
"I may be crazy, but that ain't why I'm good," Cora said. "I'm good because I've had plenty of practice. Me and Ben been doing this job for near about twenty years now. When you been at something that long, you find your knack for doing it."
"Twenty years?" James raised his eyebrows. "It truly is a miracle that you're still alive."
"By the grace of the Lord," Cora said, crossing herself.
"How did you first get into the business?"
Cora glanced at the ruined cross as they passed. "You know of the war between the states?" James nodded. "Well, that's how."
"I'm afraid I don't follow."
"Ben and I was raised and married in the South. Virginia, to be exact," Cora said. "Once the war was over, we didn't have much by way of anything. No homes, no family, no nothing." She spat in the dirt. "Damn Yankees took all that away from us when they came through and burned out our town. On top of that, they went and made a law that said we couldn't head west and claim our own land to start over. Our hands was tied everywhere we turned, so we had to think of something else.
"We was plain stumped for a spell before Ben came up with the idea of bounty hunting. He figured since he'd trained some with guns and swords in the Confederate army, we could come out west and round up crooks and rustlers. Being raised on a farm, I already knew my way around horses. I taught him to ride and he taught me to shoot, and we sold what little we had left to buy some tickets out to Saint Louis."
"I'm with you so far," James said, stepping around the fallen vampires in the tunnel, "but it's still a big leap from arriving in St Louis to hunting the supernatural."
"Hold your horses for a tick and I'll get there," Cora said. "As I said, we showed up in St Louis with our guns, our horses, and not a damn clue as to going about hunting bounties. Ben figured we could just check in with the sheriff and he'd set us on our way, but turned out it ain't that easy. Back then, the James gang was just getting their start, Indians was still a big threat west of Dodge, and the railroad didn't go all the way through to the Pacific yet. You couldn't take ten steps without falling afoul of somebody or other."
"Sounds like an ideal set of circumstances for bounty hunters," James said.
Cora nodded. "So it was, which was exactly why we was in a fix. Saint Louis was crawling with folk hunting bounties and folk with bounties on their heads. Couldn't make sense of which was which, and the sheriff wasn't no help to us. We was penniless and in a strange city, so we turned to the Church. A priest called Father Higgins took us in and gave us a place to sleep for a few nights. He asked us why we was in Saint Louis, and we told him. When we did, he got a funny look on his face, and he says, 'What kind of bounties you hunt?'
"'Just about any we can find,' Ben says.
"'Can you spare some help for an old priest like me?' he says.
"Me and Ben looked at each other for a moment. 'Why, sure,' Ben says. 'We owe you, anyway.'
"Father Higgins got a big grin on his face then. He started telling us how he had himself a problem with a local coven of witches. Seems they was set on calling demons out of hell into this world. The local law and bounty hunters couldn't help him none, not wanting to dirty their hands with anything unnatural and all. Father Higgins was up a tree about it, and had nobody to help him out. Ben and I talked it over, but we really didn't have no choice. This nice old man had taken us in, and he needed help.
"So we took the job, and soon we found where the witches was hiding. They'd managed to conjure up a hellhound that they kept in a big cage in this old abandoned schoolhouse on the outskirts of the city. We saw that and figured it'd