Full Moon Cleaners: By Fair Means or Foul

Faith Jordan, owner of FULL MOON CLEANERS, cleans up crime scenes after the police, CSI, and the dead have gone home and faithless, dark places where the dead and other creatures sometimes linger on...My name is Faith Jordan. When I was twelve, my mother died during an exorcism gone wrong. If you're thinking Linda Blair, levitating beds, projectile vomit, and spontaneous flesh wounds, don't. It was worse. Because it was real. No Hollywood special effects. Just a charismatic priest that my mother shouldn't have trusted.My mother was Irish Catholic. My dad was an atheist. I'm somewhere in between. My dad didn't stick around after I was born, and that's when my mother's interest in the church grew.A priest named Jorge performed the exorcism that went wrong. Believing he saw the devil in my mother's eyes, he tried to scratch him out with his fingers. He syringed holy water into her eyes and mouth, then got his hands around her throat. Ash Shannon, a former priest who left the priesthood when he fell in love with my mother, burst into the church and tried to stop him. Ash was too late. He thought a demon was involved. I didn't. But I was only twelve at the time. Who was going to believe a kid who hadn't even been in the church during the exorcism?My mother wore eye patches during the last three days of her life. She died in darkness and fear. So I made it a point to learn about exorcism rites. And biohazard bags. And other things that go bump in the night.When I grew up, I opened a crime scene cleanup biz called Full Moon Cleaners. I clean up after the police, CSI, and the dead have gone home. And then there are the paranormal crime scenes, faithless, dark places where the dead--and other things--linger on. My main responsibility is to thoroughly and discreetly mop up after someone or something dies violently, to restore a scene to what it looked like before the violent death. I am daily exposed to nasty human blood-borne diseases that may carry viruses such as HIV, HBV, HCV, and TB. Not to mention the nasty inhuman viruses like vampire, zombie, and the rarer werewolf virus. My business partner, Eddy, a nearly seven-foot tall Blackfoot Indian with a scarred face and a big heart, helps me clean up homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths. I get to wear a hot Hazmat suit, double-filter respirators, and chemical-spill boots. Sometimes I even use welding gloves when I have to pluck splintered bone that's sharp as razor from walls. I mean, what girl doesn't dream of being able to do that when she grows up? I drive a white van with biohazard stickers and sigils, or magic seals and symbols, on the back of it. I use it to transport stuff like containers, mops, buckets, spray bottles, and sponges; ozone machines and foggers; putty knives for scraping up brain matter; and a steam-injection machine, in case I need to melt dried brain matter that can't be scraped off with putty knives.The crime scenes I'm currently cleaning smack of werewolf and Eddy has a pathological fear of dogs. He's not afraid of much else, just dogs. I've involved Val Starr, an animal forensics expert who also heads up an animal rescue SWAT team, who knows a thing or two about hairy beasts. I should mention I have this habit of lifting something from each crime scene. I think it helps to balance out some of the evil. I lifted a notebook of sigils from the crime scene of a murdered psychic and now his ghost is begging me to solve his murder. Like I don't have enough to do already.Ash, demon profiler, is back in my life. I'm attracted to him, a man who briefly dated my mother. He came back because he thinks I need protection from a big, bad demon who is tracking an ancient grimoire and killing people in an attempt to become a werewolf the likes of which the world has never seen--the demon he believes was involved in my mother's death. Oh, and I may have been infected by the werewolf virus too. As Ash says, we'll take it one full moon at a time.