The Monster Hunters

  Susan had a handful of Julie’s hair and had jerked her head back, exposing her throat. Julie was fighting, struggling against the iron-hard claws. Her mother’s face distorted as she opened her mouth impossibly wide, razor teeth gleaming.

  I shoved myself up, putting my shoulder into Ray, trying to drive him back. He clubbed me in the back with a blow that should have crippled me for life. I went to my knees. The vampire’s mouth descended toward Julie’s neck. Time slowed to a standstill. I could see the terror in her eyes, the pulse in her carotid artery, the unnatural black mark on her skin as Susan’s fangs pierced her flesh.

  “NO!” I jerked my kukri from its sheath and slammed it through Ray’s stomach with all my might. He looked at me in shocked disbelief as I lifted him off the ground, blade tearing through half his torso. I hurled him over my shoulder, screaming the entire time.

  Susan looked up, hot blood streaming from her mouth. Animal face contorted, she hissed. Julie’s eyes were closed, her pretty face twisted in a grimace of pain. “She’s mine n—” The vampire suddenly jerked, hands flying to her face, releasing Julie. Red steam rose from her open mouth. “What’s happening? Her blood burns!”

  Ray was pushing his guts back in as he struggled to rise. “The mark! The Guardian’s curse!”

  Susan clamped her claws down over her lips. Acid smoke was pouring from her face. The flesh on her chin and lips was peeling away, leaving nothing but exposed teeth. She tripped back, shrieking.

  I leapt forward, trying to protect Julie, blade held high. Julie’s eyes flashed open, and for a moment, they seemed to be pure black, but then she blinked, and they were normal. There was no wound on her neck, nothing. There was nothing on her skin except for the Guardian’s mark. It flickered briefly with its own living movement, then it was still.

  “I’m okay,” Julie whispered.

  Susan was shaking, in terrible pain. She lowered her hands. The bottom half of her face was nothing but glistening bone. “I can’t . . . can’t turn you . . .” the vampire stuttered, confused. “Why . . . why isn’t it healing?”

  Ray cried out. “Susan!”

  “I’m not regenerating.” She rubbed her fingers across her exposed jaw. “What have you done to me? I’m hideous!”

  I rose from Julie, blade extended. It was time for Susan to die.

  “Damn it.” Susan raised one hand, pointing the artifact toward us. It crackled with black energy. I knew it was going to consume us both. “If I can’t have her, nobody can.” The air around the artifact swirled into a vortex.

  “No!” Ray shouted. “Don’t kill her!”

  Then the artifact dropped harmlessly from Susan’s stunned fingers.

  Susan stumbled forward, white oak stake sticking out her back, black blood drizzling out. Sam Haven brutally slammed another stake into her. Heart ruptured, Susan went to her knees, paralyzed. “Leave them alone!” He backed up a step, raised his boot, and kicked the stake right through her.

  “SUSAN!” Ray bellowed as he leapt right over Julie and me.

  “It’s over, Ray!” Sam yelled as he drew his bowie knife. He jerked Susan’s head back as the blade came down.

  Ray slammed into Sam. The two of them crashed and rolled across the dirt. I went after them. Ray was up first, his form twisting, muscles snaking across his vampire frame as bone talons burst from the ends of his fingertips. “Get away from my wife!” Ray struck with supernatural desperation. Struggling to rise, Sam grunted as the bone claws tore right through his armor and sent him sprawling.

  The vampire hesitated, looking down at his former friend, then at the blood dripping down his arm. “I’m real sorry, Sam.” Ray bent down, grabbed the stake from Susan’s back and yanked it free.

  With a cry, I swung my blade for the base of Ray’s head. The blade struck and a tremor ran up my arm. The steel came to a stop most of the way through his neck. Black fluids came welling slowly out the cut. Ray stood there for a moment, his vampire features gradually softening, returning to a semblance of normalcy. He smiled slightly. “Good shot, kid. . . .”

  I cleaved the blade the rest of the way through his throat. Ray’s head fell from his shoulders and bounced away. His body dropped a second later.

  “Ray!” Susan cried. “What have you done?” She stood behind me, hole in her chest sealing shut, her lower jaw still nothing but white bone. She took a step forward. “What have you done?”

  I spun my knife and got ready for her charge. “My job.”

  My father-in-law was dead. Ray’s flesh was softening, turning to ooze, and dripping from his skeleton. I’d finally done him the favor that I should have fulfilled last summer.

  Susan hesitated, shaking, looking down at her husband’s body, then her red eyes locked on mine. “Oh, now I’m mad.”

  “Dad’s free, Mom,” Julie said as she rocked a magazine into her rifle. There were flashlights approaching from all directions and the shouts of Hunters. Julie pulled back the charging handle and let it fly forward. “You’re done here.”

  “Not yet, I’m not.” Susan bent over to pick up the artifact, but Julie’s bullet knocked it flying away from her hand. Susan snarled. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

  Julie took careful aim. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  The bullet passed through nothing. Susan’s bloody clothing fell to the ground as a thick gray mist rolled across the ruined cemetery. Within seconds the mist had mingled with the fog and rolled out of sight.

  “Are you all right?” I shouted at Julie.

  “I’m fine. Check Sam.”

  The burly Hunter was sitting down, pressing his hands against his side. I squatted next to him. “Sam? You okay?”

  “Naw. . . .” He moved his hands. Torn sheets of Kevlar parted, and I could see inside his chest cavity. Desperate to protect his wife, Ray’s blow had been so powerful that he’d cleaved right through the armor. Sam coughed violently and blood drenched his giant walrus mustache. “Shit, that hurts.”

  “MEDIC!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Julie spoke into her radio, calling desperately for an orc healer. I wrenched open my first aid pouch and pulled out a pack of bandages. I ripped them from the package and stuck them against him. It was soaked useless almost instantly.

  “Gotta lay down,” Sam wheezed. I put my hand on his back and gently lowered him. “We . . . win?”

  “Sure did, man.”

  Julie knelt at his other side, shining a flashlight at the wound. The vampire’s claws had torn four terrible lacerations deep through him. Blood was pouring out. I was shocked he was still conscious. Julie looked up at me, a terrible knowledge in her eyes. “Hang in there, Sam. Gretchen’s coming.”

  Sam’s strong hand grasped mine. “It’s all good, guys.” Other Hunters surrounded us. A group of Feds found Agent Franks and called for a stretcher.

  “Not Sam,” Holly cried when she arrived. I glanced around the assembled Hunters. None of us could do a thing. Sam could have taken an injury like this in an emergency room and still not have had a chance. Holly began desperately cutting the rest of Sam’s armor away. There was no way she was going to stop the bleeding in time.

  “Figures it would be Ray. He always was a dick.” Sam closed his eyes. His breathing was rapid and shallow. “I taught you kids good, though. Where’s Milo?”

  “Right here!” the little man shouted as he sprinted up to us. “Oh, Sam, no . . .” Milo dropped down beside me. “What happened?”

  His eyes opened. “No biggie.” Sam coughed. “Listen . . . brother . . . I . . .”

  Then he was dead. The great heart simply quit beating. The hand grasping mine was suddenly still . . . just like that.

  “Sam?” Milo asked. “Sam?”

  We were all quiet. Finally Milo, trembling, reached up and closed Sam Haven’s staring eyes.

  Chapter 22

  The mortuary became our temporary headquarters while we regrouped and figured out what was going on. Myers had not accompanied his men through the rift
from Alabama but was in contact. With Franks incapacitated, Archer was in command. The thin man was pacing back and forth in the mortuary chapel, speaking excitedly into a satellite phone.

  “No, sir. I don’t see any way that we can cover this up. Negative. It’s like twenty stories tall.” The agent stalked back to the window. When the sun comes up, the town below us would surely see the giant alien tree. It was a secret agency’s worst nightmare. Archer nodded as Myers gave him instructions. “Yes, sir. I’m on it.” He closed the phone and started yelling orders. “Johnson, contact British MI4. They have an office in Auckland. They’ll have to evacuate the town before dawn. Have them make up something about . . . anthrax or plague or something . . . hell, I don’t know, maybe an outbreak of rabid sheep.”

  I was standing in the doorway, waiting. “Auckland? We’re in New Zealand?” That would explain why my watch was saying that it was afternoon in Alabama; it felt like we were getting close to sunrise. That, and it had seemed unseasonably cool.

  Archer glared at me. “What? I’m busy.”

  “Yeah, Myers sure does make it look easy, doesn’t he? Keeping all those lies straight and all that. The man has a gift,” I said. Archer frowned, waiting. “I was wondering if Franks . . . is he okay?” We had blown up a god together, after all. Now that’s male bonding.

  Archer actually smiled. He really wasn’t a bad sort. “Franks will be just fine. It takes more than getting his spine pulled out to kill him. He probably won’t even take sick leave. I’ll tell him you asked.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to leave.

  “Hey, Pitt . . .” He stopped me, suddenly uncomfortable. “Just so you know, man. I was just doing my job. I didn’t know about Torres. I really was just trying to protect you.”

  I nodded once, then left the young Fed to his damage control.

  The Feds had taken the comfortable waiting room, leaving MHI the soaking wet and partially burned chapel. Our people had moved in to tend to our injuries and check our gear. The mood was chaotic and somber. Julie was sitting on one of the pews, wrapped in a wool blanket. She looked haggard, with big dark circles under her eyes. She gave me a weak smile when she saw me. I flopped down next to her.

  “I just got some good news,” she said. “Nate’s going to be fine. He broke his leg when he fell down that hole and took a good whack on the head, but other than that, Gretchen’s not worried about him.”

  “Good thing Shacklefords are so hard-headed,” I responded.

  She didn’t laugh. “I haven’t told him about Dad yet.”

  “Oh . . . okay.” That was going to be hard. This would be the second time they would have to deal with his death, only this time, it was permanent. “Have the Feds found the artifact yet?”

  Julie bit her lip. She seemed deep in thought. “No . . . not that I know of.”

  “Well, when they do, they better stash it someplace that nobody will ever find it. That thing’s too dangerous. I hate the idea of them even having it, because eventually somebody is going to use it again. Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “Amazingly enough, we’ve got a ton of injuries, multiple gunshot wounds, and one Newbie lost a foot, but we only had the one fatality. The Feds lost two pilots, but the other two lived.”

  “How’s Skippy?”

  “He’s good. He managed to put the Hind down right side up. Not bad considering the tail rotor was gone. Minor injuries on the orcs running the door guns, but that’s it. Skippy even thinks that we can fix it, provided we can ship it home.”

  “We’re in New Zealand,” I pointed out.

  She nodded. “We checked GPS as soon as we stepped through the portal. By the way”—she pointed at my armor—“your patch is upside down.” Sure enough, I had stuck it back on wrong after tearing it off Torres. I had been a little preoccupied at the time. “Will you look at that? Upside down, it’s a penguin . . . swimming right at you. Never noticed that before.”

  Milo arrived and sat down next to me. He looked even worse than Julie. He and Sam had been friends since Milo had joined MHI as an orphaned teenager. He was holding together right now, but that was only because there was still work to do. “I checked. The magic rope’s toast. Half of it is still stuck under that stupid tree, so I don’t think I can turn it back on. Don’t have the ward stone to juice it up either.”

  “How did you do that, anyway?”

  Milo shrugged. “Couple of clever people, a killer deadline, and a mutant that happened to be familiar with the inventor’s work. Esmeralda figured out how to turn it back on, and I said, why not splice it into a couple hundred feet of climbing rope and fly some attack helicopters through it . . . Seemed like the reasonable thing to do with a magic teleporter thingy. Then we took volunteers to go through it, and that turned out to be just about everybody who wasn’t already banged up.”

  “Well, you guys saved my life. I’ll never forget that.”

  “Don’t ever forget Sam.” Milo sniffed and blew his nose into a handkerchief. “Darn, I must be allergic to penguins or something, making me tear up and stuff. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to see about arranging transport out of here. I’m assuming most of us didn’t bother to bring passports.”

  Milo walked away. I corrected my patch. “Does New Zealand have penguins?” I asked.

  Julie shrugged.

  The British Supernatural Service, commonly known as BSS, working in conjunction with the U.S. Monster Control Bureau of the Department of Homeland Security, was gracious enough to provide lodging and transport for the forty-some-odd members of MHI stuck in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand. Mostly I think they just wanted to get us out of the rapidly disintegrating situation. The small town had not been evacuated quite in time, and many photos and even cell phone video of the massive Arbmunep had been taken and dumped on the internet. People were freaking out. The Feds were scrambling to come up with a plausible cover story.

  Not my problem.

  Skippy had refused to leave until Archer had agreed to have the Hind crated up and shipped back to Alabama. I didn’t know if Myers would allow his subordinate to keep that promise, but if he didn’t, I figured the orc would probably just hunt him down, and it wouldn’t be pretty. That chopper was Skippy’s baby.

  I was riding business class on a transoceanic flight when I got the phone call. My phone was still sitting at the bottom of the Alabama River, so Earl had finally managed to get ahold of Julie. She woke me up with a poke to the ribs and passed the phone over, violating the hell out of the airline policy about using electronic devices in-flight.

  “You did it,” Earl said. “As soon as the link with the Dread Overlord was broken, Rocky said he was done and went home.”

  “Rocky?”

  “You know, Rok’hasna’wrath, devourer of worlds and all that crap. We spent a lot of quality time together, so we’re on a first-name basis now. I think he was surprised to find that I was a little tougher than he initially figured. I didn’t give up anything without a hell of a fight.”

  “Any permanent damage?”

  Earl was quiet for so long that I thought I had dropped the connection. “Well, I lost a few things . . .” He didn’t specify further. I remembered the terrible fate of Carlos, and was just glad that I had been able to spare one of my friends from that. “Thanks, Owen. Thanks for everything.”

  “I’m sorry about Sam.” If I hadn’t freed Susan . . .

  “Don’t be. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. Sam Haven was a hero and one of the best friends I’ve ever had. He died how he lived, brave as hell, saving lives, and getting the job done. That’s exactly how he would have wanted it.”

  “See you in a few, Earl.”

  The day after our return, I had been summoned to a meeting at one of the miscellaneous federal buildings in Montgomery. I was to come alone. It had not been a request. Apparently the MCB had a few questions they wanted answered about the events of the last few days.

  I wore my only suit, which was normally reserved for funerals and we
ddings. There was still a very good possibility that I was going to be prosecuted for the various things that I had done. There was also the much smaller possibility that they were just going to make me disappear for being a general nuisance. My gut feeling told me that was unlikely though. If the government ever decided to just pop me, I knew that they would just send Franks.

  Myers had requisitioned an office near the courthouse during his stay in Montgomery, and the receptionist pointed me in the correct direction when I got off the elevator. There was a single chair outside the office, and it was occupied by a fidgeting Grant Jefferson.

  I paused, waiting.

  He stood, adjusting his suit, which was much nicer than mine. He looked a little nervous, which was understandable, despite the fact that I’d had to go through a metal detector in the lobby. “I wanted to talk to you before your meeting.”

  I waited. I didn’t really have anything I needed to say to him.

  But he apparently felt the need to get something off his chest. “When you asked me why I came back, I wasn’t lying when I answered.” I didn’t respond, so he gradually continued. “I did feel like a failure. I hated knowing what was out there, and I felt like a coward for not fighting anymore. I was bitter. I felt like MHI had let me down, not the other way around. When Myers approached me, I saw a way that I could do the right thing. I could protect people, serve my country . . . I saw a way that I could make a real difference.”

  A difference? Hiding the truth, killing people who talked too much? All while deluding yourself that you’re a hero? “Why are you telling me this?”

  He shook his head. “I . . . I don’t really know. I just thought you should understand.”

  “You done?”

  He stuck his hand out to shake. I just glanced down at his waiting hand. It would be a cold day in hell before I accepted his pseudo-apology. Finally, awkwardly, he lowered it back to his side. “Never mind then.” He brushed past me and walked quickly down the hallway, footfalls echoing on the granite. I put my hand on the doorknob. Grant paused and glanced back. “One last thing, Pitt.”