Chapter 11
Fabian was sullenly silent toward me for most of the drive back to the safe house. We’d had a deal, and I’d explained my reasoning, but Grimm Berlin was out a giant bounty and a magical lunatic was still at large. I bet Fabian felt like he’d gone against both the SJK and his employer for nothing.
He was still pissed at me when we parked inside the garage. I finally broke the awkward silence.
“Look, I had to make a call. Was it the wrong call? Maybe.”
“She could have made up the whole thing,” he snapped.
“Like I said…maybe. I’ll find out. She either lied and I screwed up and all the future horrors she causes are on my head, or she wants the artifact bad enough to keep her word.”
“And all the future horrors she inflicts are still on your head.”
Ouch. But it only hurt because he was right. “You got any kids, Fabian?”
“No.”
“Then maybe one day you’ll understand. Until then, judge away. I’ve got work to do.”
Fabian was ticked, but he wasn’t a bad dude. The concern was obvious. “What do you intend to do next?”
As mad as he was, I didn’t think he was going to betray me to the SJK. Plus, really, there was no way he could do that without incriminating himself in the process. “I’m going to find this Marchand and make him tell me where Brother Death is.”
“With what resources?” Fabian was still dressed as a police officer because Hunters always knew how to get by in their area of operations. Unlike him, I had no clue how to blend in here. “The minute you use your credit card or turn your phone back on, the government will be on you. You can’t use your ID. You’ve got no passport. You can’t go to your embassy because they’ll just hold you for the MCB.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Inside the mud room, I noticed the dog bowl had a new owner. Mr. Trash Bags must have gotten hungry because he’d crawled out of my bag and was eating Prinz’s food. The bowl was nearly empty, and the shoggoth had grown from hamster- to puppy-sized. Poor Prinz was standing a few feet away, growling at the thing that was absorbing his breakfast.
“Cuddle Bunny return.” His voice was getting less high-pitched the bigger he got.
“Scheisse!” When Fabian saw Mr. Trash Bags, he went for the pistol in the cop holster at his hip.
“Stop! The blob’s with me.”
“What the hell is that?” When Prinz saw how upset his owner was, he took that as a good indicator it was okay to start barking wildly.
“That’s Mr. Trash Bags.” I didn’t want to say he was a shoggoth because that sounded really evil. Besides, when Hunters thought of shoggoths, we thought of two-ton wrecking balls of Old One-powered destruction, not things that could fit in a soup can. “He’s a friend and the only reason I found the Condition.”
“Whatever it is, it’s menacing my dog.”
I was just glad he’d not eaten the dog. “Let me grab my stuff and I’ll get out of here.”
“Ah”—Fabian waved his artificial hand at me—“I’ve seen weirder. I’ll still help you. I don’t like being screwed out of a bounty, but that doesn’t mean I want your baby to get hurt. Come on.”
The map we’d used to plan the Lucinda meet was still on the table. Fabian went to a bookshelf and got out a heavy binder. He dropped it on the map. “I’ve heard of Marchand. It just means dealer in French.”
“Local?” I asked hopefully.
“Sadly no. France. And I think I know how to find him. Lucinda Hood is a lying psychopath, but what she said about an auction does sound plausible. What do you know of the Affair of the Poisons?” Fabian asked as he got a beer out of the fridge. “Want one?”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Eh, it’s a German thing.”
“More like an alcoholic thing. But I’ve heard of the Affair of the Poisons.” You can’t get an art history degree without picking up a lot of trivia about European royalty. “It was something about people making poisons and selling them to noblemen to kill each other.”
“It was in the reign of Louis XIV. It was believed that Athenais de Monstespan, Louis’ mistress was part of the ring, but he stepped in and it was never really investigated. Or at least that was the public version of events.”
I felt that weird hollow feeling in my stomach again. This is how stories among Monster Hunters start. It’s always, Yes, that’s what the public was told, but—which wouldn’t be nearly so disturbing if this didn’t involve my child and if my recollection was correct the Affair of the Poisons had involved a whole lot of sacrificed babies. Like babies burned and reduced to powder to make potions and mind-control substances, behaviors that made absolutely no sense in a normal world where monsters didn’t exist and magic was make-believe, but knowing how things really worked, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
“What’s the real story?”
“Unpleasant,” Fabian said. “Necromantic rituals and pacts with otherworldly forces in exchange for power. The affair was simply the temporary surfacing of something that has been going on in Europe for a very long time, and which continues in secret to this day. You know how in the mundane world there is human trafficking for immoral purposes?”
“Of course.”
“The supernatural world is far worse. It’s a scourge on this continent. I imagine there is some in America, too, but you’re a young country, with new traditions, and these things are old. You have some bad actors, and bad actors often use children for sacrifice or worse. But you don’t have the history we do. I speak of organizations, cultures, and practices going back to the Neolithic.”
I must have given him an incredulous look.
“No. Really. It’s like the saying goes, Europeans forget how big America is, but Americans forget how old Europe is. The ring revealed during the Affair was ancient. We don’t know how ancient for sure, because Hunters of the time didn’t keep precise records, they just speared monsters and burned them at the stake. However, many of the participants escaped and there are still established networks that traffic in innocents for necromantic purposes, especially infants or pregnant women.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Which is why Grimm Berlin fights them. Klaus has a special hatred for such creatures, and we disrupt them at every opportunity.” He shoved the binder toward me. “Take this. It’s everything we know about these groups.”
I flipped through. It had names—both human and other—locations, dates, and the descriptions of their crimes… I quickly closed the binder.
“What does the Affair of the Poisons have to do with Marchand?”
“He participated in it.” Then his phone rang. “It’s my superior. I’ve got to take this.” He answered, and the lady on the other end started yelling at him so loudly and angrily that I could hear most of it.
Fabian responded defensively. My German wasn’t good enough to get all of the rapid-fire conversation, but I got enough of it to know that something bad was happening. Fabian began protesting that he hadn’t seen me, but then he shut up when the lady said something about his car on video.
Then he hung up on his superior. “Bad news…”
“I gathered that.”
“SJK found a security camera that recorded you getting into my car. They just called my employers and demanded to know the addresses of all our safe houses in Cologne.”
“Your bosses just gave you up?”
“Of course they did. Klaus is the only one of them with the spine to spite authority, and he’s not here. I’m lucky they called to warn me that SJK is on the way at all. They’re rather cross about one of their employees harboring someone wanted for murder.”
“They were death cultists!”
“Germany is not so loose on the subject as your country. You must go now. The best I can do is get you a private flight to the Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where you can talk to Vincente Ducharm.”
Something about the name tickled my memory and there w
as some kind of unpleasant association, but I wasn’t sure what. “Who?”
“The government calls him a consultant. I consider him a snitch. There is a dossier on him in the binder. It’ll explain. Take the Volkswagen in the garage. It’s my teammate’s personal vehicle. She’s about your size and keeps a suitcase in the trunk with clothing and some Euros. She’s at Severny Island so won’t miss it until she gets back.” Fabian took a Sharpie out of his pocket and scribbled an address on the binder. “Go to this airport, ask for Max. He’s got a small plane, is discreet, and owes me a favor. You can’t fly into Sainte-Marguerite as there’s nowhere to land, but you can go to Cannes and then hire someone to take you across on a motorboat. You must keep a low profile in France, too, though because all the government monster control agencies in the EU cooperate.”
I didn’t know much about the SJK, but by rep they were similar to the MCB and, if an American Hunter had crossed the MCB like this, they’d be in deep shit. “What are you going to do?”
“If the rabbit runs, the wolf chases. I’ll stay here, lie for you, and stall them.”
I grabbed my gear bag and saw Mr. Trash Bags was already hanging onto one of the straps. “If Grimm Berlin fires you over this, MHI is always hiring.”
“Wonderful. I shall look you up after I get out of prison.”
I really hoped that didn’t happen. “You went out of your way to help me and I won’t forget it. Thank you.”
As my hand landed on the door knob, Fabian said, “Julie.” I turned back to find him looking solemn. “Good luck with your son.”
Chapter 12
The Ile Sainte-Marguerite is just off the coast of Cannes. I’d never visited, but I’d read about it. It was one of those tiny places that packs a ton of history.
It was little more than a square mile total, but it had been held by Romans and Moors, still had the remnants of German gun emplacements from World War II, and had been the place where the Man in the Iron Mask was held.
Now that was one of those legends that always made me wonder exactly what had really been going on, and what kind of monster needed an iron mask. It would certainly subdue—and torture—certain kinds of fey, that was for sure. Hunters found partial truths showing up in fiction all the time. I was half convinced that Dumas had just run into some old-timey Hunters telling stories in a bar. One rumor was it had been some kind of doppelganger who had tried wearing the likeness of a king, but the details were long since lost.
During my long flight in a tiny, slow plane, I read through the entire binder. It turned out that Klaus Lindemann and Pierre Darne had been working together to really put a hurt on human trafficking cults in Western Europe. A bunch of the monsters had big red Xs through their page.
Vincente Ducharm, however, was off limits.
He wasn’t a monster, cultist, or a trafficker. He was human, but he was a monster rights advocate which, trust me, is way more annoying. They were the useful idiots who lobbied for equal rights for monsters, which was fine, if you were talking about things that were happy to leave people alone—like Sasquatch or orcs—but those assholes inevitably wound up pushing for leniency against unrelentingly evil things like vampires. Oh, they don’t mean to be blood-sucking monsters, look how charming they are! Can’t we all just get along?
Darne and Lindemann both believed that Ducharm was in contact with Marchand. I could believe that. It was common for gullible, monster-rights types to secretly rub shoulders with the horrible things they defended. However, because Ducharm was super rich, politically connected, and occasionally fed the government some monster intel, the EU agencies had declared that Hunters weren’t allowed to bother him. The last who’d tried had gotten busted for harassment. They’d been warned that they’d get the book thrown at them just for making contact with the man.
I was already wanted for murder, so there wasn’t really a significant downside for me.
Now Marchand, on the other hand, was a beast, not human. It had been involved in a bunch of killings and disturbances over the years, but had been off the grid for the last few. The government didn’t even know what it was, just that it was a shadowy broker of secrets and dark magic, and that it had been around for a very long time, as in centuries. It served as the go-between for evil people who wanted terrible deeds done, and the worst kind of supernatural predators, in exchange for a cut. Only a very select group knew how to contact the dealer.
It took a special kind of asshole to get one of Marchand’s business cards, but the European Hunters figured that Ducharm was just that kind of asshole.
We landed in Cannes or, rather, in a private airport at the edge of it. My French is better than my German and for a few euros I got a ride to the sea, where for a few more euros, a cheerful young man with a broad smile said he’d take me across in his boat.
We motored across the maybe half mile separating the mainland from the island. I didn’t need to encourage him to go fast. My driver was already in a hurry because storm clouds were coming in, and he warned me that I was probably going to be stuck there for the night. It was early in the afternoon, and I’d be damned if I got stuck here that long, not with my baby out there. I’d question Ducharm, then swim back if I had to.
I’d ditched my gear bag at the airfield in Germany and traded it for the far-less-militant-looking backpack Fabian’s coworker had left in her car. It turned out whoever she was had a fashion sense that tended toward the whimsical, because I’d wound up wearing a hoodie that said “Das einzige gute Monster ist ein totes Monster” or “the only good monster is a dead monster” and had a cartoon vampire with a stake through the heart on it.
My armor, I’d left behind. It was heavy and basically impossible to use without sticking out like a sore thumb. Same with all the mags of silver .308—I had nothing to shoot it out of. But I’d kept all the equipment that had been stored on my armor and stuffed that into the backpack just in case. Along with Mr. Trash Bags, of course.
Fabian’s friend had also left a Walther PPQ and some spare mags in the center console, so I’d borrowed that too. I didn’t have a holster for my 1911, but the PPQ had been in a Kydex appendix rig, so that way I could hide a gun on me and not walk around like an idiot with my pistol sliding around loose in my waistband. My 1911 went in the bag. It saddened me to ditch the sniper rifle, but it’s hard for a tourist to walk around France with one of those unnoticed.
The boat kid knew who Ducharm was. Apparently all the locals knew him. Nobody knew what he did—just vague ideas about being some kind of consultant for the government—but he was really rich, though humble about it, and mostly kept to himself.
As we motored across the water, the island grew nearer, and it seemed to have a split personality disorder. Nearby, nearer the water, it looked like a standard Mediterranean holiday village, with tiny colorful houses, moored boats, and festive flags and signs. But further up, forest loomed, with squarish cement protrusions that I assumed were the remains of the Nazi gun emplacements. And at the top, there was the medieval fortress where the Man in the Iron Mask—whatever he really was—had been imprisoned until death.
Under the roiling dark cloud, it all looked dark and ominous. “There’s going to be a massive storm,” the kid said, his words sounding odd, buffeted by the wind. “By the time we get there, I’m going to have trouble seeing to come back.”
Once we docked, he pointed me at a path and said, “Take that to the right, then up the first flight of stairs you come to. You can’t miss them. At the top, it’ll be the first house on the right.”
Of course I missed the stairs. In my defense, it had started to pour, and the place wasn’t particularly well illuminated. The path was along what remained of the beach. I say what remained because it looked like it had been eroding and, in an effort to stop it, someone had dumped a bunch of trash on it. I wasn’t even sure what the trash was, but it looked and felt like shredded Styrofoam that had gone grey with age and contact with seawater. It gave unpleasantly underfoot, but
also bounced back in a way that wasn’t normal for plant matter, let alone for rocks or sand.
I scrambled along it for a good while, until I came upon what seemed to be a little street front of small houses. Only from the look of them they were actually touristy shops and were closed. The realization that if the stairs were past these, these would likely have been mentioned, hit me. I backtracked my way along the unpleasantly bouncy, weirdly crunchy, very much unstable path until I found the stairs.
They were wooden, sounded rickety underfoot and were dark as pitch. At one point the railing went away, and I couldn’t tell if there wasn’t a railing there on purpose, or if it was broken. I only knew I’d arrived at the top because the feel underfoot changed, and running my foot one way and another, I determined I was on a dirt path. The first house to the right had lights glimmering faintly through curtained windows. I headed that way slowly because the path was unexpectedly narrow, and there was a deep drop-off on one side.
It seemed to me that if this Ducharm wanted Hunters to leave him alone, he shouldn’t live someplace so scenic and easy to visit.
The house appeared to be one of those low-slung Mediterranean cottages, with two or three windows and a narrow wooden door fronting right onto the street. It might have been built any time from a hundred years ago on back. From the boat man’s description, it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I’d been picturing a mansion with a perimeter fence and armed guards with Dobermans.
The knocker on the door was a Fatima hand. I pounded it and was in the midst of raising it to pound again when the door opened, pulling the knocker from my grasp. To be fair, I might have pounded a little energetically.
The man who opened the door was shorter than I, with dark hair, a receding airline and an aquiline nose on either side of which shone very bright hazel eyes. He was wearing a brocade robe and grinned at me, displaying an overbite, and rather large, very white teeth. “Ah, Mrs. Shackleford. I’ve been waiting you. Please, get in out of the rain.”
Also, not what I expected. And here I was thinking I might have to kneecap him and then beat him until he talked. “Ducharm?”
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 15
