“Nice swimming pool.”
“Which the owner only ever uses after the sun goes down.”
I hated vampires. I won’t say that of all the undead they’re the worst, because honestly, it wasn’t like I’d met them all, but I’m not sure there are any good undead. There are all sorts of different kinds of curses out there, things that twisted people into something different, though some people learned to turn them around and use them almost like a superpower, like Earl…or hopefully me—if I could prove the previous Guardian wrong—but undead were different.
Earl did still have his anger issues, though that made him more human, not less.
But vampires…
They were stuck between worlds. Not really alive, but jealously clinging onto this world that didn’t want them. Taking life from the innocent, just so they could stick around, being miserable just a little bit longer. Vampires were like immortal vermin.
I had no idea what pool parties meant for vampires, but something I was sure of was that beautiful mansion would have feeding pits, filled with terrified, mistreated humans used as fodder by vampires till they died, and then chopped up and served to their fellow sufferers until they were all gone and a new batch of fodder brought in.
“There’s going to be hostages besides Ray. You say they feed on transients.”
“Yes. Runaways, prostitutes. People with no papers. Many from Eastern Europe, but we even get them from France and England,” Lopes said.
And Lopes had to go to work every day, suspecting that people like that were getting eaten in her jurisdiction, and that there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. For any real Hunter, that would be torture. I bet she had ulcers.
“Saturnino also has servants, but we don’t know what they are.”
“Even if she’s by herself, Susan is the bitch whore from hell.”
“Now for good news and bad news,” she said, as if a Master vampire wasn’t bad enough. “Because it was once a place for smugglers, this mansion is built over caverns. They are under sea at high tide. The bad news is that we don’t know what Saturnino keeps down there now.”
“And the good news?”
“We know about them and can use the caverns as another entry point. Or at least make sure they don’t escape out the back.” Before I could ask her how they planned on covering underwater tunnels, there was a noise on Lopes’ radio. “Have them drive right into the hangar.” Apparently my backup had arrived. “Come on.”
Lopes led me inside the unremarkable building. One area had been set apart for operations planning. There were pictures and maps of Saturnino’s estate and the surrounding area on a cork board, and somebody had been drawing up an entry plan with dry erase markers. It took me all of three seconds studying it to tell that I was going to need to try and gently offer as much advice as I could to get Lopes to alter her plan, before she got Ray and the rest of us killed.
I was getting the impression ASS had a lot of enthusiasm, but not a lot of actual experience against this level of threat.
Inside, there was a lot of equipment on shelves plus racks of guns. She probably thought that I would be impressed, but the first thing I noticed was that everything was old, dated, military surplus. Their radios and night vision were a decade out of date.
“Nice, huh?”
“Very nice,” I lied, realizing that MHI’s operating budget probably dwarfed poor ASS. Another thing I just kind of took for granted.
“Technically for operations like this, ASS is supposed to call the army, but if I call the army, the network finds out and—”
“Your ASS is grass.”
Lopes looked at me for a moment. “I don’t get it.”
Luckily, before I had to try and explain the American idiom, the rental cars arrived, and Hunters began getting out. The Americans had arrived on a couple of different flights. Dorcas had managed to hook them up with some of the foreign Hunters who’d been arriving at the same time.
They were all dressed low-key, jeans or cargo pants, T-shirts or casual shirts, that sort of thing, but even when Hunters try to look normal, most of them can’t help but stick out a little. It wasn’t just that even the sloppiest of us tended to stay in good physical shape, or that there was a much higher than average number of scars and militant looking tats on them, or that their luggage tended to be brown or olive drab with a whole lot of extra straps on it… Naw, it was that people who are constantly prepared to inflict violence tend to carry themselves in a certain way. Not cocky. That’s for posers. More like alert and confident.
I spotted the MHI guys right away because I knew every single one of them, at least from interviews and performance evaluations, so I knew about their skills and backgrounds. And I also knew why each of them hadn’t been picked for the siege. Inexperience mostly. The majority of these had been in our last or second-to-last Newbie class. The others were because they’d been injured or out sick when the siege had been put together, but in a couple of cases, they’d been the healthy, experienced ones who’d been unlucky enough to get picked to hold down the fort because somebody had to.
But since the rest of us might have just been swept away in a nuclear fire, they were probably feeling lucky right now.
Then the next van arrived. There were also… My jaw dropped open.
Look, I couldn’t tell who all of them were. I recognized some, others were familiar, but it had been a long time.
She was so desperate to find me help that Dorcas had called up some of our retirees.
Hunters do retire. Well, sometimes. Lots of us tend to die on the job, but most don’t. Like any other career, eventually you get too tired and beat up to do it anymore or, in our case, you’ve made enough PUFF bounties that you don’t need to work ever again.
Keep that in mind next time you see an elderly white-haired lady knitting or playing bingo in a retirement home. She could be a retired Hunter. In which case, I guarantee she still has a lot of weapons somewhere around her person and is ready to put you down if you look like a threat.
None of these were as old as my grandpa had been, but there sure were a bunch who could collect social security. Dorcas must have told them to disguise themselves as typical tourists. There were lots of Hawaiian shirts—one of them with naked girls on it—and some of them were wearing big floppy straw hats.
I did recognize Steven Daniel Roberts. Twenty years ago he’d run Kansas for us, and I remember him visiting sometimes and bringing bottles of whiskey for my dad. Hell…if I was remembering right, he and Dorcas had dated like thirty years ago. She had probably called everybody she knew who was still in decent enough shape to handle a gun, who she figured wouldn’t want to die of old age.
It wasn’t just Hunters who’d retired due to age though. It was hard to miss the buff Indian guy with a cane. That was Doctor Nikhil Rao. After a bad back injury in a fight with vampires, Dr. Nik had left MHI, and was now working to help monster attack survivors with their PTSD.
They were on the far side of the hangar, and even from here I could see the near instant animosity between my people and the European volunteers they’d just barely met. It wasn’t anything personal, but just like that casual violence thing, we tended to be cautious about working with people we didn’t know. And you should have seen the Euro Hunters’ reaction when they saw half my people belonged in an old folks’ home.
I must have been really tired because I hadn’t even started thinking through the logistical and tactical challenges we were going to face. We were throwing together a bunch of Hunters, most of them inexperienced or over the hill, who had not only never trained together, who probably all didn’t even speak the same languages, to perform a complicated hostage rescue under the nose of a Master vampire, in a few short hours…
“Oh shit,” I muttered to myself as the reality of the situation sank in.
But Lopes overheard me and had apparently been thinking along the same lines. “It’s going to be difficult…but we’ve done difficult befor
e.”
Problem was I didn’t know if she actually had.
“Do you mind if I talk to my people for a minute?”
“Sure, sure,” Lopes said.
I walked over to where they were taking their bags out of the trunk.
It looked like Jonathan Dinger was in charge of the currently employed bunch. He was in his late twenties, wore glasses, and had a buzz cut. He was a solid enough Hunter that he’d been picked to go on the siege. Only a climbing accident while training at Camp Frostbite had gotten him injured and Earl had sent him home.
“Julie,” he nodded. “I’m so sorry about the Boss. We’ll do everything we can for little Ray.”
My other employees and ex-employees gathered around me. They might have been the ones who’d been benched, but right then they looked as pissed off and determined as any Hunters I’d ever seen.
“Thanks for coming. It’s been a hard couple days. I’m thankful you’re here. This is going to be dangerous, and normally vampires this high up we’d get paid a PUFF bounty, regardless of the borders, but because of the legal problems—”
“Dorcas already warned us. This one isn’t about the money,” said Kenneth Bell, who was a Newbie I’d sent to Team Haven just a few months ago. “This is about getting your kid back.”
“The Boss would’ve expected nothing less,” declared Steven.
There was a chorus of agreement.
I was suddenly very emotional, but I did my best to hide it.
“You all know about the bombing at Severny Island… I don’t know if everyone else is okay or not. All of you have friends there. My husband’s there, my brother’s there. I just don’t know what’s happened. All I do know is that this company has been killing monsters for well over a hundred years, and no matter what happens today, because of heroes like you stepping up to hit evil in its bitch face, we’ll be doing it for a hundred more.”
“Amen!” shouted another Newbie.
“You being here means more to me than you’ll ever know. Thank you. Now, let’s go rescue Ray!”
* * *
We had all gathered at the front of the hangar for Lopes to give a briefing. The Portuguese were trying hard to puff themselves up. I could tell they were a little intimidated by the arrival of my people. MHI had a reputation for being the premier eradication company in the world, and the locals didn’t know this was scraping the bottom of our talent barrel. That’s right. Let them think that this half of us appear to be grandparents, and we’ll still kick your ass.
Lopes had found a bunch of old real estate photos from when the house had gone up for sale ten years ago. The pictures had been taken to accentuate the red tile floors, warm cream walls, ocean views, and Arabesque tiles in the bathrooms. We were using them to plan our attack.
“How big is this place?” asked Dinger. He was one of my smart ones so of course he’d ask the pertinent questions.
“Eighteen thousand square feet including the basement. Twenty bedrooms, ten and a half baths, eight-car garage, and lots of other rooms. Plus we don’t know what renovations have been made since Saturnino bought it,” Lopes replied.
“Bet you ten bucks he’s installed a torture dungeon,” said Bell. He was another one of my employees, but I hardly knew him. He hadn’t even been with us for a year yet… What had his introduction been? Zombies, if I recalled correctly.
The Newbie meant it as a joke, trying to lighten the mood. I should have let it go, but I was just too weary. “There will be feeding pits for sure. Guaranteed. When a vampire sets up shop like this, there always are. It’s like an instinct for them. They can feed off a single victim a whole lot longer that way. It’ll either be a secured room in the basement or a hole the victims can’t climb out of in the cavern. Even if we can get them out alive, they’ll probably be in bad physical and mental shape.”
That little ray of sunshine certainly killed their spirits. Way to go, Julie.
Lopes continued her briefing. Over half of us spoke English, so that’s the language she used. While she talked, a couple of Hunters translated for their friends into Portuguese, French, and German. “Within the property, there is also a boathouse, pool house, and the tunnel which leads to the beach cavern which is of unknown size.”
I scowled at the dry erase board. That was a whole lot of ground to cover.
“Defenses?” I asked.
“Sergio Saturnino has an entourage, as does your mother. We are unsure on the numbers, eight to ten maybe, or how many of them are enthralled humans, and how many may actually be other lesser vampire slaves.”
“How can human beings live there and not freak out and run away?” someone asked.
“Vampire bite and enthrallment would be my guess. They are probably scared and fascinated in equal measures,” Lopes answered.
“Don’t forget that powerful vampires often create other types of undead to serve as their daylight watchdogs, usually wights,” I said. “But there’s another serious complication. Agent Lopes and I were spied on earlier today by an Adze known as Brother Death. It’s possible that he might warn Susan and Saturnino that we’re coming.”
My experienced Hunters shared an uneasy glance at that. A few of them had been at the battle for DeSoya Caverns. They were the only other ones here who actually understood the sheer murderous power of a Master vampire. Especially one who was expecting company.
“He might have told them, he might not. He’s not loyal to Susan, but his primary motivation seems to be that he enjoys screwing with people. It’ll just depend on who he wants to screw over more—me or her.”
“Do not worry, everyone,” Lopes said. “I have men watching the property. If the vampires attempt to flee, we will know. That would be even better because then we could take down their transport in the daylight!”
Dr. Nik, who had dumped a belt of fifty cal into a Master at DeSoya Caverns and still got his back broken by it afterwards, whispered to me, “I was more worried about her looking forward to our visit than her running away.”
“She’ll work as hard to protect Ray as I should have,” I whispered back.
There was genuine concern in his eyes. “When’s the last time you slept?”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
Lopes had kept talking, and she pointed to one of the mansion’s top-floor windows overlooking the sea.
“I believe this is where they will be holding Raymond Pitt.”
That certainly got my attention, but it didn’t make much sense. Vampires were harmed by sunlight. Even though Lopes’ intel indicated that all the windows had been tinted and heavy blackout curtains installed by local workers, from what I’d seen, vampires had an almost instinctive desire to stick to the shadows and stay low to the ground.
“Yesterday afternoon, the Saturnino estate called a few local stores and purchased high-end nursery furniture, a truckload of stuffed animals, and a lot of diapers and formula. The delivery was made, signed for by someone we believe to be a human servant, who had the workmen carry everything up the stairs. They assembled the crib in this room.”
Lopes flipped through the pictures on her iPad until she landed on one that had been painted a colorful blue, with a mural of little yellow ducks playing in a stream. “On the real estate listing, it was labeled the nursery.”
Son of a bitch. I’d been thinking about Susan like she was a typical vampire. Sure, she was a monster, but she was still terrifyingly motherly. Of course she’d put Ray in the room best suited for him. Then I realized something even worse. She’d ordered the crib and baby stuff before the auction. That was how confident she had been. She saw Ray as rightfully hers.
I hadn’t admitted it, even to myself, but I’d been afraid that my mother wouldn’t care if he stayed forever a child. She had once, when human, while looking over an album of pictures of me and my brothers when we were little, said that every mother secretly wishes she could keep her babies forever.
Thinking back to that—at the time innocuous—convers
ation filled me with dread. She might very well decide it would be fun to have a baby-doll vampire forever. The clock was ticking.
“Our equipment is nearly loaded and the aircraft are prepped. We will rendezvous with more of my men at a small naval base not far from the target. Please continue to go over the action plan during the flight. Each of you will be given an ASS handler to”—Lopes scowled as all the foreign Hunters laughed at her—“to tell you where to go.” She put her hands on her hips. “Need I remind you, you are guests of the Portuguese government and we will not be disrespected!”
Even though we were very much not guests of the government, but rather one rogue agent with a chip on her shoulder, I glanced over at my guys and gave them a subtle head shake in the negative. Be cool.
Lopes might have been prideful, but she was also savvy enough to recognize who got the most respect in this room. “Is there anything that you would like to add, Julie?”
“Sure.” I walked to the front. The Americans knew me. I assumed most of the Europeans at least knew of my résumé. “Thank you for doing this. My baby’s life is in your hands… But here’s the deal: most of you have never seen a Master vampire before. They can soak up an incredible amount of damage and keep fighting. They heal unbelievably fast. They move like a hurricane-force wind. Blink and you’ll miss them. For them, ripping your limbs off is like you plucking the leaf off a tree. Susan in particular also has some psychic powers. She’ll cloud your thoughts and screw with your head. She may be able to read your mind. She can change shape. We have documented her being able to turn into mist to pass through walls. And when we get close, she will sense us coming.”
Some of the Portuguese Hunters had been smiling when I’d started. They weren’t now. Good.
“Susan Shackleford has all those nasty vampire powers, but she’s worse because she used to be one of us. She knows how Hunters work. She knows our tricks. She used to teach this stuff for a living. The other Master vamps we’ve killed? It’s because they got proud. They got stupid. They underestimated us. Susan won’t. She’s way too young to be as strong as she is, but she is. Whether it’s from black magic, her sucking the life out of monsters that vampires normally wouldn’t prey on, or who knows what, she’s damned strong. Pair that with a flexible mind and a killer instinct, and she’s quite possibly the most dangerous thing you’ve ever fucked around with.”
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 30
