Trip told Hertzfeldt, “Keep gaining but try not to look like you’re chasing her.”
She went several more blocks and crossed over the freeway. I was glad she didn’t get on it. If she decided to open that bike up on there, I really didn’t know if our little drone could keep up.
“Oh, hell I forgot,” Boone said. “It’s Labor Day weekend. Can you guys grab her now?”
“Negative,” Trip responded. “She’s too far ahead.”
“Get closer or you’ll lose her in the crowds.”
But before I could ask what crowds, Trip pointed through the windshield. “I see her again.”
I was holding onto the back of his seat so Hertzfeldt wouldn’t break my neck. I spotted her too, a couple hundred yards ahead, and she was still wearing that big red backpack. If it was empty, and the Ward Stone was back with Stricken getting busted by the MCB, I was going to feel really stupid. “This is Z, we’ve got visual on the bike. She’s half a block ahead. Looks like she’s got the Ward.”
She was checking her mirrors, but we were driving normal now, and there were lots of unremarkable work vans like this in the city. But I was still getting a bad vibe. This was a busy part of town with a bunch of gigantic hotels. Which meant lots of parking garages and big crowded buildings to duck into. “What if she bails and goes into something Skippy can’t follow?”
“Grab that bag if you can but be extremely careful. Whatever she is, she’s dangerous.”
She was fast enough to beat up a bunch of goons and Feds and jump out a third-story window after brazenly robbing a former spy and some underground lizard monsters, so yeah, my money would be on very dangerous. I had Abomination in my gear bag, but a full-auto shotgun and grenade launcher might stick out a bit if I needed to hop out and follow her on foot. Abomination wasn’t exactly low key.
“She’s heading south again,” Trip said.
Milo confirmed that a moment later with some more street names, one of which, I kid you not, was Peachtree Center Avenue Northeast. But I was zoomed in, focused like a laser beam, watching that bike, because my gut was telling me something was about to go down. We were in the shade of a bunch of tall buildings. Traffic had gotten really snarled up. We were barely moving at all now. The sidewalks were absolutely packed with pedestrians.
“Crap. I know where we are,” Trip said.
“What?” As we crept closer, I realized there was a ton of people here. I’m talking thousands upon thousands of people packing the sidewalks. And most of them were in costume. Superheroes, GI Joes, anime characters, etc. “What the hell is this?”
“I was so focused on catching the reptoids I forgot to warn you guys about DragonCon,” Boone said.
“I should have thought of it myself,” Trip said apologetically. “I went last year. I took Polyphemus to thank him for helping us with the siege. I was kind of hoping we’d wrap this mission up fast enough I could go again since we’re in town anyway.”
“Is that the big party thing where you played dress-up?”
“It’s not dress up. It’s cosplay,” Trip corrected. “Poly needed a disguise to go out in public and you’ve got to admit my Witcher was amazing.”
The glamor shots he’d taken had been pretty badass. That’s what happens when an extremely physically fit geek also has crazy amounts of disposable income. Only, Trip’s fake yet high quality movie poster he’d framed and put up in the office didn’t change the fact we were now screwed. If we tried anything here, there would be a thousand eyeballs on us, and unlike the MCB, we couldn’t just flash fake badges and talk our way out of anything.
“Never been myself, but DragonCon is nerd Mardi Gras,” said Hertzfeldt. “It’s a hundred thousand people packed into a few blocks. If she disappears into that mob we’ll never find her.”
Sure enough, the rider pulled her bike over to the curb, in a place where parking clearly wasn’t allowed, and put the kickstand down.
“She’s bailing,” I transmitted. “Trip and I will follow on foot.”
“What do you want me to do?” our driver asked.
“Follow as best as you can I guess.” But it was already obvious that it would be totally impossible for him to keep up.
Hertzfeldt hadn’t actually stopped, but the flow of traffic had slowed to such a crawl that it didn’t matter. I left my shotgun behind and made sure my pistol was concealed beneath my untucked shirt. I slid the door open, hopped out, and then closed it behind me. Trip got out the front. We both started walking fast. The rider was about a hundred yards ahead of us.
And when she took off her helmet, she wasn’t a dark-haired Asian, but rather a white girl with short, brightly dyed, pink hair.
“We’ve been had!” Trip keyed his radio. “It’s a different rider. We were following a decoy.”
“This is Milo. No way, I could see you and her both the whole time. That’s the same bike; it had this neat little white box around it on the computer and everything. It never left my sight, I swear.”
I looked to Trip. “You got a better idea?” He shrugged. We were committed now either way, so we kept walking fast, trying to get closer. It was hard because the sidewalk and several feet of road were filled with bodies, and they were going both directions. I bumped into a shirtless man in a loincloth who I think was supposed to be Conan the Barbarian. “Excuse me.” Then I collided with a fat dude who made a very disturbing Sailor Moon. “Sorry.”
The decoy got off the bike and started walking with the general flow toward the nearest hotel.
Thankfully, our target was on the small side, so couldn’t exactly bull her way through the crowd like me and Trip. I’m six foot five and three hundred pounds of impolite muscle. Trip was several inches shorter and a whole lot lighter, but our company nerd had also played college football, so shoving people came naturally to him. We were gaining on her. We just needed to be chill enough doing it to not cause a commotion. If she spotted us and ran, this was going to get really complicated. Thankfully, it was extremely loud. Groups of friends were talking, music was playing, horns were honking, and there were guys with coolers hawking bottled water for five bucks a pop. Which they were probably getting, because standing in the middle of thousands of people meant that it had gotten a whole lot hotter real fast. I felt bad for the people in the really big costumes. Who in their right mind wears fur in Atlanta in summer?
“You know this place better than I do, so you’d better handle giving everybody else directions,” I told Trip.
“Sure. But I’ve only been here once, and if she goes inside the hotels, it’s a maze.” Our radio setup consisted of an earpiece and a microphone that hung around our neck, which was about as discreet as you could get. So Trip vectoring the rest of the Hunters in on us would just look like he was having a conversation with me, or maybe just talking to himself. Which, all things considered, wasn’t even sort of close to the weirdest thing on the street right now.
I had to put my hand over my ear to block the crowd noise. “This is Earl and Gregorius, coming in from the Hyatt side on foot. Boone’s trying to go around and will be waiting in a car on the south side. Holly is coming up behind Z and Trip.”
We closed to within fifty yards and our target still hadn’t seen us. She kept looking around too, seeming calm but alert. But there were so many people that even as big and ugly as I was, we didn’t stand out that much in jeans and T-shirts. Losing her in the crowd was our biggest danger, but simultaneously our biggest asset because it was slowing her down. The mob had to stop at an intersection, waiting for the light to change before they could cross. And that was a huge mess because cars were trying to make it across the intersection but getting stuck and blocking traffic from the other direction when those lights changed. Which led to a lot of distracting angry honking from drivers who had unwittingly blundered into this.
Our target was short enough I lost her in the clump at the crosswalk, hidden behind five Deadpools. When the light changed again and the crowd started across the str
eet, I couldn’t find her.
“Where’d she go?” Trip asked. Had she ducked into a business? Turned down the other street? “Milo?”
“Uhh . . . I can’t see the pink hair anymore, but the white box thingy is still going in the same direction.”
Ain’t technology grand? I was walking and pushing about as fast as I could without knocking anybody over, but I still couldn’t spot the decoy. Then I saw the big red backpack, and the woman who had it over her shoulder was still in the same black riding clothes, and still about the same age, height, and build . . . Only now she was black with braids. There hadn’t been a handoff either. This wasn’t somebody else carrying the same bag. I was about ninety percent sure I was looking at the same girl, just wearing an entirely different face.
Trip spotted her about the same time I did and came to the same conclusion. The key to being a successful Monster Hunter is having a flexible mind, so neither of us got rattled too much by this new development.
“We’ve got a shape-shifter. I repeat, she’s some kind of shape-shifter.” He hadn’t said that into his microphone very loudly at all, so either she had supernatural hearing or the timing of her glance back was just really unfortunate, because she turned her head and caught the two of us gawking at her. There was only a split second of hesitation, the slightest bit of a grin . . . and then she ran.
And the girl was quick.
We went after her. It was on now.
Trip was a far smoother runner than I was, and he darted between the brightly costumed people, then found an open patch of flowerbed to sprint down. When that ran out, he jumped a little metal fence into the street and started dodging between slowly moving cars.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t that graceful, but I was really big and really loud. “Make a hole!” Subtlety went right out the window as I plowed my way through the con goers. “Emergency!” I, of course, did not specify the nature of said emergency, because the MCB had zero sense of humor when it came to monster business in public. “Coming through!”
The girl darted back and forth, swiftly making her way through the crowd. Miraculously, Trip was keeping up. They were both starting to leave me behind. And that was before I tripped over Batman’s cape and ate pavement. I jumped right back up and kept going, ignoring the people yelling and calling me all sorts of names, many of which I deserved because I was being very rude. But if I didn’t get that Ward Stone, then an ancient chaos demon was probably going to destroy the world and consume all their souls anyway, so they could suck it up.
Trip was still shouting directions into his radio. “She took a left and is heading for the Marriot,” he said. Which wasn’t helpful for me at all. But thankfully people were starting to get out of the large maniac’s way, so I had that going for me. One angry little buffed dude, who was either supposed to be casual Wolverine, or who wasn’t in costume at all but just really liked tank tops, threw his soda in my face while calling me a dick, which was super helpful.
There were security people or volunteers checking badges at the hotel entrance, but apparently our little shapeshifting thief hadn’t bought a ticket, or didn’t slow down enough to show it, because by the time I got there, the poor fellow was lying on the sidewalk, holding his bloody nose.
Trip was just inside. “I didn’t hit him!”
“I know. Which way did she go?”
“This way.” He’d already started running again. “Now she’s a white chick with red hair and freckles.”
“Crap.” She could change faces so fast, if she ditched the distinctive clothing, or had a chance to transfer the Ward to a different bag, we would never catch her.
Apparently, the actual convention itself was inside the hotels, and the mob in the street was just the people moving from event to event, because the interior was even more crowded than the street. Plus, there were lots of volunteers in matching shirts talking excitedly into their radios, probably about the badge checker who had just gotten sucker-punched, which meant we’d have cops on hand shortly. And since we were having to sprint to keep up with her, who were the cops going to notice first? The tiny inoffensive girl? Or the gigantic scary thug looking guy and his dreadlocked and nearly as scary looking companion, chasing her?
Yeah . . . We were probably going to get shot.
I spotted the now redhead, booking it across the room, and chased after her. The interior was one of those gigantic spaces where you could look up and see the landings wrapping around all the way to the top. It made me kind of dizzy. It was either the vertigo, or I just really hate running. She slid under a railing, leapt onto a bar, ran down it, and did an actual fucking back flip over some Power Rangers waiting to have their picture taken. She landed smoothly, ducked behind a bunch of people waiting to catch an elevator, and when she ran out the other side, she was deeply tanned with dark brown hair.
“Are you kidding me?” I shouted.
“Trip, Owen, come in.” It was Earl. “We’ve got a complication.”
“Like this isn’t complicated enough!”
“We ran into some snake cultists and whooped on them. They had some kind of tracking thing on their phones.” Earl probably meant an app, but give the guy a break, he was born in 1900. “They must have planted a bug on the Ward. They’re following her too.”
“Can you track her position?” Because, frankly, that sounded a lot better than running after an acrobat until I had a heart attack.
“No. His phone got broke when I threw him down the stairs. But there’s more of them here, so be on the lookout.”
She turned down a hall and we sprinted after her. A security volunteer tried to grab Trip, but he ducked under the arm. He watched Trip go, like shoot, missed him, then turned and saw me coming. When he saw how big I was and how fast I was moving, he thought about it, but wisely decided to get out of the way.
“Really sorry about this!”
The girl was insanely athletic, but Trip was keeping up. I’d been pretty religious about my cardio since training up for the siege, but I was getting winded. Worse. I looked back and saw the volunteer pointing us out to a cop, who immediately started talking into his radio. There had to be a ton of uniforms here and they would all be descending on us in short order.
“Boone, come in.” Wow. I was really getting out of breath. “APD is after us. Can you call your contacts and tell them we’re the good guys?”
“I’ll try. We’ve got a pretty good working relationship on the downlow. This city is lousy with monsters.”
“Great.” When I looked back there were two cops running after me. “Hurry.”
The next minute was a blur of me crashing into people while Trip kept getting further ahead. My concerns, in order, were get the Ward, don’t get shot by the cops, don’t get shot by the attendees, because this was the South after all, which meant at least a quarter of them were probably packing heat. Thankfully, I temporarily lost my police pursuit, because the cops violently collided with a bunch of stormtroopers. It was like two bowling balls hitting a bunch of pins. Strike! And they all went down in a tangled mess.
I didn’t know where the hell we were. Trip hadn’t been exaggerating when he called this place a maze. There were crowded halls, lots of turns, and now we were chasing her across a glass sky bridge with a busy street below us.
For the first time since the chase had begun, she stopped running.
Oh, thank goodness. I needed some air.
At first I thought that maybe she’d froze because some of the other Hunters had gotten to the other end of the sky bridge to block her. Trip had been giving directions the whole time after all.
Only it wasn’t our guys waiting at the other end of the bridge. It was more snake cultists. They were all in leather vests that showed off green scaly tats. And I didn’t know if one of them was actually some sort of reptoid-human hybrid, or he was just that friggin’ ugly and had gotten fang dental implants and was wearing yellow contacts. But there were five of them plugging the exit.
&nb
sp; So the girl turned back, saw that there were only two of us, did the math and started toward Trip. Except he shook his head in that assertive manner which was sort of like the universal signal for fuck around and find out. The girl paused, realizing that we were far more ready for her kung-fu antics than the unsuspecting security goons and MCB agents had been.
Since this was about to turn ugly I roughly stopped the people coming up behind me, while still letting the people who were already crossing off. “Sky bridge is closed for maintenance. Sorry. Go around.”
“Aw, come on,” said a very round, very red, Kool-Aid Man. “The food court’s right over there.”
“Trust me, pal. You don’t want to crash through this wall.” I really wasn’t in the mood. “Seriously, we’re about to have a rumble here.”
“Ooh, a flash mob.” He took out his phone to take video.
For a very tense moment, the regular, unwitting people kept getting off the sky bridge, as an increasingly annoyed crowd backed up behind me, until it was just us, the girl, and the snake people, one of whom was staring at his phone, then at the red backpack, and then back at his phone. “That’ss her.” He hissed, and by hissed, I mean he really put the accent on the s sounds. “Sseize the ssstone.”
That was a very obnoxious affectation. I’d long thought the Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition held the title for most annoying death cult, but that fake lisp nonsense sure bumped these guys up the rankings. “Shove it up your asssss,” I said. “Just talk normal, doofus.”
From the way they all pulled out knives, I think my words actually hurt the snake cultists’ feelings. They had been trying extra hard to be frightening.
The girl looked between us and the cultists, then grinned and said, “Ooh, MCB dorks versus snake pricks. Nice.”
“We’re not MCB, and we don’t want to hurt you.” Trip was ever the diplomat, as he appealed earnestly to the possibly psychotic shape-shifter. “I can’t say that for these other guys. We just want the Ward. We can protect you from them.”
Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC Page 3
