“I’m not convinced there is an our side, but you expect me to believe the trickiest bastards in existence would help us? Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack. I’ve got some courts on my side, and more I’m working on. And there’s others. Those are just the tip of the iceberg of what I can bring to the table. We’re going to need a real big tent by the time I get done.”
His alliances sounded like a darker version of what MHI had been trying to do with other groups of Hunters. So what Stricken was saying sounded plausible. Insane, but plausible.
“For proof that you should believe the words coming out of my mouth, I give you exhibit A.” He reached out and patted the stack of paper again. “In here, all my multitude of sins are forgiven, I get full immunity, and will be given a positively obscene amount of money to become a special consultant for the United States government. When the people with access to all the juiciest secret intel in the world believe in me enough to offer me this sweetheart deal in exchange for my cooperation, literally one minute after I’ve been taken into custody, that’s saying something, because I’ve done some evil shit in my time.”
I raised my voice. “Hey, Director Cueto. You strike me as an honest guy. Knock on the glass twice if this weasel is telling me the truth about what’s in this phonebook.”
Thump thump.
Well, crap. “Okay, Stricken. That’s pretty convincing. Good for you. You’ve hoodwinked the President. Makes me glad I didn’t vote for the guy.”
“Aw, that’s cute how you still think voting matters.”
Since we were in the offices of an agency that existed to lie and commit fraud, he probably had a point there. “So you got a deal. Now why did you need to talk to someone like me?”
“Well, Pitt, there’s two reasons for that.” He extended an abnormally long finger to start a new count. “Number one, there is a massive problem looming that only someone of your unique nature can handle—or one of the other Chosen, should your dumb ass get killed in the process. It’s not a world-ending kind of threat, yet, but it’s a make-life-really-uncomfortable-for-a-lot-of-innocent-people problem, and by uncomfortable, I mean violently dead. Regardless, it’s Chosen business. I was just going to nip this little problem in the bud myself. I’d prefer to handle it myself, because I don’t trust you clowns to not screw it up, but as you can see, I’m currently indisposed.”
“Bullshit. You don’t care about innocent people dying.”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “True, that hero nonsense is more your thing. But stopping this crisis would be a favor for one of those aforementioned potential allies, who would be a huge help down the line. I’ll fill you in on the details later, but it’s nothing that one of Sir Isaac Newton’s Ward Stones couldn’t handle. Which was why I was trying to buy this one off those stupid reptoids.”
So much for me not telling the Feds about what MHI was trying to steal. Ward Stones were so incredibly rare and super valuable, I could only imagine that Beth was making a very frantic phone call right this very instant.
Stricken must have caught the pained expression on my face. “The really sucky thing, Pitt? My former coworkers are probably losing their minds right now. They’d kill for another Ward. A little-known fact is that the strategically placed one that protects Washington DC is dying. It’s running out of juice. And the other one we have in inventory, belonging to the Department of Defense? Well, they don’t dare move it because it’s the only thing keeping something ancient and super nasty bottled up under Cheyenne Mountain, which is the real reason we built the base there to begin with. But that’s super classified.” He put finger number one to his lips and went, “Shhhh.”
That was probably one of those secrets that would get me killed one of these days. Wards were strategic assets. Defensively, undead or unearthly beings couldn’t cross their boundary without exploding. Offensively, they were the only thing mankind had which could obliterate a Great Old One. Except the secret to making them had been lost to time. What was out there was all that was left, and there hadn’t been very many to begin with.
“The lizard people found this one, lost and abandoned, deep underground somewhere. I was going to use it to do something good . . . Don’t laugh. It’s true. But if Unicorn gets it first, it’s going straight to DC instead, and all those poor orphans and widows and kittens will get mulched. But that’s on you now. It’s out of my hands, and thousands of people are going to die . . . unless, of course, MHI agrees to take care of it. I’d sleep a lot better if you promise me you’ll handle this problem.”
“Fine. I’ll look into it.”
Stricken had a sly, evil grin. “Excellent.” He raised his voice. “I assume you heard him say that, Harold.”
“You’re such a douche,” I said, as the realization sank in that I was getting dragged into someone else’s nonsense once again. But if there was even a tiny chance that what Stricken was saying was true, I couldn’t let a bunch of innocents get massacred and not at least try to stop it.
“Just a heads-up in the meantime, and this part is really important. The auction contract for this Ward specifies that if the seller failed to deliver the item, there’s an entity on retainer to punish whatever party broke the deal. Your wife damaged the Dark Market’s reputation so badly that they’re adding free insurance to every deal they broker now. And by insurance, I mean they’ve got some incredibly deadly beings contracted to handle any problems that pop up. So that little scamp who stole my rock, she’s about to get wrecked. If she’d just waited until after I had it in my possession, free and clear, she’d be off the hook. But now? This thing will not stop. You’re going to need to find her before it crawls up from hell, because once it’s on the trail, things are going to get really messy.”
“What kind of entity are we talking about here?”
“Powerful shit that even I don’t understand what-all it can do. There’s thirteen of them to choose from. Which one will get called up, I can’t guess, but all of them are bad. These things are the unliving embodiment of the word relentless.”
“Call it off.”
“I would if I could. I can’t. It’s called a Drekavac. Look it up.”
“I will. You could have just sent me an email about all this and spared me from this interrogation.” I shoved the agreement closer to him. “Now sign your stupid form so I can go back to work.”
Stricken picked up the cheap pen in his left hand and clicked it, poised to sign, but then he paused. “Do you realize, Pitt, that this isn’t just mere ink and paper. An agreement made with Harold watching isn’t just symbolic. Signing my name to something created by the PUFF Adjuster would be just as eternally binding as making a contract with a Fey queen.”
“Good to know. Luckily for me I’m not the one who has to choose between it or the electric chair.”
“How morbid!” Stricken grinned. “Only you forget, Pitt, I said there were two reasons I demanded to speak to a Chosen before I’d sign this thing.”
“What’s the second one then?”
Stricken extended finger number two. “For the longest time I thought I wanted my old job back, but I’ve really enjoyed being freelance, so I’m not signing shit. I just needed to buy some time for my associate to get here.” He raised his hand toward the mirror, then he put finger number one down, so that he was flipping off everyone on the other side of the glass. As he did so, a wall of thick black smoke suddenly rose up behind his chair, coalescing into two giant bat wings. “So long.”
A form rose through the smoke. It was a voluptuous woman, only with horns, fangs, and a tail. She wrapped her wings around Stricken’s shoulders, protectively covering him. Franks or Heather immediately fired through the glass, except Stricken and the succubus vanished in a flash of fire. The wave of heat knocked me from my chair before I was blinded by smoke.
Chapter 5
The humans who had been caught near Stricken’s demonic smoke bomb exit lurched, coughing into the MCB bullpen. The interro
gation room had gotten so thoroughly gassed that it had activated the fire alarm. I felt like I’d been flash-banged and my borrowed MCB T-shirt wasn’t a very good gas mask.
The bullpen area was much less chaotic, but the whole place stank of sulfur and it was still hard to see. Luckily, they must have disabled the fire sprinklers to keep from frying all the computers, because at least we weren’t getting drenched. The MCB agents who hadn’t been nearly suffocated were scrambling, weapons out, thinking they were under attack.
Figuring that smoke rises, I found a corner and laid down on the carpet to try and catch my breath. While lying there, I realized that the flash from the demon had been actual fire because my eyebrows and arm hair were singed and crinkly. I felt like I had a sunburn.
Franks probably had armored lungs or something because inhaling all that smoke hadn’t done anything to hamper his ability to shout orders. “Jefferson! Do you have Stricken’s signal?”
Grant ran to a laptop that was open in one of the cubicles and started clicking buttons.
“You stuck a tracker on Stricken?” I asked between bouts of coughing.
“Of course. Four of them. There’s no way he’ll . . . ” Grant trailed off and stared at the screen. “I’ve got nothing, Franks.”
Franks stood there, wearing an expression of absolute disgust on his big square mug. I realized that he was holding a chunk of the table from the interrogation room in his hand, the steel of which was still glowing orange from being magically sheared through. So much for the chains.
Cueto was leaning against a cube wall, tie undone, wheezing. “How’d that thing breach our perimeter? Franks!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was that?”
“Unknown.”
I was a little surprised he said that, because Franks was normally super observant. But he had been busy throwing his body through glass after his bullets hadn’t worked so maybe he hadn’t seen her face. I’d been closer and must have gotten a better look. I pointed at the last picture on the MCB’s Most Wanted wall, of the demon woman with the fangs. “That’s her right there.” I hacked up some brimstone phlegm and spit on the MCB’s carpet.
“Maybe,” Franks muttered.
“No. I’m sure. You’re probably going to want to bump her up a few spots from number ten.”
“Damn it,” Cueto said. “Alert every agent in the city. Lanoth is in league with Stricken. We don’t know how far her kind can shadow-walk carrying a passenger. They might still be near. Get a sniper team on the roof and scramble the chopper. Check the footage from every camera. And somebody open some windows already!”
The director must have forgotten this particular MCB office was in a basement. It took me a second to pick Beth from STFU out of the chaos because she’d wrapped a scarf around her face to filter the smoke. She was only a few feet away. Her ninja skills must have been second only to Gretchen.
“Where’s Heather?” I asked her.
“She ran outside to use her nose,” Beth said. “If she catches a scent, she’ll call for backup.”
Considering taking Stricken alive had already resulted in him escaping once today, I very much doubted she’d be waiting for backup. If Heather found Stricken, she’d pluck his heart out, then call it in. “Good luck with that.”
“We paid those stupid elves to draw their stupid magic runes on all our offices to prevent this kind of invisible magic portal bullshit!” Cueto roared. “How did a succubus get in here? I want answers!”
I sure hoped those weren’t the same elves MHI used. “Did any of those elven contractors ever happen to work for STFU while Stricken was in charge?” I asked Beth quietly.
“We used European elves as contractors. They’re snoots, but their work is usually solid. The American ones are usually a little too yee-haw, fly by the seat of their pants for us. But if Stricken learned their runes he could have taught his people how to get around them. I’ll go check on that. You should stick around, Pitt. MCB isn’t done with you yet. If MHI knew there was a Ward up for grabs and didn’t call it in, there’s going to be hell to pay.” The head of Unicorn stomped off to make some calls.
According to Heather, her current boss was actually a moral and decent person, so basically Stricken’s total opposite. However, Beth still worked for the uncaring federal leviathan, and I didn’t want to wait around to get yelled at or worse. So as soon as Beth was out of sight, I got up and headed for the exit. The MCB was awfully distracted so it would be a real shame not to take advantage of that.
I saw the evidence bag with all my stuff in it, but it was over on the desk next to where Grant and Franks were checking camera views. There was no way to grab the bag without being seen. Everything in it was replaceable except for the pistol. It had sentimental value because Julie had given it to me and we’d been through a lot together. But it was slip out now, or risk getting tied up in Fed BS for the rest of forever while the Ward got further and further away. So I walked out.
The air was much more breathable in the parking garage . . . except the mysterious PUFF Adjuster was standing there, briefcase in hand, obviously waiting for me. Oddly enough, even though he’d been in the hallway where all the smoke had vented, he looked completely unfazed.
“Going somewhere, Mr. Pitt?”
“Yeah, home. I’m not under arrest. I did what you people asked me to. So I’ll take the thanks of my grateful country and get out of your way while you guys handle your fugitive business.”
“Of course.” Coslow looked me over slowly. I couldn’t tell if he was disapproving of me in particular or just mildly irritated in general. It could go either way. “Will you be keeping the promise you made to Mr. Stricken?”
I was still a little flustered and oxygen deprived. “What promise?”
“You agreed to deal with the specific events Stricken alluded to. Events which would necessitate a Ward Stone in order to prevent a tragedy of unknown nature. I observed you, speaking on behalf of Monster Hunter International, entering into an agreement with Mr. Stricken. I shall check my notes.” He reached into his jacket, pulled out his little notebook, and flipped it open to a page . . . which appeared to have an entire handwritten transcript of my conversation with Stricken in it already somehow.
“That’s a nifty trick,” I muttered.
Coslow didn’t look up from his notes. “Yes. Here it is. You said, I quote, Fine, I will look into it.” He put the notebook away. “That would appear to be a verbal contract. A gentleman honors his contracts. I take contracts very seriously, Mr. Pitt.”
“I bet you do. You seemed proud of that big one you printed out for Stricken, but last I saw it had gotten blown all over the room and most of the pages had caught fire.” I didn’t know what Coslow was, with the magical healing and Stricken’s vague utterances, but there’s only so many times a guy can get kicked around by cosmic forces before he becomes pretty jaded. “I owe you nothing and I owe Stricken even less. Assuming he wasn’t just lying his ass off as usual, and there is actually a problem, I’ll handle it as I see fit. Now have a nice day, Mr. Coslow. I’m out of here.”
I began walking past him.
“Wait, Mr. Pitt.”
I paused, sighed, then turned around. “Yeah?”
The PUFF Adjuster was giving me a curious look, brow knitted in confusion. “Your involvement was not part of our initial projections concerning this particular situation. Nor is this the first time your presence was an unforeseen variable in one of our calculations. Once again, it appears you are a complication.”
He said the word like it was the most unsavory thing ever. The PUFF Adjuster seemed to be the sort of man . . . wizard . . . entity . . . whatever who really liked to keep things orderly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I do not know yet. Now that you are involved, we will recalculate accordingly before proceeding. The Subcommittee thanks you for your aid.” He popped open his briefcase, reached inside, and pulled out the clear plastic evidence bag with all my st
uff in it. “Allow me to return your property.”
I took the bag from him. Sure enough, inside was my pistol, phone, and wallet. It was the same bag that I’d seen on Grant’s desk while I’d been walking out the door a minute ago, except Coslow had already been out here. “How—” Except when I looked back up, Mr. Coslow had simply vanished into thin air. I’d not heard him move, and the nearest car he could have been hiding behind was like twenty feet away, and he didn’t strike me as a sprinter. “Never mind.”
In this job, when things get weird you just have to roll with it, so I hurried up the ramp toward daylight.
* * *
Once I was free of the smoking federal building, I called in and they sent Hertzfeldt to pick me up with the van. The crew hadn’t had any luck catching the shapeshifter. I found out that when Trip had heard my gunshots he had rushed back to help me, but the Feds were already there, so he’d gone after the shapeshifter again. The delay had cost him, so the thief was long gone. Without the big red backpack to spot, Milo and Skippy had come up with zilch. Earl had caught up with Trip and used his werewolf senses to follow her scent for a few more blocks, but lost her in another garage, where she’d either had a backup vehicle stashed, or had hotwired herself a new ride.
The other Hunters had converged at the Atlanta team’s HQ, which was in a nondescript warehouse not too far from the airport. The team room had been the upstairs office, which they’d made into something like a comfy living room, with lots of couches and a ping-pong table. When Hertzfeldt and I walked in, most of the Hunters were sitting around, sullenly trying to figure out their next move. Boone was up front, standing before a great big map of the city, handing out assignments of where we should check next.
Earl wasn’t there. From my Alabama team, Trip Jones, Holly Newcastle, and Milo Anderson were there. Skippy, of course, who was uncomfortable around humans, was off doing Skippy things. The rest of Boone’s team consisted of James Mundy, who’d been an African bush pilot; and a married couple, the Groffs, both of whom had been Marines; their doc, Kathy Sherlock; and of course Gregorius, the crusty old SF vet, whom I’d known since Natchy Bottom. Hertzfeldt was the only Newbie, so it was an experienced crew.
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