“You tried to feed him a dead mouse,” I shouted.
“Tiny mammal was food,” Mr. Trashbags stated without irony, which also explained why we no longer had a vermin problem around the house.
“Ray didn’t even have that many teeth yet!”
“It’s okay, I’ve got this.” Julie reached over and patted my hand to get me to chill out. “Just remember, Mr. Trashbags, who’s in charge when Cuddle Bunny isn’t here?”
“Shelly Nanny,” Mr. Trashbags said with resignation. “Mr. Trashbags serve Shelly Nanny.”
“And what do you do if anyone tries to hurt Ray?”
“CONSUME!”
“Good boy,” Julie dropped some slices of lunch meat on him, because she knew that Mr. Trashbags would straight up eat anybody who tried to mess with our kid.
Once we finished eating we started staging the gear we wanted to take for the night in the living room. The rows of Shackleford family portraits looked down approvingly as the pile of guns grew. To be fair, I was anthropomorphizing the paintings because not all of the Shacklefords had gone into the family business, and the ones who had stuck with Hunting, most of them were dead now. Julie came from a big family, but the paintings hadn’t been updated since she was a kid, and she didn’t really keep up with any of the multitude of uncles, aunts, and cousins who’d bailed out to lead normal boring lifestyles. For Monster Hunting royalty, the Shackleford family’s numbers were getting a little thin on the ground now.
Long before the doorbell rang, we were alerted that someone was coming. After the events of the last few years, we had really beefed up this place’s security system. There were motion sensors everywhere. The cameras were in regular and thermal, which was especially handy for undead beings that didn’t radiate body heat. If something was moving with an unnaturally low body temp, that was a huge red flag. Since we were on much better working terms with the elves since Tanya had joined the company, there were protective and warning runes inscribed all over the property to alert us to any supernatural presence. There were armored shutters that would drop down over the doors and windows, and we had one concrete, fireproof panic room sufficient to contain a werewolf, that Shelly could take Ray into to wait for the cavalry, or until Mr. Trashbags digested whoever was bothering them. Did I mention he was kind of terrifying?
I let Shelly in. Like most of Skippy’s tribe she was shorter than average, squat, and wearing a mask to hide her features among humans. But even with the mask she was easy to pick out from the other orcs, because she had a really obvious lazy eye.
“Hey, Shelly.”
“Brother of Great War Chief,” she greeted me with a bow. Because even though I’d saved the world, to the orcs I was still basically chopped liver when compared to my brother, the former rock star.
Once inside, the orc girl took off her mask, revealing her tusks, snout, and pointy ears. Then she hung her coat on the rack. She had a hand-tooled leather gun belt around her waist, with a Super Blackhawk magnum revolver holstered on each side, and shells in little loops all the way around.
All orcs were born with gifts, where they were supernaturally good at one thing. Shelly’s was blasting stuff. The teenager could toss a handful of quarters in the air and draw and shoot them all before any hit the ground. She was to six-guns what Edward was to stabby things. Shelly was near the top of my list of people never to get into a gunfight with. I’d tested her when she’d applied for this job, and I could say without a doubt that she was like a one-orc Secret Service detail. Plus, Ray really liked her. As an orc she was too honor-bound to invite her boyfriend over to mess around like a human babysitter might, so she was basically perfect for the job.
Julie came in carrying a rifle case over each shoulder. Mr. Trashbags was squishing along at her heels. Ray was riding the shoggoth like he was a pony and giggled with delight when he saw Shelly. She was his favorite, probably second only to Mr. Trashbags. The blob gently lifted Ray with two tentacles, and Shelly took the happy toddler from him and immediately squished his chubby cheeks. She may have been a stone cold badass, but she really loved kids.
“Okay, we’re not going to be back until really late. We’ll set the perimeter alarms when we leave. There’s a meatloaf in the fridge for dinner. You’ll just need to warm it up.”
Shelly nodded along to Julie’s instructions. “Shelly will nourish junior war chief and bring great honor to tribe.”
“Of course you will.” Julie looked down at Mr. Trashbags. “Remember, Shelly is in charge.”
“Mr. Trashbags NANNY!”
“Wrong,” Shelly said, giving him one suspicious eye. The other eye was pointed at the wall. “Mr. Trashbags blob pet. Shelly the nanny.”
Mr. Trashbags gurgled a bit before agreeing. “Orc is nanny. Orc has opposing thumbs.”
Shelly looked down at her hands, suspicious about this revelation. I gave my son a hug, and then grabbed my gear bags and headed out the door with my wife before either of us could worry about the wisdom of once again leaving our progeny in the care of a gunslinging orc and a domesticated shoggoth.
Chapter 15
The compound was about as busy as I had ever seen it. It’s a rare opportunity for MHI to have a monster come to us, and even rarer to actually be able to schedule it in advance. The last time there had been this much excitement here was when Hood had dropped off a few truckloads of undead monstrosities. We’d learned a few things from that experience and invested in some improvements. This would be the first time we’d give them a real-life work out.
On the flight back from Georgia, Earl had put out the call for help. Everybody who wasn’t working an active case—as in monsters were going to eat somebody if we weren’t there—and who could get to Cazador before sundown, was on the way or already here. Luckily, we were between Newbie classes, so we wouldn’t have any untrained people getting underfoot. By the time the Drekavac arrived, we would probably have a few dozen experienced Hunters on hand, which is one hell of a welcome committee.
In addition, the orcs and the elves had agreed to help. Since the orc village was really close to the compound, it would be evacuated. Their noncombatants would be camped by the Shackleford estate. The elves were sending a few of their best trackers down from the Enchanted Forest to help.
Elves and orcs working together? Crazy, but true. If a historian—assuming he was cleared to know about the secret existence of monsters obviously—ever looked back on my life, he’d be forced to say that my greatest achievement had been helping broker a peace treaty between those two groups. And I’d saved the world and killed a god once. That’s how much orcs and elves usually despise each other. They had even worked together the whole siege without a single murder occurring. As much as I’d like to blame all this newfound peace and harmony on my brilliant diplomacy, in reality the current peace was the direct result of Princess Tanya being a bossy force of nature and her browbeating the rest of the elves into not being judgmental pricks. Meanwhile, Chief Skippy still didn’t trust the elves, but with his beloved brother and right-hand orc, Edward, hooking up with Tanya, he was kind of stuck. MHI was happy, because it meant we had access to orc muscle and medical, and elf magic at the same time.
And we were going to need that magical edge too. From what Albert had been able to look up, and what the Secret Guard had sent from the Vatican’s archive, I’d only scratched the surface of the Drekavac’s full capabilities last night. Stricken’s contract with the reptoids must have had the Really Scary Bastard Clause in it to make sure nobody backed out because the Drekavac’s later forms were supposed to be terrifying.
Only with this many Hunters, this much prep, and all our resources, it shouldn’t be anything we couldn’t handle. Provided that we didn’t accidentally sever his head before we got to the thirteenth death, because then we’d just have to do it all over again the next night, and according to Coslow’s predictions, we couldn’t afford to be dicking around with this thing.
So while the others got ready for
tonight, I tried to figure out what Coslow thought was about to kill a few million people. Albert, our regular researcher, was up to his eyeballs in Drekavac lore, so I couldn’t bug him. The other big-brain Hunters who had arrived were trying to figure out how to get the Ward unstuck from Sonya. Melvin, our internet troll, might be of use to me, but that would have required me to visit Melvin’s office-cave in the basement, and he was a real pain in the ass to deal with. Giving him this broad of a topic to look into would be an exercise in futility and whining, so I’d save Melvin until I had something more specific for him to drill down on.
The interior of the MHI archives looked like a very large, very full used bookstore, with floor-to-ceiling shelves, jam-packed with books and papers throughout. The room took up a large chunk of the basement and had been filled by Hunters bringing back anything they found which was monster-related. It had been a mess before it had gotten blown up during the Christmas Party, and that had made it a whole lot worse, but Albert Lee had devoted himself to caring for this place, and after years of labor it was actually pretty well organized now.
To begin my mission, I decided to learn more about the guy who had stuck me with it. Not Stricken, because we already knew he was a complete mystery, but Coslow.
I pulled up Al’s topical master database on one of the computers and typed in PUFF Adjuster. It referred me to a bunch of other documents, including the scan of the official—yet nebulously useless definition—provided by the Department of the Treasury, about how that office was the final ruling authority over all PUFF bounties. The term was mentioned in several reports and journals, but those all seemed to be referring to normal human bureaucrats. So I typed in Harold Coslow and was rewarded with several other hits. I wrote down the shelf numbers and went to look for the documents.
The first one I found was from the Boss, Raymond Shackleford the Third, may that total badass rest in peace. It was one of his journals and he mentioned Coslow showing up to oversee a case involving an unidentified transdimensional being in West Virginia in 1967. Boss Shackleford said Coslow had given him the quote “heebie-jeebies” but hadn’t known what he was either.
The next mention of Coslow I pulled turned out to be a handwritten diary that dated clear back to the founding of the company, before it had been renamed Monster Hunter International, and had still been known as Bubba Shackelford’s Professional Monster Killers. I kicked myself for not sorting by date, because this one was so old that at first I thought it had to be a mistake, but Al seldom made mistakes, so it probably had to be a different Harold Coslow. But Hunters have flexible minds, so I checked anyway. The journal was written by a Hunter named Hannah Stone, which was kind of surprising for that era. I’d not known Bubba had employed any female Hunters. The old books were kept in plastic bags to protect them, and I put on some of the disposable gloves Al kept on the reference desk before handling the pages because I didn’t want him to yell at me. Like all good librarians, the dude was rather protective of his books.
The journal was about a case where the Professional Monster Killers, led by Bubba himself, had tracked down a traveling circus run by a powerful necromancer, that had been moving from town to town secretly taking victims, because all the things in the freak show were actually real monsters. That sounded like an amazing case, and I was bummed I didn’t have time to read the whole account, but I skipped to the one page where Coslow was mentioned. After Stone described him as “an elderly fellow of somber words and obnoxious condescension who was the chief administrator for the Federal’s new bounty program for monsters,” I had to admit that it sounded like the same guy. Which meant that Coslow had already been an old man over a century ago.
The next number I’d written down was for a Hunter’s memoirs from the 1980s. It had been filed a few rows over. Except when I walked there, the spot on the shelf was empty. Well, crap.
Except then I heard somebody . . . weeping?
I moved around the end of the shelf to see who was making the noise. There were a few comfy reading chairs in the back corner. One of them was occupied by a young woman I’d not seen before, and when she saw me coming she quickly wiped her eyes and composed herself. “Hey, Opie.”
“Owen,” I corrected her, immediately knewing I was talking to Sonya. Today she looked like a gawky teenager, Asian, and kind of awkward and nerdy, like she wouldn’t be allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table in the lunchroom. I noted that her left hand looked perfectly normal, and the Ward wasn’t there anymore. Somebody must have figured out how to remove it already, and in such a way that it hadn’t even left a mark. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just reading.”
“Were you crying?”
“No. Of course not.” Sonya was clearly lying and doing her best to hide the fact that she really had been crying. She wiped her nose and sniffed. “It’s dusty in here.”
“You’re supposed to be confined to one of the guest rooms but, let me guess, you changed your face again so you could sneak past the guards unnoticed?”
“Yeah, dude, I totally risked getting shot by some trigger-happy goons just so I could go to the library.”
“I’ll pass that on to our librarian. He’ll take it as a compliment. Let’s go.”
“Wait. Earl gave me permission to wander around the main building, as long as I didn’t mess with anything or get in the way. And this is my real face. I was born with this one.”
If she wasn’t lying, she was actually a lot more unremarkable-looking than most of the masks she wore. I thought it over, trying to decide if she was telling the truth, or if I needed to escort her back to her room. My gut told me she was lying. After the stunts she’d pulled, Earl wouldn’t let her wander around our basement unsupervised. We had some scary shit stored down here and secret tunnels that could be used to escape.
“Come on, Sonya. I’ve got a finely tuned bullshit detector.”
“Just give me a few more minutes, please?”
I looked to see what she’d been reading that was so important. I could read the numbered sticker on the side. Coincidently, the notebook in her hands was the very same one I’d just been looking for. Then the realization slowly dawned that the memoirs she’d been reading had been written by her dead father. She saw me looking at it, and then she knew that I knew. Sonya got embarrassed and put the book on the table. This had just gotten awkward.
“Have you read your dad’s stuff before?”
“Sure. Earl made copies after you guys found them and mailed them to Mom, but I wanted to see the originals because . . . ” She trailed off for a moment. “Never mind. I don’t really know.”
“Yeah, you do.” I picked up the book and handed it back to her. “And there’s no shame in that.”
She took the memoirs, looked at them, and then sighed. “I guess it’s because my dad touched these pages, so it’s different. You know?”
“I do, kinda.” It hadn’t been that long since I’d lost my dad, and sometimes I still forgot he was gone. It wasn’t like we’d been super close most of my adult life, but I suppose I’d just taken for granted that he’d always be there. At least I had known mine. Sonya had never had that chance. And thinking about that made me feel a little bad for her, and the next thing I knew I was trying to be helpful.
“I looked at those after Lee found them. Your dad seems like quite the character.”
“You think he’s full of shit.”
“I didn’t say that.” Some of the guys had, but I didn’t say that part out loud. “Hunters tend to be a little colorful in our recounting of events is all. Some more than others. Earl and Milo vouched for him. That’s good enough for me.”
“All I ever knew about Dad was what my mom told me. She always said he was the brightest and bravest human she’d ever seen. She really loved him, which you’ve got to understand is a big deal for one of her kind to fall for a human. As I got older I always thought she might be exaggerating. You’ve got to understand that my mom’s kind of a hopeless r
omantic. She’s addicted to Scottish time travel romance novels. She’s a little flighty, so I take her stories with a grain of salt. But after reading his memoirs, it’s like I’m hearing his voice. I don’t know, it changes things, makes him seem more real to me.”
Sonya and I had gotten off on the wrong foot, but she was basically a scared kid who’d gotten pulled into some crazy business, so there was no need for me to be a jerk when she was being vulnerable. I pulled up one of the other chairs and sat down.
“I get it. I didn’t really understand my dad most of my life either, and mine was around. Sometimes you think you know somebody, but then it’s not until you get older that you really understand what makes your parents tick.”
“Was your dad cool?”
“Cool?” I snorted. “If you mean cool as in nice or fun, oh, hell no. But he was a good man. And probably the toughest man I’ve known, and I work here. Look, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to connect with your past. Even if you didn’t meet him, he’s still part of you, and part of where you come from. You should take that memoir and keep it with you during your stay. But just make sure you put it back before you leave, because Albert will lose his friggin’ mind if somebody messes up his system.”
She laughed, but did keep the book on her lap. “Thanks . . . About the whole thing with yesterday, I really am sorry about how that went down. I kinda stepped in it, and you guys have done nothing but try and help me. I even threatened to shoot you.”
“Hey, I’m fine. Though you should probably take it up with Milo. He’s a nice guy and gets kind of sensitive about being taken hostage.”
“That wasn’t my finest moment.” She seemed genuinely contrite.
“It really was a douche move. But Milo is honestly about the kindest and most forgiving person in the world. He’s like Mr. Rogers but with more guns. Talk to him. You’ll see.”
“I’ll apologize to him,” she promised.
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