I gestured at her hand. “I see the Ward is gone. Was Milo the one who figured that out? He’s remarkably good at that kind of thing.”
“Oh, no. They’re still stumped.” Sonya reached up and pulled down the neckline of her hoody, revealing that the stone was now embedded in the top of her chest.
I cringed. That didn’t just look painful, it looked like it should be fatal. “How’d it get there?”
“Beats me. When I went to sleep it was on my hand. I woke up and it was there. The thing is just kinda swimming around or something.”
Only a quarter of the Ward’s surface was visible, and the part that was embedded in her would’ve been cutting off her subclavian artery, so she should’ve been dead. You can’t just move a softball-sized rock through a body and not wreck a lot of systems. “Does it hurt?”
“I feel fine. It’s like it’s not even there.”
“You seem remarkably calm, all things considered.”
“If I’m being honest, I just hide it well. My mom’s an immortal from a spirt realm, so by human standards I’ve seen some weird things in my life, but this one has got me a little freaked out.”
That was probably why she’d turned to her dad’s books. He’d been a smart guy, good at this kind of thing; she’d probably been looking for comfort. “Since you’re not dying or screaming in agony, that’s got to be some sort of effect that’s enabling both it and you to exist in the same space at the same time.”
“You get that idea from one of these books about magic?” She waved her hand toward the shelves.
“Sorry. I just pulled that theory out of my ass. I’ve got no idea what’s going on. Anything like this ever happen before to you?”
Sonya shook her head in the negative. “I guess Isaac Newton never thought someone like me would try to use one of his magic weapons.” She covered the oddity back up. “That big lumberjack-looking grandpa who flew in earlier messed with it but didn’t know what to do to get it out either, but he assured me they’ve got an elf princess on the way who will be able to fix this right up.”
From that description the old lumberjack in question had to be Ben Cody, who had a wall full of PhDs and knew more about crazy super science than anyone else in the company. He’d retired from heading our New Mexico team after the siege, but Julie must have called him up and asked him to come in for a consult as a favor. If he was stumped, that was really bad. Plus, I knew Cody had zero faith in elf magic so if he was talking up Tanya’s abilities, he had probably just been trying to make Sonya feel better. That wasn’t a good sign.
“Cody’s right. Tanya is the expert on magic. She knows all the old ways.” That was a huge exaggeration, but I didn’t want to scare her. “She’ll know how to get it out.”
“I sure hope so. I never should have taken this job, but I was desperate. It’s just that I really do need a whole lot of money—and fast.”
“You mentioned that. What kind of life-or-death thing makes it so a college student suddenly need millions of dollars? I know tuition and books can be a pain but stealing something that puts a giant target on your head is kind of extreme. You got gambling debts with the mob?”
“I didn’t know about the target at the time. It’s my problem, I have to be the one to deal with it.”
“Because that’s worked out so good for you so far.” My chair creaked as I leaned forward. I might not be able to do much about the Newtonian super weapon stuck in her chest, but I could maybe help with the nuts-and-bolts stuff. “Level with me, Sonya. MHI can’t help you if we don’t know what’s going on.”
She thought it over for a long time. I did my best to try and look sincere. Apparently, it worked, because she relented. “Okay, you know what my mom is, right?”
“A little. Japanese folklore isn’t my area of expertise.”
She patted the book. “My dad loved that stuff.”
No kidding. I’d read some of Gardenier’s records. The guy had been a total weeaboo, from the mystical spirit of the sword stuff, to dressing in kimonos. If he was still alive he’d probably have one hell of an anime collection, but I just said, “I heard he was knowledgeable in that area.”
“It was his knowledge on the subject that got Mom interested enough to date him, but she never told him what she is. Humans tend to get a little twitchy about that kind of thing. He died never knowing that my mom is a yokai. But that’s a really big category. They come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. I know it sounds hard to believe, but they’re not from Earth originally, but from one of the realms that’s connected to Earth.”
“I got it.” She gave me a curious look when I said that, because it was the sort of concept that baffled regular people, but I just shrugged. I’d visited more dimensions than the average American visited other countries. “Trust me. Our world being connected to others is not something I personally struggle to believe in.”
“Okay, but my mom has lived on this planet for a long time, so she’s not as connected to the spirit worlds as some of her relatives. Some yokai are good, some are evil, just like people. Specifically, her family come from the kodama family.”
“Forest spirits, right?”
“Yeah. Sorta.” Sonya seemed a little surprised that I’d known that, but it was only because I’d gotten to know some members of Strike Force Kiratowa while training for the siege, and they’d told me a few stories about what monster hunting was like in Japan. “The kodama are connected to forests. Like nymphs are connected to bodies of water. You’ve got nymphs here, right?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Oh, come on, Georgia is lousy with nymphs, those stuck-up bitches. Alabama has to have them too. But anyways, even kodama come in different forms. Yokai aren’t like humans in that they’ve got a sort of fixed shape with some variations. Yokai can get weird. Mom’s branch of the family can easily pass for human, so they live among them and usually like them. They traditionally try to protect people and do good. But she had this one cousin, who was kind of psycho from what I hear, and he’d gone on this revenge-fueled murder spree in New York City. She was trying to stop her cousin, and it turns out my dad and MHI were trying to catch him too, and long story short, they totally hooked up.”
“It’s the classic love story, boy meets yokai. Boy gets yokai pregnant. What’s all that got to do with why you need millions of dollars fast?”
Sonya became deadly serious. “I have to save my family’s forest.”
She let that hang, like I was supposed to be shocked by this revelation or something, but I was just confused. “What?”
“It’s the forest my branch of the kodama are connected to. It’s my ancestral homeland. It’s the place that links the two worlds. Don’t you get it? It’s in danger. Humans used to leave it alone because they thought it was haunted, but the Hunters there chased off the last of the evil yokai in the area so people weren’t as afraid as they used to be, and they started moving in. Big business doesn’t care about the local superstitions anymore. They’re going to develop it. Log the trees and bulldoze the stumps and put strip malls on it. I have to buy all the land to keep them from doing that.”
I rolled that over in my mind. “Huh . . . ”
Now it was her turn to say, “What?”
“That’s way more Fern Gully of you than I expected. No offense, but you just struck me as the pragmatic type.”
“I’m not some hippy, you big dope. I’m doing this for my mom. She’s connected to that land. It’s her anchor to the spirit world. If it goes, she goes. Not fast, like instantaneous death, but she’ll weaken and become mortal, and start to age like a human. She tells me she’s okay with that. Like ‘it’s the way of things. All things change. Blah blah blah.’” Sonya made quote marks with her fingers. “Screw that! Most of the kodama in Japan have already faded away, same as most of the spirit beings that used to be super common on this continent. I can’t let my mom wither away like that.”
“So you need a few million bucks to buy a
bunch of trees?”
“Have you priced Japanese real estate lately? I need that much to start!”
For someone descended from forest spirits, her blundering around in the woods earlier hadn’t exactly struck me as someone who was one with nature. Sonya saw my incredulous look and must have realized what I was thinking.
“Yeah, I know. I’m a city girl, born and raised. My mom tried to keep me away from the natural world as much as possible. I think she was afraid I’d hear the call of the wild and go feral or something. I guess kodama do that once in a while. No danger there. I like electricity and showers.”
“Have you ever even been to this family forest?”
Sonya got a little defensive. “Not really. See, there’s . . . well . . . let’s call it clan law that kodama aren’t supposed to ever mix with humans, so Mom has been declared an outcast, eternally banished—only she likes living in America better anyway so she’s fine with the decree—but I’m considered a half-breed disgrace and would be destroyed on sight by the old kodama. So I’ve never actually been there. The pictures make it look nice though.”
“Dang. Your mom’s family sound like racist assholes.”
“It’s more speciesist than racist. But I’m not buying that land to protect those crusty, stuck-up, decrepit old losers. I’m doing this for Mom. Now do you understand why it’s so important that I sell this stupid rock for as much as I can get?”
“Which is why you slashed Gutterres’ tires and ran off when somebody made you a better offer. That sure worked out well for you. So who was on the phone?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say her name, but she made a real compelling argument with a lot of zeroes on the end of it.”
“She?” That was curious. There weren’t very many things which would know where a monster like Phipps was hiding in order to send Sonya to a certain doom, which would also be keeping tabs on MHI’s affairs, and be motivated to screw with us, so I immediately thought of my mother-in-law. “Did she have a Southern accent and call you hon?”
“No accent, though she had one of those smokey voices. Sultry, you know? But it wasn’t an affectation for right then either; I bet she always talks seductive to everyone. That’s her default.”
That made me scoff. “And you made that psychological workup based on one short phone call there, Criminal Minds?”
“Trust me. I can change voices like I can change faces. Accents, inflection, tone, piece of cake.”
“Yeah, I heard you sing.”
“Now, that I do for fun. But one of my gifts means that I can tell a lot about people just by looking at them or listening to them. I figure it’s genetic. Mom’s people survived thousands of years because they could watch humans and then blend in with them. It doesn’t do much good to be able to look like anyone if you aren’t good at pretending to be them too. So I can get a read on someone fast.”
“Yet you were still gullible enough to walk into a trap.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you? Whoever she was, she’s a super good liar.”
Susan Shackleford was cunning, but this didn’t sound like her MO. She would’ve just killed Sonya and kept the Ward for herself, not farm that out to some other monster and risk losing something so incredibly valuable. “We’ll figure out who it was. In the meantime, you should probably just tell Earl about your mom’s ancestral land and ask for his help.”
Now it was her turn to be incredulous. “Like Earl has that kind of money.”
“Are you kidding? He’s not big on flash, but the man bought stock in Ford back when horses were still the big thing. Do you know how compound interest works? Because Earl sure does, and he’s over a hundred.”
“Mom is way older than he is, but she’s not exactly good with money. She’s more . . . artistic. Dad actually had a fortune when he died, but Mom opened a new age bookstore and went broke trying to sell healing crystals to housewives who do yoga.” Sonya sighed. “Look, I know he’s probably got some money, but just because Earl feels guilty about my dad sacrificing his life so he could save the day, doesn’t mean that this is anyone’s problem other than mine. My family, my solutions. I’m not going to beg for handouts. I’ve got gifts, I’ve got skills, so I’m going to use them to handle my business. You got a problem with that?”
I could respect the stubbornness. “Naw, that’s cool.” I was also going to tell Earl about this, even if she wasn’t. Knowing his sense of honor, he’d probably pay her out of his own pocket for the Ward and call it a finder’s fee. It would actually be charity, but neither one of them would call it that, so they could both keep their pride intact. “I bet you’ve always been like that—tough, dedicated, standing up for what you believe—even when you were a kid.”
“Why would you guess that?” she asked suspiciously.
“I read that book you’re holding. Earl wrote the ending. He wouldn’t have called you a badass otherwise. He’s got high standards. Coming from him, that’s one hell of a compliment.”
“Oh.” Sonya actually blushed, then she tried to blow that off. “I figured he said that because when I was a freshman in high school, I kicked the shit out of a vampire who was eating our cheerleading squad.”
“Probably that too . . . So now that I know you snuck out—because if Cody came out of retirement to figure this puzzle out, there’s absolutely no way he’d let you wander around unattended with that Ward stuck to you—let’s get you back to your room. We can concentrate on keeping you alive through the night, and then you can worry about saving your magical forest tomorrow.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds dumb.”
“Whatever you say, tree hugger. Let’s go.”
Sonya stood up, but kept the memoirs clutched tight. “Just a heads-up, tree hugger translates to a really serious insult to the kodama. Don’t say that in front of my mom or she’ll smack you.”
“Duly noted.” I’d once gotten my ass kicked for not realizing how offensive garden gnomes were to real gnomes. Hunters had to be culturally sensitive like that.
Chapter 16
There were over thirty members of MHI at the compound, which by our operational standards, was a lot. We would also have twelve orcs, five elves, four Secret Guard, two MCB, our internet troll, and a partridge in a pear tree, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Secret Guard arrived late that afternoon in the same big black van that I’d seen them pick Gutterres up in the night before. I wasn’t surprised to see them show up for the party. It was less than a three-hour drive from Atlanta to Cazador, and they really wanted that stone for themselves. They were stopped by the guards we’d posted at the main gate but asked for me by name. When I got the call from the guard shack, I said to let them through and went outside to meet the Catholics in the parking lot.
The van stopped and four men got out. Gutterres I knew, but the rest were strangers. Two of them were big, bald, tough-looking dudes, one as tall as me, the other just over six foot. The last one looked kind of like a young Charles Manson with the beard and hair. In the brief moment their van doors were open I could see piles of modern gear, armor, and guns, but they also had things like swords, crosses, and a big silver thing on a pole that I assumed was some kind of holy water sprinkler. The door slid closed before I could figure that one out.
Gutterres was carrying the same cooler from last night. “Good afternoon, Pitt.”
“Let me guess, the head melted at the crack of dawn?”
“Despite my best efforts, yes.” He opened the cooler lid to show me that the interior was filled with black ashes. “However, I should be able to use these remains to perform a rite which might help us turn the tables on the creature.”
“What kind of rite?”
“The kind which will make it so that he doesn’t reset the clock each night. Thirteen lives total, no matter how long it takes us to get through them, and then he’s done, forever. I’ve also confirmed the Drekavac’s mortal identity.”
That sounded like a pitch. �
��Are you officially offering a trade?”
“I am. Our expertise and help in return for access to the Ward.”
“On that, you’ll have to make your case to Earl Harbinger, but he’s a reasonable guy. What happened to we prefer to work alone?”
“I made a convincing case to my superiors,” Gutterres said.
“If you’ll let us, we’ll help,” the tall one said. I was a little surprised when he sounded American. I’d thought that all their muscle was Swiss. “The Combat Exorcist made a very compelling argument to the council about the value of cooperation. They’re not used to him asking for help. They called us up and said we should escort him to scenic Alabama to offer our services.”
I looked at Gutterres and raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, your actual title is combat exorcist?”
“That is one of the titles bestowed on me, yes.”
“Dude, that is so badass.”
“It is. These are my associates.” Gutterres gestured at the big one, “Messina.” Then the average height one that could probably still easily bench press me, “Warrington,” and then the skinny one. “LoPresto.”
None of them struck me as particularly priestly. They seemed more soldier than clergy. “Are you the junior exorcist squad then?”
“Hell no,” said Warrington, who also sounded like an American. “If somebody’s head starts spinning around and projectile vomiting, that’s his problem. We got recruited for this because the Church couldn’t get a contingent of the guys with the pikes and stripes here fast enough.”
“Don’t let the festive colors on their dress uniforms fool you,” Gutterres said. “The Swiss Guard are an elite force, and trained to deal with the supernatural, but they are few in number and have other duties as well. After the incident with Franks, the council decided we needed to be able to bring in reliable agents for rapidly unfolding situations around the world. We’ve been keeping tabs on members of the faith who have applicable skillsets in case of need.”
I looked over the three, and they all had that air of no fucks to give, all in a days work, been-there-done-that attitude cultivated by professionals in the fields of applied violence. I’d have bet good money that each of them was some kind of combat vet or their regular day job required door kicking. I’d have to see how they did tonight, because if the Church was using unpaid volunteers for this weekend warrior stuff, MHI was always hiring, paid good, and had medical and dental.
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