I’d done well on my orals. Now all I had to do was pass the written portion and turn in my thesis and I’d have my second master’s.
“Pretty,” I said. The stone was deeply colored, cut in an oval and just beautiful. “Hate to ruin it.”
I pulled out a loupe and checked the alluvia to be sure. I’d followed up on pretty much everything Briscoe had brought to me and there was a way to check if it was a Russian stone.
“Bit of a budget line item,” I said, dropping it in a pocket.
“I had to call in a favor,” Gordon growled.
“Favor from whom might I ask?” I asked.
“MI6,” Gordon said. “Let’s just say it didn’t come out of my budget. Or theirs. I had to get authorization but it came pretty quickly. Seems this beasty has gotten out of the sewers. Two people were found dead from natural causes in the area in the last few days. Both were in the prime of their lives. And MI6 had to burn a cell. So this had better work.”
“I tried out some of the white incantations from the book,” I said. “They worked well enough. Only one way to find out. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have my ass to chew if you know what I mean.”
“When can you get started?” Gordon said.
I had exams all week. If I missed one, there went my master’s. And I really needed to bone up before each of them. Not to mention sleep.
Death is lighter than a feather. And I could sleep when I was dead.
“Tonight.”
* * *
“You don’t really need to be here,” I said.
The capture and destruction of a piru takes more than just an alexandrite. First, the piru must be attracted and fed. They liked expensive food, drink, and drugs. Yes, drugs. Tobacco will do but opium has much the same effect on them as on humans for some reason. We were banking on heroin for that. You could find it on various street corners in Manchester, and it wasn’t like we were in danger of getting arrested. On the other hand, MI4 could just get it out of an evidence locker, which they had.
We were doing the rite in an alleyway off of The Sanctuary, which I thought rather ironic in the circumstances. It was where the now three people had died of “natural causes,” one each night.
You bring them in by burning tobacco and alcohol. Then set up a little tableau with the various comestibles laid out. Checking the police reports, all three had been smokers; if young enough, that shouldn’t have caused their deaths, and all three had been drinking. So they’d “called” the piru but hadn’t offered to share. Die, humans, die. Handy tip: always be unselfish if you’re being tracked by a wraith. If one shows up when you’re smoking and drinking, offer them a fag and a shot. Or else.
“Rather want to see what we’ve been chasing,” Briscoe said.
We laid out a brass tray with some shots of rum, a prime cut of lamb and a small brazier. Then we lit the gin and dropped pipe tobacco on the coals in the brazier.
We were right by a storm drain and it took about fifteen minutes for the piru to appear, following the scent of burning alcohol and tobacco. It was just a darker shadow amongst the shadows, a tenebrous fog rising from the storm grating.
The piru floated closer. It was difficult to see in the moonlit darkness even with the help of the streetlights. It moved from shadow to shadow. We’d placed the tray in shadow, knowing it would avoid any sort of light. It was generally bipedal, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t anything derived from human. You get a certain feeling around human ghosts and this was definitively unearthly.
The wraith floated to the tray and into the smoke from the tobacco and the burning essence of the rum. It was clear it was feeding in some way. Maybe it just liked the aroma. But it also made contact with the lamb. I’d gotten a tissue sample and I intended to check the differences between the original and the sacrificed. It was pretty sure that the people who had “died of natural causes” had died of some sort of loss of something. Phosphate, calcium…something. It would be easier to find between the two versions of lamb.
Since we were properly propitiating it, we weren’t in any danger at this point, so I took as careful notes as I could. I knew there was no way to photograph it but I wish I could have.
The gin had burned out so Briscoe lit another shot. Give the guy credit, para or not he wasn’t fazed by an otherwordly spirit being.
Once the piru was feasting, I opened up the nickel bag of heroin and dropped that on the brazier.
The result wasn’t immediate. The thing wasn’t moving real fast as it was, but it slowly…slowed until it was simply hanging there in the smoke from the fire like a black sheet on a clothesline.
I got out my notes and the irreplaceable gem. I laid the gem on the tray, in contact with some of its tendrils of shadow, and began to read.
The toughest part of the whole thing had been finding the proper pronunciation for some of the Uralic and Germanic in the incantation. Dean Carruthers had put me in contact with a traditional Uralic speaker and that had helped. Some of the words were close enough to tribal Tibetan I had to wonder if there was a racial connection.
I began the incantation, calling upon the owl spirit and the moon spirit and the spirit of the gem to bind and entrap this creature of darkness. Three repetitions and I could see it starting to sink into the stone. It also was starting to move, so I gestured at the second heroin packet and Briscoe tossed it in. Good little wizard’s apprentice.
It took nine repetitions of the incantation but finally the piru sank into the stone completely.
I picked the stone up with a pair of tongs and winced.
“Let’s hope this works,” I said and dropped it into the brazier.
Nothing happened at first but then a sound started to emit from the stone. It was so high-pitched at first that it wasn’t even audible but dogs started barking in all the flats nearby. Then it was in the audible range, for me at least, and I started to get the whole banshee cry thing. Horrible sound, eerie and painful to the ears despite being surprisingly quiet. A bit like what a hamster would sound like if it was being slowing burned to death. At least a bizarre space hamster.
Finally, with one last tortured wail, the priceless gem shattered amongst the charcoal bricks and it was done.
“Did we get it?” Briscoe asked.
“Only way to know is if nobody dies tonight,” I said. “Let’s pack up. We’ve both got exams in the morning.”
* * *
Nobody died that night nor in the subsequent weeks. A guy died of a heart attack three weeks afterwards in the area but he was a risk case, so all good.
The lamb samples were subsequently bent, folded and mutilated by MI4’s labs. There was a significant difference in the levels of isoleucine, an amino acid, between the two samples. Notably less in the one that the piru had touched. So apparently, besides liking to get high, pirus steal isoleucine. The pathologist who gave the report started to explain about isoleucine and I asked him not to. I’ve got enough stuff stuffed in my head. I’ll leave that to the medical professionals. Bottom line, not enough will kill you.
I later went back and translated the book of incantations and traps for various Slavic and Siberian entities as well as adding quite a few others from Europe and Eurasia. The three-book set: Identification of, Protections Against, and Traps for Supernatural Entities of the Slavic, Siberian, Balkans and Eurasian Spirit Tribes by Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, PhD, is available from Oxford University Press…if you have the clearance. There’s a complete copy in the MHI library as well.
Now to explain why I added all that to my memoirs besides as a commercial plug…
My teacher hat is on at this point so bear with me with the pro-tip. One reason for this long explanation of tracking down one minor entity is this is stuff you’re going to have to learn at some point. You can’t always depend on someone else to do your research for you. I don’t mean you have to learn proto Uralic. But you do need to learn the Dewey Decimal System.
It’s also about teaching itself. I could hav
e taken the time to go look all this stuff up myself. But part of why Briscoe was at Oxford was to learn how to do the research. So I delegated. And that, too, is part of your job once you get past “me dumb grunt.” He learned how to find some very obscure stuff in the sometimes baroque library system. For that matter, he found the tome that had exactly the right information. I might not have. Why? I knew where to look, he didn’t. Sometimes sending out the person who doesn’t know the “right” answer is the right answer. Sometimes it’s not. But until that day, we didn’t have an answer to piru. We found it because Briscoe went and looked in what was basically the wrong place.
Most of this particular memoir, for one reason or another, has been about the background of hunting. Everyone likes the big fight scenes. But hunting is about more. Once you’re over “me dumb grunt,” learn the more.
For God’s sake, at least learn Latin and crack a book once in a while. Don’t just expect me or Milo or Ray or whoever is the equivalent in your day and age to do all the work.
No matter how tough you think you are, Hunters need vacations, too. Sadly, when you make a living pissing off the forces of evil, that doesn’t always work out. —A.L.
Huffman Strikes Back
Bryan Thomas Schmidt & Julie Frost
Every time he watched the video of his brother Cecil’s death, Glen Huffman’s chest grew tighter and tighter until he was forced to cough for air.
A friend with connections had gotten him footage from the building’s security cameras after some wheeling and dealing. The Feds had confiscated it, but then MHI had gotten copies and a lot of Hunters were having good old laughs at his brother’s expense. So Glen had paid good money for a copy.
Cecil had been sitting naked in his office when Owen Zastava Pitt walked in. Cecil was a successful executive—hard-working, dedicated, a family man—working in the fourteenth-floor finance department of Hansen Industries, Inc., in Dallas. Pitt was some tall, fat loser with a cocky attitude—a cause of many of Cecil’s woes, he’d told Glen.
They started arguing. There was no audio to hear what they said, but it was obvious from their body language on screen that Pitt held Cecil in contempt. Pitt sneered with every word, his eyes rolling and widening as if everything his boss said was ridiculous or over the top.
Sure, Cecil was naked. That was unusual, but he was the man’s boss. Pitt, of course, had no way of knowing what Cecil had been going through. Wouldn’t have mattered. The man had no respect and no honor. They had their argument, then Cecil got righteously angry—Glen watched him tense on the video, leaning forward. Pitt uttered some kind of threat, then Cecil was changing—the fur, the twisting flesh as his arms and feet formed claws, his face warping into fangs, a long snout.
Cecil had been ready to teach the lazy sonuvabitch who was boss. That’s all.
Then that moronic, selfish, fat brute Owen Pitt had broken Cecil’s neck and thrown him out of a window.
Owen Zastava Pitt had murdered Glen’s brother in cold blood!
Glen had to fight to control his own anger and inner beast just watching it over and over, cursing to himself, fighting back tears for his brother. He’d mourned enough. Now was the time for revenge.
* * *
The Huffmans had just returned, a few weeks before Cecil’s murder, from a family camping trip to Yellowstone National Park, a return to an old favorite from their childhoods they hadn’t visited in two decades. After their father died, Cecil and Glen swore they’d take their own kids there and give them the same experience they’d had with their father as boys. And so they did. Only, a couple things had happened, and it hadn’t been quite the same experience.
For one, Cecil’s wife had gotten herself eaten by a werewolf. The campsite had an A rating from the rangers. It was supposed to be one of the safest. Nita had left the tent to defecate in the woods. Her screams awoke everyone, followed by growling, a terrible sound of ripping flesh, and the warm, metallic smell of blood. Glen and Cecil had rushed out and found a werewolf chewing on her arm, her intestines ripped out of her stomach.
To say this was shocking would be a bit understated. And Cecil had gone nuts. In all his miserable life, Nita had been his center, his anchor, the one thing that kept him sane and happy no matter what. Glen’s brother was a bit moody, one might say—angry at the injustices which slowed his advance at work, frustrated with lazy, no-good employees, bored with his job—but not when Nita was around. With her, he smiled, laughed, and lived a mostly calm, happy existence. Home was his sanctuary. And now some motherfucking werewolf had taken that away in an instant.
Glen wouldn’t have said his brother was weak or even harmless—but he’d had absolutely no idea he was Rambo.
Cecil screamed at the monster, ripping it off his wife’s body, and then pounding at it with fallen logs and branches from nearby—all the while shouting for Glen or the boys to get the guns from the truck. The boys ran; Glen was too stunned and just stood there, staring, while his wife and daughter screamed beside him.
Cecil just kept attacking the wolf, who howled and growled and swiped at him with its claws, ripping into his flesh. He didn’t seem to care—he was a man possessed.
But then the werewolf dropped Nita’s arm and went after Cecil, biting into him with a bloodcurdling roar. He didn’t stand a chance. His own blood mixed with his dead wife’s as the monster howled and chomped.
Glen fired his rifle, round after round, but while it pissed the monster off, it didn’t take it down. In fact, after a bit, the wounds started healing right before Glen’s eyes. He hoped to save Cecil, but then got a good look at him—a bloody mass, flesh ripped, eyes shiny, wide, but dead. He was a goner.
The werewolf rushed Glen and bit into his arm like a shark on a swimmer—an arc of agonizing pain tearing through him like fire on gasoline. Glen screamed and cursed and hit at it with the rifle stock, his eyes watering under the assault of the rancid, rotting-meat-laced breath. He managed to turn the rifle around and fired point-blank at the wolf’s head, hitting it once in the forehead and once each in the nose and paw.
The werewolf roared and smacked Glen with the back of its other paw, knocking the rifle free and into a spin. It flew ten feet and landed in view atop the leaves and decay that formed the forest floor.
Glen fell back, landing on his ass, his arm bleeding something awful, and then gasped for breath before scooting away backward on all fours, trying to get away from the monster. Its forehead, paw, and nose bled, its bones and flesh looking like the creature had fallen off a mountain. The wolf just stared at Glen, glaring evilly, its teeth a snarly grimace as he shook his head, trying to recover focus.
Glen’s hands touched metal as he spider-crawled backward, and he recognized the rifle. Somehow, he managed to grab it and jump to his feet, then turned and ran for the car as fast as he could.
Brush crackled, bark tore, and howling filled his ears as the monster raced after him. But thankfully, Virginia, Glen’s wife, had gotten the car started. Jessica, his daughter, screamed at him and pushed the door open. He slid inside, slamming it even as the wheels starting turning, spinning on dirt and leaves seeking purchase, until the car finally lurched ahead and Virginia tore up the road.
That cursed monster chased them for a mile or two but Virginia drove like some kind of Danica Patrick. He’d never known she could handle a car like that. She hit every turn with squealing tires and slammed the wheel just right to get the car straight and steady again, all the while gaining speed. She never yelled once, just stared ahead with intense focus and drove the shit out of that minivan.
Made Glen damn proud of her.
Cecil’s boys and Glen’s kids were sobbing messes, of course. He just sat in the seat, exhausted from the adrenaline rush and tension, while Virginia got them the hell outta there in no time flat.
Glen figured he’d never see Cecil again…until he showed up the next night at their hotel, naked, not a scratch on him.
That was the night their lives changed forev
er.
A few weeks later, his brother was dead—fallen out of a skyrise to the street below, then taken by some government agents—hauled away like some lab-animal study, whatever those bastards did.
Glen would never get over it, though he tried to get on with life, learn to live with it. He’d made progress, too, he thought.
Then that fucking video showed up.
* * *
The others were actually laughing—enjoying the sight of his brother falling to the street. Fucking monsters—brutal, uncultured, cruel bastards, all of them. But he needed them. They were the key to his revenge, so he ignored it, despite the pain it caused.
The group had been hand-chosen for their unique abilities and broad experience. All had solid reputations as reliable and had been trusted by Glen’s close friends. And he needed a special team to ensure his mission’s success. All also wanted revenge on MHI, and taking out one of their star Hunters was the perfect opportunity.
He looked them over now. The first didn’t look like much beyond your standard garden gnome—short legs and arms covered by bright-colored clothes and a white cone hat with an equally long, white beard covering his face. In fact, until he moved, no one could tell if Björn Smallhands was a statue or alive. But when he did, you’d better pray he wasn’t moving after you. He’d lost two brothers battling Hunters a few years back, but until Glen had offered money, he’d resisted. Gnomes would take any job for money. Fortunately, Glen’s success in finance had left him quite rich in resources—both money and other kinds…so he could offer amounts that were hard to refuse.
The second had bumpy, mottled-green skin, bald with wispy white hair. His nose was squat with a slightly raised snoutlike tip, and tusklike teeth protruded from his mouth. He stared at the others with yellow eyes set under thick bone ridges on a short forehead, piercings of bone and steel covering his cheeks and chin, as the orc’s sharp teeth spread in a laugh. His name was unpronounceable to Glen but everyone just called him “Happy,” because for an orc, he had a rather pleasant disposition, even when he was killing someone or something. He’d been outcast from his tribe who had been adopted by MHI, and he wanted to hurt them and their allies. It was about respect, self-worth, and the joy of rejecting those who’d rejected him.
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