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CHAPTER 9

Sonya crawled out of the truck and landed in the stream. “Ooof.”

“Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk.” She swatted my offered hand away and got to her feet.

“Hopefully better than you can shoot.”

She looked up the trail of destruction and saw that we had ended up probably two hundred yards from the road. “Way to go, jackass.”

I grabbed my go bag, tore it open, and pulled out my vest. There was no time to fully armor up, but I wanted the pouches full of mags and grenades on my body. I threw it over my shoulders. I’d buckle everything up on the move. Then I took Abomination in one hand and the bag in the other and started walking. “There’s another shotgun on the front seat if you want it.” At least the borrowed one had fewer levers to confuse her.

“That’s it? We’re just going to hike through the woods until it catches us?”

Strangely enough, I actually had a lot of prior experience at evading monsters on foot through the wilderness. And Georgia was much nicer than the Nightmare Realm. I didn’t know how the Drekavac had found her. I didn’t know if it could track us. Maybe we could shake it. Maybe not. But we had to try. I set out, double time.

Sonya grabbed the sawed-off and followed.

I waded down the stream. I didn’t know if his hell hounds had noses like normal dogs, but if they did, maybe this would throw them off our scent. Once we were on the other shore, we ran along the stream’s edge for about a quarter mile. I knew we needed to turn off. This path was too obvious. The temperature had returned to the normal, muggy, summer heat. I could no longer see the fog. However, losing that pale illumination meant that I couldn’t see shit. I stopped to get my bearings.

“This would be a lot easier if you hadn’t wrecked your truck,” Sonya whispered.

“What’s your excuse? He caught you when you were on a bullet bike.”

“I didn’t know he could shoot fireballs.”

The darkness made it really difficult to move, and the woods here were thick. I had multiple flashlights but turning one on would make us a huge target. I also had my night vision goggles in the bag, but I only had the one pair. “Can you see in the dark?”

“Why would you think I could see in the dark?”

“That seems like a reasonable thing for a half-human shapeshifter to be able to do. If you’ve got other abilities, now isn’t the time to be coy about them.”

“Sorry. I didn’t inherit that gene. I can’t see any better than a regular human.”

“I’ve got night vision goggles, so stick close and follow me.” I reached into the bag and found one of my rechargeable Surefires and handed it to her. “Take this. But don’t turn it on unless you absolutely have to if we get separated.” Then I gave her the last of the loose shotgun shells from my pocket. “You should be able to figure that one out.”

I fished out my PVS-14 night vision setup and strapped it around my head. I much preferred using this mounted to my helmet, because worn on my head I had to cinch it brain-squeezingly tight to keep it from flopping around. Still, it beat tripping and impaling myself on a sharp branch. I turned the goggles on and the murky woods became perfectly visible in pixilated green. No matter how many times I used these things, that moment was always James Bond supercool. “Let’s go.”

Once we got away from the stream and beneath the trees, there was zero light, but I was fine. It takes a while to get used to walking with such a narrow view that you can’t really see your feet, but I had a lot of practice. Sonya kept one hand on the drag strap on the back of my vest. She had to be totally blind right now.

We kept moving, but there was no sign of the Drekavac. Maybe rear-ending the truck had actually killed it once and for all. That would be nice. Which meant it was unlikely. Monster Hunters never expect nice things to happen to us. If you expect the worst, you’re often pleasantly surprised when some things don’t suck. With no sign of our pursuer, I crouched next to a tree, to watch and listen.

“What’s going on?” Sonya whispered.

“Shhh.”

That warning lasted about twenty seconds, before she went, “What do you see?”

“I don’t see anything. I’m trying to listen to the woods.”

“What do you hear?”

“You. Because you won’t shut up.”

“Oh.” She was really good in her element, but Sonya wasn’t striking me as the outdoorsy type. I glanced back at her. Everybody looks unnatural in night vision, but the difference was plain. Ditching us through the urban crowds earlier, she had been on top of the world. Out here, squatting in the dark, being hunted by a scary unkillable monster, she was a bundle of nerves. And she kept turning her head, waiting for something to pop out and kill her.

I couldn’t see the Drekavac’s glow or its fog, but the woods were too still. A night like this there should have been a lot more noises. Warm summer night in a Southern forest, there’s always insects chirping and frogs croaking and general animal noises. Except it was eerie silent. The effect wasn’t as pronounced as when the Drekavac had arrived at the bar, but I could still sense it. That thing was out there, searching.

Since it was hot again, maybe that meant the supernatural interference was gone. But when I got out my phone to check, there was still no signal. Either the monster was still close, or his weird energy field had permanently fried my phone. There was a GPS tracker on the truck and on my armor. I didn’t know if those would still be working, but if they were, my friends would be coming after us.

“Why are you helping me?”

I sighed. “It’s my job.”

“I’m not paying you.”

“Holy shit, kid, how mercenary do you think we are?”

“Don’t act like you’re not in this for the money. I know how Hunters work. I know what I’ve got. You want the Ward. You’ll have to outbid the Church boys. They’re up to two million. Do I hear three?”

“What’s your I didn’t leave you to get chopped up by a Drekavac discount?”

But then Sonya twitched and looked straight up. She’d seen something. I glanced up to see what had caught her attention. The bird was super bright on night vision, far too bright to be natural. And sure enough, when I flipped up the goggles out of the way, I could see that was because the bird was glowing with that same ghostly light as the fog.

The Drekavac didn’t just have hunting dogs and a mutant horse—he had a falcon.

“Don’t move,” Sonya whispered. “I heard birds can’t see you if you don’t move.”

She was probably thinking of the tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park, but what the hell. It was worth a shot. We held perfectly still as it circled high above us, then it let out an unearthly shriek, banked hard, and began flying back toward where we’d wrecked. Apparently, Sonya’s Wild Kingdom hot take about magic-bird vision had been incorrect.

Just like Skippy and Milo had tracked Sonya across Atlanta, the Drekavac had done the same thing to us. This was just the low-tech, supernatural version. Low-tech problems require low-tech solutions, so I shouldered Abomination, led the falcon just a bit, and pulled the trigger. There was a flash followed by a rain of blue-fire feathers.

Except the bird must have had some sort of telepathic connection to its master and didn’t need to make it back to report. There was a horrible, echoing shriek back the way we’d came. It was a sound of delight. Then the hounds began barking.

“We’ve got to move!” The time for slow and stealthy was over. I flipped up my goggles and turned on the tac light I had mounted on Abomination, which was a scalding thousand lumens bright. It turned the night into day as we ran for it.

It was easy to forget just how supernaturally athletic Sonya was, until she easily got ahead of me. Then she turned on the light I gave her and quickly left me behind, running effortlessly, leaping over logs and ducking beneath branches fast as a deer. We made it less than a quarter mile before I had to shout after her.

“Hold up. We need to stick together so we can cover each other.”

She stopped, way ahead, perched on top of a rock, turned back and called, “You know that old joke about how if you’re chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear, just your slowest friend? It’s like that. Sorry.”

I thought about demonstrating my favorite version of that bear joke by shooting her in the knee, but instead I said, “Go ahead then. You’ve got a handful of shotgun shells left and a pocket pistol, while he’s got two dogs, a horse, a bird, a death ray, and keeps coming back to life. So I’m sure it’ll work out splendidly for you.”

“It always does.” But Sonya hesitated, torn, but the sound of barking must have convinced her I was right. “Fine, but try to keep up.”

“Except you’re going the wrong way.” I pointed the direction I thought the road would be. If I did have reinforcements coming, they’d find us faster by the road than blundering deeper into the woods.

We kept running, and Sonya’s light stayed ahead of me, only at least now she was stopping to let me catch up once in a while. Thankfully, the underbrush wasn’t too horribly dense here, so I only tripped half a dozen times. From the noise, the dogs were getting closer, and every time I crossed a gap without trees, I could see that damned glowing bird had re-formed and was above us again. Only it had learned its lesson and was flying high enough that it would be really hard to blast out of the sky again.

I was going as fast as I could, sweating, my face and arms continually scratched by thorns, yet the hunting dogs were getting closer. Then I realized that there was only one animal barking behind us. The other had gone silent. Instinct told me the quiet one was circling ahead while the loud one herded us toward it.

“Sonya! Wait!” Except she had gotten too far ahead of me again and didn’t hear me that time. Her light kept bouncing away. I’d tried to warn her to stay close, and now she was going to get eaten by a demon dog. “Damn it.”

Behind me was a new noise, and it was a sound that brought back memories of running from the Fey. The thunder of hooves. When the Drekavac’s horse had re-formed, it must have lost the high-speed ghost hover and come back in a more terrain-appropriate form. It turned out the Drekavac liked to make a lot of noise, because it let out a sound that sounded like a higher pitched wolf’s howl. It was a frightening noise because you could feel the savage joy of the hunt in it, like the monster wanted its prey to know it was having a good time.

I shined my light back the way I’d come from and, sure enough, the fog was getting closer. I assumed the thickest part represented where the monster was coming from, and there was really only one spot here wide enough to ride a horse through.

“Okay, you want to play, you son of a bitch?” I dropped my pack and pulled out the experimental device Milo had given me. “Let’s play.”

Milo didn’t have an official name for his new, nasty little smart mine yet. He was still trying to think of a cool acronym featuring the words Explosive, Quick Deploy, Area, and Denial. The rest of us just called them Milo’s spider mines on account of all the legs. I stuck the bottom spikes into the packed trail dirt, aimed it where I thought the Drekavac would have to ride through, pulled the safety pin, hit the arm button, and then ran like hell to get away from the evil little machine before it went nuts.

Thirty seconds after I pushed the big red button, the IR targeting lasers turned on. They served the same purpose as trip wires, only there were eight of them, instantly. And as an added bonus, if our monster didn’t set it off, the lasers were on a timer, so it would go inert fast, hopefully before some innocent hiker tripped over our unexploded ordnance. Milo was considerate like that.

I think the default on the timer was thirty minutes but it could be turned up or down, depending on the mission. I didn’t need thirty minutes though. I barely needed two before the Drekavac’s mount broke one of the lasers.

BOOM!

It was only a pound of C4, but it had pre-segmented wire wrapped around it for shrapnel. One coil silver. One coil iron. I couldn’t see them because of the trees, but from the awful noise radiating through the whole forest, I’d nailed the horse. The scream abruptly died, and somehow I knew it was because the Drekavac had put it out of its misery.

Not that it wouldn’t just come back to life again anyway, but at least it bought us some time. I kept running, trying in vain to catch up with Sonya before the dogs got her. And they were definitely after her rather than me. The noisy hound had passed by on my right and was now ahead of me. I never even saw it through the brush to get a shot. I’d bet anything it was chasing her right into a trap.

“Sonya, look out!” But then I lost my footing on a steep downhill and ended up sliding on my back through the leaf scatter, light bouncing crazily through the trees, unable to stop until I caught a log with my boot.

“Face me, Hunter.”

I looked back and saw the Drekavac standing on the crest of the rise above me. He hadn’t waited for his horse to come back to life but had pursued me on foot. The monster had its sword in one hand and the blunderbuss in the other.

“You will pay for meddling in my—”

He didn’t get to finish that sentence because I shot him with Abomination’s grenade launcher.

The 40mm round got him square in the chest. The resulting explosion flung flaming monster pieces every direction.

I got up and ran after Sonya, hoping I could reach her in time. I heard her surprised cry over the barking. The trap had been sprung. There was a gunshot, and then another. One of the dogs yelped.

I crashed through the brush until I blundered into a clearing. The flashlight I’d given Sonya was lying on the ground, still on. There was a glowing blue spot, still flickering with weird fire, where one of the dogs had gotten blasted. The other one was at the base of a tree, snarling and leaping, scratching at the bark because Sonya had climbed up into the branches. She had dropped the empty shotgun but fished the little .380 out of her pocket and was trying to get an angle to shoot the dog below her.

I saved her the effort and put a load of buckshot into the back of its head.

“About time,” she shouted as the dog dissolved. Then she hopped off the branch, which had to be ten feet up, to land effortlessly on the ground. “I thought you said you could protect me.”

“You’re not making it easy.” I looked around, trying to get my bearings, and it was then that I realized that she hadn’t just run off without me, but she’d done it in the wrong direction again, and taken us farther away from the road. “You’ve got a horrible sense of direction in the woods.”

“That’s kinda embarrassing actually, considering my family tree. It’s a long story.”

“Save it. Come on.” I pointed. “This way.”

Sonya retrieved the light and shotgun. “What was your name again? Opie?”

“Owen. Now stay close because I can’t help you if you’re running off like a—”

There was a hissing crack as the lightning bolt hit the tree Sonya had been hiding in. The trunk blew apart, throwing chunks of wood in every direction. The shockwave put me on my ass.

I sat up, blinked a few times, and realized the newly re-formed Drekavac was stalking through the trees toward us, manipulating its archaic weapon, probably to reload. How do you reload lightning? But I didn’t have time to think through magical weapon logistics. “Run!”

Getting to my feet, I cranked off several quick shots in the Drekavac’s direction. Rather than let me kill it, this time the monster ducked behind a tree trunk. Maybe it only had so many lives, or maybe it was just tired of having to pull itself together. Either way, it wasn’t shooting at me for a second, so I fled.

I crashed through the forest as fast as I could. Sonya’s light was bobbing along ahead of me. At least this time she was heading in the right direction. It wasn’t until I’d gone too far to go back that I realized I’d lost my gear bag when the lightning had struck. Most of my kit was back there in the clearing. I kept my light pointed straight ahead so I could see the ground, because if I stumbled here, I was probably going to get flash-fried.

There was another hiss-crack as the Drekavac fired. The lightning hit a stump next to me and ripped it to pieces. I could feel that impact in my lungs. Dirt rained from the sky. I vaulted over a waist-high boulder, turned around, and snapped off two more shots at the Drekavac, forcing it down. It probably expected me to run, but instead I waited a second, sight on the spot where I’d last seen the Drekavac. And the instant the pilgrim hat rose into my vision, I pulled the trigger.

The hat went flying and the Drekavac stumbled out of view. He hadn’t disintegrated into sparks that time, so I’d probably only winged him. I moved up on him, aggressive, searching for the glow, looking for a shot.

And then his damned falcon hit me right in the head.

It had dropped out of the sky like a bomb. The only reason I didn’t lose an eye to a talon was that it struck my flipped-up night vision first. The PVS-14s got torn off, but better them than my face. It screeched, pecked, and scratched at me, wings beating around my head. It was a lot bigger than it had looked in the air, with a wingspan longer than I could stretch my arms.

I punched it out of the air.

The ghost falcon hit the ground. I shouldered Abomination and fired. I was so close the buckshot dug a hole in the ground right through the bird.

Then one of the dogs came out of nowhere and bit my arm.

I roared in pain as its fangs sunk into my flesh. Searing cold crawled up the limb. It hit right near where the reptoid had gotten me earlier, so it really fucking hurt. The jaws clenched and the dog pulled, dropping its haunches, trying to drag me off my feet.

My left hand was on Abomination’s foregrip. I hit the button to pop out the bayonet and stabbed it right through one burning eye. I shoved the silver blade through the dog’s head until the point popped out its opposite ear hole. The jaws unclenched as it dropped dead, black skin crumbling to nothingness.

Then the other dog jumped on my back.

I went down hard enough to catch a mouthful of trail dirt. It was on me. I managed to roll over as it snapped at my face. I managed to get one hand on its head, trying to hold it back, but it was like wrestling a block of ice. Its teeth were going for my throat.

And then its head popped and all I could see for a moment was a shower of blue sparks.

Sonya was standing there, with smoke rising from the end of her double barrel. “Quit dicking around and let’s get out of here.”

I was actually surprised that she’d not kept running. I grunted as I got to my feet. “Thanks for coming back.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of it.”

We stumbled through the woods. The teeth marks in my arm burned. I could still move all my fingers so it hadn’t severed any tendons, but I switched Abomination to my left hand because it hurt less that way. We kept on for a few more minutes, as the fog seemed to dissipate a bit, and there was no sign of the animal menagerie from hell.

“You’re not going to bleed to death, are you?” Sonya asked.

“Not anytime soon I hope.” I shined my light on my arm and winced when I saw it was a bloody mess.

“I don’t see any more glow. Do you think he’s gone?”

“Not a chance.”



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