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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 workout.

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 Shackleford’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 romantic. 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.

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 spirit 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 superweapon 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 supergood 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.



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