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CHAPTER 12

Stakeouts are dull. There’s no other way to put it. Every minute feels like five, and hours crawl by in a painful manner. You can’t read a book or magazine or anything because you don’t want to lose track of time and miss the person you’re looking for, so you’re stuck listening to the radio. Except the radio drains the car battery, and eventually you have nothing but idle conversation to pass the time with. It’s doubly horrible when you have to stay night after night while everyone else takes turns rotating out. Since I was the only person who could actually see through the hag’s glamour, I had the luxury of sitting in the car for hours on end.

After returning from the amusement park, I barely had enough time to shower and swap out gear before I had to turn around and head out to Hollywood to try and spot the hag, and that’s what I had been doing fruitlessly ever since.

The others got to keep looking for the werewolf, and I was jealous. My life now consisted of boredom, staring, and chitchat with whoever I was partnered up with that night. I’d change cars and positions to keep from sticking out, but it was always at some vantage point on the same block in sight of the Siren’s Last Call. It did no good for the rest of my team to watch for the fashion model, because if a hag could create one fake identity, she could create more.

It was midweek so the club would be quiet until the weekend. Hags were supposedly nocturnal, and our assumption was this was her lair. Except if we kicked in the door and went in, and we were wrong and nobody was home, then she’d bolt and we’d never catch her. So we would have to wait until I spotted her, then act.

Lizz and I were on the first night, and she’s always a hoot to hang out with. She had stories from her days back with the St. Louis team that had me rolling in stitches. The Gateway City might not be the most active area when it came to monsters, but since they responded to everything from Indianapolis to Kansas City and all the way up to Minneapolis sometimes, there were some crazy things that popped up from time to time, often caused by people messing with magic or necromancy. Bored Midwestern teenagers were a perpetual danger to society.

When Melanie took her place, we’d had a nice talk. The girl had really grown on me since training. My initial take on her had been way off. Sure, she was softer than most Hunters, but she wasn’t squeamish. It turned out she had wanted to go to law school, and do the strong, career woman thing, and was still thinking about trying that after socking away a few years of nice Monster Hunter paychecks. But then she spent the rest of the night talking about how jealous she was of her older sisters who’d settled down and how cute their babies were. Yeah, girl, life is complicated.

The next night, up first was Kimpton, who really is a sweet guy, but outside of killing monsters and pro baseball, his conversation skills were surprisingly limited. He mostly kept to himself, taking catnaps and running out to get food when we needed something. He never once brought up meeting my family, and I kind of felt like he’d gotten over that. Not being a baseball fan much myself, we mostly sat in silence while watching the hag’s nightclub.

It was Justin who showed up to take the midnight-to-dawn shift. I was surprised to see him here, since he’d done so much avoiding me over the last few weeks. He walked up with two coffees and a bag of snacks, knocked on the passenger window to make sure we were awake, and then climbed in the back seat before Kimpton could get out to leave, which meant he probably had something to report.

“What’s up, guys?” He passed me one of the coffees.

“Isn’t that other one mine?” Kimpton asked.

“Naw, you get to go home and crash. You don’t want strong stuff. This shit’ll keep you awake all night. Before you go, though, no luck finding the hag’s accountant. Too bad Melanie never got his last name. But we got hold of the paperwork and this club’s owned by a shell company that’s owned by another shell company. I don’t know all the details, but Rhino was complainin’ about Swiss bank accounts and shit like that.”

“So our hag’s got money, and that accountant she brainwashed is pretty good at his job.” I sipped the coffee, and Justin wasn’t kidding about it being strong. It also tasted like licking a tire. Thankfully, Justin handed me some Sweet’n Low packets. “Anything else?”

“With the full moon coming up fast and being on the lookout for two different monsters at the same time, Rhino broke down and called ’bama to see if they could send some temporary help.”

Normally I’d be prideful enough to take offense at that, but we still hadn’t seen any sign of Nicole, I was stuck here for eternity, and Rhino was on crutches. “Who?”

“The Boss’s brother, Leroy. He got some big contracts to negotiate for us out here anyway, so we’ll pick him up at the airport tomorrow. You know him?”

“That’s one Shackleford I’ve not met,” I said. “I hear he’s good, though.”

“Good? Cat’s a legend.”

“I heard he once killed a wendigo single-handedly,” Kimpton said.

“No way.” I snorted. Earl, maybe. A regular human beating a wendigo by themselves? Wasn’t going to happen.

“Someone said that President Ford personally offered to appoint Leroy as head of MCB,” Justin said. “Only he told the president straight to his face that whole outfit should be disbanded in shame and their office space turned into something honest and dignified, like a whorehouse.”

Kimpton laughed. “You know, after what happened to my unit in Cambodia, the MCB offered me a job? That’s how they recruit agents. Just like MHI talks to survivors, MCB tries to keep it to people who are already in the know, only it’s military and government types. They said I’d shown I had skills, and did I want a job? And this was barely five minutes after they’d threatened to make shit up and court-martial me and throw me in prison if I ever talked about what I’d seen. Can you imagine?”

“Same thing for me, kinda,” Justin said. “Marines run into some freaky weird shit in the jungle. They say that’s Top Secret and they’ll kill us if we blab, dig? Thing is, I didn’t get a fancy federal job offer out of it. Uh-huh. I wonder why? You ever seen a Black MCB agent?”

Come to think of it, I hadn’t. “Beesley was the only woman I know of.”

“And probably the last, after she damned near got her head taken off.”

“Don’t feel bad, man, we get paid a whole lot better than those assholes. Now I’m going home.” Kimpton opened his door and got out. “Don’t have too much fun.”

“See you, brother.” Justin took his place in the front seat, closed the door, and held out the bag of snacks. “Pork rinds?”

I was terrible at staying kosher, but I already had one god grumpy at me, so I should probably try to stay square with my adopted one. “Naw, I’m good.”

And then we sat there for about ten minutes of awkward silence, watching a nearly empty street. It was so dead it wouldn’t have surprised me if a tumbleweed had blown through.

“Kimpton’s a good dude,” Justin said out of nowhere. “Solid.”

“I agree.”

“It takes him a while to warm up to people. It’s because of what happened to him after he got back from Nam.” Justin kept eating. “I bet he was a cool customer before that. Had faith in his country, pledged allegiance to the flag, apple pie, all that bullshit. So him and all his friends getting used and abused and treated like shit and killed, all while nobody seemed to care if they lived or died, then getting spit on and called a baby killer when he got home . . . You see why he’s slow to trust folks now.”

“What’s your deal, then?”

He chuckled. “I got spit on before I left. When you expect the worst, you don’t let your guard down. I rarely get surprised.”

“I bet finding out someone you thought of as a friend was the daughter of a bloodthirsty Aztec god was quite the surprise.”

“It’s a kick in the nuts.” He brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Ain’t gonna lie.”

“So why’d you volunteer to be here tonight?”

“Rhino threatened to beat my ass with his crutch if I didn’t take a turn.”

I laughed. “I knew he’d catch on with the leadership thing eventually.”

Justin laughed too. “Even crippled in a cast, that motherfucker’s scary.”

Luckily, Justin brought other snacks too, so I reached over and grabbed a bag of potato chips. “I can’t believe you were going to try and set a hundred pounds of explosive on fire with toilet paper.”

“Improvise, adapt, overcome.”

“I’ve heard that before as improvise, adapt, survive.

“I might’ve slightly underestimated how fast I could get to cover. Or, how likely the snake was to bite me in half . . . Which, by the way, thank you for saving my life.”

De nada. You’d do the same.”

Justin mulled it over. “Yeah, I’d probably try. So it’s kinda pointless me being an asshole to you in the meantime . . . We cool?”

“We’re cool.”

One reason I loved this job, Monster Hunters tended to be honorable people.

* * *

The next night’s first shift I got Alex, and I couldn’t get him to shut up. He also brought snacks and had plenty to talk about, mostly regarding mythological beings from history and his personal theories of how monsters became intertwined with these myths. It might have been a fascinating conversation but at this point I was stir crazy and easily annoyed. Staying up night after night, watching a club from a distance wasn’t exactly fun. To be fair, Alex’s book smarts were interesting, and I did learn a lot about how mermaids were not manatees like everyone claims these days. Sailors might be imaginative, but even they weren’t that desperate.

“Sailors aren’t so drunk and stupid we’re going to mistake a sexy, clam-shell-bikini mermaid for a big honking manatee.”

“I’m just saying that I’ve seen drunken sailors hit on mannequins in storefront windows.”

The Siren’s Last Call was only open from Thursday evening to the early hours of Monday morning, which left three days during the week for the hag to clean the place up. Or, conversely, do whatever it was that hags did. In fact, with the exception of the night when Agent Orwig was killed, we had never spotted the hag outside. It was irritating when a monster wouldn’t show its ugly face so we could just kill it.

I’d floated a few ideas to the team but without any way to test them, we were going on the assumption that the hag was simply living in the basement. Considering we couldn’t find any current plans on the building at either the county or city planning commission’s office—and those bribes hadn’t been cheap—we were shooting in the dark with this thing.

MCB had been useless. They knew what we knew, but they were playing their cards close to the vest. If they were keeping an eye on this place too, they were way better at being unnoticed than we were, because I’d not seen any of them.

Hollywood after midnight was actually quiet during the workweek—not completely asleep, but there was definitely less going on. There were a lot of bums wandering around, but this was to be expected wherever the police didn’t patrol as much, and I rarely saw them here. Some of the homeless had stolen shopping carts from a nearby grocery store, and it was sad to see them shuffling around with all their life’s belongings gathered together in a simple little cart.

Two of them were working their way down the sidewalk toward us, picking cans out of the gutter to sell. They were bundled up in coats, hoods, and hats, probably because it was the best way to carry every bit of clothing they owned.

“Man, that’s messed up,” Alex said.

“Do not—I repeat, do not—give them any money. If they knock on the window, ignore them.”

“Charity’s a good thing, Chloe, and we’re going to get more money off that snake bounty than these guys have seen in their lives.”

“You want to feed the pigeons, don’t do it on company time.”

“That’s cruel.”

I had worked undercover in the underbelly of Cairo. He had no idea no idea what cruelty looked like. “I had this same conversation with Melanie. We’re on a stakeout. You give them money. They’ll come back, and their friends will come back, and then the crowd looks suspicious, and the target will know we’re here.” I’d already had to chase off a couple of guys who wanted to squeegee the windows. “Don’t make my life more difficult than it already is, Alex.”

“Alright . . . Hey, I think whoever is in that car is checking out the club.”

Sure enough, someone had pulled onto our street and slowed to a suspicious crawl in front of the nightclub. The headlights were coming our way.

“Duck.”

He did, and I scrunched down in the seat too, so I could barely see outside. I’d parked in the shadows. So many streetlights had been burned out that had saved me from having to use the BB gun I had stashed in the trunk for bulb busting. Destroying city property was better than getting spotted by a hag.

It was a muscle car, and from the noisy rumble it had a gigantic engine. Though I could only see the shape of the driver, from the sheer mass of him and that big square head, I knew right away who it was. Somehow, despite me trying to hide in the dark, I had a suspicious feeling that he’d seen me anyway, but he kept driving.

“Well, hello, Agent Franks.”

“Is that the big scary one you were telling us about?” Alex asked from beneath the dash.

“Franks makes Rhino look like Lizz.”

“Why do you think he’s here? Hey, if the hag was seducing Orwig, maybe she found a new MCB agent to ensnare! That would explain why the MCB hasn’t just raided the place.”

I didn’t know Franks hardly at all, but from what I’d seen I doubted very much than anybody or anything had ever ensnared that man. Watching in my side mirror, I saw that Franks stopped in the street about a hundred yards away, then backed into an alley. I lost sight of his car, but the headlights shut off, so he’d parked.

“I’m going to go see what he wants. Stay here and keep an eye on the nightclub.”

“Okay. Be careful, Chloe.”

When I got out, it was unseasonably cold, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, and started walking toward the alley.

The car was a turquoise Dodge RT with white racing stripes, and though I wasn’t a car person, from the way the engine was so big it had to stick out through a hole in the hood, I got the feeling this thing was very fast . . . and also not a government-issue vehicle.

Agent Franks had gotten out and was clearly waiting for me. He was still in the very-inappropriate-for-a-stakeout suit and tie and was unwrapping a sandwich. I think his dinner might have been a thick pastrami on rye, but I couldn’t be certain in the dark. At least, my stomach thought so, because it reminded me I had been munching on the terrible treats Alex had brought with him and I’d not eaten a proper meal in days. Alex was a terrific Hunter but the boy had a sweet tooth that dentists were going to pay their mortgages off with.

Being from the office that controlled my exemption status, Franks could make my life miserable, so I tried to keep it polite. “What can I do for you, Agent Franks?”

Ignoring me, he shoved almost half the sandwich in his mouth and started chewing. I’d seen dogs with better manners. I waited patiently as Franks seemed to contemplate shoving the second half in his mouth before he swallowed and deigned to give me an answer.

“Your job.”

“If you didn’t notice, I’m trying to do my job. What are you up to, then?”

“You don’t need to know.”

It was too late in the night for this, and I was too weary and hungry to keep up the polite act. “Why are you being such a prick?”

He seemed to think this one over between bites of his sandwich, and I was beginning to wonder if he was trying to come up with an answer that would irritate me the most. Most MCB agents I could charm, or at least get them to answer a few questions before chasing me off. Franks, however, seemed immune.

“Alright, if that’s unanswerable, then how about this? I told you about who Orwig was with before he died. Hags are deadly fairy creatures. I told you where we last saw her. Right over there, and why we think she’s the owner. Why isn’t the government rousting the place?”

He scowled, which told me he had wanted to kick in that door. “It’s complicated.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“Really? You can’t even tell me that?”

Agent Franks shoved the last of his sandwich into his gaping maw, chewing noisily as he mulled it over.

“Is there any question you’ll actually give me a straight answer? Good sandwich?”

He shrugged. The guy was as communicative as Rhino on a good day. I don’t know what it was about people who preferred to communicate in as few words as possible, but it was starting to piss me off. The nagualii, though, was calm and quiet. Which . . . was unusual.

“Oh wait, don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. Sandwich quality’s a matter of national security. That’s classified too, isn’t it? Nice car, Franks. Yours? Oh wait, don’t tell me—I don’t need to know, it’s classified.”

While I went off, Franks held up a Styrofoam cup and loudly sucked from the straw.

“I’ve not seen you guys for days. What’s MCB doing here now? Wait, I think I got this—it’s classified. Is that a soda or tea you’re drinking? Let me guess. Classified.”

He paused and looked at me, a curious expression on his face. If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn he almost smiled. Something I said must have been funny to him. Or he just had indigestion from eating his sandwich in three bites. There was no way to be certain with the man. I was beginning to have a serious dislike for the hulking brute of an agent, even more than I had for the average MCB agent.

“Shut up and listen.” He tossed the now empty cup on the ground. “MCB can’t touch her. This hag’s got diplomatic immunity.”

“She’s a hag! They’re dangerous and super evil! Even if she’s from some court the government has cut a deal with, she was obviously meddling in MCB business, and it can’t have been for any good reasons!”

He nodded, like, No shit, Sherlock.

“Who made that stupid decision?”

“Classified.” And it almost seemed like he enjoyed saying that, because it was one word while you don’t need to know was five. It was like I’d given him a helpful suggestion on how to save four whole words a day.

“Hang on . . . That’s why you’re here like this. Your hands are tied. Mine aren’t. Until MCB gives MHI the official word to back off a particular monster, as long as they’re PUFF applicable, we’re weapons hot.”

Franks said nothing.

“Holy shit, you’re off the government reservation, aren’t you, Franks? You know this thing’s a menace as much as I do, so you’re going to slow-roll the on-the-record orders for us to leave it alone, so the private sector contractors can kill it for you and save you the red tape hassle.”

Franks shrugged his massive shoulders and began walking back to his car.

“Can you at least confirm if this is her lair, and I haven’t been wasting my time?”

“She’ll be beneath the club during daylight.” Franks got in the car and closed the door, but his window down. “You’ll need to access an eskrathidor.

“What’s that?”

Franks stuck an envelope out the window, and I took it. “You’ve got twelve hours before getting ordered to back off.” He started the engine, and it was so loud, that I reflexively put my hands over my ears. If that car got more than a mile a gallon I would have been stunned. “This conversation never happened.”

Franks drove away and left me alone in the stinky alley.

I opened the envelope and inside was a single sheet of paper. With Franks’ car long gone it was too dark to read, but I was curious enough I let my eyes shift so I could at least see what it was. It appeared to be the typed MCB case notes and a summary of an interview with the still hospitalized Agent Beesley, time stamped tonight, about what she’d found out investigating their deceased SAC.

Well, this is interesting. Our hag was probably the city-destroying threat the Court of Feathers had warned me about, and she was somehow politically connected enough that she could get someone to pressure the MCB to back off, even though this case involved Fey, werewolves, human sacrifice, and dead agents. Any of those things would normally be enough to send the MCB on a rampage.

With the clock ticking and a lot of work to do, I hurried back toward my car.

I heard glass breaking. Then a gunshot echoed through the empty street.

“Alex!”

With my eyes still changed, ahead of me I could see that one of the two bums we’d spotted picking cans out of the gutter had fallen into the street. The other one was violently pulling Alex out of the passenger-side window. He was struggling and yelling, but got dragged out and hurled to the sidewalk, where I lost sight of both of them.

I drew my pistol and sprinted toward the car.

The one Alex had shot was getting back up, and though I had mistaken it for human earlier, with its hat and scarves knocked off, this thing clearly wasn’t. What I’d taken for malnourished skinny was actually dangerous wiry. It was wearing fingerless gloves, but those weren’t fingers sticking out the end. Those were claws.

The bum heard my rapid footfalls approaching and turned to growl at me. The mouth opened, revealing a tongue that was a cross between a knife and a suction cup.

Blood fiends are nasty things, twisted and deformed. Shorter than the average human, they have a reddish tint to their skin that becomes more prominent the more recently they’d fed. Judging by how white this one was, I’d say it must have been on the verge of starving.

I didn’t even slow down. I just raised the Browning one-handed and started popping off shots. I’m no master pistolero, especially shooting on the move, but I made up for that in volume. A couple bullets missed, but a few others hit.

Puffs of filth flew off the fiend’s dirty coat. It screeched, fell to all fours, and ran down the street, trying to get away.

Alex’s shouting had stopped.

“Hang on!” I went around the trunk of my car, gun up, rushing stupidly. I should have slowed down, checked the blind spots, but a fellow Hunter was in danger. The nagualii warned me Alex wasn’t the only one in danger. The second blood fiend was nearby and radiating hunger. The heavy stench of coppery blood filled the air. The monster was feeding.

I found them on the sidewalk. The blood fiend’s claws were holding Alex down, feeding on him through the little mouth protrusions in its hands. It had been so starved and distracted by feasting that it either hadn’t heard the gunfire, or simply didn’t care.

“Leave him alone, you bloodsucker!”

The blood fiend looked up at me and hissed. It released Alex and started to stand up, hands spread wide, like, What are you gonna do about it, bitch? The tiny lamprey mouths in its palms were opening and closing and dripping Alex’s blood.

It stumbled when I put two in its chest, but quickly recovered and charged.

Instead of trying to meet the monster head-on, I used its momentum against it, caught it by the coat, and flung it against my car, hard enough to dent the door. I was furious. The nagualii was furious. And when I hurled the fiend across the sidewalk and into the light pole, it bounced off the iron with a bone-snapping clang.

They hadn’t been expecting something like me.

Except the second one had circled back, run up the hood of my car, and tried to leap onto my back. If I’d not heard its shoes hitting metal, it would have gotten me, but I ducked and turned, and it hit the concrete where I’d just been. I fired, but at a really bad angle, only hitting it in the leg. As the blood fiend hissed and retreated, I lined up another shot, and this one struck its shoulder and clearly punched out the monster’s back. An unearthly shriek of agony erupted from its throat.

Both fiends were upright, but they were trying to get away, awkwardly scrambling from the bullet wounds and broken bones. All of my instincts screamed at me to chase them. When prey runs, the cat takes it down.

Alex moaned.

It was their lucky day. Run, you little bastards. I rushed to Alex’s side.

There were circular bites on his chest, arm, and neck. Blood was flowing freely. If I didn’t do something soon, he was going to die. “Hang on, Alex. You’re going to be okay.”

Alex couldn’t even say anything. He just kept his hand pressed against his neck, eyes wide, terrified he was going to die. It looked like he might be right.

“Just keep pressure on there.”

I rushed back to the car, yanked open the door, and grabbed the first aid kit. I spilled Alex’s bags of sugar snacks in the process.

“Okay, get your hand out of the way.” Only I didn’t even really need to say that because he’d already passed out. I ripped open a bandage and got that on his neck, because that looked to be the worst of his injuries. Alex groaned weakly. My night vision is difficult to describe in human terms, in that I could still see colors, but everything was more greyed out. Even then, I could tell Alex was deathly pale. A few more seconds and it would have sucked him dry. I had to get him to an emergency room, fast. There was one only a few blocks from here.

The blood fiend had managed to pulled Alex out of the car but thankfully hadn’t taken him far. Dragging his limp body along the sidewalk, I hoisted him back into the seat. He was a lot heavier than he looked.

* * *

The next hour was frantic and jumbled. I was barely tracking anything going on around me. Alex’s heart stopped minutes after he arrived in the ER, so the nurses performed CPR on him while hooking him up to a few machines. I told them not to give up on him because he was stubborn. They told me to get out of the room.

I called HQ from a hospital pay phone. Lizz had been in tears but I’d told her I thought everything would be okay.

When hospital staff came to update me, they told me that a doctor had managed to suture his jugular vein. That was all they had for me, and no idea if he was going to live or die.

A couple of beat cops arrived after the intake nurse had called them, suspicious because it looked like someone had tried to slit Alex’s throat. I told them we’d been attacked by a couple of transients with knives. They wanted to know what the two of us had been doing in Hollywood at that hour, as if we’d brought this upon ourselves.

I suppose, in a way, we had.

Luckily, Kimpton and Justin arrived, and they were in the state of mind necessary to run interference with the cops, and direct them to speak with somebody in the know, who’d tell them to shut up and accept our bum with a knife story at face value.

The rest of the team got there a little while later, including Rhino walking on his crutches. We sat in the waiting room all through the night, hoping to hear something, anything. The emergency room staff were polite but firm in not letting us go back to see him. Justin paced angrily around the waiting room while Melanie simply sat next to Lizz, holding her hand. Nobody looked at me. I don’t think they blamed me, but at the same time I’d been distracted by Agent Franks and hadn’t been expecting to be ambushed by blood fiends. They might not have blamed me, but I sure did.

I passed around the notes Franks had given me. In her interview, Agent Beesley said she had been suspicious that Special Agent in Charge Orwig was on the take, and she had evidence that he had covered up several monster incidents in the LA area over the last few months. Her theory was that some powerful entity had her hooks into him and other important political figures, in order to avoid attention while it put together some kind of monstrous operation in the city. From the cases Orwig had squashed, she suspected this force was an alliance consisting of renegade Fey, werewolves, a necromancer, some miscellaneous undead, and . . . a pack of blood fiends.

There was nothing else we could do except wait. It felt like the longest few hours of my life.

Rhino wasn’t the waiting type, though, and I’d never seen him this mad. One of his Hunters was hanging on by a thread, and we knew where the ultimate culprit was sleeping, and we had just one morning available to murder the bitch. He told me he’d call me when it was time, and then he went to work.

Just before sunrise a surgeon came out, and the way he hadn’t wanted to look any of us in the eyes told us the news wasn’t good. Alex was alive, barely, but he had lost so much blood that they weren’t sure if he was going to pull through or not. He told us to pray because it was in God’s hands now.

Good idea, only I had a different, angrier god in mind to talk to.


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