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CHAPTER 14

Time was against us. We needed a plan but without Alex, I worried we might be floundering a bit as a team. The newbies were still in shock. They’d gone through training with Alex and had formed a very tight bond with him. Melanie and Kimpton were handling it as best they could but I could tell they’d been hit hard by him getting seriously hurt. Rhino was clearly bothered but he was doing his best to be stoic about everything. This was the most emotion I’d seen from him our entire time working together. Lizz, on the other hand, got her crying done already and was set to roll on the hag. Justin, I didn’t know, because he was at the airport waiting for Leroy Shackleford’s flight to come in, but he was tight with Alex too.

Me personally, each time a friend got hurt or killed, it stung and sucked, but I knew that the best way to honor them was to go kill more monsters. And we had a very narrow window to do that before the MCB came down on us like a ton of bricks. If we hit the hag after they told us to back off, MHI would be looking at fines, and Team Rhino would be looking at prison.

Back at headquarters, I told my team almost everything my father’s avatar had said to me. Even though the guy who was the most sensitive about my background wasn’t even here right now, I was mostly an open book. I told them I’d cut no deals, but got a supposedly killer knife. I didn’t mention the bit about it having belonged to my mom, because that sounded way to outlandish to be accurate.

Franks had told us to look up an eskrathidor, but sadly our smart guy who was into that kind of thing was occupied barely hanging onto life, so the rest of us were bumbling around, making long-distance calls to other teams to ask if they knew what that was.

After checking and packing our equipment, we gathered in the conference room to do one final rundown. We’d be on the move within the hour. We were also using Lizz’s nifty answering machine to screen our calls, because that way if it was other Hunters calling us back, we could pick up, but if it was the MCB telling us to leave the club alone, we just wouldn’t answer and then we could play stupid later. Plausible deniability.

The only building plans we had managed to snag from the county commissioner’s office of the club were hopelessly out of date. It was built beneath a multilevel structure, and the dance floor we had been on was the old storage cellar, which had been excavated and rebuilt to be its own business sometime after the Korean War. Sadly, it had been modified a lot since then. Kimpton had tracked down one of the contractors, but all he could tell us was that what had started as a warehouse area with lots of little cubby holes had been turned into a maze of rooms all connected to one central location: the dance floor.

Luckily, Melanie’s sense of direction translated well into going over architectural plans, and she remembered how the place was laid out a lot better than I did. “Yeah, that’s the dance floor, alright. Only these walls are all gone. This cubby over here? That’s where the bartender was set up. Bathrooms were two different rooms here and here. We sat about here.” She pointed at a seemingly random spot on the blueprint. “I could see there were hallways here, and here, but don’t know where they lead. And a doorway here . . . and there. But they never opened so I don’t know where they go.”

I had no idea, but I trusted Melanie’s judgment. “Okay, so we’re pretty certain the entrance to the hag’s prison is somewhere in the club.”

“Makes sense,” Rhino said. “Assuming your jaguar dad is legit.”

That could go either way, but we proceeded with the hope Tezcatlipoca wasn’t conning me somehow, and came up with a rushed plan of attack, and how we would sweep and clear the place.

“What sort of prison do you think this is?” Kimpton asked, leaning forward across the table.

“Bubble pocket dimension, more than likely,” Lizz declared as she entered the room. “I just heard back from Cazador. That thing Franks told you is an elf word.”

“A bubble what now?” Kimpton asked.

“A bubble from a different reality, stuck onto ours somehow,” Rhino explained. “Two different places existing in the same place at the same time. Usually with some kinda magic portal to go between them. Size ranges between a broom closet to something you could play football in.” Our commander may have looked like a lunk, but he’d been around the block and knew a thing or two about this business. “I hate weird magic shit.”

“Ayup,” Lizz agreed with Rhino. “Finding the entrance to that is gonna be hard if it’s camouflaged. Earl said they can be hidden in plain sight, or downright obvious.”

“Anybody have any personal experience in dealing with something like this?” I asked the group. They collectively shook their heads in the negative. I’d never seen one in person either. “Melanie, skim through Alex’s binders for anything about that or anything else that might be some kind of interdimensional prison, you dig?”

“On it.”

“We’re down a man, but we’ve got to work with what we’ve got.” Rhino was reasserting his command authority in our time of crisis. “I called the Seattle team, but there’s no way they can make it in time. Next closest is New Mexico. Same story. They’ll be here in time to take over if we fail.”

“There should be a Vegas team,” Kimpton grumbled under his breath. “We’re on an island here. Bad defensive position. Phoenix, Vegas, and LA would form a nice triangle. Think of the business we’d drum up and still be able to watch each other’s backs.”

“Complain about it later to the Boss. Focus on the problems we got now,” Rhino said with his command voice, because clearly the beaver incident had been humbling and educational for him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Justin’s on his way back with Leroy. Luckily, he was already on the red eye. While you were gone, Chloe, Lizz called that deputy from Lake Arrowhead to see if he wanted to come help.”

“What?” I looked Lizz’s way. “Tom Black’s not a trained hunter.”

“He’s a trained cop. He’s already shown us he’s got a cool head under pressure. He found out monsters are real and handled it fine . . . and too late, he’s already on his way and will meet us there.”

“I didn’t like that she involved a citizen without asking me first,” Rhino muttered. “That’s against company policy unless it’s an extreme case. That’s how you get friendly fire incidents.”

“I told him we found who was ordering his werewolf to attack folks, and he didn’t hesitate to jump in. If Deputy Tom gets killed, I’ll feel super guilty. In the meantime, we need somebody to watch the door if we draw attention, and he can at least flash a badge to make the looky-loos go away.”

Lizz had a point there. The club was in a basement, but we’d be making a lot of noise. “We’ve got a couple city works contacts who will take bribes. I’ll see if we can get the street shut down for road work,” I suggested. “That way if it spills out into the open we can keep the collateral damage down.”

“Already handled that. There’s going to be a”—Lizz made quote marks with her fingers—“broken water main there in about forty-five minutes.”

It was nice working with professionals.

Someone honked a horn in the Gasparyans’ parking lot. Kimpton went over and looked out the window. “Justin’s back. That must be Leroy with him.”

“Good.” The timing of his visit was fortuitous. I didn’t know Leroy, but I very much doubted there had ever been a Shackleford who wasn’t worth their weight in gold on a hunt. That family had just been born to fight and had the experience to match. “Alright, guys, any questions?”

There were none. They all had their assignments. Every single one of them had a determined look on their face. I hadn’t needed to worry about them holding up after Alex had gotten hurt, because Team Rhino knew what was at stake here. I glanced at the wall clock. Time was wasting. We had work to do.

“Get to it,” Rhino ordered. We all started off to grab our gear, but Rhino coughed to get my attention.

“What, boss?”

“I don’t like that Lizz is inviting park rangers or whatever the hell he is to the party, but having somebody else to watch the street means I can go in with you.” He tapped his leg cast. “Come help me get this off.”

“Marco—”

He cut my protest off. “I can’t help if I’m stuck here. I’m sick of that shit. This one’s personal. Everyone fights. No one quits.”

According to the docs, he was supposed to have it removed in two weeks anyway. I hoped that wouldn’t make much difference, but then again when I was a kid if somebody broke their leg, they simply tied a splint on the thing and hobbled on it until it healed.

“Damn it, Mendoza, I really need help cutting this thing off. Please?”

The fact that Rhino was using complete sentences and asking nicely told me just how serious this was. “I’ll grab a saw.”

* * *

We met our new arrival in the parking lot, and I had to admit Leroy Shackleford was a good-looking dude. Tall as his brother but lean instead of thick, Ray was built like he lifted weights. Leroy ran marathons. If I squinted a bit, it was like I was looking at a taller, handsomer version of Earl Harbinger. Rhino limped over to him, shook hands, then provided quick introductions.

“Nice to meet y’all. Now, I hear there’s some killing needs to get done.”

“You in, boss?” Rhino asked.

“Damned right, I am. I flew out to negotiate the final deal with your movie company lawyers.” He looked toward me. “Mendoza, right? Thanks for impressing the studio people, by the way. Big potential there.”

I shook his hand too. “It was only some zombies.”

“They said it was your quality customer service. But the lawyers can wait. Killing a hag sounds far more appealing than golf.”

“A Shackleford golfs?” I asked incredulously.

“I had to learn. It’s the fashionable way for millionaires to negotiate nowadays. I got pretty decent at the game, but between you and me, a golf course is a waste of a perfectly good rifle range.”

I’d never seen a Shackleford dressed in a tailored suit and Italian shoes before either. They were so pragmatic the fancy clothing seemed downright unfitting on one of them. Apparently Leroy seemed to think so too. “Anybody got something I can wear instead of this frilly nonsense?”

“We’ve got an extra kit inside,” Kimpton said.

“You happen to have a spare MG-42 or M-60 lying around? I don’t usually pack machine guns on business trips.”

“Right this way, sir.” Kimpton led him toward the office.

When Leroy was gone, Justin said, “Riding over with him, all I can say is that dude’s a badass.”

“Uh-huh,” Melanie agreed as she twirled one finger through her hair. “Is there a Mrs. Shackleford?”

“There was once,” Lizz stated flatly. I’d known Lizz could harbor a grudge but this was a level of hate I’d seen her save for monsters. “Only she turned out to be a coldhearted, money-grubbing, mean-as-hell manipulative shrew, who decided she hated Hunters and wanted nothing to do with us. She took their kids and left him. One nasty divorce later and now he doesn’t even get to see his sons.”

“So you’re saying he’s single now?” Melanie asked.

“Oh, calm down,” Lizz said.

“Just playing.”

We handled last-minute prep, and hashed out the long list of things that could go wrong. We didn’t know what we were up against. We didn’t know what kind of defenses would be in place. We didn’t even know what kinds of magic the hag could do, or even how to find her hidden chamber. To say there was a lot of nervousness would be an understatement.

Leroy came back a few minutes later, kitted up and looking like a proper Shackleford. I was surprised to see he was wearing an eye patch now. I’d had no idea he was missing an eye.

“The usual eye is a realistic fake, but it tends to pop out in a fight and I hate when it rolls around getting scratched up,” he explained. “Though I do wear the eye patch to negotiations if the client seems like they’d be impressed with the whole man of danger look. If the patch might scare them, I plug the fake eye in.”

“Smart.”

“Contract negotiation’s a science.” Leroy tapped the side of his head. “Psychology, Mendoza.”

Judging by how fast MHI had been expanding, apparently he was pretty good at it too.

“Alright, Team, this one’s for Alex. Saddle up.” Rhino spun one meaty finger in the air. “We’ll meet at the club.”


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