Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC Larry Correia (all ebook reader .txt) 📖

now. So . . . about which one of us needs Newton’s device?”

“I don’t honestly know.” I’d accidentally woken up our world-ender while trying to stop their world-ender several years ago. “One wants to enslave us and use humans for food and entertainment, and the other wants to obliterate the whole universe. It’s like choosing would you rather have lung or colon cancer?”

“I’d prefer neither, but one threat at a time.”

“Flip a coin?”

The Vatican Hunter ate the last of his hotdog and thought about it while he chewed. He swallowed. “Sadly, the decision will be made for us if someone else, like your MCB, gets to Sonya before we do, and then neither of us will have it.”

I looked at the wall clock. It was almost midnight. “And the Drekavac will be after her at sundown again tomorrow?”

“Perhaps. When I leave here, I’ll go directly to a church where I can perform some rites over this head.” He thumped the cooler with his shoe. “That might slow it down a bit, buy us a few extra hours maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Cursed beings of this nature are tenacious. They are only set free when they have a contract to fulfill, so they take a great deal of perverse joy in their work. We need to find Sonya before he does.” Headlights pulled up out front. Gutterres looked over, saw that it was one of those tall Mercedes-Benz vans, and said, “These are my reinforcements. I must go.” He stood up.

I gave him one of my cards. “I’ll have our archivist pass on everything we know about Koriniha in case she’s connected to your problem.”

“I appreciate that, and we’ll do the same for the Drekavac. I recognized this one from the descriptions. This particular creature has been around since the 1600s.”

“Not shocking, considering his fashion sense.”

“The first time my order encountered him was in the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials. As a man, he was a judge, trusted to be righteous, who instead made a pact with evil in exchange for immortality. What you saw tonight is only a fraction of his capabilities. He’ll only grow stronger the more you kill him. We’re all in great danger. My organization isn’t very keen on working with others, but in this case, I will strongly suggest to my superiors they may want to make an exception.”

“I think that would be wise.”

“We’ll be in touch.” A bell rang as Gutterres walked outside. The van door slid open, and there were two really tough-looking guys sitting inside with carbines slung over their plate carriers. I’m pretty sure those weren’t local clergy. Gutterres got in and they immediately took off.

“That half-Chinese fella seems kinda high strung,” Bonnie declared from behind the cash register.

“He doesn’t work for us. Different . . . company.” We’d shaken on it, but that didn’t mean I could trust him. They were almost certainly going to grab Sonya as fast as they could and not tell us a thing. I waited until Gutterres’ van was down the road a bit. Then I got up. “Could I see that phone you let the girl use?”

“Sure, hon.” She reached beneath the counter and pulled out an old plastic phone. “Here you go. But I thought your cell was working again?”

“It is. But I’m going to hit redial and see who Sonya called.”

“Oh, the girl didn’t call nobody. It was the weirdest damned thing. Somebody called her.”

“Really?”

“It was funny timing too. Nobody ever calls here at night. It’s pretty dead usually. Anyways, as soon as she picked up the phone to dial, there was somebody talking to her. She must’ve picked up before the first ring, but anyways, whoever it was got her to stop and listen to them.”

That didn’t sound like a coincidence at all. “Did you hear what she said?”

“Oh yeah, sure. She seemed real confused, but then she got all excited, perked right up and said that was way more than she’d already gotten paid so far.”

Son of a bitch . . . Somehow—I looked at the security cameras suspiciously—someone had known where Sonya was, and made her an even better offer for the Ward. “Are your cameras connected to the internet?”

“Oh, those aren’t hooked up to anything. The cameras quit working years ago. I leave them up to scare off shoplifters.”

It had to have been some form of magical scrying then, which narrowed down the possible suspect pool considerably. I was going to be extremely pissed off if it turned out I’d been tailed by an invisible gnome all night. “Did she say anything else?”

“She said she knew where that was, it was a bit of a drive, but she was on her way and then hung up. Too bad I didn’t realize she was about to steal my Hyundai, bless her heart.”

“We’ll get your car back, I promise. I’ll even get it detailed.”

“What if you don’t find it?”

“Then my company will replace it with a new one as an apology for inflicting her upon you.” I mainly didn’t want Bonnie filing a police report and complicating matters. MCB monitors that kind of stuff.

“I’ll take your word, on account of the other ones of you I’ve met being so damned courteous.”

I stared at the phone in my hand and tried to remember what the old trick was so you could call the last number that had called you on landlines. Bonnie must have read my mind.

“Star six nine, hon,” she said helpfully.

“Thanks.” Once I heard the dial tone, I punched that in. Except it didn’t do anything. The number was probably blocked, or maybe that service didn’t work anymore. I memorized the number written on the tape attached to the phone though, in the hopes that maybe Melvin could somehow look up who had called that recently.

I texted everything I’d learned and Bonnie’s license plate number to the other Hunters. Then, with no other investigative leads to follow, I used what time I had left to buy a whole bunch of snacks and sodas for the road. I had