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

was one of the perks of a good marriage, you see each other at your best and your worst, but you still like each other anyway.

“You’re beautiful.”

“You’re just delusional because you’ve been on the road too long. I need a shower.” Julie smelled her armpit and then made a grossed-out face. “But anyways, I’ve got a team of smart people trying to figure out how to remove the Ward from that girl’s hand. I called for backup Hunters and everybody else is prepping the compound’s defenses now. The Catholics sent us their file on Drekavacs. We’re breaking the good stuff out of the armory. It’s all hands on deck.”

“Hang on a second.” I knew her moods way too well. “You’re actually excited about the prospect of this thing attacking us tonight, aren’t you? You’re pumped for this.”

Julie flashed me a sly grin. “What do you think? I’ve either been playing mom or running this company while you’ve been flying around to exotic locations having stakeouts and car chases. You’re damned right I’m looking forward to doing some real monster hunting. I’ve already arranged for a babysitter.”

“Atlanta’s hardly exotic.” Well, DragonCon was actually kind of nuts, but I didn’t need to go into that. “How’s the Chunk?”

“He’s taking a nap. Speaking of which”—Julie peeled her shirt off—“hurry and get naked before he wakes up.”

Actually, being married has several perks.

* * *

For the first time in decades, the Shackleford family estate wasn’t actively under construction. Most of the time I’d been here, we had been fixing the old mansion from one crisis or another. Julie was actually good at home repair and power tools. I was good at heavy lifting and reaching things that were high up. Between the two of us, and a few complicated things where Julie’s pride had actually allowed for us to hire contractors, we’d finally gotten the place fixed. Which meant that now we could actually sit in our kitchen and eat in peace, not surrounded by tools and drywall dust.

Julie and I sat at the table, eating sandwiches, while we waited for Ray’s sitters to arrive so we could go to work. Ray played on the floor, brutally whacking his toys with a plastic squeaky hammer, a useful skill that he had probably gotten from me. Dispensing blunt force trauma had come in really handy in my career.

“So who did you get to babysit?” I asked, because after your kid has already been kidnapped once by the forces of evil, you tend to get kind of paranoid about that sort of thing.

Before Julie could answer, the black blob that was lying beneath the kitchen table declared, “No need babies sat. Mr. Trashbags protect Cuddle Bunny’s Cuddle Bunny.”

“Shhh . . . He gets sensitive about that,” Julie warned.

I sighed, because I had once again inadvertently hurt the feelings of the Saint Bernard-sized eldritch abomination that lived in my house. “Sorry, Mr. Trashbags, but you need backup.”

The blob rolled out past my bare feet and looked up at me with seven blinking eyes. He loved Julie and Ray unconditionally, but he was still kind of suspicious of me. “Mr. Trashbags nanny.”

“I hired Shelly to be the nanny, but you get to be assistant nanny.” Julie took a handful of potato chips and dropped them on the floor for her loyal pet shoggoth to devour. “We know Mr. Trashbags is the very best at protecting us.”

Two mouths full of weird-looking teeth formed on Mr. Trashbags’ amorphous form to gobble up the chips. He formed a third mouth to keep talking. “Shelly Nanny good. Mr. Trashbags more gooder.”

It had taken me some time to get used to having Mr. Trashbags around, since the first time we’d met he’d been a multi-ton killing machine who had tried to steamroll me. He was from a different dimension, but he had demonstrated his total loyalty by saving Ray and Julie’s lives on multiple occasions in Europe. Plus Julie was really fond of him, so now he slept in one of the downstairs bathtubs and ate our trash.

“You’re both good,” Julie assured him. “Just good in different ways.”

“Shelly Nanny is biped. WEAK.”

“But she also has opposable thumbs, can reliably operate a telephone, and can cook human food for Ray,” Julie pointed out.

Mr. Trashbags made a strange gurgling noise as he thought that over. “Mr. Trashbags procure nourishment for Cuddle Bunny’s Cuddle Bunny.”

“You tried to feed him a dead mouse,” I shouted.

“Tiny mammal was food,” Mr. Trashbags stated without irony, which also explained why we no longer had a vermin problem around the house.

“Ray didn’t even have that many teeth yet!”

“It’s okay, I’ve got this.” Julie reached over and patted my hand to get me to chill out. “Just remember, Mr. Trashbags, who’s in charge when Cuddle Bunny isn’t here?”

“Shelly Nanny,” Mr. Trashbags said with resignation. “Mr. Trashbags serve Shelly Nanny.”

“And what do you do if anyone tries to hurt Ray?”

“CONSUME!”

“Good boy,” Julie dropped some slices of lunch meat on him, because she knew that Mr. Trashbags would straight up eat anybody who tried to mess with our kid.

Once we finished eating we started staging the gear we wanted to take for the night in the living room. The rows of Shackleford family portraits looked down approvingly as the pile of guns grew. To be fair, I was anthropomorphizing the paintings because not all of the Shacklefords had gone into the family business, and the ones who had stuck with Hunting, most of them were dead now. Julie came from a big family, but the paintings hadn’t been updated since she was a kid, and she didn’t really keep up with any of the multitude of uncles, aunts, and cousins who’d bailed out to lead normal boring lifestyles. For Monster Hunting royalty, the Shackleford family’s numbers were getting a little thin on the ground now.

Long before the doorbell rang, we were alerted that someone was coming. After the events of the last few years, we had really beefed up this place’s security system. There were motion sensors everywhere. The