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

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 Shackelford’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