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

on, Georgia is lousy with nymphs, those stuck-up bitches. Alabama has to have them too. But anyways, even kodama come in different forms. Yokai aren’t like humans in that they’ve got a sort of fixed shape with some variations. Yokai can get weird. Mom’s branch of the family can easily pass for human, so they live among them and usually like them. They traditionally try to protect people and do good. But she had this one cousin, who was kind of psycho from what I hear, and he’d gone on this revenge-fueled murder spree in New York City. She was trying to stop her cousin, and it turns out my dad and MHI were trying to catch him too, and long story short, they totally hooked up.”

“It’s the classic love story, boy meets yokai. Boy gets yokai pregnant. What’s all that got to do with why you need millions of dollars fast?”

Sonya became deadly serious. “I have to save my family’s forest.”

She let that hang, like I was supposed to be shocked by this revelation or something, but I was just confused. “What?”

“It’s the forest my branch of the kodama are connected to. It’s my ancestral homeland. It’s the place that links the two worlds. Don’t you get it? It’s in danger. Humans used to leave it alone because they thought it was haunted, but the Hunters there chased off the last of the evil yokai in the area so people weren’t as afraid as they used to be, and they started moving in. Big business doesn’t care about the local superstitions anymore. They’re going to develop it. Log the trees and bulldoze the stumps and put strip malls on it. I have to buy all the land to keep them from doing that.”

I rolled that over in my mind. “Huh . . . ”

Now it was her turn to say, “What?”

“That’s way more Fern Gully of you than I expected. No offense, but you just struck me as the pragmatic type.”

“I’m not some hippy, you big dope. I’m doing this for my mom. She’s connected to that land. It’s her anchor to the spirit world. If it goes, she goes. Not fast, like instantaneous death, but she’ll weaken and become mortal, and start to age like a human. She tells me she’s okay with that. Like ‘it’s the way of things. All things change. Blah blah blah.’” Sonya made quote marks with her fingers. “Screw that! Most of the kodama in Japan have already faded away, same as most of the spirit beings that used to be super common on this continent. I can’t let my mom wither away like that.”

“So you need a few million bucks to buy a bunch of trees?”

“Have you priced Japanese real estate lately? I need that much to start!”

For someone descended from forest spirits, her blundering around in the woods earlier hadn’t exactly struck me as someone who was one with nature. Sonya saw my incredulous look and must have realized what I was thinking.

“Yeah, I know. I’m a city girl, born and raised. My mom tried to keep me away from the natural world as much as possible. I think she was afraid I’d hear the call of the wild and go feral or something. I guess kodama do that once in a while. No danger there. I like electricity and showers.”

“Have you ever even been to this family forest?”

Sonya got a little defensive. “Not really. See, there’s . . . well . . . let’s call it clan law that kodama aren’t supposed to ever mix with humans, so Mom has been declared an outcast, eternally banished—only she likes living in America better anyway so she’s fine with the decree—but I’m considered a half-breed disgrace and would be destroyed on sight by the old kodama. So I’ve never actually been there. The pictures make it look nice though.”

“Dang. Your mom’s family sound like racist assholes.”

“It’s more speciesist than racist. But I’m not buying that land to protect those crusty, stuck-up, decrepit old losers. I’m doing this for Mom. Now do you understand why it’s so important that I sell this stupid rock for as much as I can get?”

“Which is why you slashed Gutterres’ tires and ran off when somebody made you a better offer. That sure worked out well for you. So who was on the phone?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say her name, but she made a real compelling argument with a lot of zeroes on the end of it.”

“She?” That was curious. There weren’t very many things which would know where a monster like Phipps was hiding in order to send Sonya to a certain doom, which would also be keeping tabs on MHI’s affairs, and be motivated to screw with us, so I immediately thought of my mother-in-law. “Did she have a Southern accent and call you hon?”

“No accent, though she had one of those smokey voices. Sultry, you know? But it wasn’t an affectation for right then either; I bet she always talks seductive to everyone. That’s her default.”

That made me scoff. “And you made that psychological workup based on one short phone call there, Criminal Minds?”

“Trust me. I can change voices like I can change faces. Accents, inflection, tone, piece of cake.”

“Yeah, I heard you sing.”

“Now, that I do for fun. But one of my gifts means that I can tell a lot about people just by looking at them or listening to them. I figure it’s genetic. Mom’s people survived thousands of years because they could watch humans and then blend in with them. It doesn’t do much good to be able to look like anyone if you aren’t good at pretending to be them too. So I can get a read on someone fast.”

“Yet you were still gullible enough to walk into a trap.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you? Whoever she was, she’s a super good liar.”

Susan Shackleford was cunning, but this didn’t sound like her MO. She would’ve just killed Sonya and kept the Ward for herself, not farm that out to some other