Chapter 1
A couple years ago my company picked a fight with an ancient chaos demon. The last round had ended in a bloody draw. Nobody knew when our battle would kick off again, but when it did, we had a new strategy to put that immortal bastard down once and for all. My idea was to harness the power of Isaac Newton’s crazy space magic in order to kick some monster ass.
The only problem was alchemical super weapons don’t exactly grow on trees. We’d had one once but used it up obliterating a Great Old One. There were only a handful of Ward Stones left on Earth, and mankind had lost the secret of how to make new ones. Except we had just gotten word that one of the rare treasures was up for grabs. Which was why two teams from Monster Hunter International were currently staked out around an office park in Atlanta, waiting for a supernatural arms deal to go down, in the hope that we would be able to steal the arcane equivalent of a suitcase nuke from the forces of evil.
My name is Owen Zastava Pitt and I have the coolest job in the world.
* * *
“Z, anything on your side?” my boss asked over the radio. Earl was in a car parked at the end of the block.
I was sitting in the back of a nondescript work van parked down the street, watching the front of the building through a pair of binoculars.
“Nothing new, Earl. Just the same bunch of security guards standing around looking bored.” The muscle had been hired by the shady legal firm which had arranged this transaction, but as far as we knew the guards were regular human beings, who probably had no clue what they’d gotten involved in, which meant us hurting them would be illegal.
“Alright, keep your head on a swivel.”
Trip was sitting in the back of the van with me and checked his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. “We’ve still got a little time before the mystery buyer is supposed to show.”
“And lunch hour traffic is terrible around here, especially with the convention in town, so don’t be surprised if he’s late,” said our driver. He was a new guy on Boone’s team named Hertzfeldt. “Who do you think the buyer is going to be anyway?”
“No idea.”
“If this deal’s even real,” Hertzfeldt muttered. “We’re putting in a lot of effort over an anonymous tip.”
It had been Management who had notified us about this sale on the Dark Market. The billionaire dragon had tried to bid for the item himself, but apparently he didn’t have enough baby souls or whatever horrible thing it was these particular scumbag monsters had wanted in trade. But since most of the rank and file of MHI didn’t know of Management’s existence, we had to keep our tipster’s identity secret.
“Trust me, man. The info will be good,” I assured the Newbie. “And with the sellers being PUFF-applicable, we’ll still get a payday out of this no matter what.”
That didn’t seem to placate him much. Hertzfeldt had come out of the company’s last training class, so I barely knew him. He was still pretty new to all this weird stuff, but he knew his way around Atlanta, so he had been assigned to drive me and Trip around in the surveillance van. The local team had been divided up so that each of us out-of-towners had a guide who actually knew the area. Which was good, considering half the streets here seemed to be named Peachtree something for some baffling reason.
While we waited, Hertzfeldt tried to make small talk. “Hey, Pitt, if you don’t mind me asking, there’s this rumor going around about when you all went to that Russian island, that . . . well . . . ”
“Yeah?” But I already knew where this was going.
“It sounds nuts, but they told us in training that you got trapped on the other side for six months. But there’s no way that’s true, right?”
Get stuck in a dimension made out of hunger and nightmares for half a year one time, and everybody has to freak out about it. It had been hard, but the guys I had rescued from the Fey had been there way longer than I had. I’d gotten off relatively easy compared to them.
“Yeah. It’s true.”
I could see him looking at me in the rearview mirror. I didn’t know what Julie had told the last Newbie class about that place, probably about how the whole warped dimension could twist reality on a whim, and it had been a dumping ground for banished and lost monsters, but whatever my wife had said, the idea of me spending that much time there seemed to unnerve the Newbie. He was probably thinking what the hell did I sign up for?
“What was that like?”
I’d fought mutants, Fey knights, and faced off against the immortal embodiment of Disorder. I’d barely survived by sheer stubbornness and a desire to see my family again, but that was none of his business, so I just waved it off by saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
Luckily, Earl Harbinger got back on our radio net and saved me from having to talk about that miserable suck fest further. “Holly, how’s it going in there?”
Holly Newcastle and a couple other Hunters were seated at the outdoor patio tables of the little restaurant next to the target location. “All clear here. Just businessmen having lunch. I don’t see anyone who looks particularly culty. The lobster bisque is excellent though. Over.”
I keyed my radio. “Save your receipts. The company will reimburse for that.”
“In that case, I’m ordering the bottomless mimosas.”
“Don’t lie, Holly. We all know you already did.”
“Guilty as charged.” But Holly was professional enough she’d keep the day drinking to a minimum. Probably. There were still death cultists to tail back to their secret lair. Plus we would have to deal with the mystery buyer, who we could totally shoot if it turned out to be something PUFF-applicable. Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund bounties were our bread and butter.
The intel Management had given us was limited because the Dark Market had really beefed up their information security after my wife had killed a bunch of their regular clientele in Europe. We didn’t know the buyer’s identity at all, except they were from out of town. The sellers were local, and we were pretty sure we knew what they were because the Atlanta team had been hunting them for months. Management had confirmed that the place we were watching was the neutral location they’d agreed upon to make the exchange, and when our dragon was certain of something, it usually panned out. He had sources everywhere.
The area seemed remarkably normal. Our target was just a regular business, next to an architectural drafting company, a brew pub, a graphic design shop, and a little plaza with benches and a fountain. It was broad daylight, on a nice afternoon, with dozens of witnesses wandering around. You’d think monsters would prefer someplace more . . . gothy. Or at least shadowy and menacing or something. Hell, there was a food truck selling tacos. Tacos are the antithesis of evil.
The building we were watching was one of those bland, featureless, two-story brick places. With a nebulous, forgettable name on the little sign like Insert Strong Word Here Consulting, or Nobody, Nobody, and Douchebag LLC, where you could never guess what they actually did inside. Such businesses were common and unnoticeable, which I guess made them perfect for monsters to secretly conduct their affairs.
“Milo, Skippy, how’s the view from up there?” Earl asked.
“Nothing suspicious yet, Earl.” Milo answered cheerfully. “These drones are really neat though.”
The two of them were on the roof of one of the nearby high-rises so they could have an unimpeded radio signal. Earl had wanted some eyes in the sky for this operation, but our giant noisy helicopter would have been super obvious. Luckily our supremely skilled orc could fly just about anything, even by remote control.
In the background of Milo’s radio could be heard a deep voice grumbling, “Skippy make tiny thing do the tricks! Whee. Barrels roll!”
“Stop that,” Milo insisted. “It’s not a toy!”
He wasn’t kidding. The invoice for the drones was still on my desk. Milo had taken Earl’s instruction to get something nice to mean max out the company card on high tech surveillance gizmos. Between the actual flying machines, and the really expensive software package they used, it probably would have been cheaper to buy Skippy another Russian attack helicopter. If our orc crashed one of those drones, Earl was going to be severely annoyed.
“I’ve got some activity at the back.” That voice belonged to Boone, the experienced Hunter who had been the Atlanta team lead since I’d started with the company. “There’s a black SUV coming up on the parking garage. I bet this is our seller. Hold on. Make that two, no, three SUVs. We’ve got us a convoy.”
“So much for just having to handle one delivery minion,” I said to the other guys in the van. “Our tip told us that the seller was supposed to come alone.”
“Think it’s a setup and they’re just going to rob the buyer?” Hertzfeldt asked.
“No way,” Trip answered. “A rip-off would bring the Dark Market down on their heads, and even dumb monsters aren’t that stupid. As valuable as this thing is, it’s no surprise they’re rolling heavy. From what Julie said about their rules, the seller is responsible until the buyer takes physical possession. If it gets lost before that, they’re still on the hook, and these things do not like to mess around when it comes to contract enforcement.”
From what Julie had learned in Europe, that was the understatement of the year there. The Dark Market was an illicit underground organization that horrible creatures used to make deals. My wife had told me a really unnerving story about watching some poor German kid get sucked down to hell or someplace equally awful for not reading the fine print on one of their contracts. Sad part was the only reason we knew anything about that organization at all was because my kidnapped son had been the prize in one of their auctions. Except thankfully Julie had ruined that deal, and by ruined, I mean she shot a lot of scumbags in the face and got our boy back.
One of the security guards in front of the building got a message on his radio, probably to notify him about the VIP’s arrival, because he snapped at the others to look sharp. Cigarettes were stubbed out and cell phones were put away.
I scanned the street through the binoculars, but still no sign of the buyer. The taco truck was busy and had a decent crowd waiting in line. It was Labor Day weekend, but it wasn’t as hot as usual, so people were sitting around the plaza, eating and having a nice time. There were other people walking by, but nobody was heading toward the unremarkable building of boredom.
A bullet bike drove past our van. The rider was obviously female. Though she was wearing a helmet, the riding outfit was so formfitting it didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Hertzfeldt whistled appreciatively. Even Trip, who tried ever so hard to always be the gentleman, obviously noticed her, though unlike the Newbie, he at least tried not to stare. Plus, Trip was currently in a serious relationship and if there was ever anybody who took the concept of loyalty seriously, it was Trip.
The rider slowed down enough that I thought for a second she might be our mystery buyer, but then the bike passed by the front of the building and kept going.
Boone got back on the radio. “They’re getting out of their vehicles and heading inside. I’m guessing snake cultists from the sleeve tats, but there’s one larger figure wearing a hood and a mask and carrying a big red backpack. That’s got to be our seller. Way he’s dressed, he’s gotta be the real thing.”
“Nasty-ass reptoids.” Hertzfeldt shuddered.
So only one of the sellers had come. By their standards they were still within the terms of the auction contract, because from what I’d heard, the lizard monsters thought of their human cultists more like pets than equals.
“Alright, everybody,” Boone said. “The stone is probably in the backpack. We let the deal go down, let them part ways, then Team Harbinger nails the buyer, and my boys will tail the snake morons back to wherever they’ve been hiding so we can clean out their nest.”
“We can’t make that call until we see who the buyer is,” Earl cautioned. “I know these scaly assholes have been a thorn in your side, Boone, but if we have to choose between letting them get away, or grabbing the package, the package comes first. That’s the big picture. Keep your eye on the prize.”
“Roger that,” Boone obviously didn’t like it much, because when a tribe of reptoids moves into your city, starts eating people, and idiots start worshipping them and doing human sacrifices in exchange for dark magic blessings, that gets super annoying. However, Boone had been at Severny Island and seen the world-ending magnitude of the threat gathering there. He knew what was at stake. It wasn’t every day MHI could score an Isaac Newton original capable of smoke-checking a chaos god.
“No matter what we’ll stick at least one car and one of Milo’s drones on the lizard lovers’ convoy.” Earl said. “Things that mostly eat the homeless really piss me off too. It’s not like those folks don’t already have it hard enough already without being terrorized by reptoids.”
“Thanks, Earl.”
I noticed a car approaching from the opposite direction. The blinker came on as it slowed to enter the parking lot. “This is Pitt. I’ve got something in front. A silver BMW sedan is pulling up to the front entrance now.”
The car stopped. Two security guards moved to get the rear door. Oddly enough, I noticed that one of the men was carrying an umbrella. He popped it open to protect the new arrival from the sun.
“Curious.” Trip raised his new camera with the giant telephoto lens and took a picture. Milo hadn’t been the only one to go nuts putting new equipment on the company card once given the surveillance excuse. “Somebody must have requested shade.”
“Maybe it’s a vampire,” Hertzfeldt suggested.
What a Newbie thing to say. I started to correct him, because it would take way more than an umbrella to protect a vampire from bursting into flames beneath the sun, but then I watched a very tall, very thin, very pale man unfold himself out of the back seat. Once safely under the umbrella’s shade, he checked out the street, his eyes hidden behind odd persimmon-colored sunglasses.
“This is way worse than a vampire.”
Trip, who almost never used profanity, simply said, “Aw, shit” when he recognized the buyer.
“You know that albino guy?” Hertzfeldt asked, worried.
“Unfortunately, yes.” I got on the radio. “We have eyes on the buyer. And, uh . . . Earl?”
“Go ahead, Z.”
“Promise not to hulk out.”
“Spit it out already.”
I looked over at Trip, grimaced, then reluctantly pushed the transmit button. “It’s Stricken.”
The radio was silent for a long time. Trip and I exchanged a very nervous glance, because Earl hated Stricken probably more than anyone or anything on this plane of existence. To be fair, we all hated the former head of Special Task Force Unicorn, but for Earl, it was really personal.
“Are you sure?”
Holly got on the radio. “I can see him too. I can confirm it is Stricken. If I can get a clean shot, want me to blast him?”
“Naw. I’ll handle that son of a bitch,” Earl snapped.
On the bright side, Stricken no longer worked for the government, so murdering him was no longer off the table. The word was that the Feds had busted him for committing hundreds of felonies, up to and including treason. Last I heard, he was a fugitive being hunted by the MCB. So if Earl lost his shit, went all werewolf, ripped Stricken’s head off and kicked a field goal with it, it wouldn’t be that illegal. Heck, there might even be a reward.
It was Boone who had the guts to point out the obvious. “Hey, Earl, good buddy, what was that thing you were just telling me about big picture keeping our eye on the prize?”
The reply came a moment later, because no matter how angry he might be—and enslaving his girlfriend into a secret government monster death squad tended to make a man righteously angry—Earl was still a professional. “Alright. That’s fair. Priority is grabbing that package. But once we have that in hand, Stricken’s mine.”
I looked at Trip again and shrugged. I could almost pity anybody who ended up on the receiving end of Earl Harbinger’s wrath. To his people, Earl was a good friend and great leader, but to his enemies, Earl was a terrifying force of unrelenting murder. But this was Stricken . . . who frankly deserved it, so good. I went back to watching.
Flanked by umbrella guard, Stricken walked up to the entrance. Another guard held the door open for him but the former head of Special Task Force Unicorn stopped and scanned the street again. I swear his eyes lingered on our van just a bit too long, but that was probably just my imagination. He had been some kind of secret agent super spy, and we knew he routinely used dark magic artifacts that regular sane people would be terrified to mess with, but he wasn’t omnipotent. Though he sure liked to act like he was.
“Oh, man. Earl is gonna wipe the smug off his face,” Trip said.
“More like Earl is going to eat his face.”
“What?” Hertzfeldt asked.
Newbies weren’t in on the secret. Earl Harbinger being a werewolf was kept on a need-to-know basis. “Nothing.” I keyed my radio. “Stricken has entered the building.”
“The reptoid and six cultists have gone inside,” Boone said. “There’s at least four more I can see staying with their vehicles.”
“It’s showtime.” We had the place totally surrounded but knowing Stricken was the buyer changed things. He was a slippery bastard who always had a trick up his sleeve. A cold lump slowly formed in the pit of my stomach. I’d gone from wary but professionally confident to having a vague sense of unease. Stricken had that effect on people.
Trip asked, “What does Stricken want with a Ward Stone anyway? He claims to be trying to defend Earth from Asag too. You think he wants it for the same reason we do?”
“Maybe. With that slimeball, who knows? I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and as skinny as he is, I bet I could get some serious air on the toss.”
“So . . . ” Hertzfeldt interjected. “I take it you guys got some history?”
“We do. Stricken used to be in charge of . . . well, let’s just call it a federal agency. He’s lied to us, used MHI, risked all our lives for his personal gain, and is basically the poster child for that saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely.”
“Luckily for us, he got fired,” Trip said. “So now it’s game on.”
I ran the binoculars across the plaza, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Stricken didn’t have the full might of a secret government black ops unit at his fingertips anymore, but he still struck me as the sort who’d want lots and lots of backup, especially when dealing with a bunch of backstabbing lizard people and the morons gullible enough to worship them as deities. Except everything seemed really normal. Maybe too normal. Which was when I noticed something that felt a little off.
“Trip, check out the taco truck. Notice anything weird?”
It was one of those hippy-dippy, brightly colored, urban-trendy kind of things. Where the food was usually overpriced, used the word “fusion” a lot in its menu, but tended to be really tasty. Trip watched it for a few seconds. “Well, I guess the dude taking orders in the window is white. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white dude work in a taco truck before.”
“Stop being racist. Tacos are for everyone.”
Trip snorted.
“I mean watch him. He’s busy, but since Stricken’s arrived he keeps glancing toward the target. Gut feeling. I think he’s watching the place, same as us.”
“Maybe . . . ” Trip snapped a picture, then blew it up on the camera’s screen. “Hey now. Look at that.”
“What?”
“Imagine taco guy without the beard, glasses, or hair net and tell me who that looks like.”
Skinny beard, blocky hipster glasses. It was a decent disguise, but . . . I started to laugh. “Oh, man! It’s Grant!”
“Who?” our poor Newbie asked, perplexed as usual.
But I got the radio instead. “This is Z. Attention everybody, the Feds are here. MCB is staking the place out too.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Earl asked.
“Either that or Grant Jefferson’s twin brother is slinging artisanal tacos for a living.” Of all the Monster Control Bureau agents I’d met, I knew Grant the best. Hell, I’d broken his nose once, so I was pretty sure that was him. Having the Feds here was bad, but worse, last I’d heard, Grant had been partnered with the single scariest thing in the federal government’s arsenal, and that’s saying something about people who have intercontinental ballistic missiles and the IRS. “If Grant’s here, Agent Franks is probably nearby too.”
Earl didn’t say anything over the radio, but I knew from experience right now he would be using a whole lot of profanity, because the MCB’s presence ruined everything.
We were private contractors. We had an excuse to be working here because reptoids are PUFF-applicable monsters. Boone had a great working relationship with the Atlanta PD: so long as we were discreet, the locals stayed happy. But the Federal Monster Control Bureau were the supreme law of the land when it came to anything related to keeping monsters secret from the public, and they had the authority to tell us to go pound sand. Since they had jurisdiction over all things magical, they would also seize the Ward, and we’d be shit out of luck.
I searched for other cars that might be doing the same surveillance thing as us. There were a bunch that had been parked here the whole time, and several of those had windows tinted enough that I couldn’t see if there was anyone sitting inside. There could be a tac team waiting across the street for all I knew. Hell, with the MCB’s insane budget and how much they wanted to catch Stricken, they probably had a spy satellite overhead.
“How do you want to proceed, Earl?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Better think fast,” Trip said, though he certainly didn’t say that over the radio.
I heard the motorcycle engine before I saw it. The same bike that had passed by a minute ago had turned around and was coming back, only much faster this time. She zipped between a few slowly moving cars, turned into the parking lot, and stopped right next to Stricken’s BMW.
I hit transmit. “A white and red bullet bike just arrived at the target. Female rider, dressed all in black. Can’t see her face with the helmet. I don’t think security was expecting her, though. They’re headed her way aggressively.” Of course we couldn’t hear anything from way over here, but it was obvious the guards were telling her to move along. Nobody, Nobody, & Douchebag was currently closed to the public. She ignored them, put down the kickstand and took off her helmet. Trip snapped some pictures.
“The rider is an Asian female, late teens or early twenties. Maybe five foot five or so.” It was hard to estimate from this distance, but she appeared really young and relatively petite compared to the beefy security thugs who were telling her to hit the road. She shook out her long black hair, smiled at the nearest guard, and then whacked him upside the head with her helmet.
Before I could key my radio she’d sprung off the bike, spin-kicked another man in the neck, and judo-tossed the next guy across the trunk of Stricken’s BMW. “We’ve got some action here.” I tried to provide a play by play. “The girl’s jumping on the car. And she just leapt on a security dude’s head! She’s monkey-crawling onto his back. He’s flailing! Oh shit, she’s got the choke. That girl’s riding him like a pony!”
“Slow down.” Apparently, Earl didn’t appreciate my color commentary. “What’s happening?”
“The rider is beating the hell out of the guards. Really well too!”
“Everybody hold your positions,” Earl ordered. “Do you recognize her, Z?”
“Never seen her before.” The last two security guards charged, but she rolled off the one she’d been strangling, ducked beneath a clumsy swing, and palm-struck that poor fool in the nuts so hard that all three of us in the van winced in sympathy as he collapsed. Then somehow, she pulled off a leg sweep like something out of Mortal Kombat, which put the supervisor flat on his back on the cement. She ran for the door, having plowed through a wall of meat in just a few seconds. “And she’s inside. Okay, that was really impressive.”
“Like human impressive, or supernatural impressive?”
“Hard to say.” I’d better get this one right, because there was a vast gulf between how we were allowed to deal with human beings versus how we dealt with monsters. She’d had surprise on her side, but physics were unforgiving and weight classes existed for a reason. That waif-fu stuff where tiny ballerina-looking women routinely beat the hell out of guys my size only happened in the movies. “Probably not all human.” But as soon as I said that, umbrella guard was hurled through the front window and landed in the bushes about ten feet away. I couldn’t have thrown him that far, and I was built like a model for protein shakes. “Amend that. Definitely supernatural.”
With nothing to see at the building besides some dazed and battered security guards, I turned the binos back toward the food truck. Sure enough the taco vendor was headed toward the door, ditching his hair net and pulling off his apron. From how fast he was sprinting, yeah . . . that was Grant. He’d always been a motivated sort. Several of the people eating lunch around the plaza must have also been MCB, because they jumped up, pulled the handguns they’d been concealing, and rushed toward the building too. I reported that to the others.
“This is Holly. A table full of people just bolted from the restaurant without paying their bill. I’m guessing undercover Feds.”
“Damn it.” A whole lot of our effort and scheming had just been flushed down the toilet. Apparently, we’d not been the only party tipped off about this deal.
“I see Feds swarming toward the back too,” Boone confirmed. “Bad guys are busting out guns. Looks like they aren’t going down without a fight.”
The MCB were always gung-ho, so Earl was probably going to order us to retreat to keep us from getting shot or arrested. Whenever the MCB decided that MHI had been meddling in their business, it turned into a legal nightmare. But Earl surprised me. “Everybody hold your position. We’re just watching. If MCB sees us, we’ve got a valid excuse for being here.” He must have really wanted that Ward Stone . . . Or more likely, he was hoping to see Stricken get shot while running from the law. If that jerk tried to resist arrest with Agent Franks around, Franks would probably handcuff Stricken, then pull his arms off to use them like nunchuks to beat Stricken to death. That would be hilarious.
Several unmarked cars along the street were suddenly moving to block off the parking lot. Red and blue lights started flashing. This was a pretty big show of force for the MCB to use in public, but Monster Control Bureau was really good at pretending to be other mundane federal agencies when they needed to. The running MCB agents reached the front of the building. Most of them went through the door, guns drawn. The rest started handcuffing the downed security guards. Stricken’s driver got yanked out of the car and thrown down on the pavement to get cuffed. Nobody was dumb enough to resist.
But who was the biker girl? Was she with the MCB? Only that didn’t feel right. They’d held their position when Stricken had arrived. They hadn’t freaked out and revealed themselves until she’d rushed in, like her sudden and violent arrival had forced their hand.
The building was three stories tall. And long before the Feds had a chance to make it up the stairs, one of the big windows on the top floor shattered. That must have been where the meeting was being held, because a man—probably one of the snake cultists from the tats—crashed through the window. A second later the biker girl leapt through the window after him.
Somehow, she hit the parking lot feet first, rolled, and popped right back up, seemingly unharmed. I couldn’t say the same for the snake cultist, who’d landed flat on his back. Her sudden arrival surprised the MCB agents, and I got my answer as to whether they were on the same team when she throat-punched one, kicked another in the knee, and ran. Trip took pictures.
She now had a big red backpack.
A female agent tried to shoot her, but the rider slid toward her like she was stealing home plate. There was a pop pop as the MCB agent launched a couple of desperate rounds—too high—before the girl hit her in the legs. The agent did a flip. The girl hopped back up and onto her motorcycle. She’d even picked up her helmet during the slide. Not only had that been damn near Earl Harbinger speed, it had been smooth.
As much fun as it was watching the MCB get their asses kicked, I wasn’t even going to try and narrate what I’d just seen to the others, so I just told everyone, “I think the rider’s got the Ward Stone. She’s making a break for it.”
Tires squealed, and then the bike took off, crazy fast. The girl popped a wheelie through the parking lot. Feds had to leap out of the way to not get run over. She hit the street on both wheels and accelerated, zipping between cars.
“Follow that bike!”