Chapter 2
The Newbie punched the gas. Except there was no way this lumbering tub was going to keep up with her, let alone with her being able to weave through traffic. “Milo, Skippy, there’s a motorcycle heading south. She’s got the Ward. You got eyes on her?”
“Got her, Z. Skippy’s following.”
There was a bunch of noise, followed by lots and lots of gunshots. I couldn’t tell if it was from inside the building, the parking garage, or both.
Boone got on the radio. “Cultists are shooting at the Feds. We’ve got us a gunfight back here.”
“Get the hell out of there, Boone,” Earl commanded. The MCB wouldn’t want our help anyway and the last thing we needed was for one of us to catch a stray round. Knowing the MCB, they’d probably bill us for the bullet.
“Already moving. So much for quietly following these assholes home so we could pop them all at once. Stupid Feds.”
The MCB would be focused on their rapidly unfolding gun battle with the reptoid and friends. They were probably here for Stricken, not the Ward Stone. We could still salvage this. Earl must have seen the opportunity too, and immediately started giving a series of rapid-fire orders. The bike was moving fast, but we had an aerial view, and four vehicles in motion. Five, if Holly and the Atlanta Hunters she was with could get to their car before the Feds locked the plaza down. We just needed to stick with the thief long enough to find a place to corner her.
The biker kept accelerating. Hertzfeldt drove like a maniac. Which I guess was the default for Atlanta anyway. Angry drivers honked at us. We made several hard turns. I got tossed off my perch and ended up sliding around on the open floor of the surveillance van. If I’d known we were going to get into a car chase today, I wouldn’t have volunteered to ride in the vehicle that didn’t have any real seats in back. Trip was smart enough to climb forward and get in the passenger seat to buckle himself in.
“She’s trying to shake us,” Hertzfeldt warned as we careened wildly around a corner. Cars honked as we zipped through a red light.
“I doubt she knows we’re behind her,” Trip said. “She’s just trying to get some distance between her and that office before a hundred cops show up.”
“I’m going to lose her.”
“That’s fine. That’s what Skippy’s for. Everybody’s got their job. Yours is to not crash.” Trip keyed his radio. “This is the van. She’s too fast. We can’t maintain visual.”
All I could see was sticky van floor. Luckily Milo had the rider on camera and kept giving everyone directions. “She’s southbound on West Peachtree, passing Ponce De Leon.”
“What is up with you people and all the friggin’ peach trees?” I asked noone in particular. But this was where having the local team driving really came in handy. Boone’s team lived here. This was home turf for them. All Milo had to do was read street names off a computer screen and our locals would know how to box her in. I could hear sirens closing fast. The MCB’s antics had attracted the regular police. I struggled upright so I could see out the window. “I bet she slows down to avoid attracting attention now.”
Sure enough, once we were several blocks from the altercation, Milo told us that the rider had stopped zipping between cars and was now blending in and not breaking any traffic laws. That meant lights and congestion were going to slow her down, but it was better than drawing the attention of a cop. We’d mounted a police scanner in the van, and from the sounds of it, the local cops were pretty agitated because some unexpected downtown bust by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had turned into a gunfight. Good old MCB and their fake credentials.
“Okay, Hunters. Try to get close as you can without being seen and get ready for her to bail,” Earl warned. “We’re dealing with a pro. I bet you she’s got another vehicle stashed, or she’s got some other escape route planned.”
Trip told Hertzfeldt, “Keep gaining but try not to look like you’re chasing her.”
She went several more blocks and crossed over the freeway. I was glad she didn’t get on it. If she decided to open that bike up on there, I really didn’t know if our little drone could keep up.
“Oh, hell I forgot,” Boone said. “It’s Labor Day weekend. Can you guys grab her now?”
“Negative,” Trip responded. “She’s too far ahead.”
“Get closer or you’ll lose her in the crowds.”
But before I could ask what crowds, Trip pointed through the windshield. “I see her again.”
I was holding onto the back of his seat so Hertzfeldt wouldn’t break my neck. I spotted her too, a couple hundred yards ahead, and she was still wearing that big red backpack. If it was empty, and the Ward Stone was back with Stricken getting busted by the MCB, I was going to feel really stupid. “This is Z, we’ve got visual on the bike. She’s half a block ahead. Looks like she’s got the Ward.”
She was checking her mirrors, but we were driving normal now, and there were lots of unremarkable work vans like this in the city. But I was still getting a bad vibe. This was a busy part of town with a bunch of gigantic hotels. Which meant lots of parking garages and big crowded buildings to duck into. “What if she bails and goes into something Skippy can’t follow?”
“Grab that bag if you can but be extremely careful. Whatever she is, she’s dangerous.”
She was fast enough to beat up a bunch of goons and Feds and jump out a third-story window after brazenly robbing a former spy and some underground lizard monsters, so yeah, my money would be on very dangerous. I had Abomination in my gear bag, but a full-auto shotgun and grenade launcher might stick out a bit if I needed to hop out and follow her on foot. Abomination wasn’t exactly low key.
“She’s heading south again,” Trip said.
Milo confirmed that a moment later with some more street names, one of which, I kid you not, was Peachtree Center Avenue Northeast. But I was zoomed in, focused like a laser beam, watching that bike, because my gut was telling me something was about to go down. We were in the shade of a bunch of tall buildings. Traffic had gotten really snarled up. We were barely moving at all now. The sidewalks were absolutely packed with pedestrians.
“Crap. I know where we are,” Trip said.
“What?” As we crept closer, I realized there was a ton of people here. I’m talking thousands upon thousands of people packing the sidewalks. And most of them were in costume. Superheroes, GI Joes, anime characters, etc. “What the hell is this?”
“I was so focused on catching the reptoids I forgot to warn you guys about DragonCon,” Boone said.
“I should have thought of it myself,” Trip said apologetically. “I went last year. I took Polyphemus to thank him for helping us with the siege. I was kind of hoping we’d wrap this mission up fast enough I could go again since we’re in town anyway.”
“Is that the big party thing where you played dress-up?”
“It’s not dress up. It’s cosplay,” Trip corrected. “Poly needed a disguise to go out in public and you’ve got to admit my Witcher was amazing.”
The glamor shots he’d taken had been pretty badass. That’s what happens when an extremely physically fit geek also has crazy amounts of disposable income. Only, Trip’s fake yet high quality movie poster he’d framed and put up in the office didn’t change the fact we were now screwed. If we tried anything here, there would be a thousand eyeballs on us, and unlike the MCB, we couldn’t just flash fake badges and talk our way out of anything.
“Never been myself, but DragonCon is nerd Mardi Gras,” said Hertzfeldt. “It’s a hundred thousand people packed into a few blocks. If she disappears into that mob we’ll never find her.”
Sure enough, the rider pulled her bike over to the curb, in a place where parking clearly wasn’t allowed, and put the kickstand down.
“She’s bailing,” I transmitted. “Trip and I will follow on foot.”
“What do you want me to do?” our driver asked.
“Follow as best as you can I guess.” But it was already obvious that it would be totally impossible for him to keep up.
Hertzfeldt hadn’t actually stopped, but the flow of traffic had slowed to such a crawl that it didn’t matter. I left my shotgun behind and made sure my pistol was concealed beneath my untucked shirt. I slid the door open, hopped out, and then closed it behind me. Trip got out the front. We both started walking fast. The rider was about a hundred yards ahead of us.
And when she took off her helmet, she wasn’t a dark-haired Asian, but rather a white girl with short, brightly dyed, pink hair.
“We’ve been had!” Trip keyed his radio. “It’s a different rider. We were following a decoy.”
“This is Milo. No way, I could see you and her both the whole time. That’s the same bike; it had this neat little white box around it on the computer and everything. It never left my sight, I swear.”
I looked to Trip. “You got a better idea?” He shrugged. We were committed now either way, so we kept walking fast, trying to get closer. It was hard because the sidewalk and several feet of road were filled with bodies, and they were going both directions. I bumped into a shirtless man in a loincloth who I think was supposed to be Conan the Barbarian. “Excuse me.” Then I collided with a fat dude who made a very disturbing Sailor Moon. “Sorry.”
The decoy got off the bike and started walking with the general flow toward the nearest hotel.
Thankfully, our target was on the small side, so couldn’t exactly bull her way through the crowd like me and Trip. I’m six foot five and three hundred pounds of impolite muscle. Trip was several inches shorter and a whole lot lighter, but our company nerd had also played college football, so shoving people came naturally to him. We were gaining on her. We just needed to be chill enough doing it to not cause a commotion. If she spotted us and ran, this was going to get really complicated. Thankfully, it was extremely loud. Groups of friends were talking, music was playing, horns were honking, and there were guys with coolers hawking bottled water for five bucks a pop. Which they were probably getting, because standing in the middle of thousands of people meant that it had gotten a whole lot hotter real fast. I felt bad for the people in the really big costumes. Who in their right mind wears fur in Atlanta in summer?
“You know this place better than I do, so you’d better handle giving everybody else directions,” I told Trip.
“Sure. But I’ve only been here once, and if she goes inside the hotels, it’s a maze.” Our radio setup consisted of an earpiece and a microphone that hung around our neck, which was about as discreet as you could get. So Trip vectoring the rest of the Hunters in on us would just look like he was having a conversation with me, or maybe just talking to himself. Which, all things considered, wasn’t even sort of close to the weirdest thing on the street right now.
I had to put my hand over my ear to block the crowd noise. “This is Earl and Gregorius, coming in from the Hyatt side on foot. Boone’s trying to go around and will be waiting in a car on the south side. Holly is coming up behind Z and Trip.”
We closed to within fifty yards and our target still hadn’t seen us. She kept looking around too, seeming calm but alert. But there were so many people that even as big and ugly as I was, we didn’t stand out that much in jeans and T-shirts. Losing her in the crowd was our biggest danger, but simultaneously our biggest asset because it was slowing her down. The mob had to stop at an intersection, waiting for the light to change before they could cross. And that was a huge mess because cars were trying to make it across the intersection but getting stuck and blocking traffic from the other direction when those lights changed. Which led to a lot of distracting angry honking from drivers who had unwittingly blundered into this.
Our target was short enough I lost her in the clump at the crosswalk, hidden behind five Deadpools. When the light changed again and the crowd started across the street, I couldn’t find her.
“Where’d she go?” Trip asked. Had she ducked into a business? Turned down the other street? “Milo?”
“Uhh . . . I can’t see the pink hair anymore, but the white box thingy is still going in the same direction.”
Ain’t technology grand? I was walking and pushing about as fast as I could without knocking anybody over, but I still couldn’t spot the decoy. Then I saw the big red backpack, and the woman who had it over her shoulder was still in the same black riding clothes, and still about the same age, height, and build . . . Only now she was black with braids. There hadn’t been a handoff either. This wasn’t somebody else carrying the same bag. I was about ninety percent sure I was looking at the same girl, just wearing an entirely different face.
Trip spotted her about the same time I did and came to the same conclusion. The key to being a successful Monster Hunter is having a flexible mind, so neither of us got rattled too much by this new development.
“We’ve got a shape-shifter. I repeat, she’s some kind of shape-shifter.” He hadn’t said that into his microphone very loudly at all, so either she had supernatural hearing or the timing of her glance back was just really unfortunate, because she turned her head and caught the two of us gawking at her. There was only a split second of hesitation, the slightest bit of a grin . . . and then she ran.
And the girl was quick.
We went after her. It was on now.
Trip was a far smoother runner than I was, and he darted between the brightly costumed people, then found an open patch of flowerbed to sprint down. When that ran out, he jumped a little metal fence into the street and started dodging between slowly moving cars.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t that graceful, but I was really big and really loud. “Make a hole!” Subtlety went right out the window as I plowed my way through the con goers. “Emergency!” I, of course, did not specify the nature of said emergency, because the MCB had zero sense of humor when it came to monster business in public. “Coming through!”
The girl darted back and forth, swiftly making her way through the crowd. Miraculously, Trip was keeping up. They were both starting to leave me behind. And that was before I tripped over Batman’s cape and ate pavement. I jumped right back up and kept going, ignoring the people yelling and calling me all sorts of names, many of which I deserved because I was being very rude. But if I didn’t get that Ward Stone, then an ancient chaos demon was probably going to destroy the world and consume all their souls anyway, so they could suck it up.
Trip was still shouting directions into his radio. “She took a left and is heading for the Marriot,” he said. Which wasn’t helpful for me at all. But thankfully people were starting to get out of the large maniac’s way, so I had that going for me. One angry little buffed dude, who was either supposed to be casual Wolverine, or who wasn’t in costume at all but just really liked tank tops, threw his soda in my face while calling me a dick, which was super helpful.
There were security people or volunteers checking badges at the hotel entrance, but apparently our little shapeshifting thief hadn’t bought a ticket, or didn’t slow down enough to show it, because by the time I got there, the poor fellow was lying on the sidewalk, holding his bloody nose.
Trip was just inside. “I didn’t hit him!”
“I know. Which way did she go?”
“This way.” He’d already started running again. “Now she’s a white chick with red hair and freckles.”
“Crap.” She could change faces so fast, if she ditched the distinctive clothing, or had a chance to transfer the Ward to a different bag, we would never catch her.
Apparently, the actual convention itself was inside the hotels, and the mob in the street was just the people moving from event to event, because the interior was even more crowded than the street. Plus, there were lots of volunteers in matching shirts talking excitedly into their radios, probably about the badge checker who had just gotten sucker-punched, which meant we’d have cops on hand shortly. And since we were having to sprint to keep up with her, who were the cops going to notice first? The tiny inoffensive girl? Or the gigantic scary thug looking guy and his dreadlocked and nearly as scary looking companion, chasing her?
Yeah . . . We were probably going to get shot.
I spotted the now redhead, booking it across the room, and chased after her. The interior was one of those gigantic spaces where you could look up and see the landings wrapping around all the way to the top. It made me kind of dizzy. It was either the vertigo, or I just really hate running. She slid under a railing, leapt onto a bar, ran down it, and did an actual fucking back flip over some Power Rangers waiting to have their picture taken. She landed smoothly, ducked behind a bunch of people waiting to catch an elevator, and when she ran out the other side, she was deeply tanned with dark brown hair.
“Are you kidding me?” I shouted.
“Trip, Owen, come in.” It was Earl. “We’ve got a complication.”
“Like this isn’t complicated enough!”
“We ran into some snake cultists and whooped on them. They had some kind of tracking thing on their phones.” Earl probably meant an app, but give the guy a break, he was born in 1900. “They must have planted a bug on the Ward. They’re following her too.”
“Can you track her position?” Because, frankly, that sounded a lot better than running after an acrobat until I had a heart attack.
“No. His phone got broke when I threw him down the stairs. But there’s more of them here, so be on the lookout.”
She turned down a hall and we sprinted after her. A security volunteer tried to grab Trip, but he ducked under the arm. He watched Trip go, like shoot, missed him, then turned and saw me coming. When he saw how big I was and how fast I was moving, he thought about it, but wisely decided to get out of the way.
“Really sorry about this!”
The girl was insanely athletic, but Trip was keeping up. I’d been pretty religious about my cardio since training up for the siege, but I was getting winded. Worse. I looked back and saw the volunteer pointing us out to a cop, who immediately started talking into his radio. There had to be a ton of uniforms here and they would all be descending on us in short order.
“Boone, come in.” Wow. I was really getting out of breath. “APD is after us. Can you call your contacts and tell them we’re the good guys?”
“I’ll try. We’ve got a pretty good working relationship on the downlow. This city is lousy with monsters.”
“Great.” When I looked back there were two cops running after me. “Hurry.”
The next minute was a blur of me crashing into people while Trip kept getting further ahead. My concerns, in order, were get the Ward, don’t get shot by the cops, don’t get shot by the attendees, because this was the South after all, which meant at least a quarter of them were probably packing heat. Thankfully, I temporarily lost my police pursuit, because the cops violently collided with a bunch of stormtroopers. It was like two bowling balls hitting a bunch of pins. Strike! And they all went down in a tangled mess.
I didn’t know where the hell we were. Trip hadn’t been exaggerating when he called this place a maze. There were crowded halls, lots of turns, and now we were chasing her across a glass sky bridge with a busy street below us.
For the first time since the chase had begun, she stopped running.
Oh, thank goodness. I needed some air.
At first I thought that maybe she’d froze because some of the other Hunters had gotten to the other end of the sky bridge to block her. Trip had been giving directions the whole time after all.
Only it wasn’t our guys waiting at the other end of the bridge. It was more snake cultists. They were all in leather vests that showed off green scaly tats. And I didn’t know if one of them was actually some sort of reptoid-human hybrid, or he was just that friggin’ ugly and had gotten fang dental implants and was wearing yellow contacts. But there were five of them plugging the exit.
So the girl turned back, saw that there were only two of us, did the math and started toward Trip. Except he shook his head in that assertive manner which was sort of like the universal signal for fuck around and find out. The girl paused, realizing that we were far more ready for her kung-fu antics than the unsuspecting security goons and MCB agents had been.
Since this was about to turn ugly I roughly stopped the people coming up behind me, while still letting the people who were already crossing off. “Sky bridge is closed for maintenance. Sorry. Go around.”
“Aw, come on,” said a very round, very red, Kool-Aid Man. “The food court’s right over there.”
“Trust me, pal. You don’t want to crash through this wall.” I really wasn’t in the mood. “Seriously, we’re about to have a rumble here.”
“Ooh, a flash mob.” He took out his phone to take video.
For a very tense moment, the regular, unwitting people kept getting off the sky bridge, as an increasingly annoyed crowd backed up behind me, until it was just us, the girl, and the snake people, one of whom was staring at his phone, then at the red backpack, and then back at his phone. “That’ss her.” He hissed, and by hissed, I mean he really put the accent on the s sounds. “Sseize the ssstone.”
That was a very obnoxious affectation. I’d long thought the Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition held the title for most annoying death cult, but that fake lisp nonsense sure bumped these guys up the rankings. “Shove it up your asssss,” I said. “Just talk normal, doofus.”
From the way they all pulled out knives, I think my words actually hurt the snake cultists’ feelings. They had been trying extra hard to be frightening.
The girl looked between us and the cultists, then grinned and said, “Ooh, MCB dorks versus snake pricks. Nice.”
“We’re not MCB, and we don’t want to hurt you.” Trip was ever the diplomat, as he appealed earnestly to the possibly psychotic shape-shifter. “I can’t say that for these other guys. We just want the Ward. We can protect you from them.”
She actually laughed. “Aw, that’s cute.” The girl had a very normal, vanilla, middle-American accent, and sounded about as old as all her faces looked. “But I don’t need protecting.”
Then she punched the wall, cracking the thick glass with one tiny fist, and then threw her shoulder against it. The glass shattered as she crashed through.
It was a pretty good drop to the street. Easily far enough to break a bunch of bones, but she didn’t actually hit the street. She fell in a shower of broken glass, landed on the roof of a moving car, rolled, slid down the trunk, and somehow hit feet first, as we all stared in shocked disbelief. She saw me watching, then put her hand to her forehead, pointer finger and thumb extended to make an L, calling us losers. Then she started running again.
The witnesses loved that stunt and started clapping for her.
Trip immediately transmitted. “She’s jumped off the sky bridge and is on the street level . . . heading . . . I have no idea at this point. I’m lost.”
“Oh, screw that. I am not jumping out the window after her.”
Even if I had been tempted to break my legs, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity anyway, because that’s when the cultists decided to try and murder us.
The five of them rushed Trip. I thought about just pulling my .45 and dropping them all, but overpenetration is a bitch, and there were about a hundred innocent bystanders just behind them whom I really didn’t want to put holes into by accident. So we’d do this the old-fashioned way. Hopefully Trip wouldn’t get stabbed before I got there.
Except Trip surprised me by pulling out a canister of pepper spray and hosing them all down with it. The cultists screamed and clutched at their eyes. One still managed to slash at him, but Trip leapt back before he could get clipped. I passed Trip by and threw a hook to the cultist’s midsection hard enough to pancake his liver. He bounced off the glass.
Even partially blind and gasping, a moron with a knife is still extremely dangerous. I caught an incoming stab and twisted the wrist hard. He squealed when the bones broke, and I slung him around into one of his buddies. Their heads hit so hard that I knew they were on a one-way trip to concussion town. Trip kicked the next one in the leg, and when that dirtbag dropped to one knee, Trip slugged him right in his stupid fake fangs. Or at least I was assuming they were fake the way they snapped off and went flying. Trip managed to hit him three more times before the silly-looking weirdo flopped to the carpet.
The last snake man still standing was orange dye-faced, crying, wheezing, coughing, and had dropped his goofy butterfly knife, but in his other hand was his phone. Since he’d been looking at it earlier, it must have had the tracking app on it. “Give me that.” I snatched the phone from him. Then I kicked him in the balls really hard, just on general principle.
It had only taken a few seconds to leave them all unconscious or weeping on the floor.
“That was awesome!” shouted Kool-Aid Man, because apparently the observers thought that had been some sort of elaborate staged event. “I’m posting this on Instagram!” Thankfully for us the crowd’s density and enthusiasm were the only thing keeping the cops from getting through. Except then the cloud of pepper spray wafted over and people started to freak out when it got in their eyes. They thought they had it bad? I’d been closer and it was really irritating my asthma.
“We’ve got to go.” I did glance briefly out the hole the shape-shifter had made, calculated the drop, and decided that I liked my ankles unshattered, thank you very much. We started toward what had been the snake end of the bridge. We were moving through the crowd again fast, but pretty much lost, and on the lookout for the cops. “I didn’t know you carried pepper spray.”
“I never leave home without my spicy treat dispenser.” Trip shook his hand out. “Ouch. This is why right here. I think I broke my pinky on that guy’s head.”
“Yeah, that happens. You need stronger bones.” Which was total BS, because I’d lost track of how many fingers I’d broken over the years against various skulls, human and other. “Drink more milk.”
“Those poor saps will want some milk to wash out their eyes.”
“That’s actually a myth. You want to scrub your face with Dawn dish soap, and then rinse it off with water,” I explained. Trip gave me a quizzical look, wondering how I knew about getting pepper sprayed. “I was a bouncer, remember? Hazard of the job.”
“Oh yeah . . . ” he said. “What do we do now?”
I handed him the cultist’s phone. It was a map of the area with a blinking dot that was steadily moving away from us. “We can use this, but we need to find a way to disappear before we get busted.” This place had to be covered in security cameras.
Trip immediately started relaying directions to Earl as we kept our heads down and kept walking, nice and calm, nothing to see here, officer. APD would certainly arrest us. By the time Boone got everything sorted out with his local contacts, our quarry would be long gone.
We’d wound up in some gigantic food court area. There were hundreds of people waiting in line at dozens of establishments, and every available table was taken. Unfortunately, a bunch of witnesses from the sky bridge were still pointing at us and talking about the fight. And of course, from the opposite direction, more cops were coming, but they hadn’t seen us yet.
“This way,” Trip said, and I followed him around a corner, and then another, where it was slightly quieter. There were still lots of people, but none of them were currently gesturing at us or taking our picture. Down some stairs, and then another turn—this place really was a maze—and now it was just people who looked really tired or hung over, sullenly eating their takeout in quiet.
“If we go after her, we’re just going to get picked up. The cops will all have our descriptions by now.”
“They will,” Trip agreed. “Be on the lookout for a ruggedly handsome black man and the Rock’s chubbier stunt double.”
“Hey now. It’s getting thinner up top but I’ve still got most of my hair. If we’re going to get back in the chase, we’re going to need to hide our faces.” At least disguises couldn’t be too hard around here.
Trip kept giving the others directions from the tracking device as we went down some more stairs and out an employee-only door that led into a narrow alley. A few people in costumes had snuck out here for a vape break. I could tell they were a group because of the matching costumes. One of them was close to my size, only he was dressed in a gigantic blue suit. A Cookie Monster helmet was sitting on a post next to him.
“Hey, man, how much for the costume?”
“What?” the guy asked, obviously confused. “It wasn’t that much, I guess. I just got it off of Amazon.”
“No.” I took out my wallet. “How much to buy it from you right now?”
“Uh . . . what?”
I checked my wallet. I had eight hundreds, six fifties, a bunch of twenties, and no time to haggle. Damn it. Earl had better reimburse me for this. I pulled out all the cash and shoved it toward the perplexed cosplayer. “Here, take this, and give me your costume, right now. There’s no time to explain.”
He took the money, looked at it surprised, but then said, “But I can’t take it off. I’m not wearing anything under here. It’s really super hot in this thing.” In fact, his face was really sweaty.
“Gross,” Trip said.
“Okay, just the helmet thing then.” Then I pointed at his buddy. “But you’ve got to throw in Elmo’s head too, for my friend.”
“Oh, come on,” Trip said. “Can I at least have Oscar?”
“No!” It turned out the one wearing a garbage can was female, and she put her hands on her mask protectively. “Mine’s custom. I put a lot of work into it!”
“Fine,” Trip said as he begrudgingly took the Elmo helmet from the other guy.
Headless Elmo and Cookie Monster counted their money. “Whoa, thanks, dudes!”
It was costing me about thirteen hundred bucks to avoid getting arrested, but hopefully this would work. I put the helmet on. It smelled like someone had been eating goat cheese in there.
We hit the street, following the tracking app. She was way ahead of us, but it looked like the shape-shifter was moving at walking speeds, probably trying to avoid any further attention. Trip kept giving directions to the others. Hopefully one of them could get eyes on the Ward before she vanished.
Thankfully, Skippy’s flying skills saved the day.
“This is Milo. The drone is over the location Trip gave. I do see one woman carrying a red backpack. She’s no longer in the black jacket though. Looks like she had a white shirt under it.”
Despite the giant googly eyes on my head, the vision on this thing was horrible because I had to look out a mesh-covered slit in the mouth. I kept bumping into a lot of people, but I tried to get into the spirit of it. “Me so sorry! Me clumsy!”
“You look like a ridiculous bobblehead,” Trip muttered.
Doubtlessly true, because so did he, but sometimes you just needed to embrace the absurdity. “Me want cookie! Me want catch shapeshifter to get arcane super weapon! Nom nom nom!”
“I refuse to do the voice. I’ve got too much dignity,” Trip insisted.
“Elmo need tickles!”
“Don’t make me shoot you.”
I switched back to my real voice. “Well, someone’s in a mood.”
“I didn’t realize I got pepper spray on my hand when I punched that cultist, until I touched my eye putting this stupid thing on my face.”
Trip had a good excuse to be cranky. That shit burns.
The blip on the phone kept moving in the same direction, coinciding with the info Milo was feeding us. She must not have known about the cultist’s bug or the drone. She could ninja leap and shapeshift all she wanted, but slow and steady was going to win this race . . . I hoped.
We were moving away from the main hotels, so the crowd was thinning out some. But there was still a lot of foot traffic, and every place that sold food or drinks was packed and had a line out the door.
“The target is turning into a building on the west side of the street,” Milo reported. He had a street address from the computer program, but no information as to what was located there. Holly checked in. She was close too. Earl and Gregorius were a minute behind her because they’d also had to dodge the law, only I couldn’t imagine either of them wearing costumes. Gregorious because he was just so dour, and Earl on general principle . . . Though come to think of it, he could have turned into a werewolf and in this crowd people probably would have just complimented him on how realistic it looked and then tried to take their picture with him.
“Sorry, guys, the drone has lost visual.”
We got there a moment later and saw that it was an office building where a bunch of different kinds of firms rented the lower floors, but residential apartments above. There were a lot of people inside the lobby area, but none of them had a big red backpack. Trip and I got strange looks from the business-casual-dressed people, which meant it was time to ditch our silly disguises. I pulled Cookie Monster’s head off and tucked it under my arm before approaching the receptionist.
“May I help you?” she asked suspiciously.
“Did a young woman come through here a minute ago?” Since I didn’t know what face our shapeshifter was currently wearing, that was all the description I could give, but come to think of it, her being limited to young and female was just a guess on my part based on her behavior so far. “Or maybe somebody else with a big red backpack?”
We must have looked like shifty, sweaty, dangerous types, because she said, “I’m afraid that’s none of your business, sir.” Except as I had asked the question, her eyes had flicked unconsciously down the hall to the left.
“Thanks.” The two of us started walking in that direction, but then I paused briefly when I saw the sign on the door. It was the lady’s restroom. Trip checked the tracker, then nodded. I shrugged, dropped Cookie Monster’s head, drew my handgun, and pushed the door open.
“You can’t go in there!” the receptionist shouted after us. “Security!”
We swept in, guns up. It appeared to be empty. There was a red backpack sitting on the sink. I rushed to it, while Trip checked both of the stalls.
The bag was flat. Empty. No magic rock.
“The stone’s gone.”
“Clear,” Trip said after shoving open the second door. “Where’d she go?”
About ten feet up, with no practical way for a regular person to reach it, was a window. From all her jumping and flipping, it wouldn’t have been too hard for her. It was open. I keyed my radio. “The target has snuck out the back. She ditched the backpack with the tracker, but she’s got the Ward.”
“What’s Skippy looking for then?”
“I have no idea.”
“We’ll do what we can. Milo out.”
“Damn it!” I kicked the garbage can in frustration.
“Boost me up,” Trip suggested.
“Good idea.” We hadn’t been that far behind her. He might be able to see something. So I holstered my gun, made a stirrup with my hands, Trip stepped on them, and I lifted. Hunters have to practice for weird crap like this, so hoisting Trip up there was a piece of cake.
I grunted. “See anything?”
He held onto the windowsill and peered out. “Just a parking lot. I think I can fit. I’m going after her.”
Trip had far broader shoulders than the shapeshifter, so it took him a few seconds of precarious struggling, but then he made it and I could quit holding him up. He wiggled through. “I’ll catch up,” I shouted as Trip dropped into the parking lot on the other side.
As we were pulling off that clever maneuver, I could hear the receptionist screaming at somebody else they couldn’t go back there, again. That was probably our friends.
Only the thing that came through the door was no Hunter. In fact, it was bigger than me, and clad entirely in dirty, tattered robes. My nostrils got hit with a smell like the reptile house at the zoo. Rags covered most of its face, but in the shadows beneath its hood could be seen two unblinking yellow eyes. Its green, scaly hands were visible, each finger ending in a long black talon. In those hands was an iPhone in a pink bejeweled case which was incongruously cheerful and really didn’t match the rest of the creature’s ensemble.
This was probably the one time of year a thing like this could walk around downtown Atlanta and not get shot on sight. This was no squishy human cultist. This was the real deal.
The reptoid glared at me, then it glanced down at the blinking light on the phone it had surely taken from one of its human cultists, then it looked over at the sink and the empty backpack. When it saw that the stone was gone, the monster let out a really perturbed hissing sound.
“Dude, I know how you feel.”
I’d vented my anger by kicking the garbage can. Apparently, the creature decided it was going to take out its frustration over losing the Ward on me, because it came over and tried to swat my head off.