Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC by Larry Correia (read a book .txt) 📕

you to call. That’s Melvin, my internet troll. He’s squirrely, but really good at his job. He’ll make it so our friends can’t listen in, then you give him every contact of hers you can think of, he’ll get them to me, and I’ll find her. Okay?”

“Promise me you’ll keep my little girl safe, Earl.”

“I’ll do my best.” He hung up, blew out a long breath, then said, “Oh boy.”

“So who, and or what, was that?”

“She’s someone I made a promise to once. She’s a type of yokai.”

“Yeah, I know what that is. But how are you friends with something from some spirit realm? Were you two in Unicorn together?”

“Not together. Different teams, different times. We first met when she was one of my Hunters’ guests at the Christmas Party.”

“The Christmas Party?” Which of course meant the big one, where a grief-stricken Ray Shackleford had been manipulated into opening a portal that had almost sucked Alabama into another dimension, and a ton of people had died as a result. That mess had gotten MHI shut down for years.

Earl nodded. “Did you ever read those old memoirs Albert found in the archives, from a Hunter by the name of Chad Gardenier?”

Chapter 6

We didn’t know if this was the same shapeshifter we were looking for, but if so, her real name was Sonya. Her dad had been a Hunter. Her mom wasn’t human, but rather convincingly lived as one. She was actually a creature known as a kodama.

Since Earl was the sort of leader who felt eternally responsible for the families of those who got killed under his command, he kept track of all of them as best as he could, helping out whenever possible, sometimes anonymously when MHI’s help wasn’t wanted. This included the girlfriend and daughter of the man who had given his life so Earl could close the gate at the Christmas Party.

Earl said that even with their shared background of having been in Special Task Force Unicorn, they weren’t exactly tight, because it had been Earl who had ordered Chad Gardenier to his death. Something which the mother claimed she understood had been necessary, but I got the impression it weighed on Earl. He had checked in on the two of them periodically to see how they were doing while Sonya was growing up. From the way Earl talked about the daughter, I could tell he was rather fond of her. He had even talked about offering Sonya a job as a Hunter when she grew up, but her mom had absolutely forbidden that, declaring it too dangerous for her little girl. Earl had respected her wishes and never mentioned it again.

His visits had become more infrequent while Sonya was a teenager, and nonexistent in the years since she’d been an adult. In his defense, we had been really busy, but he was kicking himself for it now, because it looked like she might have turned to a life of crime.

Melvin had called Earl. Our obnoxious—yet surprisingly useful at times—internet troll had set up a secure line and gotten all of Sonya’s info from her mother. It turned out she had a bunch of different accounts under fake names on all the social media sites, each one filled with pictures of a different girl, none of which looked similar, but for whatever reason I could sort of see how they could all be the same person. It was hard to get a handle on what Sonya was actually like because each profile was into wildly different things. There was a pretty version, a goth version, a jock, a nerd, and even a cowgirl, but the only thing they had in common was a love of selfies. It was as if she had a different name and face to wear for whatever mood struck her that day. My gut told me none of these public ones were real, and she kept her real personality secret.

Though they all looked extremely different, at least all of her identities appeared to be about the same age, size, and sex. That would narrow our search a bit, but Earl didn’t know if that was an actual limit on her shape-changing powers or not. Looking like a twenty-year-old girl could just be her normal comfort zone, and right now she was escaping the country disguised as a morbidly obese eighty-year-old man named Morton Leibowitz or, hell, maybe even Morton’s seeing eye dog. Earl didn’t know all the details about what that type of yokais’ powers were, her mother kept the family secrets close to the vest, and he knew even less about which of those powers had gotten passed onto her half-human offspring.

Working backwards through her pages, Melvin had broken into Sonya’s private messages and then email. Trolls are scary. You’d think trolls were scary because they were huge, nearly unkillable carnivores, but oh no, their ability to get into your private info was the real terror. A troll was way more likely to steal your credit card or social security number than they were to eat you. Identity theft was a multibillion dollar busines in this country, and not all of that was done by humans. Melvin had run a trace on Sonya’s regular cell phone, but it was still sitting in her dorm room. Hoping that he had the wrong shapeshifter, Earl had called that number, but it had gone right to voice mail, which wasn’t a good sign.

Melvin skimmed through the recent emails and texts, and it turned out there were a few messages from an untraceable source that seemed to be in some sort of code. It wasn’t slang either, because trolls are really good at keeping up on that sort of thing. Our troll said he’d try to crack it because, I quote, “Melvin love puzzles!”

By the time we got all that from our internet troll, it was nearing sundown. If Sonya had fled the city with the Ward as soon as we’d lost her, she could