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

further bullshit. You’re on your own.” But then Earl saw the pained expression on Milo’s face. “What?”

“You missed that part. The Ward has merged with her. I don’t know how to remove it. It has to be something to do with her not-human half messing with magic designed to be used by humans. We can probably figure it out, but we have to take her with us.”

Then it was my turn to deliver more bad news. “From what the Vatican Hunter said, that Drekavac thing is going to be coming after her again in . . . ” I checked my watch. It was just after two in the morning. Sundown this time of year was around seven. “ . . . about sixteen hours at the earliest.”

“Sucks for her then,” Holly said.

Earl took a long angry drag off his cigarette. “You sure about that, Z?”

“I’ve got no idea, but Gutterres seemed pretty certain of it. That Drekavac is going to keep coming back, stronger and stronger, until we manage to kill him thirteen times in one night. I probably got about halfway there and it was already one scary son of a bitch.” I gestured toward the road. “Not burying a bunch of cars in a dirt tidal-wave-level scary but getting there. He’s fast, mobile, has really bitey spirit-animal helpers, a blunderbuss that shoots lightning bolts, and he strikes me as the highly motivated type. On her own, she’s as good as dead.”

“You’ve got to help me, Earl,” Sonya begged.

I cut her off. “What was it you said to me earlier when I told you MHI needed the Ward Stone to stop an ancient chaos god from destroying the whole world?” I feigned confusion trying to remember a distant memory. “Oh, yeah. ‘Sounds like a personal problem.’”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Sonya batted her eyes and tried to look innocent for Earl. I wasn’t sure but she might have even shifted her face a little bit to look more victimized and forlorn, and she was already wearing her Girl Scout cookie dealer face. “So I stole a thing from a bad guy to try and help some good guys, and in exchange I was going to use the reward money to help a loved one in need.”

“And then everybody clapped,” Holly said sarcastically. “So she’s the real hero, but I’ve got a suggestion. We could just saw her hand off. We keep the stone, and then maybe she can find Stricken and apologize enough that he’ll call off his attack dog.”

“Hang on,” Sonya shouted.

“She’s kidding,” Trip said. “We wouldn’t do that.”

Holly shrugged.

Of course this offended Milo’s sense of chivalry. “We can’t abandon her. Her dad was a fellow Hunter!”

“And my dad was a construction worker, Milo.” Holly said. “That doesn’t mean everybody else owes me a free house. She just threatened to cut your throat.”

Milo grimaced because Holly had him there. “Yeah, but—”

“No buts. We’ve got what we came for. You want to find a nicer way to get the rock, great, do surgery, whatever, but then kick her to the curb. If princess here wants us to save her ass, she’d better talk to the accountant.” Holly jerked her thumb toward me. “Maybe she can work out a payment plan.”

“What’s the PUFF on a Drekavac anyway?” Trip asked me.

There was a sudden crash as a bunch of the burning barn beams split, dumping more shingles into the inferno. A giant cloud of sparks rose into the night sky.

“I don’t think that monster is on the tables. I’d have to fill out a request form and send it to the MCB for a special one-of-a-kind ruling. Judging by his abilities and annoying ability to keep coming back from the dead, it’s got to be a pretty good payout.”

“Give me your best guess, Z.” From Earl’s tone, he was asking that question as the man who had to pay for all this stuff. SMAWs and attack helicopters aren’t cheap.

“Well, specials are all over the board. Like this lich. They’re all different based on their danger and history. MCB will look at their criteria and then decide the payout. What did MHI get paid for Buford last time?”

Earl thought about it for a second. “I can’t recall exactly, but since he’s been annoying the Feds for over a century, it was pretty good. I remember the company cleared seven or eight hundred thousand after Leroy parked that bulldozer on Buford’s head, and that was back in the Eighties.”

I said, “With inflation, it’ll be a lot more than that. You know, Gutterres told me this Drekavac has been around since the 1600s. If we could document that—and he said the Church would share their records—that creature could be one hell of a lucrative PUFF bounty for us.”

My boss was clearly thinking the same thing I was. Though with Earl, it probably wasn’t about the money. My guess was that he’d angrily said he was going to ditch Sonya, but he was far too honor-bound to leave her to her fate, and it was easier to act tough but mercenary in front of his Hunters than it was to be a big softy. Except a seven-figure PUFF was a seven-figure PUFF, so even Holly, as much as Sonya clearly rubbed her the wrong way, was interested in getting paid. We did a lot of good things, but we were ruthlessly practical about it whenever we could be. It took a lot of work to pay for this rock-and-roll lifestyle.

“I do like when the paycheck comes to us,” Holly muttered. “Beats chasing them down. I made bank on the siege, but I sure didn’t like having to go to the ass end of the Earth to do it.”

We all looked down at Sonya, who was still sitting on the grass, trying to look helpless and forlorn. Except she was too cunning to make that stick for long. “Hang on now. You’re thinking you could potentially make millions of bucks for scary hat guy. Only in order for you to ambush him,