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

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