Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Monster Hunter Guardian – eARC
Larry Correia
Sarah A. Hoyt
Look for the final version on August 6, 2019
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
Baen
Monster Hunter Guardian
Larry Correia and Sarah A. Hoyt
NEW ENTRY IN THE BESTSELLING MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL SERIES BY DRAGON AWARD WINNING AUTHORS LARRY CORREIA AND SARAH A. HOYT
When Owen Pitt and the rest of the Monster Hunter International crew are called away to mount a month’s-long rescue mission in a monster-infested nightmare dimension, Julie Shackleford—Owen’s wife and descendant of MHI founder Bubba Shackelford—is left behind. Her task: hold down the fort and take care of her new baby son Ray. Julie’s devoted to the little guy, but the slow pace of office work and maternity leave are starting to get to her. But when a routine field call brings her face-to-face with an unspeakable evil calling itself Brother Death, she’ll get more excitement than she ever hoped for.
Julie is the Guardian of a powerful ancient artifact known as the Kamaresh Yar, and Brother Death wants it. In the wrong hands, it could destroy reality as we know it. Julie would die before giving it up.
Then Ray goes missing, taken by Brother Death. The price for his safe return: the Kamaresh Yar. If Julie doesn’t hand over the artifact it means death—or worse—for baby Ray. With no other choice left to her, Julie agrees to Brother Death’s demands. But when you’re dealing with an ancient evil, the devil is in the details.
To reclaim her son, Julie Shackleford will have to fight her way through necromantic death cults, child-stealing monsters, and worse. And she’ll have to do it all before Brother Death can unleash the Kamaresh Yar.
It’s one woman against an army of monsters. But Julie Shackelford is no ordinary woman—she’s one tough mother!
IN THIS SERIES by LARRY CORREIA
THE MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL SERIES:
Monster Hunter International
Monster Hunter Vendetta
Monster Hunter Alpha
The Monster Hunters (compilation)
Monster Hunter Legion
Monster Hunter Nemesis
Monster Hunter Siege
Monster Hunter Guardian (with Sarah A. Hoyt)
The Monster Hunter Files (anthology edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt)
MONSTER HUNTER MEMOIRS (with John Ringo):
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints
MORE BAEN BOOKS by LARRY CORREIA
THE SAGA OF THE FORGOTTEN WARRIOR:
Son of the Black Sword
House of Assassins
THE GRIMNOIR CHRONICLES
Hard Magic
Spellbound
Warbound
DEAD SIX (with Mike Kupari)
Dead Six
Swords of Exodus
Alliance of Shadows
Target Rich Environment (short story collection)
Target Rich Environment, Vol. 2 (forthcoming short story collection)
MORE BAEN BOOKS by SARAH A. HOYT
THE SHIFTER SERIES:
Draw One in the Dark
Gentleman Takes a Chance
Noah’s Boy
Night Shifters (omnibus)
THE DARKSHIP SERIES:
Darkship Thieves
Darkship Renegades
A Few Good Men
Through Fire
Darkship Revenge
Uncharted (with Kevin J. Anderson)
To purchase any of these titles in e-book form, please go to www.baen.com.
Monster Hunter Guardian
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Larry Correia & Sarah A. Hoyt
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8414-5
Cover art by Alan Pollack
First printing, August 2019
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
tk
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chapter 1
Take it from someone who grew up in this business. You should never, ever, ever hunt vampires in a dark basement as the sun is going down.
Crash.
Something broke in the dark basement where I was hunting vampires at sunset.
Yes, I know. My grandpa would have hit me upside the head for even considering this job, but I had my reasons. Sometimes a girl’s got to do what she’s got to do, and I had ignorant college kids to protect.
My fellow students lived in a kind of dream world, filled with comforting lies and pretty fairy tales. I’d grown up in the real world, where monsters exist and are out to destroy humanity. My youth was spent in shoot houses and eavesdropping on autopsies. My first monster kill was when I was ten, and I’d been a member of the family business ever since. My classmates, if they thought of monsters at all, thought of them as sexy, or tragic and misunderstood. Personally, I’d found there were few misunderstandings that couldn’t be cured with a sufficient quantity of silver delivered at a high enough velocity. I’d been to way too many murder scenes to buy into any of that pro-monster propaganda nonsense. Monsters were evil, and evil needs killing.
Which was how I’d ended up alone in the creepy basement of the science building, armed to the teeth, and surrounded by vampires. The high narrow windows meant that there was still a little light getting in, but despite that, some of the vamps were already awake and moving. Retreat would’ve been the smart thing to do.
Only the infestation could not be allowed to go on, not even for one more night. No more innocents would die. Not on my watch.
Technically, it wasn’t my watch anymore. This wasn’t supposed to be my responsibility. Private monster hunting had been banned. Both tactically and legally speaking, being down here was stupid.
Only none of that matters when monster hunting is in your blood.
It’s what I do.
* * *
It had started in the library where I was studying with my friend Cynthia Anne Aiken. Well, sort of my friend. She was younger than me, naïve, having trouble adapting to college, and she sort of clung to me like a bird with a broken wing. We sat at a table with a pile of art books between us. I was a grad student in anthropology, but I was picking up an art history degree while I was here too. When
you’ve worked as hard a job as I’d had, going back to school was a piece of cake.
“No, I don’t think vampires are romantic,” I told her, as I had many times.
Cynthia Anne sighed. “You’re no fun.”
I shoved some books aside and looked at her. Really looked. She was just a baby. Granted, I was older than most other students in my classes—education gets delayed when you’ve already got a good paying job—but Cynthia Anne Aiken was just a round-faced little freshman with big blue eyes and wispy blonde hair. She wore a blue headband and little flower earrings, and had He listened, like we dream of others listening tattooed in fancy script around her wrist. She reminded me a bit of the youngest Hunters who’d ever shown up for our training classes, meaning those who’d had their first supernatural encounters when they were just kids but had to wait until they were adults to join. Only without their cynicism. Or guts. Or perspective. Or, you know, the scars of having survived an encounter with homicidal monsters.
I’d noticed she was reading Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned and had to comment. “Vampires aren’t sexy, or cute, Cynthers. They want to eat you, and not in a good way.”
She had stared at me, mouth open like a guppy. She hadn’t said vampires don’t exist. That should have been my first clue. Instead, she muttered something in a tumble about the tragedy of living forever and not having anyone to understand or love you because people would think you were a monster.
“That’s because they are monsters, evil spirits animating the soulless undead husk of a human.” I started to tell her the truth, but then her wide-open eyes told me I was out of step again, unable to communicate with people who hadn’t grown up like I had, or seen the things I’d seen. Regular people can be so exasperating at times.
For a hundred years my family’s business had been eradicating the things most people didn’t think existed. For generations, we had killed vampires, werewolves, and weirder. We’d kept people safe and collected the bounties—quite good bounties—until the government had decided to shut us down. Okay, the government had a reason, and I’d been there for that event, but I still didn’t like to dwell on it.
After I’d been put out of work, I’d come to Auburn to study and to be normal. Not to think of the Christmas Party or dwell on my dead brother or insane father. I failed at that a lot. I constantly had to remind myself about that being normal thing. A normal person had no reason to blow up little Cynthers’ illusions. The Monster Control Bureau was still keeping tabs on all of the former employees of MHI, and they’d love to throw the book at a Shackleford for violating the Unearthly Forces Secrecy Act. It was illegal for someone like me to speak frankly to someone like her. If she started blabbing about how crazy Julie Shackleford believed vampires were real, the MCB wouldn’t hesitate to further ruin my life. They really weren’t messing around right now, not after the Christmas Party. Nobody was getting let off with a warning nowadays. I’d be looking at prison time minimum, or more likely a bullet to the head and a fake suicide note.
Besides, if she wanted to dream of vampires as fairy princes, that was innocuous. After all, odds were most humans would never run into a vampire.
So I chickened out, shrugged and said, “Whatever” and “Aren’t you going to study for the test?”
She shoved the novel aside with a sigh and allowed me to share my flash cards with her. We drilled each other on art history and the ability to recognize different styles from just a portion of the painting.
I left the library at five p.m. to go to another class. She stayed behind. It was the last time I saw Cynthia alive.
* * *
She didn’t show up for the test the next morning.
I didn’t think anything bad happened to her either, really. I thought I’d just pushed her too hard studying and she’d finally lost it and driven back home to Mommy and Daddy. In fact, her little sporty red Mercedes, which she’d told me had been her eighteenth birthday gift, was gone from the parking in front of her dorm. Mom and Dad must be talking her out of the dismals right now.
Because that’s the sort of conclusion a normal person would come to.
I didn’t have to be normal. It’s not like I didn’t keep getting job offers to join teams operating in other countries. Despite my dad’s screw ups, I still had a good reputation. It’s not like I couldn’t have left the US and made a bit of money. But after losing so much, I’d just wanted to walk away. I’d lost my brother. I’d lost my best friends. Talking to the ones who were still alive just reminded me of the dead. So I’d cut myself off and moved on.
Even though I was actively trying my hardest not to think like a Hunter, I couldn’t help but keep my ears open. Another girl had gone missing recently, but she was one of those types where disappearing for weeks to find herself wasn’t odd. Then the day after Cynthia, another girl didn’t show up to class, and the next day, another.
That was when people began to panic. Photos of the missing girls got plastered all around campus. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing, no witnesses, and no bodies had been found, but the police had started talking about a possible serial killer operating around the Auburn campus. Like a good normal, I told myself they were probably right and all the disappearances were because of a run-of-the-mill psycho killer and, trust me, by my jaded standards those were practically cuddly, they were so nonthreatening. They were also not my problem, so I could leave it to the police.
Still, I felt prickles of discomfort about Cynthers almost immediately, but I kept telling myself not to be paranoid. She was deluded about vampires, but that wasn’t uncommon. Half the girls on campus were crazy for stupid, fake, sexy movie vampires.
But as the number of disappearances rose, it got harder and harder not to think like a Hunter.
Since I was the last person who’d seen Cynthia, I was interviewed by the local police. They weren’t read in on the supernatural, so I couldn’t even risk warning them what they might be up against. They’d just think I was crazy.
While the locals formed search parties to walk through the woods looking for dump sites, I was a good citizen and called the MCB to report my suspicions. That wasn’t a number that was listed in the phone book, so they took all their tips seriously. However, after I gave them my last name, they said they’d look into it, and then promptly hung up on me.
A few days after Cynthia went missing, I stayed at the library late, studying for a linguistics test. Linguistics is kind of like math without any numbers, and you need to dislocate your mind to fit it. That’s the best I can describe it, and back then I was still having some trouble with it. I loved it, but it just took some effort. Afterwards I ended up having to cross the whole campus after dark.
Maybe subconsciously I was looking for trouble, I don’t know.
Auburn has all these tall brick buildings that look like they were built by homesick Englishmen. Between them, the lush vegetation of Alabama grows rampant. There was this trimmed area with topiaries, but it had to be trimmed constantly because one thing Alabama vegetation doesn’t do is “restrained” or “civilized.” The path home wound past the topiary garden and through an area with really thick trees.
With the serial killer scare, there weren’t very many people out after dark, and those who were, traveled in groups. That was smart. I was alone but wasn’t worried about getting kidnapped. I’m not really the victim type. If we did have a serial killer, I’d just drop him and consider it a community service.
I confess I wasn’t even thinking about that at the time. I was thinking of the set changes that had taken Middle English to modern English. I needed to translate “Our Father” from modern English into some defined century of the past. It’s harder than it sounds, and because you were required to explain the transformations, just memorizing the thing wouldn’t solve it. So I was doing it in my head, and had got to the fourteenth century with Oure fadir that art in heuenes when someone slid out of the trees onto the path in front of me and started in my direction.
It was Cynthia.
The light was bad here, but it was definitely her. A normal person would have reacted with joy, probably just thinking she was coming back with her tail between her legs, wanting to know if I’d help her sweet talk the art history teacher into letting her take the test late. Like Professor Clark would listen to me anymore than to her…but the Hunter part of me read things differently.
In that second, I noticed several things. Like, if she’d gone home, why was she still wearing the same yellow top and artistically torn jeans she’d worn last time I’d seen her at the university? I’m a good observer and those weren’t just similar clothes—they were the same. Also, she was walking differently, like she had a lot more self-confidence all of a sudden. Maybe she’d found a boyfriend and had been shacked up with him for a few days. It has that effect on some women. Hell, maybe she was just on painkillers or something.
But since I’ve already said that the library was the last time I saw Cynthia Anne Aiken alive, you know how this is going to go.
I said, “Cynthers, you’re back,” friendly as could be, as I moved my hand to my gun.
Of course I was armed. I’d never understood why most universities banned concealed carry. I mean, if they wanted to provide targets for killers, couldn’t they buy some clay pigeons? You can hide a Colt Officer’s Model .45 inside a waistband holster beneath a baggy War Eagle sweatshirt really well.