“Son of a bitch!” Dorcas started coughing and the orc gave her something else to drink, and then started smearing something all over her head. There was so much blood from Dorcas’ scalp that it was making a real mess on my carpet. “I parked out front, everything looked fine. I unlocked the door. It must’ve come out of nowhere and clocked me.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Everything you remember.”
“I had Bubba in my arms, so I remember turning to protect him from the fall. I didn’t even have a chance to draw my gun. I’m slower than I used to be, but not that slow. Whatever it was, it’s fast… Did that bitch nurse set us up?”
“Maybe.” That hurt. I was furious. We’d sort of become friends while she was looking after Grandpa.
“Hang on.” Dorcas winced and closed her eyes. “Room’s spinning again.”
For you and me both.
I dealt with a lot of crises. I knew freaking out was useless, but right then I couldn’t help it. I was on the ragged edge. My kid was gone. My grandpa had been murdered. My friend had been shot. I wanted to scream at Dorcas for failing to protect my baby, but that was just stupid anger talking. Whatever this monster was, it was clever, and it must have been planning this for a long time. Wynne’s monster encounter had been a setup. The distance, the setting, it was all a perfect lure. If I hadn’t taken that bait, it would have been something else. It had watched and waited, exploiting our weaknesses. It was smart, murderous, and had my baby.
I’d lost a lot of people. I knew the grief about Grandpa would hit later. As long as I had business to focus on, I’d be fine. If I started thinking about my baby though, I’d crack. I had to keep moving.
I went back outside. Amanda’s car was gone. Of course it was. That bitch had stolen my kid, and she had at least a forty-minute head start.
Several orc warriors were there armed with a motley assortment of guns—mostly hunting rifles and shotguns decorated with feathers and small animal bones—and contact weapons—axes, swords, and a baseball bat with nails in it.
Shelly was short, squat, and ugly, even by orc standards, so I recognized her immediately as she waddled up. She was wearing a serape and carrying a pair of six-shooters like something from a Clint Eastwood movie.
“No baby find. Who we go kill?” Shelly demanded.
“I don’t know yet.” All orcs had a gift, something that they were truly world-class amazing at. Skippy could make a helicopter do things that were supposedly impossible. In close combat, Ed was like a walking blender. “Are any of you a tracker? I think Ray was taken away in the nurse’s car. Can any of you follow Ray’s trail?”
“Shelly, shoot good,” she said apologetically. Then she turned and started shouting in Orcish. I understood about three quarters of what she said as she repeated my questions, but apparently none of them had that talent. One snapped something back. I understood the part about wargs.
“Maybe wargs track? Good nose warg.”
They were giant wolves after all. It was worth a shot. “Can you go get some?”
Shelly nodded vigorously and then took off running.
That was everything I could think of to do right then. This was a kidnapping. I had something he wanted. He’d call with instructions. I went back inside and stood there, seething and useless, still covered in my friend’s drying blood. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. My clothes were still blood-soaked, but they could wait.
I went back upstairs to say goodbye to Grandpa. Thing was, he didn’t look upset. He even had a contented look on his torn-up face, like he’d died doing what he loved. Or maybe I was just imagining it. Going out fighting was the Shackleford way. Even though he was in pajamas and socks, he had, in fact, in every other way but the literal, died with his boots on.
Then I noticed something. While he’d been lying here, he’d scratched something into the wood with his hook. It wasn’t very clear. He’d been running out of time and blood pressure, and hadn’t been big on penmanship to begin with, but it looked like he’d tried to write A-L-U and the beginning of another letter.
Grandad must have held on, staying alive so he could leave me this message, and bled out before he was done. And I had no idea what it meant. His message was unfinished. It was a dead end.
Just then the phone I’d taken from the garage rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. Through the bloody smears on its screen I could barely read Guardian.
I answered with “You son of a bitch—”
“No time for pleasantries, Guardian. Do you hear that?”
He must have held the phone close to my child so I could hear his cries crystal clear. I cringed. It was his “I’m scared” scream not just his “I’m hungry” or “I’m dirty” scream.
“You know what’s at stake. Do as I say or else.”
“Or what? My baby dies?”
The guy—well, whatever he was he sounded like a guy—on the other side, laughed as if I’d said something funny. “Is death truly the worst thing you can think of? We both know there are worse things than death. Far worse. Use your imagination.”
There was a short silence during which I did my absolute best not to use my imagination. Instead I said, “I’m listening.”
“Very well. I want you to go to your kitchen. I left something for you there.”
I went downstairs. There were bloody footprints on my otherwise clean kitchen floor. The prints were from small shoes, and the blood was from Grandpa and Dorcas. Hopefully just them, and none of it was Ray’s. Just that thought made me sick.
“I’m in the kitchen.”
“Open the first cabinet on the right.”
I did. There, atop my familiar plates was a small length of unfamiliar rope. It had that kind of fizz feeling I get from something magic. It took me only a second to figure out what it probably was. It had to be one of those transportation spells used by the Condition cultists. In fact, this entire operation was smelling more and more like the work of the Sanctified Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition, founded by the necromancer Martin Hood, and now run by his bat-shit-crazy daughter, Lucinda.
“I assume you know how to use the portal rope. When you place it down, it will be too small for a person to come through, but the artifact will fit.”
I was thinking frantically. Working alongside Franks, Milo had come up with a way to use the Condition’s teleportation magic against them. By using their existing, preprogrammed length of rope, he’d spliced a bunch more on, and then opened a path big enough for us to fly a helicopter through. But that had taken lots of time, and I didn’t have lots of time.
“How do I know you’ll give me my baby back when I’ve given you the artifact?”
There was hesitation. I could sense I’d taken it by surprise. It’s not that evil is stupid exactly, but every evil thing I’ve ever dealt with tends to have this unique inability to think outside its own very narrow parameters. This particular evil was used to being obeyed.
“You have no choice.”
“How do I even know he’s still alive, and you haven’t just recorded his cry?”
“You do not. Once you send the artifact through, I will pass your baby back.”
I was the company negotiator for a reason. “No. You’re not putting my kid through some evil portal. I need proof he’s alive. I need to see him in person. Then we hand off.”
“The artifact must be delivered through the portal. That is the only acceptable outcome.”
“Fine. Then agree to meet me somewhere I can see my kid in person, I’ll drop the rope and put the artifact through it, then I walk away with my kid. If I can’t see him alive and in person, then you get nothing.”
The thing was quiet for a long time as it thought over my counteroffer. “I will call in thirty minutes with a location.”
“Wait.” If I could get more time I might be able to splice the rope thing and go through with a rescue party full of orcs and guns blazing. “I need more time to retrieve it.”
; “Do not lie to me. I have no idea how you managed to hide it from everyone, but I do know that the Guardian would be compelled to keep it nearby.”
Damn it. I hated when evil things were thinkers. “It’s under a magical lock. It takes time to open. I need more time.”
“You have thirty minutes.” The call ended.
I stood in my kitchen, trying to think. I was shaking so hard, I could hear my teeth chatter. It wasn’t fear, it was absolute, blinding anger that I had nowhere to put. If I could, right then, shoot all the evil bastards, my hand would be as steady as ever. But that’s not what I had to do. I had to think. There was no way I could hand the artifact over to His Evilness.
In the wrong hands, the Kumaresh Yar could literally destroy time. I knew this because my husband was one of those wrong hands, and using it once, he had erased several minutes from existence for everyone in the whole world. Not to mention that had also woken up an ancient chaos god. It was the kind of thing that powerhouses like Lord Machado, Martin Hood or, yes, even my mother, could use to accomplish all sorts of evil.
After the Arbmunep incident, everyone else had thought the Kumaresh Yar was missing. My taking it and hiding it away had seemed like the logical choice at the time. MHI didn’t need to know about it because eventually there would be a big enough threat that someone with good intentions—like Owen—would be tempted to try and use it. And I definitely didn’t want the MCB to get it, which had turned out to be a good decision considering what a power-mad asshole Stricken had turned out to be.
So I’d stashed it and not told anyone, the whole time telling myself that it was my choice, and not that I’d been somehow compelled to protect that thing because of the Guardian’s curse. I didn’t think that the marks were messing with my mind, but magic could be weird and subtle.
Cursed obligations aside, there was no way the kidnapper would turn over my baby without at least seeing the artifact first, and bringing it out of hiding at all risked losing it. However…if I did have to turn it over, they might not be able to use it. From what I understood, it was always useful for dark magic, but it took someone special like Owen to unlock its full potential, and from everything we’d learned, someone like him—or Lord Machado—only came around once every five hundred years. Luckily, the only man in the world right now who could use the Kumaresh Yar’s full power to tear holes in space and time was a good man who wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. So I’d have to trust that this murdering, baby-kidnapping asshole would at least need a little time to figure out how to use it at all, and five centuries before they could find another special person to end the world with it.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to pull out the potential world ender, but I needed my baby back and I was on the clock. I grabbed the length of rope, shoved it in my pocket, and ran for the back door. I stopped by the tool shed to get a sledgehammer and a crowbar.
The evil dude had guessed right. I did keep the artifact nearby. In fact, it would probably have driven him insane if he’d realized how close he’d been, also how unguarded it was. Most of its protection was in misdirection and secrecy.
There is a building on the grounds of the old plantation that had been slave quarters. When I was little I’d set fire to it, but there were parts that didn’t burn.
Back then I’d been teaching myself how to make homemade explosives. In fact, it had been that same melted packing peanuts in gasoline mixture I’d later used in college on those vampires. Owen says that it’s a common mark of a future Hunter to have caused unimaginable destruction with improvised explosives while they were young and didn’t know any better.
The slave quarters didn’t have anything to do with my family. Bubba Shackleford had bought this property a long time after the Civil War. His branch of the family had always been dirt-poor farmers, treated like trash. Once monster hunting had made him wealthy, he’d returned and bought the biggest, nicest, most historically significant plantation house in his home county. According to family tradition, Bubba didn’t even like fancy things, other than guns obviously, but like a lot of men who’d grown up with nothing, spiting those who’d once looked down at him was a hell of a good motivator.
But the slave quarters had been part of the history of this place, and even the ugly parts of history shouldn’t be forgotten. All the people who wanted every reference to the bad things we’d done in the past removed were fools. They were just trying to signal that they were better than their ancestors, but in fact, we’re no different. We’ve just got hindsight and their mistakes to learn from. If we forget the atrocities of the past, we’ll repeat them in the future, just with prettier names and new justifications.
Which is why as an adult, I felt bad for burning down a historical landmark. As a kid I’d thought it was kind of awesome how the melted burning Styrofoam had stuck to everything.
There were a few things that hadn’t burned, like the really solid prison room that had served as Earl’s full-moon retreat for decades, but most of the slave quarters had been totally destroyed. Except years later, my brother Ray and I had found something while poking around in the ruins.
I had no idea what the secret chamber past the trapdoor had been used for or who had built it. The locking mechanism was intricate and well hidden. You had to push on different stones in order, like a spy movie. I’d once tried to sound Grandpa out about the secret room, without giving too much away, but he’d shown no sign that he’d known what I was talking about.
Since it was newer than the building which had burned down on top of it, it had probably been Bubba Shackleford himself who’d designed it to hide something important. Ray and I had figured with Bubba it had probably been buried treasure. Literally. But whatever had been in there was long gone by the time his great-great-grandkids broke in. When I’d checked Bubba’s writings in the archives, there was no mention of this room. And apparently Bubba had never told his son, because Earl hadn’t known about it either.
As kids, having a secret clubhouse like that is kind of amazing. Ray had thought it was dorky, and he’d thought he was too mature to crawl around narrow muddy tunnels, but he’d sworn to never tell anybody what we’d found. I’d stashed my diary in there, because that’s the kind of thing teenage girls do. Except now that Ray was long dead and I’d found something far more important to hide, I’d put that secret chamber to better use.
Beneath the trapdoor was a narrow hole, like an old well, stone-lined, with iron rivets stuck into the stones which could be used to climb down. At the bottom was a tunnel which had been a lot easier to navigate when I was a kid. Now, it took getting on all fours, and then squeezing past a half-moon opening on the wall. I crawled along with my flashlight in one hand. It looked so rough and small that I suspected anyone who got this far would think it was just an opening to an old cistern or well, and would turn back. The whole place smelled musty. The air was humid. It felt like if you kept going you were going to get stuck, and die trapped down here.
But that was just to set the ambiance. Once you squeezed past the half-moon opening, there was an actual stairwell. Each step was of a different height, as if the people who’d built it had either not cared the least bit how it looked or had used the materials at hand without any thought. My flashlight illuminated the signs I’d posted all over the walls, signs that read keep out and turn back and skulls and crossbones and danger high explosives, that sort of thing.
Not that I’d normally warn people they were about to step on a land mine, but I was afraid that Owen or someone else—Owen had a talent for finding things no one wanted found or blundering into places no one wanted him to go—would come in here without the slightest notion of what it was. So I’d taken precautions.
I now disarmed the precautions as I went, avoiding the spring-loaded spikes and being careful not to pull the trip wires that would set off the silver-loaded claymore mines. I wasn’t joking when I said I really did not want this thing to fall into hostile hands.
Then it occurred t
o me that I might be putting it directly into hostile hands, and I shuddered. Hopefully not, but if I did, only for a very short time. A very short time. Certainly too short for them to get up to anything interesting with it.
After getting past the booby traps, I unlocked the heavy wooden door at the bottom of the stairs. The door looked positively medieval. I’d replaced the Bubba Shackleford-era locks with some new ones, mechanical and electronic. Then I had to disarm the second layer of booby traps. No, you don’t need to know what they are because I might need to use them again. It took me a little while and quite a bit of concentration. If I’d forgotten any of them, I’d get killed, and then Ray would be on his own.
The room was relatively small, probably only large enough for Bubba’s treasure chests or whatever it was he’d hidden down here. The walls and floor were made of big stones mortared together. I had a few things left out in the open, and I’d made sure some of them were valuable enough that if someone did manage to get in, they’d think that was what all the booby traps were trying to protect. But the real prize was under the floor.
I’d tried to destroy this damned thing. A bullet had chipped it once a long time ago, but it must have wanted that little piece to break off to go and cause mischief, because bullets sure hadn’t worked when I’d tried again, including some really big ones. I’d tried melting it, crushing it in a hydraulic press, acid, and a plasma torch. I’d even thought about going old school and throwing it in an active volcano, but then it would probably send out a signal and some kind of fire demon would find it.
Evil has a way of attracting evil, which was why I’d put the artifact in a lead cube with an outer one of cold iron. I figured that would stop it from sending out any negative waves. Then I’d buried that, mixed up a few buckets of cement, and put that on top so that even if someone did find this place, they might not know they were walking on top of it. I had done what I had to do to keep psychos like the Condition or my evil vampire mom from sniffing it out. Now I had to get it out before my baby ran out of time.
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 7