Monster Hunter Guardian

by Larry Correia

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t heard anything. That’s not why I called.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I hoped you had news of Klaus and the others.”

  “Me too. I’m afraid I’ve not heard anything since that blizzard started. I’m in Cologne pursuing something, and I could use your assistance.”

  There was a long pause. “Our teaming agreement with MHI states that you must inform us when taking a contract in our territory. Not to mention foreign Hunters must register with the government twenty-four hours before entering the country, and we’ve received no notification of—”

  They sure loved having their papers in order. “Listen. I don’t mean to be rude, but an hour ago I was in Alabama. I fell through a portal to get here, and at the time I didn’t even know where here was. A few minutes later I walked right into an active cell of Condition cultists and shot them with a gun I’m probably not supposed to have, and now I need to know if you’re going to help a sister out or turn me over to the police.”

  “Why—”

  “Because I just found out that Lucinda Hood is on her way to Cologne right now.” That caused an audible gasp and then a really long pause. Long enough for one of the local studly-looking young guys to wander over to try and flirt with me. Flattering as that was, I moved the phone away from my mouth and said, “Buzz off.”

  As the dejected hipster wandered away, the lady from Grimm Berlin said, “Excuse me?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you. But from your shocked silence I’m betting your government’s got as big a bounty on Lucinda’s head as mine does. I’ll tell you what I know to help you catch her, and MHI doesn’t expect a single Euro of the reward money.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “A chance to question Lucinda. And no police, no SJK.” That was their equivalent to the MCB. “I don’t have time for them. Hunters only.”

  “We have a man in Cologne right now.”

  “Only one?”

  “Like you, we are a little short-handed right now. All of our teams are currently occupied. We have one man there in an advisory capacity. There were some reports of unusual activity there tonight.”

  “Oh, it was definitely unusual. Could I have his phone number?”

  “Just a moment please.”

  And then there was a long silence, the kind of dead silence you get when you’ve been muted. I knew exactly what the person on the other side was doing. In our career, there are things we have to worry about that no other field of endeavor would even think of. When you meet an old friend, especially in an odd situation like this, you want to make sure they are who they say they are. There are things like doppelgangers. I had some experience being fooled by one, and I knew Grimm Berlin did too.

  I figured calls were being made, at least to the MHI office, to make sure I wasn’t at home. I hoped there was someone on the other side to answer. How was Dorcas? Had Lee made it? Crap…I really needed to check my messages.

  A few minutes later the voice came back. I must have checked out. “Where in Cologne are you?”

  “By the riverside. Near…” I had to lean over and read the names off the nearest street signs.

  “Ah…by the disturbance. Our man is at a parking garage—”

  “Yeah…I was just there.”

  “I presume you don’t wish to meet him there?”

  “Good guess. Have him meet me in front of… Hang on…” I found the name of a bar a ways down on the other side of the street that I still had a good view of. That way if they ratted me out and a bunch of cops rolled up, it would be the wrong place.

  While I waited, I checked my texts and voicemails. Dorcas was awake, in pain, and really cranky, but holding down the fort. A Hunter from our Atlanta team was on the way to help her out. Albert was out of surgery, wasn’t awake yet, but stable. Thank God. There were a bunch more messages I didn’t have time to go through from Grant, Melvin, and other stateside Hunters who’d just heard something had gone down who were ready to kick ass and take names. Too bad they were on the other side of the world. By the time they got here, it would probably be too late.

  I sent Dorcas a message telling her where I was, and she’d pass that on. Then I decided to power it off. If the police did identify me somehow, they’d be able to track my phone. But before I did, I realized I was staring at the background photo because it was a picture of my little guy. “Oh, Ray.” I wanted to hear his fat, rolling, satisfied giggle. And I needed—with a near physical craving—to know he was safe and well, and that he would grow up safe and well, my son, Owen’s son, a happy young Monster Hunter who’d inherit the company, just the way Grandpa would have wanted it.

  I needed kin and comfort. Neither was available. What I got instead was a black Audi with tinted windows pulling up in front of the bar down the street.

  Shutting my phone down, I looked around. No sign of uniforms and nobody I could pick out as a plainclothes cop or SJK agent trying to blend in, waiting to pounce. But then again, I was a Monster Hunter, not a professional criminal. What did I know?

  Since there wasn’t an open parking spot, the Audi was blocking traffic. Other cars were backing up behind it, but the Audi didn’t move. People got impatient and started to honk, but the driver didn’t give a shit… That was a very Hunter-like attitude.

  I ran over to the passenger side door. He must have seen me coming because the window rolled down.

  The driver was a young man with longish hair. “Julie?”

  “Yeah,”

  “I’m Fabian. Get in.”

  And we were moving before I even got the door closed.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately start to grill me with questions. Instead we drove in silence.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A safe house.”

  The idea of being able to stop running for just a moment, to be able to eat something, to stop and think sounded wonderful. But then I was hit with this frantic sense of guilt. Yes, I was still worried about my son and, no, I couldn’t waste time on my way to finding him. I was tired and vaguely dizzy, yet the thought that I probably would have to take a break, maybe even sleep before I found him was strange and revolting. You have to be a mother to fully understand why. It seemed selfish that my body would even have necessities while Ray was missing. The minute he’d vanished, as far as my back brain, my mommy brain, was concerned, I should have become a perfect titanium automaton, needing no food, no sleep, no rest, no slowing down until I found him.

  In a way I wished it were really like that. It would make life much easier.

  But here, in the slightly cold spring night of Cologne, listening to the mournful metallic clangs from the motion of some sailboats anchored nearby on the darkened Rhine, smelling the beer and the fresh pretzels, I felt as though my arms and legs were made of lead, my stomach an empty hollow composed of hunger and fear, and my mind a muddle from lack of sleep. I rolled up the window so I could tune out those distractions.

  “A safe house, huh? And not the local SJK office?”

  “Sonderjagkommandos? I was told you requested no government interference.”

  They wouldn’t care about Ray nearly as much as they’d care about killing the threats to their national security. “My son…my infant son has been kidnapped by an Adze that calls himself Brother Death.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear that.” He was slim, and young as Benno and the cultists. I could tell his hair had been cut to frame his face in a way that women would think “so romantic.” He wore tight black pants and the sort of loose white shirt that belongs on the cover of a romance novel. But his eyes were sharp, and the look he gave me then was one of respect. He knew I was dangerous and desperate. For whatever reason, that little bit of recognition meant a lot.

  As if to prove he had no ill intentions, Fabian started talking. “My office called your office. The woman there told us of your predicament. Anything I can do to see your baby returned to you, I will do. Grimm Berlin is
dedicated to protecting the innocent from monsters, and there’s no one more innocent than an infant.”

  “Your kindness is much appreciated, but I can’t go to a safe house. I need to keep moving.”

  “To where?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  He was an unknown, and I didn’t have the inclination to get betrayed, arrested, or otherwise screwed with. I kind of wished that international Monster Hunters, who had to face diabolical deceptions in the course of our everyday business, could’ve worked out some system of sign and countersign, or secret rings or something so we were sure we were speaking to the right people. But that was just the tired talking because it wasn’t like the smart monsters, or the mind-reading ones, or the ancient chaos gods wouldn’t just learn all that stuff in short order to screw with us anyway.

  So I’d just have to trust my gut.

  “Mrs. Shackleford, if I may. Germany is a much smaller country than the United States. Not just in size, but in how far apart things are. I have experienced the American way of monster hunting, having fights in public or on the Autobahn. It can’t be that way here. Anything publicly experienced will get around fast because everyone has an aunt in the next city over, and the next city over is less than an hour away. Our SJK makes your MCB look gentle as a lamb. Unlike back home, you can’t just go off half-cocked.”

  “You’re pretty good with your American euphemisms.”

  He shrugged. “I did my post-grad at MIT. Grimm Berlin avoids using public accommodation unless it’s strictly necessary; instead, we have safe houses or chapter houses, perhaps you’d call them, where we can stay when a disturbance occurs in the area. In major cities like this we always have one or two, with disguised entrances and exits, or neighbors who aren’t particularly observant…and, of course, some additional protections against the supernatural. I was going to drive to the nearest one, so that we could have a meal and discuss our strategy.”

  “Our strategy?”

  “Yes. You’ve only been here a couple of hours and already burned a parking garage at a major cultural festival with thousands of potential witnesses. I am in no way exaggerating the merciless nature of the SJK. They are efficient. They will surely find you, and then they will put you into a very dark hole for a very long time.”

  Good thing I hadn’t told him about the collector from another dimension showing up.

  “So, if you do not wish for me to take you to the safe house, where would you like to go?”

  The mystery meeting with Lucinda wasn’t for several hours, so I didn’t actually know, and that was killing me. I just shook my tired head.

  “Safe house it is then.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The place Fabian took me was on the outskirts of Cologne. It looked much like a warehouse district anywhere else would, except that the big, bulky buildings were older and made of stone, interspaced with the occasional younger looking prefabs with metal roofs.

  The road was potholed and bumpy, and the old warehouses had faded painted signs that said things like BEST WINES and METAL AND HARDWARE. The lights shining at the street corners seemed yellowish and dim. Except for some trucks and panel vans parked in front of some of the warehouses, there was no sign of life or modernity. There was a fog coming in, rising from the ground up, the tendrils reaching upward and around the car, like living things. I was kind of waiting for that fog to turn red. Thankfully it didn’t.

  Fabian touched a button clipped to the visor, and iron gates I hadn’t noticed before opened. He drove the car down what looked like a narrow alley, but I suppose was really a long and winding driveway hemmed in by trees on either side.

  As we drove through the iron gates, I felt something that wasn’t quite a jolt in my neck, right along the Guardian’s mark, as though a very slight electrical field had been broached.

  “This place is warded.”

  Fabian seemed surprised I could tell. “Nothing nearly as potent as a ward stone, simply some spells drawn by an elf we contracted with. It merely warns us if anything otherworldly breaches the perimeter, but it does not give us any details.”

  I’d heard European elves were different from ours, but that would have to wait for another day. “Well, I’ll tell you now, it’s going to warn you that something just did.” If I’d felt it in the marks, I probably qualified. Not to mention Mr. Trash Bags—and I wasn’t going to say a word about him. Bringing a shoggoth into somebody’s house wasn’t exactly polite. “It’s just me.”

  “Oh really?”

  I’d been thinking paranoid thoughts about things like doppelgangers, and I’d never stopped to think he was probably thinking the same thing. So I pulled back my hair so he could see the black mark on my neck. “I got cursed. It’s a long story. Don’t believe me, you can let me out here and I’ll walk to a hotel.”

  Fabian sighed. “Very well.”

  There was another old warehouse at the end of the lane. Fabian touched a different button and a corrugated metal garage door rolled up in front of us. It moved far more quietly than expected, probably so no one would hear late night comings and goings.

  We pulled in and the door shut behind. I realized I had, once more, put my hand under my shirt to rest on my .45.

  “I suppose paranoia is a perfectly normal reaction to what you’ve been through,” Fabian said pointedly. “But now you’re just being rude.”

  “Yeah… Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  The interior of the warehouse looked almost mundane. There were an assortment of cars, a panel van, and shelves with the sorts of things you expect in a garage: oil and stuff for automotive maintenance.

  There was a door in the back. Fabian went over and held it open for me. I entered and found what looked and smelled like a suburban home.

  We’d come into what appeared to be a mudroom, with a row of shoes on mats. A big shaggy dog came running in and jumped on Fabian. “Down, Prinz, down!” Fabian said, but in the sort of tone a person uses to a very spoiled animal that they know won’t get down. He patted the great, untidy head for a moment, then said, “Now, where are your manners? Say hello to the lady.”

  The dog plopped down and lifted a paw in such a polite and intelligent manner as to make me wonder if it was something supernatural. I shook his paw, then looked up at Fabian, who must have read my thoughts, because he smiled. “No, no, he’s just a dog.”

  He led me and the dog—whose wagging tail was a weapon of mass injury—out of the mudroom and into such a brightly lit room that it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. It was a large, well-appointed kitchen, and the source of the smell that permeated the place: soup and bread.

  “I left my dinner simmering on the stove when I heard about the fire. A well-informed detective saw the squid necklaces and called me for a consult. You should eat.”

  “I’m fine,” I muttered. Now that I had a chance to slow down, I felt nauseous.

  “You don’t know if your child is eating, so you think why should you get to? Don’t be irrational. Here.” Fabian got out a bowl and began ladling soup into it. The way he held everything struck me as odd, and that’s when my tired brain finally realized that he had an artificial hand. In my defense, it was so lifelike it was hard to notice.

  He saw me looking. “Ah, this… It is why I’m here and not on the siege with my colleagues. Notice, this is a big place. Normally there would be five of us here. But with the siege, we only have a few full teams traveling constantly, and a single coordinator, such as myself, everywhere else. So they left the one-handed man home.”

  “I was having this same exact conversation with a friend before my day went sideways.” Seeing that fake hand reminded me of Grandpa, and that thought just made me sad. “How’d it happen?”

  “I’ve not had it for long. Do you remember when your government offered that obscene bounty on Special Agent Franks of the MCB?”

  “How could I forget? Two hundred and fifty million dollars, biggest PUFF bounty in history.”


  “I was one of the fools who tried to collect.”

  “Oh…” I’d heard that had gone really badly for Grimm Berlin. “Sorry.”

  “Franks easily picked us off one by one. It could have been worse. He spared our lives, but not all our limbs.” Fabian handed the bowl to me. “Sit. Eat.”

  It did smell good and I needed the calories so I could keep going. I pulled up at a spot at the kitchen table and started eating. I didn’t know how good of a Hunter he was, but Fabian was a great cook. While I shoveled food in my face, he got a text. Fabian read his phone, then scowled.

  “It’s my grandmother’s recipe. Good, no?” He sat down across from me.

  “Excellent,” I mumbled with my mouth full.

  “So now for the bad news. SJK just sent out a wanted notice with your name and a street camera photo of you and a cultist.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “I told you they’re efficient. Facial recognition software is truly a marvel.”

  Dead Condition and shell casings from American-manufactured silver bullets at the scene had probably drastically narrowed the SJK’s search parameters too. “Now what?”

  “They take great personal offense to foreign companies working here without approval. If you attempt to make contact with any of us, you are to be detained for questioning.” He began texting back, typing with one finger.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Telling my superiors that you never arrived at our meet. You must have gotten spooked and run off.” He even held up the phone so I could see the words. Then he hit send.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “The SJK can pound sand. They’re efficient at everything except for action. If they detain you for questioning, your baby will be ready for kindergarten by the time they let you out. And what my employer doesn’t know can’t hurt them. I’m on my own. It’s just me and the dog.”

  “So you’re helping me because you’re lonely.”

  “And bored. Now let’s talk about how to get your baby back.”