Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 2

  She didn’t say anything, just smiled, as she kept closing distance. I could feel something coming off her, as if she were trying to send thoughts my way, suggesting she was inoffensive. Vampires do that thing where they project right against your mind. I always hated that feeling.

  Normal people would tell themselves that they were imagining things, that they were being fanciful. But it turns out I wasn’t normal, no matter how much I’d tried to pretend I was.

  Cynthers charged and I was sure. No human could move that fast.

  I shot her in the face.

  She jumped back, startled, blinking, as if she hadn’t expected me to resist.

  I’d been a little off. That’s what I got for being out of practice. I lined up the night sights and immediately put my second bullet through her eye socket.

  Sadly, guns aren’t the best thing for killing vampires, which was pretty obvious since shooting her twice through the brain only made her stumble.

  She might not have been alone. There could have been more vampires hiding in the bushes. I should have run away, but honestly that thought never even crossed my mind. Cynthia was hissing and squirting blood. When I saw her remaining eye glowing red and a sneer that revealed sharp fangs, I was committed. This monster was going down, no matter what.

  The night had been still so the whole campus must have heard the noise. People or vampires were sure to come running, but I didn’t think about that as I dumped the rest of my magazine into her.

  My slide locked back as I fired my last round.

  Cynthia had a bunch of new holes in her, but the instant the gunfire let up, she lurched in my direction.

  I wished I had a flamethrower. And body armor. If you don’t have something belt-fed or explosive, stakes and decapitation work best. I swung my book bag around, ripped open the side pocket, got ahold of my big knife, and yanked it from the sheath.

  Milo Anderson had made this blade, hammering it from a truck’s leaf spring over an open fire, just to teach himself how, and given it to me for Christmas. I intended to take her head off with it.

  Cynthia was wounded and pissed. She also had super vampire strength, but like most new vampires, she was too stupid and clumsy to use it well. The bullet wounds had screwed her up, so I might have a chance.

  She leapt at me.

  In my head was the story of how the Maasai hunt lions with just a sharpened stick. They crouch when the lion jumps, then run out of the way when the lion falls, preferably on the stick. No-longer-Cynthers was the lion, and a Milo-forged blade was a whole lot better than any stick.

  She tackled me. Cynthia wasn’t very big and Milo’s knife was huge. We landed hard, her on top of the knife, and I split her wide open. It was a mess. With my free hand I pushed against her face to keep her snapping fangs away from my neck. With my other, I just kept twisting and sawing, aiming for her heart. She shrieked and snapped, nothing but an undead animal. Thick black blood was gushing everywhere.

  She smelled like road-kill death.

  We rolled until I somehow wound up on top. I jerked the knife out of her torso and slashed it hard against her neck. Fluid sprayed out like a geyser. That took the fight out of her.

  Vampires are incredibly tough, and if you give them any time at all, they’ll heal. So I hacked her head off.

  It wasn’t pretty. Everything was slick, and I’d let myself get out of shape. My arms were on fire. It took me several tries to remove her head.

  At the time I felt nothing. My friend was gone. This was just evil animated meat.

  The overgrown area was quiet again. There was a bunch of noise and commotion around the rest of campus, but my gunshots had been so rapid that they must have been hard to pinpoint. The whole fight had taken like thirty seconds, but I was breathing hard, pulse pounding, sitting on top of a headless corpse whose flesh immediately started softening into black goo. I knew that pretty soon all that would be left were bones covered in ooze, but some idiot might stick the head back together with the body, and that would be bad. So I picked Cynthia’s head up by the hair and carried it back to my book bag. I shoved her in on top of my expensive textbooks… Well, those were certainly ruined now.

  No, you don’t need to know how I disposed of it. Suffice it to say no one ever found her head.

  I got out of there fast, before whatever vampire had turned Cynthia came to feed—or worse. I’d get caught by the cops covered in blood with a severed head in my bag. That would be tough to explain. I avoided the arriving police cars and hurried home off campus.

  My place was the top floor of a Victorian. I’d bought the house with my savings left from the bounties I’d collected. The bottom floor was two apartments, which paid a good portion of my tuition. The top floor was all mine, with a secret addition where I stored a bunch of my old equipment. It was well hidden. I could even have friends over for parties—not that I ever had parties—and they’d never have guessed that room was there. The first thing I did was open up the safe room to pull out some real hardware in case I’d been followed.

  Then I stripped off my blood-soaked clothing. While I showered was when the guilt really hit me. I could have saved Cynthers. I could have warned her, told her the whole truth…something. It was my duty to protect the lambs who couldn’t recognize a wolf. Really, I had barely known her, but I cried more right then than I had when my brother Ray had died, because at least with Ray, I had tried to save him.

  Grieving over my family and friends had made me selfish. Being normal was a foolish dream. It was too late for her, but not too late for the rest. The Feds be damned, it was time to go back to work.

  Normally when a vampire moves into an area, it takes victims and then stashes them, bleeding them slow, feeding over a period of time. That kept the number of disappearances low enough to not attract the attention of Hunters. When their helpless blood bags eventually died, the vamp would usually rip their heads off to keep them from coming back; less mouths to feed that way. Only this one was actively creating new vampires. That kind of escalating behavior was extremely dangerous. They’d still need a place to sleep during the day. That’s where I would find them and kill them.

  Solo hunting is stupid. It’s reserved for people with a death wish or nothing to lose. I didn’t think about that. This was personal. Nothing makes you dumber than anger or guilt, and right then I was feeling plenty of both.

  I spent the rest of the night preparing. I had a ton of guns, but with the MCB breathing down my neck, I was actually trying to obey the law, so I didn’t have any explosives. So I made up some Molotov cocktails in my kitchen. They would have to do. While I worked I kept asking myself where, on or near campus, was a place where vampires could hide from the sun without anyone seeing them?

  I came up with a few ideas and made a list. I had lockpicks, bolt cutters, and a crowbar. The minute the sun came up I got busy breaking and entering.

  I burned way too much daylight before I found my winner. The old science building was the fifth place I checked that day. It had a deep basement that had been closed off years ago. Theoretically, some people had keys for it, but nobody ever went down there, something about exposed asbestos. There had been articles in the student paper about all the stuff abandoned, including decaying books and science instruments long out of date. There were jokes about the philosopher’s stone forgotten in some cardboard box down there.

  I had put loose clothing on over my armor and stuck my equipment into a duffle bag, just enough of a disguise that someone seeing me on campus wouldn’t wonder when Auburn had added a Commando 101 course. I expected someone to challenge my right to go into the science building basement, but no one did. Since it was closed, there wouldn’t be any innocent people getting in my way.

  As soon as I found a bunch of dried bloody handprints and scratches where they’d dragged some poor struggling victim down the stairs, I knew I’d found the right place.

  * * *

  There were a lot more of them than I’d expected. This d
irtbag had been building an army.

  Young vampires are sluggish during the day, but they’re not entirely helpless. So every time I found one, I’d slam a stake through their heart to paralyze them, then immediately go to work chopping their heads off. Surprise them one at a time like that and they’re not too bad.

  The hard part is they like to hide. Vampires can sleep in the weirdest cramped conditions. In those cases, I’d toss a rope over whatever was sticking out, then drag them into the open to stake them. It’s time-consuming work.

  These were all weak, barely more than incoherent ghouls. They might have survived if Cynthers hadn’t gone off the reservation. A couple tried to fight me when I woke them up, but I’d shot those with a suppressed carbine until they were practically Swiss cheese. Then I dragged them out and finished the job. New vampires can hardly talk, but one tried to beg for mercy. I didn’t have any to give her.

  Vampires have a stink to them. Decay and blood. Their presence makes your skin crawl. They suck the warmth out of a room. They leave all that stuff out of the romance novels.

  I killed vampires all afternoon. They’d been collecting here for a while. There had probably just been one to start. That was the one I was really worried about. The longer vampires live, the tougher and smarter they get until the old ones are practically a nightmare.

  I never found him, but I found where he’d kept his captives: chained to a toilet in an old bathroom. He’d probably picked that room because it had a drain in the floor. But as the people he’d fed on died, he’d let them come back, and their numbers had grown. I really wanted to make him pay.

  As the sun went down, I knew the rest would wake up and swarm me. There was no way I’d make it out alive. Then the surviving vamps would escape to inflict this same horror on some other unsuspecting place. I was angry, guilty, and really tired, but I’m not dumb.

  So I lit my Molotov cocktails and burned that whole son of a bitch to the ground.

  My name is Julie Shackleford. My family have been Monster Hunters for over a hundred years. My job is to keep the sweet little idiots who don’t believe in monsters safe.

  And I’m okay with that.

  Chapter 2

  There was fire and screaming. The smell of gasoline stung my nostrils. I stood outside the burning building, the university campus behind me as dark shadows—the distorted bodies of vampires—threw themselves at the windows of the science building. One of them broke through.

  It was looking for me. Not to kill me, but worse. To steal my soul and make me like her.

  And someone had taken my baby.

  This made no sense, as my dream self didn’t have a baby—college had been a long time ago—but nonetheless I knew someone had taken him, and I was desolate.

  And then the shrieking started. Fire and vampires vanished.

  I woke up in the dark, shivering, with my baby screaming nearby. He’d saved me from a bad dream, a twisted version of what had happened years ago in school. We were having one of those winter nights when the temperature dips into the thirties, which would make people in more northerly states laugh, but it shouldn’t. It’s one thing to be in the teens or negative temps when you are in an insulated house that’s ready to take the cold, but in Alabama, no old house is really ready to take the cold.

  I had spent half the night not fully asleep, but too sleepy to get another blanket, and now I stared stupidly at the red glow of my alarm clock: four a.m. This was a problem because everything ached, and I was more tired than I’ve ever been, including times when I’d been out on a contract for weeks on end. But the baby’s screaming continued—loud, disconsolate, and demanding.

  “All right, all right.” I probably didn’t sound maternal at all as I dragged my tired ass out of bed and put on a robe. The crib was in my bedroom, both because I was sleeping alone and because…well, given the things that had been known to happen to my family, I still wasn’t too comfortable about letting my son too far out of my sight.

  Raymond Auhangamea Pitt was a big baby. He was also adorable, responsive, and just now a handful. How someone could be a handful when the sum total of his accomplishments were rolling over, drooling, and smiling was somewhat of a puzzle, but my son managed it.

  The minute he saw me appear over the edge of his crib, the crying stopped and a kind of amused gurgle came out as he waved his hands at me. Thing was, even this early in the morning I wasn’t even mad. There was something about my son’s laughter that melted my heart. It was a sort of chubby laugh, a rolling happy sound.

  He had reason to wake me, which I realized when I took a deep breath. He quit crying and gurgled and laughed through the changing, and then, when I sat on my bed holding him, he fell asleep, still smiling.

  He’d been a big baby—a super baby, as my husband had predicted/hoped, ten pounds plus at birth, and 22 inches long—and three months ago, I’d started supplementing his feedings with solids and he’d sort of given up on breast feeding. He was so big and perpetually hungry that my body couldn’t really keep up with him. The kid was probably ready for protein shakes. By six months he was done nursing but I still loved holding him and feeling him close to me, and the way his baby head was all heavy and warm in my arms.

  Owen had never even seen his son yet. I hadn’t signed up to be a single mom, and I told myself I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. But it was getting harder and harder to believe my husband was going to make it home and everything would be as it had been before.

  A shiver ran up my spine. Four in the morning is a terrible time to start thinking about your missing husband. I’d last heard from Owen right before Ray was born. In an underground city belonging to an ancient chaos god, he’d crossed a portal to a nightmare world—quite literally a place made out of nightmares—on a rescue mission, and hadn’t been heard from since.

  Owen was, like me, a Monster Hunter. More than that, he was a protector, a man who would always instinctively try to help others. It was part of the reason I loved him. Hyperresponsible, competent, and a protector. How could anyone not love that?

  But even the best of us lose sometimes, and he might not be coming back. That was part of what we signed up for, right? Hunters often married Hunters. It’s too much effort to stay married to someone who didn’t understand the truth, too difficult to keep up a façade about your job. Some of us told our spouses all about what we did, and others lied because they didn’t want to put their loved ones at risk. There’s no way I could’ve done that. Owen and I understood each other. Still, when you marry a Monster Hunter, you know you could end up widowed early.

  I looked at the ring on my finger and shook my head. No. Owen wouldn’t let that happen. I wasn’t going to be alone, and little Ray would know his father.

  It wasn’t just Owen either. I had a bunch of friends and family on that mission. I’d not heard from Owen for six months, but the rest—who were at least still in this dimension—checked in daily, or whenever the weather allowed at least. Yet whenever a day went by without a check-in, I had the forlorn thought that everyone on Severny Island had been killed, and that if only I’d been there, they’d be okay. I realized that was stupid. They weren’t lost, and I wasn’t some kind of superwarrior who could have made that much difference. Never mind that I had a duty, and that was to keep superbaby—or as Earl tried to call him, Little Bubba—safe and sound.

  Still…

  I must have dozed off, sitting up in bed holding my son, because I dreamed that Owen was right there with me saying, “Oh, man, he’s so chubby!” And I woke up feeling like I was about to drop him and clutched Ray tighter. He woke up, too, and fussed at being held so tight. The evil-red alarm clock said it was after seven a.m. and I was going to have to go to work.

  I showered in really hot water, but still felt cold. The nightmare about the science building basement had left something behind, some sense of foreboding. I should’ve been able to shrug it off and say it was just a dream but I couldn’t.

  Because I’d remembered th
e feeling that my baby was gone, I’d brought the little dude into the bathroom with me, sitting in his little car seat. He kicked his legs and chortled at himself, the way babies do, as if they knew some joke that they’re just not willing to share. When I was done showering, I washed him, then put a fresh diaper on, and dressed him in his little onesie with the MHI logo on the chest, a green smiley face with horns. By the time I’d dressed, he’d started to fuss, so I went downstairs to prepare a bottle.

  The big old house was quiet. It was a landmark, owned by the Heart of Dixie Historical Foundation—which was basically me but for tax purposes. The house was also currently a mess, with tape and tarps everywhere. I’d been renovating this old place for years. I don’t really know why. Maybe because of all my family memories growing up here, and if I was the one doing the work, it meant I got to keep the best and get rid of the worst.

  We’d been making real progress too. Owen was terrible at anything requiring a delicate touch, but he was great for manual labor. Because I’m not very good at staying with one task, various rooms were in different states of renovation at all times. And because varnish, paint, and particulates are almost as bad for pregnant women and babies as monster hunting, I hadn’t been able to do much for over a year now.

  And then of course, stupid Franks had shown up, and he and Earl had trashed the place. I’d hired contractors to fix the worst of it so the house would at least be livable again. I could have kept them on until the whole house was done, but that didn’t seem right. That was my job to finish.

  I really wanted to get back to it too. And back to monster hunting. When you actually like what you do, maternity leave kind of sucks. Being a mother makes you feel both really powerful and really helpless at the same time, which was a mind twist I hadn’t been looking for.

  With Ray on a crossbody sling, holding his bottle and drinking with horrible grunting slurping noises, I went to check on the other resident of the house.