"Earl wants us to meet him somewhere."
"I don't like it. Myers said we should go back to the compound," Grant said.
"Screw him," I said automatically. "When did you start caring what the Feds say?"
Grant snorted like that was absurd. "I don't."
"You're just worried that you're too pretty for prison." They'd have loved Grant in Tijira. Lee came back. "Where to, man?"
"Birmingham. Harbinger gave me an address for a house in a neighborhood called Hensley." Lee said.
"Never heard of it, but cool." So Harbinger had something up his sleeve after all. The whole "hide and wait for the bad guys to kill me" plan hadn't gone real well so far, so hopefully he had found a way to go on the offensive.
I like being offensive.
Chapter 8
Birmingham was the next big city north of Montgomery. It took us awhile to drive the van through all of the various detours that popped up in the aftermath of the concert. It gave Gretchen a chance to bounce around between the seats, applying greasy, smelly ointments to all of our various injuries.
"Yes, damn it, Tim. The tour bus exploded…Yeah, you heard me. Ex-Plode-Ed," Mosh said into Lee's borrowed cell phone with quite a bit of consternation. He had wanted to contact his band to let them know that he was still alive. "No, I don't know what's going on…Atlanta? Hell, I guess we're probably going to have to cancel it, don't you think? Since the bus exploded. " He shook his head sadly. "Okay, whatever, I'll call you back as soon as I can." My brother handed the borrowed phone back and then banged his forehead against the window.
Yep, I've had nights like that before.
Mosh wasn't very responsive and appeared deep in thought. He hadn't even commented as Gretchen had applied a paste made out of old squirrels and herbs to the scratches on his face and arms. I had thought about taking him to a real hospital but I knew that he was a lot safer with me than floating around out there, alone and a target.
The worst injury to our contingent had been to Edward. Bia had clubbed him pretty good. He was resting in the back, and Gretchen informed us that he would be just fine. Orcs were built tough.
The broken windows made conversation difficult but at least the airflow made the evaporating gas stink from my soaked boots bearable. Grant rode shotgun, literally in this case, with a 12-gauge FN auto-loader sitting across his lap. It was still unknown just how much info the Condition had about us but we were a relatively small and vulnerable force out here on our own.
Lee had asked for details on the monsters while Gretchen pasted an inch-long cut on my scalp shut. I had lost a lot of scars because of the magical healing at DeSoya Caverns but I was having no problem picking up new ones. Lee had pumped his fist in the air when I had told him the details of Force and Violence's demise. "Yes!" our librarian shouted. "The clay, the explosions, the ghosts, that's textbook right there. They were giant, animated, soul containers. I was right. They were definitely oni, disembodied spirits living inside a created form. That's awesome." He turned to look at me over the seat. Apparently I gave him a stupid look. "Don't you get it?"
"Uh, no? And watch the road, I've already been in two car accidents tonight. Don't make me make a tacky comment about Asian drivers."
"Puh-leeze, like I've got a Camry with a giant spoiler on it."
Lee flipped back around. "PUFF on an ogre is only like twenty grand, depending on the breed. They're big but they aren't anything special. The PUFF bounty on an oni is in the hundreds of thousands."
Grant perked right up at that. "You all saw it. I got a confirmed on the purple one. So I'm the primary," he said smugly. At MHI, the entire company shared bounties, but the team, or in this case, the individual who did the most work, got the most pay. "And to think Earl left me behind to train stupid Newbies while he wasted his time on some wimpy trolls. How many hundreds are we talking about?"
"I'll have to look it up. It's not like anybody has killed one of these in a long time." Lee almost giggled. He was such a dork when it came to monster lore. "And the best part? The Feds smoked the big one, but the law says that government representatives can't collect PUFF."
"Really? Agents don't get PUFF?" Grant was incredulous. "That's…that's crazy. Well, good thing I'm not a Fed! We'll file the paperwork for an assist on the red one in the morning." He had been MHI's golden boy once, but had left in disgrace. Pulling off a great kill in his first few days back would probably help his reputation. "They couldn't have got him without our providing a distraction."
"Oh, that'll piss off Myers, but good." Lee held out his fist for Grant to bump knuckles. Grant looked at him awkwardly for a moment and then did so.
"On a personal note, it sucks to be the number one target of a godlike interdimensional being, but it sure is good for business," I added.
"That's it." Mosh finally spoke up. "I've had about enough of this shit. PUFF? Ogres? Oni? Who the hell are you people?" He jerked his thumb to where the orcs were sitting quietly in back. "What the hell are those people?" He turned toward me and stabbed one callused fingertip into my armored chest. "And you. You owe me an explanation or you can pull this thing over and let me out right now."
I glanced out the window. It was the middle of the night and we were in the country. "Not the best place to hitch a ride, bro."
"I swear I'm about to beat you like a tetherball," Mosh said.
"Well, it's a long story," I began.
"Give me the short version."
"Monsters are real. We make lots of money killing them," Lee piped in.
"I didn't ask you. I asked my stupid brother, who I'm guessing isn't really a CPA." He thumped me in the armor. "I want answers."
I laughed. "Short version?"
Mosh gave me a dangerous look. "Break it down for me."
Well, if he wanted to be that way…"Cool. Remember last year when my accounting supervisor turned out to be a serial killer? Nope. Werewolf. Remember last time we talked and I told you about my new finance job? Nope. Monster Hunter. These guys are some of my coworkers." I waved toward Grant and Lee, then I jerked my thumb to the rear. "Those folks back there are orcs, but it's all good, they're on our side. That muscle-bound guy who got killed back at the overpass? He was my bodyguard, assigned by a shadow government agency that keeps monsters secret from the public. The things at the concert were mythical creatures hired by a death cult to sacrifice me to a giant space mollusk because they think I poked it in the eye with a nuclear weapon last summer…Any questions?"
Mosh glared. "You always were a dick."
"You ready for the long version now?"
I wrapped up as much of my story as possible by the time our GPS guided us to the location that Harbinger had given Lee. It was in an old, rundown, kind of scary area on the northwest side of Birmingham. We pulled onto a narrow street. To our immediate left was a series of fat, rectangular, red-brick buildings. Each identical building was aesthetically awful, with barred windows and knee-high brown weeds in the neglected yards. We were in the Projects.
"So, what do you think?" I asked my brother. "We cool?"
Mosh had been stroking his goatee and quietly looking out the window for the last little while. He turned back to face me. He was still incredulous, but taking it well. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
Honestly, I had wanted to. I shrugged. "If you hadn't seen what you saw earlier, would you have believed me anyway?"
"No. I would have told you to put down the crack pipe. But now? Hard to argue with what I saw tonight." When I had first joined MHI, Harbinger had told me that Hunters' greatest weapons were the flexibility of their minds-their ability to take in situations, no matter how weird, and just deal with them. I had made a pretty good Hunter, and judging by my brother's reactions, flexible minds ran in the family.