Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (54 page)

Stricken stepped away from the hospital bed, stroking his pointy chin thoughtfully. “I see…” like that messed with his schemes.

“Yep. I’m the Champion of everything. You kill me, you’re on your own. I don’t know what your fancy secret Nemesis thingy is, but it won’t work. You’re gonna need us. You’re gonna need
me
. Like, my family’s been prepping for this for like
forever.
Prophecies and stuff, generations of this kind of thing, people coming back from the dead. The works.” My words were really slurred. The stuff in the IV was potent. “He’s
scared
of me.”

Stricken didn’t seem convinced. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“Yup. It’s my destiny.”

“Hunters never cease to amuse me. I’m not too worried about this new threat. I know all about him. With Nemesis assets in place we’ll be able to handle anything the other side throws at us. No more being puppets on a string for a bunch of cosmic superpowers and their endless bickering. I’m changing the rules of this game once and for all.”

Stricken turned and walked to the door, then paused, deep in thought. “But, tell you what, Pitt, just in case you’re not completely delusional…I wouldn’t drink that water if I was you.”

I looked over at the cup, then back at Stricken, but he was already gone. I hadn’t even seen the door move. I reached over, picked up the cup of water, poured it back in the pitcher, dumped the whole poisonous thing into a potted plant next to the bed, and went back to sleep.

“Oh, my head…” This time I woke up to a much more welcome sight next to my bed. “Hey, hon.”

Julie startled awake. She’d been sleeping in the chair next to the bed. “You’re up.” I was glad to see the relief on her face. “Thank goodness. You’ve been out forever. How’re you feeling?”

“Sore and drugged.”

“You took a beating. Two broken bones in your foot, a compound fracture in your arm, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Sore is understandable.”

“Is Stricken still here?” I asked suspiciously.

“No…He was never here. Nobody’s seen him since he left the city during the dragon attack. There are several hundred Hunters in town who’d love to make him have an
accident.
”

“He was just here,” I looked over at the potted plant, suspicious that it would be turning brown already, but it was fine. “I think he was.” The concept of linear time was still a little fuzzy.

Julie reached over and stroked my cheek. “I’ve been here almost the whole time, and when I wasn’t, somebody else was. Trip and Holly have been practically camped in the hall. We didn’t see anybody.”

Weird.
Had I imagined that conversation? I felt okay. The memories started coming back. “You…You came back on the chopper…”

Julie nodded. “What’s a girl supposed to do? And by the way, that twenty millimeter is great
.
It’s so big I had to use all the bungees to hold it up, stick the barrel out one door, then hang myself out the opposite side to aim it.”

“But the
Nachtmar
—” It had wanted to possess a new host. “The baby!”

“Don’t worry.” Julie patted her abdomen. “Tanya promised she could ward it off with elf magic if it came around. Skippy almost had an aneurism when he found out she was drawing runes on his helicopter, but I talked him down because they were only in Sharpie. Tanya said she could handle anything disembodied.”

“And you
trusted
her?” I raised my voice.

Julie raised an eyebrow. She won the argument. “And if I hadn’t come back…”

“I’d be getting dissolved inside a dragon right now,” I admitted. “Sorry. It’s one thing to worry about one of you. I don’t know if I can handle two.”

“Better get used to it. I took a test an hour ago. Earl’s nose was right. I guess this is official.”

“What if—” There were a thousand questions.

“We’ll deal with whatever happens, like we always do.”

And that pretty much summed it up. We’d be okay. “You’ll be a good mom.”

“And you’ll be a great dad.”

We sat in silence for a long time. It was weird to have time to think again. I didn’t want to ask, but had to. “Who’d we lose?”

“We’re still trying to figure that out, but he hurt us.”

“Lacoco and VanZant?”

Julie shook her head. “MIA.”

I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the bed. They were dead because of me. “I had to make the call,” I whispered.

“You were right, though. The
Nachtmar
concentrated on us. The demons attacking the conference center lost focus, and when the
Nachtmar
followed us through the clouds, it broke the spell. If he hadn’t followed us, who knows what would’ve happened. If we hadn’t made it off that roof, the Last Dragon might still be on the other side.”

Being right didn’t make it any easier. Lacoco had a little girl. “I had to make the call.”

She patted my hand as she began to cry. “I know.”

Epilogue

Mosh stopped the rental car at the end of the driveway. He took way too long to shut the engine off. It was like he was debating putting it back in drive and making a run for it. I couldn’t blame him.

“Ready?” I asked.

He glanced over at me. He’d gotten out of Vegas in better shape than I had physically, but his face was still bruised, swollen, and scratched from his fight with the nightmare cultists. Basically, the Pitt brothers looked like crap. “We could just pretend this whole thing never happened.”

“Like that ever works out.”

Mosh sighed and shut the car off. “Let’s do this and get it over with.”

It took me a minute to get my crutch out of the backseat. Even with Gretchen’s additional attentions, she said the human doctors were right, and I was going to be on that crutch for a while longer. My brother met me on the other side of the car and the two of us stared up at the house with dread. There was still a discolored spot on the driveway from where a Condition cultist had bled all over it. This part was much harder than squaring off against a nightmare monster.

“You hear anything new?” Mosh asked, obviously stalling for time.

I shook my head in the negative. The news was still the same. The MCB had finally picked one of its conflicting stories and run with it. Las Vegas had been the site of an awful terrorist attack, first with weaponized Ebola, then with chemical weapons that may have caused crazy hallucinations, and finally with high explosives that had caused considerable damage down the Strip. “Last I’d heard they were still attempting to bring those horrible miscreants to justice.”

“Good. I hear they’re real jerks.”

Like Julie had told me in the hospital, MHI had gotten hurt. Of our thirty-three members that had attended the first and final ICMHP, six had died, two were missing, and ten had been injured, with three of those being severe enough that they would probably end up retiring. We’d had another two Hunters that didn’t get a scratch on them that had quit as a result of being exposed to their worst fears in the nightmare realm. None of the other companies had come out unscathed either. Everybody had lost someone. Earl had to say his goodbyes to Heather again. She still had one year of service left before she gained her PUFF exemption. It had been a bittersweet and too-short reunion for those two.

At least we had managed to protect the vast majority of the innocents who had been trapped inside the Last Dragon with us. As expected, they had all been threatened and silenced by the MCB. Some would make the transition to accepting the real world, others would end up in Appleton, a handful of them would end up like us.

ICMHP had left everyone with scars.

On the bright side, we had made some valuable new allies. The agreement that Earl had put together to share information and resources on the first day of the conference had managed to stick. We now had a strategic partnership with most of the other companies. Nate Shackleford and a small MHI crew had sealed the deal by risking their lives to hold the final wave of demons until every single other Hunter could fall back past them. That had gotten us a lot of respect. The kid had gained a reputation as a hero, maybe even enough of one to overcome the shame his father had brought on the family name years before.

It felt good to have allies. Sure, we’d compete against each other when it came to regular business, but when the time came that this new enemy showed his face, those differences would be set aside, and the world’s Hunters would collect their pound of flesh.

I’d been surprised that so many of our new friends had stopped by to see me in the hospital. News travels fast among Hunters, and within a few hours of me catching a tranquilizer dart in the neck, pretty much everyone knew roughly what had gone down in order to defeat the
Nachtmar
. Just when I felt the worst, I had an army of strangers thanking me for saving their lives. As Earl Harbinger would say, they were
all right.
Sadly, White Eagle had gone home already, so I didn’t ever get to ask that loud guy if he was related to Mordechai or not. Grimm Berlin had taken the PUFF money they’d received from Stricken and divided it out evenly to be given to the families of the Hunters that had died at the Last Dragon. Klaus Lindemann was a class act.

The only other bit of happy news that had come out of our Las Vegas trip was that our bomb expert, Cooper, had gotten hitched. One of the party girls that had crashed Grimm Berlin’s celebration had wound up following him around learning how to build improvised explosives during the siege. I guess that had led to love at first blast. Once they’d gotten back to Earth, having decided that life was short, they had immediately gotten married at a twenty-four hour wedding chapel by an Elvis impersonator. Tanya had approved.

As for that particular odd couple, I never found out what it was that Edward the orc had given me to give to Tanya in case he died. He had taken it back and hadn’t said another word about it. I wasn’t going to push the guy that had single-handedly sword-fought a dragon about it, either.

“Crap,” Mosh said, drawing me back to the present. “I can’t do this.”

“What’re you worried about? I’m the one that has to kill him.”

“We’ll see about that. Once he tells us who sent him back, I’ll—”

“What?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I don’t know. Something. But they’re not taking Dad if I can help it.”

That’s the spirit.
I reached over and rubbed his bald head. “For luck.”

Mosh swallowed hard and followed me up the steps. I screwed up my courage and rang the doorbell. We were about to face the hardest man in the world. A minute later there was much rattling as many sets of locks were undone.

The door opened and Dad was standing there. It was hard to read his expression, but he knew right away why I’d come. “I’ve been expecting you. I knew you’d do the right thing.” If he was a little surprised to see me, he was really surprised to see Mosh. “David? What’re you doing here?”

“Being responsible, I guess.”

Dad hadn’t expected him at all and I think it might have shook him a little. “Come in, come in. Your mother’s not home,” He led us inside. “But I’m guessing this surprise visit shouldn’t involve her anyway.”

“How is she?”

“She’s had years to get used to it. You’re the ones that have had to learn all this on such short notice. And for that, I’m sorry.” We all sat at the kitchen table. “Judging by the shape you two are in, Las Vegas. Was that your work?”

“Afraid so,” I answered.

Dad looked at Mosh. “You too?”

Mosh nodded quickly. “A little.”

“He saved a lot of lives,” I said. “We wouldn’t have made it without him.”

“I’m proud of you, son.” Auhangamea Pitt said to my brother for probably the first and only time in his life. “I’m proud of you for that, and I’m proud of you for having the guts to come here today.” Mosh had to look away, blinking rapidly.

My father turned back to study me for a long time. “Something’s changed since I saw you last, Owen.”

“We lost people,” I said simply.

“Naw…That’s not it. You’ve lost people before.” He shook his head. “But this time was different. Either you sent them or something you did made it happen. I can see it in your eyes.”

My voice cracked. “How can you know?”

“Because, son, I see that exact same thing I see on your face right now every single time I look in the mirror. It’s a heavy burden, and it don’t ever go away. You do what you have to do. Leadership is a hell of a thing.”

I rubbed my face. “I can’t—”

“They won’t be the last,” he promised. “That’s war, and yours is just beginning.”

“I know it is,” I answered. “But we’ve got a lot bigger army than I thought. There’s legions of us.”

The men of the Pitt family sat at that table for a while, mulling that over. Dad waited patiently to begin. He’d already waited most of his life for this moment.

It was time to fulfill his destiny.

It was time for me to start mine.

“Dad, it’s time we talk…”

END