Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

“Have one on me, Maxie.”

Simon R. Green has worked as a shop assistant, bicycle repair mechanic, actor, journalist, and mail order bride. And every day he’s glad he doesn’t have to do any of that any more. His best known series are the “Deathstalker” books, (like “Star Wars,” only with a plot that makes sense,) the “Nightside” books, and the “Secret Histories,” featuring Shaman Bond, the world’s most secret agent. Although he does not have a website as such, there is a tribute site, to which he sometimes contributes information, at www.bluemoonrising.nl

John Taylor is a private eye who operates in the Twilight Zone, solving cases of the weird and uncanny. His beat is the Nightside, that sour secret heart of London, where the sun has never shone and it’s always three o’clock in the morning, the hour that tries men’s souls. Gods and monsters can be found there, often attending the same self - help groups. John Taylor is your last chance for justice, the truth, and other disturbing things.

I landed hard, ribs snapping and a wash of red agony pouring through me. High tittering laughter from the hellbreed with the primrose-colored eyes, screams of approval from the clustered Traders. Five against one, and here I was on the floor.

This is not going well.

“Oh, Kismet.” The tittering hellbreed actually had the gall to play to his Trader gallery. “Did you fall down ?”

Hot salt blood dribbled on my chin. The scar — the mark of a hellbreed’s lips — chuckled wetly on my wrist, a burst of razor-wire power jolting up the bones and cresting over my shoulder, my ribs popping out and hastily fusing back together. My left hand closed around a gun butt, and I found out that the primrose-eyed bastard had thrown me over near my whip.

Well. Better late than never. My right hand shot out, grabbed the bullwhip’s handle, and the sonofabitch was still laughing when I rolled up off the floor and the leather flashed out, a high hard crack that was the jingling silver flechettes at the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier. The hip leads in whip-work, a slight advantage women have. When added to speed and cussedness and the etheric force humming through the scar and jacking me up into superhuman, it was all I was going to get.

It was going to have to be enough.

Naked light bulbs swung at the end of cords, crazy-dappling shadows over the warehouse’s interior. The whip lashed, and flayed the primrose-eyed hellbreed’s face. It cut him off mid-chuckle, and if I wanted him dead now would have been the time to shoot him.

But I didn’t. Instead, I shot the Trader springing at me in midair, and to my right, the one who had somehow cottoned on that I wasn’t down and out yet. He’d swapped some of his humanity for superstrength and superspeed, but my aim was true and half his hell-trading head evaporated. That took the pep out of him, bigtime.

Lucky shot. I was just lucky all over tonight.

The screaming started, and from there it was straightforward. My next shot took out one of the hellbreed ringmaster’s bending-backward little knees. He had folded down and was screaming, the black ichor that passes for their blood bubbling out past the thin fingers clasping his face. Said face was now a mess of hamburger and there were three more Traders to deal with.

I hadn’t thought they’d be stupid enough to stay at their last known hangout. Not when they knew I was after them. I hadn’t precisely made a mistake — I’d just thought about questioning them before I started killing.

Mikhail would have told me not to bother. But he wasn’t here. Twenty-nine days since the Weres lit his pyre and his soul rode the smoke to Valhalla.

I was on my own.

Four minutes later the last Trader died gibbering at the end of a long smear of black-tinted blood, the corruption eating up his tissues and making the body do a St. Vitus’s dance. The pacts Traders make claim more than the soul, and maybe they would think twice about mortgaging themselves if they could see what happens when one of them bites it.

I don’t know. All I see are the ones who chance it.

I turned back to the hellbreed. He wasn’t so pretty now, and I hoped I’d gotten one of his eyes, popped it like a bubble. The whip coiled neatly and stowed itself, habitual movements while I kept the blubbering hellbreed covered. I ached all over and my ribs twitched, bone resetting itself. The scar pulse-burned on my right wrist, sawing against the nerves of my arm.

Slow and easy here, Jill.

My smart eye was hot and dry, watching the plucking under the fabric of the surface of the world. He could really be that hurt, burbling and moaning into his hands. But the tension in his shoulders — clad in once-elegant navy Brooks Brothers, now spattered with blood and other fluids — told me otherwise. His suit coat flopped around a little, low on his right side where the first bullet had taken a chunk out of him. Black ichor dripped and the noises he was making were straight out of a nightmare.

“Cut it out.” My voice sliced through his. The silver charms tied in my hair rattled and buzzed, blessed metal reacting against the contamination in the air. “You’re not that hurt.”

“Bitch,” he blubbered into his hands. “Oh you bitch .”

You’d think they’d find something more original to call a female hunter. I kept the gun on him, every muscle quivering-alert. The scar burned, working into my flesh. “You can guess what I’m after.” Each word very carefully weighted. “Slade. A hunter. Taller than me. Black hair, silver charms. Disappeared about twelve hours ago.”

“Bitch,” he moaned again.

I didn’t have time. So I blew away his other knee. The report boomed and caromed through the warehouse’s interior, and he crawfished on the floor, whisper-screaming because he’d run out of air.

“You have arms, too,” I reminded him. “Shoulders. Ribs. Genitalia. Start talking .”

In the end it took one of his elbows, too. By then the Traders were smears of bubbling black, corruption eating at their tissues, and the primrose-eyed ‘breed screamed until I put him out of his misery. Silence descended through the foul reek.

I swallowed hard, set my jaw, and took just enough time to clean the contamination of hellbreed away with whispering blue banefire, shaken off my fingers like oil, before I got going. I didn’t even stop to wash the blood off my face.

When another hunter calls, you go. It’s that simple. We who hold back the tide of Hell don’t ask for help lightly. I had irons in the fire back home, but Slade had called. A short message— Trouble brewing. Something big. Need backup . And I was on a plane and out of my town before the sun rose, ending up in his territory over a thousand miles away. Where the skies were always gray and there was a coffee shop on every single corner. The whole city smelled like concrete and old, moldy java.

I didn’t have a chance to ask why he’d called me, since he’d disappeared before I could get here.

We’d done hunter residencies together in New Orleans with Katja Lefevre, and that had been one sliptilting screamfest after another. I still had scars twitching from those six months. But you don’t ask questions. A hunter won’t call another away from her territory without a damn good reason.

His house on its quiet tree-lined street was empty, the front door smashed to flinders and Slade himself gone. The local Weres, Slade’s backup, knew nothing. The hellbreed weren’t opening their mouths much. All I had was a name — Narcisa . And another one: the Dutch.