The decoy got off the bike and started walking with the general flow toward the nearest hotel.
Thankfully, our target was on the small side, so couldn’t exactly bull her way through the crowd like me and Trip. I’m six foot five and three hundred pounds of impolite muscle. Trip was several inches shorter and a whole lot lighter, but our company nerd had also played college football, so shoving people came naturally to him. We were gaining on her. We just needed to be chill enough doing it to not cause a commotion. If she spotted us and ran, this was going to get really complicated. Thankfully, it was extremely loud. Groups of friends were talking, music was playing, horns were honking, and there were guys with coolers hawking bottled water for five bucks a pop. Which they were probably getting, because standing in the middle of thousands of people meant that it had gotten a whole lot hotter real fast. I felt bad for the people in the really big costumes. Who in their right mind wears fur in Atlanta in summer?
“You know this place better than I do, so you’d better handle giving everybody else directions,” I told Trip.
“Sure. But I’ve only been here once, and if she goes inside the hotels, it’s a maze.” Our radio setup consisted of an earpiece and a microphone that hung around our neck, which was about as discreet as you could get. So Trip vectoring the rest of the Hunters in on us would just look like he was having a conversation with me, or maybe just talking to himself. Which, all things considered, wasn’t even sort of close to the weirdest thing on the street right now.
I had to put my hand over my ear to block the crowd noise. “This is Earl and Gregorius, coming in from the Hyatt side on foot. Boone’s trying to go around and will be waiting in a car on the south side. Holly is coming up behind Z and Trip.”
We closed to within fifty yards and our target still hadn’t seen us. She kept looking around too, seeming calm but alert. But there were so many people that even as big and ugly as I was, we didn’t stand out that much in jeans and T-shirts. Losing her in the crowd was our biggest danger, but simultaneously our biggest asset because it was slowing her down. The mob had to stop at an intersection, waiting for the light to change before they could cross. And that was a huge mess because cars were trying to make it across the intersection but getting stuck and blocking traffic from the other direction when those lights changed. Which led to a lot of distracting angry honking from drivers who had unwittingly blundered into this.
Our target was short enough I lost her in the clump at the crosswalk, hidden behind five Deadpools. When the light changed again and the crowd started across the street, I couldn’t find her.
“Where’d she go?” Trip asked. Had she ducked into a business? Turned down the other street? “Milo?”
“Uhh . . . I can’t see the pink hair anymore, but the white box thingy is still going in the same direction.”
Ain’t technology grand? I was walking and pushing about as fast as I could without knocking anybody over, but I still couldn’t spot the decoy. Then I saw the big red backpack, and the woman who had it over her shoulder was still in the same black riding clothes, and still about the same age, height, and build . . . Only now she was black with braids. There hadn’t been a handoff either. This wasn’t somebody else carrying the same bag. I was about ninety percent sure I was looking at the same girl, just wearing an entirely different face.
Trip spotted her about the same time I did and came to the same conclusion. The key to being a successful Monster Hunter is having a flexible mind, so neither of us got rattled too much by this new development.
“We’ve got a shape-shifter. I repeat, she’s some kind of shape-shifter.” He hadn’t said that into his microphone very loudly at all, so either she had supernatural hearing or the timing of her glance back was just really unfortunate, because she turned her head and caught the two of us gawking at her. There was only a split second of hesitation, the slightest bit of a grin . . . and then she ran.
And the girl was quick.
We went after her. It was on now.
Trip was a far smoother runner than I was, and he darted between the brightly costumed people, then found an open patch of flowerbed to sprint down. When that ran out, he jumped a little metal fence into the street and started dodging between slowly moving cars.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t that graceful, but I was really big and really loud. “Make a hole!” Subtlety went right out the window as I plowed my way through the con goers. “Emergency!” I, of course, did not specify the nature of said emergency, because the MCB had zero sense of humor when it came to monster business in public. “Coming through!”
The girl darted back and forth, swiftly making her way through the crowd. Miraculously, Trip was keeping up. They were both starting to leave me behind. And that was before I tripped over Batman’s cape and ate pavement. I jumped right back up and kept going, ignoring the people yelling and calling me all sorts of names, many of which I deserved because I was being very rude. But if I didn’t get that Ward Stone, then an ancient chaos demon was probably going to destroy the world and consume all their souls anyway, so they could suck it up.
Trip was still shouting directions into his radio. “She took a left and is heading for the Marriot,” he said. Which wasn’t helpful for me at all. But thankfully people were starting to get out of the
