Arlo Pike sat in one of the visitor chairs. Tilda sat in the other. She still looked tired.

His partner, Jason, stood behind her chair. He didn’t look affected by slicing a giant

monster worm apart as it tried to eat him.

They had spent time at the scene answering questions, and now they were waiting on

the captain in charge of the Guard to talk to them. More questions to be answered

didn’t thrill Pike.

And he still had to tell their client that his daughter had been eaten. He didn’t want

to do it, but it was part of his responsibility. He had been hired to find the girl. He

couldn’t do that. He had to refund the part of the money they had been paid, and

report the circumstances.

The client would still think his girl was alive if they couldn’t come up with absolute

proof. Pike had no way to produce that.

“Why do they want to talk to us?,” asked Tilda. “I have to get to work. I don’t have

time for this.”

“It’s just procedure,” said Jason. “They want to know how we killed the thing, and

if they can be taught to do the same thing.”

“Can you teach them to do the same thing?,” asked Tilda. She looked up at the

monster hunter.

“Sure,” said Jason. “The first step is to sell your humanity to the Master of the Hunt.

Then you have to train. Then you have to forge the weapon you need to kill the

monsters. It takes about ten years before you’re ready to hunt on your own.”

“Did you have to go through that, Pike?,” asked Tilda.

“Not a monster hunter,” said Pike. He refused to open his eyes, or raise his head. “I

just track lost things.”

“He’s the best finder around,” said Jason. “He’s worth every cent we charge our

clients.”

“I need some extra money,” said Tilda. “Maybe I could throw in with you two.”

“We would be happy to have you,” said Jason. “I admit I thought that you would get

killed trying to help us. I apologize for that.”

“I almost did,” said Tilda. “What I did takes a big charge. I could have blown up part

of my brain.”

The office door opened. A Guard captain in the familiar blue and sporting a giant

mustache came into the room. He sat down behind his desk with a smile at his guests.

He leaned back in his chair and took them in without saying anything.

“I’m Captain Munroe,” he said. “I am told that you three killed a death worm. My

subordinates are impressed. I admit I am too. How did you get on to it?”

Jason and Tilda looked at Pike slumped in his chair.

“Arlo?,” asked Jason. “Captain Munroe would like to know how you found the death

worm.”

“It was a conclusion based on what Tilda told me about the North Side,” said Pike.

“It was just luck that we stumbled on it the first night we started to look for it.”

“Why were you looking for it in the first place?,” asked Munroe. He focused on Pike.

He frowned at the way the man barely moved in his chair.

“We were hired to find a missing girl,” said Pike. “We leaped to the conclusion that

the death worm had eaten her, but we weren’t sure. Then we stumbled on it. Jason did

most of the work of killing it.”

“Really?,” asked the captain. He turned his gaze on the monster hunter.

“I have permission from the Master of the Hunt to kill monsters,” said Jason. “And

the blessing came in handy. We had to fight our way out from the inside. That’s what

led to killing the beast.”

“Jason cut its brain up with that sword of his,” said Tilda. She made swinging

gestures with her arms.

“I can believe that,” said Munroe. “How would you three like to work for the city?”

“Don’t you have your own finders?,” asked Jason. “What would you need us to do

that your own people are already doing?”

“There is a shadow war going on in the city,” said Munroe. “The city council doesn’t

want me to ask for help from other cities. They want me to find people here and

recruit them to sort things out.”

“So they don’t want you to ask the Green Lights for help?,” asked Jason. “For

example?”

“And they don’t want us to ask the Rhiem or the Alvas for better border controls

either,” said Munroe. “The general feeling is the city should defend itself against all

threats.”

“I suppose that’s reasonable,” said Jason. “I admit I am not a strategist in any shape.”

“We can’t control what’s going on,” said Munroe. “We need someone who can find

the threat, and stop the threat, without having to call someone from outside. You three

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could be the answer to the general problem.”

“You want us to hunt monsters for you?,” asked Jason.

“Essentially,” said Munroe. “While you three were dealing with the death worm,

someone shut down a virtual world designed to kill the people using it. We have

people going missing all over the city. And a dead man killed a mad scientist from

Lobster Bay and a masked magician at the Elzay Tower.”

“Do you want us to find out why all these people are disappearing?,” asked Jason.

“That will be the first job I need you to handle,” said Munroe. “If you can deal with

the dead man if you come across him, I won’t deny that will be one less problem

stirring the pot.”

“We’ll need a starting point, and twenty gold pieces up front,” said Pike. “That will

cover our expenses for a bit. We don’t guarantee the work, but summaries of what we

did will be written and provided for you to show that we are doing the job if we can

do the job. If we can’t do the job, the money less what we needed will be refunded.”

“Twenty gold pieces is steep,” said Munroe.

“Some of that will have to go to bribes,” said Pike. He didn’t look up. “That many

people missing and no one has found them looks like a conspiracy at work. We’ll

have to pay someone for a way to link the things together.”

“Don’t worry, Captain,” said Jason. “We will deal with this as smoothly as butter

on toast.”

“Butter on toast?,” said Tilda.

“I’m a bit hungry,” said Jason. “I thought we could get something to eat after our

meeting.”

“Do you have a list of the missing people and where they live?,” asked Pike. “That’s

where we’ll start.”

“We have a collection of reports stored in a room next to the cells,” said Munroe.

“How much cooperation are we going to get?,” asked Pike. “We are going to have

to talk to the patrol men on their rounds to get a sense of these people.”

“I will give you a writ to make things easier,” said Munroe. “Don’t try to abuse this

in the name of helping the city.”

“We don’t need permission to break things,” said Jason. “We already know how to

do that.”

“Not me,” said Tilda. “I’m an innocent bystander.”

Munroe gave her a look. She smiled back.

“We’ll get started while you’re getting the writ and the gold,” said Pike. He stood.

“Could you show us the files? We’ll start by reading what your patrol men have

already collected. Then we’ll go out and ask questions. Hopefully, we’ll have some

idea on how to focus on what we need to give you some kind of solution. Don’t

expect too much. A big enough conspiracy could be inside the Guard, and the

Council. There might not be anything we can do except what we do best. If that

happens, it might be best if you never saw us.”

Munroe looked at the finder, and then his partner. Pike still looked at the floor. Jason

grinned.

“Can you stop whatever is going on?,” asked Munroe.

Pike looked him in the eye for the first time. The captain saw a glint there. It was a

surge of something that was buried as the finder looked at the floor again.

“If we can’t, it can’t be stopped by people,” said Pike. “I hope you know a demigod

who can lend a hand if we need something extra.”

“Let me show you the work space,” said the captain. “Then I’ll get you the gold and

writ.”

“Don’t worry, Captain,” said Jason. “We have tracked some ruffians in our time.

This won’t be any different.”

Munroe nodded as he led the way out of the office. He took them down to the cell

block underneath the building. Two cells had been set aside from the looks of the

cabinets pressed against the wall and the long table taking up one cell.

“I’ll be back,” said Munroe. He retreated from the cell block, nodding at the guard on

duty at the partition door.

“What’s a dead man?,” asked Tilda.

“There’s a rumor that sometimes the Underworld gets overworked, or maybe wants

to grab someone to be punished early instead of waiting for the natural order of things

to occur,” said Jason. He pulled his sword. He sliced the wall between the two cells

with his blade. He stacked the free stones out of the way. “When that happens, they

send someone to do the job.”

“So a dead man is a messenger from the underworld?,” said Tilda.

“He’s a finder like us,” said Pike. “Only he has to find whatever the Underworld

wants instead of being for hire like we are.”

“Their reputation is for exceptional single mindedness and a lack of qualms about

how much violence they have to use,” said Jason. “I’ve never dealt with one

personally but there are stories.”

“And one of these is loose in the city,” said Tilda. “How do we stop it?”

“We don’t,” said Pike. “Once it’s collected its bounties, it will return to the

Underworld. The best thing we can do is stay out of its way and hope that one of the

people it’s looking for is what’s causing all these disappearances.”

“That wouldn’t help us hold up our exceptional reputation,” said Jason.

“Stopping a dead man from grabbing any evil doers its boss wants is not on my list

of things to throw my life away over,” said Pike. He started pulling out the reports

and placing them on the table. “Now I have a lot of reading to do. See if you can get

me some food and drink while I go through this. We might need a map of the city

also.”

“Hunting grounds?,” said Jason.

“Some of these will be because of the death worm,” said Pike. “Once we rule out

anyone seen trying to board a train, we can start on the rest.”

“Rowena’s father?,” asked Jason.

“We have to talk to him too,” said Pike. “He won’t believe that his girl was eaten by

a fake train.”

“I’ll talk to him while you are collecting information,” said Jason. “We’ll bring back

food from any place close enough to bring it in hot.”

“Thanks,” said Pike. “This might be connected to the dead man somehow.”

“It would be asking too much if it wasn’t,” said Jason.

Pike nodded.

“Come along, apprentice monster hunter,” said Jason with a smile. “First, we’re going

to have to break some bad news, and then we will bring back our meal to this

dungeon so we may spend the next few hours thinking about not being in a dungeon.”

“Don’t forget the map,” said Pike. “We might need pins also.”

“I won’t, Arlo,” said Jason. “Don’t overwork yourself on the first day. There will be

time enough to chase our culprit, or culprits, down so they can face justice.”

Pike nodded. He didn’t look up from his reading.

Jason and Tilda left their friend alone. Munroe came back briefly and put the writs

and gold down on the table. Pike moved just enough to drop the items in a drawer

of one of the cabinets. He barely looked up from his reading.

How many of these cases were because of the death worm? Once he had all those

ruled out, then the real work could commence. He put the dead man aside too. They

would know soon enough if they were chasing the same thing. If they were, then they

would meet somewhere down the line as Pike and Jason started looking for the link

between the cases.

Something bad was going on if the Underworld sent a personal representative to deal

with it.

By the time, Jason and Tilda returned with their meal, he was ready for a break. He

had set the read files in two stacks. The North Side stack had to be checked but he felt

most of the missing persons there was because of the false train. The other stack was

for the rest of the city.

Those files would have to be gone over again for a place to start looking for their

villain.