No hospitalizations.
Ryn stood her ground until he backed out of the room—far too slowly and not without making her skin feel grimy from what his eyes and his tiny imagination were doing. Fire flared in her chest, and she wanted to eat his heart. She couldn’t injure or maim, though—she couldn’t even threaten, couldn’t even look up to bare her eyes at him without betraying her savage divinity and endangering her new freedoms.
And so she bowed her head. Like a supplicant. Something in her almost broke from the rage.
The Rabble was its own kind of trouble, a chattering tide of energetic bodies that filled the cramped apartment with unwelcome noise and smell. Between them and the itching presence of Albert Birch, the apartment frayed her patience, and Ryn was always grateful to leave.
She savored the walk to her first day at Parker-Freemont High School, a boring, tall stack of cinder blocks with shadowed windows, a few smashed and covered with plywood.
The apartment Rabble was nothing set next to the high school. Between classes the halls flooded with students packed tighter than cattle, and the noise—it staggered Ryn. The scents of a thousand oily bodies choked her and she stowed herself in a narrow space at the base of a stairwell with hands clamped over ears.
The students filtered into classrooms and the bells rang again and all fell silent. Ryn crept through empty hallways full of long echoes. She liked the school much more without the people; it felt like a locker-lined cave.
Ryn turned a corner and came across a stocky woman in a uniform. The grooves of middle age scored her face. Humans invested authority in uniforms, and this one even had an electrical weapon jutting from her hip. Ryn was supposed to respect the weapon and the uniform both. They got angry if she didn’t. Ryn tilted her head inquisitively and let the human make the first move.
“Hey. You.” She stuck her thumbs into her belt and strolled closer. “You lost?”
“No.” Ryn folded her hands into the deep pockets of her hoodie. She wore baggy cargo pants and kept the gray hood up. Sinking into it soothed the itching from their eyes just a bit.
“Let me see your hands.” She tapped the electric weapon.
Ryn didn’t understand the woman’s face, but saw tension in her shoulders. She showed her hands. The woman ordered Ryn to her class and followed to ensure she arrived. The force of thirty sets of human eyes centered on her at once and made her spine itch. She flitted to a seat.
“If you’re all settled in, we can continue,” said the teacher. Her face blended together with all the other faces Ryn had seen today. “Also, I have a very well-lit classroom, and you are not Tom Cruise. Remove your sunglasses, please.”
“I have an eye condition,” Ryn said, precisely as she had been taught.
“And I have a condition. That condition is: if students don’t do as I say, I embarrass them in front of their peers.” She squared her palms to the front corners of Ryn’s desk and leaned over it, and Ryn wondered once again if she had to fight for dominance. If Ryn won, did she have to teach the class? She hoped not.
“The one with the weapon said I should be here,” Ryn said.
The instructor’s face changed color and Ryn could track the small explosion of tics and tremors through the right side of her upper lip and the corner of her eye. “Fine. If the glasses stay on, you’ll be punished. Detention.”
“What is ‘detention’?”
“It means you sit in your chair, shut up, and suffer through the afternoon until I’m satisfied!”
Ryn couldn’t figure out how that differed from where she was now.
The classrooms brimmed with students. After the bell rang, their chatter filled the air and they reminded her of the Rabble: loud, pack-minded, yet each one a mystery to her. She couldn’t fight or flee, couldn’t intimidate or growl. They had clipped her claws and locked her in a building and mandated by law that she spend her days with a thousand unknowable animals, and only one survival strategy remained.
Stealth.
She kept her hood drawn up and pressed through the hallways, their odor and noise putting the screws to her braincase. Then there were the classes. She struggled through English. She understood words and could follow the rules of punctuation, and spell or recite definitions. But they saw things in words that weren’t there, like shamans who smoked herb and stared into the sky, imagining shapes in clouds.
In history, they missed important details. Their instructor discussed the Soviet Empire, a collectivist state encompassing much of the world that had collapsed only after the turn of the millennium. They only talked about its human rulers. There had been deva, too, pulling strings, propping it up and allowing it to live longer than it should have. The instructor seemed to hate them, since decades ago they had assassinated two people called President Paul Tsongas and Vice President Bill Clinton.
Mathematics interested her, but she doubted its application. Biology seemed strictly limited to the modern era, ignorant of the Long Ago, of magic, gods, the things hidden from humans behind the Veil, and they only knew about the material parts of the cells—and they taught a very crude version of even that.
Gym was the most difficult. It challenged her every conception of humans as her sister species. They ran as if wading; they used their hands and fingers with all the nuance of flippers. They played elementary games of coordination with ball and bat, only interesting because they couldn’t perform them consistently. They couldn’t even repeat a single basic motion, let alone a complicated sequence, like a toddler who beat—poorly—upon a piano key over and over. She felt embarrassed for them, even more so because they didn’t know to be embarrassed for themselves. Ryn tried to blend in and mimic their ungainly motions, and it made her conscious of her own body in a way that she hated. She hoped they didn’t all live that way.
At night, away from the school, she forgot the ungainly stumbling and exploded across rooftops. She savored the gorgeous sensation of matching her movement to the contours of the city. Like two pieces fit perfectly together, like hand in pocket, her sprint pushed her into a groove, the only thing in her life that worked right. Every night she ran, from black midnight until pre-dawn blue, and every night the moon filled and filled, grew brighter, and poured its jittery energy into her limbs.
Most people left her alone. One girl who hid behind her bangs tried to talk to her, but Ryn’s stony silence chased her away. Then on Friday, the waxing moon became unbearable. She stared across the cafeteria, inhaled the stale scent of bland food, and wished for clear, frigid streams, and for the feel of wriggling fish in her hands. The moon teased her from the other side of the Earth. It tugged subtly on her slight shoulders. She wanted to drop to the floor, press her cheek to cool linoleum, and listen for its approach.
A boy sat at her table, directly across. He wore neatly pressed slacks and a buttoned shirt, his hair crisply in place so that he reminded Ryn of a well-clipped porcupine, and stank of spicy body-wash odor that burned her sinuses so that she couldn’t even tell if he smelled wrong.
“You’re in my gym class, aren’t you? My name’s Harper.” His face did a lot of different things and he had very straight teeth.
Ryn fixed him with a steady look, one that chased most humans off after only a few minutes.
“So what’s the story with the shades? I know you’re not—ah, you know—visually impaired. You get around pretty well in gym.”
Ryn stared.
“I mean, it’s the only class I see you in. I’m taking all advanced-placement stuff this year. Trying to really get everything I can out of this school—it’s not a great school, but my parents are kind of snobby about supporting public ed. I’m a senior. Doing college next year. How about you? Plan on getting out of here anytime soon?”
She stared.
“You look like you belong at a college. You’ve got the whole alternative look down. I’m into alternative stuff. Very, you know, open-minded.”
“Leave now.”
“Look, I know I’ve g
ot the preppy look a little too cornered, but I swear it’s just to keep my parents off my back. What do you like? Horror movies? Politics?” He leaned in. “Handcuffs?”
“Solitude.”
“I even know where you can find a lot of quiet. A place no one would bother you.”
Ryn wondered if someone had damaged his brain.
“I’ll show you. It’s a great place to get away from crowds. Promise I’ll be a gentleman.” He sneaked out of the cafeteria, and Ryn followed him, even though she didn’t like him. A hiding place might prove useful. He led her up a flight of stairs and pushed open the door to a janitor’s closet with the heavy odor of chemicals.
Ryn stepped in and frowned. “Small.”
“Cozy,” he said, shutting the door. “Hey, want to listen to my playlist?” He offered her an earbud.
“You promised solitude,” she said, glaring at him.
“Right. Just you and me.”
“I don’t think you know what that word means.”
“Oh c’mon, don’t be like that. No one goes into a closet with a boy unless she’s a tiny bit curious. Aren’t you curious?”
“Only about what you taste like.”
“Oh, holy shit, it’s like that, huh? The guys were so right about you.” He slid a thin plastic-wrapped wafer from his back pocket, its surface worn and crumpled. “Safety first, right?” He reached for her.
Ryn flicked back a pace. It took him a moment to reorient, to find her again with his eyes. She had been wrong to dismiss this one as an annoyance—he reasoned like a child, but he was full grown, and while he wasn’t a threat to her, what if she had been a mortal girl?
“Relax, I don’t bite.” He reached again.
“I do.” She braced him with her palm flush to his chest and his hand went to her shoulder, trying to urge her to her knees. His intentions offended her so deeply that her pulse spiked. “No.” Anger flashed through her with the word and her free hand curled, finger by finger, into a rocky ball.
“Oh. I get it. You punk girls like it a little hardcore.” He grabbed her shoulders and tried to drag her close.
Every fiber of muscle in her arm groaned for use. The full moon had left her in a fog of hunger. She salivated at the thought of pulling an organ out and showing it to him. Instead, she wrapped her hand into his buttoned-up shirt and cracked her skull into his.
He flew back into the door. It burst open. He flopped out of the closet and onto his back. Ryn strode after him and knelt atop his chest. She seized him by the spikes of his hair, and glared into his eyes. “I will forgive the confusion because we are not the same species. But this word. ‘No.’ You understand it?”
“Uhnn.”
“Remember it.”
It took his eyes a moment to focus on her and Ryn realized she was being observed by the uniformed woman from earlier, now standing over them both. The woman drew her weapon. “Back off!”
“He will be fine.” Ryn stood and slunk back a step. “No hospitalizations.”
Harper sat up, wobbled, and swayed back to the floor.
“…I think.”
~*~
Ryn sat in a neatly arrayed office made to feel smaller by having too many people in it. There was a desk and a man in a crisp suit behind it in a high-backed, black chair. The desktop marker labeled him “superintendent.” Ryn was separated from Harper Pruett by Harper’s mother, who emphasized several times how upset she was at being summoned from the art gallery she managed.
Mrs. Pruett pushed up the tiny glasses on her nose and said, “I think it’s clear this isn’t a parental matter anymore. It’s a police matter. My son was assaulted. It’s not a question of whether I’ll press charges, it’s a question of whether or not I’ll sue. My husband works for the law department at Graystone University and we know a lot of excellent lawyers.”
“It’s still unclear who started the fight,” the superintendent said.
“Look at my son!”
Blue and black bruises had amassed around the bridge of Harper’s nose and a cotton ball was stuffed up either nostril. Ryn only felt thankful she had restrained herself. The full moon made her blood sing. It clouded her brain, and whatever she did always seemed foolish in retrospect.
“Well?” Mrs. Pruett asked, looking at Ryn as she examined Harper’s face. “Are you satisfied?”
“No.”
Mrs. Pruett’s mouth snapped shut. Her eyes got very large until Ryn could see the whites and tension filled her small, bird-like shoulders. “You filthy little—”
“That’s enough, Mrs. Pruett!” The superintendent leaned forward. “Ms. Miller.” That was the last name they had assigned Ryn. “Harper claims that you lured him into the closet—‘seduced’ him—and then tried to mug him. What about your side?”
“What is ‘mug?’ ”
“Pardon?” the superintendent asked.
“Do you think playing stupid will get you out of this?” Mrs. Pruett snapped.
“Mugging is when you rob someone by force,” the superintendent said. “Did you try to rob Mr. Pruett?”
“He has nothing I want.”
“Then why were you in the closet?”
“My head hurt from noise. The closet was quiet. He wasn’t supposed to stay.”
“All right, so he took you to the closet and stayed. Then what?” He had to cut off Mrs. Pruett’s objection with a pinch of his fingers.
“He reached for me. I warned him once. He touched me. I struck him.”
“How many times?” the superintendent asked.
“Once.”
“Once?” His eyebrow did something.
“Yes.”
“He never hit you?”
“He cannot hit me,” Ryn said.
“What, because you’re a girl?” Harper asked. “Like that’d stop me, you crazy bitch.”
She leaned out to peer around his mother at him. “Because he is slow.”
“She’s crazy!” Harper said. “She said she wanted to fuck and when we started, she flipped out!”
“Harper!” Mrs. Pruett said.
“What!”
“Did she tell you to stop?” the superintendent asked.
“No! I mean, not at first, not until we already started. I mean, it’s not like—I mean, what is this, Red Light Green Light? I didn’t hear her. And then she just whales on me! She’s a liar.”
The superintendent cleared his throat. “You can press charges if you like, Mrs. Pruett, but this sounds to me like a big miscommunication.”
“It was assault!” Mrs. Pruett said.
“Yes,” the superintendent said. “And sexual assault is a very serious matter. So I understand if Ms. Miller would also like to press charges.”
For a while, no one said a word. Finally the superintendent glanced at Ryn. “Are you all right? You’re shaking the entire floor.”
Her knee bounced steadily. “I’m fine,” she said. The moon still teased her.
“You’re making us all nervous,” the superintendent said.
“I’m fine,” Ryn repeated, gaze zeroing in on the window behind the superintendent’s head. A fly batted against the pane. Its tap, tap, tap made her toes curl and her stomach turn over twice and she wanted to stalk it.
“Might you stop?”
Her knee still bounced. She willed it to stop. The buzz was not in the fly, then—it tremored up her calf instead. Her knee bounced again. “No. I can’t.”
“She belongs in an institution!” Mrs. Pruett said. “Not around my boy.”
“I’m sure a woman of your means can afford all sorts of alternatives if you’re unhappy with where Harper is,” the superintendent said. “In the meantime, if Harper is saying he was physically assaulted and Ryn is saying Harper attempted to sexually assault her, I have to turn this over to the school resource officer. There will be a formal investigation. Possible criminal charges. If, however, you both admit to a big misunderstanding, it can go away.”
The superintendent and Harpe
r’s mother both seemed very interested in making things “go away,” and Ryn doubted it was to her benefit.
He motioned them out, and while Ryn couldn’t read Harper’s face, she assumed the look he shot her meant this wasn’t over.
She went to the roof. She lay on her back, shut her eyes, and waited. Lunar gravity took hold of her like a second, alien world, pulling from another direction. When it crested the night sky, the pull was from above and below and the moon’s power made her weightless. She rose, stood on her toes, pocketed her sunglasses and let the moon touch her face.
Then she tore through her territory, her senses so sharp that she could hear screams from decades past, smell blood spilled into the paving stones a century ago. The six scars holding back her kanaf glowed red hot. Every noise and smell and sight pushed into her brain at once, too fast, like Ms. Cross’s driving on the highways.
Pressure built behind her scars. She stripped on a dark rooftop, tearing off mortal cotton, until all that remained were faded, red tennis shoes. Her scars peeled open, split by black strands of razor wire beneath her skin. Countless thin fibers exploded from the slits and filled the air like a black cloud. They flexed and Ryn arched her back at the exquisite sensation of an eighteen-month cramp finally stretched and soothed. With a thought, she wove her kanaf into sheets and smoothed them over her bare skin. She willed them soft and airy as a breeze and reveled in the sleek feel of them covering her—adjusting them to the same shape, color, and apparent texture of her hoodie and dark cargo pants.
She no longer felt naked. The kanaf was as much a part of her as a bird’s feathers.
Unfurling her wings had not released the deeper tension that coiled in her center. It was a spring prepared to release, crushed tighter and tighter by the institution, the school, the humans she couldn’t hurt but who desperately deserved it. There was still one thing she could hunt, though, that mortals wouldn’t miss. She filtered through the overlapping trails of old blood, the layers of killers and rapists and all manner of beasts on two legs until she found a fresh one. One that stalked right now, under the same full moon she did.
Perfect.
Ryn slid down a drainage pipe and vaulted across an alley, angling between two close boards on an upper-floor window. She dropped into the dingy room, which was cold from the gaps that exposed it to January’s elements and delicious in its lonesomeness. Street sounds crept in unfiltered, the walls laced with mildew and the smell of aged wood. There was a taped body outline on the bare floor and an incongruous, wooden rocking chair that creaked in the draft.
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 6