She knelt before the rocking chair. “Dust. I thought you hated flesh riders.”
He didn’t answer at first. Then the chair groaned, its wooden struts protesting as if put under an invisible weight. “Mind your own business, deva.”
“I am.”
“On the prowl, eh? You’re wound tighter than a three-day clock. Splat’s got it too. Full moon gets him riled up.”
“Splat.” She rolled the name around in her head. It gave her ideas—delightful ones—for how to deal with him. “He was here. I can smell him. Why?”
“Just a little, ahem, territorial dispute. Splat keeps a hollow in Whitechurch and I got an attic in the same apartment. Like to visit. Has old photos on the wall. Black-and-whites, full of flavor. Tastes like old-fashioned romance, a dash of tragedy, just the way I like it. Don’t find it on anything newer than Great Depression.”
“A hollow?”
“Spare body. Call it that ’cause he and his cabal pulled the soul outta her. Did it with one of them plastic porn boxes, those buzzing, noisy what-do-ya-call-’em… laptops. So he and his asura buddies, they infest the laptop and convince this girl they’re real flesh-and-blood people on the other end, isolate her, cave in her world. Grind her soul down to just about nothin’. Keeping her on tap, see, in case he needs spare skin. A good hollow’s already half dead, soul partway out the door. Gotta get ’em so low they don’t feel the asura slipping in to fill the fat, gaping void they carved out. Lotta ways to do it. Torture. Rape. This one was subtle. I kinda ruined it for him, I guess.”
“How?”
“The photos. One of ’em was the hollow’s grandmother. She kept a diary in a locked trunk, one with sweet, old pages dusted in perfume and tears. I knocked it onto her floor one night. Those old pages filled the hole they put in her. So Splat stopped by to tell me—covenants be damned—he’d eat me if I did it again.”
“Who is he in?”
“Some nutcase he’s been grooming. Dunno much. He’s got a place on Oakland above the Big Shots Tavern. If you scent his hollow, you’ll find it there. This isn’t gonna come back to me, is it?”
“He won’t bother you.”
“You say that, but somehow I doubt you got a mirror box. How you gonna trap him?”
“I won’t. He won’t eat you because I’ll eat him first.”
“Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you must be too young to know. Deva can’t kill asura. Unlike you, we got no bodies to kill.”
“I am from the black places and the Long Ago. I can kill anything that can die, and a few things that cannot.”
Oakland was only a few blocks away. Ryn found the apartment and cut a circular hole in the window with one fingernail. She popped the lock and seeped into the room’s shadows. The urine-and-mold stink saturated a bare mattress. The hum of a refrigerator and computer fan didn’t quite drown out the skitter-clicking deluge of bed bugs in the shadowy parts of the walls. They moved at once, poured from the ceiling like grains of sand, but left a neat ring of clear space around Ryn. They sensed death on her.
Her eyes peeled back the dark and she examined papers heaped onto the computer desk and pinned to the walls. There were maps with tacks clustered in different locations, shorthand notes with times of day, surveillance-photo printouts, and a reminder note taped to the computer monitor, scribed in disjointed letters. “To get: duct tape, needle-nose pliers, 45-cal, rivets (various),” with a final line in different marker, an afterthought scrawled at bottom: “car battery?” It was underlined.
A rotten smell came from the bathroom and she peered in long enough to be sure there were no corpses. Just blood in the sink and two clipped-off, human toes in the bathtub, shriveled and black with weeks-old gangrene. The asura hadn’t taken care of its hollow, perhaps because it was nearly done using it. Whatever its plans, they happened soon. Probably tonight.
The photographs depicted groups of teenage girls who appeared outwardly near Ryn’s age. One recurred—a very pretty, pale girl with auburn hair. She was the target. But for what? It involved bullets, pliers, and a car battery.
Ryn had to settle her imagination before it could offer a suggestion.
She took the scent of Splat’s hollow from a ball cap near the door and returned to the rooftops. With the moon full, she could have found him from three cities distant. She trailed the street he’d driven and rode the steel spine of a tractor trailer across the Goldwater Bridge. Terrain mattered, and she didn’t know the rooftops of Commonwealth Plaza, so she darted from the truck, spidered up the exterior wall of a train station, and scented the air. Northeast.
Another train line whisked her that way. At each stop, she bounded to the station roof and sprinted over top, avoiding the prying eyes of humans and their cameras. She recalled Splat’s maps. Most pins were in Garden Heights, where the new line terminated.
She picked the scent up again just before Garden Heights, in unfamiliar terrain between the suburbs and Commonwealth, called Center Square. The buildings were shorter than in Commonwealth, but crowded with bus stops and neon lights advertising department stores, coffee shops, and the bright arches of fast food. She rode the train into the station this time, dropped to the platform among startled passengers, and slid beneath the turnstile. She tracked the scent across an elevated walkway that crossed six lanes of traffic and connected the station to a massive parking deck that fed into a sprawling, four-story shopping complex called Center Square Mall.
Ryn paused. The predator’s scent had filtered down to her mouth where she could taste it; she savored the moon’s bright light and opened her senses. The dark was wide with possibilities. Deciding on her next move, she hooded herself from prying security cameras and tracked Splat’s scent to a white van on the top deck.
She darted between camera rotations and found a blind spot by the van’s windowless rear doors. Locked. She stiffened her fingers into a knife-hand punch and drove it through the smooth metal. Though her nails appeared mundane, they parted the aluminum hide like oily liquid. She wrapped her fist around the locking mechanism and tore it out with a firm twist. It banged against the asphalt and she cracked the door open.
A duffel bag reeked of Splat. She opened it. It contained a car battery, phallic-shaped plastic objects, handcuffs, duct tape, and a roll of cloth that, when unfurled, revealed a shiny collection of corkscrews. Sitting at the bottom of the bag was an acetylene torch.
Ryn lit the torch and examined the inside of the van by blue-hot glow. She set the shag carpet aflame and tossed the torch into the center of the crackling fire. Slamming the back doors, she ducked behind a row of cars and evaded the cameras until she arrived at the walking bridge into the mall.
She walked into a wall of noise and stink. Bodies and wares pressed and puréed together—fried foods, sweets, paperback books, detergent-stiff clothing, hard plastic, and human oils mashed into one thick soup. Then the perfumes hit her: a meteoric explosion of a thousand compounds that each combined a hundred other scents detonated inside the front of her brain and slumped her into the wall. She lost Splat’s trail. The noise and color, too, the riot of signs and the music intermingling with three or four hundred chattering voices collided together like ten trains in her skull. She stumbled forward into a fourth-story railing over the food court.
Too much. No time to adjust. She’d gone from the bright full moon sharpening her senses in the empty city to the crushing mall interior in just two steps.
Clapping her hands to her ears, she shuddered a breath in, then out, and shut the door on the world and everything in it except the measured thud of her inhuman heart, hard and sure. It dimmed the universe outside her skin.
The first sound to cut through the deep well she’d dropped herself into was the voice of a young woman. “Are you all right?” It ran through Ryn smoothly, except for a faint rasp that brushed at her senses. The girl’s scent hit next. Her soul smelled different, like a rain shower that washed out the salty taste the entire city bled from its pores. An
d her skin had the faint tinge of a citrus shampoo that made Ryn think of sunlight.
Ryn slitted an eye open behind the dark sunglasses that shielded the world from her, and every fine detail of the pretty girl’s gleaming, auburn hair burned through. She stood a head taller than Ryn, with a slender and long-limbed build that brought to mind the strength and flexibility of willow branches. She dressed in a calf-length skirt, trim blouse, and a red, hooded jacket. She had poise, the sort of grace other humans forgot, her hands clasped. Her large eyes were soft and deep brown, fixed on her, and when Ryn looked at them she couldn’t move.
“I asked if you were all right,” the girl repeated.
It was the girl from Splat’s photographs.
CHAPTER FIVE: Dinner with a Demon
Naomi realized she was talking to a girl. It had been hard to tell from a distance because of the formless outfit and dark sunglasses that—truth told—kind of made her look like the Unabomber. The tips of Naomi’s ears burned as she asked her question a third time: “Are you okay? Sorry, clearly you are. And I’m being weird now.” She withered under the girl’s stare.
Up close, the other teenager looked more her gender. She had pretty enough features, with a straight, expressionless mouth and a stray wisp of darkest-black hair dangling loose from her hood. She might have been goth with a bit more effort, but seemed more than anything like a tomboy dressed in the slapdash apparel of secondhand stores. “I’m fine,” the dark-clad stranger bit off.
“Good.” Instinct had demanded Naomi approach her. Instinct, and maybe Iosef’s ghost still walking around in her shadow. Something in the girl’s stance at the railing, in the way she clutched her head as if under attack, had drawn her closer. It could have been a migraine. But it could have been something worse, too, and she’d forced herself to make sure. “I’m Naomi.”
The strange girl examined her with a cant to her head, like a dog trying to figure out whether or not someone was speaking to it. “Ryn.” Her nostrils flared and she snapped her gaze to a spot behind Naomi, where Denise and Elli stood.
“Those are my friends,” Naomi said. “Denise is the long-haired one with the affected expression of boredom and Elli is the one in black-frame glasses.” Denise made a show of checking her phone impatiently and Elli held the bags while examining her toes. Naomi turned back to Ryn. “We were just buying some books. Do you have friends here?”
“No.” She didn’t elaborate. It came out as a dismissal, an invitation for Naomi to leave.
Naomi took a deep breath and ignored the critical gazes that no doubt bored into the back of her head. Sometimes she wished she could ask the obvious: Are you okay? But that never worked, so instead: “Want to hang out?”
“No.” Ryn glanced back at the railing.
Okay, the direct approach it is. “It’s the crowds.”
She caught a hint of Ryn’s eyes narrowing behind those dark glasses. “How did you know?” An accusation.
Naomi lowered her voice, too quiet for her friends to hear. “The skittish way you looked at Denise and Elli, at the people around us.”
Ryn’s eyes sparked beneath the shades and a current of alarm shot up Naomi’s spine. “I am not afraid,” Ryn growled. Naomi had never heard anything like it, never heard someone wrap the English language so perfectly into a snarl, and it switched down some kind of primordial breaker in her brain.
“Sorry, no, of course not,” she hurried, the words matching her quickened pulse. Forcing a steadying breath, she ordered herself against every instinct not to scurry off with tail between legs—What is it Dad says? Timid doesn’t look good on us. “Okay. Full confession, you’re the kind of girl more likely to elicit terror than to feel it. I get that.”
A solemn nod, as though Ryn were satisfied with the answer.
Clasping her hands in front of her, Naomi added, “Promise you won’t murder me, and I might even feel bad enough to make it up to you.”
“I won’t harm you.” Ryn’s tone softened. “You smell right.”
Naomi blinked. The fear, though, had fled her, the invisible fist that squeezed her heart unclenching so that she could breathe again. “Glad to hear.” A jolt of exhilaration followed, her body’s reward for surviving an encounter with this strange, almost-goth creature. “So you’ll let me make it up to you.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are, but I’m not over it. You want to grab food with me?”
Ryn bit her lip in a way that hid it in her mouth, no teeth on display, and it was a strangely sweet gesture that made Naomi think: cute like a cat; like someone who thinks she’s apex predator, but also doesn’t mind when you bring her tuna. The self-serious girl shifted and looked in the other direction. “Not hungry.”
Naomi had never met a worse liar. “Not at all?”
“I can feed myself.”
“And I can buy the food that you feed yourself with. Teamwork.”
“There is… food at home.” Oddly, another lie.
“There’s food here too. Come on. My treat.” Naomi used her brightest smile—a dirty, low-down move that usually worked. “Just this once and I’ll never bother you again. Scout’s honor.” Three fingers held up, somewhat guiltily since that was probably also a lie if they spent any time at all together.
Ryn opened her mouth, shut it, gazed back into the crowds, and finally back at Naomi. “What do you want from me?” She wore a look of such desperate frustration.
“Naomi!” Denise called. “Getting hungry. Let’s go. Let emo kid be emo.”
Naomi shot her a warning glare. “Stop.” Facing Ryn, she offered her hand.
Ryn danced back, hands clenched to the rail, tension filling her body like a spring compressed tight. When Naomi backed off, palms out in placation, Ryn relaxed.
Not just the crowds, Naomi realized. Like an idiot, I cornered her. She really was a stray, in more ways than first surmised. “Sorry,” Naomi whispered, lowering her arms to her sides and relaxing her posture. This seemed to relax Ryn slightly as well, and the girl eased back to her full height. “I’m not trying to trick you into going to my church or voting for my candidate, and I won’t let Denise make fun of you. Just wanted you to grab a bite with us—if you want. Do whatever you like. If it happens to be eating with us, I’m buying. That’s all. Sorry again.”
Naomi expected that to be the end of it. This was a girl who had seen violence. She could sense it, could tell Ryn needed a basic charity without a covert quid-pro-quo. But she couldn’t force it. For certain wary souls, the harder one tried, the faster they sprinted the other direction. Yet something happened between the two of them in that moment, a calculation in Ryn’s mind that Naomi couldn’t intuit. The other girl examined the floor between them and murmured, “I will go with you.”
“Awesome.” She smiled over her shoulder at her friends. “Guess what? This is Ryn, and she’s joining us for dinner.”
Elli and Denise both forced smiles and Ryn did nothing to acknowledge them, keeping to the other side of Naomi as they all walked. Naomi struck up a conversation and found out Ryn went to Parker-Freemont. It was a high school in the neighborhood next to Thatcher High, where Iosef had attended. Ryn’s school competed with Madison Academy in a few sports, and since Elli had been a cheerleader and particularly hated their teams, her face scrunched up in scorn.
“Parker-Freemont is on the other side of the city,” said Denise. “Did you really come all this way to shop?”
“No.” Ryn’s stare was on the crowds.
“Then why commute over here?” Denise asked. “Planning to rob someone?”
“It’s a nice mall,” Naomi said. “Maybe she likes it here.”
“I’m looking for someone,” Ryn said.
“I thought you said you didn’t have friends here,” Denise said.
“I’m not looking for a friend.”
“Family?” Naomi tried to verbally separate Ryn from Denise, who tended to get catty when her blood sugar dropped.
&nbs
p; “No,” Ryn said.
“Who, then?” Denise asked.
“A man.”
A boyfriend. That made sense. Naomi grinned. “Is he handsome?”
“I doubt it,” Ryn said.
“Wait, you don’t know?” Denise scoffed. “Is this some digital hookup? That’s a little trashy.”
Ryn’s attention was fixed elsewhere. “I am not hooking with anyone.” Naomi wondered for the first time if English was her first language.
Elli sighed. “The animal-vegetable-mineral game is kind of annoying. Just tell us what it’s all about. Are you dating this guy or are you planning to murder him?”
“I have to find him first.”
“So it is murder,” Denise teased. They all laughed except for Ryn.
“She doesn’t have to say what she’s doing here.” Naomi motioned with her jaw to a café. “Come on. Let’s eat here, before Denise dies of starvation.”
“I won’t starve.” Denise grinned. “I’d eat one of you two before I’d let that happen.”
Ryn glanced at Denise for the first time. Naomi saw suspicion in it.
They sat at one of the café’s outlying tables, separated from the mall proper by a divider covered with advertisements. Ryn fumbled with the menu and paid a lot of attention to the three of them, mimicking their movements and reading the sections they read from. Naomi made sure Denise and Elli ordered first. She figured Ryn was a foreigner and picking up the customs. Ryn ordered some kind of salad with oranges in it. “That looks good, I’ll have that too,” Naomi said. She glanced at the strange girl. “What do your parents do?” It was one of her surreptitious tricks for gauging how a person was doing. The more willing someone her age was to talk about their parents, the more likely they were okay.
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 7