The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1)

by Casey Matthews

  Someone had torn off the steering wheel.

  And scratched “BEHIND YOU” into the side panel.

  “Are you ready?” he whispered, his voice in her left ear and his breath far too warm on the back of her neck. “To scream?”

  Naomi twisted around. Fingers vised around her throat, choking off her cry. He lifted her into the air with just one hand. How can he be so strong? She tried to say “Please” and only heard a weak gurgle. Her eyes watered and her vision filled with sparks. She gripped his wrist and kicked, but it felt like hitting a frozen slab of meat.

  She thrust the pepper spray into the dark space near his face and squeezed.

  It was a ski mask, but she unloaded into it. He choked, dropped her back onto her feet and slammed her flush to her car, gripping her neck without entirely cutting off her air. Her lungs worked fast to suck in oxygen.

  He coughed and laughed at the same time, free hand wiping at his eyes. “Bad kitty really wants to get declawed. Don’t worry, I can do that. Oh, but first: am I handsome?” He peeled off the mask.

  That’s not a face. Not really. It was a skull with skin stretched across it, yellow-toothed grin so wide she could see all the way to the back molars. He’d slit his cheeks from ear to ear. The gashes were stitched with thick, black wire, and messily, as if by the hand of a drunken boxer. His bugging eyes seared through her, the veins in one having burst, turning it red. “So, pet? Would you like to scream now? Or do you find me handsome?”

  Naomi swallowed her revulsion. She shuddered out a deep breath and dropped her pepper spray. It rolled noisily away. Reaching up, she touched his mutilated cheek with her fingertips. “Maybe once. Before this.” She covered the gashed part with her hand, until she looked only into his eyes.

  He blinked, confused, and Naomi tried her best to hold him there in her gaze. It was a low-down, dirty trick, but she even managed half a smile.

  That caught him off guard. For a moment, he was only trying to figure out the kindness in her eyes.

  A moment was just enough. She sought with her right hand a loose black wire on his gashes and ripped it out with all her might. It made a p-p-p-pop, like the important stitch from a jacket sleeve.

  He howled. She looped the wire around two fingers and kept pulling. His shriek pitched up an octave.

  He threw her. The psychopath and the ground shrank. She sailed too high and too far, spun partway, and saw the hood and windshield of a car rise up at her. Rolling her body, she threw her arms down in a breakfall drilled into her by gymnastics, and the windshield cracked on impact. Pain jolted through both her forearms and her back, but evenly, and nothing snapped.

  No sooner had she hit than she rolled off the hood and dropped to her feet, sprinting away.

  Footfalls echoed behind her. She realized in her panic she’d sprinted to the wrong end of the parking deck. There was no ramp or stairs ahead, so she tucked around a corner and ducked between cars, working her way to another row. She stopped by an SUV and pressed her back into it, breathing heavily, and listened. Find him. Then sneak around him. It was hard to hear over her car horn.

  A corner of the garage strobed in her car’s headlights. She heard the psychopath snarl. The sound told her where he was, so she scampered down the aisle a few more car-lengths before something stopped her in her tracks.

  Something moved out in the shadow, a patch that was blacker than normal black.

  “Here kitty, kitty,” the psycho called. He sounded far away, his voice from another direction than the twist she’d spotted in the darkness. “Here pussy. Such a bad girl. Wish you thought we were handsome. Maybe you’ll grow to like our face once we carve you to match.”

  Naomi settled into a crouch. Trying to scare me, she realized. Wants to flush me out, and he’s getting frustrated. Just keep your head. His voice made that hard, but when she glanced back at the weird knot of shadows, something else stole her breath.

  Something else—that was all she could make of it, because it looked like nothing more than a distortion in the darkness that blew like smoke from behind a column, flitted across the floor, and merged into another column. Her heart thumped against the inside of her ribcage at what she’d seen: at something more fluid than form. Dread squeezed the air from her lungs and erased every rational explanation from her mind—for that instant, there was something wicked staring at her from the blackness; something had crawled from Hell and watched her with an ancient patience.

  It terrified her in ways the psychopath could not. She sensed they weren’t together, because the Hellish thing crept toward the madman’s singsong voice—liquid shadows peeled from the column and appeared for an instant as the silhouette of a person, bounding to the rear of a truck and joining the shapeless ceiling. So quick it might have flown. So purposefully toward the stitch-faced man, she realized it wasn’t hunting her. She was merely in its way.

  No. She’d lost track of it, and with it gone from her sight, she closed her eyes and likewise forced it from her mind. It’s not real. Just the fear playing tricks. Focus on getting out of here.

  Her feverish mind pushed through the haze of terror, grasping for an escape. There was a stairwell and a ramp, and the psychopath would only have a general idea of where she was. He’d split the distance between the two, in case she ran for one of them. But Naomi was closer to the stairs now. Maybe close enough.

  She sprinted for them.

  She heard a commotion. A wet, animal snarl. The collision of bodies.

  Every step up the stairs, she envisioned hands ghosting from behind to grab her ankles and drag her backward. Each stride across the bridge to the lit mall, she swore that furnace breath gusted against the back of her neck.

  She hit the heavy glass doors. They resisted her and opened so slowly. She burst through one set, and the second was heavier than concrete. She stumbled through and ran until she reached a shocked, frozen gaggle of shoppers.

  Everyone stared. Naomi collapsed, inhaled sharply, and gesticulated toward the exterior doors. Through hot, thankful tears she managed to focus on a round security guard—a badge had never seemed so lovely and welcome before—and struggled to say, “Parking deck! Someone. Some… man. Psychopath.”

  “What’s he look like? Miss, are you hurt? Your hand.”

  She looked down at the black wire looped around her fingers, sticky with blood. It was all over her.

  “Not my blood. He—had this. In his face. Oh God.” She clapped her other hand over her mouth and shuddered, realizing how much of her own horror she’d swallowed in her effort to escape—but that sticky blood and black string sent the nail straight into the deepest part of her. He almost had me. That thing with half a face almost had me.

  ~*~

  Fear was delicious. It was sour and pooled in the sweat of wicked men. It dribbled into their sinful blood, and like discordant sounds arranged suddenly into the loveliest kind of music, turned bittersweet. And it made stalking delightful. Fear caused paralysis, fogged the mind, and lent her prey the impetus to run. And when they ran, it twisted all the right places inside Ryn’s stomach.

  Naomi’s fear was different. She fled the asura and trailed the musk of terror chemicals on car hoods and concrete. It wasn’t a right smell. It was ripe-things-turned-rotten, like a rain shower filled with heavy oil. It was profane.

  She flowed along the ceiling like wet ink, her hoodie and cargo pants dissolved into the formless black wings of her kanaf, bleeding her shape and color into the negative spaces around her. Every nerve buzzed, a sensitive conductor. The asura passed beneath her and Ryn’s pulse quickened with voyeuristic pleasure. She could have reached out to flick open his carotid, yet she remained unseen. The waiting almost felt better than the bloodletting, savoring the moment before full, kinetic contact, her visceral urges piqued but teasingly denied for just a few heartbeats longer.

  Naomi cut short Ryn’s stalking when she sprinted for the corner staircase. Splat whirled to follow her.

  I could let him cat
ch her. I won’t let him hurt her, but then I could stalk him more. No, she decided. Naomi was her territory now, and she didn’t share.

  Splat passed beneath her again. Ryn tore from her shrouded place on the ceiling and snarled her hunger at the asura. “Mine.” The word came in the midst of her growl and she didn’t know why she said it. He spun in time to see teeth and shadow, no more.

  She hit him. They tumbled. Her force punched him into the concrete. She cracked him across his face, and because he was slow, she did it nine more times.

  Then he fought back, throwing a wild punch. She rolled backward. His fist whiffed the air and her fingertips settled onto the concrete floor as she eased into a low crouch at his feet. She had to wait for him to stand. It took forever. He wasn’t much faster than a person, not at all.

  But she could smell some person in him. The asura wasn’t in a hollow, strictly speaking; there was something of the human being left. She didn’t want to kill the person if he wasn’t either evil or completely gone, but getting Splat out of the human would be tricky. There were tales of holy men who could draw out an asura with words from their Almighty, but monsters had a messier alternative.

  Pain.

  He cocked his fists and she shot in low, wove a dance around his two blows, and vaulted onto his chest. Her deft fingers gripped one of his incisors and she leapt over him.

  “Fuck! Fucking fuck!” He clutched his face and Ryn tossed the incisor aside.

  “One,” she said. Asura hated pain. They were not accustomed to it. Even the ones who mutilated their flesh preferred to do so with only one toe dipped into the host. As heady and intoxicating as the flesh could be for the pleasures it brought, they didn’t have tolerance for agony. Life granted that tolerance only to creatures who wore their skin each day.

  “Are you my new plaything?” he asked, practically singing the last word. But when Ryn advanced, he retreated.

  She flew at him again. He tried a punch and missed, his fist crumpling in a car hood.

  Ryn’s hand whipped through the air and he shrieked. She twirled around him, then ducked an elbow strike. She tossed away a molar. “Two.”

  “Tell me, plaything, what do you— fuck!”

  “Three.”

  The singing was gone from his voice. “You’re going to run out of teeth eventually, you bitch.”

  “You have more than teeth.” The dark was full of things that glittered, but none so bright as Ryn’s eyes.

  “I’ll teach you respect.” He wrapped his fingers into the soft metal of a car hood and spun the vehicle out of its spot. Its tires scraped on the floor and he swung it like a bat. Ryn rolled over top. The car crunched into the front grille of a Jeep. “What are you? Not asura. You’re a damned goddess, aren’t you? Think you can come down here and piss all over me on a full moon?”

  He swung into a concrete pillar and powdered it. The choking dust flew into Ryn’s face, an attempt to blind her. He followed it up by snagging a coupe and rolling it through the air at her.

  Ryn dove through the car’s passenger window, passed mid-roll through the cab, and burst through the driver-side door just before it crunched onto the floor. She alighted on the ceiling, gripping a metal rafter. “I will hear you scream,” she promised.

  Her cloak shrank at the fringes, tightening so it wouldn’t get in her way. She was prepared now for battle.

  He pounced from the floor; she descended from on high. They tangled in the air, where she allowed him to grapple her because it would limit her advantage in speed and agility. Ryn had been lit and left burning for too long; she needed to stretch, to taste blood, and to destroy him in all arenas—even those where he had an edge.

  Together they whirled and sank to the concrete in a flurry of shattering blows. They traded fists and knees; Ryn deflected Splat’s, and as they tore at one another, his blows pocked a trail of tiny craters in the concrete. He brute-forced Ryn into a steel girder. She snaked a leg around his knee, flexed him into the ground, and loosed a hurting volley into his ribs. He tore one arm loose, backhanded her, and she spat the blood into his eyes. Then she cracked her forehead down into his temple. He went limp.

  But not for long. He lurched with new vigor. He grabbed a fistful of her kanaf and slammed her back into the pillar over and over until it dented. On the fifth slam, Ryn clung fast to the pillar. She pincered his throat with her legs and jerked him to the side, into a car hood so soundly that his face left an impression in the soft metal.

  Splat took her knees in both hands, spun, and tossed her across the parking deck. Ryn let him. She reoriented in the air like a cat, landed gently on the face of a parked bus, and slid to the floor.

  “Next time I get a hold of you I’m going to rape every part of you,” he snarled.

  She laughed at him.

  “What’s so funny? You think I’m going to tickle you? You think I’m playing games, you bitch? I’ll make you feel every inch.”

  “You talk too much. Is that why you’re so bad at this?”

  He lunged and she melted away. He let loose an onslaught of blows, each one slow. He hadn’t overpowered her in a grapple where Ryn’s mobility was limited, and on open ground he simply couldn’t touch her. She angled her body around one blow, rolled her shoulder to avoid a second. Each step he took, she countered, and each blow met vacant air. He backed her into a pillar, but she knew it was there. She ducked.

  His fist powdered a chunk of concrete and Ryn stepped behind him. Four strands from her kanaf unfurled and tightened like a noose around Splat and the pillar. She cinched it with one pull, fastening him there.

  “The hell—”

  “I promised pain.” Lashes from her cloak whirled around his forehead and lower jaw, and anchored below his armpits, so that she could place one foot between his shoulders, tug, and his head snapped back with his mouth forced wide. He struggled. But Ryn took her time and gripped two more teeth. She twisted the molars in their sockets very, very slowly, until his wails echoed. “Five.” She scattered the teeth across the floor like dice.

  He coughed blood, unable to fully close his lips. “Enough.”

  Ryn released him and absorbed the strands of her kanaf into the cloak.

  But he hadn’t ceded, not really. “What are you? You’re no goddess. They don’t fight that…” He coughed out more blood. “…that dirty.” He was trying to distract her; the tension hadn’t left his shoulders and his fists were still clenched.

  Ryn didn’t answer. She intended to demonstrate what she was. With her hands.

  He lunged and Ryn caught him. She tossed him over her shoulder and folded him in the front of a sedan. He pushed out from the metal cavity and Ryn met him with her fists, because her claws would have killed host and asura alike. She painted him with concussive blows. Side of the neck. Ribs, ribs, thigh. He tried a kick. She broke the femur. No more kicks, she decided.

  He produced a gun. She punched the weapon with a knife-hand strike of her claws. It cut the weapon into two neat halves.

  Splat’s other hand produced a knife. She deflected it with her hardened palm and threw her shoulder into him. He stumbled onto the broken leg, screamed, and fell to his knee. She flattened him facedown and drove a hundred razor wires from her kanaf into the space below the bump on the back of his neck. He tried to push up, but the syringe-thin wires coiled along his spinal column. She threaded gossamer into his nervous system. His arms twitched and went limp.

  “It’s mine,” Splat whined. “It’s my body. I earned it.”

  “Now it’s mine.” And with the slightest vibration of her kanaf, she fired pain through every nerve. He screamed. She vibrated the wires lower, longer, and the scream changed volume and tenor. Ryn tilted her head to the side, intrigued by the new instrument she had made. Then she scraped the wires, hard, and he cut loose with obscenities that evolved into a sound no longer human.

  He jerked. His flesh went limp. The words came from a slack, unmoving mouth, his voice different when it was just the as
ura and not the human vocal cords: “Fine. You want me out? Fine. But, monster—”

  Ryn felt pleased he’d figured it out. Demonstration successful.

  “—whoever you are, wherever you’re from, I will punish you. You wait. You won’t see us coming.” A thin vapor dissipated from the host’s lips into the air.

  Ryn retracted her cloak and her skin buzzed. She could sense the asura in the room. She could not see an asura without consuming psilocybin mushrooms, but she detected his presence. Car lights flicked on and off, signs of his power.

  “You’ve earned enemies tonight, demon whore. Powerful enemies. I had plans for that mortal and… Oh. I see your face now! I saw you in the food court. You dined with my kitty. Oh, yes. I know how to hurt you now.”

  “And I, you.” Ryn swept her claws through space. She slashed marks across a concrete pillar, then a second blow that left similar grooves in the front grille of someone’s truck. Splat shrieked. She’d struck off a piece of him.

  “Get away from me! What are you! You can’t—”

  “I did.” She slashed the air twice more. She had only wounded him.

  Splat’s howl faded. He had fled.

  Ryn stood alone in the parking deck. She crouched over the bloody, shallowly breathing human she had spared from death. His soul without Splat didn’t smell especially clean, but he was just a man with a broken mind, and she no longer cared about him one way or the other so long as he stayed out of her way.

  Distantly, she heard shouting voices from the walking bridge. Mortal security. Then, without Splat to keep them turned off, the deck lights flashed once, twice. Before the cameras could turn back on, she pulled up her hood, leapt through the open side of the parking deck and tumbled out into the moonlit sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Black Binder

  Kessler crossed yellow police tape into a world full of twisted metal and broken glass. The parking deck was littered with crumpled cars and shattered pillars. A Chevy Cavalier lay on its side dripping oil from its broken engine block. He jogged to the ambulance and flashed his badge at a paramedic who shut the wagon’s back door. “Where you taking the suspect?”