“Then arrest me. Or don’t. Until then, I’ll do as I like.” She hopped onto the ledge, turned her back to him, and stepped off. He ran to the ledge in time to see her spider into her bedroom window.
A feeling, a shiver, like a dark premonition, wriggled all the way up his spine. “Stay away from that girl, Ryn. Stay away, or this isn’t going to end well.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Invited
The wane of a full moon peeled back layers of noise and sensation until Ryn was left with slack limbs and a steady heart. What she lost in power she gained in control, and in her clearer state of mind she had regrets.
She had declared Naomi Bradford her territory. True, she’d announced it only to herself after a moment of unusual feeling that she chalked up to the excesses of a lunar hunt. But no deva—not even a monster—took such words lightly. It was not a vow, but close to one, and Ryn had never regarded a human that way before. Worse still, she found herself thinking about Naomi, and not in the usual ways. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, the teenager’s smile greeted her, and she would remember Splat’s cruel promise.
Splat was a rank terror. He would suck the humanity from Naomi like the yolk from an egg, hollow her into a pale and decorative shell. To Splat, human skin was an instrument, their spirits a troublesome noise to be cleared out of his engine. That must have been why she thought so much about Naomi—it reminded her of the importance of killing Splat and his cabal.
Naturally, the thing to do would be to get as close as possible to Naomi.
Kessler was right. She risked prison in doing so, and mortal laws could contain her. But a deva her age was a constant, and like the orbits in the sky she would do the same bloody things always and forever.
Splat would rather attack Naomi while she was alone to avoid another touch from Ryn’s claws and to keep himself hidden from mortal authorities; he had to, if he wished to avoid punishment by the secretive gods who despised mortal entanglements in their world. However, from Kessler she also learned he had mortal resources—and they could strike during the day and in public. There was little she could do about that, as Ryn was usually trapped in school on the other side of the city when the sun was out.
At night, though, she expanded her influence, commuting across the city and exploring Naomi’s neighborhood, her school, the nearby rooftops of two- and three-story houses. It was called Garden Heights and featured grand, old trees and large backyards. The space between people eased a tension in Ryn’s mind she’d forgotten was there.
She mastered the rooftops and hunted for fresh signs of asura, but all the scent trails were days or weeks old. She also prowled the city for the mushrooms that granted vision of the asura and poached a handful from a distracted vendor in Bourbon Alley. Humans enjoyed them for the hallucinations, but not everything they revealed was a lie.
School busied her during the day and Ryn eluded the notice of her teachers. She was introduced to the concept of grades and realized they marked her efforts. To avert attention, she strove for mediocre marks. It meant pouring effort into her English literature class, because the arcane interpretation of texts was impossible for her. In math and science, she varied her answers strategically to earn lower marks. In history, she simply answered truthfully. If an essay asked what the medieval era was like for women, her answers included a lot of detail about the main kinds of edible roots and the quality and range of military weapons.
Harper Pruett and his pack mates ignored Ryn, their attention having shifted to a girl with dyed blue hair two grades lower, who they mocked because of something she might have done with boys more times than they wanted her to. It bothered Ryn even more when they focused on the dye-haired girl, and Ryn wished she could get Harper into that closet again. She wondered how Naomi would handle the situation. Probably with less head-butting.
At the apartment, Albert Birch avoided her, often sweating his anxiety in fat beads. He also stopped bursting into their room, and Susan said that when Ryn was around, the Birches rarely bothered her.
“Does Albert Birch bother you when I’m gone?” Ryn asked, sensing prey-fear on Susan. It was something she scented on many girls and boys at school.
“No,” Susan said. “Not me, at least.”
“Who?”
“The girl before you. Before she went out the window, Albert bought her expensive things. Clothes mostly. I wondered what it was about.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well.” Susan closed her book. “I figure—and I guess I don’t know, but I figure—maybe he tried to keep her quiet about something they might have been doing, something they weren’t supposed to. Anyway, he’s creepy, but he never does more than gawk. How about you?”
“He sweats fear when I’m close.”
“Hope it lasts.”
On Friday, she rode the train to meet Naomi because daylight made the rooftops impassable—too many human gazes to avoid. It shrank her routes through the city almost to nothing. New Petersburg was uglier in the sunlight and there were too many bodies filling it with prattle and odors.
The city rolled past her window. She rode beneath the bay, changed trains, and then wandered Porter Avenue, a downtown spot near Whitechurch that blended the graffiti and panhandlers of the Docks with the noisy bars and nightclubs of younger neighborhoods. Salty brine and mud-slush caked the streets and cars so that everything had a grimy coating, but a sharp winter breeze lit Ryn’s spirit on fire. She wasn’t certain why she felt so buoyant, but the evening felt wide and unexplored.
She waited outside a club called the Nine Lives for Naomi and her friends. Near sundown, Elli and Denise arrived together.
Naomi isn’t with them. Ryn’s heart fell. “Where is she?”
“Couldn’t come.” Elli’s smile was large—the shape of it meant something other than happiness, because why would she be happy her friend had stayed home? Ryn would have had better luck deciphering patterns in frosted car windshields than in Elli’s face.
Confused, Ryn looked to Denise. This one doesn’t smile at all. “Tell me more.”
“Her dad freaked out.” Denise got in line beside Elli and refused to look at Ryn. “Not sure if you heard. She was attacked last week at the mall. It was serious. She’s okay, but it was close. Been on the news all week; made national. You don’t own a TV?”
Ryn felt strange then. If her only task was to stand watch, find Splat, and exterminate him, this should have been fortuitous—Naomi was a lure, and watching the auburn-haired teenager from her rooftop narrowed his paths of attack, forcing him to fight Ryn straight-on. So why had the fire in Ryn winked suddenly out? There was nothing desirable in a club stuffed with oily, aggressive, aroused teenagers. Disgusting. Naomi would have had to drag her in.
It made no sense, what Ryn was feeling, and she scowled at her own sour mood.
Elli shuffled, seemingly unable to make eye contact. “You know, if you want to bail since Naomi’s not here, we’d understand.”
The question escaped Ryn’s mouth ahead of conscious thought: “Did she want to come out?”
Denise’s smile was thin—did that make her only a little happy? Why were her eyes narrowed to slits? “Doesn’t matter. Her dad said no, and the princess always listens to dear, sweet father. The way is blocked. Verboten. Her social life shall commence sometime after, hm, I predict graduation.”
Ryn bristled and had to suppress a flash of her canines. “She is human. She has will.”
Denise snorted. “Not in that house she doesn’t.”
Outrage blossomed fresh and invigorating in Ryn’s chest. “I shall see.” She strode away from the girls.
“Hey. You leaving?” Elli did that smile again. “That’s fine! Nice seeing you.”
“I am going to have a conversation with Naomi.” Ryn didn’t break stride. “I may return.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Denise called. “Are you dense or are you actually going on the warpath against a senator?”
“I would rather go
around than through him.” But either works.
Already half a block behind her, she heard Elli whisper, “At least that’s over—she gives me the creeps.”
Denise scoffed. “Just now? I started to like her.”
~*~
With sunset at her back, Ryn clung to the train’s filthy spine and rode it across the city. In Garden Heights, she danced among satellite dishes and outpaced cars on the suburban street.
The Bradford home was guarded by a tall rock wall that might have kept out a particularly stupid human or one who couldn’t operate a ladder. The trees were the right height to cross from wall to branches to rooftop. The house possessed the sort of recesses and nooks that, along with the trees, hid her from the street. It was an ideal perch.
The security wasn’t terrible: one bored cop in a squad car passed sometimes on the street and a soldier in a dark suit walked the perimeter at intervals. The soldier looked competent for a human. With enough bullets and luck, and on a new moon, he might have slowed down Splat.
Naomi’s rain-clean scent rose from the back of the house and Ryn dropped from the roof to her window. Her toes caught the sill and she perched on the three-inch sliver, fingertips flush to a window with drawn curtains on the inside. Ryn felt a flutter of anticipation and knocked.
Would Naomi or the soldier answer?
The curtain whipped open. Naomi stood on the other side of the glass in a halo of warm light, dressed in pajama pants and a too-large, faded T-shirt whose wide neckline sloped almost off one of her shoulders. Ryn filled her window, and Naomi yelped. She shot back a step, tripped over a book, and flailed for balance, hitting the bed.
Ryn tilted her head to one side. She nudged the window open. “May I enter?”
Naomi propped herself on her elbows and gaped. “How did you get up there? Why are you here?”
“May I enter?” Ryn asked again.
“Yes! Hurry. If Mark catches you out there he’ll shoot you.”
Ryn eased in and shut the window. Naomi’s room was filled with her scent and it immediately wrapped around the deva in a way that overwhelmed her with a sudden swell of feelings—a curious blend of longing and comfort, as though happy to be in the warmth of Naomi’s presence, but made acutely aware she was an outsider; that she lived in the dark, and was only meant to watch from beyond the light’s reach. That is why I declared her my territory, she realized. Not the full moon. This. I wanted this. That thought froze her with sudden alarm, because she was standing in the place she least belonged.
Naomi heightened that fear as she paced a circle, inspecting Ryn from every angle—inspecting a body meant for the shadows and hands suited for violent deeds. Her skin prickled in ways she… didn’t hate, though her heart galloped.
While Naomi examined her, she in turn examined the teenager’s room: clutter, clothing draped on chairs, and a bookcase with English and Russian titles. A high shelf contained famous monuments built from interlocking, plastic blocks. One—the Eiffel Tower, recognized from her school books—was only partway finished, as if some invisible hand had obliterated half of it.
Naomi breathed out. “Weirdo.” She stood in front of Ryn again, fists to hips, and even though she’d called Ryn a word she knew to be insulting, the girl smiled after saying it.
Ryn didn’t have any trouble whatsoever interpreting this smile—it sent warmth radiating from her stone heart.
“How did you do it?” Naomi begged. “How did you slip past Mark?”
“I climbed.”
“How?”
“I don’t understand.” Ryn felt a hopeless tug because she’d explained and Naomi still stared.
“My dad’s got police protection, motion sensors in the yard, and an armed guard. It’s crazy you would even try. Seriously, how? And why?”
“You don’t believe me,” she realized.
“Of course I don’t!”
“These things are easy for me. I don’t move like anyone you know.”
“You’re agile, I get that. But you’re not on Delta Force, and I’m pretty sure Mark could sneak up on his own shadow.” Naomi peered out the window again, sliding her curtains closed, and Ryn moved into her blind spot—then bounded to the wall, skirting higher. When Naomi turned back, Ryn was perched in the corner of her ceiling, braced by fingertips and feet.
Naomi’s back thumped into the far wall and she pressed her shoulders flat against it. Her breath quickened and a strange urge to touch her cheek floated briefly through Ryn’s mind. “This is how I move.” She dropped to the floor.
“You could have just said so,” Naomi blurted, heart hammering in her chest like a cornered rabbit’s.
Ryn softened her bunched-up stance, and tried to approach with one hand raised as she might an animal she didn’t want to spook. “You didn’t believe me.”
Naomi folded both arms protectively around her middle. “You’re right. Sorry. Still jumpy I guess.” Fear had indeed darkened her rain-clean scent, less profane than a week ago, but something in the shape of her eyes made her fragile—made Ryn want to fold her in protective wings. “You heard about what happened to me?”
“I know about it.”
Naomi opened her mouth as though to speak. Blanching, she folded back into the room’s corner with her arms tight around her body, and she seemed, in the very midst of her home, to be somehow lost.
“Nothing will harm you here.” Ryn approached carefully as the girl’s heart slowed, but fear still overwhelmed her scent. As though she were that cornered rabbit, Ryn set a hand on her shoulder and stroked it with her thumb. Not knowing any other comforting gestures, she tried some human words: “I have no interest in eating you.”
A snort of laughter, and Naomi stared with glassy eyes that seemed distracted from their troubles only long enough to notice her. “Thank you. I won’t eat you, either.”
Ryn nodded solemnly.
“I’m going crazy,” Naomi whispered, her full attention locked on Ryn in a way that charged her with excitement. “Can’t sleep from all the nightmares. No more than a couple hours at a time all week.” She swallowed. “I don’t want to be a mess in front of you, but I’m exhausted and my filter’s burned out. For an instant, when I saw you up there, I thought you were… it.”
“Banich.”
“Kind of.” She turned sharply, pacing, as if it would toss off the memory, and Ryn’s hand fell away. “I don’t like to think about it.” She stopped and pressed her palms against her eye sockets. “I see things in every shadow of this stupid, creaky house.”
Ryn wondered what, exactly, Splat revealed to her—how much Naomi knew.
“I realize it was just the fear, but I remember the whole thing clearly when I sleep, except now I know more about what Banich was planning than I ever wanted to. The news had all the details. The things in his van…” She covered her mouth suddenly, eyes going still. “A blow torch,” she murmured. Blinking, she lost control of her tears. “Corkscrews.” Her scent bloomed into a more acidic flavor, typical of horror-fear—familiar to Ryn from all the ways she’d taken men apart. It didn’t belong on Naomi. “I try not to think about it, but I can’t stop dreaming… Want to know something morbid?”
Ryn didn’t know how to answer, as most of what she knew already was morbid.
“I Googled pictures of the corkscrews. Hoped that if I stared long enough the horror might somehow pass through me, like I needed to get to the other side of it. Stared until my skin turned to ice, but I think I just invited all of it in. I wonder if it ever goes away.” She strode to her bed and collapsed there, thumping face first into a pillow.
“It will,” Ryn whispered.
She shook her head, around which her wavy auburn mane had settled in a bright pool. “It won’t,” she groaned through the pillow. “And I’m an idiot.”
“It will.” Ryn took two small steps forward.
The girl rolled into a sitting position, clutching pillow to lap. “Dad wants me to take a semester off at Madison and atten
d cyber-schools. Maybe he’s right.”
“You fear leaving your cell.” Ryn’s lip curled, not at Naomi, but at what Splat had poisoned her with.
“It’s not a cell.” Her voice faltered at the look on Ryn’s face, and she squeezed the pillow to her chest. “And I’m not afraid.”
“It is. And you are.” Ryn could taste it in the air, bilious and foul. “It turns strong legs wobbly and fills you with the need to vomit—yet you cannot, because the thing wriggling within you isn’t bad meat. It’s horror-fear.”
Naomi stared, lips somewhat parted. “Horror-fear?”
“Why do you lie about it? I smell it.” Ryn tapped her nose.
The smile was small—on any other mortal, a mystery, but on Naomi it made such wonderful sense: small because it was the mark of light weakly penetrating whatever pall afflicted her. “Smell. Right.” She tapped her own nose, teasing. “That obvious, huh? I guess I don’t want this to be a cell, and I don’t want to be afraid.” Her eyes glistened, and she brushed at them with both hands. In spite of it, tears still streaked down her face after.
Ryn’s chest tightened. Before she thought better, she reached out and brushed one of those tears aside—a gesture she’d only seen humans do; why did it feel so right?
Startling at the contact, Naomi watched her a few moments while sucking on her lower lip. “Thanks. You’re sweet.”
“I’m not.”
“I mean you’re nice, not that you taste sweet.”
Ryn thought on it. “I still am not.”
Her giggle almost broke Ryn open. “You must think I’m a flake. Afraid to sleep, afraid of a dark hallway in my very-well-protected house.” She pushed her tears away with the heel of her hand. “Banich is hospitalized. I know that up here.” She tapped her temple. “Just can’t shake the sense it isn’t over.”
Fingers wet from catching a tear, Ryn smudged them together, the tactile evidence of Naomi’s terror filling her with sadness. She spoke the ugly, true words. “It isn’t over.”
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 12