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

by Casey Matthews

  Naomi skated back. “That was terrifying. What were you going to do to that guy? How did you see that from across the rink? And Denise. And all of the stuff you told me. How?”

  Ryn shrugged. He was a distraction, she realized. The asura had put both the sniper and predator in play. Clever.

  “I don’t get you. You can’t figure out dating, but you can sniff out a pedophile or a rapist from eighty feet away. You beat up a guy who was like three times your size. You speak some kind of crazy old-fashioned Russian.” Softer, she asked, “Who are you?”

  “All those things and many others.” But Ryn could tell it wasn’t what Naomi wanted. She wanted a label, a category, but the monster was too old, too large for those things.

  So she edged away from Naomi, coasting backward on the ice. With the danger passed, the moon high, and the power in the auburn-haired girl’s eyes raging through her, she whispered, “I must go.”

  “Wait! I don’t understand—Ryn! You’re skating backward.” She glided quickly after. “You’ve been skating twenty minutes and… you’re already better at it than anyone I know. I don’t understand. Who are you?”

  “You know more than you should.” More than any other mortal has, she realized, shivering—and turned to flee. She sped from Naomi, hopped over the rink’s wall and kicked off her skates, exchanging them for shoes. In an instant she was fading into the crowd while sliding them on, casting a final glance back.

  Behind her, Naomi stood still on the ice and only watched, mouthing words she couldn’t expect Ryn to hear, but which electrified the blood: “I don’t understand yet—but I will.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Just Friends

  That night Ryn listened to the wild pump of Naomi’s heart from the shadows of her rooftop. A nightmare dragged the teenager under black waves. Her panic sweated into the sheets and her thrashing transformed the covers into knots, pinning her arms. Each terrified moan cut Ryn—brutal cuts, a novel pain inflicted on the only pink and uncallused part of her heart.

  No knife was sharper than her friend’s soft plea of “no, stop.” This new pain was felt in sympathy for another, allowing no defense. The faintest whimper upset the immortal’s patience and set her to pacing.

  And how much worse would the nightmares be if Naomi knew the truth? An asura cabal using humans could attack from almost anywhere: any mortal they could buy, blackmail, or deceive might become their instrument.

  Ryn rolled the deformed rifle slug across her palm and didn’t think too carefully about what it would have done to a wet, mortal body like Naomi’s—how its speed and hardness would crack human bone like soft wood, shred skin and muscle, how so much of Naomi’s soul depended upon the preservation of that fibrous mass behind her eyes. Ryn had seen brains cleaved in two, had seen them slip out large fissures in the skull and smear against stone. Those humans didn’t have heads one iota less durable than Naomi’s.

  And so that became another thing she didn’t think too carefully about.

  Instead, she scouted widely and thoroughly, yet always keeping close enough to her ward to sense imminent danger. She no longer attended school or spent time in her group home, and left Ms. Cross’s increasingly terse phone messages unanswered.

  She stayed awake even on the new moon, all the way through a freezing rain that drove like needles and soaked through every part of her. Too tired to move, she perched like a gargoyle on Naomi’s rooftop and waited for asura, for mortals, for any kind of malice to show itself. A cold river ran between her shoulder blades, a waterfall poured off the point of her jaw. The wet worked between fingers, toes, until no part of her was dry.

  When the wind struck, the wet froze to ice. It encased her in glittering crystal and the rain turned to snow, which piled atop her, layer by heavy layer. Her cloak became a stiff burrow and Ryn tried her best not to drowse.

  At the first touch of dawn on her forehead, the weariness of the moonless night lifted. Ryn moved and snow shed from her shoulders in great mounds. Her ice encasement cracked and slid off her in sheets as she stood. Her fingers flexed, released, and she listened to Naomi rouse with a start from another nightmare.

  And throughout the day, still no sign of asura or their mortals.

  Ryn could keep this up forever, but she worried if she didn’t find the asura first, they would prod her defenses until a gap was laid bare.

  ~*~

  “I understand,” Casper Owens told his ex-wife over the phone. “I’m working on it. The check’s literally in my hand.” He polished the barrel of a custom rifle smuggled to his cookie-cutter motel room by benefactors he’d never met. Its mysterious black metal was too cold to the touch—too cold and too dark—and it was longer by half than anything he’d ever fired. He didn’t recognize the design; there was no manufacturer’s stamp, just stenciled silver scribbles in a bizarre language, and though he didn’t understand the words, they made him queasy.

  “I swear, I’m putting it in the envelope now.” Casper lifted the weighty scope, disconcerted at the way a low-frequency hum emanating from the metal lifted the fine hairs on his arms when he touched it. “Take a picture? I don’t have a smart phone anymore, I can’t. Can I please just talk to our daughter?”

  The line went dead. Figures. Frustrated, he set the scope on his desk and shut his eyes, trying to remember what Julia’s voice sounded like. He’d give anything to hear it again; once he was finished, he never would. He’d be dead or incarcerated for life, and had no illusions that Julia would visit him in prison—she’d disown him, change her name, and pray her new friends never asked about her father. If they asked, she’d tell them he’d died in a war.

  Hell. I basically did. Last time he’d felt alive had been that hot skirmish in Greece, shooting Soviets so Hillary Clinton could avenge her dead husband. Funny how he’d thought life would get better after the service, but his last job was on the road selling pharmaceuticals to doctors who were too busy or stupid to realize the latest “novel molecule” was a substandard repackaging of the last—different only for the fact it wasn’t off patent and sometimes caused nausea.

  He’d justified it at first: had to sell the drugs if his company was going to make new ones; he was only bilking the insurers, really; those doctors ought to know better; not like the drugs aren’t doing their job. That’s how this world eats you. Doesn’t make you do evil; makes you believe heroes aren’t possible. Squeezes you under the weight of its mediocrity. The best you can hope for is a nice-paying job that’s only a little selfish—and a daughter who calls.

  He missed war. He missed the way—when he’d first come home—a dropped dish in the other room would rip him from a dreamless sleep and drench every cell with adrenaline. He missed the smell of spent powder and brass, missed the feeling of purpose when he woke, the sense of mission. Sure, he’d laughed at the idea then. But if he’d known what was waiting for him, he’d have seen war with clearer eyes. Even the shitty things he’d done in the service—and there were a lot—had made a kind of sense. They were for a reason, something more than hawking a slightly worse cholesterol pill.

  Casper booted his laptop’s video chat. Time to corral two dipshits. The benefactors had warned never to meet Trevor Wilkins and Paul Burns in person. The guardian demon had Casper’s scent, and his associates could wind up contaminated by it, so they met digitally.

  He wished either of them had spent even a day in the service, but Wilkins was some moonbat who hated Bradford’s drilling policies and wanted to sterilize everyone with an IQ below his—he claimed it was 140. Casper had his doubts. Casper had once asked him, point blank, what he’d do if he could push a button that’d kill half the human population.

  Wilkins had told him he’d hit it twice.

  The Gaia-hugging hippy wanted to save the Earth from humankind, but Burns was just rancid in every way. He’d claimed way back in the day his great-great-grandfather had owned a hundred slaves and a plantation, and he’d talked about it like it was a good thing. Bitched and bitched about
how Northern aggression had destroyed his inheritance, and now—apparently—the Mexicans were going to do it again. Bradford had spearheaded a couple immigration bills, which was all the excuse Burns needed to unload his bile.

  Ludicrous, Casper thought, rankling. I’m trying to save the world, and all I’ve got to work with are two guys who aren’t even believers; not in anything that’s real, anyway.

  The video chat picked up Wilkins and Burns. It took them a while to get Burns’s computer unmuted since he wasn’t very good with technology. After wasting ten minutes on that, Burns asked, “Did the admins get your BFG?” He had on a baseball cap and was bristle-necked, with the blocky face of someone who might have been a linebacker in high school, a contrast to the fancy hotel room behind him. He was in New Petersburg proper, somewhere, and Wilkins appeared to be inside a dark van, sucking on the paper of a joint. He wore those black-rimmed glasses that were popular among stupid people who wanted to look more like their favorite pundits.

  “No idea where on Earth this monster came from, but yeah,” Casper said, holding up the impossible rifle cartridge. It had a red tip and felt ice-cold and heavy. The bullet didn’t look like any metal he’d ever fired.

  “Shee-it,” Burns said, “could shoot through a fuckin’ school with that thing.”

  “A tank, at least,” Casper agreed.

  “This country has a serious gun problem,” Wilkins muttered.

  Casper sighed, because that led to an eruption of shouts between his two cohorts. He couldn’t figure out who he hated more between the two. “Stow it, both of you. We’re here for our own reasons, but we’re all here.”

  “Damn straight,” Burns said, the crinkle in his eyes suggesting he only argued to see other people get angry. “Nothing wrong with a li’l tree hugging, we’re all friends here.” They weren’t. “I’ll personally fuck a redwood gentle-like if it’ll get Wilkins here to help me wax that traitor Bradford and his uppity bitch of a girl.”

  Casper had yet to figure out why Burns also hated Naomi Bradford, except that she was pretty, rich, and talented: three things Burns had never been.

  “Get fucked, Neanderthal.” Wilkins pronounced Neanderthal with a hard “t” and it made him insufferable.

  “Plan to,” Burns said. “Got a couple buddies coming in this week and we’re gonna hit the Red Light district. You wanna come, Wilkins? Do you stop being feminist if you pay for it? Or do you just have to tip real well?”

  Casper could tell Wilkins was close to exploding, so he schooled his expression. “This is not spring break, Burns. We’re here to do a job, and here are your orders. Wilkins, you follow the Bradford girl and monitor her routines. Be on the lookout for the girl in the hoodie, but don’t approach her for any reason. Observe. Report. Figure out when she’s not guarded, when she’s vulnerable.

  “Burns—do what you do best. Dig up everything on the dark-haired kid in the hoodie, but don’t engage her. Figure out where she lives, who she knows, where she sleeps, and what her routines are. All our benefactors know is that she’s centered somewhere in the city, but she’s often close to the Bradford girl. You’ve got a description. Looks like she’s a teenager, so start with the schools.”

  They both scowled. “What about you?” Wilkins asked.

  Casper showed them the round again. “Target practice.”

  ~*~

  Friday was special, because Ryn was invited into Naomi’s home and didn’t have to hide on the roof. Instead, she watched the girl fan out notecards on the table. Naomi had dark shadows beneath her eyes, her posture bent from sleepless nights—but her smile was somehow still glorious.

  “What are these?” Ryn leaned down, sniffing a notecard.

  “I can’t get over the never-tasting-chocolate thing,” Naomi yawned. “But you must know some kind of food. If you can find it here, I’ll cook it for you. As thanks for the Nine Lives.”

  Each card had a recipe. Ryn scanned them all. “I know none of it.”

  “None? There’s fourteen nationalities of food here. What’s closest?”

  Ryn seized a rolodex full of notecards and spun it, the cards going flickity-flick past her vision until she snapped it to a stop. Plucking one out, she examined the ingredients and recalled the hearty beet aroma rolling from peasant homes at forest’s edge. The script was Russian and by an unfamiliar hand, the cardstock bearing faint impressions of a woman’s scent that was… half Naomi. “This.”

  “Borscht? You’ve had borscht?”

  “No. But I could smell it in their homes.”

  Naomi gave her a worried look, nodded slowly, and examined the card. “I could make it.” She sucked on her lower lip, uncertain.

  “This was your mother’s?”

  “Uh. Yeah.” She breathed differently—as though air was catching too high in her lungs. “I haven’t had this since… well, not for a while.”

  Since her mother died. “Do as you wish.” Then, more quietly: “I will try new things if they are your things.”

  “Let’s make borscht.” Naomi placed the notecard reverently on the countertop.

  They ordered a ride to a nearby grocery store, one filled with too many smells, though the food was surprisingly fresh. It was there she realized not every human in New Petersburg fed from boxes and cans. While none of the meat had been properly hunted, the vegetables were only lightly poisoned and hailed from so many different places that Ryn had never seen some side by side. Naomi insisted on pork for the borscht, but picked meat that wasn’t as thick with human-schemed hormones.

  The Bradford kitchen featured hard marble surfaces, bright knives and wooden cutting boards, copper pans dangling from a ceiling rack, and a gas-burning stovetop. Naomi yawned again and her knife slipped on the onion. “Ah!” She clutched her finger, body seeming to fold around the wound. “Shit!”

  “Let me see.”

  “Could you grab me a towel, it’s bleeding.”

  “Let me see.”

  She was reluctant to turn over her hand, drops of bright crimson dripping from her closed fist.

  Ignoring the blood, Ryn took the auburn-haired girl’s hand and let trickles of it pool into her palm. The cut bled freely, so Ryn bent close and gently blew.

  “That’s so unhygienic,” Naomi said.

  “Better?”

  Naomi rolled her eyes, but then furrowed her brow and muttered, “Yes, actually. It doesn’t hurt at all.” Glancing at her digit while running it under tap water, she frowned at a cut now noticeably shallower than before. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”

  The blood on Ryn’s hand excited her, filling her with an unnamable frisson. It didn’t feel like hunger—but seeing part of Naomi imprinted red on her hand was right. Part of her on me. It was only with reluctance that she washed it off.

  While Naomi rummaged for a bandage strip in a cabinet on the other side of the kitchen island, Ryn took the knife to onion, beets, carrots, and potatoes.

  “I can hear you chopping like a maniac,” Naomi laughed. “Trying to murder the onion for hurting me?” When she turned at the sound of Ryn planting the knife point down, she took an involuntary step back at the sight of minced vegetables. “How’d you do that?”

  Ryn shrugged.

  “They were— They’re all done.”

  Ryn nodded at her bandaged finger. “You’re too exhausted.”

  Suppressing a reflexive yawn at mention of exhaustion, she narrowed her eyes. “Show me this time.” Fetching the cabbage, she tossed it underhand across the island.

  Ryn thrust her knife through the cabbage, spearing it between them. “If you wish.” A thrill jittered through her whole body and she realized she’d decided something without ever thinking on it: to drop her social camouflage. It kicked her pulse, to know she was about to show her friend a secret—to expose it. Watching for a reaction, she was unsure if she’d see terror or shock or, perhaps, something better. As with their species’ mating rituals, this was a disrobing. Desire. That is what I want to see in yo
ur eyes.

  Releasing the cabbage from its seat on her knife with a graceful roll of the blade, she halved it with a thunk to the cutting board.

  Whether at the fluid gleam of metal or the sound, Naomi straightened, and for a slow-moving second, Ryn savored the blossoming surprise in her eyes. I like when your face does that.

  The knife flashed in her hand. Let me make you do it again. She showed with the singing knife what she couldn’t with words, and she held back nothing: This is what I do. The lightning strokes made clean arcs at a speed no mortal could follow. Something the earth and sun took months to make whole, she had reduced to tiny, regular pieces in less than a heartbeat.

  Naomi gripped the counter’s edge tighter at the sight.

  Now you see. I destroy, and I am good at it. Ryn again planted the knife point-down to punctuate the act, and her friend breathed, as if having forgotten how until that moment. Her gaze seemed to drink the deva, realizing only gradually what she’d witnessed—and how little she’d been able to see.

  Ryn had never done this before. Never… shown off. Even she was breathing quicker in anticipation. “Is it as you like it?” she whispered. Or did I show you too much?

  There was stillness to her friend at first, and then—her mouth somewhat open—a look of quiet awe that pleased Ryn so deeply, so thoroughly, that she now understood why some gods craved worship. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Naomi asked.

  “There was never a day I couldn’t do that.”

  She snorted in disbelief, the awe wiped clean. She was too sure of her world’s boundaries and things taught in school to take Ryn at her word. “Fine, don’t tell me. But since you already did the hard work, and I promised to cook for you, how about you let me finish? Unless you think I’m too sleepy to stir a pot.”

  “I don’t mind watching.”

  Once the ingredients were set to simmer, Naomi led her upstairs and showed her books—showed her one called The Brothers Karamazov with her mother’s notes in the margins. It seemed as though her mother’s ghost lived in those notes, in the smell of the soup downstairs, and the auburn-haired girl’s voice trailed off as her fingers danced over the spines on her bookshelf. She brushed one in particular, saying she could nearly hear her mom reading it to her. Ryn especially liked its title: Where the Wild Things Are.