“He won’t bother you.”
“It’s not in you to stop him. He’s fatter every year. All he does is eat and grow, and he’s bigger now than some deva.”
Frustrated, Ryn squeezed the cue tighter but still hadn’t budged. “Tell me more.”
She leaned on her own stick, closer. “What’ll you give me?”
“Life.”
“It’s not in you to kill Mel—or me. You can’t bluff an empath.”
“Then what?” Ryn growled.
Muse took her time, eyeing the monster curiously from head to toe. “Old but inexperienced. Heartsick for someone else. And even though you flip out when I get too close, you’re attracted.”
Ryn bristled.
“It’s like I said: can’t bluff an empath.” She pointed with the ember of her cigarette. “You’re a monster. Can’t pass for human, so you live in the wilds. Who the hell let you back into civilization? Whoever fucked it up, I should thank them—I’ve never met a monster before. You’re my first. Bet it’s lonely out there. Lonely and cold.”
“I enjoy it.”
“Not me. I need to touch. To be touched. Got to feel the beat of a heart beneath my ribs; got to feel someone else’s race against me. Ever felt that?”
Ryn glanced away.
“Chin up, half-pint. Tell you what I want. I want to bed a monster. Want to show you the ten thousand things you’ve missed living outside the cities for—what, a hundred years? More? I want to see how much I can make a two-hundred-year-old virgin twist in the sheets.”
Ryn bared her teeth. “No.”
“Easy, put the chompers away. I’m a creature of delights—I only get pleasure from giving it. And your pleasure is guaranteed. There’s not a rough bone in my body. Not unless you need it rough, and even then—I’d make you beg.”
The outrage came alive, uncoiling inside her until she knew the shine of her eyes glowed through blue-tinted lenses. “No.”
“Whatever you say. But I hope you’re a billionaire or something, because I’m no saint. I don’t risk my neck for free.”
Ryn finally glanced from the pool table. “Then a wager.”
She screwed out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Loving your confidence. You’ve never shot pool in your life. But all right, if this is your game: I win, I want you. Not for a night—too skittish, you’d need more time. A month. Never further than you can handle, but on your honor, you’d give me a real shot at… teaching you.” Her gaze was too bold. “And I want you on the full moon—want to see how it makes you move underneath me.”
“When I win, you tell me what I want to know.”
“Deal.”
They both crossed their hearts. The bet couldn’t be rescinded.
Ryn glanced back at the table, examining it once more.
“You going to shoot?” Muse asked. “My beer buzz is fading.” She waved her hand for another round and lit a fresh cigarette.
“Soon.” By the time Muse’s drinks came, Ryn had finished studying the table, searching for whatever trick was meant to make this game challenging—it dawned on her there wasn’t one. It was exactly as it appeared, and the fact irritated her. Everything in this realm is clumsy—this game can only be enjoyed by the clumsy. She’d won before she’d even shot and all that remained was to show Muse that truth, so she raised her cue and did so.
She fired the cue ball into a single stripe and knocked it clean to the pocket, shifted to a new table side, and lowered her cue to the precise spot where the white ball coasted to a stop, shooting again. It bounced over two solids, pocketing another stripe. Rounding the table, she sank two stripes with a shot, and finished by sinking three more in one go.
“There.” She pointed at a corner pocket and cracked the eight-ball home. Straightening, she laid her cue on the conquered table. “I win, yes?”
A thick column of ash fell off Muse’s cigarette. “Fuck me.”
“No. Now tell me about Splat and his cabal.”
Muse nodded, her face pallid. “You going to kill them?”
“Yes.”
“Can you?”
Ryn narrowed her eyes.
“All right. I’ll tell you everything.”
~*~
They sat in a shadowed booth, Muse burning down another cigarette and swallowing two shots of whisky before she explained.
“Two years back, my friend Drake tells me there’s a flesh-riding cabal that’s recruiting. Never been in one, and with the asura population in New Petersburg going up, I figure, ‘Why not?’ Could use the protection. They needed an empath. I met them over in the Palisades on top of a parking deck and found out why they needed one: to mark fresh targets; sniff out the vulnerable. It wasn’t the kind of cabal I thought it was.”
“Their names,” Ryn said.
“According to Drake, Ghorm leads it. Born out of a cult—maybe it was nine hundred people drinking poisoned fruit punch, maybe it was something older. He’s a deceiver. He can worm into a mortal’s head and move all the furniture around.”
“He controls them?”
“Tugs their strings. It’s gradual, a kind of gravity that pulls people further and further into madness. He can do more directed stuff with effort, especially under a full moon. He doesn’t control, he perverts. It’s his specialty. Used to work with religion, but nowadays in this part of the world, politics is easier—it’s like he can twist an idea until it’s turned back on itself.
“Ghorm’s number two is Mr. Saxby. Don’t let the suit and funny name fool you. They say he was birthed from a Nazi experiment on twins. Strongest shifter I know. Bends the mortals he flesh-rides, molds them. He can add six hundred pounds of muscle to his hollow in under three seconds. Unnaturally strong, poisonous, and he can grow fangs, claws, stingers—biology’s his arsenal. And his work on mortal bodies, what he does to their skin, to the symmetry of their form—it’s unnatural. Between him and Ghorm, they can remake a person, body and mind.”
“And Splat?”
“Strong and durable. Weaker than Saxby, but more sadistic by a mile. Addicted to hurting women and he hates them. Didn’t even like me for flesh-riding one. I can’t look at him, can’t think of looking at him, without…” Her cigarette trembled in her hand and she stabbed it out, drinking another whisky from a row of glasses and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I could see what he’s done in his eyes. He’s worked on women, on kids. The less said about that, the better.”
“Is that all?”
“No. There’s a fourth—a new one. Tooloo’s the empath they got when I turned them down. I know her through Drake. Most empaths can’t work with those guys—we can’t stand suffering. We feel every piece of it. That’s why we’re all such fucking hedonists.” She circled her thumb over the shot glass’s lip. “Way more fun to watch pleasure than pain. But Tooloo’s wired wrong. She’s got a mind like a supercomputer; she can see all a person’s inner workings, but she doesn’t actually feel them. Feelings are just clockwork to her, and bodies are just sacks of blood, and… well, she’s born of the digital age. People are just things to her on the other side of her eyes, the same way the internet is just a bunch of things on the other side of a screen.”
“Where can I find them?”
“I’m not supposed to know, and if they knew I did, they’d eat me. But they think empaths are about reading minds. We’re not. It’s a kind of perception; it’s about noticing things. So I could see the concrete powder on Saxby’s penny loafers, I could smell the kerosene from a heater on Splat. They piped Ghorm in through a web connection, because he’s basically immobile, and his voice had an echo, like from an empty space. They were in a housing project. My guess is Primrose—supposed to be a residential highrise on Park Ridge, but it’s been delayed and half-built for years.”
“Do they all stay there?”
“No, just Ghorm. But it’s their nest, and they’ll meet on the full moon. Best time for Ghorm to work his magic on a new hollow. Splat ruined his a few months ago
and Drake says he’s burning through the new ones too fast—he’s sick, broken. Something’s the matter with him and he can’t keep them from rotting.”
“He’s wounded.”
Muse snorted. “That’s not possible. We exist or we don’t. There’s no ‘wounding’ an asura. We’re spirits. We don’t work like that.”
“A sharp enough edge will cut anything. Even a soul.”
“So someone cut Splat’s soul?”
“You’re the empath. Am I lying?” Ryn stood.
“Holy shit.” The next shot glass shook in Muse’s hand and she gulped it down. “You serious? You can cut an asura?”
“I can cut anything.”
Muse breathed out a curse, but her fear gradually changed into something else. “You wouldn’t cut me. I can tell. Have a drink with me. Or five. Bet you’d be a fantastic drunk.”
“No.”
“Who’s the other woman?”
Ryn hesitated.
“Go on,” Muse teased. “Ask me what you’ve wanted to all night.”
Damn her. “There is no question to ask. She isn’t… interested. Not like that.”
“Let me tell you something a monster might not know. I’ve been in men and women, straights and gays, closeted and open, and everything in between. From where I’ve been sitting, you’d be surprised who wants what. Some people play their desires close as a hand of poker, and some won’t even look at their own cards. Bring her by sometime and I’ll have a closer look. Maybe she’s more interested than you know. Maybe I’ll see something you can’t.”
Ryn glared.
“Hey. Relax. I’d be respectful.”
The glare continued.
“Well. Respectful-ish.”
~*~
Muse proved persuasive enough to draw Ryn into a conversation—or, at least, to sit and listen to Muse’s end of one. The asura expounded elaborately on her experiences with humans and their drinking rituals—it involved a lot of waking up in distressed or mysterious circumstances. But whatever else Muse could do, she couldn’t withstand a half-bottle of whisky, and she begged Ryn to help her to a cab.
“I will, but you won’t… touch me.”
“No, no, all the touching will be you—strictly carrying-me-related touches,” Muse slurred from her half-cocked position in the booth seat. “Honest! I’m not sneaky. I attack head-on.”
Ryn sighed, easing one of Muse’s arms over her shoulders and assisting her out of the bar. “We are not friends,” she growled.
“Not even slightly,” she agreed, touching her mouth to hold back a wet belch.
The cold air of the street licked her skin and Muse groaned her approval.
An explosion transformed a line of twenty windows to Ryn’s side into glittering shards of glass. She snapped her hand up and caught the bullet in her palm before it could tear the asura’s body in half.
The force threw Ryn and she adjusted her stance. Concrete scraped underfoot. It kicked her four yards before she regained traction. Smoke poured out of her open palm, which was on fire, and she clutched in her right hand a dense, alien metal intended to murder gods.
Her gaze zeroed in on the distant smoking speck of the rifle’s barrel.
“Stay.” Ryn eased Muse into the crevice of a storefront, concealed from the sniper. He fired a second time, air pulsing from the bullet’s passing—it would have broken through both sides of a bank vault, but instead the unearthly metal struck Ryn’s palm and flattened.
The force only kicked her back half as far, but the shockwave ripped the doors from four cars and whisked them down the street. Car alarms went off up and down the avenue and the streetlights had shattered, casting the neighborhood into darkness.
Muse clutched her bleeding ears and shouted, too loud, “Shit, what is that!”
“A dead man.” Ryn vaulted to the wall, gripped brickwork, and ascended to the rooftops.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Achilles’ Heel
Ryn flew across the city’s uneven roofs. The distant muzzle flashed, a flicker of warning before its thunderous shot struck her outthrust palm. The force hurled her backward, feet planting into a building side; the mortar popped, bricks cracking in a dusty spiderweb of fractures. Ryn’s calves tensed, and she pounced forth again with hands shedding burning powder like twin contrails behind her.
Another flash. She deflected the stinging metal with the back of her hand, the bullet sparking white from the collision and hurled into the heavens.
A third flash, and she batted it over the bay.
It never broke her stride.
He’s less accurate than at the rink. Different shooter or is he nervous?
Then she sensed it. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she spotted another figure sneaking from a van on the street near Muse. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and carried a shotgun and something on his back.
A mirror box.
Ryn was caught between the sniper and another mortal intent on capturing Muse, equidistant between the two. Deciding, she bore down on the sniper. Do it. Shoot me.
The rifle clapped. Lightning erupted from the barrel’s mouth, another wave of thunder and alloy tumbling through the air. She stretched the thread of time thin until the bullet was visible and caught the angry metal between both hands. She twisted her body from its path and arced the freight-train force off its tracks, casting it to the street where it bore down on the bespectacled man hunting Muse.
It struck him center mass. The bullet obliterated most of him, rending what remained into two great, uneven pieces sundered clean apart. The top parts slapped onto a car hood like wet laundry.
Ryn completed the spin she’d started to evade the bullet, flitting to another rooftop, and rocketed toward the sniper. She angled her approach from his side, forcing the barrel to waver and track to follow her, but the firearm’s size made it hard to reorient.
She ate the distance. Her snarl was a long, vicious sound that grew in volume across her final leap. He fired one more time, point blank.
Ryn’s claws glinted, cutting the bullet in half. Its two neat segments wobbled through the air above and below her shoulder and she traced her claws along the length of a Deep One artifact disguised as a rifle. Unnaturally cold metal casings, rune-inscribed plates, and hissing fluid filled the air—no sign of bolts, pinions, or springs, as it wasn’t built from those things in its true form. The Kl’thunian weapon screamed its death rattle, its remains falling to the rooftop in a rain of viscid blood and tinkling metal shards.
Transitioning fluidly from claw to kick, Ryn cracked the mortal’s jaw and tossed him into a brick smokestack. It cratered and he hung limp in the indentation.
Ryn traced her fingers across the tarpaper and sniffed where he’d lain. Different mortal. Then where was the one from the ice rink? This one was ugly. In fact, she wasn’t sure he was human. He was… lumpy. His face didn’t look right. His skull bulged out like he had a grapefruit under his scalp and his swollen shoulder was hunched, one arm a foot longer than the other. Saxby’s work. But to what ends?
“I know you’re conscious.” She crouched, ready. “Where is the other shooter?”
His eyelids peeled open, but only one held the eyeball—the other was ringed in hooked teeth, a tiny mouth. Both his regular mouth and the second one in his eye socket smiled sickeningly together. “Look-it you, you’re just a little girl. I could take you home in my pocket.” He fell out of the crater and coughed out a molar. His neck was two vertebrae too long. “You’re the reason they did this to me. You’re the reason I haven’t got half my working parts, you’re the reason for the pain, for the fact I got Cody’s brain stitched into mine and can’t stop hearin’ him scream about his missing face. I kill you… and maybe they let us die.”
She fixed him with a stare. “Death is here now. Come closer. It sleeps in my hands.”
He flicked his elongated arm her way, as though making a shooing gesture, but instead a spike of hardened bone squirted from a pucker in his wrist. Ryn batted the
glistening spike aside, pouncing on him.
She struck his chest knees-first, claws out, intent on his throat.
His neck inflated to twice its size and blowfish spines puffed out. Flaps behind his ears had sucked in the air, so she clubbed the vents with her fists. He seemed to gag, the inflated skin protecting his windpipe sagging.
Flipping off his chest, she dropped and swept his legs.
There were no bones in his legs. They slapped wetly from under him, and though he collapsed in a thrashing pile, both legs wriggled on the tarpaper. Abruptly, his pant legs bulged and tentacles shredded through the fabric—dozens of them, bristling with claws or very human eyes with some teeth mixed in. The root of one tentacle patch held what seemed to be half a flesh-covered skull, no jaw but a tongue, screaming gibberish.
“See? Don’t you see?” the creature said from the mouth in its head but not its eye. “It’s crowded in here,” he sobbed.
Barbed tentacles slapped the rooftop, dragging their mass closer to Ryn, so she kicked the bricks from the bottom of the chimney stack beside them. Brick powder clouded the air and the heavy stack leaned toward the fallen creature. She slipped behind it, giving it a shove that dropped a ton of rubble on the aberration’s mewling flesh.
The air filled with choking, abrasive dust, and she heard him worming that slimy, near-boneless body from beneath the weight, crying and screaming and blubbering from four different mouths. She didn’t even know where the fourth mouth was—didn’t want to know, really. She could hear the beating of three hearts.
Something orange glowed in the fog of brick dust. Ryn thought of bombardier beetles and their chemical ignition system.
Fire roared through the air, but to her side. The blistering-hot film spewed a wet trail of flames, covering the tarpaper rooftop. Children live here. She had to take that weapon out, or the building would burn.
Ryn hefted a loose brick, flicked through the cloud, and launched a flying kick that planted both heels into the creature’s torso. It knocked him stumbling out of the debris cloud, burning oil thrown into the air, spattering down in fat drops. It hissed against Ryn’s cloak and clung to her forearm. She ignored it.
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 23