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

by Casey Matthews

  ~*~

  Naomi’s world flipped end over end. Water pushed into her nose and ears, grabbed hold of her whole body, wrestled her into the dark. It was strong—stronger than anything that had ever held her; she belonged to it, and it was trying to kill her.

  The current sucked her down and squeezed her head. The river pushed its thumbs into her eardrums until she wanted to scream in pain. It ignored the buoyancy of her life vest and held her there, pinned her to a cold, dark blue space and somehow the river bit her ankle—her whole foot was wedged in the lip of a heavy tablet of underwater rock.

  I’m going to die here.

  It pounded at her chest, as if beating at the doors to her lungs, demanding the last sliver of precious oxygen locked beneath her ribcage. She jerked on her pinned foot with all her might, and when that failed, fought to undo the waterlogged laces. No good. She’d double-knotted them, a habit from running, and her fingers were numb and trembling.

  A wild thought to cut off her foot shot through her brain. No knife, she realized.

  Her lungs burned. She focused on calm. On surviving, on having faced worse things than rocks and rivers. She fought the wet strands of her laces again, and when the knot finally released, hope sprang to life—but even untied, her foot wouldn’t budge. The river had her, and it wasn’t going to let her go.

  Hope died.

  She bit her own mouth, hard, to fight the reflex to inhale. She clung to her last breath, but the oxygen burned down lower and lower, a sputtering candle flame on the last of its wick.

  Her vision darkened. Bright spots popped off behind her eyelids. An ache blossomed like a hand grenade in her skull, her mind shuddering off and then on, as if she’d drowsed, and adrenaline kick-started her brain in time to watch the trail of silver bubbles escape her mouth and rise through the murk. Now her chest felt concave, and the urgent need to inhale grew.

  The escaping bubbles distorted around a shadow. A thing descended toward her—a thing from her nightmares. It rode on draperies of fine darkness and its pale face was the only thing on it with form. Death. Death is real, and it’s here now. It had eyes that were at once beautiful and terrifying, something Naomi had only felt staring into lightning storms.

  Yet Death had an oddly serene, oddly familiar face. Not Death. Ryn.

  She’d followed Naomi down into the frigid, lightless void and ignited it with the strangeness in her eyes. Not that it would help, with Naomi’s foot wedged in the crevice.

  No time. She tugged her knee again, but there was no give.

  No time.

  Naomi’s eyes shut and her mouth opened. Reflex kicked through her willpower and she inhaled, her whole body expanding to fill the painful vacuum in her chest with water.

  Instead, precious air surged into her throat and sweet oxygen flooded her lungs. Naomi’s eyes shot open. Ryn’s hand clutched the back of her head. Naomi felt her lips on hers, fused. She drank the air greedily from Ryn’s mouth.

  The raven-haired girl floated a few inches away and again Naomi saw her eyes. The irises burned bluer than stained glass backlit by the sun. They produced their own light, eerily illuminating the water. But where a human’s eyes would have been white, hers were matte black. Nothing on Earth should have eyes like that. And it confused Naomi, because she hardly recognized Ryn—it was a small part of her face, but utterly changed the meaning of every other line, and so it was the first time Naomi had really seen her.

  She tried to push her away, but not from fear. Ryn had just fed her the air in her lungs. They might both drown if her friend didn’t surface now.

  Ryn’s hand stroked the side of her face. Soundless, the girl’s mien was placid, unconcerned. It was her calm that stopped Naomi’s struggling. She drifted lower, to the pinned ankle, and stretched one hand back, striking the stone tablet with four stiffened fingers. A crack of thunder. A tremor hummed all the way up Naomi’s leg to her hip. The world split, it must have, judging by the sound ringing in her ears. Then, the strange girl rolled away an engine block–sized stone with one arm.

  Again, the oxygen in Naomi’s lungs was spent. Again, her vision darkened. Ryn took her chin in hand, leaned in, and briefly their eyes met. Had the water paralyzed her, or had something else made her timid? Their lips touched a second time. Naomi’s eyes widened as air once again filled her. She only stole half a breath, likely all her friend had to give—every last whisper passed from Ryn to her.

  And yet Ryn didn’t die or pass out, didn’t slow. With unflagging strength, she tugged Naomi close and powered through the vicious current, carrying her, dragging her inexorably to the surface world. A ceiling of glassy water jumped closer with each of the girl’s kicks. They broke through.

  She collapsed onto a rock slab, Ryn beside her. Coughing, sucking in gulp after gulp of air, she hacked out mucus that dangled from her lip in a slimy strand and inhaled again. Blackness at the edges of her vision receded. The oxygen starvation left needle-prick burns in her face, ears, and lips. “God. Ryn. What are you?”

  Ryn settled onto the other side of the slab. Her shoulders rose and fell, no more winded than if she’d been jogging, instead of battling the river without a drop of air in her lungs. Her head bowed. She wrapped her arms around her knees and made no response.

  All the pieces settled into place: the men she had hospitalized or killed; the way she’d faded into shadow; her vicious speed, unearthly grace, and strength enough to overturn great stones. Her eyes. Oh my God, her eyes. They burned in her mind, a fire that wouldn’t go out, and she couldn’t tell if her limbs shook from the near drowning or from the creature who’d saved her.

  Creature. Because Ryn wasn’t a person. She was something else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Eye to Eye

  Naomi sank to her knees atop the stone slab and lowered her terrified gaze. When the edge of her vision caught Ryn, a jolt ran through her, as though her entire wet body were an exposed nerve, and she snapped her eyes back down. A hundred thoughts collided, locked up, and she didn’t know what to do: run, hide? Some errant part of her thought to bow.

  Yet when she at last dared to look, Ryn faced away with arms folded around her shins and forehead to her knees. She didn’t seem dangerous that way; she seemed small, alone.

  They must have stayed that way twenty minutes. It was Jane lurching from the brush, stumbling upon them, that woke Naomi from her mental paralysis. The counselor appeared to count them over and over, confirming both were there. “The hell was that?” she asked Ryn. “Your life vest!” She stabbed a finger at the river, as if accusing the monster and river of conspiring. “What. The. Hell!”

  Shifting, Ryn only presented her back to Jane. It deepened the counselor’s rage.

  “Stop it.” The words sprang from Naomi unbidden, and she said the next words as much for herself as Jane: “She saved my life.”

  “What?”

  “I almost drowned. She dove in after me, and I’d be dead if she hadn’t. Don’t yell at her. We’re both freaked out enough.”

  “All right.” Jane seemed to be collecting herself. “All right, but you fell in; she dove. Let’s not do that again.”

  Fell. Had she? Frowning in thought, she tried to remember how it had happened. It hadn’t felt like a fall. But the only person next to her had been Patrick.

  Denise hit the slab a moment later, rocketing directly into Naomi so hard she almost knocked them both into the river. She tightened her long arms around her friend, whispering “Thank God” over and over. Elli appeared from the brush as well, but instead of hugging, she stood back and sobbed uncontrollably.

  When the hugging and crying had started to work itself out, Jane said, “Come on. The others are downstream, worried sick. They’ll want to know you’re all right.” When she reached for Ryn, the creature scooted away.

  Ryn’s eyes were shut, head still bowed. She’s hiding her face. Remembering those unnatural eyes that marked her as a predator, she realized Ryn had lost her glasses. She sat next to the girl
, swallowing, body buzzing harder the closer she got. “You don’t want to show your eyes?”

  Ryn nodded.

  “Wear a blindfold.” Her mouth was weirdly dry. “We’ll tell them the light hurts your eyes without your glasses. We’ll guide you.”

  “You would do that?”

  Heart in her throat, she nodded.

  Ryn produced a dark strip of cloth seemingly from nowhere, putting it on.

  When Naomi stood, she offered her hand by reflex before her brain could remind her: Don’t touch. Danger.

  At the contact of the raven-haired girl’s palm, she shivered reflexively as another jolt leapt up her elbow. The strange energy that entered her seemed to pour hot oil into her heart, making it pound faster. Shooting back a step, she severed the connection. What was that? It summoned a vivid mental image of Ryn’s mouth pressed to hers underwater, one that left her lips tingling. A terrible thought worked through her: That’s why I can’t forget her. Why she sticks to my senses for hours after she’s gone; why she haunts my dreams, both good and bad; and why my skin remembers her when she comes closer. It’s some kind of… spell.

  That dreadful thought seized hold. She was helpless before the power of this spell, but it put all these past months’ confusion into sharp relief. Denise had been right—she’d poured her attention into Horatio and Patrick, trying to find in them the things Ryn had unleashed with her clever magic.

  Staring at the slight, dangerous creature before her, Naomi tried to hate her.

  She couldn’t. That was how deep the magic had rooted.

  Denise stepped in to guide Ryn by the elbow. Naomi trailed, but for the entire walk her head swam with sensations. The air was delicious, and every current of wind exploded her senses. Colors had brightened, refined, and she could distinguish minute shades that changed the foliage from a swaddle of green to something infinitely more nuanced and beautiful. Her brain absorbed details until she felt dizzy.

  At first she wondered if it might have been caused by nearly drowning in the river—but no, this was more than sensory overload. The air tasted alive. She could distinguish smells she’d never known before—that Elli was on her period, that Jane carried enough of Todd’s scent that she could tell they were an item.

  Her thoughts warred: though Ryn had saved her, she’d also done this to her; changed her senses, how she felt, and against that spell she was defenseless. If Ryn could do all that, what else was she capable of?

  Downstream, the rafts were dragged to an embankment and Todd had corralled everyone around untouched lunches. Relief overtook all their faces at the sight of them—everyone except Patrick, who sat on a cooler with guys on either side of him. He registered only surprise, and maybe guilt.

  Naomi could feel from ten feet away Ryn’s skin tightening, hear the low-frequency growl purr from her throat and gradually swell into the range audible to humans. Slipping close, she set her hand to Ryn’s damp shoulder, sensing that coiled-spring body beneath her fingertips. “Please don’t,” she whispered. If he threw me into the river on purpose, she might hurt him. Or worse. She didn’t want this creature to murder Patrick on her behalf.

  Ryn wore her intensity like a cloak. Simply in touching her, Naomi became somehow aware of her friend’s body, of its shape beneath wet cloth—from powerful heartbeat to the soft contours of her skin, an intimate knowledge that burned her ears. Jerking her fingers away, she was scalded by the swell of desire it produced.

  Hovering there, the raven-haired girl danced on the balls of her feet with the energy of a lightning bolt with nowhere to go. She stormed across the beach with Denise at her heels, the blindfold not seeming to hinder her one bit.

  It took a while to explain what had happened to everyone’s satisfaction: to describe Ryn’s rescue while editing out the supernatural parts—and also how their mouths had touched. She echoed assurances that she was all right again and again, more frustrated each time, because all she really wanted was to puzzle out this otherworldly girl who had bespelled her.

  Jane finally ended the explanations by asking if Naomi wanted to leave. “We have a radio. We can hike up to the road.”

  “No,” she said automatically. Though terrified of what Ryn was doing to her, she couldn’t risk letting her disappear again—maybe this time forever. Maybe I’d get my regular feelings back. But did she even want to? Some dark part of her liked being in its thrall.

  “You’re sure?” Perhaps Jane sensed her uncertainty.

  Looking to the distant log where Ryn sat alone, she nodded. “I want to keep going.”

  The crowd clung to Naomi, trying to drag her into more detail about her brush with death, but anyone who spoke to Ryn ran into a stone wall of silence and eventually gave up. Patrick stayed on his cooler, nodding wanly when a boy muttered, “God, that was lucky.”

  But when she next looked to the log, Ryn was gone. Edging from the crowd and making excuses all the way to the trees, Naomi slipped into the forest. No, she’s not gone. She could feel Ryn, taste her in the air, and she peeled through brush until she found the girl gliding between trunks—angling for Patrick’s position. No blindfold. The sight stilled her, because she’d come upon a predator in the woods, and her heart crushed against her ribcage. She managed to ask, “Wh-what are you doing?”

  Ryn crouched on a splintered stump, head bowed to hide her searing gaze. “What I’m best at,” she whispered, and Naomi was seeing her for the first time—seeing the animal in her stance, her voice. “Hunting.”

  “Please don’t hurt him,” she whispered. Bowing in turn, hoping supplication would win her over, she said, “I don’t want you to kill because of me. And… I want to know why he did it.”

  She loosed a low, clicking growl. “I hunt other monsters. This is my way.”

  “Please. Is it because you think he’ll hurt me?” She risked a glance.

  Ryn nodded, thankfully keeping her gaze low.

  Taking a breath, she tried to bargain with the monster who was her friend: “If I rescind my… request… that you leave me alone… if I ask you to watch over me instead, will you agree not to hurt him?”

  “Do you know what promises are to me?”

  “I’m beginning to understand.” She lowered her head again, aware she was bargaining with something far different from the shy creature she’d befriended. “The truth is, I don’t want you to go,” she confessed.

  “Why?” When Ryn lifted her gaze, the sight forced Naomi back into the crux of two slender maples. “You know what I am.”

  “A demon. Or an angel. Or something stranger. I don’t know, but I don’t want you to disappear again, and I don’t want you to hunt Patrick.” She at last looked up, eyes pleading.

  With a solemn slowness, Ryn crossed one finger over her heart, as she had several times before; except now Naomi felt the gesture’s gravity. “I vow to protect you until you’re safe from him. And I will not harm him—unless he first tries to harm you. Then he is mine.”

  It would have to be enough, because Jane was calling the campers back to their rafts. With a quick aside, Naomi convinced the counselor to swap her onto Ryn’s, mostly to avoid Patrick. She paddled one seat ahead of Ryn and, in spite of the blindfold, could feel how the monster’s attention fixed on her. It marched a prickly sensation up the ridge of her spine, the fine hairs on her neck abuzz. Her heart came alive at the crisp spray of water against her face. Sophisticated river smells danced through her forebrain, and Naomi marveled at the subtle difference between sweetly oxygenated surface water and the moldering fragrance of the nutrient-rich depths.

  Ryn’s attention had a texture to it, the sensation reminding her of the dressing room, where nearness had caused Ryn’s teasing breath to tickle her hot skin; or how it had felt to dance with her for hours, reveling in their two bodies’ intimate knowledge of each other without ever touching; or how safe she’d felt falling asleep on her bed while Ryn perched stalwart above her.

  That last memory lingered, and Naomi had never b
een sure if the dream of soft fingers brushing her hair while she dozed had been real or imagined—because oh, she’d had so many dreams. Some unintelligible with terror, dark shadows in Ryn’s shape prowling through parking garages or the corners of her house. Some not just frightening, but thrilling, the shadows wrestling her into dark, sweet-smelling places, tangling around her like bedsheets, tightening—but not too tight—capturing her and holding her exquisitely still. How often had she dreamt that and thrashed in anticipation of forming shadows whose soft breath brushed her body? How often had she woken in a state of half panic, half arousal?

  Naomi had to shake off the redolent memories, as they’d joined with her sensitized skin and the rocking of the raft, leaving her acutely aware of how near Ryn was behind her. It changed something in the air—her own scent, she realized. The monster was right about her scent, and her cheeks burned with shame. She couldn’t look up from the paddle or water for the remainder of the trip. From the beginning, Naomi thought. Ryn had worked this dark magic on her from the very beginning.

  By the time they arrived at their campsite and had dinner, all Naomi wanted to do was get the monster alone and pry out why—why her, to what ends, and would it ever end? At least, she hoped that was all she wanted.

  The sky darkened over their grassy embankment above the shore, where everyone erected two-person tents—boys on one side, girls the other, and a shared firepit between. Ryn took a tent away from the group, placing it among the network of roots and beneath the crowning of an oak’s mossy branches. In spite of the blindfold, she found a gap in the roots and felt out locations for spikes with her fingers, sureness in every motion.

  Naomi approached, hands clasped behind her. “Can I help?” She knelt, finding Ryn’s blindfold hid those impossible eyes and she could get near; even reach for the hammer.

  Ryn jerked away. “I can do it.”