by D. D. Chance
A tenant. That was important. I wasn’t some sort of rando Airbnb guest. I needed a mostly unfurnished apartment that I didn’t have to worry about messing up. I even paid two months in advance because, as I told Mr. Bellows, I traveled sometimes and didn’t want to miss a payment if something at the bank screwed up. I’d learned a long time ago that landlords appreciated money in hand more than nearly anything on earth, at least besides you not having a cat.
“That’s…a lot of locks,” Tyler observed, and I started a little at the multiple voices. Did I have enough popcorn for all of him?
“I’m a safety girl.” I stared at the door, a little confused. Something about a cat? Tyler reached down and turned the handle, then pushed it open. “Oh,” I breathed out. “This is my place.”
I’d only sagged a little when his arms went around me again. He lifted me up against his warm, firm chest, his body smelling of eucalyptus, sweat, and heat. It was a heady, intoxicating scent, and I maybe drifted off for a second. Then he was laying me down on my gloriously wide sectional chaise-without-feet, my favorite piece of furniture that I’d brought from home in the back of Mom’s truck, which wasn’t maybe saying so much since it was practically the only thing I’d brought. Chaise, side table, sleeping bag. Why bother with anything else other than the kitchen table and chairs that came with the place?
“I’ll be right back,” Tyler said, and I murmured something that I hoped sounded like approval, because at this point, I was blissfully sliding down into sleep. Sleep was how I shook off most monster attacks, my body healing rapidly except in the very rare situations where they got in a particularly deep bite or cut.
But screamers didn’t cut. They choked and beat you to death while deadening your screams, but that was the worst of it. Nasty little bastards, but usually not a lot of blood. Blood could be such a pain in the ass.
I patted my rust-hued chaise and smiled. No feet, so it sat flush with the floor, rendering it monster-avoidant. Upholstered in Scotchgarded tweed, with enough flecks of cinnamon-colored thread in the pattern to help even the most stubborn bloodstain blend in. Best piece of furniture ever.
“Here we go.”
Tyler was back by my side, no longer smelling of eucalyptus and mint but of antiseptic wipes and intensity. I blinked my eyes open, focusing hard. “I’m going to have to fall asleep,” I said, and his thick, dark brown brows bunched together, his whiskey eyes turning yet more serious.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sweetheart,” he said, lifting a cool washcloth to my face and wiping at it. The cloth seemed to push inward a little more than was reasonable, and I flinched away at the sudden sting.
“Stupid bricks,” I muttered. I tried to pull the errant flecks of stone out of my skin, but Tyler batted my hand away, all the while keeping up what seemed to be an endless roll of questions, like a magpie rattling outside my window. Finally, beaten down worse than I’d been with the screamers, I told him he was cuter when he was quiet.
As he laughed and agreed with me, my gaze drifted up, past the really hot and super gentle guy who seemed determined to scrub off every inch of exposed skin and swab it with antiseptic, past all his equally super sexy friends who leaned over other girls who looked like me. I gazed over to the windows of my darling brownstone, which had shades that started midway, leaving the tops open to the sky. It was a starry night, tonight. Such a starry night. Such a pretty, starry, open night.
“You’ve got an awful lot of medical supplies in that bathroom of yours,” Tyler said after another few seconds, and I blinked back at him. It wasn’t a question, it was an observation, and I relaxed. I didn’t like questions, but observations weren’t dangerous, right? Nobody could get in trouble with observations.
“Ow,” I muttered as he peeled away my choker.
“One of the lizards got ahold of you, looks like,” Tyler said. “I should probably cut this off.”
I waved vaguely toward the kitchen. “I’ve got more. They hide the scars. There are scissors in the—”
“Everywhere,” he agreed, amiably. “You’ve got pairs in the medicine cabinet, rolling cart, kitchen drawers, kitchen table. Along with gauze, antiseptic in three different places, and a washable sleeping bag on a plastic tarp in your bedroom.” Once again, he wasn’t asking a question, and I smiled down at the thickly cushioned, brightly colored sectional chaise, with all its jagged lines of rust-hued threads woven in with all the other colors.
“Brand-new,” I said. “Want to keep it that way.”
“Yup,” Tyler said. “So when things get really bad with the bleeding, you crash on the sleeping bag.”
Also not a question. I appreciated that. Nobody liked a guy who asked questions all the time. And since it wasn’t a question, I didn’t have to answer. Really, win-win all around.
That didn’t change the fact that I was super tired, though. “I really do need to sleep,” I told him, and when I looked up, only one Tyler looked back at me. I was a little sad. I’d liked having all of him around. “It helps.”
“You get better when you sleep.”
My mind parsed the words, the tone, the drop at the end. Not a question. No answer needed, but I nodded anyway, my eyes drifting shut. “I get better if there’s not a lot of blood. Cuts can scar and breaks are bad, but scrapes and bruises heal. Choke holds are no problem if they don’t crush the bones. If I strike first, that isn’t a problem. I have to be careful, right? Have to be smart. Don’t tell Mom.”
A soft hiss of dismay floated toward me. “Because Mom worries.”
I smiled. “Mom always worries. It’s what moms do, she says. She might even write about it in her letter. So don’t tell her, or it’s back over the lessons, all the lessons. Cut and hit and run. Kick and roll and slash. Leave the bodies to disintegrate. Don’t get caught. Get back to your room before anyone sees. Back to your room, and clean yourself up, quick and quiet. Don’t make a sound. Back to your—”
Darkness slipped around me like a homecoming. I slept.
7
My stomach registered the smell first. Bacon and eggs and buttered toast. My first and most powerful thought was…I was dead, and this was heaven.
Then my ears registered the hissing of cooking meat, my mouth watered, my heart rate spiked, and I cracked my eyes open. Light streamed into the apartment, creating bright patchwork squares on the hardwood floors and the rug, and I could tell at a glance something was wrong. Different. The apartment had changed somehow…
I blinked as a shadow at the kitchen door moved, and I was on the floor and scrambling away before my eyes fully registered what was happening. The creature froze, coalescing into a solid form as I blinked the rest of the sleep out of my eyes and slammed hard against the wall, my right hand swiping down for the knife that wasn’t in my ankle sheath, my left wrist rotating forward the guard that wasn’t there—
Tyler leaned against the doorframe to the kitchen, the spatula poised in the air, his body loose, but his expression focused. All the way across the room, I could see the intensity in his piercing light-brown eyes. My face flushed, and my heart started pounding for an entirely different reason.
“Mornin’, Nina,” he drawled, nodding at me. “You seemed to sleep well.”
“I…” Shit.
I swallowed as my gaze swept the room again, noticing new details in sharper relief this time through. The tidy stack of gauze pads, tape, and antiseptic on the TV table by the chaise. The jumbled pile of blankets and the pillow from my bedroom on the floor beside the chaise. The gorgeous hunk of male lolling easily in the doorway to the kitchen. The smell of sizzling bacon.
Sadly, the only image in all these that gave me any anxiety was the collection of medical supplies. I risked a look down. I only had one bandage, on my upper left arm. The rest of my skin was clean, unbroken except for fine pink scars.
“Your cuts all healed in the middle of the night, just like you said they would,” Tyler confirmed.
I blinked at him. “I told
you that?”
“You said you needed sleep. That sleep would help you get better. I didn’t know if you were dropping into shock, but based on the arsenal of medical supplies you had in your bathroom, I figured you had some experience in the matter. And you were right. I’m glad you’re better.”
He said this last without a hint of admonition, but I still flushed. Before I could say anything in reply, he’d turned again. “This is ready, if you’re hungry.”
I clapped my hand over my stomach as it growled, my knees bending of their own accord, my body lurching forward without giving my brain any say in the matter. I rubbed my hand through my hair and tasted the metallic grittiness in my mouth that always showed up the morning after a late-night monster bender. “I, uh—I’ll be right back.”
I decamped for the bathroom.
My second favorite room in the apartment—any apartment—was always the bathroom, right after whatever room held my chaise.
What I saw reflected back to me in the mirror wasn’t all that impressive. Pale hollow-cheeked face, lost in a mess of dark hair that hung past my shoulders and, at the moment, stuck out in all directions. Boring brownish eyes. The kind of face that blended in whether it needed to or not. But a strong face, I thought, lifting my chin a little. One that had looked monsters in the teeth and survived. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that a straight-up college-trained monster hunter was currently frying bacon in my kitchen.
Yeah, no. It was still surprising.
I washed up hurriedly and brushed my teeth, feeling almost human again, then ran a brush through my hair. Stopping off briefly in my bedroom, I switched out my clothes for a slightly cleaner pair of jeans and a tank top that wasn’t ripped to shreds. I went through tank tops the way some people went through tissues, but I’d learned a long time ago that leggings didn’t fit my lifestyle. Cute didn’t matter if you ended up getting your ass thrown across blacktop or glass-strewn alleyways.
I had no idea where my tennis shoes were, so I tucked my feet into slides, promising myself once again that I’d get a pedicure someday. Not this morning, though.
By the time I stepped back into the hallway, I could smell something else magical and true wafting from the kitchen. Coffee. Oh my God.
I picked up the pace and breached the room as Tyler turned toward me, glass pot in hand.
“You were out of, like, everything, but there’s a great little store a half a block down on the right. You know it, right?”
I blinked, feeling dizzy, and stepped hard to the side. The pot clattered to the countertop, and Tyler strode across the room in three quick steps.
“Hey there, hey,” he said, though when I flinched back from him, he stopped short. “I’ve got you. You’re okay. Do you not like bacon? Is there something else you’d rather have?” Tyler asked, startling me back to the present moment. “I’ve never met a vegetarian monster hunter, but I totally should’ve asked.”
“What—oh. No, no. This is great. I just…thank you. For cooking.” I moved to the table and sat, picking up my fork, and, as if to prove my sincerity, dug in as he returned to the stove and got his own food.
The first bite of food was beyond heavenly. I hadn’t eaten dinner the night before, late as it was, and I hadn’t eaten much in the way of breakfast or lunch before that, now that I thought about it. It wasn’t that I was trying to lose weight, I just didn’t think much about food in the moment that it was available. I had other things to focus on.
“Good. Eat,” Tyler said, as he settled into the chair opposite me, seeming too large for my small dinette table from sheer force of personality alone. My mind cleared a little bit more, memories of his overbearing attitude coming more sharply into focus—and his protective streak too. Why did he feel the need to protect me, and why did the idea of his protection bug me so much? He was an actual, bona fide monster hunter, for heaven’s sake, and he’d clearly scraped my ass off the pavement not once last night, but twice. I should be grateful.
I wasn’t, though. I was stressed, on edge. I narrowed my eyes at him. There was something about Tyler I’d missed, gnawing at me. Something he’d said last night, after…
I scowled. “We got hit by screamers?”
“So you kept calling them,” he agreed, leaning back in his chair to regard me more steadily. It wasn’t the regard of a guy who wanted to jump me, I decided. I swallowed an unexpected pang of disappointment along with my next bite of eggs. Despite my strange anxiety about the guy, I hadn’t been jumped by anything of this world in way the hell too long. “They have a formal Latin name, but of course, you wouldn’t know that.”
“Because I’m not a super-special monster hunting student,” I agreed.
“Yeah, well, maybe you should be a super-special monster hunting student. Monsters seem to have a thing for you.”
Monster bait. Unbidden, Grim’s derogatory comment came to mind, and I stiffened in my chair. “I do fine by myself, thanks.”
“And you have for some time, haven’t you?” Tyler shot back, leaning forward into my space. His whiskey-brown eyes sparked fire, and his rock-hard jaw clenched tight as he went in for the kill. Jesus, he was hot. I struggled to focus on his words, not his face, but his words were way less fun.
“At least that’s the way it seems, given the full-on first-aid clinic you’re rocking in every room of this place, and the random comments you dropped after you survived your second monster attack of the night. So, spill it, Cross. What’s really going on with you?”
I thought for the tiniest moment about telling him to get out of my kitchen, get out of my apartment, and let me move on with my life. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. It had been so long that I’d been fighting all by myself, with no one—not even my mom, who never seemed to attract monsters the way I did, but who had taught me everything I knew about what to do when one showed up—who could understand. What harm would it do to tell this cute, sexy, eggs-cooking, bacon-frying, eucalyptus-smelling college-guy demigod the truth, even if he was kind of a dick and thought he was better than me? At least he didn’t think I was crazy.
“Okay, fine. I’ve been fighting monsters for a long time,” I finally agreed, and Tyler settled back in his seat with satisfaction, watching me intently as he chewed his eggs. As hungry as I was, I pushed my own eggs around on my plate for a second more, not meeting his eyes.
“I don’t know when it started. But I was pretty young. Little-kid young. I was living with my mom in our small, cute house, and we hadn’t been there very long, I don’t think. I heard something under the bed, and when I looked, there were eyeballs staring back at me. Like any self-respecting kid, I screamed bloody murder. Mom came running, whisking me up and out of the room and taking me to hers. She didn’t ask me to sleep in my own bed again for a week, and then she offered to stay with me. Like to sleep in a chair by my bed.”
“She sounds like she was a good mom,” Tyler said.
I smiled a little wistfully, not missing how he referred to her in the past. Had I told him the truth about that too last night? I must have.
“She was the best,” I said simply. “But even when I was what, four years old? I didn’t want to put her at risk by staying with me. It was one thing if I was with her somewhere else. That seemed to be okay. Not in my bedroom, though. Not somewhere I was supposed to be alone. Even though she, like, knew what was happening to me. I didn’t understand that at first. I just wanted to keep her safe, if that makes sense.”
He lifted one well-muscled shoulder. “None of this makes sense,” he said with a candor that made my heart stutter a bit. He wrapped his hand around one of my mugs, dwarfing it, and I stared at his fingers for a long second, suddenly way too aware of him as a guy. A sexy guy. A sexy guy in my apartment who knew his way around butterfly bandages and a skillet. I flushed and glanced away as Tyler lifted the coffee mug to take a sip. “Don’t worry about that. What happened?”
I blew out a breath and refocused on all the ancient hist
ory I’d bottled up for so long, with no one to tell. “The monster came back that very first night when I was in my room by myself. But I was ready for it. It stared at me with its big scary eyes, and I stared right back and told it to go away. It did. By the time the next one came, I had weapons. My mom had been hanging pictures in the hallway, and there was a jar of nails she was using.”
“Nails.” Tyler nodded. “Iron.”
I gestured to him with my fork, feeling ridiculously rewarded by his approving smile. “Iron. Though I didn’t understand why at the time, pretty much anything with metal seemed to do the job. I threw a handful of nails at the second monster that showed up. It shrieked and scrambled back, and I went to bed. I didn’t sleep well after that, but it didn’t come back the next night, or the night after. I’d almost convinced myself I’d scared it away for good when I opened my closet door a few days later, in broad daylight. There was another one standing just inside. A different one, I was pretty sure. Because it was long and tall and skinny, and its skin sort of didn’t quite fit right. It was too loose, it seemed.”
“Wings?” Tyler asked, and I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. It looked like a skeleton that hadn’t quite become a skeleton yet, and I didn’t have any nails on me, of course. It reached out and yanked me into the closet and slammed the door behind us. I freaked out and called my mom, but she was all the way downstairs. Fortunately, I was a typical little girl with lots of pretty dresses and jumpers that Mom got from the local thrift shop because I went through them so fast. Most of the clothes were stored kid-high because she’d put in special shelving. Best of all, we used regular hangers.”
“More metal.” Tyler winked.
I fought the blush. “You bet. By the time my mom reached my room and yanked the closet door open, all the clothes on hangers were on the floor, and I’d been cut up kind of bad. I tried to explain what had happened, but that seemed to upset her worse. So I apologized and told her I was playing make-believe and that I was sorry and I didn’t want her to be mad, that I wouldn’t do it again or at least I would try not to do it again. My mom wasn’t dumb, though. She didn’t miss how I changed my promise, and she hugged me tight and told me there were a few things I needed to know. Stuff that would help me stay safe. That’s all she ever wanted, was that I stay safe.”