Mortality Bites - The COMPLETE Boxed Set (Books 1 - 10): An Urban Fantasy Epic Adventure

by Ramy Vance

  “It’s OK,” Justin said, hand on the door’s handle. “I’m part of the Army cadets.”

  I blinked. The Army? Did he mean the World Army? I mean, he had asked me what I thought about that World Army training poster over a week back, but it had seemed like an offhanded thing. He hadn’t mentioned actually joining them in all the times I’d seen him since.

  The World Army, from what I knew about it, didn’t favor Others. It was, in fact, Otherist in the extreme. Had Justin actually signed up with them? But I didn’t have time to ask, because he had already slipped through the door.

  I started after him, emerging onto the sidewalk at a jog. “Wait up.”

  Justin stopped. “It’s not safe, Isa.”

  “They’re gone.” Though I could still hear that scream echoing deep in my head—the sound of death. The memory of it sent a shiver through me, and I went up to Justin’s side. “Besides, safe or not, you’re not going anywhere without me.”

  He sighed, nodded. “OK.”

  We continued down the street together, the whole of which was lit with feathers like icicles glittering in the night. People were starting to appear from the buildings they had ducked inside, their eyes wide, faces upturned. But only the moon greeted us now, a white orb low in the sky.

  When we had walked three blocks, something caught my eye down an alley. I stopped us. “Wait,” I said, squinting. “Is that a person?”

  Justin and I stood at the mouth of the alley, the whole of which was lit by nothing but the moon. And that was enough to make out the dark edges of what sat slumped against the edge of a metal trash receptacle.

  As we neared, my hand went to my mouth.

  A young blond man lay before us, a hole where his heart should have been.

  CHAPTER 14

  T wenty minutes later, the police arrived. Justin had called them, introducing himself on the phone as a “cadet,” though my mind slipped past that unpleasant fact and returned at once to the far more immediate fact of the murder scene. The death.

  Justin and I stood six feet apart on the sidewalk, each of us talking to a police officer. And though we’d backed out around the corner from the alley where the young man lay, I couldn’t stop glancing at the hard edge of the building as though I might glimpse him. As though I might see again that spot of brick wall visible through the center of his body.

  Even with closed eyes, I still saw the agony on his face.

  We had been the first ones to discover him, but we didn’t know anything more than what we’d seen: a body against a wall. Since then, he’d been surrounded by yellow tape, a white cloth slipped over his body.

  The officer, who’d introduced himself as Tremblay, asked me about the birds that had attacked—apparently not a single death had occurred as a result of the flock—and the metal feathers they’d shot off. The one Justin had retrieved for me was still tucked into my coat.

  “Based on what you saw, do you believe they’re monsters?” Tremblay asked. He glanced up from his notepad, those perfectly human eyes studying me. He bore a certain crow-footed kindness around the eyes, a little paunch, some wispy white hair near his ears.

  “I believe they’re Others,” I said. “They weren’t like any regular bird.”

  “Right.” His pen moved across the paper. And I realized that he didn’t make any distinction between monsters and Others. It was as though I’d said only, “Yes.”

  “The reason why I think they’re Others and not monsters,” I added, “is because they didn’t kill or badly injure anyone when they could easily have done so.”

  Tremblay’s eyes lifted to me. “You don’t think they killed that boy in the alley?”

  I thought back to the razor beaks, the massive talons, the way they’d dived and flocked and shot those feathers off. Those were hunters—birds of prey. If they’d wanted to, they could have killed at least a half-dozen people in the street and injured as many more.

  Besides, ripping out just the heart? That was a monstrous thing.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think they killed him.”

  Tremblay studied the information he’d written on his pad. “And you’re a biology student at McGill, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you human?”

  This line of questioning seemed … pointed. And then it occurred to me: we were the first two onto the scene. We were more than sources of information. Justin and I were potential suspects.

  “I’m an Other,” I said, lowering my voice. My eyes drifted toward Justin, who appeared as cool as ever, gesturing and nodding and buzzing with rapport with the officer he’d just met.

  I felt Tremblay stiffen next to me. If everything about him hadn’t screamed human before, his reaction to finding out my Other status was about as human as it got. “Other? What species?”

  “Encantado. From Brazil.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re a … an aquatic species. Our natural form is somewhere between a mermaid and a dolphin.”

  “So why don’t you look like a mermaid-dolphin?” And all at once, those crow’s feet didn’t seem so kind.

  “I’m a shapeshifter.” I realized how bad this sounded. “It’s in our nature to shapeshift into humans.”

  “Huh,” Tremblay finally said. More scratching of that pen on his pad. “When did you arrive in Canada?”

  “One and a half years ago, to attend McGill.”

  “So, recently. How is your English so good?”

  Had he really just asked me that? If I were braver—maybe if I still looked like Katrina, whom I had spent a week masquerading as—I would have flashed him a look. As it was, I only lifted my chin to say, “I’ve been alive five hundred years. I speak eight languages.”

  Tremblay kept taking notes, as though speaking to a semi-ancient, octolingual being didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow. Three, then five seconds elapsed as Justin and the other officer chattered away. Things seemed to be going much better for him.

  “Do you have identification?” I heard Tremblay ask me.

  I fished both my Canadian ID card and passport out of my purse, tried to keep my hand from shaking as I passed them over. It was the cold, I wanted to tell him. Try spending hundreds of years in a rainforest and then acclimate to Canadian winters. But I found myself saying as little as possible—a protective measure I’d developed around authority figures. And people whom I believed didn’t mean well.

  And I was starting to suspect Tremblay really didn’t mean me well.

  He opened the passport, stared. Swapped the ID card to the fore, stared at that. Ten seconds later, he extended both back. “What about your Other ID?”

  Merda, my fingers were shaking even more. “Other ID?”

  “A new Other requirement,” he said, a certain strain of victory echoing in that baritone voice. “All Others in Canada have to carry them, per the World Government.”

  “Since when?” I said, my rare temper flaring. This was a ridiculous encroachment on Other rights, and I was about to tell him so at great length, in both English and Portuguese, when Justin appeared from nowhere, his warm hand enfolding mine.

  “Officer,” he said, “I couldn’t help but overhear you mentioning the Other ID. I’m a new cadet here on campus, and as it happens, we were just briefed about the ID today.”

  “Oh?” Tremblay said. He looked displeased about Justin’s intrusion, but of course, he’d pooled in so swiftly and easily that it felt only natural for him to be a part of the conversation. I recognized it at once: the halo effect coupled with unblinking daring.

  “One of the interesting details we learned: since it just went into effect this month, all Others who entered Canada before January have until July to obtain their ID.”

  “You’re a cadet, you say?”

  Justin nodded, that boyish half-smirk appearing on his face. I stared between him and Tremblay, whose crow’s feet deepened just a few degrees. GoneGodDamn, why couldn’t I do a boyish half-smirk?r />
  “It’s good you found the poor kid,” Tremblay said, nodding toward the murder scene around the corner. “We need more citizens like you.”

  And like that, our suspiciousness washed off us as simply as dirt in the shower. But if anything, I felt dirtier than before.

  Shame doesn’t wash off so easily.

  ↔

  AFTERWARD, Justin stood close to me, and I stepped into his arms. We hugged, and as we did, I felt my phone buzz three times in my purse. “That’s a campus alert,” he murmured by my ear.

  “How do you know?”

  “We were briefed on that. Three short vibrations mean an alert.”

  I nodded, wondering what else he’d been “briefed” on as l lifted my phone out of my purse. Well, he was right. CAMPUS ALERT, the text read. STUDENT MURDERED NEAR CAMPUS, SITUATION STILL RESOLVING. STAY INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered. The birds, the murder. Even Professor Allman’s call about my grant funding and “meeting in his office” had seemed mysterious, foreboding. I remembered my happiness of a few hours ago as a simple, faraway thing.

  “Whatever it is,” Justin said, “I think we should get indoors. One of the officers offered to give us a ride back. We should take it.”

  “OK,” I said, even though the last thing I wanted was to ride with Tremblay, or any other officer. But I felt numbed through.

  We climbed into the car and the officer who’d spoken with Justin started toward my dormitory in silence. After a few minutes, Justin’s hand squeezed mine. “It was an Other who killed that guy, wasn’t it?” He was talking to the officer.

  “We really don’t know as yet,” the officer said. He was being vague because we were civilians, but I sensed he agreed with Justin. I knew from my long history of interacting with humanity that they were capable of doing every depraved thing imaginable to their own species, but since the gods had left, perceptions had changed.

  By default, Others were held responsible for such depravity.

  And in that moment, I discovered my temper again. “Does it matter?”

  Justin’s eyes flew to me with a certain surprise. “Absolutely,” he said. “If it’s an Other, they operate by different rules, protocol, motivations—“

  “Right at this moment”—I held his gaze—“does it matter?”

  Justin studied me, and after a moment the hardness in his jaw softened. He understood, and his arm came out. I leaned into him, my head on his shoulder. “No,” he said. “Right at this moment, it doesn’t.”

  So I still had more sway over him than the World Army’s teachings, at least. A small comfort. He didn’t speak again until we arrived at my dormitory, but that thing still hung in the air between us … the stickiness of a wedge, future problems.

  After all, I was one of them—the Others, the depraved.

  When we arrived at my dorm and I stepped out of the police car, Justin leaned out after me. “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  I turned back, pulling my coat tight. “I have a meeting with Professor Allman.”

  “After?” His pleading blue eyes did 90% of the work. “I’d like to talk about this whole Army cadet thing. I could tell the effect it had on you when I mentioned it.”

  I sighed, panned my gaze around in the night. The street was unusually empty on account of the alert, and an icy wind hurt my ears and nose. I felt a strong urge to be inside. “After.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Great.” I turned away, heard him pull the door closed. Why had I been so brusque? I understood it, in part—he was a cadet for the World Army, an organization whose very mention made me feel a little violated—but it was something bigger.

  It had to do with the blackness of the evening. The birds, the murder, the human whose heart had been perfectly carved from his chest. Somewhere nearby lurked a creature capable of such things.

  Back in the dorm, Aimee nearly accosted me at the door. “Isa,” she cried, clinging to me, “I was so worried about you. I heard about the birds, and then the campus alert about the murder—”

  “Woah,” I said, stepping away. “Sharp metal object on board.” As I pulled from her grasp, I untucked the metallic feather from the recesses of my jacket, the whole of it still wrapped in Justin’s coat.

  When I revealed it under the fluorescent light, it shone like a piece of glass. As Aimee and I stood over it, our faces reflecting back at us, she opened her mouth. “Is that …?”

  “It’s a feather.”

  She reached out, tapped the flat of it with her nail. It made a clinking noise. “OK,” she said. “OK. I think we’re going to need more weed.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I n the night, I dreamed of him. The blond boy missing his heart.

  I woke in the early dawn, my own heart thudding so hard against my chest I set a hand there. Through the window, cumulus clouds hung low and gray. And that same blackness pulled at my mind. It pinched with two fingers, wouldn’t let go as I dressed, pulled on my coat, set the metallic feather in my purse.

  I had six hours until my meeting with Professor Allman. That gave me six hours to figure out what the hell kind of creature this feather had come from.

  I clomped down the stairwell as the feeling percolated inside me. Here was the thing, I thought as I stepped into the frigid morning. The birds hadn’t killed anyone, even though they could have. And simultaneously, a student had been murdered not two blocks from where they’d flocked.

  I inspected the high branches of every tree I passed. Bare, bare, bare, all of them devoid of regular birds, the birds I’d so often hear chirping through my dorm window in the fall, even in the winter.

  Even as recently as two days ago.

  Around me, the campus spread silent and empty. Normally I’d spot a few early-risers, but not this morning. In fact, I felt more alone than I had since arriving at McGill.

  As far as I knew, a suspect still hadn’t been brought in for the murder. Which meant he, she—it?—was still walking or crawling or flying. Still at large. And I didn’t have a single clue who or what to be looking for, which raised every hair along my spine. And everyone knew that in the scariest movies, not seeing the monster made for an infinitely more frightening time. Because everyone’s imagination catered to their own fears, their own scariest monster.

  So I just about ran to the Other Studies Library, and when I pushed through the doors, my cheeks had nearly frozen from the wind. I doubled over in the warmth, my purse clutched to my side.

  “Oh dear.” The librarian at the circulation desk eyed me over her glasses. “What’s wrong?”

  I straightened, shook my head. “I just got spooked walking here. A student was murdered last night.” And I saw him after he’d died.

  Her aged eyes grew wide. “An awful thing. I heard a few of those World Army cadets found him in the tree.”

  “No, he was—” I stopped hard. “Wait, what tree?”

  “Just outside his dorm, in one of those red ash trees. A sophomore, maybe twenty.” The librarian stood, appeared now about to cry as she leaned over the desk toward me. “His eyes were gone. Both of them.”

  Heart. Eyes. I just stared at her, my body running hot with fresh adrenaline.

  “You meant another murder,” she realized.

  I nodded, both hands on the strap of my purse.

  “A student as well?” she asked.

  “On Saint Catherine Street,” I whispered.

  Her eyes reddened, and the librarian slumped back to her seat like she’d been hit in the solar plexus. “What a GoneGodDamned thing.” She glanced up at me. “Sorry for cursing, dear.”

  I waved a hand through the air. When I turned away, started toward the stacks, I realized the noise in my ears from last night had never stopped.

  The screeching continued in my head, reduced to a thin ringing.

  ↔

  I GOT myself together in the bathroom, tried not to look in the mirror. I knew I’d imagine myself eyeless,
with a hole in my chest; my imagination was overactive that way.

  Twenty minutes later, I flicked on a reading lamp and sat with a stack of books on birds. Given my knowledge of them, it didn’t take me long. Birds with metal feathers weren’t terribly common throughout history, or in lore. The second book I opened—Creatures of Greek Mythology—contained exactly what I’d been looking for.

  “Stymphalian,” I whispered, finger tracing the lines. Birds of prey, except unlike regular birds, these preferred to eat humans. And they were well-equipped to do so. Beaks and feathers of bronze, the impossibly sharp talons. They had destroyed the ancient countryside like swarms of locusts, devastating crops and villages. And ultimately they had been subdued by Hercules, who had shot them down with arrows tipped in the poisonous blood of the Hydra.

  Ancient Greek birds of lore. Where had they come from? And why had they attacked Montreal? And the most baffling part of all: Stymphalian birds were man-eaters, and yet they hadn’t killed or eaten any of the slow, sedentary Canadians. Why?

  I closed my eyes, both hands set to my face. Last night, it had seemed like they were attacking, but from my studies of birds of prey, I knew they weren’t. They had been diverting. Distracting. All that noise, dive-bombing people—it was theater. If they’d been intending to kill, they would have waited for the right moment to swoop in, silent and lethal.

  But distracting from what? I stared off into the empty stacks, my ears ringing. Two murders had occurred last night. The heart removed from one victim, the eyes from the other.

  What was the story? From everything Justin had told me about his girlfriend, I had a fleeting sense that if I were Katrina Darling, I would be able to piece it all together.

  But I wasn’t Katrina, and I never would be—even if I’d once looked like her. I was Isabella, and maybe, just maybe this was a problem that didn’t need Katrina Darling to solve.

  After four hours of research, I pushed the stack of books aside; I needed someone else’s mind at work on this, and I knew exactly whose.

  I glanced at my watch. By the GoneGods, when had it gotten to be nearly noon? I was going to be late for my meeting. I grabbed up my bag and jogged through the stacks and up to the main floor, passing by the librarian I’d spoken to on my way in.