Run, Kat, Run and Encantado Dreams (Mortality Bites: Publisher's Pack Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

“Isa.” Professor Allman set a hand on my arm. “This is an amazing opportunity.”

  I nodded, pushing everything else from my head. This was a huge grant and undertaking that would likely take a whole semester to implement, so I’d be able to scale down my classes anyway. “When do we start?”

  Dr. Russo’s eyes flitted from Professor Allman to me. “Tomorrow.”

  Nobody blinked. Nobody laughed. So I did, a little giggle. Then I realized she was dead serious. “Oh.” I tapped my knuckles on the edge of the workstation with an echo. “OK. Tomorrow.”

  She smiled, and despite getting everything I’d wanted (and so much more), the blackness tugging at my mind didn’t dissipate at all.

  Chapter 16

  The next day, I shut his office door and dropped into Professor Allman’s armchair. He was still going on about the research grant and the work I would be doing with Dr. Russo, but I had dragged him back here as soon as we could politely get away.

  The truth was, I just wanted to talk about the murders. I felt somehow responsible for figuring out what had happened to the two students who had been killed. Maybe it was because I couldn’t get that agonized face out of my mind, or maybe it was because, ever since I’d taken on the illusion of Katrina Darling, a little bit of her had seeped into me.

  Whatever it was, I knew the stymphalian birds were intrinsically connected to it all. And no one had a better mind than Professor Allman. Especially for creatures of lore.

  I reached into my purse. “You have to promise me you won’t freak out when I show you this.”

  He set his reading glasses on, sitting across from me. “You say it’s a bird’s feather? I can’t imagine why I would … Oh.”

  When he saw what I’d pulled out, he went silent. I extended the bronze feather toward him, and he received it with two hands. “You say these were all over the street last night?”

  “My boyfriend—I mean, friend—pulled this one out of a car. It went right into the metal.”

  His eyebrows went up over the rims of his glasses. “And the rest?”

  “They went everywhere—through windows, into the sides of buildings, even into the ground—except people. They didn’t hit anyone.”

  He turned the feather from end to end, tipped it onto its side. “Curious.”

  “That’s right. Professor, I did some research this morning—they’re stymphalian birds from Greek mythology.”

  He nodded. “Oh yes, I suspected that right away. I can’t think of another bird species of lore described this way.”

  “The part I can’t explain,” I said, “is why they didn’t actually kill anyone last night. But I’m sure you heard about the two murders.”

  Now his eyebrows lowered, a gloom settling over his features. “Two students. One off-campus, and one right here outside his dorm. An awful thing.”

  “I know—I was the first person to see the victim on Saint Catherine Street.” I took a deep breath. “His heart had been taken from his chest. It was almost like someone had reached in and scooped it out.”

  Professor Allman eyed me. “Isabella, do you think it was the birds?”

  “No,” I said. “I saw them attack. The birds didn’t actually hurt anyone—it was all a distraction. And you can see that wing for yourself … If they’d wanted to, they could have killed everyone on Saint Catherine.”

  “Oh yes,” he said with more fervor than I liked. “The stymphalian birds were a terrible scourge in Greek mythology. They’re uniquely lethal.”

  “I saw a flock of them in one of the trees outside my dorm this morning.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “They just … stared at me. And then they flew off.”

  He nodded slowly. “That makes sense. They’re nocturnal killers—poor daytime vision.”

  I leaned forward. “I didn’t see anything about that in my reading.”

  “Think about it. Where did these birds originate?”

  I thought back to my reading. “It was … the Stymphalian swamp.” Apollo was said to detest the place. And if Apollo—the god of sun—wouldn’t go there, then the swamp must have been a place where the sun literally didn’t shine.

  If that was true, then it would make sense that they were nocturnal hunters.

  His hands went out expectantly.

  “They prefer a lack of light,” I said slowly. “They’re nocturnal, as you say.”

  He lifted the feather closer to his face, holding it before him like a blade, inspecting the edges and flat of it with reverence. “Remarkable.”

  I took a deep breath. “What if they were commanded by someone else? The real killer.”

  He glanced up from his close inspection. “How do you reckon?”

  “The killings are too alike in profile. It was nighttime. One victim ended up missing a heart, the other his eyes. And they’re both young men. Professor, were there any creatures in Greek mythology who preyed on young men?”

  His eyes drifted, thumb touching the scruff at his chin. He’d always done this when something captivated him, and I felt a surge of excitement that his mind was fully set on this mystery. “Yes,” he said finally. “More than one. But my knowledge of the Greeks isn’t so extensive as with South American creatures of lore. Have you researched it?”

  “I just came up with this theory on my way over. I’ve only researched the birds.”

  “I think you’re onto something, Isa.” He stood, paced two feet left, came to stand with his hands on the back of the armchair. “And if what you’re thinking is actually the case, that won’t bode well for Others.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me, but he was right: if it was an Other perpetrating these murders—and it almost certainly was—whenever this individual was caught, it would reflect badly on all Others.

  And that was the last thing we needed right now. For some reason, when it came to human violence, humans were able to distinguish between awful members of their species and the rest. But not Others—when one of us ran amok, we all got the shaft.

  “So if I go to the local police, they’ll probably be on the lookout for an Other,” I said. And given how little information they probably had about the suspect, that could quickly devolve into a witch hunt.

  “If you go to them,” he said, “I advise you to do your research beforehand. Be very specific about the Other you think is responsible for these killings.”

  I nodded. We were clearly on the same page.

  When I stood, he escorted me to the door. “Isabella,” he said before I left. I turned toward him, and he passed me the bronze feather. “Be careful. Don’t stay out alone at night.”

  “I won’t.” Though if my theory was correct, it wasn’t me who needed to worry about being out alone at night.

  Justin, I thought with a squeeze of the heart.

  ↔

  I arrived at the O3 house at mid-afternoon. No one answered until the third round of knocking, and then it was a Miss Doubtfire-esque woman with a feather duster staring back at me. “Yes?”

  They employ a maid service? Really? There were some things I had to get over about Justin’s frat life, but this wasn’t one of them.

  “Hello ma’am. May I come in to see Justin Truly?”

  She shook her head. “All out.”

  “They’re all out? Where?”

  “Gym. McGill gym.”

  She must have meant the rec center on campus. I raised a hand, thanking her before I turned away to make my way back onto campus and to where the whole O3 house was apparently doing a group workout.

  Which, probably to their horror, struck me as deeply erotic. Twenty sweaty young men, grunting and flexing together? I mean, everything about fraternal tradition suggested as much, which made their absolute obsession with women a little hilarious to me.

  But, I thought as I arrived at the gym and pulled open the massive doors, I wouldn’t even mind if Justin swung both ways. After all, few people were 100% straight, and as a distinctly sexual Other, who was I to
stand in the way of someone’s desires?

  Except all my illusions about a group workout were destroyed when I stepped inside and saw the big stand-up poster greeting me. WORLD ARMY CADET TRAINING, it read. TODAY AT 2PM IN ROOM 113.

  Beneath the lettering sat the World Army’s logo, and I nearly gagged. I knew Justin had gotten involved, but was the whole O3 house in on this now? And how often were they participating in these trainings? I’d thought they’d meet up maybe once a week, but as I came to Room 113 and looked in through the door, I saw all twenty of them engaged in a very particular form of self-defense training.

  I’d taken self-defense training before. It involved striking the most vulnerable points on a person’s body—a human’s body: the eyes, the groin, the neck. But they weren’t going for the typical places. In fact, they weren’t even fighting humans. Someone had drawn the short straw and now labored around the room in a three-headed dog costume, pretending to lunge at a few of them. In return, they swung at it with wooden practice swords.

  It was self-defense against Others.

  ↔

  I stared through the window, my mouth open. At the head of the group, whistle in hand, stood a man you could have pegged for a drill sergeant. Tall, blocky, shaved head and a muscle tee. He set the whistle between his lips, and a shrill noise filled the room. All motion ceased, and the twenty O3 frat boys—Justin among them—straightened, turned toward him.

  The World Army’s local cadet trainer.

  And it was in turning toward him that Justin spotted me through the door. His face registered surprise before he swung away. One by one, the trainer passed down the line of them, retrieving their training swords. He directed them to a wall fitted with a series of bows and quivers of arrows.

  “Minatours have blind spots, just like bulls,” he explained. “Try to stay directly in front of them and you just might have an edge. As for a cyclops, there’s only one target you should aim for: their eye. And when fighting a wendigo, go for behind the knees. That’ll send them tumbling.”

  “What about a dragon?” one of the cadets asked.

  “A dragon, son? Well, if you’re up against one of those, there’s only one effective strategy that I know of … run.”

  Laughter echoed through the room.

  That was when I spun away and walked over to the nearest bench. It was where I was still seated when Justin and the other cadets walked out of the training room.

  At the back of the group walked Justin and the trainer. They stood by the door, and the World Army man clapped Justin on the shoulder. He grinned back. I didn’t hear everything, but I did make out, “Good job, son,” before the man turned away and proceeded down the hall in that smug, militaristic style.

  Justin, his grin still wide, came over to me, hands finding his jeans’ pockets. “Hey, Isa. I didn’t think you’d—“

  “You didn’t think I’d come here.” I knew exactly what he would say, because it was what every vaguely ashamed lover says. As an encantado, I knew how the back-and-forth went better than anyone. And right now, I didn’t have the patience to let the whole script play out.

  He shrugged, nodded. “I’m glad you’re here, though.”

  I turned my face up to meet his eyes. “Oh?”

  “I saw you peeking in through the window. Pretty cool stuff, huh?”

  “Which part—slapping a guy in a cerberus costume with your wooden sword, or the brainwashing?”

  To his credit, he didn’t say anything. If he had—even one word—I might have launched into a rant in Portuguese. When he sat down next to me and took my hand, I felt myself easing toward him against my own will. He stroked my fingers.

  “Why are you a part of that?” I whispered. “It’s a hateful group.”

  “We’re learning to defend ourselves.”

  “What about self-defense against other humans? Why a cerberus?”

  “Come on, Isa. You know that whoever committed those two murders wasn’t human. There’s an Other running around campus killing people, and I want to be ready.”

  Well, he was right about the murdering Other, which pissed me off even more. Because even though I had come here to tell him to take care of himself and explain everything I suspected about these crimes, everything I said would only add to his burgeoning beliefs. I would just confirm his feelings about Others.

  Others were the “other.”

  I stared down at our touching hands and sighed. Whatever his feelings, I still knew my own feelings for him. “I came here to warn you. I did some research, and I believe whoever is doing these killings is targeting young men—specifically at night.”

  “An Other,” he said. “Like Sergeant Johnson thought. Do you have any ideas about the species?”

  His name is really Sergeant Johnson? If everything about a man ever screamed rah-rah-xenophobic-nationalism, it was that World Army recruiter. And his name suited him to a tee, but I didn’t think Justin would appreciate me saying so.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said, “but I think it’s a creature from Greek mythology. I discovered today that those birds are called stymphalian birds, and I believe they could be controlled by someone.”

  “You said Greek mythology?”

  I nodded.

  “Isa, you’re brilliant.” I glanced up into a pair of blue, lit eyes. His mouth was so close I could feel his breath. “We need to go.” He stood, pulling me up.

  “Where?”

  “Well, we’re not going to narrow down the candidates for murdering Other from Greek mythology in the weight room, are we?”

  And as much as I wanted to object, to be mad, something melted in me as he led me down the hallway, my hand clasped in his. Thoughts of being taken and ravaged by his strong hands flowed into my head as we walked, and all my frustrations with him were shoved to the attic of my mind.

  He glanced back at me. “You want to save a young man’s life, don’t you?”

  And all I could do was nod. Well, there you have it—the encantado weakness. GoneGoddess Yemoja help me.

  Chapter 17

  Twenty minutes later, we stood outside the Pointe-a-Calliere Museum. Was this another attempt to show me how cultured and liberal artsy he was? A few days ago he’d taken me to a local art exhibit, where he’d spent the whole time with his fingers on his chin.

  I turned to him. “Justin, I don’t think …”

  He held a finger to his lips. “Just trust me.”

  Trust him. Well, after everything we’d been through with El Lobizon, nearly drowning and a decades-old grudge that had nearly resulted in catastrophe, I could do that. Easily. So we walked into the museum and he paid for our tickets.

  Five minutes later, we stood at the entrance to an exhibit on Greek mythology. Before us sat artifacts and old books laid open and every creature from Greek legend and lore documented on the walls.

  Or at least, that was what the placard claimed.

  “How?” I whispered, stepping up to the display on Artemis. Before me sat an intricate series of pots and plates painted with depictions of the huntress. Along with a detailed description of her importance to the Greek pantheon. “How did you know this was going on right now?”

  “Believe it or not, I did some research of my own.”

  I glanced up at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I had the same suspicions as you about the birds, and I did some Googling based on their characteristics. But I hadn’t made the connection to an Other from Greek lore controlling them.”

  I grinned at him. “And here I thought of you as a frat bro.”

  He set one hand to his chest. “Isabella, dost thou stereotype? I am a human unlike all other humans.”

  “Touche.” I turned away. His point was well taken: mentally, I had lumped him in with all of Greek life. Just like I was accusing him of doing to Others.

  We walked through the exhibit, examining every god and creature and ruling them out one by one. We passed by Scylla the sea monster. “It can’t have been
something too big or crazy—people would have noticed on Saint Catherine,” I said. “It probably looked human.”

  “What about this one?” He pointed to a creature known as Lamia.

  I stepped close, inspecting her placard. She seemed a likely candidate, but … I shook my head. “No—she only killed children as revenge for Zeus killing her own.”

  Justin’s fingers slid over mine as we moved on to the next placard, and he slowed us to a stop. “How have you been feeling—you know, since everything happened last night?”

  I lowered my face. I hadn’t taken much time to process anything that had happened in the last day. Did I even know how I was feeling? Bad, I thought as I listened to my gut. I felt really, really bad. Just a swirl of icky, black badness.

  “Not good,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a dead man.”

  “Really? What about your lovers? I thought you had all sorts of men you loved.”

  I sighed. Was I about to deliver an important life lesson? “Love and lust rarely align for long,” I said. “And men usually couldn’t get past the mermaid-dolphin thing, which meant we didn’t often grow old together.”

  “You said it had been a long time, but not never.”

  The last time I’d seen a man die was when Marco left the world, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go there. I had only just recently been able to study birds again with the same joy I’d used to feel.

  He led me toward one of the low couches in the middle of the exhibit, and we sat on it. Around us spread the entirety of Greek lore and legend. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  Did I want to talk about it? Not really. Right now, I felt a strong compulsion to scour this entire exhibit until we came across the “aha!” creature. The one we could peg as the murderer. It was a scientist thing; we got no greater thrill than from a solvable mystery, one with a definitive answer.

  And then I remembered that I was expected to start working for Dr. Russo tomorrow … and on into the indefinite future.

  “Justin,” I said, “there’s something else we need to talk about. Remember that grant I mentioned?”