by Rhys Ford
Even with the ones missing a neck.
I went right by Jonas and launched myself at the creature. It saw me coming and tried to correct the angle of its tentacle, but it couldn’t shift in time. I heard the slap of its meat hitting something, and I could only hope it wasn’t my adopted human uncle, but Jonas’s scream followed too closely on the heels of that horrific booming sound.
All I had left was my hope that he’d survived the strike.
My Glock was useless. I don’t know what normal cuttlefish were made out of, but this one seemed to be constructed out of Kevlar and meanness. Bullets ricocheted off of its skin, and after I emptied a clip into its head, I tossed my gun aside and went after it with my knife. Sometimes killing had to happen up close, and this was going to get very messy.
I’d already gotten personal with the thing, but that hadn’t prepared me for the stench. There was something wrong with it, or maybe there was more beneath its skin than flesh. Its eyes went wild and whirred about in their deep sockets as it spread its legs out, and it became a profane angel of suckers and featherless wings. Its beak lay at the juncture of its limbs and was broad enough to snap a man in half. For all I knew, I wouldn’t be its first victim. Who knew what else lay beneath the water churning at the back of its body?
A tentacle whipped out, slapping my legs from under me, and I rolled with the motion and landed on my knees. The broken cement was hard on my joints, and I would have bruises down my legs, but they would be a small price to pay for not dying. It slapped down at the ground where I would have been had I not tucked my body in and let my shoulders take the brunt of my momentum. Bits of rock and dirt flew up from the impact of the cuttlefish’s tentacle, and the surrounding concrete cracked and spit up small sprays of fine grit. I sucked in a mouthful of white sand and accidentally trapped it against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, caught between spitting it out or swallowing it.
I swallowed and got back on my feet before the thing could strike at me again.
“I’ve got your back, boy,” Jonas shouted behind me. I didn’t dare glance back. I took it as a good sign he was alive enough to yell, and then I held in an alarmed scream when he began to fire off shotgun volleys into the cuttlefish’s gaping maw. “I’ll keep it distracted!”
“You’re going to get me killed,” I muttered, knowing he couldn’t hear me. When I was younger, that kind of mouthing off probably would’ve gotten me backhanded by my surrogate-father-of-sorts, Dempsey, but Jonas was a different breed of man. He was gentler and kinder by far than Dempsey, but then so was a dragon with an abscessed tooth. Still, just in case, I yelled back, “Just don’t shoot me!”
A torrent of ink shot out from somewhere on the cuttlefish’s body and nearly hit me. The sting of its fluid dissipated once it was dry, but the ink was milky and easily slid behind eyelids and into nostrils, making it difficult to see and breathe. It also turned the ground into a slippery mess. My boot heels caught something jagged beneath the slick, which gave me some traction. Then I hit the rim of the wading pool, its rough gravelly edge angled slightly up, and that provided enough of a hard lip to steady my leap.
To my right, a scatter of buckshot blackened its frills, and for a brief moment, I thought Jonas would hit me as well, but his next volley smacked directly into the creature’s beak. I was in flight for less than a second and landed hard against the cuttlefish’s flanged body. Its skin was slippery, and I couldn’t find purchase, but when its eye rolled over to look at me as I slid across its length, I knew I had to strike quickly. Its tentacles threw shadows against the water and the ground as they folded back to grab me.
If it got hold of me again, there was a good chance it would slither back down to the wading pool and probably drown me in the muck. I would’ve liked to say I didn’t know how elfin tasted, but my father was a sick, sadistic bastard who’d gone out of his way to ensure that I experienced that particularly horrific delicacy. I didn’t imagine the cuttlefish was starving, as I’d been back then, but judging by the bits and pieces of animals floating in the murky water, it either had an eclectic palate or it just didn’t give a shit about what it ate.
I was going to go with the latter.
Its skin was too slick, and there was nothing I could grab. Working my hand beneath the lip of its head and body slowed my descent down its side but left me open to its tentacles. Desperate, I sunk my knife into its eye and dug down deep in an effort to anchor myself, but my arm was nearly jerked out of its socket when I came to a screeching halt.
“Don’t shoot!” I screamed back at Jonas, but the cuttlefish’s writhing turned me around, and its body dipped back down into the filthy water. My boots skimmed a bit of debris, and my toe came back up wet and covered in a sticky green film. “Iesu. Why ask me to help you on a job if you’re just going to kill me? Why not just shoot me back where my cat could eat my corpse?”
The tentacles slapped at my back and legs, nearly dislodging me, but I hung on tight and dug my boot heels into the edge of its frills. The slice in its eye gave me something to hold on to, so I plunged my hand past the cut, looking for anything to grab. I found it—a cluster of connective tissue that squished a bit through my fingers when I grabbed it. Where the cut didn’t get a reaction, my grabbing at its innards did. The cuttlefish spasmed beneath me. Its limbs began a furious dance to dislodge me, and one tip caught me across the ribs and found every single bruise forming along my torso from where I’d hit the fence.
I raised my knife to slice at it again, and that’s when I noticed that Jonas had a bazooka.
Or it could have been a rocket launcher. I was never clear on the difference, and at that point, it didn’t really matter. Jonas became a blur running toward me, and then all I saw was a flash of the neighborhood, because the monster was writhing beneath me, and I was forced to ride its body as though it were a bucking mechanical bull in a cowboy bar. Tightening my legs seemed like a good idea until I heard Jonas shout my name.
“Jump loose!” he shouted.
Jumping loose was not an option. I had my arm tangled up through the cuttlefish’s tiny brain and its eyeball, beginning my own version of yum pla muk minus the lime juice, the fish sauce, and all the vegetables. A second later I discovered I really had no choice, because there was a large kaboom with enough concussive force to rattle the few remaining windows of the school building next to the pool and I was once again flying through the air.
Luckily for me there was a rusted wrought iron fence to catch me when I landed.
My pants were on fire, and I’d lost my knife. I also appeared to have lost a shoe, but what was most concerning me at that moment was the length of wrought-iron piercing through my ribs. The fence was at a slant, and I’d caught it at an incredibly wrong angle. My legs dangled a few inches off of the ground, and every effort I made to get loose only moved me down the iron spike.
The pain was both incredible and familiar—a gut-wrenching, spine-curling agony that stretched through every single nerve of my body as my elfin blood reacted to the iron cutting through my flesh. Flakes of rust were being caught up in my blood, or maybe it just felt that way. Within a few breaths of being hung up on the fence, my heart burned as though plunged into a vat of molten rock.
I knew the iron wouldn’t kill me, but it would certainly make me wish I’d died back there on the twitching cuttlefish, waltzing alongside its death throes. Throwing up hurt even more, but I did it anyway, unable to hold back the instinctive reaction to the iron in me.
The chunks of cooked cuttlefish smacking the ground like sacks of wet cement only made matters worse.
I was suddenly no longer hungry for either the Mexican corn or the savory goodness of spiced shredded pork over crispy sliced potatoes. If I’d landed a few inches to the left, the wrought iron would’ve pierced my stomach. As it was I was fairly certain my liver was going to have to find one of its lobes in the area of my abdomen. For an elfin, the puncture itself wasn’t a fatal wound, but the iron—the fucking iron�
�would be the death of any other in my race if it stayed in too long.
Lucky for me—if anyone could even stretch the truth and call it luck—I’d built up a pretty good immunity to Earth’s most poisonous metal.
“Hold on, kid,” Jonas said when he appeared at my side. His massive hands were under my back in an instant, taking the pressure off of my legs. “Grit your teeth. I’m going to pull you free.”
I had carried iron under the skin of my back for countless decades—swirls of filigree and bars thick enough to leave a pair of black pearl dragon wings etched across my shoulder blades and on either side of my spine. It’d been a while since those pieces had been removed, but their memory remained. The fencing wasn’t stuck to my flesh like the dragon wings, but it still hurt like fucking hell.
I clenched my jaw, but my stomach still tried to empty itself for a second time all over Jonas’s back. It is a pity I had nothing in me but the cup of coffee we’d had before doing the job, because if anybody deserved to be thrown up on, it was Jonas for bringing out a bazooka and firing on me and the cuttlefish.
“What were you thinking?” I gasped and ground my teeth when he yanked me off of the shaft’s flared end. “I was on the damned thing. And where the fuck did you get a bazooka?”
“I had it in the back of the truck. I use it sometimes when I go after nightmares. I figured it couldn’t hurt this time around.” He made a face—a halfway apology through grimaces and sucking at his teeth. “Guess I forgot how powerful the thing is. One last pull and you’ll be free.”
“Good,” I spat out. “Because as much as I love you, I’m going to kick your damned ass.”
Jonas stopped his tugging and stared down at me, his soulful brown eyes welling with emotion. “Trust you to tell me you love me for the first time while I’m yanking you off of a wrought-iron fence.”
“You gave me my first chocolate,” I reminded him. “But I’m still going to kick you in the balls, especially if you don’t hurry up.”
The last few inches were a horrific test of my willpower and the strength of my jaw. I felt the moment my body was free of the iron shaft—a wave of jangled relief passed underneath my skin, and my spine unclenched, willing to let go of the memories of screws and bolts through my shoulder blades and the slide of twisted barbs through my flesh. Laying me down on the cement as gently as he could, Jonas crouched by my side and offered me a mouthful of water from a bottle he’d brought with him. A long shadow fell across both of us, cast down from the flickering streetlamp I’d narrowly avoided in my flight. I reached for my remaining knife and half yanked it out from the sheath tied to my thigh.
“Hey, mister.” A little kid of indeterminate sex and dubious cleanliness held out a smoking chunk of our practically thoroughly cooked cuttlefish. “Are you going to eat all of this? Or can me and my friends take some of it home?”
Two
I WAS able to get a quick shower at Jonas’s house before I headed home. After we packed the monster’s remains in ice, I left it to him and his son Razor to get the cuttlefish’s eyes and beak to the Post in order to collect the bounty. The money would’ve been nice—money is always nice—but I told him to leave my cut in the pot, a half-assed thank-you for introducing me to chocolate and saving my life more times than I could count.
Its eyes and its beak, along with some footage we took, were enough evidence of the kill for the Post, and we left about three hundred pounds of usable cuttlefish behind, even with a good amount of meat going into the back of Jonas’s truck once we laid down some tarps. We salvaged a lot of its body—or maybe it was its head, I wasn’t up on cuttlefish anatomy—but mostly everything behind its eyes had been blown back and remained raw.
My heart ached as I watched him battle his pride with practical necessity, but in the end, he knew I was only doing what was best for his family. The bounty on the cuttlefish was high, based on the size of the monster, and despite what the SoCalGov inspector put down in his report, the thing weighed in at a hefty chunk of change. The meat we scavenged would go into the freezer or the smokehouse to make jerky, and his spouses could sell it in their booth at the farmers’ market on Saturday.
“We squeeze everything we can out of what we can get. You guys can do more with that than I can,” I’d told him as I gingerly climbed into my own beat-up Chevy truck. “I’m good for now. Maybe one day when I’m not, I’ll come knocking on your door for some soup.”
“That day ever comes, boy,” Jonas rumbled at me through the open window and grabbed at the back of my neck to give me a quick, intense squeeze, “I’ll be the first one to fill your bowl and pass you the bread. After you pick all the good bits out of it.”
We shared a grin, recalling days on a hunt where the bread was mostly weevils and we’d made jokes about being thankful for the extra protein. My younger self existed in a state of constant hunger and craved meat. The bugs were a welcome addition to my meal, and I’d been confused the others hadn’t thought the same.
“They’re nutty. Like cashews.” I chuckled when Jonas’s face curdled into a sour expression. “You better step away from the truck before one of your wives comes and drags me back inside to have dinner with you. Right now, while I’m thankful for the shower, I just want a long soak in a tub full of hot water and a glass of whiskey on ice.”
“I’ll get you some of that jerky once we’re done with it. And you might want to check that backpack of yours when you get home. I had one of the kids put some cuttlefish scraps in an old butter container. That’s not something you want to find two weeks from now.” He ruffled my hair, and I snarled playfully out of habit. “I figured you would probably crawl home, throw some noodles into a bit of miso soup, so that cuttlefish would cook fast in the heat. Providing of course that damned cat of yours doesn’t eat all of it.”
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t.” I wrinkled my nose. “Last time I give him some octopus, it was like I was under siege from a chemical weapons factory. I love the tiny asshole, but that cat farts napalm. Take care. And whatever you do, don’t take another contract until you know exactly how big the monster is. I’m going to be feeling this one for days.”
“You know that’s a lie, boy.” Jonas chuckled and slapped at my battered truck’s roof. “You’ll be healed of all your bruises by the time you get home.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t want that whiskey,” I shot back and put my truck into gear.
The ride back into the city was shorter than the one I made every week to Dempsey’s. Jonas and his sprawling, ever-growing family didn’t live that far off of District 3, a homesteading initiative meant to populate the upper mesas near Mission Valley. All in all it had been a good plan—carve out pieces of land and hand farmers incentive to grow crops to support the hospitality industries San Diego was known for. The biggest problem with the homesteading idea was that they hadn’t quite gotten rid of all the lions in Kearny Mesa, so anyone east of the 163 River often found themselves fighting to maintain their flocks.
Most gave up and sold off what they were never going to use. Jonas benefited from that immensely, scooping up low-priced properties already plumbed with irrigation lines and with outlying buildings. Farming was a hard life, but it was easier than being a Stalker, mostly because a rutabaga wasn’t going to chew your face off. His wives and husband dealt with the day-to-day stuff, doing everything from supplying produce for farm-to-table restaurants to making herb-scented soaps. I usually left their house smelling like lemon and lavender, although one of the kids begged me to try out the loquat bars and promised me they were bubblegum scented.
Little bastard wasn’t wrong.
A dip through the mesas and then over the rise and San Diego spread out in front of me. It was a glittering bristle of skyscrapers and neon, with a Buddha’s-hand scramble of Medical dominating the shoreline where the upper and lower levels met. The crystal, glass, and steel spires were merely rich armor for the teeming gritty streets below. While the city’s façade was beautiful to look at,
I preferred the honest dirt the lower level provided. And sitting at the far east of the city, right up against the raging river that once was a freeway, sat the Southern Rise Court, home to the Sidhe lord who’d become the bane of my existence.
Ryder, Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon, got it into his head one day that San Diego needed an elfin presence, so he’d added another title to his long pedigree and become the High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, assumed ownership of Balboa Park and all surrounding properties, and set them aside for the elfin race.
He’d also tried to assume ownership of me.
We had a few words about that.
He was tricky—like most elfin—and as arrogant as all hell. When he rolled into San Diego, he convinced SoCalGov and the Post to make me the court’s liaison between the elfin and the humans. On paper it made sense. I was elfin by blood but human by culture, and Ryder knew jack shit about how humans thought or lived.
Problem was, he made my blood sing, and I wanted him so badly I was willing to chew off my tongue after kissing him so he would be the last thing I ever tasted.
After what the Unsidhe did to me—what my own father did to me—the last person I would ever want to be involved with was one of my own kind. I’d felt the touch of their treachery, wore the sting of their torture in my bones, and carried their viciousness on my skin. The Sidhe weren’t much better. The first thing Ryder’s grandmother tried to do was kill me, and our relationship went downhill after that.
We’d come to an understanding, Ryder and I. It was an uneasy friendship at times—he would pull and I would push away—but he was getting under my skin, much like the iron my father, Tanic, the Wild Hunt Master of the Unsidhe, slid into my back. And I knew that if I let him in, he would leave me with much more horrific scars than what I had already.
