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

by Casey Matthews

  The models of monuments made from plastic blocks also came from her mother, given to her “so you will not play with the slatternly dolls your friends play with,” and they built them before visiting places. Ryn didn’t ask why the Eiffel Tower wasn’t finished. She sensed the answer.

  Leaning back into her pillow with Ryn on her bedside, Naomi talked about needing to pull a new book from her mother’s shelves over the summer. Then, yawning so wide it seemed to expel the last of her energy, the girl relaxed with eyes shut and she talked more quietly until at last the book she held slumped to her chest.

  Listening to the rhythmic, slow breathing, Ryn tilted to face the girl, and Naomi rolled her way at the same time, curling almost around her, coming nearly to the point of touching. Half lost to sleep, she murmured, “Haven’t slept much.”

  “Sleep now.”

  Something unintelligible—all Ryn could make out was “have company.”

  Leaning down, she whispered close to her friend’s ear: “Nothing will hurt you when I am close. You are safe now.”

  A stale air left Naomi’s lungs, as though releasing the last tension inside her, so that she pooled by Ryn’s hip. Impulse seized the deva and she settled her hand into that auburn hair and tucked its glossy locks behind the girl’s ear. Watching her breathe for two hours, watching her enjoy her first dreamless rest in weeks, Ryn felt strangely content. There was no other place she’d rather be, nothing else she’d rather do than stand guard so that Naomi could sleep in peace.

  She heard Tom Bradford’s car pull into the drive, so she gave him time to come inside. Sliding from the bed and prowling downstairs, Ryn found him on a stool at the kitchen counter eating borscht and watching the news on his tablet, a lone overhead bulb highlighting his haggard expression. The weeks had eroded him. She’d seen mortals crumble under far less. The hot, bloody-purple soup relaxed his shoulders and he slumped with arms circled around his bowl.

  The Channel 5 news played on his screen and reported rumors of a “shadow” that street dwellers had seen in the Docks jumping from rooftop to rooftop. An elderly man with missing teeth told the anchorwoman, “Like some kinda animal. No sound. Made no sound.” Bradford snorted and sipped the borscht off his spoon.

  He jolted when Ryn paced around him; gawked a moment, then relaxed. “Jesus, be careful sneaking up like that. If I’d had my gun I might have shot you.” He winced. “No need to tell any Democrats I said that.”

  “It isn’t true anyway.” She put the lid on the soup and turned off the burner. “Your daughter isn’t sleeping enough.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Three,” Ryn said. “But she is the worst off.”

  “I’d sleep better if Mark didn’t take days off, though my daughter insists you’re quite the badass. Where’d you learn that?”

  “Many places.”

  “What was the last?”

  She told him a country—if it could be called that. There were regions recognized on maps as states which weren’t, where the rulers had power in name alone, and Ryn could still walk those lands uncursed.

  He nodded, the two of them saying nothing. She sensed he inspected her almost as closely as she did him.

  Soon Naomi padded downstairs in her quiet socks, rubbing her eyes. “Ryn, you’re still here. Sorry for passing out on you. Hi, Dad.” She kissed his cheek on her way to the stove. “It smells nice. How’d it turn out?” She fetched bowls.

  “Perfect,” Tom Bradford said.

  Naomi spooned out borscht and glanced over her shoulder. “How was the Hill?”

  “Rough.” He hesitated. “Holland and Gordon are trying to ram through that security bill. Not happening. Trying to strangle it in the crib. If it escapes committee, I’ve got the votes—Lipset owes me after last November, and he puts me over.”

  “That’s the bill on the news?” she asked, staring at her borscht.

  Tom Bradford nodded, a silence opening between them that seemed a gulf. “I’m sorry. I rethought it after Banich. I just… I can’t. It’s too flawed, too deeply.”

  Ryn straightened when he mentioned Banich in connection with the mortal law. “What does the one have to do with the other?”

  The senator explained something long and stupid and said the word “unconstitutional” the way old priests might have said “blasphemous.” At one point he explained, “Private social-media companies would have to collect personal information on every user and provide the lists to law enforcement. Things as simple as your uncle’s tinfoil-hat rants could put him on watchlists that violate a laundry list of rights.”

  Ryn stepped forward, bristling. “But this law. It makes finding Banich’s associates… easier?”

  “They bill it that way, but the bad eggs could just skirt the law. It’s not about protecting people from lawbreakers, it’s about controlling the rest of us.”

  Ryn could not care less about which mortals controlled which. “But it might help find them?” she pressed, heart blazing.

  “It might put the website threatening her out of commission.” Tom Bradford slid his bowl away. “It’d also chill speech all over the web, add about fourteen new ways for the government to jail people they don’t particularly like.”

  Ryn didn’t care. “You let these beasts exist, though they threaten Naomi? And for what? So fools might feel free to whisper in the dark to one another?”

  “Rebels whispering in the dark started this republic.”

  Ryn’s lip curled, caring nothing for republics. Let them burn, to the last. Were one day of life a grain of sand, the sand of Ryn’s immortality filled the length of every ocean and desert across all the Earth—no republic’s days had yet numbered enough to overflow her cupped hands.

  “Dad’s right,” Naomi whispered, sipping borscht from her spoon and shutting her eyes, as though to taste without distraction.

  “He is not,” Ryn snarled. Were Naomi’s days sand, they would fill even less than her cupped hands—less than a teaspoon in her palm. Yet each grain was more precious to the deva than any contrivance of law.

  “It’s like with my bedroom.” Naomi wove those skillful words: “That’s what Dad sees that you don’t, Ryn. This bill’s just an ineffectual wall. It’s theater. It’s meant to make us feel safe, but instead it… becomes a cell.”

  “A cell for others,” Ryn insisted. And I care nothing for them.

  “Sorry.” Naomi winked. “Not ready to sell out my fellow countrymen. We’re all in this boat together.”

  Ryn growled.

  “I sympathize.” Tom Bradford scraped at his empty bowl. “I don’t like it either. And Holland and Gordon are good at reminding me. Been hammering me in the press, saying not everyone can afford private security if their kid gets threatened.”

  “Did you tell them about your latest scheme to arm teenage girls?” Naomi teased.

  “I did, and wouldn’t you know it, that idea’s not flying with the press.”

  “Have more borscht. You’ll feel better.”

  “It’ll make me fat and slow is what it’ll do.” He checked his watch. “I have some calls to make. Give me an hour, will you?” She nodded and he disappeared from the kitchen into a nearby office.

  Naomi laid a bowl out for Ryn and sat opposite, blowing gently in a way that was interesting to watch. “My mom cooked this for Dad on their fourth date, except with tons of garlic. My dad hates garlic, but he was so scared of upsetting her that he choked down three bowls. The best part? Mom could tell he hated it, so she kept giving him bowl after bowl, trying to get him to be straight with her. His eyes watered so bad, he tried to pass it off as tears of joy. He threw up in her bathroom.”

  Ryn sniffed the borscht. “Strange.”

  “They had a strange courtship,” Naomi agreed.

  Courtship. “This food is part of a mating ritual?”

  Naomi lifted an eyebrow. “For them. Maybe we don’t talk about my parents mating?”

  She nodded.

  Leaning cl
oser, Naomi grinned. “But if you don’t like my borscht, you should shut up and pretend to love it anyway.” Her eyes crinkled into a smile. “It’s tradition.”

  Tasting the soup, she startled at heat and flavor wedded so rightly together; the beet and vegetables warmed her insides. Even the pork was fine, stewed into the broth’s flavor. “Good.” She wolfed down the rest.

  Probably too fast, because Naomi watched with amusement. “I declare this Food Friday successful. Would you like to come to another?”

  “Food Friday?”

  “Old traditions are good, but so are new ones. My dad worries because Mark takes off Fridays. He likes it when you’re here. So if you visit every Friday to keep me company, I’ll make a different recipe—my treat, or you can help if you insist. We’ll find out what you’ve been missing when it comes to cuisine.”

  One visit had been pleasing, but a promise of more was dangerous: too many opportunities to show this mortal too much. Despite currents of alarm, she couldn’t refuse. Naomi had become like a sun that Ryn wanted to orbit. Feeling weak, and a fool, she whispered, “As you like.”

  ~*~

  Casper knew better than to conference Burns and Wilkins again, so he contacted them separately. Wilkins reported—disappointingly—that the guardian was only at Naomi Bradford’s house on Fridays. Casper knew that wasn’t true, so it meant the guardian was too stealthy to be noticed unless she meant to be.

  Not good.

  Wilkins’ next job was to set up electronic surveillance near the Bradford home. Maybe it would help pinpoint the demon, but Casper doubted it.

  Burns connected with him a few hours late, and when he came on screen his eyes were bloodshot and ringed in red. He was drinking a tall glass of water. “Are you hung over?” Casper asked.

  Burns shook his head. “Negro woman maced me.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t call her that word.”

  “Not like I said—”

  “Or that one.”

  “I can’t keep track of what they like.”

  If I have a spare bullet when this is over… “What happened?”

  “Found that hoodie chick’s bitch of a caseworker. Got her name drinking with this burnt-out teacher. She gave me the lowdown on your little beastie. Ryn Miller. Stays at a group home off Oakland in commie town—sometimes—and she’s fresh from the nuthouse. Anyway, tried to lift the caseworker’s phone on the train; figured she’d have appointments. You believe that black bitch pepper-sprayed me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, she thought I was copping a feel, but still. She was a five—a six, tops—so it was practically a compliment.”

  “I’ll let you know what our next move is.” He cut off the video chat and drank a beer, digesting the information, finally typing it into an email for the benefactors:

  You won’t like it. Wilkins never spotted the guardian except for when she wasn’t hiding, so we can’t identify her patterns. Burns couldn’t figure out her routine either. She’s a ghost.

  Still, he included the guardian’s name and address. The benefactors could use that, surely.

  He clicked “send.”

  ~*~

  Ghorm’s email dinged on the monitor to his left. With a pneumatic hiss, the chair spun and his hollow’s greasy hands worked the mouse over its distended lap. Reading the email, he felt cold fear fill his vast center. “Mr. Saxby,” he said in dulcet tones to his cabal-mate. “Oh, dear Mr. Saxby, did you realize—there is a tiny monster staying near Oakland Avenue?”

  Mr. Saxby appeared at his side, the asura’s middle-aged, balding, boringly average hollow dressed in a finely tailored suit, fingernails clipped to a level of impeccable symmetry. “Fascinating. Out of curiosity, do you remember who else fancies that neighborhood?”

  “Dust,” Ghorm ground out.

  “Yes. Dust, with his long memory and loose lips.” Mr. Saxby rubbed at a speck of dust on his sleeve. “Perhaps I should eat him.”

  “No,” Ghorm said. “Dust is protected.”

  “By whom? A monster?” Mr. Saxby scoffed.

  “No, not her; by someone who matters. A rival of our own paymaster, in fact. But I want to know what Dust is saying to our uninvited monster, and why precisely she is meddling in our work. I’ll tell my peons to surveil Dust’s haunts and we’ll have a listen.”

  Mr. Saxby read the email carefully. “Ryn Miller, they call her. Why-oh-why does that name put the slightest shiver between my shoulder blades?”

  “Might she cause you indigestion?”

  A chortle, though Mr. Saxby’s face didn’t change. “What she did to Splat was special. She cut not the flesh, but the essence of him. That is something I’d like to study.”

  “And the gun you lent my peon—will it kill her?”

  “That is no mere rifle,” Mr. Saxby said. “That weapon has taken a hundred forms, suiting itself to the age. It’s a… machine… and it came from my allies across the stars. The Hidden One said it would kill any god weaker than he.” There was something malicious in his thin-lipped smile. “Though perhaps it would work against him too.”

  “You mustn’t kill the one who pays us,” Ghorm cautioned.

  “Taking money from the Hidden One, who fights a cold war against another god—that was dangerous enough. But now he wants us warring with a monster. Our arrangement rather leaves us the pawns, and I prefer the space behind the board to being on it.”

  “Suggestions?” Ghorm asked.

  Mr. Saxby removed his spectacles irritably and polished the lenses to banish nonexistent smudges. “I will need one of your toy soldiers. As well some tarp.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll have him war ready. We let them take their crack—my twisted lovely with tooth and claw, and your pet Bible-thumper with weapon from alien world. We eliminate Ryn Miller, then move on to Naomi Bradford. No two-front wars. And believe me,” he smiled mirthlessly, “I would know.”

  Ghorm waved his chubby hand in the air. “Fine. Take one of my toys. I only have the three ready—still chipping away at the fourth. Which would you like?”

  “Someone violent. Unhinged. I’m feeling… inspired.”

  ~*~

  Ryn had evaded Ms. Cross too long and agreed to meet her at the beginning of March. Outside, a heat spell had turned New Petersburg into a city of slush, and runoff trickled down the exterior brick walls of the office. They sat opposite one another, Ryn perched on the sofa’s edge. Ms. Cross had populated a coffee table with stress balls and trinkets meant to distract patients.

  Stacking cards in the style of the Eiffel Tower from Naomi’s bedroom, Ryn understood from Ms. Cross’s stare that she was upset.

  “Good to see you at least read some history this month,” Ms. Cross said. “A shame you weren’t there to take the exams.”

  “I need no examination,” Ryn said.

  “I want you to get your GED.”

  “Meaningless.”

  “It means something to employers,” she said sternly.

  “You think without this thing I will starve?”

  Ms. Cross firmed her mouth. “Listen to me very carefully. We both know that at your age, there is precious little I can do to punish or reward you. But we also know a girl like you will—eventually—get into some kind of trouble. I know this city, I know how it works, I know police, prosecutors, and public defenders. When that day comes, I can be your greatest ally. Or: I can be your worst enemy. So what I want from you matters.”

  Ryn scowled, leaning two cards against one another. “What I do is important.”

  “Can you do it and study too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then study. And show up for your exams. And we’ll take it from there.”

  Yet even now, Ryn vibrated with the need to fly across the city, to where Naomi had track practice at this hour. She loved watching her friend’s pole stick, loved that instant as she soared over the bar when she seemed to float, body bending as supple branches in a windstorm. It was also a d
angerous moment, where sabotage might snap the auburn-haired girl’s life away.

  “Ryn,” Ms. Cross said. “Study. Take your exams.”

  Ryn relented and nodded. “As you will it.” The words tasted bitter.

  “Eiffel Tower.” Ms. Cross nodded to the card tower. “Do you want to go there someday?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t like to try new things, do you?”

  “I try new foods,” Ryn said.

  “With the girl. Naomi?”

  “She shows me new things.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  Ryn realized she did.

  “What if she took you to Paris? Or I did?”

  “I don’t want to go to Paris.”

  “Why not?”

  Because even if she weren’t banished from their lands, the Fates lived in Europe. Because they would hunt Ryn, and because she couldn’t protect Naomi there. The gods in America were fewer and younger. “I don’t want Naomi to get hurt.”

  “She’s the girl people are threatening?”

  “Yes.” Ryn fidgeted, irritable.

  “You want to help her. That’s interesting. What do you see in her?”

  “Who cares?” she snapped.

  “There’s no need to be defensive. It’s healthy to form emotional attachments to people. It means you’re making progress. How would you characterize your relationship with Naomi?”

  “We meet on Fridays.” The rest of the time Ryn just stalked her.

  “Friends then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “No,” Ryn said firmly.

  “You seem very certain of that.”

  “Friends.”

  “Ryn. It’s not uncommon for a woman who’s seen abuse at the hands of men to form her most intimate relationships with other women.”