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

by Casey Matthews

  Out of the cloud now, she saw how his fire worked: his puffer throat filled with fluids from chambers in his guts and when he spat the flaming gel, it sparked on contact with oxygen.

  She chucked the brick into his gaping mouth where it lodged firmly between his teeth. His puffer throat swelled, but couldn’t contract. The fluids backed up, dribbling weakly from the corners of his mouth.

  Ryn’s claws flashed through his throat and she booted him off the building. He fell into an alleyway.

  About halfway down, the glass-clean cut in his throat forced the chemicals from his guts to mix and let just enough oxygen seep in. The explosion started inside him, roaring out of his throat, mouth, and eye sockets, finally erupting like a wet bomb from his center. He landed in a dumpster and Ryn lost track of him as he detonated twice more in geysers of liquid fire.

  Her cloak shivered, smothering the fire she carried on her shoulders and forearm. The rooftop still burned, and she launched a tether from her cloak to a water tower one building over. It smacked a wooden strut and she gave it a mighty pull. The strut bowed and snapped, the tower crashing down, overturning its contents on the adjacent flames. Water surged up to Ryn’s hips and she had to anchor with three more tethers to keep from being carried over the building side with the deluge.

  It made a waterfall into the alley where she’d dropped the creature, the torrent filling the dumpster and extinguishing the flames.

  Ryn dropped down to finish him. He lay blackened with his throat split open and vertebrae exposed, but he’d half regenerated from the wounds already. He screamed and cried and cursed from his many mouths, but all of them a chorus of pleas for death.

  Obliging, she ripped the first of his sinful hearts from the screaming corpus and wolfed it down. The meat slid into the center of her, a place not her stomach but nearer to her wrath. That dark furnace was buried deep, folded parallel to normal space so that it was tucked away from the world—necessary because its heat was like a star’s. It was called gehenna, and the moment wet flesh touched that pocket of space within her, the organs burned to black ash. A scream vibrated through her, her inner fire so hot it ate his soul next, burning until that too was obliterated.

  Digging for the other hearts, she sent speckles of blood to the alley wall, dissecting the monstrosity Saxby had stitched together. The second heart she slurped down in four snaps of her bright teeth, that one’s soul stickier, the vagaries of their individual evil modifying the flavor. Coming to the final heart, she tightened her fist around it, stared down into the mangled face of her quarry and asked one more time: “Before I release you, you will tell me: where is the other shooter?”

  “Kill me,” rasped the bloody head. He was little more than severed spine, a cobweb of blood vessels, heart, and brain, but the unholy work done to his biology kept his soul rooted, and might for days yet. In a way, the eternal end of gehenna was a mercy, and the only one she knew. “Please… kill me.”

  “The ice-rink shooter,” she insisted. When she spoke, glowing cinders from annihilated souls floated from her mouth.

  “…Casper wouldn’t come. Casper said it wasn’t the mission. He went to finish it.”

  Tearing his heart out, she sprinted for the train at full speed and ate him as she went, ripping into hard muscle a bite at a time until his screaming soul joined his friends, first shrill, then silent forever.

  Yet there was no satisfaction, no warm glow at her center knowing the world was cleaner for her efforts. There was a hard lump, and a rising, terrifying knowledge she might not be fast enough.

  ~*~

  Casper had studied details of the Bradford security system emailed to him by the benefactors; studied Sgt. Mark Brody’s dossier and patrol patterns using Wilkins’ surveillance. Brody wasn’t his idea of an easy fight, but at least he wasn’t some kind of hell-spawned demon.

  The backyard had three motion detectors. Casper scaled the outer wall and then walked carefully through an inch of snow, using a blind spot between their sensor ranges. Reaching the house, he stood flush to the wall and dusted the snow from his body as best he could, not wanting to leave a trail of slush in the house that could alert Brody.

  Near his place on the wall, he found a disconnected hose. It was cold, but the water ran. Screwing it in, he set the sprinkler timer for fifteen minutes.

  He worked a gap in the window just wide enough to insert a small magnetic strip meant to fool the alarm—the only trick was figuring out where to insert it, and he’d brought a compass to show him. It made him think of his daughter. Julie used to do this to our windows at night. Sneaking out to see that asshole boyfriend. Sneaking out ran in the family, he supposed. Sure surprised her when I installed that backup sensor, though. He smirked at the memory and jerked the window up. No alarm sounded. So far, so good.

  He pulled off his boots before ducking into the darkened house. Would there be motion detectors inside? No idea. They don’t have a dog, so almost no reason not to.

  With the shrug of a man who realized he had no real options, Casper padded on socked feet across the floor and slid the taser from his hip. No alarms, no flashing lights. Could be silent alarms.

  Ignoring the thousand what-ifs, he stationed himself in a shadowed nook, observing the hallway Brody would take if he left Bradford’s office. Brody was sharp, almost restless in his patrols. A good soldier. He wasn’t a bad man, but he’d fallen in with the devil. Been there, done that. Better not to kill him, though. Naomi Bradford was enough; no one would die tonight except the ones who had to.

  The sprinklers hissed and he heard no alarm, so it must have triggered in the office. Brody pushed out his chair on the other side of the door and Casper tensed.

  The office door slid open and Brody patrolled briskly through the home, his pistol readied in a two-handed grip.

  Casper slipped from his nook behind him and planted the taser into the back of the soldier’s neck. It emitted a series of sharp, staticky clicks and Brody crumpled to his knees. Casper followed him to the ground, device held flush until he’d snatched the pistol and tossed it over the sofa.

  An elbow cracked into Casper’s ribs, absorbed by his armored vest—but the soldier threw his weight back, twisted, and flipped Casper onto his back.

  Brody was quick, wound up on top and landed a series of shots. One to the throat set off alarms in Casper’s head.

  His training kicked in. Tucking both arms close, shielding his neck and face, he weathered the attacks until he could club back with either fist. Their foreheads knocked together, and he had no idea who threw the head-butt. They rolled, exchanging positions, and then did it again in a struggle for chokes, arm bars, punching any time he had a fist free.

  Brody’s knife flicked out, but Casper locked down the arm, straining it almost to the point of breaking. The knife clattered to the floor.

  With a snarl, Brody threw them into another roll that freed his arm, but Casper found his taser on the floor, wedged halfway under the sofa. Planting it into the soldier’s ribs, the electric charge hit them both together. Every muscle snapped taut—it was like being shaken in a paint mixer. His finger tensing on the trigger, he tased them both until it slipped from his sweaty palm and a stray kick sent it skating away.

  It had stunned Brody harder, so Casper threw himself behind the soldier and wrapped the crook of his elbow around the man’s throat. He hoisted with all his strength, Brody elbowing his armored vest, kicking over a lamp, slapping his hands across the floor in a vain search for weapons and, at last, gagged and went deadweight.

  It wouldn’t last. Casper rolled the unconscious soldier to his belly, zip-tying him by wrists and ankles, then hogtying them together before he could recover from his daze.

  Only need a minute, he knew. His pistol had—miraculously—stayed holstered at the small of his back, and he drew it now. Easier to shoot the man, but glad I didn’t. Turning, he was just in time to witness a willowy girl exit her bedroom and cross the upstairs balcony, stretching sleepily
without quite looking down. “Mark,” she yawned, “I heard a noise. Is everything—”

  She froze. Casper did too. He was at the bottom of the stairs in black face paint, wheezing through a sore nose that bubbled snot and blood, his gun dangling from one exhausted arm. Brody groaned, coming to beneath him. Naomi Bradford, the daughter of the Apocalypse, stood at the top of the stairs and registered all this.

  “Oh God,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry.” He lifted the pistol, knowing what had to follow—resigned to it, but without the heart he’d once had for killing. Just a fucking girl. Disgusted, he opened fire.

  She sprinted across the hall—his heavy arm hadn’t been steady enough, and the slugs spanked into the wall behind her, one shattering the glass on a family portrait. “Shit.” Stupid to one-hand my gun—half-assed, sloppy. Don’t care if you don’t want to, Casper, this is the fucking mission.

  He pounded up the stairs. It’s fine—she’s got nowhere to run. Odd that she’d gone into her father’s empty room and not hers. “I’m going to make this easy,” he called, pistol now in a sturdier two-handed grip, leveled on her father’s door. “I’m not like the other one. I’m not going to rape you.” Just the bullet, he thought grimly. I wonder if we’ll both laugh about this after we’re dead.

  He shook it off and approached the closed door to Tom Bradford’s bedroom, where she was cornered.

  “Are you still there?” she sobbed. It sounded so goddamn pitiful. I wonder what I would do to a man who tried to kill my daughter.

  “I am,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be hard. I know how to make it easy. You won’t feel it.” Like flipping a light switch.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said through the door. “No one has to get hurt.”

  He shook his head. “Wish the world worked like that.”

  “Then you won’t leave?”

  He shut his eyes. “Afraid not.”

  Three shots ripped through Bradford’s door and the first hit him square in the chest. It knocked him flat to his back. Five more shots penetrated the door, all over his head. He picked the slug off the cracked plate in his vest. Of course he has a fucking gun in his room, you dipshit. He’s a Republican.

  Casper fought to his feet, breathless like a hippo had sat on his chest, and kicked the door open. No Naomi Bradford—just an open window and spent pistol on the floor with its slide ejected back. He peered out the window. There was a narrow section of roof to one side, dusted in snow so that he could see footprints from where she’d jumped.

  Casper hoisted himself into chilly air and leapt for the roof, almost skating off. He scaled to the apex and leveled his pistol at Naomi Bradford’s retreating figure. “Don’t move,” he gasped. “Don’t move.”

  He had her—nowhere to go, she stopped running. She lifted her hands in the air and collapsed to her knees, facing away. Head bowing as though in supplication, the wind whipped her gleaming auburn hair. Casper’s mouth was tacky with drying spit as he approached, licking chapped lips. Snow crunched softly underfoot. “I wasn’t lying.” He swallowed. “You won’t even feel it. I promise.”

  Her shoulders shook with another sob. “Did you kill Mark?”

  “No. He’ll live.”

  “So you just want me. Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “For money? Are you being paid?”

  “No.”

  Her hands trembled above her head and she panned her gaze, perhaps looking out at all those slumbering, snowcapped homes and quiet sidewalks where she’d grown up. Somewhere in the distance, sirens—but none would make it in time. He felt for her, felt the helpless knowledge that in four minutes cops would arrive and find her body.

  And him. He wasn’t leaving here a free man.

  “Tell me why,” she whispered.

  “I said it’s complicated.” He stared down the barrel, a peace settling over him. The urgency was gone. All that’s left is the trigger, and I have minutes to do it. Just… squeeze it off. Do it while she’s talking, when she won’t expect it.

  “Uncomplicate it.” She wiped at her face with one hand, the other still over her head. “I want to know why.”

  His finger closed over the trigger, tightening until he felt that tiny hitch of tension before it usually popped off. His heart had never been steadier. “The world ends if I don’t.”

  She started to turn.

  “Don’t. Don’t you fucking move.” Don’t look at me.

  She froze. Their warm breath spilled into the air, misty and bright from the streetlights below. She turned again, so he jumped forward, putting the gun almost to her temple.

  “I said don’t!”

  Yet she turned still, all from her knees, so that their eyes met and the muzzle was suspended in front of her nose. Some part of him knew he shouldn’t stand within arm’s reach of someone he meant to shoot—he ignored it. He knew from her eyes that the fight had gone from her.

  More than that, when the wind caught her hair, streamers danced over her cheek and mouth. Her eyes were almost black, reflective, and they could have been Julie’s. The way she looked at him was absent hate, anger, even fear. There was a roundness in her eyes, concern— Shit. It’s pity.

  “I said,” and his voice caught, “turn the fuck around!” He ratcheted the hammer back.

  “What if you’re wrong?” she whispered.

  “I’m not.” He’d studied, he’d prayed, he knew. “I’m not wrong.” But seeing her face made the words hollow. When he went over the evidence and the signs now, it looked different—like an old cellar exposed to daylight, the shadows gone and shapes all unfamiliar. The story, scriptures, it was all… bent wrong—or maybe bent right for the first time.

  “I’d be dead if you believed that.”

  “I have faith. It brought me here.”

  “Conviction brought you here. Faith is the reason you haven’t finished it. You’re so sure you have to, but it’s faith that’s telling you: no, don’t do the bad thing. Even if you’re certain it’ll make things better, trust God. Trust you don’t have to do anything bad.”

  Something hot blinked out of his eyes, ran down his face. “You think the world works like that? What would you do? If the world were ending and you could stop it with a bullet? Because that’s our world. It’s falling apart, it’s always falling apart, and it’s held together by… willpower. By laws and the armed men who make them real. You think any of this shit—any of it—” He waved all around them. “—exists unless someone will pull the trigger? Everything, all around us, it’s all here because hard men do mean jobs.”

  She kept her voice steady. “I think the point of dangerous things is to protect people who aren’t.”

  “And when it’s gone to hell? When God takes you to account at the end of days, what then?”

  “Look up and say, ‘You gave me hope and a bullet. I come before you with hope and an unfired bullet.’ ”

  He snorted and tapped the scar on his armored vest where she’d shot him. “We both know it doesn’t work like that.”

  Her smirk was nearly playful, surreal from a kneeling girl held at gunpoint. “In my defense, that was Dad’s bullet, and you’re way scarier than I am.” Mentioning her own father seemed to bite her like a snake, though, and a sadness filled her. She no longer looked up at him.

  “He’s the reason—can’t kill him without doing you first. He’s the Antichrist.”

  “No, just a regular, old libertarian.” Still frowning, she stared off into the distance—the sirens were two blocks away. “You’re right about one thing, though. After Mom… if you kill me, I don’t think he’ll make it.” She blinked up at him. “You’re a dad too, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “No.” The gun felt heavy. He was so damn tired.

  “You knew about that other one—Banich. The one who wanted to tor
ture me. Rape me. Someone’s convinced you to hurt me, but they keep telling all of you different stories. What if you’ve been lied to?”

  He’d seen the rapist in the news. He’d met Wilkins and Burns firsthand. Shaking his head at fresh doubts, he wasn’t sure why it had never occurred to him before. It was like she’d cast a spell; or lifted one. The rising fear that he was crazy swept over him. What was this new voice—his inner critic or his conscience? “What about the demon girl?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Ryn?”

  “She’s not human.”

  “She’s exactly what you should be. Dangerous—but good.”

  Casper’s barrel wavered. The sirens were almost to the street. He had to do it now: there was no more time.

  Naomi stood and he backed off a step, keeping the muzzle centered on her chest. Without flinching, she wrapped her hand around the top of the gun, stepped closer until it pushed against her, and looked over the gun as though it weren’t there, meeting his eyes. “Tell me your name.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re familiar enough to talk about God and politics and to shoot at each other. You could at least tell me your name. It’s etiquette.”

  “Casper Owens.”

  “Casper. It’s cold up here. Let me have the gun and we’ll go inside. We can make sure Mark is okay. Maybe sit for a while. You look tired. Like a man with a lot on his mind. Like maybe this isn’t the time to decide whether to take my life.”

  “I have to. No time left.” The sirens were close, flashing blue on the pale snow. But his finger wouldn’t squeeze, not while she looked him in the eye, and when she tugged at the gun, he released it. “I have to kill you.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go inside.”

  ~*~

  Ryn tore across Commonwealth Plaza and sprinted the rooftops in Garden Heights, cutting through backyards and taking risks with being seen. She didn’t care. The sight of flashing lights at Naomi’s house made her heart lurch.