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

by Casey Matthews

  Merging back onto the highway, Wes and Horatio kept the conversation afloat while Naomi slumped into her side window, dozing, a victim of restless nights and the rhythm of dark highways.

  Her pulse quickened in her sleep. Realizing why, Ryn’s hands balled into fists at her knees.

  They turned onto narrower roads, lines masked by fresh snowfall. Naomi’s head rolled fitfully to one side and she jerked awake with a shout. “No!”

  She panted and everyone refused to look at her except Ryn.

  Horatio rushed to fill the silence. “C’mon, my driving’s not that bad.”

  “Where are we?” Naomi coaxed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, head bowed.

  Ryn had no answer. The boys had driven them far from New Petersburg.

  “Just wait—it’s up the next rise,” Horatio said.

  They crested the hill and Naomi shot forward in her seat. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yup.” Horatio pulled into a gravel lane behind a line of cars working through the ticket booth.

  “A drive-in?” Naomi asked. “They still have these? I’ve never been to a drive-in before.”

  “Real piece of history,” Horatio said. “My family used to go all the time. They open earlier and earlier every year trying to spin a buck.” He peered into the black-clouded sky. “Hope the snow holds back, or we won’t make it through both features.”

  With only a few other cars out in the weather, they found a prime spot in the middle and Horatio left the engine running, the heater pumping warmth into the interior. He tuned the radio to a station broadcast from the theater. “Going to turn the engine on and off to save gas,” Horatio said. “Hence the blankets.”

  He retrieved them and passed two back to Ryn and Wes. Then he unfurled a large one up front.

  “Just so happens you only have three blankets, hm?” Naomi asked.

  “I can go without if that’s a problem,” Horatio said.

  “Just making sure you know that I see through your machinations,” Naomi grinned. She scooted under the blanket and folded her feet beneath her.

  The screen rose like a cliffside of white, and she furrowed her brow at images projected onto it—the noise and flashing pictures captivated the mortals. She’d never watched anything on their screens more than a few minutes, but it startled her how their mouths closed and their eyes subtly opened wide. The pictures were jouncy, garish, but something visceral in them held the mortals’ attention, and she couldn’t blame them: mortals couldn’t control the speed of their perception, couldn’t make an hour disappear or stretch a moment to infinity. These moving pictures did that for them: she’d seen how they erased hours by cutting suddenly between two scenes, or how they distilled a moment with music and held onto it; in a way, a hint at how the divine saw the world.

  This film started with text insisting the events were based on a true story. Eerie piano music played and the picture swooped over a small, coastal town amidst trees and hills.

  “Is this a scary movie?” Naomi asked anxiously.

  “Yeah. Uh. Is that a problem?” Horatio asked.

  “No. No, it’s fine.” But Ryn could tell it wasn’t, and that feeling—guilt, Naomi had insisted—twisted in her belly, too real now to deny. This is my fault.

  In the film, a family moved into a house against the pleas of a menacing, elderly man with a leathery face. As the story unfolded, ever-less-plausible horrors befell the family.

  Naomi slid into the nook of Horatio’s body. Whenever something popped out on the screen—first it was just a cat, then later an eviscerated doll—she jumped, almost into his lap. Her fingers dug into his arm, his other wrapped over her shoulders.

  Ryn wished she could guard Naomi instead of sitting by Wes. Guard her from what? Yourself? The thing in her gut squeezed harder.

  “That little girl is creepy.” Wes shifted closer, then when she glared, further away. “Bet she’s possessed.”

  “She isn’t the ghost,” Ryn said. “It hides in her mother.”

  “You seen this one?” Wes asked.

  Ryn shrugged. “If I were an asura, I’d be in the mother.”

  “A what?”

  “A spirit,” Ryn said.

  Wes rubbed his chin. “I feel you. The girl’s got that psychologist, and they’re trying to make the shrink look evil, because she hates the mom. Bet it turns out the shrink is the good guy.”

  “Would you two stop guessing the ending?” Horatio grumbled.

  “What do you think’s going to happen here?” Naomi asked, her voice small. She squirmed as the mother entered a corridor full of groping shadows.

  “Ghost jumps out of the attic door,” Wes said.

  “No.” Ryn shook her head. “It’s inside her. So it appears from the mirror in the bathroom, down the hall, to the left.”

  The woman rounded a corner and a black thing flew from the bathroom mirror. Shrieks sounded from other cars, the camera shook, and Naomi whimpered.

  “Ha. Ten points to Ryn,” Wes said.

  “Whoever talks next is walking home,” said Horatio.

  In the rearview mirror, Naomi’s face drained of color, her shoulders tensed. That shadow—it had looked almost like Ryn when swaddled in her kanaf. One more turn of the screw and the deva’s fists trembled. She wished she could open Naomi’s mouth and eat her fear, drag it into her gehenna and burn it to nothing.

  The scenes grew darker, emphasizing the menacing shapes inside the family’s house at night, until Naomi’s hands shook. Horatio seemed concerned, but Wes—oblivious—whispered about potential ghost weaknesses.

  “One spirit can kill another by eating it,” Ryn said, “because they’re made of the same substance. For non-spirits, you must have Hell-fire or something sharp enough to cut a ghost. I only know one such thing.”

  “A plus-three vorpal sword?”

  An odd piece of lore to know, for a mortal. “Two things,” Ryn allowed. She kept her gaze on the movie screen and the rearview, where Naomi’s eyes were bright with fear. The smell was worse than the parking deck and Ryn clenched her teeth.

  Onscreen, the shadow creature pounced twice more, from a dark window and through water in a bathtub, where it drowned the family’s patriarch. Each time it appeared, Naomi squirmed. Finally, the ghost sucked the little girl beneath a car in the garage.

  Naomi threw her door open and bolted. Horatio sat momentarily stunned before following her.

  Ryn stayed put. What if she mistook me in the dark? But part of her wanted that—part of her wanted Naomi to scream and to see the truth of her.

  The teenager fled to the concession stand and restrooms with Horatio’s coat over her shoulders, disappearing between the lights, where her long shadow vanished.

  “She okay?” Wes asked.

  Ryn unclenched her hands. Blood seeped from thin wounds in her palms.

  Naomi’s scream cracked the night like a gunshot. Ryn threw her door wide. Wind bit her as she hurdled a car hood, forgetting her pretense of humanity, and slid to a halt at the concession stand. Horatio held his jacket, calling into the darkness: “Naomi! Come back!”

  A blond boy of middle-school age with an impish face and backward ball cap laughed hysterically. Horatio spun and lifted him by his shirt, slamming him into the wall by the women’s restroom entrance. “You shithead. Why’d you do that?”

  “What did he do?” Ryn’s desire to harm the boy laced every word and for a moment, she didn’t care that he was only a pup.

  Horatio glanced at her, then lowered the boy an inch or two. “He jumped out. Scared Naomi.” He nodded toward a mask matching the creature from the movie, discarded by the wall.

  “I’ll get her. Deal with the pup.” Kicking off her flats, Ryn jogged into the snow. She tracked footprints into a lightly wooded area beside the drive-in, where a copse of trees opened to a picnic area. Naomi sat hugging her knees on the picnic table in a ring of artificial yellow light from a single lamppost. Beyond the light, black trees hemmed h
er in.

  Ryn circled in the wood, looking in, a soundless presence that pricked at her friend’s intuition until she looked up.

  “Hello?” Naomi wiped tears and shivered, sensing the predator—sensing Ryn.

  A blanket of snow muffled every sound but the panting of hot breath from Naomi’s fear-squeezed throat. She blinked through glassy tears. Ryn stilled, her friend’s gaze panning across her, failing to catch. The pulse in her jugular quickened.

  “Stop following me,” she pleaded. “Stop sleeping under my bed. Stop stalking through my house. Stop hunting me. Kill me or don’t, but show yourself.”

  Ryn stepped from the trees, into the light, and Naomi jolted back. Her mouth opened to let out a scream. The monster silenced her with one finger to her own lips. “Shh.”

  Recognition came next and Naomi sprang from the picnic table, rushing closer. It was the hardest part, because it made Ryn’s hope flare briefly to life. But there is only one way for me to end this. Naomi had to face her demon—they both did.

  “Thank God it’s just you.” Her arms flew around the deva’s slight frame.

  Ryn didn’t embrace her back.

  “I’m such an idiot.” Naomi shivered against her. “So worn down, only ever half awake. I saw something jump at me, I just reacted—and I can’t stop shaking because apparently I dropped Horatio’s jacket.”

  “It’s not the cold,” Ryn whispered. “It’s the monster.”

  “I— I’m sorry you heard that. I thought there was a monster out there, the one I keep dreaming about. I was sure it was there, I could feel it, and I think part of me still does. Am I crazy?”

  “No.”

  “Was it the fear, you think?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “You’re right.” Ryn’s voice was a ghost. Her chest tightened. The words were hard. Not hard to find, like usual—hard to say, as if each one was a mountain to be pushed over.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ryn stepped back. “There’s a monster out here. Tonight.”

  Naomi’s face changed and something flashed in her eyes. “Don’t even joke.”

  It wasn’t exactly anger. Betrayal. The lash of her friend’s gaze burned and felt good at once, replacing some of the guilt with pain. Ryn far preferred pain. “Monsters are real. One has lived in your shadow for a while.”

  “No. You said you could tell. You said—”

  “I missed one. It stood in the lightless parking deck with you. It moves through your home’s dark passages. It stands here now looking at you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes you do.”

  Her soft face changed again, lips parting even as she accused with her eyes, a hurt so brilliant it burned through Ryn—all the pain her words wrought, she inflicted on them both and couldn’t stop.

  Shaking her head, Naomi glanced back toward the distant concession-stand lights. “Let’s go back.”

  “Look at me.”

  Naomi shook her head. “No, let’s—”

  “Look at me!” Ryn growled.

  The sound snapped Naomi to attention. She didn’t turn right away, squeezing one hand in the other, her skin matching the color of snowflakes caught in her glossy hair. When at last she faced Ryn again, her large brown eyes had dilated with prey-fear.

  “Watch now and understand what I am.” Ryn took measured steps back, pausing after each. A stiff breeze tugged on Naomi’s skirt, and she hugged her trembling body. The monster melted into shadow, wrapped herself in it like the wings of a bat. On the twenty-first step, Naomi’s gaze unfocused, and on the twenty-second she lost the deva. Easing behind a tree, Ryn slid from trunk to trunk, using not just the darkness but the blind spots produced when Naomi’s eyes searched for her—pausing when the gaze neared, flitting silently when it focused elsewhere. From inside the dark wood, she circled the clearing and her friend.

  The predator in Ryn smelled her friend’s rising panic, but Naomi couldn’t quite see her, couldn’t find the slippery movement. There was one human facial expression she could always read—a lurching fear at the realization one was being hunted. That expression crossed Naomi’s face; she pivoted and fled.

  Chase her! screamed Ryn’s instincts. Her blood sweet and muscles warm, she snarled—I shouldn’t have done that. But the sound rose as though plucked from her depths by dark magic. She burst from the trees, cutting off Naomi’s retreat while she was still glancing wildly back over her shoulder.

  Naomi thudded into the monster, stumbling back and collapsing into the snow. “This isn’t funny,” she stammered, crab-crawling away as Ryn advanced inch-for-inch, giving no quarter from the truth. “Why would you do this! Is— Is this some kind of test? Are you trying to prove anyone can do that?”

  “Not anyone. I am shadow and wind.”

  “Stop it.” Tears lanced down her cheeks. “You’re not. You’re my friend.”

  Ryn knelt and her only mercy was in not removing her glasses. “I am a killer and a predator. I hunted Walter Banich in the garage that night; I saw his ruined face. Do you remember how he lifted you with one hand? I could do that, and more—as I did to that man I tore apart in Whitechurch. Do you remember pulling out Banich’s stitches? Did it feel good? Because I think I was laughing when I broke his ribs. His femur? It snapped like tinder. I enjoy breaking things—breaking humans. It makes my spirit sing. And it is easy.”

  Naomi’s breath quickened and her head shook.

  “I am a monster. I am the one who lurks outside your bedroom at night, and I am the one haunting your nightmares.” The gorgeous self-destruction flowing through Ryn’s veins crescendoed as she tilted down to whisper, “And when I kill, it has nothing to do with war. It’s what I am.”

  There. It is done. Now she sees me—all of me.

  “Please,” Naomi whispered, her body curled into a ball and her arms shielding her head. She hid her eyes, voice barely audible. “Please.”

  “Please what?” Ryn didn’t like the pleading, and now the guilt returned—it didn’t replace the searing pain of having betrayed her friend, simply added to it. “Please tell you I lied? Please go away? Please never speak to you again?” She needed to hear it, needed to remember it forever, to clutch it like a talisman in case she ever let a mortal make her feel this again.

  Naomi’s breath and body seemed frozen. “Please don’t kill me.”

  “Kill you.” The words echoed. Ryn wanted to laugh. Kill… Naomi? Was it a human joke? No. She knew the position the other girl lay in now. She’d seen ten thousand mortal women like that before, kicked, spat on, beaten, raped. Ryn flinched away, stumbling. Snow fell in the dark wood all around them and it made her dizzy. “Please don’t kill me.” The words stamped into the core of her and the deva had no answer.

  She found herself wandering through the trees, Naomi sobbing in the distance. It was a while before she realized Horatio was shaking her. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” How was he so far away if he was shaking her?

  Ryn pointed to the distant speck of lamplight in the woods. Horatio ran off.

  She wiped melted snow from her cheeks, where it seemed to have gathered, its taste too salty.

  She hid. She didn’t know what else to do, how better to shrink into nothing, than that. Eventually, Horatio carried Naomi to the car, where he wrapped her in a blanket. He and Wes seemed to argue by the light of a phone’s LED screen, and the car turned on.

  Naomi had convinced them to leave Ryn behind. Good. Good and wise.

  But the car hit black ice on its exit. The tires whirred uselessly, lost their grip, and the vehicle lurched into a slow spin that planted its back wheel in a ditch. Horatio and Wes got out and pushed in vain. Ryn approached, uncertain, but decided to send Naomi along.

  “Get in the car,” she told them.

  Horatio glanced over his shoulder from the bumper. “Oh, thank God. You disappeared. Naomi won’t say a word, but… look, we had our phones off, and it turns ou
t something happened at home. It’s bad. We need to get her home now, there’s people after her tonight, and there’s a blizzard coming in.”

  Ryn slammed her shoulder into the bumper with the boys at either side. It shot up onto the road.

  “Got a good angle on it that time,” Horatio said, dusting his hands proudly.

  Ryn strode past them. “Get in.” She slid into the driver’s seat.

  They scrambled in, Horatio asking if she could drive, but Ryn didn’t answer. She adjusted the seat so she could reach the pedals and looked sideways at Naomi in the passenger seat. The human girl shifted into the door until she pressed the window glass. The deva lowered a console divider that had been lifted for the movie. Naomi glanced down at the divider, then at Ryn, as if to ask if she was serious. They both knew it was barely more than a gesture, and gestures from monsters meant nothing.

  “Seriously. Can she drive?” Horatio asked.

  Ryn stepped on the gas and pushed the vehicle over sheets of black ice. She manipulated the wheel, edged the rubber over clean asphalt, and the tires gripped. She smoothed them out of a fishtail and sped down the road.

  “Apparently?” Wes said. “Yeah.”

  Ryn drove through blackness and flying snow. Other drivers nailed their horns when she shot by. Horatio begged her to slow down, swore elaborately in Spanish, and Ryn sped past two accidents.

  Naomi never spoke, never moved.

  They pulled up outside her house. Ryn glanced back at the boys. “Get Naomi.”

  She went directly to the front door, pounded twice, and Mark answered. He had his pistol drawn. “Where is the senator?” she demanded.

  Naomi’s father stood from the sofa. “Is it her?”

  Ryn dodged past Mark. “She’s here. Safe. What happened?”

  “Police called us. Carol disappeared from the district office tonight. They…” His face was anguished. “They say someone pulled up in a van. Grabbed her. In front of her goddamn husband and kid. They saw it happen.”

  Wes and Horatio escorted Naomi inside, her father rushing to lift her off the ground in a crushing hug, and Ryn used the moment to slip into the night unnoticed.