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

by Casey Matthews

  Her head canted. “Then make me bleed.” She wanted it. A disturbing, alien thought, so dreadful and backward she hardly noticed the blow from Saxby’s tail.

  A wall came from nowhere and cracked into her, shattering. A follow-up swipe from the tail’s backlash beat her all the way through the dented cinder blocks and she blew through a second wall, smashing into the third amid spiderweb cracks.

  Up lost its meaning. She tasted blood, could feel it seeping from fissures in her skull, and it felt good. All the pressure of her building rage vented from her broken scalp and soaked through her hair. She tossed the fraying braid over her shoulder, speckled blood on the wall, and centered her stare on Saxby.

  “Again,” she said.

  His dark coils spilled like ribbons through the hole in the wall and he sneered with dagger teeth. In a flick of motion, his venomous tail opened three red gashes across her chest.

  Yet the red-hot glow of pain didn’t exorcise her demons.

  Beneath the bleeding cuts, she felt the wyrm’s searing venom thread into her veins, weakening her. Her body fought the poison, but it wasn’t the thing slowing her down; it wasn’t the thing dragging twisted desires from her soul—she’d ingested the psilocybin willingly, and whatever a deva consumed by her own will, whether alcohol or drug, affected her fully. She could see an asura, true, but now when the serpent licked her blood from his spiny tail and grinned, she could think only: To her, that is what I am. Bloody-mouthed, grinning.

  He struck with the twin spears of his horns.

  Ryn caught the glinting point of one horn and stopped it an inch from her throat. The force bowed the cinder blocks she was pressed into and the crumbling wall swallowed her, spat her out the other side where she tumbled through wind and snow. Hitting the top of a cargo container, she skidded across slick steel and jumped to her feet.

  On great and ragged wings Saxby descended, displaced air scouring whorls of snow from the broken ground where he alighted, just forward of the container. He rose, towering high.

  Ryn spread her hands to either side, cool air tickling between her fingers, the ache of poison and fractures not enough to slake her thirst. She met the wyrm’s unfeeling gaze, finding nothing in his soul but hatred and arrogance; nothing that wasn’t also in hers. “More.”

  He sneezed globs of ooze that smacked both her hands, viscous so that when she clenched her fists they wouldn’t reopen. She could wriggle individual fingers, but her deadly nails were each secured to the only thing they couldn’t cut: her palms. No more claws.

  Saxby pounced, snatched her in his hind feet, and on wings as wide as city buses, carried her up, up, to the top of Primrose, where he broke her spine against steel girders. Feeling winked from her limbs. She slid off the girders, dropping to a worker’s platform, helpless.

  Saxby brought his spiny tail overhead for the killing blow.

  But she still had cards to play. Threads from her kanaf pierced the back of her neck, shooting through her vertebrae and fusing a connection. Sensation woke throughout her—agony like black lightning—and she caught the tail’s downswing. Spines ripped through her forearm and broke off in the wound, the impact shattering her platform and dropping her through space.

  She caught an I-beam in the crook of her elbow, dangling over the building’s metal skeleton while the broken-off spines pumped her other arm full of venom—worse venom than before, blowing through her veins like wildfire.

  It was melting her arm.

  Before, the poison had slowed her. This one bubbled her flesh inward in bloody honeycomb clusters. Cinching a razor-thin thread from her kanaf just below the shoulder, she bit and pulled the line taut with her teeth, slicing off the offending limb. It thumped onto the platform below and she stitched the stump closed.

  Saxby thudded onto a steel strut below, slurping her arm into the back of his throat, gulping it down. “Lovely how my poison brings out your flavor,” he purred. “When I tasted your blood before, it helped me tailor this venom just for you. This sampling will evolve it even further, sharpen it so that my next sting will end you—from now until the End of Days, every little piece of you I take makes me better at killing you. I have your scent, monster, and now it is I who will follow you through the ages, killing your every incarnation.”

  Wind whistled against Ryn and undid her braid, the loose, whipping strands filling her with a sense of loss. Naomi’s kind hands would never do that for her again.

  “You hear me?” Saxby spat. “I am what you’ve always claimed to be—I am the thing that eats you.”

  She fastened her attention back on the dragon, its fury bunching all that killing power into a tight S-curve. It reminded her why she’d come: not to feel sick, not to mourn the phantom of a thing that never could have been. I came here only to kill.

  “—and when you wake from this death decades from now, I’ll bring you the girl’s bones.”

  Yes, Ryn decided. Too much time among mortals—I’ve forgotten what I am for. My purpose is simple. She tossed herself from the beam and flew past Saxby down the building side, sensing his mass behind her when he lifted his wings into a V and dived.

  At the third floor where they kept the laboratory, she snapped a tether from her kanaf to the building side and bent her momentum through a tarped-over window, rolling to a stop amidst workstations. Saxby overshot, shaking the whole structure when he hit the earth.

  Outside, Saxby threw a truck, roared, blew chemical fire into the sky. Inside, Ryn mixed his chemicals into an acrid concoction using the limited dexterity of her glued hand and her feet.

  He pummeled through the wall, dusted gray from concrete powder, all jaws and burning strands of spit. Ryn stood atop his station and punted a smoking flask into his throat. She shoulder-rolled beneath him before he could chomp down and landed a blow to his tenders that forced him to aspirate the flask’s acid.

  With the serpent choking and thrashing, Ryn dodged between his legs, bounced to the wall, the ceiling, and alighted on his spine. But his venom weighed her down and he bucked hard, sending her to the floor; he shouldered a workstation over and pinned her by the waist.

  His laughter echoed, interrupted by a wet cough that brought up sizzling mucus; he laughed again, louder, as he leaned his tonnage onto the workstation. A loud pop and jolt of pain signaled the dislocation of Ryn’s hip. Reflexively, she snapped a tether from her kanaf around a distant stool, jerking it into her palm, swinging it in line as he made to swallow her. He snapped his teeth closed on the stool, and she twisted it, jamming his maw open.

  But the metal bowed. The bolts strained. He had her.

  Almost. Bracing the stool with her shoulder to keep him at bay, her kanaf opened to let Wes’s batarang fall into a gap between two knuckles. She took aim and flung it, curving the whizzing steel around the room, to a stack of half-knocked-over gas canisters where it clipped off the stems of two pressurized tubes. They jetted like two steel torpedoes and one pounded Saxby in the ribs, setting off another hacking fit that teetered him, taking his weight momentarily off her.

  Wriggling from the debris, she lashed her kanaf onto her right leg, using one sharp tug to sink the ball joint into its socket. She bit off a scream, rolling to her feet.

  Saxby wheeled, mouth opening wide—he blew fire and the world turned molten.

  Ryn whirled her kanaf entirely around herself except for her remaining fist. Fire beat harmlessly off her cloak, and when it had passed, she snapped the burning cloth down, extinguishing the flames. Still wreathed in fire, Saxby’s scales had a hellish glow and the room was flooded with barking dogs, shrieking monkeys, and the scurrying of escaped animals. In the midst of the pandemonium, she extended her invulnerable hand, which he’d bathed in that fiery expulsion—the hardened glue had turned black and polished like volcanic glass and, with a flick of her hand, it shattered and released her claws.

  “My turn,” she said.

  She dove into the maze of his coils and cut him—cut off his tail, sent his
lower jaw sailing, laughing as she took him apart a piece at a time. He lurched away, steering for the entry hole he’d made, but her nails clipped off a wing, so that when he escaped through it he helicoptered to the ground like a maple seed.

  When he landed, he roared back at her while limping away. Ryn returned a snarl and leapt after to finish what she’d begun.

  But her killing blow never landed. With vision altered by mushrooms, she witnessed his spirit spread from a concentrated point near his heart, burn through the blood and separate into almost every cell of him, until he erupted. Flesh and spirit both split into ten million tiny pieces and Ryn dropped through a cloud of snakes, centipedes, wasps, and scorpions, each carrying a piece of her quarry’s soul.

  Swaddling herself in the protective fabric of her cloak, she hit the ground and rose, stepping on a single beetle, crunching it underfoot as all the rest of him slithered through grates, buzzed up into the sky, or skittered into distant crevices—too many to count, or to stop.

  Crushing the beetle had winked out that piece of Saxby’s spirit. Transporting his essence into so many pieces left them vulnerable to something as simple as her heel, but battling him in this form would be like fighting the tides.

  Soon they were gone and it was just Ryn and the whistling wind, the darkness, and the descending snow. She’d killed three asura, badly mauled the fourth, but there was no “almost” to this task. Saxby had her taste—enough so that if he stung her again, it might end her present incarnation.

  It wasn’t finished. Naomi wasn’t yet safe.

  ~*~

  She returned to the burning lab, knowing the asura could use mortal currency to purchase leverage against Naomi. Slashing the safe open, she shoved money and one-kilogram gold bars into it, slowed by poison and her missing arm.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, a sound distorted by the swimming in her head. She zipped the bag shut, stumbling from the lab. Blood drops fell like beads from her fingertips, pattering a trail on the floor. It would reduce to black dust once parted from her body a while, but she wasn’t confident she could slip past the police in her state—not while weighed down by the bag.

  Shuffling past Tooloo’s headless corpse and up a stairwell, she felt the chamber shift and slumped into a wall.

  Blackness covered her vision like a ribbon.

  When she came to, voices were rising up the stairwell, beams from their lights cutting through the precious darkness that hid her. I cannot black out again.

  Teeth gritting, she ascended the stairs to a floor open to the elements, surrounded by skeletal beams. Wind brushed her loose hair, cooling her sweat-soaked face. Blood now drizzled from her wounds, which wouldn’t clot—perhaps, like a mortal, she’d bleed until she died. The kanaf stitches in her wounds tightened, forcing a grimace, but staunching her blood loss to a drip.

  Below, more police cars arrived. They seemed small like toys, but there was no way past them. To shake off this poison, she had to sleep.

  Collapsing against a vertical girder and slumping to her knees, she scanned the work area and spotted a stack of unplaced cinder blocks. Too weak now to walk, she was reduced to crawling, leaving behind her a slick of blood and some of her pride. Lying parallel to the stack of cinder blocks, she pulled her remaining fist back, punching a critical block at the base of the heap. It powdered and the stack teetered, heavy blocks dropping atop her. They thudded into her hard, small body, an avalanche that covered her and the duffel bag.

  Lying still in her concrete cocoon, she slept.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Hollow

  For the third time since Ryn Miller had come out of the institution, Kessler stared at a New Petersburg crime scene reduced to chaos.

  It took the fire department a half-hour to extinguish the third floor and the process frightened about a dozen soaked dogs, countless mice, and several monkeys out into the frigid night. Animal control were now attempting to round them up, having to bob and weave around firefighters and their hoses.

  Kessler and O’Rourke sat on the hood of their unmarked car eating burritos in the flashing glow of emergency lights.

  “Is this beef or mutton?” It tasted a little gamey.

  O’Rourke shrugged. “Big mystery.”

  Examining the burrito’s contents, Kessler frowned. “Where the hell you get these at this time of night?”

  “Part of the mystery.”

  An explosion upstairs ripped an outer wall open and a pressurized gas canister whistled through the air, smashing through the front grille of a parked ambulance. O’Rourke took a large bite.

  “If you told me,” Kessler said, glancing from the empty ambulance to his food, “I wouldn’t eat it, would I?”

  O’Rourke nodded, chewing.

  With a sigh, Kessler finished it off. Wadding up the foil wrapper, he asked, “Is this burrito some kind of metaphor for the city?”

  “The burrito is a burrito.” O’Rourke swallowed the last of his and glanced peevishly down at his bandaged thumb. “This city, on the other hand, is a pain in my ass. Monkey bit me before you got here.”

  Uniforms had interviewed Carol Metzler, the senator’s legislative aide, who had woken a block from the scene, apparently carried to a stranger’s car and left there. Kessler had also snagged an interview with a senile woman hooked to an oxygen tank, whose apartment overlooked the scene.

  According to Metzler, someone dressed like the Grim Reaper had killed an anti-Bradford fanatic in front of her. As for the old woman? She was the reason animal control was already on scene, but she’d called them about the dragon.

  “I sure hope they don’t put it down,” she’d said. “I think they’re endangered.”

  After assuring her no one would put the dragon down, he’d excused himself. Now he was considering a second round of interviews, maybe getting a better description, like how many horns it had and if it looked like it was from around here.

  Summoning the courage, he glanced at O’Rourke. “You… you think it could’ve been a dragon?”

  “Firefighters are cleared out.” O’Rourke pushed off the car hood, ignoring the question. “Let’s have a look.”

  The bodies were upstairs. Kessler mistook the first for a beanbag stitched into clothing, but up close, he realized someone had neatly bisected a morbidly obese person. He nearly lost the burrito.

  There was a headless one a floor above and a uniform found another without a heart in a trailer outside. They located the head in a room next door to the body, but no one ever found the heart.

  The room with the head looked like a lab, maybe twenty surviving animals still locked in their cages, along with workstations and a massive computer set up with six monitors and a hole in the floor where someone might normally have sat—likely where beanbag-guy had been before someone dropped him down one level and did to him precisely what they’d done to Banich’s gun a few months back.

  “Huh.” O’Rourke steered the monitors to the side and set the keyboard up on a desk. “Good thing it’s stuck back in this corner, or the fire and water would’ve done all this in.” He flipped the keyboard over, peeling off a sticky note. “And look at that. Passwords.”

  O’Rourke started to work at the computer, and when the uniforms shifted to another part of the room, Kessler leaned in to whisper: “This was Ryn. Had to be.”

  The fat detective snorted. “If she did this, are you really going to arrest her?”

  “You approve?”

  “No. I mean… if a teenage girl did this,” he motioned all around—to the shattered floor, howling animals, scorched room, and the severed head two detectives were delicately trying to roll into an evidence bag—“are you going to walk to her fucking door and read her rights?”

  “Then what do you suggest?” he hissed. “This is a triple homicide and about seven figures of property damage.”

  “Keep your eyes on the prize. I believe that Wiercinski woman, the one who talked about this being a war between ‘gods.’ Or powerful men. Whatever. T
his place is a war zone, and I’m not interested in soldiers. I want the generals.”

  Kessler noticed how quickly and fluidly O’Rourke moved through the computer. “You think this helps?”

  “Whoever that guy was,” O’Rourke said, pointing down through the hole, “he was not overly worried about information security. Whatever he’s up to? I think it’s all here. The anti-Bradford site’s in his browser, and I think he was an admin. These guys were the whole middle tier—maybe they got wiped out by Ryn or, more likely, a team of Army Ranger fucking ninjas paid by someone rich. I don’t know, but from the safe back there, it’s clear these guys going after Bradford were mercenaries too.”

  “So maybe there’s a connection in the computer?” Kessler asked. “Emails? A way to figure out who was paying them?”

  “Maybe. And Wiercinski gave me a hell of a lead. Zmey-Towers, she said—did you know they lobbied in support of that security bill Bradford’s fought all year in the Senate? And there’s more, I can feel it. Just need to find all the pieces so I can make them fit.” His attention was laser-focused on the monitor.

  Shining his light on the safe, Kessler approached it and crouched. A small puddle of blood had gathered there and he leaned to get a closer look. It dissolved before his eyes into a patch of black dust. “The hell?” Swiveling the light, he spotted other drops dissolving a few feet away. He stood and followed the disappearing trail.

  ~*~

  O’Rourke copied files onto a portable drive, running a hand through his thinning hair. Sweat plastered his stiff shirt to his chest and his brain zinged over what he’d found, disassembling the pieces he had so he could fit the new information.

  Yes, this computer held secrets—a tingle of excitement and fear electrified his skin, one that meant he was brushing closer to those parts of New Petersburg most folks ignored. It was not in O’Rourke’s character or job description, though, to ignore a thing just because it muddied the prevailing theories of reality. He wanted to see the grimy insides; to pry open the casing and see what made his city tick.