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

by Casey Matthews

  He’d researched the Senate security bill Melody Wiercinski had hinted was center stage, which, though thwarted, had come close to passing after a series of suspicious defections. Four senators who’d opposed it had abruptly flipped sides. Two had been subject to harassment: one’s dead son had had his memorial page vandalized online; the other’s niece had slit her wrists after strangers passed around images her ex-boyfriend had sent to a revenge-porn site. Whoever operated this computer had coordinated those attacks, plus blackmail leveled at the other two defectors.

  It had the whiff of Soviet-era psychological warfare and manipulation. While O’Rourke couldn’t yet connect this computer to Zmey-Towers, they were involved. The company had formed after the fall of the Soviet Empire a decade ago, a corporate haven for oil oligarchs and former KGB. A member of their board had been implicated—but never tried—for war crimes in Yugoslavia.

  On paper, he knew Zmey-Towers had lobbied hard for the bill. Now he knew they’d done more than lobby; how much more was the question.

  O’Rourke paused by a rack of spilled gas canisters, picking up a dinged sliver of metal with his handkerchief. “You’ve gotta be shitting me.” It was a shuriken in the shape of a comic-book batarang—the kind idiot kids bought online. O’Rourke owned four. He deposited the batarang in an evidence bag.

  ~*~

  Kessler tracked the disintegrating blood drops up a stairwell and into the blistery air on the unfinished fourth floor. It led to a streak across the floor where someone had crawled, disappearing beneath a heap of collapsed cinder blocks. Dragging a block from the stack, he aimed his flashlight into the crevices.

  He spotted a limp, girl’s hand.

  “Ryn!” He tore the blocks away two at a time. “Can you hear me?”

  He uncovered her face, flashing back to finding her strapped to that post in the desert. But no—she lifted her gaze, eyes no longer swollen to slits and no longer empty of color. Irises of flaming blue lit her eyes in a way that seized his heart, stole his reason. There was power in her eyes that made him believe all her strange tales of ghosts and demons.

  “No hospital,” she said.

  But blood covered her chest—his stomach lurched when he saw she had no right arm below the shoulder. “You’re going to die if I don’t.” He reached for his phone.

  She seized his wrist with an iron grip. He struggled to pull away, not wanting his hand anywhere near those eyes. “No. Hospital.”

  It was her burning stare that convinced him. Relenting, he nodded, unable to think until she at last collapsed and stopped looking at him.

  ~*~

  O’Rourke’s phone rang when he was midway through the laptop’s cache of incriminating file folders—the call a welcome distraction, as everything in the one labeled “Splat’s Recordings” would haunt him till he died.

  Clicking the folder shut, he answered before the second ring: “O’Rourke.”

  “Remember how you told me to keep you… informed… when I do something a little off the books?” Kessler asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I might be sneaking a certain teenager down a stairwell right now. She’s hurt.”

  “You mean she was actually here? No way she was the one who—”

  “Look, you going to arrest me for this or not? Just asking.”

  Glancing again at that folder—remembering the things someone had done to a young drifter with a corkscrew—O’Rourke made a snap decision. “Fine. Whatever she did, whoever helped her, she’s still not the one I want.” Whoever had hired these bastards was used to slithering through the shadows unseen. But I see you now.

  “Thanks,” Kessler huffed through the phone.

  “Why are you panting? Thought she was tiny.”

  “There was also a bag of gold.”

  “The fuck?”

  “Look, I dunno, she had a bag of gold, it’s heavy. What do you want me to say?”

  “Ask her about the batarang.”

  Now it was Kessler’s turn to ask what the fuck.

  “Just do it.”

  A moment passed and Kessler muttered, “It, uh, was a gift from her date. She said.”

  O’Rourke glanced at Splat’s folder on the monitor again, shivered, and then looked to the room ravaged by some lightweight package of savagery and—probably—a dozen Army Ranger ninja sidekicks who’d helped her. He hoped. “Use the back stairwell. Leave through the fence’s rear exit. I’ll meet you in the alley behind in the car.”

  He hung up and popped the portable drive into his pocket, knowing evidence like this tended to disappear—swallowed down a weird memory hole, like everything else he regarded as black-binder weird, or else destroyed by someone on the take. He told a uniform to bag the computer as evidence, but kept the drive to himself.

  Sucking on his bandaged thumb, he swore for the hundredth time that one day he’d stop being surprised by this goddamn city.

  ~*~

  Ryn slept only during the new moon or to heal, but it was always dreamless—her awareness would have sharpened for danger, except Kessler placed her somewhere warm that smelled of him, and her slumber was disturbed only when he bandaged her. His hands startled her and she woke with a snarl, but his scent and clinical ministrations quieted her. Once bandaged, she sank into a fortification of covers.

  When dawn’s light touched her eyelids she roused and stretched, Kessler’s coffee mug shattering as it hit the floor. He’d wandered into the bedroom where she stayed and was now transfixed on her regrown arm.

  “You didn’t put me in jail,” Ryn whispered, unsure why. He was police now and it was what his tribe did—police were for jailing lawbreakers, as surely as she was for killing monsters.

  “Your arm.” He still gaped. “I thought—”

  “Are you not honorable?” She’d thought Kessler unlike other mortals—capable of being one thing, unchanging, of having no duplicity; closer to her kind than his own. “Why am I not jailed?”

  Shaking himself from the sight, he took his time figuring out her question. “It’s complicated. But I had a dad once, and he died half a world away fighting for these people—people he didn’t know, who I didn’t either. I never understood until I met you. When I got you out of that hell, I felt a piece of what he must have. That… connection you can have to kids who aren’t yours, family that’s found, not made.” His eyes tightened and he unclipped his badge from an inside pocket, examining it. “You’re big on honor. I get that. But I brought you here, you’re my responsibility, and I’m not sending you to jail.” He set the badge face-down on his bureau and turned his back on it, walking out. “Get some rest.”

  Family. The idea felt claustrophobic; like she belonged, yes, but also belonged to someone, and its first taste wasn’t good. Tossing her blankets off, she flicked the kanaf from her back, cloaking herself and scaling from the window with Saxby’s gold in tow.

  A few months and the Veil would swallow Kessler’s memories of her regrown arm; a few more and it might eat this absurd idea about “family” too.

  I was wrong about him. He’s like the rest. Like Naomi. They didn’t understand what it was to be constant as the stars—to be forever just one thing.

  ~*~

  With Saxby loose, all Ryn could do was hide his gold in an abandoned smokestack and guard Naomi during those nighttime hours when the beast would most want to take her. She was loath to approach her former friend’s home, its roof unwelcome and the scents producing the most rending sensation in her heart, urging memories forward that hurt for being so blissful.

  But immortals held mastery over the passage of time and what they beheld. Ryn banished all perception of Naomi’s heartbeat, voice, and aroma, attuned to danger while inoculating herself from memories too happy and bitter. She made the girl into a living ghost—into a gaping hole in the world.

  And what a hole it was. As Ryn lay awake on the roof, she knew that to surrender her control for even a moment, she’d be allowed to inhale Naomi’s scent and listen
to her strong pulse and the oddly soothing rhythm of her breathing.

  Any time she wanted to, she remembered Naomi in the snow, lying still and clutching herself, sobbing. That memory haunted Ryn most of all, making her want to flee into those unpopulated forests where she could live decades without bothering to have any thought beyond: hunt, eat, drink, rest, run, a part of the earth without being distinct from it; no different from the stones she slept upon or the animals she devoured.

  Some days, when Ryn felt certain Saxby’s presence was far away, she went to school simply to spend time alone—a large school, she’d finally realized, was as good as alone, if she could endure its smells.

  After hours of staring at dead words, a strange thing happened, and some of them came alive. One piece in particular she read over and over, as though there was something special in it. It was about a bird coming down the walk, its restless eyes and feathers somehow brought to life with ink stains, until at last:

  Like one in danger, Cautious,

  I offered him a Crumb,

  And he unrolled his feathers,

  And rowed him softer Home –

  Something in the lines came off the yellowed page and pinched, the syllables stamped into her brain, and she found herself watching birds and wondered if she ever again could simply watch them, live like them, without remembering those branded words.

  The time in school also brought higher marks, but thankfully no new attention. Other than a colorful sticker and different letters, it was the same.

  The cold weather broke, the days lengthened, and the moon swung around without so much as a whiff from Saxby. When the new moon arrived, Ryn stumbled through a day at Parker-Freemont half aware, even as Harper Pruett and his pack once again mocked that blue-haired girl. They’d Named her, so often and well that the entire school called her those things.

  The Naming and the mocking must have broken her, because on this particular day Ryn had to catch a knife the blue-haired girl tried to bury between Harper’s ribs from behind. Tearing the blade away, she tossed the girl back into some lockers.

  Harper spun to face Ryn, his sneer transforming and face going ashen when he saw the knife in her hand. “Help!” he belted out, shrinking away while gesticulating wildly at her. “That fucking psycho’s armed. Shoot her! Someone shoot the bitch!”

  The blue-haired girl slunk into the crowd with the same frightened eyes as that bird in the poem, disappearing even as the resource officer in her uniform strode from among the gawking students, leveling her electric weapon. “Drop the knife!”

  Ryn blinked through the haze, weary. “It wasn’t—”

  The officer fired and Ryn was barely cognizant enough to catch the barbed prongs in her palm, the tingle rousing her. The snarl she loosed sent everyone, officer included, clearing the floor around her. She presented the knife to the officer, then drove it forcefully into the wall’s cinder blocks, to the hilt. “Take it,” she spat. “If you can.”

  She stalked from the school, its bullies and cowards and clumsy administrators, intent on never returning. No one stopped her.

  Detouring through the parking lot, she cut Harper Pruett’s car in half.

  That night, Naomi and her friends attended a religious gathering called a “lock-in.” None of her father’s soldiers would attend, so Ryn did her best to shuck off gravity and follow the girls to an old part of Garden Heights with a stone Episcopal church, its iron fences hemming in a lawn of spring grass. Neither asura nor deva were permitted in temples of the new religions, which afforded some protection from Saxby—though Ryn couldn’t enter without herself being damaged, so she folded into a ball on the laundromat roof across the street, breathing in warmth from nearby steam vents.

  Heat made her muscles spongy, her brain fogged, and the weight of other sleepless new moons pushed down on her until she slept; hopefully she’d rouse if there was trouble.

  She woke in the dead of night, alert.

  Rolling to her feet, the sight of Naomi startled. Though Ryn lived most nights on her roof, she never really looked at her—but there she was, sprinting joyfully across the fenced-in lawn. That smile broke something in Ryn’s chest—broke whatever thing let her pull deep, clean breaths. At a full run, she was perfect in the way her hair flowed, body sharpened, all her grace on display. Ryn wanted to run with her like it was the only thing she’d ever desired.

  Naomi didn’t seem troubled, or to be running from anything, and soon disappeared into the church. Unable to put it to rest until she’d sniffed around, though, Ryn dropped to asphalt, jogged to the fence, and vaulted over. She knelt in the grass to savor its tickle against her palms, grass Naomi had enjoyed moments ago.

  “Hey! What the hell are you doing here!” hollered Denise.

  Ryn’s stomach tightened and she stood as Denise approached from around the corner, flashlight in hand.

  “Some nerve showing up here.” As Denise closed in, her expression remained inscrutable as ever.

  Blinking through the haze, Ryn shifted back a step. “I’ll leave.”

  “Fucking stalker.” The words were barbed, and she jabbed two fingers into the monster’s shoulder, more fearless than she had a right to be. “You hurt my friend—did I not explicitly warn you? And following her is screwed up. Hope you don’t plan on ambushing her out here.”

  “No,” Ryn swore. “Don’t tell her I’m here.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m twenty seconds from screaming some things that shouldn’t be uttered in the shadow of one’s church.” She set fists to hips, examining Ryn with an intensity that suggested she was deciding what exactly to do with her. “Not here and not tonight, but you’re going to fix her.”

  “What?” Ryn asked, retreating another step.

  “Fix her. You broke my friend. I thought it was her dad’s aide getting kidnapped at first, but she hasn’t talked about you since that night. What’d you do to her? If you hurt her, I swear to Christ I’ll—”

  “I showed her the truth,” Ryn growled. “What I am.”

  “Bullshit. You did something to her.” Denise strode forward, almost nose-to-nose as though searching for the truth in the deva’s blue-tinted lenses. “You kiss her?”

  Ryn stiffened. “No!”

  “Too bad.”

  Now Ryn was confused. It was the norm around Denise.

  “I stayed over at her house a few times.” Backing off, Denise assessed the deva again. “She seemed to want me there with her; she was scared.”

  Ryn tensed, remembering a few nights with Denise in the bedroom below. She had no idea what Naomi had been like those nights.

  “She jerks awake from the nightmares. Sits up with this wild look. But she screams your name.”

  How her palms ached—she’d balled her fists, cutting them again.

  “Of course, some nights she’s not jerking awake; she’s gasping, rolling around, moaning.” Denise smirked. “Not ‘in pain’ moaning, either. The other kind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Denise’s eyes rolled upward and she shook her head, patting Ryn’s shoulder in a humiliating way—but she knew things, clever and sideways things, and if the deva wanted to hear, she knew to ignore the gesture. “Sometimes when she dreams, it’s like she’s running from you; other times, more like she’s fucking you.”

  Ryn sputtered, a torrent of started words that never finished.

  “Since that night, my friend’s only ever half smiling. She broke up with Horatio—said it was because he’s going to Alaska this summer and she hates long distance, but Horatio says she wouldn’t even kiss him. Not interested. And that is a boy who’s not used to disinterest, trust me. So I don’t know, maybe she is and maybe she isn’t, but for a while, all that attention she poured into you made me wonder. I can’t tell what screws with her head the most: that you scare her, that you turn her on, or that you disappeared.”

  Remembering Naomi’s scent, how it changed when Ryn got too close, she shut her eyes and shook h
er head. “No.” She couldn’t let herself believe it; it made the loss too large if there’d ever been hope.

  “You’ll fix her, but you don’t get to make up with her tonight. You’re in pain, and you deserve it, so you have to wait. But in June, we’re all going to camp together. A week of outdoor adventure, right up your alley. You’re coming as my guest, and you’ll approach Naomi—timid as a pussycat—and grovel until she forgives you.”

  Ryn’s fine hairs went bristle-brushy, her words low and dreadful: “You have no concept of what I am.”

  For only a moment, Denise wilted in uncertainty. But she found her footing and turned her back on the monster, headed for the tall church doors. Over her shoulder she called, “See you in June.”

  “You won’t.”

  “You must be confused,” Denise smirked. “Because I always get my way.”

  The heavy wood doors swung shut, a dull sound that vibrated in Ryn’s chest, shutting her out from Naomi’s world.

  ~*~

  The city thawed in April, warm spring winds teasing Ryn’s hair; she walked the parks, starving for things green, and touched every blooming tree. Her school expelled her for the fight, though security footage showed her thwarting a stabbing, which plucked her out of legal trouble.

  She didn’t stay out of legal trouble. She’d been avoiding Roosevelt Place, but Ms. Cross’s fury at her expulsion led Ryn to return to the group home early one night. Coming in through the window, she caught Albert Birch masturbating beside Susan, asleep in her bed.

  In retrospect, she shouldn’t have thrown him through the wall.

  But she didn’t feel bad in the least about what she did to his nose. It deserved to be as crooked as the man.

  It was her first night in a detention center. She spent it worried sick about Naomi, planning to break out if they kept her more than a day. Kessler had posted bail by morning, and he and Ms. Cross both set to work—their case was helped along by the testimony of Susan and two of the Rabble, who described Albert Birch’s lewd behavior around boys and girls alike. He was implicated in the suicide of Susan’s old roommate.