“It’s all your fault,” Chiara said, with a conspiratorial smile. “You offered them pizza and said you’d train them.”
Phoebe came in next, with a hand on Jon’s elbow to help him navigate, although he’d gotten a lot better with his white cane since the lamia blinded him months before. Tall, pale, and slender with dark hair and wrap-around sunglasses, Jon rocked a little of the Cyclops vibe. Scott came in last, quiet and wary, making sure to scan the sidewalk in both ways for interlopers before coming inside and locking the door.
“The pizza’s in the back,” Chiara said, leading the parade and gesturing with a whole-arm swoop to indicate we should all follow.
Crystal Dreams is Conneaut Lake’s only bookstore. Thanks to Chiara, it not only stocks the bestsellers, but it has a solid selection of science fiction and fantasy, the best gaming manuals, some manga, and LGBTQ books no one else in the area carried. There’s also an occult section we had personally vetted to ensure the information was responsible.
The backroom hosted activities almost every night of the week. The Cards Against Humanity teen night was open to everyone, but it also offered a safe space for gay and queer kids. On Tuesdays, the Bunko game was really the local coven’s gathering. Other community groups reserved the room for all kinds of activities that brought people together, especially the folks who didn’t fit Northwestern PA’s flannel-and-football culture.
I hung back, letting the kids eat first. Father Leo and I pitched in money for the pizza, soda, and chips. Chiara donated the cookies—her big Italian family owned the best restaurant in Conneaut Lake, with an awesome bakery.
Chiara and Blair made sure the food was set out, and then stood to one side, arms around each other’s waists. This part of PA isn’t known for being particularly open-minded, but Chiara and Blair both came from families who had been in Conneaut Lake for a very long time. That familiarity earned them leeway, which they used to make others feel safe and welcome.
Watching the kids jostle and tease each other, I felt old. Thirty-six isn’t exactly over the hill, but the hunting life speeds up the clock. Blair and Chiara were in their late twenties, and the others were barely legal to drink.
Once we all had pizza and drinks, we sat down at the table. Donny belly crawled underneath around our feet, waiting for someone to drop food. I’d warned the crew that he barfed when he ate pizza, and they’d be cleaning it up, but I didn’t really expect them to actually get through the evening without passing along plenty of contraband treats.
A potato chip rose off the table by itself and hovered in mid-air.
“Quit showing off, Scott,” Kayla said. “You’re just trying to impress Mark.”
Scott, the group’s fledgling telekinetic, glared at his friend, the budding psychic. “Not cool to rummage through someone’s head, Kayla.”
“It’s not rummaging if your thoughts are right there, flapping in the breeze like a beach towel on a balcony.” She rolled her eyes at him and grabbed the hovering chip, then popped it in her mouth.
“Hey, that was mine!” Scott protested.
“Maybe it had psychic cooties on it,” Carl teased.
“Have any good dreams lately?” Kayla shot back. “Did you win the lottery yet?” Carl randomly got prophetic dreams that came true, which sometimes made him scared to go to sleep. I looked at him and saw the signs of fatigue, which left me wondering if he’d had a nightmare that he didn’t want to talk about.
“Lay off him.” Phoebe was the old soul in a young body, but getting visions of future events was a heavy responsibility for someone who, even with our help, still barely had the minimum training to handle her Gift. “There’s nothing fun about spoilers.” She and Carl were close friends, bonded over their similar abilities.
“The old guy over by the stairs says you make more noise than stray cats at midnight,” Jon announced. We all turned to look, but of course, only Jon, the group’s medium-in-training, could see the ghost.
“If he wants to rest in peace, why is he hanging around here?” Scott leaned back, making another chip do aerial tricks, and this time, keeping it out of Kayla’s grasp.
“He says he was here first and muttered something about ‘kids today,’” Jon replied, grinning like there was a secret joke. We were never entirely sure when he was spoofing us.
“How’s everyone doing with the online classes?” I asked when the joking died down, and their plates were empty. They all worked real jobs—even Jon, who was learning to do computer programming with the help of adaptive software—so training on how to use their talents without hurting themselves or anyone else happened after hours.
“Good—but everything takes so much time,” Carl said, finishing the last of his soda. “How come it’s not like in the movies, where people just wake up one day able to do stuff?”
Phoebe smacked him on the arm like an annoyed sibling. “Because they’re movies. Duh.”
“And the martial arts lessons?”
“I earned my next belt,” Kayla announced.
The others all had progress to share as well, and we made sure there was plenty of praise to go around. When I’d stumbled on the group, they had already found each other, but they had no training and no way to protect themselves. That made them sitting ducks for supernatural predators. They’d agreed to use their abilities to help me out when I needed it, I worked with Father Leo and our contacts to get them the training they needed, and the “meddling kids” became a thing.
“Have you guys run into anything really strange in the last couple of weeks?” I asked. “I’m working on a case, and I could use some new leads.”
Carl frowned. “I had a really weird dream about this thing that had a body like a dragon, but the head looked like a squid, with all the tentacles where the mouth should be. It was a ‘real’ dream—not just a regular nightmare. They feel different.” Out of all of them, Carl still seemed the most self-conscious about his abilities.
“That sounds like a snallygaster,” I replied. “Could you tell where it was located? They’re not usually around here.”
Carl looked up. “Seriously? It’s really real?”
“Don’t you dream true dreams? Yeah, they’re real. Not very common though.” I didn’t doubt what he’d seen. Snallygasters weren’t something most people had ever heard of, so it would be an odd pick for him to make up.
“It was rising over a big brick castle,” Carl added and looked sheepish. “I know castles aren’t usually brick. But that’s what I saw.”
“Okay,” I replied. “That’s good. Anything else?”
He blushed, as though he thought his next comment might seem ridiculous. “There was a man in funny-looking clothes chasing it, trying to make it come back.”
“I’m going to have to think about that, but I don’t doubt what you dreamed,” I replied. “Thank you for telling me.”
“There’s a ghost girl who keeps showing up and telling me that she doesn’t like the monsters in her house,” Jon said abruptly.
We all turned to look at him. “That’s really specific,” I answered. “Did she tell you anything else?”
Jon’s abilities had grown stronger faster than those of his friends. Privately, I wondered if it wasn’t nature’s way of compensating for the loss of one kind of sight with another, different sight.
“She said her name was Penny Michaels, and she lives in the big house with her mother and brother, and the monsters don’t belong there.” He paused. “She wears old-fashioned clothing.”
“How old fashioned?” I asked. “Have you seen something like what she’s wearing on TV?”
“Maybe the Depression?” he answered, not sounding entirely sure. I didn’t know how much history he’d studied. “There was a picture in one of my books in school that had people who lived in a coal town, during the Depression. She looked like that. Not fancy.”
“Did she say where the house was? Or what the monsters were doing?”
He shook his head. “I don’t th
ink she knows where it is. She looks like she might be around ten years old, maybe. Sorry—that’s all I know.”
“Don’t be sorry—that’s helpful. Now I get to play detective and put the pieces together.” The ghost’s comment about monsters being somewhere they shouldn’t be, along with Carl’s dream about a monster getting away from someone who wanted to catch it sounded like they might have a connection to the mad doctor. If only I could figure out what.
“You’re not just saying that?” Phoebe looked skeptical.
I shook my head. “I really mean it. And I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about the case. But if you see or hear anything else related to monsters that don’t belong or are running away—please tell me.”
It was always a delicate balance of what to tell them and what not to say. They weren’t hunters. I didn’t want to get them killed, either by giving them information that drew them into a situation they couldn’t handle or by bringing them to the attention of people like Smith and Jones—or worse. At the same time, they were adults, and if I wanted their help, I had to treat them that way.
“I can tell you one more thing,” I added. “There are some men who might come poking around. Two of them look like the Men in Black, from the movies. The other man—I’m not sure yet what he looks like, but he’d be asking nosy questions, about strange things going on around here, or whether people have seen odd creatures. You really don’t want any of them to notice you and what you can do. That would be bad. Dangerous.”
Once again, I teetered on a fine line requiring judgment I wasn’t sure I had. Maybe an alternative existed between scaring the shit out of them and not having them take the danger seriously, but I didn’t know what it might be. Smith and Jones might haul them away to study like lab rats in some secret government facility. Brunrichter or Tumblety—I didn’t want to think about what their endgame would involve.
Then we got down to business with the fun part, a cutthroat game of Cards, definitely NSFW. I kinda felt like after this, I might need to go to confession, but then I’d have to repeat what got said to Father Leo. Not that it wasn’t all funny as hell, but my mom would have made me eat Tide pods if she’d have ever heard me say half the stuff that came up in the game.
Too soon, everyone packed up to go. Phoebe hung behind, waiting for the others to head out. “I, um, had a vision. But I didn’t want to talk about it in front of everyone.”
I wondered why, since the group had been tight with each other before I came on the scene, but I let her tell me in her own time. “It’s just, they’ll worry. And even though it looks bad, we don’t really know what it means, right? It might not turn out the way you’d think.”
That worried me, but I managed to stay quiet.
“I saw a hallway in an old building. Like a school or something. But, the paint was peeling, and it looked abandoned.” Phoebe seemed nervous, and she wouldn’t look at me.
“There was blood,” she added, almost too quietly for me to hear. “On the floor, on the walls. Fresh. And then I saw you, and you were covered in blood, too. That’s when the vision ended.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but I wanted to avoid spooking her any worse than she already was. “When you say you saw me covered in blood—was I on the floor, not moving, or up and fighting?”
“Standing. Running, actually.”
There’s a lot of fighting involved in monster hunting. Also a lot of running away. I didn’t take it personally.
“Well, if I was running, I couldn’t have been in too bad shape,” I said, trying to joke her out of worrying. “Thank you for the warning. I will definitely keep it in mind.”
She flashed me a self-conscious smile and hurried after her friends. Before Chiara or Blair could say anything, Donny let out a howl and ran back into the hardware store.
“Does he need to go out?” I asked.
Blair shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Donny came back, human—and naked as the day he was born.
“Jeezus, Donny—pants!”
“Oops.” He flung a hand down to cover himself, but we’d already had a free shot. He came back a moment later wearing gym shorts. “Sorry.”
Shifters weren’t much for modesty, and we were his adopted pack, but still.
“I heard what you said, about letting you know if anything weird is going on,” Donny said. “Thought you’d want to know that a shifter disappeared.”
“Shifter or werewolf?” I asked. I tend to use the terms interchangeably, but now I knew that there actually was a difference. Shifters are born, werewolves transmit lycanthropy through a bite. Technically, Donny is a shifter, but a lot of the packs think “werewolf” sounds more badass, so that’s how they refer to themselves. And there are shifters who can change from human into a lot of other creatures besides wolves. It’s one of those touchy topics I stay out of, since I’m not part of the community, and tempers run hot.
“Bobcat shifter.”
That caught my attention because it couldn’t have been easy to trap a creature with the claws and fangs of a wild cat and the mind of a human. “Where and when?”
Donny scratched his head behind his ear, managing to still look doggy even in human form. At least he used a hand instead of his foot. “I just heard about it, but I’m not the best-connected dog in the pack,” he admitted. It was true. Although Donny’s adorable new shifter girlfriend had helped smooth raised hackles with others of their kind.
“From what I heard, the guy was just reported missing a week ago, but no one’s completely sure when he disappeared. Bobcats are very independent,” he replied.
“So he could have been grabbed a while ago,” I finished. This wasn’t good. “Where was he last seen?”
“He lived near Tidioute,” Donny replied. “Apparently when he wanted to let his cat run, he went into the Big Woods or the state game lands.”
That area is pretty sparsely populated. Tidioute sits on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest, about an hour from Kane. “So the last time anyone saw him?”
“He said he was going to go for a run.”
I nodded. There were plenty of areas that didn’t have improvements like permanent restrooms or picnic shelters, meaning only hunters and real nature-lovers bothered because they remained uncomfortably rustic. Not the worst place to stretch his legs if he needed to exercise his cat.
“You have a name?”
“Corey Landon,” Donny replied. He looked a bit sheepish. I knew that it went against a lot of pack pressure to trust humans, and I deeply appreciated the honor. I also realized that some in the pack gave Donny grief for hanging out with humans, but he always told us we were a better pack than they were, and if he had to choose, he’d pick us.
“Thank you for telling me. I’ll look into it quietly. Not hunting,” I added quickly. “More like specialized search and rescue.”
Donny gave me a dorky, lopsided grin. “Thank you. We all fight over the differences until someone goes missing, and then everyone’s all ‘shifter unity.’” He rolled his eyes. I understood. Nice to know that some things stayed the same for everyone, furry or not.
Chiara had been quiet as we cleaned up the community room. I could tell something was on her mind.
“C’mon. Nickel for your thoughts… ‘cos I’m a big spender like that,” I teased.
Blair shot her a look that I knew meant, “tell him or I will.” That made me a little nervous.
“It’s all in the folder I gave you,” Chiara replied. “But hearing the gang talk, with the dreams and visions and stuff, makes me think we’re on the right track about Brunrichter or Tumblety. Pennsylvania has lots of abandoned facilities and ghost towns. I’m going to do some more digging and see what I come up with.”
“Be sure you look for Penny Michaels,” Blair added. “If her ghost is showing up complaining about monsters, there’s got to be a connection.” Chiara added that to her list.
“Sounds good,” I said, but my mind was still stuc
k on snallygasters.
Snallygasters didn’t usually show up in these parts, but if the mad docs were kidnapping cryptids, that could certainly explain its presence. They looked like winged dragons, with a Cthulhu-like, tentacle mouth inside a sharp, pointed beak, and a single eye in the middle of their head. Add in sharp claws and a screech like a train whistle. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing anyone who saw it would mistake for something else—or easily forget.
“Carl’s dreams are true,” I said. “Can you please connect with Travis and see what you can find out about snallygasters? Might as well bring Simon Kincaide in on it too, while we’re at it.” Simon was another friend who was both a psychic medium and an expert on lore, since he had a Ph.D. in folklore and mythology. “Since whether we need to rescue Snally from the crazy doc or trap him to get her back to where she came from, I’m obviously going to be getting up close and personal.”
“Snally?” Blair asked, raising an eyebrow.
I shrugged. “Gotta call her something, and the full name takes too long to say.”
Chiara pulled an untouched box of cookies from the family bakery from somewhere and handed it to me. “Because I know how much you love these,” she said, patting me on the arm. This is why she’s one of my favorite people.
Blair pretended to pout, and Chiara produced a second box for her sweetie. “Did you think I’d forget about you, pooky?” she asked in a sappy, exaggerated voice that made Blair mimic gagging.
“I surrender. Quit with the pooky-snookums stuff,” Blair protested, raising her hands. I’d known the two of them for years and could vouch for the fact that they were sweet and affectionate with each other, charmingly so. Blair just liked to protest to maintain her badass credentials. Maybe it was an Army thing.
If I ever got married again, if this thing with Sara turned out to be the real deal, I hoped we’d have a relationship even half as good as what I’d seen between Blair and Chiara.
“That’s my cue to leave,” I said, “and let you guys get a room.”
Chiara flipped me the bird. I did the mature thing and stuck out my tongue in reply.
Monster Mash Page 4
