Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  A black shadow moved across the Carlson’s lakeshore.

  I stood up. Ivan vanished. Across the lake, the shadow slowed, turned, and pointed at me.

  I grabbed my cell phone off the deck rail and ran for the shore. It’d take me seven minutes if I took my truck. Running the eastern shoreline, I could do it in five, as long as I didn’t twist my ankle. Swimming, I could probably do three or four, but I’d be fighting wet on the other side.

  I ran the shore.

  The shadow extended upward from below the window as if it had tentacles, then pulled back to its blob of a body. In the house, the last workers stopped as if listening.

  They didn’t appear nearly as alarmed as they should have been.

  I dialed Arne. His voice mail answered. “It’s at the house across the lake.”

  I hung up, dialed Dag, and left the same message.

  Ed answered just as I dodged into the first reed patch. “It’s here,” I said.

  “What? At your place?” He yelled at his wife over his shoulder.

  Mud squished into my boots as I picked my way closer to dry ground. “At the new house across the lake. There are workers still in the building. I’m halfway around the shore.”

  “Jesus, Frank—”

  I tripped on a log and dropped my phone into the water. It glowed long enough for me to scoop it out before it sank too deep, but it sputtered and died in my hand.

  I swore under my breath and did my best to stay silent. The creature might have better hearing than most, or it might sense my anger. I did my best to center and stay as calm as possible, and to continue moving.

  I tucked the phone into my pocket. Nothing I could do about it now.

  The shadow inched up the side of the house toward the grand window as if scaling the siding. It moved more like an insect than anything remotely human. “What the hell are you?” I whispered.

  I couldn’t be sure it was the same creature that had attacked Ed and me at Rose’s Hill. Not until I got close. But my gut said yes.

  My gut also said I needed to run in the opposite direction.

  I snuck out of a second set of reeds as best I could and then around one of the worker’s trucks. I couldn’t see the shadow well, nor could I see magic around it. But I smelled ash.

  Rose’s ash, from her hill. From her home. This was the creature that had attacked Ed and me.

  Arne’s attempts to keep it at bay had failed.

  It stood at the house’s foundations with its hands on its hips, watching the people up above. A woman walked over to the window and looked out, stepped into the room again, then stepped back to the window.

  She must have sensed something, probably in the same way that Ed had sensed it before. The two workers with her didn’t seem to care.

  The shadow creature pointed up at the woman. “She looks tasty,” he said.

  I froze. So much for stealth.

  The creature laughed. “You are not a man capable of sneaking in any sense of the word, dear son of Victor.”

  A large, black bird landed on the house’s roof. The animal cocked its head and spread its crow-like wings, but stayed silent.

  The shadow pointed at the bird, then touched his ash-swirling finger to his face. “Quiet,” he said.

  I looked up at the crow, then at the creature. “What are you?” I asked again.

  “You dropped your phone,” he said. “Did you think to bring a flashlight?” He pointed at the woman. “They’ll turn off the lights when they leave.”

  How could I be so dense? I had no way of holding off the creature. None. But at least for the moment the people in the house were safe.

  “You anchored yourself here before Arne closed the portals,” I said.

  The creature laughed. “I love how elves think they know everything about magic.”

  “You are not a simple demon,” I said. He was too articulate to be an unthinking creature. He’d traveled through The Land of the Dead an already fully-formed vampire.

  Was Dag correct? Was he an assassin? “Which clan sent you?” I asked.

  He continued to stare up at the window. “Clans?” He sighed. “Please.”

  He’d done what we’d suspected Maura’s ex was trying to do—walked through The Land of the Dead. “You already have a body. That’s how you anchored yourself here.” No other explanation fit the shadow creature in front of me.

  He laughed. “And you? Aren’t you simply possessing a body built by science instead of offered up by magic?”

  I stepped out from behind the truck. “I am not a demon.” My father’s words held no truth. “I am, like all non-magicals, the product of the life fueling my form.”

  The creature laughed. “Aren’t we all?”

  He appeared directly in front of me. Up in the house, someone laughed. A light moved, and the creature, who had been backlit, now had a beam of light filtering around his side and through the ash.

  He looked down at my face. This thing, this creature, stood a good five inches taller than me, an already monstrous giant. But unlike me, he watched the world from icy, honey-colored eyes set in an unscarred, strong-jawed face.

  An unnaturally handsome face framed by wide, lovely brown curls. His teeth glowed in the slight light, too alabaster and too predatory. I was most definitely face-to-face with a vampire—a vampire unlike any other I had met or knew of.

  He winked and stepped back. Like me, his wide shoulders fit proportionally with his huge frame. Also like me, he would have a difficult time with the mundane architecture of the world—doors, vehicles, clothing. But this creature had no connection to the mundanes other than to feed on them.

  “I will tell you the truth, son of Victor. I feel I owe you that much,” he said.

  “Why?” I should stay silent, but the more he spoke, the more information I gained. And if he was like all people coming out of isolation—magical or otherwise—he would be particularly talkative. Best to use what advantage I had.

  His ash cloak pulled inward. It tightened and settled, and folded down onto his frame like a well-cut, well-made suit. This demonic vampire stood at the base of a new house dressed in dapper death.

  I had been correct, he was traditionally handsome, but I was incorrect about the scarring. Along his neck and up toward his ear, a fine tree-like—or perhaps bolt-like—scar fanned out over his skin. Unlike my old and puckered scars before they’d healed and lessened, his looked smooth—more a discoloration than anything else. His scars would not disgust a woman.

  They could be a tattoo. I had a tree on my scalp. He might as well. But if his was Yggdrasil, it was a dark and twisted, deathly version of what a world tree should be.

  His eyes narrowed. “I will tell you the truth, son of Victor, because I wish to.”

  “Then speak,” I said.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and returned to watching the woman and the workers. “I had been watching for an opening into this place,” he said. “Waiting. The elven protections here are strong.” He sniffed. “I even tried via that dead witch’s books. I figured the two vampires here would help.”

  He tugged at his black ash cuffs. “They did not.” He shook his head. “Not their fault. That witch left as many protections as the elves have laid.”

  The woman stepped away from the window. The creature walked backward, to keep a sightline on her. “But there is a geometry to the universe, don’t you agree? A particular set of lines and angles that one must respect.” He waved his hand. “They can be obtuse at times, the angles. They can make passage painful unless you have a light to guide you.”

  I did not answer.

  “It’s scientific, really.” He chuckled. “Navigation. That fire spirit added just enough spark to allow me to see the slicing of the shifting planes and points. But, son of Victor, can you guess what gave me the beacon I needed? The glaringly bright light that illuminated my course?”

  The notebook. “Rose’s book was—”

  He chortled and pointed his
finger at my nose. “That book? Oh, no, my dear brother. That notebook was blank. It still is. The only thing it does is reflect into the real world any light in The Land of the Dead.”

  The flower… “So that flower was a manifestation of the firelight caused by Maura’s ex?”

  He touched the side of his nose and winked.

  “But…” But Maura’s ex wasn’t nearly good enough to light a path into Alfheim for this creature.

  “But what?” he asked.

  “But a tracer is bright enough.” A tracer allows magic to home in on a location.

  I never thought it might work both ways.

  He clapped his hands. “Yes!” Then spread his arms wide. “I called to you! We are connected, you and I. And you answered.”

  I let him in?

  “And once here, I turned that witch’s spells to my advantage.” The ash around him lifted up and wiggled, then dropped back toward his body. “The soot of the dead will cloak its wearer from most magic of the living.” He grinned. “But only if you are dead.”

  No, he was not a simple vampiric demon, or even one complex. He was something with an understanding of dark magic beyond that of the elves.

  “I called to you with the voice we both know so well.” He pointed at the crow. “The rage. The anger. I sent my friends and I had them glue it to you, to amplify the signal.”

  The crows. The ravens. The slime.

  He pointed a well-manicured finger toward my chest. “I needed the beacon of your pain. I needed to feel your anger at being forced to awaken inside a body polluted by death.”

  No, I thought. No. My father died shortly after he built me.

  “I’ve been looking for you, brother,” he said.

  What did my father do?

  My brother sneered.

  And my brother punched me in the face.

  Chapter 19

  I blacked out.

  Or I blacked in. I entered something—somewhere—that was not my neighbor’s property. Somewhere utterly human.

  Two hundred years is beyond a mundane’s perspective. What happened a decade ago is ancient history; what happened two centuries before was to be romanticized. So my pre-Victorian origins were, to most living humans, a flurry of uptight clothes, clockwork industry, well-mannered aristocrats, and imperialism.

  My father had been a man of means. He had the fortune to build himself a well-stocked laboratory. He understood his letters well enough to collect and consume other great men’s opinions about science. But like so many of the well-mannered imperialists of the time, he believed himself to be more important to the natural order of the world than he truly was.

  I remembered waking into a thick world, one soot-covered and coal-infused. The sour smell of unfresh humans and their wastes caught by the Alpine winds and carried away to other, uncared-about places. The noise of carriages and the clomp of horse hooves on paving stones in the village below his manor home.

  This memory-place into which my “brother” knocked me was the world of my wakening—yet it was not. Soot, coal, stink—they were all here. Steel and ice, as well.

  I’d never tried to explain to the elves what had happened to me, or how it was that I came to be. Two hundred years and the memories have faded to the point that I now carry more memories of remembering my pain than I do of the pain itself.

  The distance was what allowed me to heal the anger. When I began to remember the remembering more than the moments of agony and the madness themselves, it gave me a flowing river between the present and the past. A distraction of gurgling, cleansing water which, when I allowed it to, separated me from the worst of the pain.

  My “brother” had been bridging that river for the last few days with his magical slime, and when he punched me in the face, he lifted me up and dropped me on the opposite shore.

  I landed face-down in horse dung and mud. A nearby woman laughed. A man spoke unintelligible snark. Heels clicked cobblestones. Gaslights hissed and flickered.

  A fog rolled into an Edinburgh night.

  Scotland, not Germany, yet cold, crisp air, filled with the same soot and fumes. Same cruel human condition. Same uncaring within which I’d gasped to life.

  To the side, in both directions, a cobblestone street stretched between brick and wood buildings. I was on a hill, or the world tilted. I did not know which. But the building in front of me, a rickety and ugly tenement with more broken windows than not, rose into the night’s blackness. And at the very top, in one single, small window, a blazing flare of artificial light.

  No lightning. No storm, this time.

  How far up were they? Five stories? To my mind, it seemed to be two hundred, one for each of my years. Yet I knew what my father did. I smelled the acerbic bath and the bitter fumes.

  He stitched together bits.

  I started as bits—cut up, sliced apart, and set too distant from joint to joint for my body to talk to itself and to function correctly.

  This was what I never spoke of with the elves. I never thought they would understand. My body had once been bits. I never formed as a whole. I never built my own entirety. I started as a jumble with fingers disconnected from my hands. With guts unwound. I started unmade, only to be remade.

  And though over my years I have come to integrate what was never meant to be integrated, my size is not correct and some parts of my brain still believe myself to be those original bits.

  Mostly in dreams. Mostly combined with uncontrolled falling, or chaos, or drowning. But not being right has always been part of me, or more precisely an un-part bit of me.

  I was stretched. I was just a little too far apart to be steady. I was unsettled.

  And there was nothing at all I could say or describe to give another person a sense of what it meant to be made of the parts of others. Nothing I could do beyond causing an equal amount of fear.

  And fear becomes terror. And terror becomes anger.

  But I was no longer that patchwork thing. I could not be that monster. I was Frank Victorsson, a man with friends. A man with a community. I had no reason to fear or to rage. I was no longer bits.

  My father never understood. My father screamed and cursed me and called me demon. I was not the child he wanted and his focus had been on his disdain for that which did not meet his expectations. He could have helped me find what life I could inside my lack of perfection. He did not.

  Because my father had been blinded by his own self-absorption.

  So blind that he found his way to Edinburgh where he set up another lab. A better one based in one of Europe’s centers of innovation. And one in the heart of a land that did not lack magic.

  Up there, in that lab, the light switched from artificial to magical. Down in the gutter where I lay, the mud turned prophetic. The horseshit, the end product of nature’s anger.

  My father had added something to his formula for binding bits together—but he’d also started with stronger bits. With pieces used to being chopped apart and thrown to the four corners of the world.

  For his second attempt, in his immeasurable hubris, my father’s patchwork had been a quilt of vampire corpses.

  A bolt hit a rod above the tenement, but not a natural bolt. This one came from The Land of the Dead.

  I gagged and vomited onto the remembered cobblestones, and my mind asked the one horrible question, the one that chilled my gut and swelled my self-hatred: “Did you at least kill him?”

  My brother, this monster born of science and magic and evil, squatted in front of my place in the dirt. And my brother grinned with his razor fangs. “Of course I killed him. Someone had to,” he said. “If I hadn’t killed him, how could he haunt you now?”

  How could any of my ghosts haunt me? Lizzy. My father. Ivan. They all came with their warnings, but my geometry was wrong. I was pulled and snapped and stretched too far.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  My brother touched the tattoo of Yggdrasil on the side of my scalp. “You wear the world tree, brother cal
led Frank. You wear the balance of life and death, of knowledge and magic. You have been blessed by elves and gods alike.”

  He stood. “I know you feel that you cannot describe our unsettledness.” He looked up at the now-dark window. “I will, then.”

  Once again, he straightened his ash-made cuffs. “Death is a process, brother. Dissolution takes time. For most, it is what it is—a state change. But for others, for the tortured and the murdered, there is no beginning of the process. They come into their story in the middle.” He watched a couple walk by. “More dramatic that way.”

  He kicked a pebble and it bounced off my arm. “Do you understand the physiology of surprise? Of the sudden shift of attention and the spike in adrenaline? The firing of nerves?”

  I shook my head.

  He shrugged. “It makes prey tastier.” He pointed at me. “It also makes a consciousness all that more aware of dying. All that more aware of its own terror and the pain of the end.”

  The pain and the terror were the same thing. The need to run and vomit and scream at the same time a body was only capable of freezing in place. Nothing hurt more. Not a knife wound. Not being hit by a hammer, or breaking a bone. Being torn to bits, dissolving, was the ultimate, overriding agony.

  No wonder so much witch magic was based on death. No wonder my brother used The Land of the Dead as his conduit—besides its ease of access, it gave him both energy to manipulate and a freedom from caring about its costs.

  Not that a vampire would care anyway. “Are you one vampiric demon, or the stitched together bits of many?”

  He blinked as if I’d handed him the most novel of puzzles. “Does it matter?” he asked.

  Probably not to him, but it did to me. “You are only my brother if you understand the question.”

  Magic flared through his ash cloak. Red, raging magic. Magic pulled from this somewhere-realm dream—from him, I suspected.

  Behind him, the strolling woman screamed.

  My brother kicked me in the head.

  Chapter 20

  The woman screamed and screamed and screamed.

  My back and neck arched. My jaw opened and my shoulders dropped back. The top of my head hit the real ground and the real moon trail across the lake spread toward my home as an upside down, painted-on glow.