Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  I was on the ground, on my back, with a hump or a log or something else pressing up into my mid-back.

  Except the log was soft. And a woman screamed.

  I gasped and rolled to the side—and directly over a face. A dead face. A still-warm man whose arms had not yet stiffened. A familiar face that I could not quite place.

  I checked his pulse just in case. Nothing.

  The woman screamed again.

  I looked up. The woman who had been inside the house stood on the pebbles up the shore, toward the house. Two workers flanked her protectively, as if I was about to charge. She flicked up her cell phone and took a picture.

  My brother did this. I looked down at the dead man again. “Do any of you know who this is—” It dawned on me where I’d seen the corpse’s features. He was one of the two idiots who had recorded Maura and Akeyla at the café.

  “Call 911!” I said. “Go back inside! The man who did this is… subtle.” I couldn’t tell them the truth. “He’s fast. You are all in danger.” I looked around, but all evidence of my brother had vanished.

  “You did this, dude,” one of the workers said. “You snapped that guy’s neck.”

  “What?” I poked at the body’s shoulder. His neck had most definitely been snapped. “I did not.” I’d been in an alternate state. A magical viewing. Not here.

  “You’re the neighbor,” the woman said. “Aaron told me about you.”

  I didn’t know her name. I hadn’t asked when I talked to her husband. “I didn’t do this,” I said.

  Sirens wailed not too far away, and blue and red flashing lights popped through the trees.

  Ed was on his way.

  Ms. Carlson turned her phone’s light onto my chest. The angle and backscatter gave me a better view of her face and the faces of the workers than I suspect she intended.

  Every part of her face had rounded in surprise. “I witnessed—” She stopped cold as if someone had ahold of her throat.

  “Mrs—” said one of the men, then he, too, stopped talking.

  My body wanted to jump up. I wanted to move, to meet Ed, but like Ms. Carlson and the workers, an unseen magic held me fast.

  A shadow swirled, and my brother appeared between Ms. Carlson and the worker on her left. He sniffed at her neck as if inhaling the perfect aroma of a brilliantly-prepared meal. “Mundanes,” he said, then vanished again.

  I gasped as his magic released my body. Ms. Carlson dropped her hand to her side and took the beam of her phone’s light with it. Neither she nor the men made any attempt to run away, or to talk, or to do anything. All three stood like mannequins.

  Ed cut the siren as he pulled his cruiser between the worker’s two trucks and onto the properties beachfront. The cruiser’s lights continued to pulse out headache-inducing red and blue flashes as Ed exited his vehicle.

  He held his service weapon pointed down, but still in hand and ready. “Frank!” he yelled. “Explain!”

  Ms. Carlson pointed at me. “He killed that man!” she screamed. “We saw it! He killed him right there on my beach!”

  “Ed! Get back in your car! He’s here.” My brother might take control of Ed, too.

  “Frank…” he said, as he raised his weapon.

  “I think they’re thralled,” I said.

  Ed yelled a rapid stream of Latin. Church words hadn’t worked last time, though these seemed different in cadence and structure.

  “Oh… your friend found some new passages,” my invisible brother whispered into my ear. “How modern of him.”

  He vanished. The feel of his presence vanished. Shadows brightened. The squinting induced by the pulsing of Ed’s cruiser lights lessened. But Ms. Carlson continued to yell and point.

  “I’m a lawyer!” she shouted. “Detain him!”

  Ed lowered his weapon. He looked from the frantic mundanes to me, then back at the mundanes. “Do you have video on that phone of yours?” He held out his hand.

  She tucked her phone into her pocket. “We do this correctly and according to the law.”

  Ed holstered his gun. “Cooperate or I’ll charge you with obstruction.”

  “He’s a murderer!” Ms. Carlson screeched.

  Ed raised his hands. “Calm down.” He walked toward me. “Frank, I may need to put you in the cruiser.”

  I looked back at Ms. Carlson. She gyrated around like a puppet on strings. The worker next to her stood completely still. “Where’s the other guy?” There had been two.

  A pop, and a bullet whizzed by my cheek.

  I dropped low just as the man stepped out from behind his truck, hands and large handgun raised.

  “Lower that weapon now!” Ed shouted. “Now!”

  The man’s face looked as lifeless as the corpse’s. “He’s thralled, Ed.”

  Ed swore. “Can you make it to the pallet over there?”

  A stack of roofing material stood about halfway between me and the house. “Probably.” I was fast, but I was also a large target. A bullet was unlikely to kill me, but it would hurt, and might incapacitate me for an hour or so if he hit an organ.

  The man continued to lurch toward me.

  “I don’t want to shoot him,” Ed said.

  I ran for the pallet. Another bullet screamed by my arm, and another by my back, but I made cover without a physical wound.

  But I was in the shadows, and the shadows held my family. The ghost of my father stood inches from my side. Even dead, Victor Frankenstein walked the world better integrated than his son.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  He allowed his hubris to be all that he was. He was an empty vessel, my father. He had always been nothing more than a shell in need of validation. Was he man enough to justify his fortune? Was he intelligent enough to never be forgotten?

  Was he god enough to cheat life itself and make a creature utterly, mercilessly his?

  I failed. I lumbered. I terrified. I was too ugly to be a beautiful child. So my father, unable and unwilling to find a more sating and nutritious filling for his vessel, went back to his addiction: his self-absorption and pride. And my father built a new me—a better me—from the parts of creatures who had died and refused to stay dead.

  My father looked up at the almost-full moon, inhaled deeply without inhaling at all, and leaned toward me. Run, he mouthed, and slid away along the lines and curved paths into The Land of the Dead.

  Ed shouted at the thralled man. Ms. Carlson screeched. And in front of me, in the blackness between the trees, Lizzy’s silver and gray muzzle beckoned.

  I ran for the dark forest in front of me.

  Chapter 21

  Sheets of magic lifted from Lizzy’s ghost fur and danced in the night air between the trees. The woods cooled, and the branches crackled. The scent of sun shifted toward the thicker, foggier silver of deep night. Humidity touched my nose and throat, and damp moss the soles of my boots.

  I followed a phantom of moon magic deep into the primordial forests at the heart of a continent. Squirrels watched me from their hollows. An owl hooted from the treetops. Birds were here, somewhere, hiding in their nests and awaiting the return of sun and warmth. Some plants opened their blossoms to the moon, others, like the birds, hid away instead.

  Most creatures in the woods understood the night. They knew if they were equipped for the dark, or if they should huddle and wait it out.

  Night, day, it did not matter. I was now, and had always been, out of my element. This world was for the living. I was a man made of dead puzzle pieces.

  Was my brother as disjointed as I? Each step, for me, was the coordinated effort of legs and blood vessels that only knew each other because they’d been locked in the same room for two hundred years. They fought at times; they laughed and danced at others. But they were not singular.

  My meditations helped. I learned the basics of psychology and biology when I went to college. My education somehow allowed me to follow the trails into a spotty understanding of what my father had done. But
my joints still crackled. My back did not always align. My breathing did not always do what it was supposed to do, and I met each morning with more death on my skin than warmth.

  I was alone, yet I was never alone with myself.

  My brother killed one of his minions and thralled others to frame me for the murder. Not as a way to remove me from the picture—no, Ed would deal with this issue. My brother murdered to feed his vampiric need for mayhem and chaos that was as strong as his need for blood.

  Lizzy’s ghost stayed just out of reach as she led me through the brambles.

  “Where are you leading me?” I asked.

  She looked over her shoulder and noiselessly barked. Then my long-dead hound, the beautiful beast who once walked at my side, who pulled my sled and led the way because there always had to be forward movement—always—leaped a log into a clearing and vanished into a spray of magic sparks and ribbons.

  A column of glow dropped through the air to a patch of wildflowers at the center of the clearing. Fireflies rose from the flowers like tiny sparks of magic—green and lovely and more alive than a flame could possibly be.

  The clearing itself wasn’t much more than twenty feet across, and the flower patch no more than seven. A sweet, honeydew-like scent increased and decreased with the breeze, as did the fluttering of the fireflies.

  I looked up. The moon hung directly overhead. A perfectly perpendicular shaft of light dropped directly into the flowers.

  I looked down at the ground.

  Rose stood in the flowers. Rose, with her tight black curls and her large, bear-brown eyes. My lovely, good Rose.

  She wore a fluttering white gown of translucent fabric, one that bared her arms but covered her breasts, torso, and legs with tucks and gathers. Her hair had been pulled back from her face and tied into a knot at her crown.

  My Rose looked more goddess than ghost.

  “Are you real?” I asked.

  Slowly, she blinked. And just as slowly, she smiled.

  “I’m so sorry, Rose,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I’m sorry I allowed you so much agony. No one deserves to die writhing in insanity.”

  Rose looked up at the moon. “I do not have much time, Father,” she said.

  She spoke? Ghosts did not speak.

  “I’m not a ghost. Not like Lizzy or your father.” She twirled around. “I cleansed myself of the pain and that cleansing brought me one last time to you.”

  She extended her hand.

  I took a step into the clearing.

  “I wish I had time to explain,” she said. “To give you a sense of this magic.”

  I reached out for her hand.

  Rose slapped her hands over my ears and dug in her fingers. She floated up like a movie phantom, her dress billowing off bits of white, gauzy smoke as if a strong wind blew through the clearing. But we were alone with only the breeze and the moonlight.

  She hung there, in the magic of the universe, at eye level with me. No real hands gripped the sides of my head. No warmth, no skin, no sweat or dirt or the joy of living. Just a tiny portion of what once was my dear Rose.

  I sensed the lack of depth to the magic around me. This Rose was all that shimmered, and nothing that toiled. This was a reflection that had been put through filters to remove the grease, and the filth, and the pain. Like Ivan’s ghost had done for me, she had been cleansed of the slime.

  This Rose was more for me than for her.

  She smiled again. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” She floated closer. “Since when has the world been that simple?”

  Nothing was simple when magic was involved.

  “I left you everything you need.” She pointed over my shoulder in the direction of her hill. “You need to clean off the ash, too, Father.”

  The moon’s beam moved, or the world moved under the beam, and Rose disappeared.

  “Rose?” I swiped at the air. “Damn it! Why are spirits so vague?”

  I wanted to rip up all the flowers, but wanton destruction would help no one, and I knew deep in my heart that killing things—even blossoms—was the last thing Rose would want me to do. She’d spent her life fighting the black urges. I had spent my life fighting those same urges. They pulled from different wells, her urges and mine, but their effect was the same.

  Different engines, same outcome. Agony had a way of destroying no matter its cause.

  “What did you leave, Rose?” I yelled. “Size, shape, and color?” Animal, mineral, or vegetable? I thought.

  No answer from the night or the spirit world. No call from The Land of the Dead. Only my own breathing and the chirps of well-hidden frogs.

  But I knew: She wanted me to trek to her hill in the dark, without my phone, or a weapon, or a flashlight. Or my dog.

  I rubbed my forehead. I knew which way to go in a general sense. But this clearing was new to me, and I didn’t quite have my bearings. “Should I trust my instincts?” I asked the breeze.

  Which set of instincts? The ones from the brain in my head, or the ones from the piecemeal body it inhabited? Or perhaps from the piecemeal, gifted magic tattooed onto my body.

  I rolled over my arm and stared at the tracer tattoos marked from my wrist to my elbow. They also shimmered with moonglow. And Earth magic. And family. “Lot of good you’ve done,” I mumbled.

  What good are protection enchantments if they don’t protect? But the ones I carried did protect me—they just protected me from living magic.

  I touched the tattoo of Yggdrasil on the side of my head. Arne had made no secret that he considered me of many realms, and that he believed the tree fit my soul.

  But the tree was life. I rubbed at my hair. Perhaps someday I would understand.

  I never realized how little of vampire magic I saw. Tony and Ivan—as well as every other vampire I have had the displeasure of meeting—did not exude any sense of the magical. They oozed metastasized addiction. Nothing a vampire did was of its own free will. A vampire served its bloodlust, and thus its demon.

  Yet that bloodlust gave its demon its own special, dark anti-magic. And my brother had found a way to control it.

  My father had tried to build a better mundane with me. Larger, faster, quicker at learning book knowledge—that was me. But the perfection that was supposed to be me had been decanted into a faulty vessel.

  So he had made a new larger-faster-quicker vessel from parts with a wholly different imperative. Because of hubris.

  “I should have chased you, Father,” I said. “I should have carried you with me into this new land.” If I had strapped him to my sled, the elves would have put a fear of all the gods and of magic itself into him. And perhaps he would have found some humility.

  Fireflies danced over the meadow’s white blossoms. I looked up at the moon, then out at the small pops of green flitting through the air. Time to make my way to Rose’s Hill.

  Chapter 22

  Every breath was a boundary crossed. Every moment one staved off death was a step into another realm. The big difference between living and a state of death was caring about the transition.

  Rose’s Hill breathed, but it did not live. The ash reflected, but the ash did not care. And somewhere in it Rose had left me “all I needed.”

  On top of the hill, the sense of peaks and valleys remained, as did the otherworldly calm. The realm into which she’d shunted her cottage was a moment without a boundary, a place one could not cross out of with ease.

  It was a borderland on the edges of death, a slow place where the labor of living began to give way to the endless uncaring. A shadowed place of ashes and vampires.

  The cottage had manifested once again as a solid phantom. The door opened like a real door, and the little house smelled of Rose’s herbs and minerals—thyme, sage, salt, sulfur. No heat rose from the hearth’s stones, and no sighs from the sleeping loft. The stepping stone papers that had ignited a path to the portal were back to their original form. No portal shimmered.

  I was utterly al
one.

  And there, on the floor in the center of the cottage, sat the only thing not made of its own remains: The blank notebook.

  I walked directly to it, picked it up, and walked out of the cottage in one swift movement.

  The door slammed behind me and the entire structure—the entire frozen moment Rose’s cottage occupied—vibrated.

  For a second, I considered trying the door. What if it was locked? What if I’d taken the wrong artifact? Would I be able to get back inside if I needed to?

  But these were all the questions a trap used to spring its jaws, so I did not. I flipped through the notebook’s pages instead.

  Nothing. No writing. No notes or drawings, not even a smudge, just like before.

  I slammed it shut and flipped it over to look at the spine.

  A dagger fell out.

  I flipped it over and opened it again. Still blank. I rotated it and shook.

  Nothing.

  The notebook obviously had a mind of its own. I tucked it under my arm and picked up the dagger—if it could be called a dagger.

  A bolt of energy ran up my arm, but the dagger did not force me to drop it. Whatever magic it possessed, it seemed okay with me touching it.

  The object was more a stake than anything else, and one forearm-length carved piece of hardwood. The hilt and guards had been stained a deep red, and the grip wrapped in leather.

  A shallow channel ran down the center of the blade and had been domed over by what appeared to be thin and fragile glass. The liquid inside glimmered with magic.

  Someone had added a break-on-impact vessel full of a potion—holy, perhaps—to what appeared to be a vampire-killing weapon.

  I tested the edge.

  It cut into my finger. For wood, it was exceptionally sharp. Yes, this wooden knife was meant to stop the heart of a fiend.

  “Thank you, Rose,” I said. “Thank you from the bottom of the bits that make up my heart.” Though retrieving this artifact had been much too easy. I understood how magic worked. Balance must be retained. The elves and their brethren had a connection to all things earth, air, water, and fire, and could shift elements to achieve that balance. A witch’s faulty connection caused breakdowns.