There's No Such Thing as Monsters

by Ren Ryder

  An unusual sluggishness seeped into my limbs, and I yawned. I inched backwards on the bed until my back was against the wall. Through heavy-lidded eyes, I could just make out the rambunctious pair frolicking around the room, like they hadn’t a care in the world.

  Days like these could be… nice.

  I was awoken sometime later by a finger jabbed in my stomach and Sammie’s face pressed up against mine. “Father’s late!” Sammie proclaimed.

  “Huh… what?”

  Groggily, I looked out the window and saw night had New London fully in its grasp. The shadows wriggled like living things and through a break in the dark clouds I saw a full moon was on the rise.

  “Oh, right. Now that you mention it, isn’t it past time the Father should have returned? Wonder if I should check in on him.”

  A bolt of forked lightning lit up the sky, followed closely by a blast of thunder.

  I gulped. “Yeah, that’s not ominous at all. Nope.”

  Not fully present, I half-opened the backdoor of the chapel, which was positioned diagonally behind the lectern.

  “Hah?”

  The smell of blood flooded my nostrils, sticky and wet with a sharp tang of iron. The sliver of hopelessness and dread that always haunted the back of my mind morphed into full blown despair.

  “Haha, no way…” I picked up my feet, which all of sudden felt like they were nailed to the floor, and threw the door wide as its squeaky hinges screeched a death cry.

  The second thing that caught my notice was bad enough, but I knew it wouldn’t be the worst thing I saw tonight. One of the candles offered in remembrance of the dead guttered and went out.

  “Ah, Kal. There you are! How silly of me, is it that late already?”

  Disbelieving laughter escaped my lips, like a demonic urge. My aura morphed and produced a dozen night-black pincushions that pulsed and spun in a vortex around me, along with half as many purple orbs lit with a foreboding inner light.

  I fell to my knees and cradled the sides of my head in my hands. “Wh-what the hell happened here, Father…?!”

  “Oh, this?” Father Gregory looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time, “You see…”

  The rational portion of my brain kept running like a persistent fever, while the rest of my mind curled up in a corner. Blood painted the walls, the lectern and the front row of pews. There was so much of it. All this blood from a single body?

  Father Gregory chuckled drily. “Well, you can see what happened as well as I can, I reckon. I’m a bit surprised myself, to say the least.” With a dramatic wave of his hand, he directed my attention to the grisly scene.

  My vision flickered and I looked through the ghostly apparition of the Father. Laid facedown at the foot of the lectern was the Father’s still-warm body. Heat haze rose from the corpse, its priestly vestments stained crimson. Mechanically, I counted the jagged rents in the cloth. He’d been stabbed fourteen times. Fourteen!

  He was a good man. A devout man. A pillar of the community. Who would have wanted to hurt him? For a man like him, there couldn’t have been an end less fitting.

  I knelt by the Father’s side, rolled the body over and gently closed the man’s sightless eyes. In death his face was locked into a rictus of terror, so I smoothed over his features with my sticky, bloodied hands.

  The cross seemed to be glaring at me.

  “I’ve gathered there is little love in you for the divine outside curses, but I would be happy to know you keep it in remembrance.”

  Nodding, not trusting myself to speak, I slid my hand under the back of the Father’s head, slipped off the silver cross, and slipped its thick chain over my own neck.

  “Who did this? Why? Is it,” I gulped, not wanting to voice the last question, but knowing I had to, “Is it my— our fault?” My hands were shaking, so I clenched them into fists.

  Father Gregory regarded me silently for several seconds, his expression grave. “Now’s not the time to lay blame, boy. The men who did this came armed and with a purpose. My mortal coil seems to have burned out, but I can’t believe the Lord meant for the same to hold true for you two.” He flashed me a self-deprecating smile.

  “No,” I shook my head, not wanting to believe he was gone despite being confronted with his beaten and broken body. Then I was on my feet in a flash. “Sammie!”

  “Go boy, go now, before it’s too late.”

  Father Gregory graced me with a beatific smile that was more painful to behold than anything else that’d happened. “Go with God, may he watch over, protect, and guide you on your journey,” the Father crossed himself and his ethereal body fractured then burst into a million motes of light.

  Achingly cold, dark fury took up residence in my chest over my heart. Anger rolled off my body in waves. “Ah—” I dug bloody furrows into the skin of my forearms, breathing ragged. With a huge show of effort, I put a lid on my raging emotions and forced down the pain and despair.

  I half-ran, half stumbled over myself to get back to the cottage, my mind a chaotic mess. The front door was already open when I got there. Half off its hinges and with the corridor sheathed in darkness beyond, to me the entryway looked like a portal to hell. Without slowing I leapt through its broken remains.

  Standing in the doorway to our shared room, the world stuttered to a stop. There was blood on the floorboards and Sammie’s stuffed animal had been utterly, completely, and painstakingly ripped to shreds. My vision flickered, my ears rang, and my vision was flooded with whitewash. Assaulted by sudden nausea, I covered my mouth with both hands and tried not to be sick.

  I have to be logical. I have to take stock of the situation. I can’t accomplish anything like this.

  “Bell!”

  I plucked the limp, unconscious faery off the floorboards and shook her violently, until I was rewarded with a scream. The tiny creature stopped screaming and gulped when it saw my face.

  “Did you see what happened? Did you see who did this? What happened to Samantha? Is she okay? Is she—” I bit off my words and part of the inside of my cheek, flooding my mouth with the coppery taste of blood. I wouldn’t and couldn’t allow myself the weakness of saying those words out loud.

  “Sh-she w-was alive wh-when I la-last s-saw her!”

  “How do I find her?!”

  Bell gave me a frantic nod. “There’s a tracking spell—”

  “Tell me how!”

  “Y-you’ll need s-some of her b-blood and h-hair to make it work.”

  My teeth strained under the weight of my clenched jaw, but I worked with brutal efficiency under the direction of the captured sylph. I smothered my questions and even my thoughts, focusing solely on completing the series of tasks Bell laid out for me. When it was done, a monstrous anticipation rose up from the depths of the repressed, recessed corners of my mind.

  I felt not a glimmer of satisfaction, nor even awe for my first feat of magic, only a grim determination to see it through. “I have your guarantee that this hocus-pocus will work, right?”

  Stiff as a board, Bell nodded.

  A parody of a smile stretched the contours of my face into what I didn’t doubt was a gruesome sight. “Good.” My voice sounded hard, clipped, and severe even to my own ears.

  With murder in my heart, I followed the improvised magical beacon to wherever it may lead: come hell or high water, if I had to chase her to the ends of the earth, I would reunite with Sammie.

  Chapter Four

  “Well, here we are. Wherever here is supposed to be.”

  For reasons known only to those responsible for Sammie’s kidnapping, I’d found myself in front of a warehouse near the auction hall in downtown New London. The streets were quiet and lit only intermittently every hundred feet or so by a series of gas lampposts.

  I imagined the full moon looking upon the night’s proceedings with great interest. To me, the extra light was something of a nuisance.

  Bell struggled mightily with her twig-like arms until she was ab
le to free her head from my breast pocket, gasping. “Abducting a lady without even exchanging names first is the height of arrogance you know!”

  At this point, I had absolutely no expectations of the diminutive faery— if anything, I trusted that she would get in the way at a crucial moment?

  Still, she was growing on me, sort of like a toxic mold might maybe, but growing on me all the same. I wouldn’t have been able to find this place without her direction, so even if she wasn’t going to be doing any heavy lifting, she earned herself a front row seat. And I intended to give her a show.

  Her attitude is completely at odds with the tension of the situation. But— huh. I never did tell her my name, did I? Sort of an incredible achievement in its own way.

  I shook my head, clearing it of stray thoughts. I pressed my ear flush up against the warehouse near the window and continued my vigil. It wasn’t long before I was rewarded for my patience.

  “Two and a half weeks spent tailing that gods-damned priest and casing the neighborhood on your word—” Hacking coughs interrupted the speaker midway.

  I peeked through the window for an instant to get a look into the dim room and saw three men arrayed around a low table, sitting on makeshift chairs made from repurposed crates.

  Another one of the goons patted the sickly fellow on the shoulder. “Believe me, friend, a natural-born mage will fill our cups and bellies for a year or more. Just you wait, it will all have been worth it.”

  A third voice cut into the chatter. “Hurry and put her in the cage— she’s waking up.

  A chillingly familiar voice screamed. Sammie. No matter how much I strained, I couldn’t get a good enough look inside to lay eyes on her, but I was reassured regardless.

  She’s alive!

  Relief flooded my limbs and I swayed on my feet before I propped myself up with a deep and furious, burning rage. I clapped my hands over my ears and bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. I tore at my hair in frustration.

  Think, you have to think. You can’t just charge in there expect things to go your way. There’s three of them and one of you.

  Bell flitted about by the window, her anger at being manhandled clear in every line of her body.

  “That priest couldn’t have made it any easier for us.”

  A second voice cackled. “What a find!”

  I laughed at myself. “Think? What’s there to think about?” I chucked a fist-sized rock through the window with a grin, shouting at the top of my lungs, “Take that, ya damn goons!”

  There weren’t any bushes or thick grasses, but given the moon’s as of yet low position and angle of the light, I was able to ferret out some deep shadows. Along with my black cloak and some inspired positioning amongst discarded piles of brick, stone, and mortar, I was able to practically melt into the night. Only those with the keenest eyes and senses would be able to pick me out from the backdrop, and I had a feeling my intended victims were anything but.

  I wasn’t made to wait for very long. Whoever had drawn the short straw and was forced to venture into the night didn’t seem too happy about their situation. The willowy form of a middle-aged man manifested in the dark before me. He cursed the bottle he tripped over, his buddies, and the gods for his current situation.

  I didn’t envy him, that was for certain. My anger at the unfairness and illogic of my own circumstances and this situation coalesced.

  I brought a big, lumpy rock down on top of his head with all my strength. Goon number one fell face first to the ground in a boneless heap. The man reeked of alcohol.

  “That was rather anticlimactic,” Bell opined, arms crossed, her amber eyes like deep pools as they gazed down at my handiwork unapologetically.

  I kicked the goon once, twice in the head to make doubly sure he wouldn’t be getting up. “My apologies for my lack of flair for the dramatic,” I scoffed as I patted the man down, relieving him of a switchblade and his coin purse.

  Waste not, want not.

  “Better hurry. They’ll be wondering where their buddy went soon.”

  Upending the coins into my own purse without checking their weight or distribution, I put the thug’s purse back where I’d found it. I tapped my chin with the switchblade and pursed my lips in thought before I used the built-in clip to hook it onto my belt; I wanted it within easy reach in case I needed to draw. For my last trick, I eyeballed the distance and dragged the unprotesting body to where I wanted it.

  I nodded, satisfied. “That’ll do.”

  “What exactly will do about that?” Bell asked in a tone that one might use to ask if someone was crazy.

  Yeah, uh-huh, I’m the crazy one here.

  I backed up ten or so feet from the wall to get a running start. At speed I propelled myself forward and up, catching two crumbled indentations overhead that I’d picked out ahead of time. I took my time finding footholds before beginning the climb. My movements were swift and sure as I scaled the twenty-something foot tall brick wall.

  I grabbed the ledge, hooked my left leg over the top, and pulled myself up then over. Once I caught my breath, I situated myself with feet dangling over the edge and waited for my prey to appear.

  Thug number two looked around, swore, and bent down to inspect his buddy’s body. I waited as the second goon’s hands ran up and down, inspecting for wounds. As I did, I wondered idly if the blow to the head had done more than knock the first man unconscious.

  At the end of the day, either he’d wake up, or he wouldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to care either way.

  To me, these are dead men walking.

  Gauging the angle and distance, I jumped off the roof silently and without fanfare. As I fell the wind snapped at my cloak and tossed my hair every which way, flung back my hood so the drawstring tugged at my neck. My booted feet landed firmly upon goon number two’s thick, meaty neck with a bone-rattling crunch.

  I hit the ground at a roll, coming up to my feet smack-dab against the high wall encircling property. I raised my hands and posed before I dropped them and went back to search the body. An involuntary giggle surfaced in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.

  Bell poked me and fixed me with a sour look, like I’d insulted her family. “You really know how to suck the joy out of things, don’t you?”

  I rummaged through the goon’s pockets and was rewarded with two silver for my efforts. “So, what, those rumors about faeries torturing, deceiving, playing all kinds of tricks on, and leading astray humans were true?” I said with mock-seriousness.

  I had a harder time believing the much too long-lived race managed to go through life without pulling tricks. Faeries were more likely to be no-good pranksters, tempters, and nightmarish boogeymen than some sparkly rendition of cuddliness and charm.

  “Hey, that’s really rude! Humans deserve some credit— not all of the flesh sacks are easy to fool, just most,” Bell said in a chipper tone, beaming while showing off her pointy teeth.

  Yeah, cute and cuddly my ass. Thanks for the reminder.

  My heart beat a harsh staccato against my ribs. “Well, that’s about all the stalling I can stand.”

  Taking next to no care to keep my presence hidden, I retraced my steps until I stood before a small door cut into the corner near the window. Tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumb had left it slightly ajar, so it appeared I had an open invitation.

  Don’t mind if I do.

  I kept low and to one side, using the stacked crates to keep myself from being spotted immediately. Alert to any sudden sound or movements, my hand hovered near the stolen switchblade as I took slow, cautious steps deeper into the shadowy warehouse.

  “Oh, we’re being sneaky! Now this is more my style! Huh, wasn’t there one more of those guys?”

  “Shhh!”

  “Shhh!” Bell mimicked with an aggravatingly bubbly giggle.

  I’m regretting not strangling this sylph when I had the chance.

  However boneheaded his henchmen were, the boss was smart enough to sense a trap. I wanted
to leap out right away to challenge the last man even a second sooner, but I restrained myself. I doubted I had much a chance of surprising him. That and I didn’t want to jeopardize Sammie’s safety by revealing myself carelessly.

  I climbed the stack of crates in front of me, hoping to throw off his expectations of where I might appear. The top rack was around ten feet off the floor and wobbled precariously beneath me. With a wince, I repositioned myself into a crouch and took stock of what I could see from the high ground.

  There wasn’t much. Besides the table that had played host to the three raucous men, the warehouse was completely encircled by deep, cloying shadows. A portable lantern highlighted the abandoned cups and dinky chairs. I grinned grimly.

  I tilted my head, listening intently for anything out of place. I heard the rattle of chains and jumped aside a fraction too late. A whiplike strike landed across my forearms and chest, knocking the wind out of me and sending me flying back off my perch.

  I hit the ground gracelessly, landing on my ass, and tumbled end over end until I ran into something hard and unyielding. Head spinning and with stars in my eyes, I groaned piteously.

  I cradled my aching, sure-to-bruise forearms and poked at my ribs gingerly. “Ow.”

  “Tehehe, he got you good!” Bell flitted by my side, looking amused and impressed. I wanted to throttle her.

  Back against the wall, I inched and writhed my way to a standing position. “You’re acting like none of this concerns you I see.”

  “I really don’t see how it does?”

  A symphony of chains approached, the ominous rattle a promise. “Hmmph, we’ll see about that,” I spoke distractedly, fumbling for the switchblade hooked to my belt.

  The blade flipped open with a satisfying schwick. It was black-on-black and sucked in the light, so I palmed it and captured it between the side of my body and my arm. With the short lull I’d been granted, I recovered my strength and gathered my wits; the latter of which seemed to have spilt all over the warehouse floor along with my fall.

  I stewed in the tension, listening, waiting.