Silver and Salt(19)

I didn’t know those kids, the possible future victims.

For me, it was difficult to…connect…with their inevitable deaths if Mr. Invisible went to ground here. I couldn’t feel for kids I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I’d have done anything about the monster in the park if I hadn’t known any of them. Niko would have. Niko wouldn’t have thought once, much less twice, about breaking both his legs and dumping him at the nearest police station. But Niko was human, and that meant Niko thought like a human.

I didn’t.

I never had. For all the behavioral and cognitive training that Nik had dragged out of hundreds of psychology books, it hadn’t changed me. All the talking and explaining that there was nothing wrong with me—never never anything wrong with me, Nik was adamant on that—but if this helped or that helped, life might be less difficult for me. None of it had made a difference. I hadn’t changed. I wasn’t human. I didn’t think like them. I couldn’t think like them, no matter how I tried.

I never would.

In this situation, that was all right. I had known someone. I had connected. It was time to think about her now. Time to think about Melanie. Her daisy shirt. Her yellow sandals. Her pink nail polish. Her freckle spattered cheeks to go with a wide smile and giggle of the catastrophically innocent.

Time to remember Mels.

One week of walking past the park, that’s all it took. Seven days, not only the school week, but the weekend too, backpack in place. The possibilities weren’t endless, but they existed. Sort of. I could be getting weekend tutoring, be in a club, some kind of sports that didn’t mind ear-biting, or maybe in the band. He couldn’t have been too suspicious, as that’s what it came down to—seven days. Two weeks since I’d eyed him for the first time. One week since Mels had been found dead. One week, and then there he was.

In all his more-or-less unseen f*cking glory.

It was his bad luck that I was on edge enough that it didn’t take a full minute as I thought it could to locate him. Nope, it took less than three seconds for me to ignore the more part of him and see the less of him just fine.

Ignoring him, I walked into the scrubby grass, dragging my backpack carelessly along the ground, as if I wanted a break. What I did want was to find out what he’d do—if anything. A careful, smart predator would observe his prey a little before deciding if the time was right to take it down. Mr. Invisible, however, wasn’t careful, and he was smart enough for a seven-year-old little girl, but he wasn’t as smart as he imagined.

He waited fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour. I wasn’t timing the *. However long it was, not long enough for the monster he was trying to be, he made his move.

It wasn’t a great one.

At least Mels had gotten a pony. Some effort had gone into the production of tricking a little girl. But for me, at least six years older? Maybe seven? He was, what do they say? Phoning it in. The * was phoning in a potential abduction and murder. One third at the most of the work he’d put in on Mels. Impressed, I was not. I wasn’t here to be impressed, though. I was here to get some back for Mels, and when he made his move….

I met his move with mine.

Guess what?

Mine was a helluva lot better.



Mr. Invisible



The next time Mr. Invisible showed up, I was walking home from school. He picked me up in the park, the very first place I’d seen him. I was trudging down the broken sidewalk and saw him crouching behind that row of thick if sickly bushes. This made the third time now. Three weeks from the first time and a week from the last.

I was surprised at seeing him again, as surprised as I’d been in—ever, but it passed. I’d thought I’d made him pay for Mels and then some. Lesson learned, message received. But I was wrong again. He’d paid, oh yeah, but he hadn’t embraced the education I’d handed out. I hadn’t thought I was any kind of teacher, but I’d thought I was enough for him.

Hesitating, I blinked at the glitter of his eyes between the sad gray-green leaves and gave a shrug on the inside. I couldn’t say much shocked me for too long anymore. When you’ve had a serial killer neighbor named Junior and monsters living in the shadows all your life, you get pretty f*cking unimpressed with everything else. I hadn’t planned on him ever showing himself another time—as much as he ever showed himself at all, but the world was weird. You had to roll with its insanity and move on.

The gleam of his eyes tracked me as I moved on. I rolled my own and kept walking. When he started following me, I had to seriously rearrange my personal ranking of levels of douchebaggery to create a higher level for him. After what he’d done, what he’d tried to do…and he wasn’t stopping even now.

What an *.

He was a shade, staying far back and sliding from behind the undergrowth to behind street parked cars, not thinking for a second that I saw him. Being an invisible creep was his unique f*cking calling, but he wasn’t quite as special as he thought. Such a loser. I finally made it home to our rented, sideways lean of a shack. Key already out, I was inside with the door locked behind me in barely a second. Our neighborhood was dangerous enough that you didn’t want to be caught hanging out on your porch any longer that you could help it…and that didn’t count the inhuman things that whispered in the shadows.

Retrieving my usual protection from my backpack and shoving it under the couch cushion, I tossed the pack on the floor. Homework could wait. Homework could always wait unless my brother was there to breathe down my neck and slap a book down into my lap. I curled up on the couch. That was a piece of cake for me as I was two inches shorter than any other guy in my class. Still waiting for that growth spurt. For the most part, people thought that with my skinny body, long and untrimmed black hair, pale eyes, and a baby face that I hated, I couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. I was fourteen, though, and fourteen in a world where that was practically an adult.