Silver and Salt(21)

He had finally made that pathetic move of his I remembered with a huge dose of contempt and a small voice in the back of my mind that whispered to me for the first time, Humans. They don’t know how to play. I could’ve done it a hundred times better and bloodier.

I could have, but that wasn’t the point. It had been about Melanie. And, no, there’d been no carefully chosen if slightly ratty pony for me. He’d waved a six-pack of beer at me before smiling the same smile he’d given Mels and disappearing behind those scraggly bushes that blocked the view from the street to block you in close to the empty dog food plant. I’d been almost insulted by how little effort he put into it, but that hadn’t stopped me from trailing after him. Nothing to see here but a stupid kid with a stupid thirst for alcohol and no common sense. He’d thought he was smart. I’d been so simple to trap.

And then I’d introduced him to the protection I carried.

We didn’t just keep knives under our mattresses, Niko and me, or one in every room wherever we lived. I took one in my backpack to school with me, too. Shadows are everywhere and so can be Grendels hiding in them. This school had metal detectors and Nik had spent a shitload of money, I knew, to get me a ceramic knife every bit as sharp as a steel one. He’d told me they were the type of knives spies carried and I was practically James Bond or Jason Bourne. I didn’t give a shit about spies and had fallen asleep during any kind of spy movie I tried to watch. If your monster was human, it shouldn’t take a spy to handle that. I liked the knife, though; it was cool, and it made it past the metal detectors with no problem. It kept me safe.

I’d shown Mr. Invisible just how safe that could be. I’d shown him a move Niko had taught me, and I’d taught him why he should never touch a kid again. How there would not be another Mels. I’d made it very f*cking clear.

Or so I’d thought.

I’d been wrong, I thought on yet another day of him tagging after me like a pedophiliac puppy. He didn’t look excited anymore, though, not as he had when he’d held up the beer behind the bushes. Now he looked pissed and pained as he kept a constant hand pressed to his stomach, where I’d given him Mel’s regards, without love. I hoped it hadn’t stopped hurting. I hope it hurt forever.

I smirked at him and rubbed my own stomach. “Try some Pepto,” I called down the street. Now he scowled, more murderous and pissy than ever. I didn’t know what he wanted or what he thought he could get from me, as he only followed, didn’t try to catch up. Revenge? Getting rid of a witness? He could give it a shot, I guessed dubiously, but I didn’t see him getting any further than the last time he’d tried. A lot less further, if anything.

Nope, I didn’t know what his big plans were, if he had any, but he didn’t show any signs of stopping trailing after me. It was irritating in the beginning, although I enjoyed screwing with him by flipping him off or waving cheerfully, but as the days went on, it had gotten old and became flat-out f*cking annoying. I already had real monsters trailing me; I didn’t need a fake one.

I was more than ready and willing to teach him another lesson, had been since he peered through the kitchen window. I’d made him sorry once. I could make him sorry again. This time, though, I had to make certain it was a permanent sort of solution. Nik could help with that. I only had to determine how he could without me telling him anything. He protected me from the big problems. I absolutely would protect him from the smaller ones.

“It was crappy beer, too, you *,” I shouted back at Mr. Invisible as I walked my usual path, now with my usual creeper behind me. “When did Chester the Molester get so cheap?”

He snarled but moved in to halve the distance between us in a rush. I liked that. I wanted this over with. I was tired of dealing with his shit.

That’s it, Mr. Invisible.

Give me time to plan, but take the bait.

Reach for that purple pony.

Get close.



Practical Lions



It was almost three and a half weeks after Mels and the park when Niko turned off the TV and the stupid movie that had been playing. Old and stupid, okay, as that was the only kind you could get without cable, but it made me laugh. Vampires with club clothes, earrings, motorcycles, body oil, saxophones, and absolutely the worst haircuts. Too easy to pick out of a crowd, but you’d be laughing too hard to catch them. If they were real.

Mr. Invisible, who was real, kept behind me every day, getting closer and closer the last three of them, but always disappearing from whatever window he’d grimly watch me through minutes before Niko got home. I wish my other monsters would do that, run at the sight of my big brother, but they didn’t. When my monsters showed up, they never ran. We did.

We didn’t know how to get rid of our monsters, the Grendels. That’s what Niko had named them after reading Beowulf long before school would’ve made him. That was Niko, too smart for anyone’s good. It did give us a label to put on our real-life nightmares, though, and that helped, weirdly enough. Not that the name mattered in the end. We didn’t know what they were and that’s what did count. You can’t fight, you can’t arm yourself, against something that doesn’t exist, not in all the twenty-five-pound mythology books Niko dragged home time after time. I had to wonder. Were there other monsters not in those books, others you were helpless against, because you knew nothing about them? Not even their true names? And if there were, was there a way to kill any monster?