Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(19)

4



Niko

Twelve Years Ago

Hell.

I’d wondered off and on if the monsters came from Hell. But I didn’t believe in Hell. I never had. It seemed too easy. Do whatever you want, say you’re sorry, and then you’re lifted unto Heaven. Do whatever you want, don’t say you’re sorry, and be cast down into Hell. The people in Hell probably didn’t think it was easy, but I had more problems with the Heaven part. If you did wrong, no matter how sorry you were, you still should pay . . . not burning in hellfire. That was over the top.

But you should pay somehow. Learn your lesson and learn it well. That’s why I leaned toward Buddhism. I borrowed books about it from the library. If you did the crime, you still did the time, but you learned from it and in another life you’d be a better person. Then better and better again in each new life—if you were capable of learning. That made sense—the same as physics made sense. There was a balance to it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As energy is never lost, you are never lost . . . only improved.

Then I saw the Grendel and I didn’t think Hell was that unbelievable after all.

It was under the car parked in front of the house across the street. The flame-red eyes, skin so transparently pale it almost glowed at night, a fall of white incredibly fine tendrils masquerading as hair and an inconceivably wide stretch of sly smile filled with a thousand metallic needles. If Lovecraft and Clive Barker had collaborated to come up with a soul-eating Cheshire Cat, that was what its smile would be. Not of this world and more effective than a wood chipper at stripping flesh from bone.

I’d searched every mythology book I could find and hadn’t found a description that came close to matching our pale shadows. As I couldn’t find their real name I’d ended up calling them Grendels from the first time I’d read Beowulf. Grendel, one of literature’s most well-known monsters. It was good enough for our own. And it helped to label your nightmares.

I pulled the faded curtains and was grateful it was across the street and not peering in the window as they often did. This was the first one I’d seen since we’d moved here two months ago. Sometimes we’d go four months without seeing one. Five months one time. But never longer, not since I’d seen my first one when I was seven. Cal had seen his when he was five.

They didn’t do anything. They didn’t try to get in the house. They didn’t come up to us if we were outside at night. They only watched. And although I’d been seven when I’d first seen one, I imagine they’d been watching all of Cal’s life. One of them was what Sophia said she’d whored herself to for gold and a child. Sophia had sold herself to a monster—a human monster for a genuine monster. Cal had been the result. Proof that two wrongs could make a right.

And he was as right as they came.

Not that Sophia saw it that way. She’d called Cal a monster all his life, an “experiment” that didn’t pay nearly enough, but Sophia was Sophia: a drunken liar on her best day. So Cal took it with a grain of salt. He didn’t believe her then . . . not completely. It wasn’t until he saw his first Grendel that he knew for sure.

What he saw that day, leering through the glass . . . that was in him. It was half of him. Sophia didn’t always lie. When it hurt worse, she would tell the truth. Cal lost his innocence at the age of five and for six years I’d been trying to get it back for him. But innocence wasn’t like a lost dog. Once innocence was gone, it wouldn’t find its way back home again.

“Grendel?”

Cal was already in his pajamas, lying on his stomach on his mattress, and reading a comic book. He’d lost his innocence, but he’d lost his fear too. For six years he’d seen Grendels watching him. If it doesn’t hurt you, it’s funny how quickly you can get used to anything—no matter how horrific it appears. If you were going to rank them, Sophia was far above the Grendels in the cruelty and caution categories.

“Just one.” I said it as if it were no big deal because that let Cal believe it was no big deal. At least on the surface. Deep down, he knew the same as I did. Monsters don’t watch you without reason. Monsters don’t make certain that a little boy, half human–half not, was born without a bigger reason. One day they’d let us know what they wanted with Cal. Given a few more years of training, and I’d be ready for that day.

Whatever they wanted from my little brother, they weren’t going to get.

I changed into sweats faded and worn thin. Like my coat, they’d come from the Salvation Army, but one state away. I took the second mattress, the one between Cal’s and the bedroom door, just in case. Thieves, Sophia in the mood to spew her spite, monsters who’d changed their minds—it paid to be ready for everything. Sophia didn’t bother to buy us beds, used or not. I could have with money from my part-time jobs, but mattresses were enough when I could save that money for getting Cal and me out of here someday. And no separate rooms. The places Sophia rented didn’t have more than two bedrooms. Sometimes they had only one. It wouldn’t have mattered if there had been five bedrooms. Cal and I always bunked together. Another “just in case.”

As I was sitting down, I spotted a black plastic handle tucked tightly against the bottom of Cal’s bed, the blade hidden between the mattress and the floor. “Is that the butcher knife from the kitchen under your mattress?”