Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(26)

She looked down at her hands in her lap, and saw they were shaking.

‘Yes,’ she said. A feeling of wrongness welled up inside her. She couldn’t do this. This was wrong. This was really wrong. This was something only a monster would do.

She pushed down the wrongness until all she could feel of it was a lingering horror. If only a monster would do this, then she could do this. She was a monster, wasn’t she?

She lifted her head and met Aaron’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We have to stop this from happening. We have to go back.’





SEVEN




Joan woke to sun streaming on her face. She heard rustling sounds nearby; someone was opening the curtains. ‘No,’ she grumbled. ‘Five more minutes.’

‘Wake up,’ a boy said.

Joan opened her eyes fast and scrambled to sit up. She was in a strange, small room. A hotel room. Then it all came back to her in a gut punch. Gran was dead. Bertie. Aunt Ada. Uncle Gus. She remembered the sound Ruth had made when they’d stabbed her.

And Nick . . . Nick had done it. That felt like another punch.

Aaron Oliver was leaning against the wardrobe door. He was fully dressed, one hand in his pocket. ‘Get up,’ he said coolly. ‘We’ve almost slept through it.’

‘Slept through what?’ Joan said.

Aaron looked clean and crisp, even though he was in the same clothes as yesterday. Joan looked down at herself. She was filthy. Her black tank top was stiff with dried blood.

‘Here.’ Aaron threw something at her. It was his jacket again. ‘And here,’ he added. He unlocked his phone and dropped it into her hand.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Is there anyone you still care about in this time?’ he said. ‘Anyone still alive?’

Joan’s stomach dropped. Oh.

She’d been avoiding thinking about Dad. Whenever she did, she found herself too close to losing it. Dad was the real world. He was school runs and Friday night sci-fi movies; he didn’t belong in this nightmare. He didn’t know about any of this. She shook her head.

‘It’s up to you,’ Aaron said. ‘But this could be the last time you speak to them.’

The room was disgusting in the daylight. There were cigarette burns on the carpet and weird streaky stains on the quilts. Joan didn’t let herself look too closely at them.

‘Make it quick,’ Aaron said. ‘We need to be at the Pit in forty minutes.’

‘The Pit?’

Aaron gave her an impatient look. ‘It’s where we’re going to steal human time.’

Aaron gave her what privacy he could, standing with his back to her, staring out the window, hands in his pockets.

Joan checked herself with the camera app. Her expression was strange, but her face wasn’t scratched up or anything. Good enough. As she dialled, Aaron shifted his weight.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Edmund lift his gun again and point it at her head. She watched Nick hurl the sword into Edmund’s chest.

‘Hello?’

Joan jumped. ‘Dad?’

The video appeared. Dad’s familiar, sensible face. ‘Hi, Joan!’ He beamed. He was wearing his new glasses with the thick black frames. He was having afternoon tea at Aunty Wei Ling’s place. There was thick toast and kaya jam on his plate, and plastic bags of mangosteen and longan.

For a second Joan was right on the edge of bawling. She bit the inside of her cheek hard.

‘It’s Joan,’ Dad said to someone off-screen, and then Aunty Wei Ling’s voice went: ‘Say hello to Joan!’

‘Hello!’ Joan’s two-year-old cousin, Bao Bao, shouted. The image shook, and then Dad’s face blurred away, and Bao Bao’s pointy little face filled the screen. ‘N? h?o. N? h?o.’

‘N? h?o, Bao Bao,’ Joan said.

Bao Bao said something then in Hakka, or maybe Mandarin. Joan couldn’t always tell the difference.

‘English, ah!’ Aunty Wei Ling said. ‘Joan speak English.’

The screen tipped over again. Joan saw the ceiling with its big slow-moving fan, and then a blur of the rest of the table—coffee, a bowl of half-boiled eggs, and then Dad again, smiling.

‘Having a good time in London?’ he asked.

Joan made herself nod. She’d never wanted to be somewhere as badly as she wanted to be there at Aunty Wei Ling’s house with Dad—eating toast with eggs and kaya jam and drinking coffee that tasted like flavoured sugar.

‘We’re going to that crab place you like for dinner,’ Dad said.

‘Next time, you have a holiday here!’ Aunty Wei Ling shouted off-screen, and Dad laughed.

‘What else have you been doing?’ Joan asked.

She listened greedily as Dad talked about a trip to the bird park yesterday. Bao Bao had seen a cassowary. He came to stand beside Dad and held up his hand above his head to show Joan how tall it had been. It was from Australia. They were going to an island tomorrow. Joan smiled in what she hoped were the right places and wished that they would talk forever.

‘You’re quiet today,’ Dad said to her.

There was movement behind the phone as Aaron shifted again. Joan glanced at him. He made a wrap-it-up gesture.

‘Yeah, just woke up. Still sleepy.’ Joan made herself smile. Then she made herself say the next bit. ‘I have to go, Dad. Just wanted to say hi.’