The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: Clockwork Men

  CHAPTER TWO: Feral

  CHAPTER THREE: Through the Gates

  CHAPTER FOUR: Hunting Grounds

  CHAPTER FIVE: Dinner with a Demon

  CHAPTER SIX: The Devil You Know

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Black Binder

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Invited

  CHAPTER NINE: The Body Electric

  CHAPTER TEN: After Hours

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Namaste

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Just Friends

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Muse

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Achilles’ Heel

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Gazing Long into the Dark

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Those Who Fight Monsters

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Reckoning

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Hollow

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Summer Storms

  CHAPTER TWENTY: The River

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Eye to Eye

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Who Owns the Skies

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Pretender

  EPILOGUE

  THE ONE WHO EATS MONSTERS

  Wind and Shadow, Book I

  By Casey Matthews

  Text © 2017 Casey Matthews

  For Emily.

  The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

  But we have both.

  “In the Long Ago, in the time before the gods wore human flesh, I lived apart from the warmth of a beating heart. In those times I was made from wind and shadow, and I danced beneath the lesser lights across a dark earth. The moon and the stars were my roof and the depths of the seas were my cellar. I traveled the world from horizon to horizon and loved everything that I touched.

  “But then Man came. Man changed everything.”

  PROLOGUE: The Great Spirit

  Not So Long Ago,

  Far From Civilization

  Aina bled to death in the dark and could think only of her younger brother.

  When she opened her lips to say his name, no words came—just warm blood, which spilled from her cut throat, swallowed by desert sand pressed firm to her back. She stared straight up—stared into the bottom of the glittering sky—with the sense she might fall off the world and disappear into the space between stars. The shadows of the men who had killed her shrank away, tethered to their crunching boots. She pitied them all.

  A dark cover slipped over her eyes. A year might have passed—or a minute. There was no time left to contain her. All she knew was her body lay somewhere beneath her, her life somewhere behind; she saw her life in picture-flashes, saw her village, her family, dragged backward on tides of memory all the way to her mother’s labor pains. Released from the overpowering current, she burst forward and swam through the good years of walking, talking, and touching everything in her world. Then came the hard, sad years after Father died from fever.

  A burst of white filled her vision and it was yesterday again—the day her brother’s skin burned just as Father’s had. Aina flew above it all, her mother and brother, above the missionaries who drove toward the city, intent on medicine that couldn’t arrive in time. Above her very last yesterday. Her brother’s fever worsened and he cried all day.

  After dark when she was supposed to sleep, his ragged cries woke her and she couldn’t wait for the missionaries one more minute. Aina’s body sprinted from the village and across the far reaches with Father’s machete in hand, her spirit flying high above in pursuit of the dream. She chased her body as it ran from cities and medicine and concrete, and instead toward the Fortress of Needles where the Great Spirit lived.

  She had not anticipated the foreigners and their trucks, and her body couldn’t hear her spirit’s shouts of warning. They ran her down.

  Another flash of white and she no longer flew. She was living her last memories from inside her own skin. They bound her wrists and placed her atop one of their crates in a stretch of featureless, flat ground at the doorstep of the Great Spirit’s house of stones. The man with the scar through his eye questioned her, every word relayed through an interpreter.

  “Tell me, Little Morsel, why are you out here in the dark with the monsters?”

  “I seek the Great Spirit.”

  “Your prayers will be heard by nothing but hollow wind.”

  It was her second time talking to the scarred man and she felt less fear, since he had already murdered her. She answered more easily in the dream. “You do not understand. Just like the missionaries, you do not know the Great Spirit. It is not a god for worship. It is not a god swayed by words or burnt offerings. It is power, thirst, and it rules men as the wind does, without care for what they are. To plead for its mercy is to ask the lion to bow down.”

  It lived out there, in a forest of tall stone, alone and hungry, always hungry, but the scarred man didn’t believe her. “Tell me more about your idols.” His men wore bandoleers; they had sharp edges and thirsty smiles, and they chuckled while he ran a knife across Aina’s cheek.

  “Sometimes when the moon is high, it comes to our village and takes the men away. It likes soldiers, the ones with hard eyes and hearts, so they don’t come to our village anymore. When I was small, it took my uncle. My cousin never spoke until the next night, and she told me it had dark eyes lit with blue fire, and that the Great Spirit promised that her father would never, ever touch her again.”

  Some of the bandits shifted uncomfortably, but the scarred man leaned close. “Do you mean to frighten us?”

  “No. You do not understand well enough to be afraid. The missionaries didn’t either, not with their God who forgives, and not you with your bullets and bombs. The Great Spirit cannot forgive, and it cannot die. You do not understand darkness or how it moves and breathes. You have forgotten magic and the shapes that lurk at the fringes of the well-lit places. My people do not forget. We live here, beneath the playground of gods, far from the thrum of electric wires.”

  He laughed and called out into the night, “Oh Great Spirit! Forgive my love of air conditioning! Of motor oil and gunpowder and the smell of money! Forgive my men the fun we intend to have with your fool of a worshipper.”

  “I do not worship. I fear.” Aina shivered and wanted the dream to end, because she remembered what came next and didn’t want to live it twice.

  “Why did you come out tonight, Little Morsel?” the scarred man asked.

  “To offer my life for my brother’s.”

  “Offer your life to me instead.”

  “No.”

  “I am the only power in this desert. I am your Great Spirit. Offer it.”

  “You are not. And it will come for you.” She lied, then, afraid because of where he slid the knife along her slight body: “There is more than one. They number dozens. They will all come for you. They are born from Hell and will burn you forever and ever.” The only light about them was in their knives, and the void inside their eyes yawned so wide that their depths froze her skin. Her teeth chattered.

  “There is no Hell but the one I make for you,” the neatly dressed translator said. The man with the scar through his eye leaned close and she could smell his breath. “And I am your only god now.”

  Then they hurt her. And through the pain and the degradation she could not help the swell of pity, because each of them—as he took his turn—condemned himself to a fate ten thousand times worse, and she wondered for the first time if some people could feel Hell coming for them. Pulling them into its orbit. And whether the pain they wrought was because of the great evils that bore down upon them. She would not let the same evil that ate through their hearts take hers, and so she would not hate them, eve
n as they worked their terrible will on her body.

  They finished and they slit her throat and left her for animals to devour.

  It was no longer before. The dream had ended.

  Aina drifted into a snug and warm place like the heat under her wool blanket on a chilly morning, and she felt a stranger’s heartbeat nearby. It drummed big, hollow notes, like a horse’s. Was she in a womb? Had she died, and passed through gates, and become a person again, only not yet fully formed? Or was she being born an angel in some newer, stranger place?

  She never found out even though she wished to. Something seized her center like a small, bright thread and tugged. At first, gently. Then, it pulled upon her like a swift river and dragged her from the cozy nest. Death was a threshold made of fire, she discovered, and though great comforts lived on either side, Aina now understood that it hurt to move through it, whether going forward or back.

  She was cold. Blood was smeared on her face and an incredible ache in her throat pinched off a scream; she touched her neck by reflex, and felt the tight weave of fine stitches. The same night sky spun above her, the moon dark, but the stars shifted. From the temperature of the blood—her own blood—and the movement of the sky, she had been dead for at least an hour. She lay on her back on something so frigid it burned, a sheet of white, and specks of the stuff floated down through the desert air. Snow. Aina had only seen it in books brought by the missionaries, and yet here it was so beautiful that it hurt to look at.

  The Great Spirit knelt over her, its body a hooded veil outlined by the drifting snow, and somehow she knew that the Spirit had made the snow, and it seemed very alone in their small patch of white frost in the middle of a vast desert.

  “Did you save me?” Her voice came out a raspy whisper because of the threads through her neck.

  It nodded. Its chin was pale like the missionaries, but its eyes held no white; the scleras were black as deep skies with irises of blue fire. Blood wreathed the snow beneath its hands.

  She had never hated the foreigners, but their bodies stained the patch of snow and she knew the Great Spirit had hated them for her. And it hated better than she ever could, cleaner and hotter, and for the first time in her life Aina felt no fear, because the most dangerous thing in the world had already decided in her favor.

  “I came for you,” she rasped. “My brother. So ill. Trade me for him, please. I will go with you to Hell if you save him.”

  It reached down and took white snow into its hands, which were bandaged in shadow like the rest of it, and exhaled until the water melted. Its breath hung, a cloudy mist in the air, and the snow became a gleaming pool that reflected more starlight than it should have. It drained the water into a canteen, which it passed to her, and Aina understood. The water carried the Spirit’s breath, a rare gift that would save him.

  But the expulsion of power caused the Spirit to collapse into the snow. Its fingers splayed there. She could see how it stooped, bent-backed, weakened, and wondered just how much of a god’s power was required to drag her back through death’s gates. So, too, was the moon gone, and she knew the Spirit was always strongest when the moon rode high. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  The first shot rang from the dark. The bullet struck the Spirit’s shoulder and Aina was shocked at the solid thud. Though it didn’t appear to wound the Spirit, it loosed a beastly growl and pointed out into the desert. “Flee,” it said, in a voice like rough sandstone. Rough, yet spoken from what appeared to be a feminine jaw.

  “They will hurt you! They’re monsters!”

  It climbed to its feet. “I am the one who eats monsters.” It turned toward the men—more of them than before. Undaunted, it charged its prey, loosing an otherworldly howl that rattled Aina’s courage.

  And so Aina ran and carried the water back to her sick brother, unsure if the Great Spirit could hear prayers, but saying one instead to any god who would listen: put wings to her feet and aid the Great Spirit in working its terrible will.

  CHAPTER ONE: Clockwork Men

  Hours Later

  Helicopter rotors spun in the darkness and nothing that lived here knew that sound. Scrub mice scattered to their burrows and snakes tasting the frigid air from their holes slithered back into the deep places.

  The headset crackled and Sergeant Kessler heard the communication from his position behind the cockpit: “Artemis One, this is Artemis Two. Package spotted. Converge at two klicks north by northwest.”

  The helo flew adjacent to limestone forests. The Fortress of Needles was a stony region of brackish rivers and mangroves protected by natural hazards that had stymied human settlement since humans first lived. Spires of rock jutted into naturally dagger-sharp points. Every ridge, crest, and handhold had been wind- and water-scoured to broken-glass edges. Razorlike stones chewed both climbing gear and flesh with ease. The deadly ridges rose above the helicopter’s trajectory, and in the distance they looked to Kessler like the uneven, serrated contours of a medieval implement of torture.

  A long desert scrubland flanked the east side of the fortress. Far to the west, though, stone spires protected a dense rainforest known mainly for its variety of poisonous reptiles. The rainforest swallowed the region’s waters, cradled its rivers, flooding for entire seasons of the year. On one side of the vast stretch of limestone walls, a man would drown and be eaten by crocodiles. On the other, he’d die of thirst and have his softer parts swallowed by buzzards.

  It lay not far from pirate-harried coastlines and warlord-controlled villages, a region once called by the British “a sort of natural anarchy” where man lived in suspicion of his neighbors.

  The temperatures, venomous animals, wild carnivores, serrated rock, blinding sandstorms, seasonal floods, and bottomless sinkholes had chased off naturalists and explorers alike. It was the last untamed place. Kessler and the other members of his squad banked and flew along its feet, scanning the cold earth for traces of warmth and life.

  Not every beastly thing in the Fortress of Needles was an animal. Their quarry used the desolate alcoves at the edge of the Fortress as a pit stop on their journey north, a sort of reverse underground railroad of human, weapons, and drug trafficking.

  The helo cruised over flat lands until it found its twin, and they hovered like moths. Long cords spilled from their bellies and dropped to the sandy earth, and soft as snake hisses the soldiers boiled out and alighted among the desert scrub.

  The soldiers were clockwork people who moved as they were taught to move—low and fast and outward-facing with their weapons, the first to land being the first to find positions until both helicopters had released their full, deadly payloads.

  Kessler paid attention to the simple gesture-and-flick of his unit commander, cocked his carbine assault rifle, and moved stealthily into position. The air tasted thin and cold, the sky above him black as a bottomless pond, the stars especially bright and the darkness behind them especially empty. Out here in the primordial sand, all distance between the heavens and earth shortened so that he could have scraped his nails across the sky—and the emptiness stretched down from behind the stars and into Kessler. It swallowed him, so that he felt suspended between cold ground and the abyss.

  Their approach was measured, slow. Their snipers took up position in the flat of the sands, on the peak of subtle crests that only rose after a hundred yards of effort, and even then, only a few scant feet higher than the rest of the terrain. They hid like insects camouflaged as their surroundings, beneath neatly folded wings of tarp, armed with rifles that could cut through a tank.

  Kessler and the other soldiers crunched through the sand and hardened earth, with the same unnoticed forward advance as the moon across the sky.

  The enemy had built a bonfire at the foot of tall limestone walls and nested in a dark alcove behind it. Three trucks with canvas backs were parked in a row, aligned so one’s headlights was on the encampment and two others faced out, creating a perimeter of light that the soldiers studiously avoided. It also
interfered with Kessler’s night vision, so that he couldn’t count them.

  The outward-facing lights didn’t fit and Kessler’s mind buzzed in quiet alarm. The smugglers used this region because it was desolate. What were they so afraid of that they’d set up a perimeter?

  No—it didn’t fit. Something had happened. Something had frightened them.

  “Eight contacts,” said the radio. Kessler counted four, but the trucks blocked his view to the alcove.

  He knew it wasn’t his place to speak up, that radio frequencies could be monitored. He did it anyway. “Be advised, they’re set up for us. Something’s wrong.”

  “Number four, shut up,” said the commander. “Team, proceed.”

  Kessler’s lizard brain vibrated the fine hairs on his neck. He wanted to scream into his radio and order the team back. He couldn’t. Just by speaking out, he put the whole squad at risk. He swallowed his intuition, forced it deep into his gut, and with jittery limbs he stepped forward.

  The first explosion erupted twenty yards to his right, washing out his night vision as hot force swept over him. It filled up the desert with a soldier’s rattled scream.

  “Minefield!” said the radio in his ear.

  High in the rocks a muzzle flashed, and the shot reached his ears the next moment. A near miss. He disobeyed his instincts again and didn’t move, because there was no cover to be sought. The explosion from the mine had backlit him for a moment, but the shooter didn’t have a good bead on him. If he moved—if he disturbed the darkness—that would change. Instead, he used his radio. “Contact, twenty meters above the campsite, sniper in the rocks.”

  A gunshot rang from their own side. His night vision registered the falling corpse that hit the dirt.

  He remembered the scream and pivoted. Smoke drifted up from Jenson, who lay still. The other soldiers dropped to the ground and fired into the enemy camp.