The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) by Casey Matthews

Author:Casey Matthews [Matthews, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

You won’t like it. Wilkins never spotted the guardian except for when she wasn’t hiding, so we can’t identify her patterns. Burns couldn’t figure out her routine either. She’s a ghost.

Still, he included the guardian’s name and address. The benefactors could use that, surely.

He clicked “send.”

~*~

Ghorm’s email dinged on the monitor to his left. With a pneumatic hiss, the chair spun and his hollow’s greasy hands worked the mouse over its distended lap. Reading the email, he felt cold fear fill his vast center. “Mr. Saxby,” he said in dulcet tones to his cabal-mate. “Oh, dear Mr. Saxby, did you realize—there is a tiny monster staying near Oakland Avenue?”

Mr. Saxby appeared at his side, the asura’s middle-aged, balding, boringly average hollow dressed in a finely tailored suit, fingernails clipped to a level of impeccable symmetry. “Fascinating. Out of curiosity, do you remember who else fancies that neighborhood?”

“Dust,” Ghorm ground out.

“Yes. Dust, with his long memory and loose lips.” Mr. Saxby rubbed at a speck of dust on his sleeve. “Perhaps I should eat him.”

“No,” Ghorm said. “Dust is protected.”

“By whom? A monster?” Mr. Saxby scoffed.

“No, not her; by someone who matters. A rival of our own paymaster, in fact. But I want to know what Dust is saying to our uninvited monster, and why precisely she is meddling in our work. I’ll tell my peons to surveil Dust’s haunts and we’ll have a listen.”

Mr. Saxby read the email carefully. “Ryn Miller, they call her. Why-oh-why does that name put the slightest shiver between my shoulder blades?”

“Might she cause you indigestion?”

A chortle, though Mr. Saxby’s face didn’t change. “What she did to Splat was special. She cut not the flesh, but the essence of him. That is something I’d like to study.”

“And the gun you lent my peon—will it kill her?”

“That is no mere rifle,” Mr. Saxby said. “That weapon has taken a hundred forms, suiting itself to the age. It’s a… machine… and it came from my allies across the stars. The Hidden One said it would kill any god weaker than he.” There was something malicious in his thin-lipped smile. “Though perhaps it would work against him too.”

“You mustn’t kill the one who pays us,” Ghorm cautioned.

“Taking money from the Hidden One, who fights a cold war against another god—that was dangerous enough. But now he wants us warring with a monster. Our arrangement rather leaves us the pawns, and I prefer the space behind the board to being on it.”

“Suggestions?” Ghorm asked.

Mr. Saxby removed his spectacles irritably and polished the lenses to banish nonexistent smudges. “I will need one of your toy soldiers. As well some tarp.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll have him war ready. We let them take their crack—my twisted lovely with tooth and claw, and your pet Bible-thumper with weapon from alien world. We eliminate Ryn Miller, then move on to Naomi Bradford. No two-front wars. And believe me,” he smiled mirthlessly, “I would know.”

Ghorm waved his chubby hand in the air. “Fine. Take one of my toys. I only have the three ready—still chipping away at the fourth.

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