A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

6. Monsters

Chapter six

Monsters

W ren made it downstairs before I did.

His speed was unnatural. On clumsy human legs, I tried to keep up, but the steep descent tripped me, and the handrail slid out from underneath my grip. I almost went soaring over the last flight, skidding when my feet hit the linoleum in the hallway.

My parents were in the sitting room, where the television had remained static and grey. At the window beside it—

The caenim.

It was the tall one from the street.

In the shadows, its features were hard to discern. It stood outside the window in tattered robes, its hood concealing the ghastly face that would plague my sleep for years to come. A conjuring of darkness and horror made real.

One hand—grotesquely thin and gangly but bearing a nauseating resemblance to that of a human—was pressed against the glass. Slowly, it scraped an iron-tipped nail down the window. The shrill, keening sound was enough to make me cringe.

And enough to shatter the entire window.

My shout of warning was swallowed by the sound of the exploding glass, and my follow-up cry was lost on the breath that Wren knocked from my lungs as he shoved me out of the way.

He prowled into the room, drawing a small blade from his side. I followed at his heels, peering around his wide frame, looking for my mother.

Broken glass littered the carpet and the coffee table, refracting light from the television and the moon. The couch was empty. I took a step further in and found my parents on the floor.

My father was scrambling to his feet. My mother was clutching her left wrist in her other hand.

The caenim stepped over the windowsill, its long legs granting it otherworldly ease. Due to its significant height, it had to bend its neck to fit in the room. As it lowered its head towards the floor, the television light illuminated its face; stumpy teeth bared in its eye sockets, forked tongues tasting the air, shapeless nose flaring widely.

Its attention was locked straight ahead—on the couch, on the people behind it.

The sound of a knife slicing into flesh cut through the room, and I glanced back at Wren to find him holding up his palm, a fast-healing wound dripping blood onto the floor.

My relief that he bled a colour that looked like red was genuine but short-lived. He smeared his blood onto the wall, no doubt in an attempt to distract the monster whose every sense was trained on my parents, and I suddenly remembered that it was deaf.

“Don’t move,” I cautioned. “Hold your breath.”

My mother’s eyes flashed to my face. The expression she wore told me she knew that already from years of living with my father. But she also knew that eventually someone would get hurt, and she—

“No!”

My shout was too late.

My mother did as she always had, as she always would, and moved to take the blow for her children without trying to find another escape. Thus, the cycle repeats, and repeats…

She jumped over the couch, crying out as her injured wrist bent further in the wrong direction, and screamed at me, “Run, Aura! Get Brynn and run!”

The caenim tracked her by scent and opened its mouth into a dark grin.

Wren sent the dagger flying across the room and unsheathed his sword, but the caenim must have felt the shift in the air. It deflected the blade with its iron claws, sending it clattering against the far wall.

“Get her out,” he barked at me as he advanced upon the beast.

But even Wren wasn’t as fast as my father.

He might have been, had he only known that there were two monsters in the room with us.

My father moved with more determination than he’d ever displayed for anything before in his entire miserable life. He careened around the corner of the couch and grabbed my mother by the back of her neck, shoving her towards the caenim head-first as he ran for the open doorway.

No—not towards it. Right into its outstretched arms.

She screamed as its nails sank into her skin, screamed as a low rumble of hunger filled the room, screamed as the front door opened and closed with a boom, and my father fled into the night.

Wren raised his sword in the air, wielding it as high above his head as it could go, but he hesitated when my mother was pushed between them—like he was trying to decide if it was worth delaying the killing blow to catch her and pull her back. He decided against it, and his sword arced up and then down, where it connected with a gut-churning squelch against the caenim’s neck. He halted the sword before the blade kissed my mother, whose slim frame hung limply between its claws, and the beast’s head thumped onto the ground, rolling a few steps away.

Blood squirted into the air like the caenim’s body was a broken fire hydrant.

I charged forward, straight into the disgusting mist of gunk, and tried to catch my mother as the caenim toppled over, dragging her down with it.

The monster slumped on its side, leaking foul fluid onto the ground. I fell to my knees before it, shards of glass digging into my skin, and found that my mother was unconscious…but alive.

Her breathing was wet and raspy, her pyjamas stained with the caenim’s blood.

She’s injured. She’s injured again .

But I knew what to do. They’d told me what to do, showed me how to treat human wounds inflicted by human hands.

“Turn on the lights,” I ordered Wren.

My own hands were shaking as they hovered over the bony, grey-skinned arms wrapped around my mother. My voice was shaking, too.

Wren didn’t move, but suddenly the fluorescent light globe in the centre of the room flickered on above me.

A tortured sound escaped my lips.

Under the harsh light, the caenim’s skin was translucent, a clear casing over the grey waste beneath. Small, sharp bones protruded from its hands, which were locked around my mother’s torso, and blood—red, human blood—was leaking out of her wounds.

It had dug its claws deeply into her flesh.

My every sense told me not to touch the creature, dead or alive, but I ignored them and reached down to grasp its ghoulish fingers and pull them out of her abdomen. I kept my other hand close, ready to apply pressure—

“Don’t.” Wren came up behind me, grinding his boots into the glass as he crouched down. His breath was warm against my neck as he said, “They’re plugging extremely deep wounds. She’ll bleed out instantly.”

Human wounds by human hands.

These weren’t quite human enough.

Tears streamed down my face, blurring my vision. “He didn’t have to do that,” I whispered furiously, flexing my fingers. A dry sob exploded from my chest, and then a feral, raw shriek. “He didn’t have to do that!” I panted through the violence clouding my thoughts. “He could have gone around the other way. He could have just left …”

“He was trying to buy himself time,” Wren murmured grimly. “Who is he?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat—nearly choked on it. “My father.”

“No…” My mother’s eyelids fluttered but remained closed. Her voice was barely a wheeze. “He’s not.”

More tears raced down my cheeks, and I sucked in a sharp breath through my nose before wiping the sadness leaking out of it onto my sleeve. “No, I know,” I agreed, voice breaking. “I know.”

Her eyes flew open, bloodshot and swollen. “No,” she gasped, chest shuddering beneath the caenim’s arms. She pointed her gaze over my shoulder—to Wren. “You don’t know.”

Dazed and confused, I looked at the face of the High Fae man leaning over my back. It was a picture of innocence marred by outrage.

“No,” he insisted. “Absolutely not.”

I was so distracted by my mother’s injuries and accusations that I didn’t hear my sister’s footfalls on the staircase until it was too late. She appeared in the doorway, blonde hair ruffled with sleep, clutching her favourite stuffed bear to her chest.

Brynn dropped the teddy on the ground when she screamed.

“Mama!”