The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 3

Quinn

The words echoed in my head, somehow more chilling than the horrifying creatures that’d been attacking me: She’s ours.

Who with the what now? Since fucking when did I belong to anyone? Or anything, as the case might more accurately be.

A shiver crawled up my spine, but I didn’t have much of a chance to process what I’d heard. If some of the creatures descending on me backed off, enough of them barreled onward that I couldn’t tell the difference in the night.

The figure that’d tackled the furry alligator spun toward the charging creatures. I couldn’t see what’d become of the beast that’d clawed me, but it was obvious the thing that’d saved me wasn’t any less grotesque, even with the little I could make out in the near-total darkness. It moved on all fours with swift jerks and a clacking of its own talons, slashing this way and that.

The figure who’d spoken, the one who’d said I was theirs, seemed to surge forward with more limbs than I’d initially registered. Or were those weapons? Something long and sinewy whipped out at both sides of the body I’d initially seen as humanoid, with sounds of impact as the lithe projectiles smacked into my attackers.

The hulking form that’d stayed silent so far lunged this way and that with more forceful blows, moving nearly as fast as its companion. It slammed itself down on a creature that let out a piercing screech, and the ground shuddered under my feet. The pain in my arm jolted with a sharper ache.

What the hell was going on? What were these things? How could this be happening?

I shook my head as if clearing it would somehow wipe away the unreal chaos around me. I’d just taken my pills—could vivid hallucinations kick in as a new side effect after years on the same maintenance dose?

As implausible as that sounded, it made more sense than the idea that I was literally being swarmed by… by what could only be described as monsters.

A splash from behind me was my only, brief warning that at least one of those monsters had decided to brave the pond in an effort to get past my defenders. As I whirled around with a lurch of my pulse, a cold, slimy form rammed into me and pinned me to the ground.

Something rough as sandpaper scraped across my already bleeding wounds. The fresh spike of pain shocked a choked gasp from my throat.

I flailed at the thing, and one of those thick, whip-like objects bashed into its side, sending it flying halfway across the pond. But more wet noises were carrying through the night.

“Get her out of here!” ordered the hollow-sounding voice from before. “Up and out. We’ll regroup on the island.”

The island?I opened my mouth, not sure whether I was going to protest or clarify—or whether the sounds that fell off my tongue would even be coherent—but it didn’t matter. The next thing I knew, the hulking figure was catching me up in arms thicker than my thighs and launching itself off the ground toward the sky.

Something flapped past the edge of my vision with a warble of rushing air. I was crushed against a solid… chest? The surfaces pressing against the bare skin of my arms had the solid, grainy texture of stone, but the body was as warm as you’d expect a body to be, muscles flexing and shifting as the thing adjusted its grip on me so I wasn’t quite as squished.

I started to squirm, gritting my teeth against the pain in my forearm, and then froze when the thing heaved upward with another swish of its wings. A glimpse of the roads below showed the streetlamps and headlights gleaming distantly against the dark like upside down stars. We’d already left them far behind.

Did I really want to escape this creature’s grasp when the only avenue for escape was a plummet to my death?

I dragged in a shaky breath, willing my body to unclench—other than the fingers still wrapped around the handle of my multitool. I might have squeezed it so tight by now that it was embedded in my palm for all time. Another urge rose up to thrash and stab at the monstrous thing clutching me, but my sense of self-preservation overrode the impulse.

I had to wait until it put me down. When my feet were on solid ground again, I’d have a real chance to fight for my survival.

My pulse rattled through my veins. The wind whooshed past us, flinging my hair across my face. And a voice—deep and gravelly in a way that seemed to fit the stony body that restrained me—rumbled by my ear.

“Am I hurting you?”

The question came out gruff, as if the speaker was irritated that I wasn’t expressing gratitude for the ride. My own voice snagged in my throat. It took me a moment to force it out.

“No. Not—not really. I’d like to go back down, though.”

The creature grunted. “Almost there.”

It—he? The voice had definitely sounded male—tilted forward, and the whole of Jacksonville stretched out beneath us, dappled with golden lights and here and there streaks of vibrant blue. I’d never seen the city from quite this high up before. For just an instant, I forgot the craziness I’d stumbled into beneath a swell of awe.

Then my mind jerked back to reality. I’d been stormed by a mass of monsters in the middle of the park and now I was soaring through the sky in the arms of a creature that felt as if it were made of stone. This was insane.

I was going to wake up soon, right? Jolt back into awareness and find myself tangled in my bedsheets? How could this actually be true?

But I didn’t wake up. The lacerations on my arm continued to ache, the wind kept on tangling through my hair, and the rock-like arms held me securely and firmly.

We tipped into a dive. With a gentleness that startled me, not that our flight before had seemed particularly rough, the beast glided downward against the buffeting of the humid air. The lights fell away behind the edges of my sight; darkness clotted beneath us.

We dropped down into a small clearing surrounded by trees. The only light came from the half moon and the few stars that showed in the circle of sky above the ring of leaves. The creature set me down in a sitting position, but I shoved myself onto my feet immediately, whirling around, taking stock.

My messenger bag still hung against my back, the strap digging into my chest. I gripped the handle of my multitool, knife ready. I should dig my first aid kit out of the bag and do what I could to clean and then bandage the wounds on my arm, but I wasn’t sure yet that I didn’t need to defend myself from more immediate threats.

As the hum of insect life wavered up from between the trees, a mossy scent filled my nose. I had no idea where we were. The river wove around several islands within the city alone, and there had to be dozens more in the ecological preserve along its northeast bank. I didn’t see any signs of human habitation around me, but then, I couldn’t see much of anything at all.

I tucked my injured arm against my chest and glanced at my protector-slash-kidnapper. He looked… oddly not quite as hulking as before. What I could make out of his form in the darkness was still at least twelve inches taller than my five-foot-five, broad and brawny with muscle, but I could have sworn he’d been at least a foot taller than that when he’d sprung into being in the park.

Of course, there’d been a lot of bizarre things happening right at that moment. It was possible I’d imagined him as more immense in my confusion.

But I hadn’t imagined the wings. We couldn’t have flown here without them, right? Now I couldn’t see them at all. Had he managed to tuck them completely out of sight behind his back?

Allof him looked more human than I’d expected—limbs and facial features in all the right places—other than the harsh, blocky angles of his square jaw.

“Where are we?” I asked. “Why did you bring me here?” I flicked my gaze to the forest around us, but if this was an island, chances were I didn’t have much chance of escape here either.

And what else might be lurking in those denser shadows between the trees?

“Getting you away from those menaces,” my rescuer rumbled. “This is the spot we agreed on.”

Ihadn’t agreed on it, but before I could point that out, something moved at the edge of the clearing.

I tensed, raising my knife, but the figure that stepped into the moonlight was a man, not a monster. Or at least, that’s what he looked like at first.

He sauntered forward on two legs with a swaying gait, tall but within a more typical range as human beings went, muscular but not hulk-like. I made out a tumble of dark curls above similarly dark eyes that held a faint glint of what seemed to be amusement. His narrow jaw canted to the right as his mouth stretched in a broad grin.

As bewildered and terrified as I was, his face was so striking even in the darkness that my pulse hitched with a jolt of giddy adrenaline. He was savagely handsome, with a wild grace that showed in every movement of his body.

Then he raised his hand in a flippant gesture of greeting, and I noticed the claws.

They were dark too, so dark they’d blended into the night before he’d moved his hand in front of him. Talons tapering to needle-sharp points protruded from his lithe fingers, nearly as long as the fingers themselves. Not a man at all.

My pulse stuttered all over again, and my arm jerked up, brandishing the knife. The clawed man cocked his ferally gorgeous head in a motion that felt more animalistic than human. He let out a chuckle.

“We help her keep her hide, and she wants to take off ours?” he said to the giant beside me in a lightly bemused tone.

“She’s scared,” the other man said in the same gruff tone he’d used when asking if he was hurting me. “Like mortals are. You traveled quickly.”

“We hitched a ride on a few cars. So convenient.” The clawed man’s attention shifted back to me, and his angular jaw twitched. “You’re bleeding. One of the interlopers took a gouge out of you. We can’t have that.”

“I—” I started, not really sure what I was going to say, but he crossed the ground between us so quickly that any further words cut off in a startled squeak. He grasped my elbow, tucking his fingers around the joint so his claws didn’t graze my skin, and lifted my arm.

I jerked backward automatically. “What are you doing? Let me go!”

I jabbed the knife at him, but he batted it away with a flick of his other hand—not hard enough to hurt, but with enough power that I could tell he could hurt me easily enough if he’d wanted to, and without even using those claws.

“Careful,” he said in the same almost teasing tone. “You don’t want to lose more blood than you already have.”

“But I?—”

“He can cauterize the wound with his fire,” the giant announced, and in the same moment, the clawed man breathed over the throbbing gashes on my upper arm.

It sounded like a breath, anyway—a slow, emphatic exhalation. But a quavering glow washed over my skin at the same time, and a burning sensation seared all the way down into the muscles as if that breath really had contained fire.

I yelped, but the heat wasn’t like the kind of fire I was used to. It was already condensing into a more soothing warmth—and my flesh was melding into a solid mass again. I gaped, staring down at the rippled patch that now looked more like a scar than a wound.

Could he really have burned away any chance of infection? What the hell was this guy?

Before I’d realized what he was doing, the clawed man leaned even closer and swiped out his tongue. It stretched only a little longer than a regular human tongue might have, but it licked over the healed skin with an oddly rippled texture that was totally alien.

A quiver of mingled alarm, revulsion, and inexplicable fascination raced through me. I yanked at my arm again. “What the fuck— What are you?—”

After one more swift flick of his tongue, the clawed man released me and stepped back. “The saliva settles the burn,” he said conversationally.

When I stared at my arm again, I realized the skin did look smoother than it had at first. The patch where the gashes had been was darker than the rest, but otherwise looked no different.

I retreated a little myself, sliding my heel along the uneven ground the way I’d learned to in my urban explorations, and tested my arm. The clawed guy had soldered the outer flesh back together somehow, but he hadn’t erased every trace of the injury. My bicep still ached faintly with the movement. I couldn’t be sure it was totally safe.

It was a good thing I had that extra prescription of antibiotics. After a scrape during one of my exploring expeditions had left me nervous, I’d convinced my main doctor to write me a “just in case” prescription.

It’d never occurred to me I’d be using it to kill whatever bacteria might lurk on a monster’s claws or tongue.

I flexed my arm again. The pain was much milder now, but it grounded me. A lot of impossible things had happened tonight, but getting slashed up still hurt. Some stunning weirdo’s breath and tongue couldn’t magically make everything better.

“We should go to the safehouse,” the clawed man said to the giant. “The city’s crawling with more of the same beings looking to chow down. You can handle the flight carrying her?”

The larger man flexed his shoulders. “Of course.” He reached toward me.

I scrambled farther back, swinging my knife with one hand and clutching the strap of my messenger bag with the other. “Oh, no. You’re not hauling me off someplace else. Who are you? What are you? What the hell is going on?”

By the last question, my voice had taken on a scratchy, hysterical quality I didn’t like at all, even if I couldn’t suppress it. It wasn’t as if I could stop the massive guy from carting me off again if he decided to force the issue. I suspected the little blade on my multitool would rebound right off his skin like it would a slab of stone. A punch would probably hurt my knuckles more than it did him.

The clawed man gestured with his thumb in what I guessed was the direction we’d come from, as blasé as ever. “A bunch of beasties tried to carve you open. We made sure it didn’t happen. Did you want to go back to them? It didn’t look like you were having fun.”

“Why did they attack me? What do you mean ‘beasties’? I’ve never seen anything like those… And why did you jump in?” Another thought struck me with a fresh chill. “And where’s the other one? There were three of you who were fighting them off.”

I couldn’t have forgotten the figure who’d looked like a man all along, who’d defended me with his strange, whip-like weapons. The one who’d said I was theirs. What’d happened to him?

The clawed guy had said “we” when he’d talked about hitching rides. Was the third man here too, lurking in the shadows with who knew what nefarious purposes in mind?

For the first time, a flash of uncertainty crossed the clawed man’s handsome face. He glanced at the giant as if for guidance.

“You don’t need to talk to Torrent right now,” the stony man announced. “We need to leave.”

“No,” I said with as much defiance as I could put forward, as hopeless as it might be. “I want to see all of you. I want to know who I’m dealing with. And I want someone to explain why the hell any of this is happening to me!”

The clawed man clucked his tongue. “She is a moody one after all, isn’t she?”

My lungs constricted even more. He sounded like he was referring to my full name: Quinn Moody. But how could he know any of my name?

“We don’t—” the giant started, but then a figure wavered into being beside them in the clearing.

It wasn’t like the clawed guy. With him, I could have believed he’d walked up from the shore of the island… however exactly he’d gotten across the river when he didn’t appear to have wings. This man clearly materialized out of the air in front of me as if the darkness itself had solidified into a human form.

Humanesque, at least. His height and lean frame matched the man I’d seen next to the giant in the park, but from behind I hadn’t noticed the strangeness of his face. One side curved inward instead of out, as if that cheekbone had been caved in. And at his sides…

I swallowed another squeak before it could burst from my mouth. The guy was dressed in fairly normal clothes, relaxed jeans and a casual button-up, but two long, sinuous things jutted from his waist beneath his shirt to arc downward, where they curved against the ground as if to help support his stance.

Tentacles, a distant part of my mind recognized. He had tentacles sprouting from his sides like extra-long bonus arms. Those were the weapons I’d watched him flinging at my attackers.

My feet darted backward of their own accord, with less care than I’d used before. My heel caught on a rough edge of rock, and I stumbled, only barely recovering my balance. My heart was pounding faster than I remembered ever feeling it before. And that weird wobble ran through it, just like the moment before the creatures had descended on me in the park.

“Is this better?” the tentacled man—Torrent?—asked in his curtly hollow voice. “Here I am. I thought you might feel better not seeing me, but since you insisted…”

He might have had a point. I couldn’t say that the sight of his monstrous body particularly reassured me.

But he had listened. He’d presented himself like I’d asked him to when his friends could have just dragged me off if they hadn’t cared at all about my feelings on the matter.

Possibly that was the only thing that stopped me from running screaming into the night. Well, that and the fact that I was on landmass surrounded by water, and unknown beasts that’d already ripped into me were still prowling around somewhere out there.

“What are you?” I said again, my voice shaking. I didn’t see any point in bothering with the who this time.

Torrent’s eyes, paler than his companions’, gleamed in the thin moonlight. His voice stayed brisk. “We call ourselves shadowkind. Humans tend to call us ‘monsters.’ Some of us travel to the mortal realm to enjoy what it has to offer in peace. Others have more vicious interests in mind. You met a lot of the latter tonight.”

I let out a huff of breath. “Yeah. Why were they coming at me?”

“There’s something special about you,” the tentacled man said, as coolly as before. “Something all those creatures wanted to snack on, as far as we can tell. But we’ll ensure that doesn’t happen. We’ll keep you safe from them.”

“Why?” I had to ask. He didn’t sound all that happy about the offer.

He shrugged. “What’s special should be preserved. Mortals would generally agree, wouldn’t they?”

I guessed so. But— “What is it—what makes me special?”

“I’m not totally sure,” he said. “But maybe you’ve felt a little of it. Back there in the park, right before the creatures came at you…?”

The first time I’d felt that weird wobble in my chest. He couldn’t mean that, could he? What could that have to do with… with anything?

“I don’t know,” I hedged.

“Well, the situation is very simple either way,” Torrent said. “Those creatures will keep coming after you. We have a place we can take you where they should have trouble finding you—where we can ensure your protection.”

My body balked. “Can’t—can’t I just go home?”

The words came out with a wobble of their own. Embarrassment flushed my cheeks.

The tentacled man’s grim expression didn’t so much as flicker at my show of emotion. “They’d follow you there,” he said. “And we can’t easily fight them off, not when there’ll be more all the time. Coming with us won’t just be for your safety, you know. They won’t care who they hurt on their way to you. They’ll tear through your family without a second thought.”

My stomach sank. In the back of my mind, I saw a horde of shadowy monsters bursting through the windows of the house, sinking fangs and claws into Mom and Dad. Phantom screams echoed inside my skull.

No. My parents had been through so much already because of me. I couldn’t lead this impossible danger right to their doorstep.

But what choices did that leave me? Trust these equally implausible figures in front of me?

I swallowed hard. “I can’t just hide forever.” However short my specific forever might be.

“Not forever,” Torrent agreed. “Not even all that long. We only need time to regroup and come up with a plan that’ll see you more permanently secure. The place we have set up is only a short distance from here. Crag can fly you there. You won’t be hurt.”

Crag—that was an appropriate name for a guy who seemed to be at least partly made out of rock. I swiped my free hand across my mouth. Then, slowly, I lowered my knife and flicked it back into the handle before shoving the multitool into my pocket.

I didn’t like this. I didn’t want to go. But my head was spinning so fast I couldn’t even focus on what other questions I could ask.

I couldn’t lead those things from the park to my parents. If the three monstrous men around me had wanted to slaughter me themselves, they’d had plenty of opportunities. By all appearances, they really did want to help me, however reluctant their sense of duty might have been.

How long did we have before the horde came after me even here?

I wet my lips and then nodded. “All right. Just to regroup. And I’m going to have a lot more questions in the morning.”

Torrent smiled faintly. “Of course you are. We’ll do our best to answer them.”

At a crackling amid the trees, his head snapped around. My pulse jumped. His face turned even grimmer.

“It’s time to go.”