Chapter 13
Farrow
Honestly, chopping up the videos into tasty little teasers was fast becoming the highlight of my week. Watching the subscriber numbers climb as the money rolled in was also pretty pleasant. It was also almost unbelievable. People were paying to watch Timothy.
They were paying me!
My savings were climbing. I kept running the numbers, trying to figure out how long it would take me to save up and move out. My brother was pushing my patience. I wanted to put a lock on my door because I was sure he’d been in my room again, and one of my favorite shirts was missing.
I was tempted to go into his room and take shit, but that would only stir up trouble.
No, I could now see the end of this living arrangement, so it was better to keep my head down and slide through the shadows while plotting my escape.
Which meant I now spent some of my spare time scanning the apartment listings.
I hadn’t gone to see any of them in person. Not yet. I wasn’t that close to freedom. I also wasn’t sure what I was looking for. There was a part of me that wanted something fancy, but that assumed this money kept rolling in not for days or months, but for years.
The smarter part of me knew it was unlikely.
People might get sick of Timothy and want someone new.
Or they’d want edgier content. I’d read articles on the dark side of Scream and Steam, and what happened when people assumed the money would be forever, but the interest and novelty died out for them and the subscribers.
Most monsters never saw the human world; for them, Scream and Steam was all about devouring tasty morsels of a strange place.
Which meant their attention was fickle. So I needed to be careful with how I spent this windfall, as I didn’t think I had it in me to find someone else to perv on, as Timothy put it, and I definitely wasn’t a risk taker like Crispin.
Though from what I’d learned, the scream people had more stable income.
While there’d be no flash riverside apartment for me, I might be able to find something in the same neighborhood, or a similar area. A one-bedroom apartment all of my own.
I checked my stats again as I headed to work. I’d tripled my subscriber account by cutting off the video before Timothy came. They all wanted to see the end.
Could I record more than one video a night?
If I had more in my library, then I could keep this going for longer. Or should I be producing more content, so they didn’t have to wait so long?
I made sure to keep my posting days random because the last thing I wanted was for people to realize it happened every five days and that it was all pre-arranged.
No, it needed to appear random, as if I’d caught him in the act. The first time, that was true. And if we hadn’t spoken, it might have continued to be true.
I scanned into the Bridges port, and the first thing I saw was a warning about a breach that had occurred up north and that we were to gather in the meeting room. My throat tightened. Messing with humans was fun until one of them messed up my world.
Sometimes, if it was bad, they banned us from recording for a bit. I don’t know why. If I hadn’t been so busy checking my Steam stats, I’d have caught the news. Not that much was mentioned on the news, aside from reassuring everyone that the incursion had been contained.
That wasn’t always true, but they didn’t want anyone panicking that their world was about to be unraveled by human children.
Humans blamed monsters for children disappearing, accusing us of bringing them through to our world.
When, in fact, it was the last thing we wanted.
Children were dangerous. The real people responsible for the disappearances were sorcerers.
They took children because children accessed the magic, which sorcerers then used in their own world.
I put on my uniform, made a cup of tea, and dragged my ass to the briefing room along with everyone else, grumbling about the meeting, the breach, and whether their side gig would be shut down.
For every monster grumbling about losing the money from Scream and Steam, there were two who looked at them like they were crazy for even risking a confrontation with pets or humans.
What would they think of me if they knew I talked to Timothy?
Was that a risk most monsters didn’t take?
Crispin flicked me with his tail as he moved to stand beside me at the back of the briefing room. “How’s it going?”
“My brother or the other?” At the moment, they were our two main topics of conversation.
I think he liked being able to share some of the behind-the-scenes stuff from his Scream channel.
After all, the setup and planning weren’t something his subscribers wanted to see, but I was interested.
All his subscribers wanted was the scare of almost being attacked by a cat or dog.
I was tempted to tell him about my agreement with Timothy, but so far, I’d bitten my tongue because I didn’t want him to stare at me with horror and disgust. That was a good sign that I was doing something wrong, even though it didn’t feel wrong.
“Both.” He grinned.
“Every time I ask my brother to respect a boundary, it’s like he deliberately finds and crosses more.
” I kept my voice low as the room filled up with monsters of every different color and all different sizes, fur, scales, and skin, wearing their black uniforms. Most gripped cups of tea and chatted to their friends.
“Damn, have you mentioned it to your parents?”
I rolled my eyes. “In their eyes, I’m being selfish, because it’s only clothes and food.”
“Maybe you should move back home with them if it’s only food.”
I had briefly considered that. “I’m not going to buy any more food.
I’ll buy what I need for dinner, and I’m going to keep my breakfast at work.
” It was going to be inconvenient, but I was sick of propping him up.
He had a job, and if he spent less money going out, he’d be able to buy his own damn food.
“As for the clothing situation, I’m not going to wash anything. ”
Crispin laughed. “You’re going to let the laundry stack up?”
“Yup.” I nodded. It wasn’t a great plan, but I hoped to make a point without demanding that he respect my clothing again, because asking hadn’t worked. “I might check out a few places…just to get a feel for what’s in my range.”
If I didn’t have a job, I’d automatically qualify for housing.
But the housing provided was only three months in a share house with three others.
Which, as far as I was concerned, was worse.
Besides, if I had no job, I would have no access to the human world.
And I liked my job. I didn’t want to work in a restaurant or a factory, or in transport, and I certainly didn’t want a government office job.
The boss walked in and silenced the room with a roar. We all hushed up and waited. The lights dimmed, and she replayed the footage of the disaster. It wasn’t a tsunami this time.
It was worse.
I stared as the child walked into the bridge room. Sirens and lights flashed as the breach was detected. The child walked up to a desk, reached her hand, pulled out a chunk, and ate it like cake.
My mouth hung open.
A monster rushed into the room, and he exploded in a shower of green glitter.
The boss paused the video. “The child had been told that our world was edible, so it became edible. She was told monsters are scared of children and that when scared, they explode into glitter. Her thoughts became our reality.”
A ripple went through my coworkers as we all shuddered in horror. Very few of us wanted to die in a green glitter shower. Or any kind of glitter, for that matter.
“The girl was stopped before she got too far, and the situation has been dealt with. But two things have become very clear. We cannot be complacent about the threat children pose. Ten years ago, we had the jelly incident.”
I was in school during the jelly incident.
But I remember the news and the chaos when one of our lakes became jelly instead of water.
The jelly killed all the fish, and people went hungry.
There was a water crisis, and some of the trees that supported the housing in the area became sick or died.
It took months to fix and was one of the reasons I joined Bridges—I didn’t want to see more of my world destroyed when it was preventable.
My boss continued. “Now this. It shows us that sorcerers are still using children to create magic.”
That drew hisses and growls from my coworkers.
Using children for their own purposes was heinous, and one of the reasons we held such disdain for Santa.
He realized children could connect with the monster world and hold magic, and he used that against us.
He wasn’t the first, but he created the most havoc.
Since him, there have been plenty of others.
Including the ones who inked themselves with dragons as a reminder to believe in magic.
Timothy… He wore the dragon, and he had access to a child, who he wanted me to stay away from. Santa, I needed to spend more time talking to him and less time watching him come.
My boss was still talking. Something about needing to stop sorcerers.
My heart became heavy in my chest. I was playing with magic that might end with me exploding in a shower of glitter. If I was lucky, I’d get to pick the color.