The Book of Broken Creatures: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 1) Read online

  Behind her, the tail swished to the side, then thumped the floor once, pounding me from my speechless, jaw-dropped trance.

  “Please, sir,” the woman said again. “If you can help me . . .” Her voice broke. “I can’t let them take her away from me.”

  Still staring at the bizarre sprout of ears like I might be able to will it back into nonexistence, I worked up my decline.

  Jera hopped in front of me, collecting the cash in one hand and saying jubilantly, “He would be happy to be of service to you, human.”

  “No,” I said, taking her wrist and freeing the money from her tightly bound grasp. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Well, it should be,” Jera said sweetly, but her eyes were blades as she looked up at me. Then, remembering her hand in mine, she yanked it away. Only to whirl on me and shove me towards the kitchen area.

  Still with that same saccharine tone, she told the woman, “If you’ll excuse us for just a moment.”

  In the kitchen, she nudged the stand keeping the door ajar, so that when it closed, I was alone with her icy regard.

  She stabbed a finger at my chest. “Listen, you brute, I told you this would happen and it has, so would it not be splendid if you could bypass your doubt and skip to appreciating this grand opportunity that’s been gifted to you.”

  “Gifted to me?” I asked. “Strangers showing up at my shop asking ridiculous things of me is not a gift.”

  Another hard, pointed jab. “I can’t comprehend it any better than your mundane, puddy brain can, but the circumstances are so, Peter. You have the Maker’s gift whether you know it or not, and the immortals can sense that. They will come to you and they will ask things of you.”

  “That girl is hardly what I’d call an immortal.” More like a mindbending mutation that made no sense at all no matter which angle of fantastical theories I implemented. She had the ears of a rabbit and the tail of a komodo dragon. What mythology out there covered such a bizarre arrangement? At least the claim of succubus fell into my realm of threadbare understanding.

  “She is not an immortal, true. But close enough,” Jera ceded.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means whatever changed her into that thing is likely the same thing that’s changing you into what you’re becoming.”

  “Which is “the Maker,”” I clarified.

  “A semblance of him. I don’t think there’s an official term for what you are. Just as there is but a loose theory as to why you are.”

  I took a deep breath, then remembered Ophelia was fast asleep out there with the two strangers. While they’d seemed kind—if not docile by circumstance alone—anything was possible.

  I gritted my teeth, then tsked. “Well, what am I supposed to do about rabbit girl?”

  “Exactly what the mother wants. Heal her.”

  “I’m not sure what power you think I’ve got, but as far I know, I’m not Houdini.”

  “And I’m not sure who Houdini is, but if he has the ability to manifest thoughts to reality via dark energy, then you are him.”

  “I’ve done nothing to warrant that ludacris assumption.”

  “You’re wrong. You made an entire squadron of hunters vanish. Hunters who were undoubtedly slayed by my sister’s gift. You rid of them with a single thought you didn’t even know you were having.”

  “That’s—”

  “Not all,” she cut in, slinking close to me in a wave of grace and something basely sensual. Her heat was an instant singe, the subtle curves pressing into me, soft edges melting into a long dormant aspect of myself. I could smell my shampoo on her, a woodsy stamp of daily routine branded against her. And something smokey just beneath it. She wrapped her arms around me, successfully short circuiting my thoughts as she leaned against me, etching herself into my awareness. “There is the matter of these,” she said smugly, fingers bearing down into the groove of my back.

  An instant, deep sound of pain erupted from me as the dull stab that’d been going all day screamed into a fury. I moved without thought, shoving her away before I could think better of it.

  Not that it mattered. In a heartbeat, she shoved back, then plastered herself against me, suffocating my stun. Her fingers sank deeper into my spine. “The only beings who wear the face of man and have wings are those of fiction and the Maker himself,” Jera all but purred.

  Through the rush and pound of ire, I looked down into the metallic steel of her gaze, and I didn’t see a trace of the incompetent woman who could hardly handle holding a plate. I saw something arcane, something not right peering up at me from behind ruins and dark places I couldn’t begin to fathom, and just for a moment, I trembled.

  Her lips pulled back into a smile then, two rows of perfectly white teeth and lips like rose petals. Gone were the ruins and left was the same smug, obnoxious, and frivolous woman I was beginning to know.

  “You can either accept the truth, learn your gift, and help that woman and her child or you can deny it, sit here, vulnerable and exposed, and wait to be slaughtered—and they will come for you when they discover your change. But something tells me you’ve had enough death in your lifetime and don’t intend to have another, even if it’s your own—especially if it’s your own.”

  I wasn’t sure how the evening had gone from a four to a ten, mellow closing time to my body settled on the edge, encased by a woman I couldn’t begin to read.

  Was I really going to accept this woman’s words at face value? Did that mean I’d officially dived off the deep end? Initiated into whatever baseless set of beliefs the sisters were a part of? Were they even baseless? I’d seen the lightning explode from Ophelia, I’d partially witnessed the disappearing of a set of men, touched horns attached to Jera’s skull, and now a tail and ears grown from the very flesh of a girl. Either I was losing my mind, or the world had lost its.

  But on the off chance what Jera said was true and I hadn’t lost my mind and the world was something more than I’d ever imagined, did I really want to wait around for those hunters to come to this shop and pick me off?

  The splintering shards inside of my back pulsed in answer, telling me something in me was changing, even if I didn’t know what. It cornered me, saying there was only one viable answer here.

  With a pit of reluctance, I said, “Fine. Show me how.”

  *****

  Out in the lounge area, Ophelia had woken and taken an instant liking to both the mother and child as if she’d known them all her life. She’d been talking animatedly with them both—mostly to the little girl, who she’d gotten a chocolate milk from the shop’s freezer—about how there was nothing they needed worry about, and that everything would be alright from here on out if they just believed it to be so. She was really starting to remind me of those Friday night hippies.

  At Jera and I’s return, however, the conversation died instantly, the woman giving me a silent, imploring gaze, awaiting the verdict.

  I asked her to sit and tell me everything.

  Her name was Anisah, and her daughter, who was but six years old and never asked for any of this, she said, was Kyda. They’d once owned a family home up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where she and her husband used to travel every summer as his work at the firm demanded it. And it all started with nothing but a little cough, Anisah told me, seated in the booth, her gaze alternating between unsure glances at the windows, protective looks placed over her daughter, and pleading glances reserved for me.

  At first I thought she meant Kyda, but then she said, “A cough was all my husband had. I thought nothing of it at the time. It was just a bug. He worked so much, did so much. Bodies wear down with age and too much working. So when that cough became a funeral, I didn’t know what to do. I left our primary home in Fargo, and I came down here to Wichita to leave the memories there. He’d been such a wonderful man, you see, so how could I stay there when all of those good memories would rot into grief?”

  Despite what’d happened in the ki
tchen, I was thankful for Jera’s presence beside me. The woman sat unphased, studying Anisah with maybe too penetrative of a gaze, as if holding each syllable the woman dropped under a microscope.

  I was also torn between what the woman had implied—that no one in their right mind would stay in a place where their dead loved one once lived—ergo, me—and looking unsurely to the daughter beside her. Hearing of a father she’d lost couldn’t have been easy, but the girl merely ambled, her head bowed, the fluffy brown ears sagged low enough to hide her face as she fidgeted with something in her hands.

  Seeing the large anomalies admittedly set something ill-at-ease inside of me. I may as well have been sitting across from a real-life Bugs Bunny.

  “It’s okay to talk about it in front of her. She’s heard it all. Besides, this was five years ago,” Anisah explained. “Kyda was only one, hardly remembers him, and I would never lie to her or hide the truth.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t a parent and I was definitely no expert in healthy ways of dealing with death.

  She took the silence as permission to continue. “I moved here hoping to get away from it all, and for three blissful years, I had. It was difficult, but I had money remaining from the homes we’d sold and the savings, but most I put into Kyda’s college savings. Still.” Her eyes wandered briefly to nothing remarkable, spacing, before she said softly, “A year ago Kyda caught a cold. I wasted no time taking her to the hospital this time. And I begged them to cross examine my husband’s autopsy and try to link it with what she was experiencing. But they said it didn’t warrant it. So they prescribed her cold medicine and a future check up.”

  “But it didn’t work?” I guessed.

  Anisah shook her head, and that desperation returned to her eyes. “It got worse, but just when I thought to take her to the hospital, she came to me that morning, healthy as could be. Except, she was different.” She took a deep, calming breath that seemed to make her more frazzled than composed. “These ears you see started off small at first. I thought they were tumors, so still I took her to the hospital, where the doctors examined her through and through. But there was something about these doctors. The things they would ask, the samples they wanted, began to sound as though they saw my daughter as less a patient and more a, well, threat. A threat they wanted to get rid of. I did what I thought was best. I took her and I ran for the second time in my life. I guess that was my own paranoia.”

  At the bar area, Ophelia was wiping down the visible surface of everything, her movements hushed, almost indiscernible. But her eyes occasionally gleaned over the pair across from me, worry on the lips she nibbled.

  I focused on her motions a moment, collecting my words. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Inflicting hope or damnation was a sizable power, and right then, I was leaning towards the darker side of the spectra. The realistic side that recognized that, even if in these last 24 hours I’d witnessed the sun falling and the dead rising, it didn’t change the core of the matter: I wasn’t capable of doing anything to help this woman. Nothing I knew of.

  Jera nudged me with her leg under the table, urging me to speak.

  I shifted from the contact, not needing another dose of emotions to cloud my already mucky judgement.

  She shot me a scornful look, then spoke to Anisah herself. “Is there someone after you now?” When no immediate answer came, she probed harder, “If you can’t trust us with that simple information, how can you trust us with your daughter’s condition?”

  Lips thinned, Anisah crumbled reluctantly under the logic. “They’ve been after us for months now. The first time was when a man came to my home asking all sorts of questions regarding Kyda, and then the second was when—” She choked up on whatever memory assaulted her, and for a moment I was afraid she would start crying, and based off of yesterday’s experience, I wasn’t the best at handling women and tears without offering up everything short of my soul just to get them to stop. Fortunately she gathered herself all on her own, fisting her hands resolutely atop the table. “The second time was when they wanted to take her from me.”

  My lips parted. I glanced at Jera, then wondered, “Are these the same men?”

  A subtle shrug answered, then, “Without a doubt.”

  Anisah looked between us, confused. “You know them?”

  Now Jera looked plain bored, even going as far as to examine her cuticles as she said, “They’ve been after my sister and I for a while now. Days, months—years? Forgive me, human time tends to blend.”

  This was news to me, but I kept my expression neutral. If those men were after these sisters for that long, there was no doubt about it: they would show up here again to collect what they wanted.

  “Who are they, some kind of scientists?” asked Anisah.

  “Hmmm. Some of them, not all. I would brand them lunatics first, hunters second, here to eradicate the existence of all things immortal and . . . strange.” Jera slid a pointed look to Kyda, who truly seemed the least bit concerned with the discussion, no matter how heavily it pertained to her. The girl instead continued to play with what looked to be a toy soldier.

  Jera went on, and I listened, suddenly all too curious what kind of whack jobs might impose upon the shop. “Their organization is called HB,” she said. “Short for Hunters Bureaucracy. Trained killers, mad scientists, you name it, they’ve got it.”

  “Do they have guns?”

  The three of us all looked to Kyda. It was the first time I’d heard the girl speak. The voice was delicate, tiny, and as innocent as the naturally wide-eyed look she deployed. Unlike the question she spread out before us.

  My mouth dangled open for a second, but Jera had no hesitation.

  “They sure do,” she said as though she were doing nothing more than informing that yes, the shop did in fact carry chocolate cake with sprinkles on top. “Big guns, small guns, long guns, short guns. They have their own facility dedicated to their manufacturing, geared specifically for putting down—”

  “Jera!”

  Her gaze whipped to mine. “What? The little human oddity asked.”

  “She’s six.” I didn’t know where or how this woman was raised, but last I checked, the most a six year old should know about guns, or any kind of weapons for that matter, was toy water guns.

  So imagine my shock when the little girl pinned Jera with a kilowatt of intensity, and asked deadpan, “Like the MAC-10 machine pistol or regular handguns?”

  Not even Jera had an answer for that.

  “I’m sorry,” Anisah said, shifting Kyda closer to her. “She gets like that sometimes. Her father hated guns. Anything war related. And she knows this but even so, Kyda’s obsessed with them. With guns, with swords, medicine, with all things wartimes. Especially the Cold War. Start her up on it and nothing’s going to quiet her down.” There was a certain enthusiasm layered beneath her apologetic explanation that made me believe she encouraged the fascination despite the chastising look she gave the girl. Maybe after years of feeling helpless to the world’s threatening sway, her daughter’s desire to explore means of power was something of a first step in her mind.

  “How did you escape?” Jera asked, shifting the focus back to the prime topic.

  “Barely,” the other woman answered. “By luck alone, I should say. The second time the men showed up, Kyda was staying with my mother-in-law for some time, until I figured out a real plan. These men didn’t know this. They assumed she was home with me, and so when they arrived, they claimed to work with the hospital I’d once been taking her to for her checkups. They said they’d found some important information that could possibly cure Kyda, but that they would have to take her to their private hospital to run some tests.”

  Already the hunters’ story sounded seedy, an under the table disaster waiting to happen. But that was from the outside looking in. I was eager to find out just how they’d gotten out of the situation. Had someone shown up to tell me they’d found a device that could have reverted Ma’s vegetable state
post-accident, I wouldn’t have been asking how, I’d have been asking when. “Why didn’t you accept?” I asked.

  The weight of motherhood bore through her dark gaze. “Believe me, I wanted to. I would have—was going to. I told the men I would have my daughter again in a few days and would love to explore treatment options. They were happy to wait and return at a later time. For that entire day, I was hopeful.” Sadness washed over her. “Hope can be either terrible or powerful. In this case, it would have been devastating, because it was this hope that would have led me to turn over my daughter to that vile organization.”

  Ophelia suddenly came out and brought a coffee to her. I tried to sniff to determine whether it was the expensive or the cheap stock. Then I wondered when the succubus had learned to work the coffee machine.

  Regardless, after thanking Ophelia, Anisah ran her finger along the rim of the drink, eyes locked on its cathartic pools as she announced the next part. “A rather odd man came to my home the next day. Tall like yourself, but nowhere near as…” Again, she seemed to drift into the memory, and when she resurfaced, it was at another point. “In fact, I’ve never met anyone like him in my life. He had the strangest eyes that I’d swear changed colors every time I looked away from him—and after all that’s happened with Kyda, I’ll believe just about anything. But that’s irrelevant. The point is, rather than tell me who he was or what he wanted, he instead gave me an envelope, a word of warning and then a word of advice. The envelope contained the truth behind the men who’d come for Kyda. The word of warning was for me to get as far from my house as possible and never bring Kyda back there. And the word of advice was that I find you, because you could help me.”

  “And you just did as this stranger told you?” Jera asked, brows raised, amusement caught on her lips.

  “No,” Anisah retorted with a glare. “I looked into the information the man provided and discovered some . . . things about the organization.”