Nope, I didn’t know what his big plans were, if he had any, but he didn’t show any signs of stopping trailing after me. It was irritating in the beginning, although I enjoyed screwing with him by flipping him off or waving cheerfully, but as the days went on, it had gotten old and became flat-out fucking annoying. I already had real monsters trailing me; I didn’t need a fake one.
I was more than ready and willing to teach him another lesson, had been since he peered through the kitchen window. I’d made him sorry once. I could make him sorry again. This time, though, I had to make certain it was a permanent sort of solution. Nik could help with that. I only had to determine how he could without me telling him anything. He protected me from the big problems. I absolutely would protect him from the smaller ones.
“It was crappy beer, too, you asshole,” I shouted back at Mr. Invisible as I walked my usual path, now with my usual creeper behind me. “When did Chester the Molester get so cheap?”
He snarled but moved in to halve the distance between us in a rush. I liked that. I wanted this over with. I was tired of dealing with his shit.
That’s it, Mr. Invisible.
Give me time to plan, but take the bait.
Reach for that purple pony.
Get close.
Practical Lions
It was almost three and a half weeks after Mels and the park when Niko turned off the TV and the stupid movie that had been playing. Old and stupid, okay, as that was the only kind you could get without cable, but it made me laugh. Vampires with club clothes, earrings, motorcycles, body oil, saxophones, and absolutely the worst haircuts. Too easy to pick out of a crowd, but you’d be laughing too hard to catch them. If they were real.
Mr. Invisible, who was real, kept behind me every day, getting closer and closer the last three of them, but always disappearing from whatever window he’d grimly watch me through minutes before Niko got home. I wish my other monsters would do that, run at the sight of my big brother, but they didn’t. When my monsters showed up, they never ran. We did.
We didn’t know how to get rid of our monsters, the Grendels. That’s what Niko had named them after reading Beowulf long before school would’ve made him. That was Niko, too smart for anyone’s good. It did give us a label to put on our real-life nightmares, though, and that helped, weirdly enough. Not that the name mattered in the end. We didn’t know what they were and that’s what did count. You can’t fight, you can’t arm yourself, against something that doesn’t exist, not in all the twenty-five-pound mythology books Niko dragged home time after time. I had to wonder. Were there other monsters not in those books, others you were helpless against, because you knew nothing about them? Not even their true names? And if there were, was there a way to kill any monster?
If they were in the books, life would be easier. Like vampires. Stake them. We’d not seen one before, and with the way we watched, I thought we’d have spotted one a long time ago, but if we ever did, we’d know what to do. Or werewolves…okay, I was not entirely sure about werewolves. They might be real. I’d caught the scent of people with that special Grendel talent of smelling everything you didn’t want to smell, and some of them smelled like dog but stronger…more rank. I thought they were dog people, had ten or so giant canines crammed in their tiny apartment, but sometimes I caught them glaring at me from the corner of their eyes. They might be dog people or they might be Dog-people. We hadn’t found out yet.
“You believe in vampires?” I asked, leaning casually against Nik’s shoulder as I had all though the movie. He was the only one I’d let touch me or who I would touch without thinking about it. Relaxed. Warm. Safe. That was how he smelled and had since I could remember. “I know we haven’t seen one yet, but I haven’t seen a komodo dragon in real life either, and they’re real, yeah?”
Niko, the corners of his lips turning up slightly, poked my ribs as he switched off the television. His eyes, the same gray as mine, studied mine with amusement. We’d watched that practically ancient movie called The Lost Something or Another. It was about vampires, although not especially scary ones, which had given me a chance to ask Nik about something without really asking. He wouldn’t take it seriously. One of the vampires in the movie had a mullet; how serious could it be?
“You think vampires are real?” he asked. “That they have Eighties-style hair and ride motorcycles? You know we’ve never seen one.” Yet. “And we’ve certainly not seen anything like those who have more jewelry than a pawn shop could afford, ride motorcycles, and read comic books.”