The Monsters in Your Neighborhood Read online

  “Fine,” Kai said through clenched teeth. Obviously she wasn’t one to back away from a challenge, either.

  “Fine,” Natalie said back.

  “Super.”

  “Yes, it is super.”

  Rehu looked no more excited by the prospect than Alec.

  “See you then. I’ll bring a dessert.” And with that, Kai turned on her heel, grabbed Rehu by the sleeve, and dragged him from the meeting room. Immediately Natalie turned to Alec.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He glared at her. “Are we on Friends or something? Awkward double date with our enemies, hilarity ensues—yay!”

  “I think we’re more Buffy than Friends, but I said I was sorry.” She batted her eyelashes and he rolled his eyes. “Forgive me.”

  “Come on, or we’ll both be late,” he grumbled as he linked his arm with hers and maneuvered them into the hall, though she could tell he wasn’t mad anymore. Much.

  The Breakup Broads, a support group for women experiencing divorce, was already gathering outside, glaring at the “happy couples” as they exited the room together.

  “It won’t be so bad,” she tried as she squeezed his arm gently. “She said she’d bring dessert.”

  “I shudder to think what mummies would bring to a dinner party.” He laughed as they walked down into the subway station together. “Two-thousand-year-old preserved cat?”

  She arched a brow. “Sounds like that would be right up your alley, Muttface.”

  “Ouch, unkind,” he teased. “Anyway, it’s just that my classes are getting intense and I’d like to have a break from it all.”

  Natalie nodded. Alec had started back to school in the fall semester at her urging and was studying for his EMT certification at a community college in Manhattan. For the first time since she’d met him years ago, he seemed focused. Which was good, since he’d have to keep his doggie attention deficit at bay for two years to complete the courses. She actually thought he might pull it off.

  He sighed. “But with a war starting, I get that we’re going to have to keep our friends and enemies close.”

  She looked up as a train pulled into the station. “Ooops, gotta go!”

  She pressed a kiss to his cheek and took off so she wouldn’t miss it. As she dove inside, she looked at him. He was standing on the platform and he looked . . . concerned.

  But that was something to deal with later. For now, she had to get to the morgue. Hopefully there she could just work and forget about her worries when it came to monsters. After all, they weren’t there. Most of the time.

  Alec didn’t have class that night, but he still arrived at Manhattan Four Corners Community College. His first semester of training was coming to an end and they were going to have an exam and a skill test in a few weeks, so a few of the guys he had classes with were doing some studying in one of the common rooms.

  It felt a little like a sitcom, really. A bunch of guys, all ages, sitting in a room studying, but what they didn’t know . . .

  Their new friend was a Wolf Man! Cue the fun music and “coming this fall” logos.

  Except if they knew what he was, if they believed what he was, they probably wouldn’t laugh.

  The double doors to the study room opened and a guy named Greg burst in. Alec didn’t like him. Greg was a total frat boy reject, boasting and loud and kind of an asshole. In truth, maybe they were too alike. Except Alec dressed better.

  “You’re late,” Alec said as he made a few notes from his manuals to review later.

  “Dude, seriously, I have a great reason.” Greg flopped down at the table and pulled a laptop from his bag. “Have you guys seen the video?”

  Alec shut his eyes and took a few breaths. Shit, it was hard enough staying focused without people creating distractions.

  “I’ve seen lots of videos, Greg. Specifically?” he asked, and he could hear the barest hint of a growl in his voice. Damn, he could usually control that better as the calendar moved further away from the full moon.

  Greg turned the laptop toward Darren and the others in the group and Alec bit back a gasp. It was a YouTube video that already had over a million hits.

  Its title?

  Real Monster Attack in New York City.

  3

  Natalie’s phone kept buzzing with texts from Alec, and each one made her jump. She glanced down at the latest.

  Almost there.

  Thank God, because she was only just barely holding it together. She scrolled through the previous messages between them, which had started with hers after arriving at the morgue.

  Something happening. Monster related.

  Her hands had been shaking when she wrote it.

  He’d responded almost immediately.

  I know.

  The messages scrolled on, with few details (just in case anyone was intercepting the messages or might find their phones later or something), but with a lot of freaking out. And Alec hardly ever freaked out unless it was PMS (Pre-Moon Syndrome)-related. This time, it wasn’t.

  She heard his key jangle at the door and rushed to open it first. He set his bag down and hugged her without a word. She clung to his shoulders, sucking in his strength like she was the vampire, not Drake. She felt better as they parted, but not a lot.

  “You know?” he asked, his mouth a thin line as they stepped into the apartment they shared and he shut and locked the door behind them.

  She nodded.

  “How? Monster telepathy?” he asked with a wry smile. They always joked about that, though the only monsters she’d ever known with a psychic connection were Jekyll and Hyde.

  Until Jekyll died, that is.

  “No,” she said as she moved into the living room and sat cross-legged on the futon. “Morgue.”

  He nodded. “I should have known.”

  “Wait, how do you know?” she asked.

  He grabbed for a computer from his bag and started fiddling with it. “YouTube,” he said with a frown as he sat down next to her and pressed play on the video he’d queued up.

  “Do I want to see this?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  He shook his head. “No, but you need to.”

  She shuddered and put her focus on the screen. It depicted a game of soccer between four friends at dusk in Central Park. Even though it was the middle of winter, there was no snow on the ground, so people were playing soccer in the park all bundled up. The person holding the camera was shouting out directions and bawdy suggestions for improvement that were being ignored.

  Then, very suddenly, the attention of the players was drawn to a place farther away in the park.

  “What was that?” one of the men on the field asked. The camera didn’t pan away from them.

  “What?” the camera operator asked.

  “That sound!” another said as the four of them turned their backs to the camera. “It came from over there.”

  The camera lifted, zoomed in, and then began to shake. “Oh my God!” the camera operator squealed.

  In the distance, across the park, there was a man on the ground. On top of him was a very tall, very bulky . . . thing. He looked like a man, but he was misshapen. One muscular arm was longer than the other and even from the distance his head seemed . . . off somehow.

  Natalie covered her mouth with her hand and stared, unblinking, as the creature reached down and tore the victim’s arm from its socket with a guttural roar that shook the very air around him.

  The soccer players started screaming and running, and the video ended to reveal advertisements of other gruesome footage one could find on YouTube, as well as a handful of cute cat videos.

  Alec shut the laptop case and stared at her.

  Natalie swallowed, trying to find her voice, trying to find any words whatsoever.

  “Well, that explains what happened to the corpse’s arm,” she finally managed to squeak.

  Her boss, the medical examiner Gretchen Grimes, had gone on and on about that during autopsy. About h
ow it wasn’t possible for an arm to be pulled clean off, even though all the evidence pointed to that fact.

  “Gretchen even said to me, ‘What kind of monster would do this to an unarmed homeless man?’ ” Natalie whispered. “ ‘What kind of monster?’ ”

  Alec paced the room with a shake of his head. “You know Grimes, she’s always saying things that could be used in television procedurals. I swear that woman thinks she’s on camera at all times.”

  “But we both know that the strength demonstrated on that video is not . . . human,” she said, rubbing her eyes as exhaustion began to make her weak and emotional.

  He hesitated. “Yeah, there is that. So if it was a monster, who was it?”

  She swallowed. “None of ours, I’m pretty sure. The video footage was pretty far away from the event itself, but the body type wasn’t right for anyone in our group.”

  Alec shook his head in frustration. “So if it’s a new monster, how is that possible? I thought we knew all of our kind who live in the city.”

  She shrugged. “Once I sorted through his hoarding and you broke the encryption he used, Blob kept pretty good records. But even he admitted in his notes that it was impossible to keep track of every monster in a city as big as this. People come and go here every day. A monster could pass through one night and be gone the next. And some don’t want to be found. Think about Hyde; he’s been missing for months.”

  Alec flinched. Once Jekyll was killed six months ago, his “brother” Hyde had disappeared off the radar, completely and utterly free to do whatever vile, hedonistic—likely violent—thing he chose.

  “You realize that . . . that . . . the monster on the video . . . well, it looked like a—”

  She clenched her fists. Alec was trying so hard to be gentle about what he wanted to say. It almost made this worse.

  “He looked like a Frankenstein’s monster, a Creature,” she said, filling in the blanks Alec wouldn’t. “I know. It was the crazy arms that did it. And that weird way he moved. But I don’t know how it’s possible. Last I heard, they . . . we were all dead except for me.” She paused and slipped into the one attitude that made her feel better in times like these: snark. “Not that we have a newsletter or something to keep track. Maybe we should have a newsletter. I should write a newsletter. The Creature Feature.”

  Alec stared at her for a minute and then broke into a wide grin. “You are hilarious. Have I told you that lately?”

  She pushed to her feet. “Not lately.”

  He shook his head. “But then what do we do about . . . this situation?”

  She sighed. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this. I mean, seriously, I can’t believe it. But . . . we need to find . . . Igor.”

  Alec stared at her, blinking excessively as he tried to process that statement. “You mean from, like, a dozen movies.”

  She shook her head. “No, like from my dad’s lab.” When Alec continued to stare, she shrugged. “Some things they do get right in The Story; you know that, Silver Bullet Boy.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Okay, so how do we find this guy?”

  She cleared her throat. “Well, um, he emailed me a few years ago and tried to friend me on Facebook last year. I’ve ignored him up until now, but I can try those. Maybe we can get him to Skype with us or something.”

  “Hey, let’s Skype with Igor from the movies . . . No, no, the mad scientist Igor,” Alec muttered. “This is the weirdest conversation ever.”

  Natalie laughed despite the circumstances. “No, it really isn’t. You don’t know what you talk about when you’re in Moon Craze right before you turn all Wolf Man. Those conversations are way weirder.”

  Alec wrinkled his brow. “Really? How embarrassing. And normally I would ask you about that, but I’m actually going to put a pin in it and save it for later. Because we have a real problem here. I think we’re going to have to tell the others what happened.”

  “If they don’t already know about the video,” Natalie said with a sigh. “And you know how they’re going to react.”

  “Like big baby monsters?” Alec offered with a put-upon sigh of his own. “Do you ever feel like we’re babysitting but not getting paid?”

  Natalie moved toward the bedroom for her laptop. “Yeah. All the time, Wolfie. All the time.”

  As Natalie stood at the podium in front of their circle, Alec could see she was shaking. It had been fifteen minutes since group started; they were running late because Drake had yet to show, but she still hadn’t brought up the YouTube video. Not that he could blame her. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel if he saw another Wolf Man tearing a human apart for the world to see.

  Of course, that was impossible off the werewolf moon cycle. But still, the point remained the same. Monsters were sensitive about their “kind.”

  Their eyes met and Natalie shrugged, like she knew what he was thinking. He definitely knew she was stalling. With a deep breath, she opened her mouth, but before she could say anything Linda stood up.

  “I want to talk about something,” she began. “I’ve been trying to bring it up the past three meetings, but someone always cuts me off.” She shot a series of dark glares around the room.

  Natalie’s lips pursed with irritation, but then she nodded. “Okay, Linda. You’re right, we don’t always listen to you the way we should. Go ahead.”

  Alec arched a brow and mouthed Coward at her, but she acted like she didn’t see it and focused on Linda.

  The Swamp Dweller smiled at being acknowledged and said, “I—I have a boyfriend.”

  For a minute, all thoughts of monsters and murder fled Alec’s mind and he stared at Linda in disbelief. But then again, she wasn’t exactly bad-looking. A little thin, with wiry arms and legs that were a bit . . . lizardlike in how they bowed slightly. But she had a vaguely pretty face and her green eyes were stunning, thanks to their very inhuman coloring. He supposed some guy might be all about that. And some guys liked clingy and needy, for some reason. He preferred tough and awesome.

  “How does that work?” Kai asked, staring at Linda as intently as anyone. “How do you cover your scales? Your makeup falls off all the time just sitting around, so how do you manage it when you’re . . . closer?”

  Linda shifted, though her makeup didn’t allow a blush. “Look, he accepts me for who I am.”

  Natalie’s eyes went wide. “Oh God, tell me you haven’t revealed your true form to him.”

  Linda blinked several times. “It’s not like that. I’m just saying he accepts what I am and what my . . . boundaries are.”

  Alec chuckled. “So you don’t let him near enough to the goods for him to discover you lay eggs in a clutch by the river?”

  “Ew, Alec,” Natalie said in the tone she sometimes used that had idiot written all over it. Only her sparkling eyes always gave away that she found him to be a charming idiot, at least.

  Linda’s already thin lips thinned even further and she glared at Alec. “Watch it, Wolf Man. You think you can screw with me, but at some point I’m not going to take it anymore.”

  Alec leaned back in his chair to examine her. Linda was usually very passive, filled with tears, and easily worked up by any shift in her environment. But right now she looked a little scary. He wasn’t sure whether to applaud her effort or threaten her right back.

  “Linda, tell us more about this guy,” Natalie intervened, her tone soothing.

  The Swamp Dweller shook her head, even though her gaze was still focused on Alec in a rather uncomfortable way. “No. You guys are assholes. I don’t even know why I keep coming to this group.”

  “So you can bitch about your cats,” Kai said with a sniff.

  Linda shoved her chair back, flipped the entire room off, and stomped into the hall, slamming the door behind her.

  Natalie covered her eyes briefly. “Thanks, guys. Now I’m going to have to smooth those feathers . . . scales . . . whatever.”

  “They’re related, you know,” Alec offered. “Sca
les and feathers.”

  Natalie ignored him and looked at the group. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment to do this, hoping Drake would be here, but I guess I’d better do it now, before everyone gets in a huff and storms off. Have any of you seen the monster video on YouTube?”

  Kai sat up straighter and Pat shuddered.

  “What?” Rehu asked. “What video?”

  Alec groaned. Their laissez-faire attitude this evening had indicated they didn’t know, but he had held out hope anyway. Now it was clear they were all in the dark.

  “It’s been removed in the last couple of days, probably because it’s considered evidence, but I managed to capture it.” Alec grabbed his laptop from under his chair and queued the video to play. “Seriously, you guys really need to get some social-media savvy.”

  “Service is spotty in the sewer,” Pat said as a defense. “I need a—what do they call it? A booster?”

  “I find social media to be rather beneath me.” Rehu sniffed. “Why would I care what you had for lunch or what you think of some terrible television show?”

  Alec sighed and played the video at full screen. Natalie turned away, but he watched the other monsters stare at what they saw, then flinch and react as the Creature’s violence took over. When the clip ended, there was only silence for a full three minutes.

  Finally, Kai spoke, her voice shaky and weak. “It—it’s a fake. That’s got to be a fake.”

  “It’s not,” Natalie choked out, her gaze still focused on something just to the side of her companions. “The victim’s body was brought into the morgue, missing his arm, just like in the video. It’s real.”

  Rehu shoved to his feet and took a step toward Natalie that could only be considered menacing. She didn’t flinch, and Alec knew she could hold her own, but that didn’t stop his protect-the-pack mentality from kicking in. He lunged between them, ready to tear apart anyone who would threaten his . . . whatever she was. Girlfriend, he supposed, was the best term.

  “What the fuck, Natalie?” Rehu snapped, almost as if Alec weren’t between them at all. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us about this straightaway? It’s a little more important than Linda’s fucking sex life or a bunch of introductions to the freaks for this week. We all know each other, Natalie! Why do we do that every time?”