A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters (15 page)

My fellow students have yet to notice these things about me, but the instructor week two, Discord, noticed right away. He never picked on me, even though I was the one who had two (rather mediocre) stories in for critique that week. Instead, he avoided me as much as possible, making him rank just a bit higher in my mind than he normally would have.

Apparently, he became a bestselling thriller writer through observation, not through all that tough-talk he imparted to the other students.

But I digress.

I also arrive at my seat before everyone else, so I can watch them enter. I ignore most of them. They’re the background for my two missions. But a handful of people are impossible to miss.

Like our teaching assistant, Raj O’Driscoll. He’s a glorified gofer, and not bright enough to realize that should anything go wrong with this workshop, he will get the blame.

Then there is the faculty advisor, Lawrence B. Hallerhaven. Hallerhaven has taken on the job to schmooze with the famous writers. He’s terrible at planning and even worse at following through. He leaves all of that to poor Raj, who is spending this morning preparing for Margarite Lawson.

Apparently, she made an unusual list of demands before she agreed to come. Raj is trying to meet those demands before her arrival tonight.

All of his running about makes me nervous, and I’m just sitting in my chair, typing random thoughts in my student laptop as the rest of the class arrive.

They’re carrying a variety of things: the laptops, hardcopy manuscripts covered with their inept scrawls, and various poisons from lattes to regular coffees to donuts to apples to leftover pizza.

We don’t have a lot to say to each other any more except
Shut up
or
Move your ass, I need some room here
or
Were we supposed to read Steve’s story for today?
, so there’s a lot of rustling without a lot of conversation.

That’s okay. It gives me a chance to figure out, once and for all, who is going to die.

That person has to have no redeeming characteristics. This is the person we all love to hate. When that person dies, we’re all going to be relieved he’s dead. We’ll just wonder why someone hasn’t killed him sooner.

As the class wanders in, I contemplate the possible candidates.

The three likeliest victims arrive in a clump. These three are miserable and proud of it, because they believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that misery begets book contracts.

First through the door is Hamlet Thorshov who deserves the Most Miserable Person of the Workshop Award just because his horrible parents decided to name him Hamlet. He’s an underdeveloped twenty-something of very obvious Russian lineage. His white-blond hair matches the color of his white-blond skin and fails to accent his pale blue eyes. He has somehow managed to find T-shirts that are too small for him, and he wears a watch half the size of his arm.

His watch is where the trouble begins, every single workshop. The damn thing can probably fly an airplane on its own. And he toys with it in the middle of the first critique, pressing buttons as if he were setting the stop-watch for his mid- morning run (if he ever exercised, which he most clearly does not).

No one tries to get him to stop any longer, although two days ago, Carlotta Sternke—one of the other three troublemakers—tried to cover the thing in bubble wrap, just to silence it.

That was probably the only time the workshop cheered for her. Carlotta Sternke was the workshop goat long before we decided to pick on Hamlet.

Carlotta is chubby and shows way too much skin through fishnet stockings, tops that deliberately leave her stomach bare, and leather skirts that are both too short and too tight. Her lips are always covered with black gloss and she outlines her eyes in late season raccoon.

Her hair is black with a white streak that might be deliberate, although with Carlotta, it’s impossible to tell. She’s as unpleasant as her clothing, with a high-pitched nervous giggle that makes me long for fingernails running along blackboards.

She feels like she needs to police everyone—hence the bubble wrap on Hamlet’s giant watch. And the person she loves to police more than anyone else is the third in our nasty triumvirate.

Norman Zell makes a good first impression. He’s tall, lanky, and reasonably good-looking. He’s embarrassed by the name “Norman,” so he insists that everyone he meet call him Zell, which, I have to admit, is an improvement.

The problem is that Zell has the attention span of a gnat and the energy level of a hummingbird. He’s in constant motion—either one knee jiggles or an arm or every single finger (and not in unison). In the first week, he managed to sleep with or proposition every woman here (I said no with probably more enthusiasm than I needed to express), and made it clear by the end of the week that he considered every woman who tumbled into his bed to be a conquest.

A conquest that he had the right to write about in Margarite Lawson roman-a-clef style. Only he wasn’t nearly as good at changing the names or the events. The instructor in week two actually made Zell stand in front of the group and apologize to everyone.

Zell burst into tears in the middle of his apology and yet somehow didn’t command any sympathy. We all had had enough by then, and even though the tears were probably genuine, they wouldn’t change his behavior. And sure enough, by week’s end, Zell was sleeping his way through the cafeteria staff, and the first story he turned in this week is titled, “Love in A Time of Meatballs.”

This morning, Hamlet, Carlotta, and Zell manage to sit equidistant from each other, forming a perfect equilateral triangle. They are getting out the first story for critique when the door opens again, and Margarite Lawson sweeps into the room.

She’s taller than I imagined she would be, blonder, and prettier. Or maybe that’s just how her human covering manifests itself in person. She wears a gauze lilac tunic over black pants, and manages to appear imposing and charming at the very same time.

I can see the magic flickering off her, sending sparks around the room. And inside that marvelous human form, I see the TrueSelf, spiny, scaly, and moss green—rather like an upright alligator with tusks.

She surveys the room and sees exactly what she should see: surprise, shock, and dismay. Surprise because she’s hours early. Shock because no one picked her up at the airport. And dismay because most of us were looking forward to our last few private hours with our sad sack western writer.

“Well,” Margarite says, “what a motley crew.”

She actually licks her lips, but it doesn’t look out of place unless you can see those tusks like I can. Everyone else just stares at her, no one more than Raj. I don’t have to be an empath to know he’s worried about losing his job. Somehow he failed to escort the most important guest writer of the workshop to her accommodation. Never mind that no one told him she’d be early. Never mind that she probably didn’t tell
anyone
that she’d be early.

Margarite doesn’t seem upset by the reaction to her appearance. If anything, she’s probably pleased by it, although she doesn’t show that pleasure. She doesn’t dare. It would ruin her entire plan.

How do I know her plan? Because if you chart the appearances she’s made before a murder, you can see a pattern of twenty- two months between unfortunate events.

The twenty-two months are the tip-off to the fact that she’s a chaos dragon. The first part of the name fits—she does thrive (and I mean thrive, as in need it to live) on chaos. The second name is a misnomer given by someone like me who can see the upright alligator in these imposters and somehow mistook it for a dragon.

More accurately, you should probably call her a chaos reptile or a chaos demon—but again, you find yourself in linguistic hell. Since she doesn’t have as many powers as the average demon, and she has considerably more than the average reptile.

Still, the bottom line is that every twenty-two months, she needs to snack on the distress caused by the release of a soul. That soul must die by murder most foul, and there must be some kind of investigation in which at least five people are suspects. If the chaos dragon doesn’t get her negative emotions within a two-year window, she will waste away.

Unfortunately, for her, she can’t overindulge either. The handful of chaos dragons who become police detectives or defense lawyers tend to explode—quite literally. These deaths are usually blamed on bombs or car accidents or, in one rather dramatic case, some weird kind of poison.

The disciplined chaos dragons feast every twenty to twenty-two months, which gives them two to four months leeway should the earlier feeding go wrong. And the disciplined chaos dragon also has a cover story for why she’s near so many horrible homicides.

She needs the cover story because the real story is more sordid. The real story is that the actual homicide itself is triggered by the chaos dragon’s presence.

In fact, she’s probably triggering someone right now. I watch her work, see her make eye contact with half a dozen people in the room, including—not surprisingly—my triumvirate. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, for which I am grateful.

Then Margarite smiles. She’s seen what she wanted to see. I know this because the reptile within smiles as well. She says, in a voice I’m already beginning to hate, “I just wanted to say hello and envision all of you before I go to my hotel room for my beauty nap.”

(She’s the only instructor who insisted on a hotel room. Even the bestselling discord thriller writer, from week two, had no trouble staying in graduate student housing for the duration of his instructorly duties.)

Then Margarite waggles her fingers at us, says, “Toodles,” and goes out the door into the courtyard. We watch her walk away, except Raj, who scurries after her.

He catches her arm, which makes me wince, and then gestures as he talks to her, probably telling her he needs to come with her to check her into that hotel.

Poor guy. He’s always been good and fair to me whenever I’ve had issues with the workshop (and I’ve had a few). I don’t envy him that moment of contact, which probably sent a small shock through his already-overburdened system.

They disappear through the courtyard’s main door. Our sad sack western writer, still nominally our instructor for the week, sighs, and somehow refrains from commenting. Instead, she holds up the three manuscripts we’re to critique today and asks who wants to go first.

 

Class ends a half an hour late, what with book signings and hugs and heartfelt cries of
I thought you were the best instructor so far
(which the other instructors also heard on their Fridays). I go back to my room and make myself a bologna and cheese sandwich, then carry it to the kitchen table where I bring out my other laptop, so I can catch up on industry news while I eat.

I probably should be with the group, eating lunch and gossiping. They’d be surprised, though, because it’s not my thing. I have to do my job—my real job—but I can’t be obvious about it either.

I figure the murder won’t take place until tonight. That gives me most of the afternoon to finish a story and probably the early evening to make sure my weaponry is in the proper state.

I bring a kit with me wherever I go. Different evil magical creatures must be killed by different real-world tools. But you already know that. You’ve seen it in a variety of stories.

The stories get various elements right, but not all of them. For example, the wooden stake that kills vampires must be made out of the no-longer existing cedar of Lebanon. The silver that kills werewolves must be old-fashioned European silver, not the purer, prettier stuff from the Americas.

Chaos dragons are a modern phenomenon, so they die in more modern ways. First, you have to touch the thing with an authentic bowie knife, preferably one from the nineteenth century. That makes the human form dissipate. Then you have render the thing immobile, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds because, at this point, you’re fighting with a small alligator. It has alligator claws and alligator teeth and in addition, really big tusks.

I’ve only killed one chaos dragon, which is one more than my colleagues, and even though my handlers like to attribute that to skill, I know that the death was simply luck.

Because there’s a third step: you have to remove the tusks or the thing will regenerate. The tusks are pretty simple to remove. You grab one and tug. The tusk comes out easily, like a fake fingernail comes off a hand. But you have to be able to get close enough to tug.

I learned my lesson the last time. I have reptile tranquilizer darts—the large kind used for crocodiles. I didn’t use this the last time. Instead, I managed to knock the chaos dragon unconscious.

But, as I said, that time, I was lucky.

This time, I doubt luck will run my way. That’s probably the other reason I’m finishing the story.

Because a part of me thinks it might be my last.

I’m finished with the bologna sandwich when someone knocks on my door. I sigh. I thought I’d discouraged knocking during the first week when I made it clear that I wasn’t into socializing or making nice.

Still, the knock’s pretty insistent. I peer through the window to the left of the door and see Raj standing there, fist up, looking frazzled. Poor guy. I actually feel sympathy for him. He probably spent the last hour with Margarite. I’ll wager he returned to a variety of errands for Hallerhaven, and one of those errands includes me.

I pull open the door—

—and dodge the giant arch of a knife.

Raj pushes his way inside, kicks the door closed with his foot, and tries to knife me again. His eyes are glazed, and spittle runs off the side of his mouth.

How had I missed that?

I grab his knife hand and shove it behind his back. He starts kicking. Then he grabs my hair and pulls my head forward. Somehow he spins me, and gets the knife out of my hand. He jabs at my neck and succeeds in sinking the knife into the flesh above my right breast.