Silver and Salt (7 page)

I didn’t know those kids, the possible future victims.

For me, it was difficult to…connect…with their inevitable deaths if Mr. Invisible went to ground here. I couldn’t feel for kids I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I’d have done anything about the monster in the park if I hadn’t known any of them. Niko would have. Niko wouldn’t have thought once, much less twice, about breaking both his legs and dumping him at the nearest police station. But Niko was human, and that meant Niko thought like a human.

I didn’t.

I never had. For all the behavioral and cognitive training that Nik had dragged out of hundreds of psychology books, it hadn’t changed me. All the talking and explaining that there was nothing wrong with me—
never
never
anything wrong with me, Nik was adamant on that—but if this helped or that helped, life might be less difficult for me. None of it had made a difference. I hadn’t changed. I wasn’t human. I didn’t think like them. I couldn’t think like them, no matter how I tried.

I never would.

In this situation, that was all right. I had known someone. I had connected. It was time to think about her now. Time to think about Melanie. Her daisy shirt. Her yellow sandals. Her pink nail polish. Her freckle spattered cheeks to go with a wide smile and giggle of the catastrophically innocent.

Time to remember
Mels.

One week of walking past the park, that’s all it took. Seven days, not only the school week, but the weekend too, backpack in place. The possibilities weren’t endless, but they existed.
Sort of. I could be getting weekend tutoring, be in a club, some kind of sports that didn’t mind ear-biting, or maybe in the band. He couldn’t have been too suspicious, as that’s what it came down to—seven days. Two weeks since I’d eyed him for the first time. One week since Mels had been found dead. One week, and then there he was.

In all his more-or-less unseen fucking glory.

It was his bad luck that I was on edge enough that it didn’t take a full minute as I thought it could to locate him. Nope, it took less than three seconds for me to ignore the more part of him and see the less of him just fine.

Ignoring him, I walked into the scrubby grass, dragging my backpack carelessly along the ground, as if I wanted a break. What I did want was to find out what he’d do—if anything. A careful, smart predator would observe his prey a little before deciding if the time was right to take it down. Mr. Invisible, however, wasn’t careful, and he was smart enough for a seven-year-old little girl, but he wasn’t as smart as he imagined.

He waited fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour. I wasn’t timing the asshole. However long it was, not long enough for the monster he was trying to be, he made his move.

It wasn’t a great one.

At least Mels had gotten a pony. Some effort had gone into the production of tricking a little girl. But for me, at least six years older? Maybe seven? He was, what do they say? Phoning it in. The asshole was phoning in a potential abduction and murder. One third at the most of the work he’d put in on Mels. Impressed, I was not. I wasn’t here to be impressed, though. I was here to get some back for Mels, and when he made his move….

I met his move with mine.

Guess what?

Mine was a helluva lot better.

Mr. Invisible

The next time
Mr. Invisible showed up, I was walking home from school. He picked me up in the park, the very first place I’d seen him. I was trudging down the broken sidewalk and saw him crouching behind that row of thick if sickly bushes. This made the third time now. Three weeks from the first time and a week from the last.

I was surprised at seeing him again, as surprised as I’d been in—ever, but it passed. I’d thought I’d made him pay for
Mels and then some. Lesson learned, message received. But I was wrong again. He’d paid, oh yeah, but he hadn’t embraced the education I’d handed out. I hadn’t thought I was any kind of teacher, but I’d thought I was enough for him.

Hesitating, I blinked at the glitter of his eyes between the sad gray-green leaves and gave a shrug on the inside. I couldn’t say much shocked me for too long anymore. When you’ve had a serial killer neighbor named Junior and monsters living in the shadows all your life, you get pretty fucking unimpressed with everything else. I hadn’t planned on him ever showing himself another time—as much as he ever showed himself at all, but the world was weird. You had to roll with its insanity and move on.

The gleam of his eyes tracked me as I moved on. I rolled my own and kept walking. When he started following me, I had to seriously rearrange my personal ranking of levels of douchebaggery to create a higher level for him. After what he’d done, what he’d tried to do…and he wasn’t stopping even now.

What an asshole.

He was a shade, staying far back and sliding from behind the undergrowth to behind street parked cars, not thinking for a second that I saw him. Being an invisible creep was his unique fucking calling, but he wasn’t quite as
special
as he thought. Such a loser. I finally made it home to our rented, sideways lean of a shack. Key already out, I was inside with the door locked behind me in barely a second. Our neighborhood was dangerous enough that you didn’t want to be caught hanging out on your porch any longer that you could help it…and that didn’t count the inhuman things that whispered in the shadows.

Retrieving my usual protection from my backpack and shoving it under the couch cushion, I tossed the pack on the floor. Homework could wait. Homework could always wait unless my brother was there to breathe down my neck and slap a book down into my lap. I curled up on the couch. That was a piece of cake for me as I was two inches shorter than any other guy in my class.
Still waiting for that growth spurt. For the most part, people thought that with my skinny body, long and untrimmed black hair, pale eyes, and a baby face that I hated, I couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. I was fourteen, though, and fourteen in a world where that was practically an adult.

Where fourteen was ten years more than old enough to know about men who followed you home from parks.

Bad people.

Sick people.

“Boogety-men.” I expected to hear Melanie’s name for them, a whisper in my ear.

I didn’t. Melanie wasn’t here to whisper. Melanie wasn’t anywhere. Never would be again.

No more thoughts of that. No. No. No. I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. Niko, my big brother, wouldn’t be home from his job for another couple of hours. Disappointed he wasn’t there to annoy but relieved I could put off any homework for a while, I bored fast of our four channels of fuzzy local TV. There were days we were lucky to have food, and cable wasn’t close enough to be a dream and nowhere near a reality. A half an hour later, I tossed the remote onto the scarred, wobbly coffee table, scrambled up from the couch, and went to check the refrigerator for a Grape Crush. I was fourteen, yeah, and already looking to get a job under the table no matter how my older brother fought me on it. I was practically a man—
was
a man on my mother’s Rom side, but I liked Grape Crush. It didn’t make me a kid. It was just good. I didn’t mind kicking the ass of anyone who said it wasn’t. I might be skinny, but I had nothing but muscle under that skinny, thanks to Nik, who taught me the kind of tricks that meant no one in my class after the first day of school messed with me, no matter how young I looked. They had learned better.

They were smarter than the man from the park.

He hadn’t learned.

He hadn’t learned a thing.

I didn’t mind—was happy as hell about that. He needed another lesson, and I loved to teach those kinds of lessons. Although his next one would have to be something fucking exceptional, as the first one hadn’t stuck.

I was going to have to put more work into this time.
That I wasn’t as happy about. Lazy through and though, no denying that. I was opening the door to the wheezing, groaning fridge when I saw him again. He was peering through the kitchen window. For a split-second, I doubted myself, hardly had any idea whose brown-gray-hazel-blue-no color eyes were fixed on me—all that average in every part of him, every
cell
—he could’ve been anybody, anywhere, at anytime to all those who didn’t know how to watch, but, no. I wasn’t one of them, the blind. The slice of a moment passed and I knew.

I saw.

It was him—as average and chameleon-invisible as he’d been the other times I’d seen him. That was counting the hiding behind bushes and cars today, thinking I didn’t notice. Thinking he was unseen. Thinking he was invisible.

Invisible.

I snorted and didn’t bother to smother it.

Invisible.

Considering everything, that was funny as shit.

That’s when he bared his teeth at me behind the glass and it wasn’t a smile. Yellow and stained with dried liquids you’d want to know nothing about, that non-grin; he thought he was scary. He thought I’d be afraid he’d eat me up with those teeth.

Scary.
To a little eight-year-old girl maybe, but I’d seen my mother, Sophia, bring home scarier “dates.” If they had the money and were willing to pay by the quarter hour, she’d take on Jack the Ripper…or worse.

This pervert…
not all that.

Right?

I stared back at him.

Right.

I bared my teeth back at the window and flipped him off before returning to my search for a Grape Crush that I knew we didn’t have. Niko hadn’t been paid yet this week. It was ramen noodles and tap water until he was. Sophia had been caught shoplifting from yet another liquor store and had disappeared for a while. In a week or two, the newbie cops would be buried in other petty crimes and forget about her. She’d be back then. It was a system she’d had as long as I could remember.

Let down but not surprised at the lack of Grape Crush, I closed the door on the semi-cool air drifting out. I checked the kitchen window again. Except for the streaks and cloudbursts of age, the glass was empty. He was gone. I didn’t get excited over it.

With my luck, he’d be back. That was a sure thing. I hadn’t told Nik about him yet and I wouldn’t. Nik had worries enough. Supporting us with two jobs, keeping social services away when Sophia ended up in jail, earning a 4.0 GPA to get a scholarship for college, the hours of practice in the dojos—protecting us, him and me. Always ready to protect and from worse than the man in the park. Much worse.

This time, I’d do the protecting.

Mr. Invisible would stay Mr. Invisible.

Purple Pony

He kept following me home.

He always started as I passed the park, which made sense. That was where he’d met Mel for the first time and that’s where he’d met me. That had been the second time for us both. I’d thought he hadn’t noticed me the first time, with all his attention on Melanie, but he had.
Mr. Invisible with the “boogety-man’s” radar for prey and possible witnesses, too. He’d been excited at the sight of me. I’d been able to smell his adrenaline. I hadn’t wanted to be too obvious and had walked past to the gas station down the street for a candy bar and came back to meander around the weedy stretch, kicking at rocks. A half hour later, he’d finally decided I hadn’t told anyone or noticed him. After all, who ever did? But oblivious or not, I
was
right there, wasn’t I?

Niko said waste not, want not. He was like a seventeen-year-old grandma with his sayings. But the
boogety-man definitely had believed in that one as much as my brother.

He had finally made that pathetic move of his I remembered with a huge dose of contempt and a small voice in the back of my mind that whispered to me for the first time,
Humans
.
They don’t know how to play
.
I could’ve done it a hundred times better and bloodier
.

I could have, but that wasn’t the point. It had been about Melanie. And, no, there’d been no carefully chosen if slightly ratty pony for me. He’d waved a six-pack of beer at me before smiling the same smile he’d given
Mels and disappearing behind those scraggly bushes that blocked the view from the street to block you in close to the empty dog food plant. I’d been almost insulted by how little effort he put into it, but that hadn’t stopped me from trailing after him. Nothing to see here but a stupid kid with a stupid thirst for alcohol and no common sense. He’d thought he was smart. I’d been so simple to trap.

And then I’d introduced him to the protection I carried.

We didn’t just keep knives under our mattresses, Niko and me, or one in every room wherever we lived. I took one in my backpack to school with me, too. Shadows are everywhere and so can be Grendels hiding in them. This school had metal detectors and Nik had spent a shitload of money, I knew, to get me a ceramic knife every bit as sharp as a steel one. He’d told me they were the type of knives spies carried and I was practically James Bond or Jason Bourne. I didn’t give a shit about spies and had fallen asleep during any kind of spy movie I tried to watch. If your monster was human, it shouldn’t take a spy to handle that. I liked the knife, though; it was cool, and it made it past the metal detectors with no problem. It kept me safe.