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Cal was better than the full version of any of my fake names and it might not have been a coincidence that they all began with Cal. If you were going to choose fake names, how much better would it be if you could genuinely answer to a fake name because part of it was true?

  “Just roaming around,” I answered easily. “I was taking care of my grandma, but she died last month. She raised me.” I shifted my shoulders in the most minute of shrugs. I didn’t want those scissors spearing me in the scalp or neck. “She always told me I should travel when she went. Find who I was besides her, hell, nurse, I guess. See where I fit in. Not that she dragged me down. She never did. She took me in when I had no one else and made the best damn double-chocolate-chip cookies in the world. But she wanted me to travel, and I’m traveling, looking for that place I fit in. It would’ve made her happy.”

  It was the biggest load of bullshit ever, and I had no problem spinning it as naturally—more naturally than if it were true. And so much talking at one time almost made my throat sore, but not only was it a massive amount of bullshit I’d so easily shoveled up, it was absolutely perfect bullshit. Dead granny, all alone in the world, I was practically a lost puppy. It covered a number of sins, such as looking ratty and homeless or being a smart-ass. Poor widdle guy lost all the family he had in the world. He’s hurt, wounded, sad. Pat pat. Give him a Milk-Bone. Monster killer, liar—I was beefing up my resume fast. I wondered if it was wrong to be proud of talents like those.

  Probably.

  “And you think the Landing might be where you fit in?” Lew asked dubiously. “That wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

  “Why?” I shot back. “Am I not good enough for your sweater-loving town?”

  He snorted. “Seriously, Cal, my friend, are you kidding? There’s a shitload of crazy in little towns. Big cities can’t hold a candle to us. And that’s what I’d have pegged you for—big city all the way.” Lew and I agreed there. “Dressing all in black. And your hair, again, Lord, I’m sorry, but Jesus Christ himself lived two thousand some years ago and he had a better conditioner than you. With hair that bad, you probably come from someplace where no one knows your name or cares enough to tell you to get thine ass to a barber. That smells like big city to me.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to reply, to say I’d cut it myself, or to ask what the hell conditioner was. He towel-dried my hair vigorously, combed it again, and said, “There you go. Minimum fuss. I figure you’re a minimum-fuss guy. Wash it, comb it, and you’re done.”

  This time I risked the mirror to see hair that was now an inch above my jaw. No more ponytails for me. I dropped my gaze. Mirrors—I was never going to like them. As I moved my head, my hair flopped in my face like a frigging Labradoodle. No, they were curly, weren’t they? Like a sheepdog, then. A pissed-off sheepdog. Damn annoying either way. “I’m glad you don’t want money for this,” I bitched.

  “You look like a damn rock star.” I could hear the wide grin in his voice without needing to see it. When I grunted, less than impressed, he added, “Okay, at least you don’t look like a goth bum anymore. That’s something.” He whisked the cape off me. “By the way, if you want to try out small-town life, for your granny’s sake, I know the diner is hiring. Tell them Lew sent you. Can’t get a better reference there, and if you stick around and get paid on a regular basis, maybe you’ll come back. I can always use the business, plus it’ll do my soul good to know you’re not walking around looking like a deranged mop. Do your granny up on high good to see it too.”

  I got up and the last thing I expected came out of my mouth. “The diner, huh?” Despite the inner need to move, to run, I had to look at this logically. Monster killing was either my job or my hobby or both. Whichever it was or not, without my memories, I didn’t have a client list to go by.

  It was a ridiculous thought. Getting paid to kill monsters. What crappy career fair steered you in that direction? Bottom line, the money I had wasn’t going to last forever. If “Cal” didn’t have a job, I’d soon be as homeless as my hair had labeled me. And this was where I’d woken up without most of my mind; this was the best place I could think of to look for it. My license’s fake address was in New York City. Good luck walking the streets there and randomly running into a clue to my identity. Going against my visceral fight-or-flight reaction was my best option. I had to have gotten here somehow. Maybe I’d find my car. Maybe it would contain some real ID or would trigger my memories. Then again, maybe my badass monster-slaying self rode into town on a fucking scooter. Sticking around was the best thing to do, no matter how wrong it felt.

  Brain over guts. Brain over guts. Unnatural, but that was what I was going to do.

  Besides, no matter what my guts were clamoring about, there was something about the Landing. I couldn’t put my finger on it and I definitely didn’t belong, but there was something… . I sensed that it was waiting right around the corner, if only I could find the right corner. Something waiting. Something … interesting.

  Crazy thoughts for a crazy guy.

  It turned out that the diner was two blocks away on Oleander. Besides loving their sweaters, they loved their flowers here too. Campy tourist Southern. The diner was the same on the outside. Flowers were painted on the plate-glass window… . Maybe they were oleanders—what did I know about flowers? Red-and-white awning, a welcome mat that actually said WELCOME, Y’ALL! No joke … WELCOME, Y’ALL! I didn’t step on it as I went through the door. It scared me worse than the dead monsters from the beach.

  Inside it was the same. Red vinyl booths, desserts in a rotating pie case, little cow salt and pepper shakers on the table. It was homey and quaint, and anyone, with or without memories, could see this was not my kind of place. I started backing out the door before I was all the way through, but there was no escape.

  “Lord, there you are. It’s two blocks. Did you get yourself lost on the way?” She was either Llewellyn’s older sister or aunt. She had the same face, same eyes, but not the same grin. She had no kind of smile showing, big or little. She was also about three times his size, but if you thought anything except “just more to love,” I didn’t think you’d live to regret it.

  Moving over to me, she shook her head at my appearance. “I should’ve never answered the phone. That Lew and his damn strays. Three dogs, five cats, and now you.”

  “I’m not a stray,” I objected immediately, although, technically, I was.

  “Whatever you say,” she replied dismissively, obviously not believing me and as obviously too busy to bother coddling my self-image. “I’m down to one employee. That trash waitress of mine ran off with the principal at the school, if you can believe that. And him married with three kids. Trash, trash, trash.” She looked me up and down. “Lew said your name is Cal. He didn’t say you’d be dressed like some sort of undertaker or vampire. Suppose that’ll have all those silly girls hanging around—see if you sprout a fang. Like they never saw a real man before. Denzel, Clooney, now those are men. Mmm mmm.” She shook her head again, this time probably wishing I was one of those real men. “Well, hardly matters. Might up the business some. All right, Cal, tell me, can you cook? And I mean really cook. Sling it, dice it, and throw it on a plate, looking and tasting pretty?”

  The question had me automatically checking for the nearest fire extinguisher. It could drive you nuts, your body remembering what your brain couldn’t. But whoever was doing the telling, it let me know that me and a griddle went together like Frankenstein’s monster and fire. “Not so much,” I said.

  “Fine. Then you can replace that home-wrecking waitress of mine.” She pushed up against the counter, reached over, and returned with a red-and-white checkered apron that matched the napkins and the awning outside. That kind of pattern had a name, something that began with a G, but I couldn’t remember it. I doubted it was amnesia, though, and figured it was more of a guy thing that was causing that particular failure. “Now put that on and be the best damn waitress you can be. Don’t let Lew down.”


  Taking the apron with two reluctant fingers, I asked, “Don’t you mean waiter? I’m a guy. Guys are waiters.”

  “Not in a diner, honey. We only have waitresses. That’s part of our charm.” She gave my arm a light pinch. “Now hustle, Vlad, and stop with the scowl. Smile. This is a happy dining establishment. Happy sells.”

  “You’re telling me to wear this”—I held up the apron—”and smile?”

  “No, sugar, I know you’ll wear it and smile or you won’t get one tip. And with what I pay, you’re going to need those tips.” She swatted my ass. “You can call me ma’am or Miss Terrwyn. I had the same crazy-ass parents as Lew, but, unlike him, I’m going to respect their wishes when it comes to my name. Now get that apron on and hustle. The church crowd will be here soon. And there isn’t nothing like a good churching-up to give you an appetite.” When I hesitated, she gave me another pinch. “Go! Hustle!”

  I went.

  I took off my jacket, put that apron on, and hoped that when I did get my memories back, I’d lose this one in the process. But I hustled, as told, and found out I wasn’t a half-bad server—there wasn’t any way I was going to say or think “waitress.” I wouldn’t win any contests, but I dropped only two plates and threw only one guy through the window, all while wearing a red-and-white apron with a goddamn ruffle on the bottom. All in all, I considered that pretty successful.

  Or so I thought almost seven hours later as I stood watching the son of a bitch I’d tossed through the glass roll around in the short shrubs outside the window, moaning for an ambulance. Now that … that had a smile on my face. He had it coming. He’d been leering at some teenage girls who were eating a whole lot of pie and giggling whenever I refilled their Cokes, which were actually Sprites, but I’d soon picked up that any kind of soda here was called Coke. It could be a Barney the Dinosaur-purple Grape Crush and it was still called a Coke. It was kind of intriguing, far more so than spider monsters, and that made me think Lew and my intuition were right. Either I’d been born a big-city guy or had lived long enough in a big city to have forgotten that backwater factoid. It also made me think what the hell kind of life did I lead that I found the Coke issue more interesting and exotic than monsters?

  “You threw Luther Van Johnson through my window?” Miss Terrwyn’s voice said at my shoulder; she wasn’t much taller than that. “You threw that boy through my window? On your very first day?”

  That boy weighed two-thirty easy, with the thirty being his gut. He was also at least forty. He’d been a full-grown man and full-grown pervert for a long time now.

  I put the smile away and tried to look contrite. But since I barely knew what the word contrite meant and I in no way was feeling it, pulling that off wasn’t easy. “He had it coming?” I tried, saying aloud the same excuse I’d given myself internally when I’d first considered tossing Luther’s ass like a ball for a golden retriever. Of course I hadn’t been at all difficult to convince, so that excuse might have been somewhat lacking. “Ma’am,” I added hastily.

  The high school girls, however, were quick to back me up. “He was looking at us and making these pervy gestures.” One of the girls demonstrated, and it was indeed damn fucking pervy with two fingers and a tongue.

  Miss Terrwyn had passed me to lean and look out what was left of the window at good old Luther, who’d stopped flopping around. “Good Lord, I can smell the whiskey on him from here. And, Rachel Kaysha Marie, you could’ve described that. You didn’t have to show us. You girls should be home now anyway. Not sitting around eating pie and mooning over the help. He could be as perverted as Luther out there for all you know. Now get on home.”

  The girls went as ordered. One of them had red hair, curly, a cloud of it, bright as fire. I watched her until the door shut behind her. She looked almost familiar, but I couldn’t pin the feeling down, so I let it go as I moved my eyes back to those of my new boss. “You aren’t, are you?” she demanded. “A pervert? With lust in your heart and nothing in your soul but wicked desire, because I have a butcher’s knife behind the counter that’ll do just the trick if you are. We don’t serve that kind of sausage here, no sir. Well? Are you?”

  Pervert, lust, wicked desire. None of that rang a bell … Eh, maybe lust. But appropriate lust for the appropriate age group. “No, ma’am,” I replied, and began to bus the table of the pie plates and glasses the girls had left behind. “No butcher knife needed, ma’am.”

  “Good. You keep it that way. I have no tolerance for the wicked. Like Luther. If I hadn’t been in back making sure Joseph didn’t set all the food afire, I never would’ve let that man sit down in my diner.” She took another look at him and sighed. “I have to say, it needed doing. But the door is only about fifteen feet away and windows cost.”

  That made sense. Windows did cost, but throwing someone out a door just didn’t have the same bang for your buck. But she was my boss and I wanted to fit in here temporarily to find out where I actually fit in when it came to the world. Keeping my boss happy would help me out. I dropped my towel on the table, moved to Luther’s former booth, and stepped over that metal frame that had held the glass. Landing in the bushes with my victim, I took Luther’s wallet out of his pocket and stripped it of money.

  “He still alive?” Miss Terrwyn demanded.

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. You want me to change that for you?” I wasn’t serious—entirely.

  “You have a mouth on you, don’t you? I was thinking you were the quiet sort, but maybe I was only thinking you should be the quiet sort,” she warned.

  I handed her the money. “Here. That should cover the window. And I’ll take it under advisement, ma’am.”

  “You do that. Now get back inside while I call the sheriff. We’ll say perverted old Luther there was so drunk, and on the Lord’s day too, the heathen, that he fell through the window. He’s so liquored up, he won’t remember if it’s the truth or not. Maybe this time they’ll lock him up for a while like he deserves.” She stashed the money away in her own red-and-white apron, then clapped her hands. “Well, come on. We’ve got to close the place up for the night and board up the window. You playing Superman doesn’t change that. Hurry. Hurry.”

  That was the beginning of the end of my first day working at the Oleander Diner, the Ole Diner, as everyone who came in called it. I’d worked my ass off, was paid a little better than nothing plus tips, and not one person had recognized me. Or if they had, they hadn’t mentioned it to me.

  I had seen one guy walk by outside. I just caught a glimpse of ginger hair and a rangy male frame through the window before he disappeared from sight. He seemed familiar, but not the kind of familiar where you think you know a person. It was more the kind of familiar of recognizing one snake as being poisonous and one as being not. If he was a snake, I’d say he was dead-on poisonous. But that was a weird, freaky thought, so I shrugged and did what I was starting to get good at—I let it go.

  Miss Terrwyn caught me watching. “Pshhh. Jesse. Ignore that one. He slinks into town once a week to buy raw meat. He must have some mighty big, hungry dogs, but he’s like Luther. He doesn’t smell righteous.”

  I wasn’t surprised she could smell righteous. I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything Miss Terrwyn could do. Before I left for the day, I filled out my paperwork for the job using the Calvin fake ID, and promised Miss Terrwyn I’d be back bright and early. Her bright and early turned out to be different from my bright and early, and there was nothing but a storm of bitching and swats to the back of my head when I did show up at nine a.m. The bitching and swatting was strangely comforting in a way. Maybe I was a monster killer and a masochist, and out there somewhere was a person with a leash and spiked collar with my name on it.

  I hadn’t spent the time before nine sleeping, although my body would’ve preferred it. My body would’ve preferred I slept until noon from the way it and my brain complained when I rolled out of bed at seven. I showered, dressed in the same clothes that I’d washed again in more soap th
e housekeeper had left—I desperately needed to buy more clothes—and spent an hour and a half roaming the streets of the Landing looking for a car that seemed familiar. I’d lost my keys on the beach as well as my phone. Whatever I’d driven into town was a mystery. There was no key to give me a clue to make or model. I walked the town proper’s twelve streets—two more streets than I’d guessed the day before. I owed someone’s ass a kissing. There were only a few cars parked on the streets and none looked familiar or had a New York tag or anything but the standard South Carolina one.

  When I reached the diner, I sat on the freshly painted green bench in front and let my hands dangle between my knees as I stared at the Victorian/plantation/some kind of big-ass old Southern house across the street. I wasn’t actually looking at it; it just happened to be in the way of my “What the hell do I do now?” gaze. The house, I didn’t really notice, and the house had the good manners not to notice me either. But the dog on the wraparound porch? It noticed me right off the bat.

  As I heard the growl, I blinked and stopped my thoughts running through my brain in the panicked what? where? who? that was my life now. The dog was a German shepherd, big and mostly black with some russet on its legs and the same russet-colored eyes. It’d been curled up by a rocker, but now it was looking at me, its head up and lip peeled back to show its teeth. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything against dogs. Why would I? Man’s best friend. “Woof,” I said, low and friendly.

  The shepherd disagreed with me on the friendly part. It was up in a split second, hitting the large dog flap in the front door to disappear from sight. It left behind a trail of yellow urine on the white board porch. I could see it, just barely, but I could smell it, strong and acrid as if the dog had pissed on my shoe. I might not have a problem with dogs, but this one had a problem with me. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing here, where I lived, what I did outside the monster thing, and other than keep hoping someone would volunteer that, sure, they’d seen me drive into town in a black 1964 Mustang convertible affectionately known as Fang, license plate XYZ-123, which was parked at the Old Goddamn Mill, I didn’t have any way of finding out. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything—oh yeah, except that the dog across the street didn’t like strangers.