Silver and Salt Read online

  He leaned back against the rock wall we were camped again, beans forgotten. His smile was as wicked as any Unseelie could hope for. “Actually, I think I am the most happy that I have ever been in my life. Let me bask in it for a moment.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at the ten stars and for once wasn’t, as we always did, counting them—the sand trickling down the hourglass. This time he was seeing them simply as stars. I could see by the softening of the stubborn jaw. He might not be a portrait of joy and rainbow farting bunnies, but he wasn’t grim. For a moment I could see home in him, see the magic lost.

  Looking back down, he leaned over to search in his saddle bags to hand me a bottle of his precious scotch and lift one of his own.

  I was shaky, but not so much I couldn’t clink my bottle against his with the peal of a bell. It sounded the same as the ones they rang at most of the outposts—a habit the Fey who ran them had picked up from the humans.

  Last call.

  Not yet perhaps, but soon. Close enough to be draining your glass and ordering that last round. There was no one I’d rather drink that last round with than a Seelie Fey. Who could possibly have known?

  “You were the worst of the best,” I said and meant it for the compliment it was.

  “And you were the best of the worst,” he offered solemnly in the same spirit.

  Maybe Scotch was fast with a knife like he said or maybe there was a tiny speck of magic left in us after all. A magic that came from finding out what a millennia of balls, duels, conniving, spying, wars, taking the throne, losing the throne, all over and over again had failed to teach us: there was no Light Fey, no Dark Fey. There was only the inevitable end, the last dancing star to burn out and vanish. It would come, sooner or later.

  But as Ialach had said, we wouldn’t be alone when it did.

  Eleven Years Ago

  The man from the park followed me home.

  It should panic you, right? The man behind you, taking a step each time you did. It should terrify you. It’s how the night terrors began of every kid, and much as I hated to admit it, I was a kid—not always, but sometimes. This time, kid or not, I knew it was how all their worst dreams bloomed into genuine damn life. Those footfalls mirrored any of those in every horror movie made. The monster behind, the scrape of the shoe against the asphalt, homing in on you and only you. That was the nightmare made into real life. But it wasn’t how my dark nighttime visions began. Not me. Mine had happened before that. Mine was reversed. My reality came first before crawling into my nightmares. The truth was in both of them, awake or asleep, but I’d been awake in the beginning—conscious and aware of the man in the park.

  The son of a bitch who had started it all in bloodstained grass, wouldn’t he be surprised when it turned out….

  I’d be the one to finish it.

  The Man from the Park

  The first time I’d seen the invisible man…

  Wait, that’s pretty hilarious, huh?

  Never mind. The first time I’d seen him was in the park—the first time I saw him, watched him, he hadn’t cared anything about me. He was already playing his game. There were no new players wanted or needed.

  I spotted him in the overgrown empty lot six blocks from the schools, the elementary and junior high next to each other. The empty lot was part of a “green space”, fucking hysterical, next to an abandoned dog food factory. Nothing else smells like that, coating the inside of your mouth. This one had shut down twenty years ago and it still stank. That didn’t stop most of the kids from pretending the weedy area was a park, that the yellow ragweed was flowers and that the broken and cracked concrete blocks were benches. They’d lived here long enough, they didn’t smell the factory anymore. Lucky them, because their park was on my way home, and I could smell it fine. I walked home instead of taking the bus.

  I used to ride it when I was younger, but I hated it now. It was a cage full of screaming and shouting. It was too much and made me want to punch and kick until there was quiet. Niko had said it was “excessive stimulation and acted as a trigger”. I hadn’t been exactly sure of what he meant. I knew what a trigger was, but what all that noisy crap was triggering specifically other than violence or why it did, I hadn’t known. But I had known he was right, that it was too much. Just too much. After I was kicked off the bus a few times for fighting, he’d agreed walking was an improvement over punching. It was a long walk, but I didn’t mind. Anything was more peaceful than a tin can full of screaming, thrown books, and the sound/sight/smell of anger.

  I’d told Niko about the smell—sweat/adrenaline/rage, how it was even worse than the noise, how it made me feel the same, only maybe more so, considering I’d tried to shove one extremely loud kid out of a bus window. It sucked that he was chunky and didn’t fit. Nik said it was hormones. The kids, they’d all grow out of it. I’d noticed he didn’t say the same about me. I hadn’t cared if the other kids grew out of it or not, as long as they weren’t around to piss me off. The walk was good, and rain or smothering heat, I didn’t mind. The bus was a frenzy on wheels, and I didn’t miss it. I called it Thunderdome from a really old movie we’d seen on TV once. Nik hadn’t known whether to laugh or admit I was right.

  He did call me Mad Max for a week or so.

  Normally, I didn’t stop at the park that wasn’t a park. I’d lived in big cites, tiny towns, and deep enough in the country that your only neighbors were cows, which smell more but stink less than the factory. Nope, a patch of weeds was a patch of weeds. I’d wait for the next time we were on the run from the cops and were back in the trees, the soft grass, and the stars that flowed in a river in the night sky. That was real peace…

  If you didn’t notice how many more shadows there were, how many more hiding places you needed to watch. Had to watch. Would sooner stop breathing than stop watching.

  But the past didn’t matter. The grass and the wide wash of light that shone above were gone, same as the deeper, darker shadows. We were in the city now, and I knew a real park, and this wasn’t one. Why bother sitting in a patch of weeds and half-dead bushes? If it was all you’d known and all you’d had, that didn’t mean it was enough. The Dairy Queen parking lot put this to shame.

  Yeah, I wasn’t a fan and I never stopped, but when I saw him, the man in the park, I did. That once. I stopped the second I recognized him or what he was. He wasn’t in the shadows, but that was because he carried the shadows with him. Under a bright sun, he’d still been hard to…not see, that wasn’t quite right…but to see as more than a smudge of dried blood on an even larger smudge of rust. They weren’t the same at all. One was carelessness and rain, and one was what kept you alive. He was that, a splatter of death against the enormous rusty machine of buzzing life that was the world around him. They were the opposite, but they blended into one anyway.

  It made him almost invisible, halfway there and halfway not. That was his talent, a snake in the grass, one you didn’t see until its fangs were hooked into your flesh. Camouflaged, waiting for a bite of fresh meat, and that meat could be you. The city was his grass and he was the hide-and-seek serpent. He was the poison that hardly anyone would see coming. I saw him, though. He was special, in a venomous way, but I was special, too.

  Special enough that “almost invisible” didn’t cut it with me.

  Mr. Bailey, who worked mopping the floors at school said “almost” only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. He’d been in the war, he’d said. I didn’t know which one; there were lots of wars. He said, too, he’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky for a while, dodging kicks while mucking out stalls. Mucking meant shoveling horseshit, he’d whispered to me gleefully. Mr. Bailey had killed people in a war, he was pretty gleeful about that as well, and he’d seen lots of horseshoes flying at him. Mr. Bailey was batshit crazy, but he knew when “almost” counted.

  It didn’t count here.

  I wasn’t a snake in the grass like this guy, but being different in my own way helped me see him. I watched, always, the kind of
watching hardly anyone else did or could do. I’d been taught since I was five to see what waited in the alleys and the shadows and the dark. I knew about the things that hid there, and because I did watch for them, I saw him, too. Not like what I usually watched for, but bad all the same.

  I kept watching as he talked to a little girl. Sitting on two of those concrete blocks stacked high and swinging her legs, she was seven or eight with dirty toes and pink nail polish, wearing yellow sandals and a shirt covered with daisies. She was talking fast and happy to the guy crouched in front of her. He smiled and laughed with her, before handing her a tiny stuffed purple pony. It wasn’t even new. It had thrift store matting in its fake fur, but her face lit up as if it were a real live Shetland pony, ribbons in its mane and solid gold saddle. As she grabbed it with both hands, he stood, tugging lightly at her orange ponytail. Girls would call it strawberry blond, but it was orange as the fake juice they served in the school cafeteria. Waving at her, the man gave her one more happy smile and walked to the sidewalk and away. I watched him go with tight lips. I knew what he was and it wasn’t her father, uncle, nothing like that.

  He was a monster.

  I knew, because I knew monsters. My mother, my brother, and me—no one but us knew what crawled the surface of the world. Grendels, the real monsters that existed outside of a horror movie. The kind that hide in the dark, press their moon-pale bodies on your roof to scratch the cheap tiles with long curved black claws and let you hear their gargled glass laughter, knowing, knowing you’re hiding under your blankets, your pajama pants soaked with your piss. The kind of monsters with red eyes that flared through a slippery fall of white hair, and hungry grins filled with thousands of metal needles. I knew these monsters as they followed me my whole life. I knew them thanks to my mother having fucked one for money, as she didn’t mind telling me over and over and over…she didn’t shut up. Never shut up.

  Anyway, I was the result—half monster, no matter how human I looked.

  They were why I watched, the Grendels.

  But I also knew there were different monsters, ones that are all human, that weren’t made by an albino thing with talons, demon eyes, and a blood-smeared mouth wide enough to swallow you whole. They were people, these lesser monsters, whose parents were both human and normal and might’ve been nice people who had no idea what they’d raised. Or they might not. They might be responsible for what he was. In that way, he—the man no one else but me bothered to see—could be like me. Monsters can be made, same as I had been. Or he might not be like me. Some monsters, the human ones, are born that way for no reason.

  It had made me think. I was both: made and born.

  Planned.

  Observed like a rat in an experiment since birth.

  Fourteen years and I still didn’t know why.

  When I finally found out, I’d probably wish I’d never learned the reason, the why.

  But while I didn’t know enough about my monsters to do anything but keep an eye on them, all of them, and there were plenty in the dark and murky places, I thought I could do something about this. This little girl, she had only one monster. I could help her with just one, and a human one on top of that, not half as hard. I wished mine were like hers. Mine made you believe in hell even if you didn’t believe in God.

  I started towards her as she played with her pony. Who let little girls alone in this neighborhood of brassy sky, shitty stench, speeding cars, and bums begging for change behind the liquor store, anyway? Someone who didn’t care or someone who cared too much, had too much faith in the world. The shorter version? An asshole or someone stupid. Sighing, I lugged my backpack over to the girl.

  If only I hadn’t seen the monster, I’d be halfway home by now and screw responsibility.

  But I had.

  “Hey.” I put my backpack down on the ground in front of her and sat on it. “My name’s Caliban. What’s your name?”

  She giggled and petted the pony. “Melanie, but my mee-maw calls me Mels.” She tilted her head sideways as she looked at me. Lots of little girls did that—the head thing. I had no idea why and less curiosity. “Caliban is a weird name. Are you lying? Did you make it up?”

  Shit. The kid would talk to anyone. Had no one taught her anything about survival?

  Stupid question. Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be in this mess.

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “Some guy named Shakespeare made it up a long time ago. Then when I was born, that’s what Soph…that’s what my mother named me.”

  Caliban, the monster, son of a witch, a lost and begotten creature. I wouldn’t have known that, especially word for word, if she didn’t say it every other week or so when she was around, softly sang it sometimes—like a particularly vicious lullaby. And if she said my name, she said it with a twisted smile of barbed-wire delight. My brother had not once called me Caliban, only Cal. Sometimes, if I’d been listening to Sophia too long, I couldn’t be like my brother, like Niko. Sometimes, after seeing too many monsters with hands and claws pressed to the glass of our bedroom window at night or across the street on other roofs or under cars, pointing at me with fingers so white they were almost see-through and laughing like rabid hyenas in the dark, I called myself Caliban. I called myself Caliban and not Cal because I knew it was true.

  Maybe not a monster, but not human, either.

  “But my brother calls me Cal. That’s close to as cool as Mels, huh?” I went on. “Or at least half as cool as your pony.”

  “She’s purple,” came the instant reply.

  “The most purple there is,” I agreed with a wide smile that was happy for her, happy for her pony, and happy purple existed as a color. My mother was a whore, a thief, and a con artist. I’d learned to take what I didn’t feel a long time ago and fake it with more talent than most adults, including the one who’d given Melanie the pony. “She’s the same color as a grape and Grape Crush is my favorite.”

  Like I gave a shit about purple, but you can’t con someone if they don’t trust you. I wasn’t conning Melanie, but I was screwed-up enough that I knew I could fake her out and get her trust that way when I didn’t know if I could as my real self. Being honest would’ve felt faker than fooling her a little.

  So screwed-up.

  More screwed-up that I didn’t much care.

  Hell, I didn’t care at all.

  She considered what was practically my love letter to the color purple and a grape soft drink, stared into the pony’s tiny eyes as if it had an opinion, and nodded. “Mels and Cal. Both are awesome, and grape is the best.” She had said “awesome” as if was a magic word, like abracadabra. She’d probably heard her older sister or cousin say it with lots of hair-tossing as she tossed her ponytail with extra flounce the same time she said it.

  “I think you’re right. Grape is best,” I replied before carefully letting the happy smile turn into a more solemn one, equally fake, but easier for me to pull off. Took less practice. “Mels, I have something to tell you. Can you listen and remember? Because it’s really, really important.”

  She clutched the pony closer to her thin chest covered in a daisy-patterned shirt, put out by the serious turn to our fun. “What?” I could see her unhappiness in the pout that pulled at her lips and paled skin under freckles half the size of pennies and the same copper color.

  I shifted on my backpack uncomfortably; faking people skills wasn’t hard, but I was out of the habit as no one had been too curious about us since we’d moved here. Plus, now I was fourteen, a teenager with a license to be surly. It was expected.

  Until now.

  I kept my eyes on hers, as friendly and innocent as I could keep them. When I looked at people, genuinely looked and for long enough, they turned away. Not my brother, not him, but other people did. They saw something there they didn’t see in a casual glance. I didn’t know what, but they didn’t look too long, the way you didn’t try to stare down a big junkyard dog. Friendly, innocent, shy, they were only extra things I learned to fak
e along the way. An hour or two and a mirror and it was no problem, but I had to remember to do it. Honestly, I’d rarely bothered even before the sanctified sullen teen years, just for special occasions. For Melanie, I would try my best. I needed her to believe me, completely and absolutely.

  “The man who gave you your pony?” I said, and she immediately whipped the pony behind her back, away from me. “No. That’s not what I mean. You can keep the pony. You should. You should never give the pony back. That was a bad man and he might ask for it back, but you should never go with him. He might try to give you more toys, but don’t take them. Don’t let him get near you. You should run if you see him again. You should run and scream. He’s a bad man, an evil man. He’s worse than evil. He’s a monster.”

  “The man who gave me my pony? The one who was right there?” She pointed at where I sat, close enough to touch, and her finger shook. “He was a monster? Like the boogety-man under my bed?” she asked, her breath caught, voice wispy and frightened, eyes wet and wide.

  Who the hell let this kid wander around alone and so damn clueless?

  “That’s right,” I grabbed onto her belief hard. If she already was a big believer in the bogeyman, that was easier to go with than explaining a child molester. “He is the boogety-man from under your bed, but he got loose and now he’s out in the world. He wants to steal little girls and boys, eat them up, and he could be anywhere.”

  That was harsh putting on a kid, although it was no harsher than the reality of my own “boogety-men.” I didn’t feel guilty about it. No one knew quite like I did that some mental scarring was worth it to stay alive. Mels, unbelievably naïve, needed all she could get to stay safe. The invisible man wasn’t the only human monster out there. “You should tell your mom and dad about him being in the park, giving you the pony.”