No Broken Beast Read online

  Did she move on that fast?

  Did she just leave Heart’s Edge—and me—in her rear-view mirror, and forget me as soon as she could?

  Have I been the only idiot holding on for dear life all these years, aching with losing her?

  I swallow hard, trying to shove down the sick feeling inside me. “Why’re you showing me this?”

  “Because, you thick dummy,” Fuchsia says. “Both her and that kid are going to be in a whole mess of trouble if they don’t get out of here. Her sister’s already gone. Missing. So what are you going to do about it?”

  Something about the way she says already gone sends a chill down my spine, and I lift my head, glaring at her. She’s so smug, like she’s enjoying the way my heart cracks.

  “You know something about Deanna’s disappearance?” I’m almost roaring.

  “I know she’s alive,” Fuchsia whispers, and some of my hard, awful tension unravels, even if I still feel like I’ve been socked square in the chest. “Not much more.”

  “So I was right. Galentron took her. Why?”

  “Ah-ah. You still seem to think I have some special inside connection. Well, I don’t. I have my eyes, my skills, and what I can find out through a little sleuthin’ and more common sense than you or your ex-girlfriend have.” She arches a brow. “I just know you’d better move fast if you want to get that girly back in one piece.”

  “Why?” I shoot to my feet. My finger tightens on the trigger again.

  I have to fight to keep aiming at her throat. “Why, Fuchsia? What’s going to happen?”

  She only smirks that shitty, insufferable smirk I hate so much and reaches inside her coat again.

  What she pulls out this time is a newspaper, folded into quarters.

  Without a word, she lets it fall, spinning to the floor.

  She turns and walks away, her silhouette melting into the night. I keep the gun trained on her till I can’t see her anymore, and even then I’m slow to lower it.

  I roll my shoulders, suppressing a shudder.

  Damn.

  I’ve always had my suspicions that Fuchsia was one of the first experiments in what became the Nighthawks program. Even now when she’s middle aged, she’s still as lethal as someone half her age, hiding a borderline supernatural talent for stealth and subterfuge. Not to mention she could drop a grown man with a ball point pen from fifty feet away.

  Yeah.

  She’s that kind of femme fatale.

  Annoying as she is real. And I’m not giving her the chance to get the drop on me as I set the photos aside and edge closer to the folded newspaper.

  The front page story doesn’t make sense.

  It’s about me.

  I don’t understand why till I see the name on it.

  It’s Tara Brenley, Warren and Haley’s niece.

  I still remember finding her lost in the dark woods months ago, this scared little thing I guided back to town. She figured out I was the town’s infamous Nine.

  Guess she decided to write a story about how I’m not such a savage hell-monster after all, and it ended up winning a contest in Seattle and being featured in a local newspaper.

  It’d be heartwarming, if I wasn’t so confused.

  This can’t be what Fuchsia’s talking about. A kid writing a story about a local legend wouldn’t bring down Galentron on Heart’s Edge, even if there’s a grain of truth to the story.

  With another suspicious glance up, I shake the paper open, flipping through it for anything relevant.

  On the fourth page, there’s a short little block column about Deanna Bell.

  It’s frustratingly brief, terse, as if the info was censored.

  It probably was. I know how Galentron works. Their tentacles are everywhere, including the media.

  But if it’s not that...what am I missing?

  I flip another page.

  A note flutters out, written on a piece of blindingly pink stationery.

  She’s even got handwriting like a knife. I know it as well as I know my own, remembering the times I’ve seen those sharp, slashing letters giving me orders or sharing company secrets.

  I knew you’d be difficult. You always are.

  But I don’t really need you, not really.

  I just need your story.

  You can cooperate and be part of this, Leo, or you can sit back and watch.

  But one way or another...

  The whole town will get the truth.

  Today.

  The town plaza.

  Six-shooters at high noon, cowboy.

  Giddy-up.

  Oh, God.

  Oh, fucking hell.

  What’s wrong with her?

  Even if the people of Heart’s Edge will listen to her instead of dismissing her as a batshit crazy lady ranting in the town plaza about conspiracies with government contractors, it’s a guaranteed disaster.

  If she goes public with that info, it’s a death sentence for everyone here.

  Galentron will torch this place to the ground and exterminate everyone. They might even get a chance to test SP-73, and then pay the news to write it off as a freak outbreak in an isolated small town.

  Either way, Fuchsia’s little plan spells slaughter.

  Shit. I’ve got to find a way to stop her before she destroys this town.

  Especially before she kills my Rissa and her son.

  5

  A Few Steps Down the Road (Clarissa)

  I hate newspapers.

  Loathe reporters, in general.

  They always seem to swing between one of two extremes: either they make mountains out of molehills, sensationalizing the smallest things for clicks and page views. Or they take serious life-or-death issues and brush them under the rug.

  Like my sister’s disappearance.

  I stare down at my iPad, my mouth pulled into a tight line that I can’t seem to unbend. I haven’t touched my brunch since I decided to check the news. The waitress asked me twice if there was something wrong with my food, and even now watches me across the diner like she’s worried I’m terminally ill, ready to collapse into my cold, rubbery eggs and sausage.

  No.

  I’m just a very scared sister, looking down at a sterile, emotionless block of text that reads more like an obituary than a missing persons report. So this is what it’s like to lose my mind in slow motion.

  Sighing, I flick through a few more pages of the Seattle paper online, then scroll back to the beginning.

  I tried so hard to ignore that story on the cover page. But now I can’t seem to look away from the large, lurid headline.

  MONSTER HAUNTING THE SMALL-TOWN HILLS?

  There’s more—apparently some girl related to one of the locals—I think she’s Haley’s niece, actually—wrote some kind of school project about “The Legend of Nine.”

  Nine.

  Is that what they’re calling Leo now? Naming him after what sounds like his prison number?

  The write-up starts like the usual crap. A legend about a brutal outlaw who burned down the Paradise Hotel and murdered the mayor. They tried to put him away, but he broke out of a Montana prison and ran away to hide in the hills around Heart’s Edge, turning into some kind of beast.

  Now, that monster stalks the hills at night, howling at the moon and standing watch over the town, living in a kind of purgatory where he’s cursed to stand guard over Heart’s Edge as an odd sort of penance, protecting the town he once menaced.

  There’s an odd shade of truth there, but I don’t know what to think about it. Or about whatever’s happened to Leo in the last eight years to make him a legend.

  But I linger on the girl’s story of how she got lost in the woods, and how the magical Nine appeared to rescue her.

  He was carrying flowers, she said. My heart clutches as I remember the crumbling flowers in the safe, real ones too much like a single wooden flower he laid outside my bedroom door a lifetime ago.

  He was carrying flowers...and apparently this lit
tle girl doesn’t think he’s a monster at all.

  Not when he was so kind to her and walked her home.

  God. It sounds too much like the Leo I know.

  The way he tried to protect me from everything–even my own father.

  How he supported my desperate need to escape from Papa’s crushing grip; how he never minded when I’d go off for hours about making candy, big plans for my shop, the life we should’ve had.

  I’ll taste everything for you, sweetheart, he’d tease, those strange dark-amethyst eyes glimmering in the sunlight cascading over his naked body as we stretched out in my bed, whispering to keep our little affair super secret. Gonna get so fat you’ll have to roll me down the hall.

  Now that hard line of my mouth relaxes—yep, I’m smiling, but I feel like crying, too, my entire body racked with tight, sweet pain.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  I breathe in sharply.

  Zach.

  The kiddo pulls me from my reverie with a hand on my arm, leaning in to squint at my tablet. His face is sticky again with pancake syrup. He’s so beautifully untouched by all of this, so content, and I want him to stay this way forever.

  Maybe that’s why I flinch when I realize he’s reading the story about Nine. About Leo. About his freaking father.

  “Whoa, is that for real?” There’s a spark of excitement in his eyes, eager and curious. He’s a little information sponge, always hungry to learn new things and go on adventures. “Is there really a monster here?”

  “I...”

  I stop.

  I don’t even know what to say. My tongue suddenly feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.

  Ugh. I swore from the moment Zach was born that I’d never lie to him, but right now I don’t know how to be honest. If I tell him yes, that’s calling Leo a monster.

  He’s not.

  But if I say no, it’s denying Leo’s real. And doesn’t Zach deserve to know something, now that I’m here?

  I don’t know. No clue what’s right or what to say. I guess I could circle around it by saying there’s no such thing as monsters, but that would be another lie.

  My father proved monsters are real.

  My hand drifts up to that scar on my cheek, then my throat.

  There’s that feeling again. Vicious fingers closing around my neck, cutting off my air, the light fading into darkness as my father’s wild, insane eyes bore into me with raw hatred.

  I shudder. I hate that I can still feel the faint echo of fear, the memory of the moment when I realized the man who raised me didn’t care the slightest for my life. Maybe even hated me.

  You don’t know true terror until you look into the eyes of someone who hates you enough to kill his own flesh and blood.

  “Mom, you okay?”

  My eyes snap back to Zach. My sensitive boy. And when I look down at him, he smiles up at me with that quiet, nervous smile that makes him seem too old for his years, but that always seems to say I’m making things too complicated when he can just tell that everything’s going to be okay.

  I hope to God he’s right.

  I smile, my throat tight, curling my hand against the back of his head.

  “I’m fine. Clean yourself up, Zim.” I’m full of Z nicknames, and he hates them all. Call it special mom privileges. “You want to know about monsters, let’s read Frankenstein tonight. It’s a bit grown-up, but I think your reading level’s high enough.”

  He grimaces and reaches for a napkin, before I pluck it out of his hand and wet it on the side of my glass of water before handing it back. With an aggrieved sigh, he says, “I’ve already read that one. You know the monster’s name isn’t Frankenstein, right?”

  “My little honor student,” I tease, but mentally make a note to keep a sharper eye on my little imp’s library.

  When the hell had he snuck Frankenstein in there? Has he read Dracula too? Is he already reading Anne freaking Rice?

  Little things like that are the only problems he ever causes, though.

  It’s always about that insatiable need to satisfy his curiosity, without the adult rules that warn him when certain things might blow up in his face like a tipped-over bowl of flour. He’s in advanced placement classes at school, but he’s so smart he gets bored, goes looking for entertainment and sometimes stumbles into things that are a little above his emotional maturity level even if he can handle them intellectually.

  He’s almost scary intelligent.

  Leo was, too.

  He had this odd way of assessing situations and then making these bizarre jumps of reasoning he could never explain beyond instinct. But they almost always turned out to be true. Like his brain just moved too fast to keep up with words.

  Honestly, there was always something a little off about the man I loved.

  It’s part of what drew me to him. He was strange and fascinating and not like anyone I’d ever met. He even thought differently.

  And his son might just be the same kind of different, in ways I’m afraid I won’t understand unless I talk to Leo himself about just what Zach might’ve inherited from him.

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our son, necessarily.

  But I’m starting to think there are certain things he needs that only his father can give him.

  I take a shallow breath, trying to calm my twisting insides as I watch Zach meticulously wipe his mouth.

  God, what am I thinking, right now?

  Am I seriously thinking about trying to reconnect with that haunted man I swear I’d glimpsed?

  How do I even find him?

  I get my answer sooner than I expect.

  The diner’s door slams open hard enough to make the glass reverberate, the bell attached to the handle jangling wildly.

  I tense, jerking, ready to bolt, my hand on Zach’s arm and my fight or flight instinct already telling me to grab my son and get the hell out of dodge before everything goes south.

  But the man who dives in—I vaguely remember him as the owner of the new garage—is wild-eyed, but unarmed, his face flushed.

  “He’s here.” He gasps. “Nine—he’s right...right here in town!”

  “What?” a waitress pipes up from behind the counter, frowning. “No way. That’s not possible, Mitch. He’s not even real—”

  “He is,” the man insists, and that’s when my confused numbness snaps into something like mixed dread and excitement, my pulse slamming as he gestures wildly toward the door, the street. “He’s in the plaza—he’s there, with some weird lady dressed in black, he—”

  There’s no chance to finish.

  Whatever he was going to say gets drowned out by a babble of excited, breathless noise.

  Everyone in the busy diner floods the door. I’d bet some of them are even skipping out on their checks, but I don’t think anyone even cares since the waitresses and cook are right there in the rampaging throng, squeezing through the door.

  The only people holding still are me and Zach.

  What even?

  But my heart’s pounding too, and Zach looks at me with his eyes bugged out, nearly bouncing. “Mom, Mom, I want to see too!”

  I groan, swiping a hand across my face.

  Dear Lord, if I wasn’t dealing with little ears that pick up every single thing they hear, I’d probably be swearing myself blue right now.

  My son doesn’t even realize he’s begging me to see his father for the first time in his life.

  This is such a mess.

  But...but I want to see him, too.

  That sore place in my heart that’s still branded with his touch needs to see him.

  I need to see what he’s become, why everyone calls him the monster of Heart’s Edge.

  And it’s like the universe is trying to tell me something, delivering an answer to my question right at my feet.

  “Okay, sure,” I murmur, already feeling like my chest crushes into a little knot at the thought. I stand, slipping my wallet out and leaving some cash on the table, then
hold out my hand for my son’s. “Let’s go see this monster.”

  * * *

  Oh.

  Oh, boy, this was an awful idea.

  I know it even before I see him.

  I know it when we pull up to the plaza and see it packed to the gills. I think everyone in town is here, and it’s a strange sense of nostalgia to pick out so many familiar faces that have aged over the years, from Tandy Thatcher who runs the tack and feed store to the kids I went to school with, all grown up now with babies of their own, holding their kids up on their shoulders so they can see.

  Everyone faces the platform, the podium on the far end of the plaza.

  I don’t think it’s been used in years. There’s another memory.

  My father, standing there giving stump speeches with the low brick building of the town’s single school at his back, even though he ran unopposed for years because there’s just no one interested in running a town this small. Hardly enough political controversy and drama for anyone to feel like they needed to step in and change things for the better.

  Papa was the mayor because he was the only one who wanted to be mayor.

  It’s horrifying to think about why, in hindsight.

  Back then the podium and platform were covered in bunting and political signs, ticker-tape showering down at the end of Dad’s speeches like he thought he was Richard Nixon or JFK or something.

  Now it’s bare, save for some old stone planters that have probably been there since the podium was built decades ago, overflowing with flowers that have gone wild since it’s not really anyone’s job to tend them these days.

  It’s empty, until Fuchsia Delaney steps out from behind a pillar and climbs the podium. And then she gestures for someone behind her, a tall, bulky form that not even the thick stone pillar can hide.

  My throat dries. My tongue goes stiff, wooden, and yet the taste of a name tingles on the tip.

  Leo!

  Even wrapped from head to toe as he is, this tattered shadow, I know him.

  I know him in the breadth of those shoulders I used to dig my nails into.

  I know him in the bulk of muscle that once pressed me so close, holding me in the protective circle of his ginormous, corded arms. They bulge against the fabric like he’ll split right through the black cloth hiding his skin.