Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 Chapter 2

In the aftermath of the attack, I felt slightly out of sync with the world. Every cell in my body was humming with adrenaline, and I almost didn’t hear Carmen speak because of the ringing in my ears.

“You okay, Pip?” she asked me, and I had to focus on how her lips moved to actually hear the question.

I blinked slowly as my adrenaline-filled brain took a moment to process what she’d said.

“Yeah,” I said finally, and then I shook myself and repeated more firmly. “Yeah, I’m good. I didn’t realize they’d… react like that.”

“At least Jonathan Rowe can properly rest now,” my sister sighed and wiped at her brow. “And stop puppeting those poor people’s bodies. I’m just glad their souls weren’t tied to them. Can you imagine being trapped inside your own rotting corpse?”

“I’d rather not,” I said flatly as I walked over and punched her shoulder. “No scratches then?”

“Nope!” she answered and popped the ‘p.’ She then turned to Kegan. “And how are you feeling, big guy?”

Kegan shrugged in an unconcerned manner, but then he winced and put a hand to his side.

“I guess I still have a little stiffness there,” he said as he took his hand away.

That was more than fair enough, it had only been three weeks since he’d been stabbed, and since he was half-faerie, healing magic didn’t quite work the same way on him as it did on normal humans.

“Not that I could tell when we were fighting.” I smiled at him encouragingly. I supposed Carmen and I had only been able to keep pace with Kegan during the fight because he was still not at one-hundred percent, meanwhile my sister and I were still learning the ropes of fighting magical dangers.

But we were learning those ropes fast, and by the time Kegan was back to full health, I was confident we would still be able to match him, no problem.

Carmen pulled her phone out of her pocket and snapped a few photographs of the burning tree and the limp, unmoving bodies strewn across the forest floor. Showing Renée a picture of the job flyer and photos that proved we completed said job was a lot easier than mailing the actual flyer and a dismembered revenant head via USPS.

And also far less likely to get us arrested.

“That’s another thousand in the bank,” my sister said cheerfully as she waved her phone at us triumphantly. “Pretty tidy for two days’ work.”

“Well, it’s two-hundred, technically,” I reminded her.

We’d all agreed it was only fair to split all our job earnings five ways, but still, two hundred bucks wasn’t bad for an hour’s worth of work. It would certainly pay our motel bill while we worked on our main job, the reason we’d come all the way to Oregon in the first place.

I was hoping Kylah and Asami would have made progress while Kegan, Carmen and I had been dealing with the revenants, but mostly I just wanted to sit down, have some food, and maybe take a nap and a shower while I was at it since the smell of smoke from the burning tree didn’t quite cover the stench of partially-rotted bodies.

“We should rebury the bodies,” Kegan said once Carmen had successfully sent off the pictures.

“Yeah, we don’t want rangers to find them and think there’s been a mass murder,” I agreed.

Not to mention, our DNA was probably all over the scene.

“I was more thinking along the lines of it being more dignified for the dead,” Kegan deadpanned. “But that, too.”

Fortunately, there was a pair of shovels in the wooden cabin, as well as an iron pot that had probably been set over cooking fires, back before Jonathan Rowe’s family died. I grabbed one, and Carmen took the other before Kegan could get it. He frowned and clearly didn’t appreciate how Carmen was fussing over him in a similar way to how Kylah had been fussing over him these past two weeks, but he said nothing.

“I expect you and Kylah wouldn’t show up in a police database?” my sister asked Kegan as she and I dug. “Cause, like, Leo and I are in the system since we were fostered. But you and Kylah don’t interact much in the human world.”

I already knew he and Kylah owned social security and birth certificates, because their father was human, however that seemed to be the extent of contact they had in the human world.

“We don’t,” Kegan admitted. “But I’d prefer if they didn’t get my DNA on file from this.”

“Seconded,” I said with a grunt as I continued to dig.

As a general rule, I tried to avoid law enforcement.

After a while, Carmen and I had dug a decently sized hole, and the three of us began to drag the bodies-- and their various pieces-- into it with as much dignity and respect as possible.

Which, if I was honest, didn’t seem like very much. At the end of the day, it was still a mass grave.

Once they were all in, and Carmen and I packed down the earth, Kegan said some vague blessing that could generously be considered last rites, and we headed back to the motel.

Despite the fact we’d been gone for several hours, it didn’t seem like Kylah and Asami had moved from their positions on the floor. They were surrounded by a sea of newspaper clippings, police reports, and everything else we’d been able to get our hands on over the past couple of days.

“I take it you were successful?” Kylah asked as she looked up at the three of us.

I grinned, walked over to her, and then ducked down to kiss her forehead.

“Very successful,” I told her. “Poor Jonathan won’t be bugging any more tourists from now on.”

Carmen pulled out her phone to show Asami and Kylah the photographs with the enthusiasm of someone who had just been on a fabulous holiday, rather than someone who’d spent their day dismembering corpses.

“That’s another grand for Team Rivera!” she told Kylah and Asami cheerfully.

“Since when are we Team Rivera?” Kegan asked with a frown.

“Because there are two Riveras on this team.” Carmen smirked as she shoved her phone back into her jeans. “We’re forty-percent Rivera.”

“We’re also forty-percent Campbell,” Kegan pointed out and crossed his arms over his chest. “Why not Team Campbell?”

“Ugh, typical,” my sister said with an expression of pretend disappointment. “And it was Leo and my idea to go freelance, anyway. So we’re Team Rivera.”

“It doesn’t matter what we’re called,” I interjected with a meaningful look at Carmen. I’d realized in the past two weeks that teasing Kegan had rapidly become her new favorite hobby, but I wasn’t sure the blond enjoyed it as much as she did. “We got a job done, we’ve saved lives, and we made some money doing it.”

“Of course you say it doesn’t matter, it’s your name,” Kegan muttered with a petulant frown, but Kylah cleared her throat pointedly, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m sure we can come up with a non-name-based team name,” Asami said with a small, amused smile. “In the meantime, this job needs doing.”

“Agreed,” Kylah said firmly. “We haven’t been able to find any kind of pattern to the killings. Sometimes the bodies aren’t found at all, sometimes they’re found whole but mauled, sometimes organs are missing-- but which organs are taken seems totally random.”

“Could it be like Phoenix?” I suggested. “Multiple people working together?”

“It could…” the blonde woman admitted, but her tone was skeptical. “But this doesn’t seem like a group effort. Not enough bodies are going missing to support several supernaturals.”

“Maybe it’s one individual, but they’re super picky,” Carmen suggested. “Anything about the blood types of the people who went missing? Or the organs who were taken?”

“There’s a lot of variation,” Asami sighed. “No common factors-- not that we could see, anyway.”

Unlike the revenants, there was no pattern to these killings. No time of year, or type of person, or even method of death. But Carmen had sensed something was off when she’d seen the story in a newspaper back in LA, and I trusted my sister’s gut as fully as I trusted my own.

“I don’t suppose the Order have changed their mind and decided to weigh in on this?” I asked as I sat down heavily in one of the chairs by the window. I was more exhausted from the fight than I realized, now that the adrenaline rush had worn off.

“Not unless you consider putting up a flyer for twenty-thousand dollars,” Kylah answered wryly.

I couldn’t help that my interest piqued. “Twenty-thousand?”

“I guess they must really care about all these helpless civilians they’re refusing to actually help,” Carmen scoffed.

The Order liked to present itself as the last and greatest defense between oblivious humanity and dangerous magic, but I was realizing more and more that this was more than a little selective. Its primary function was to keep humanity ignorant about magic, to uphold the integrity of the veil. Protecting supernaturals and protecting humanity was only a side-effect, and only sometimes. As long as these murders were being written up as ‘animal attacks’ by the human authorities, the Order wasn’t going to do shit to help stop them.

I picked up a nearby newspaper with one of the killings on the front page. This had been one of the more high-profile examples because a body was actually found. Carmen had done her radar thing over as many missing persons reports as we could find, and sometimes the only evidence recovered by the police had been bloody scraps of clothing. This particular case talked about how the body was mauled by a very large creature, such as a bear or a mountain lion.

“Could a werewolf do this?” I asked and showed the paper to Asami and Kylah.

“Maybe, if they were very large,” Kylah said. “But werewolves can only turn on the full moon. That killing happened a week and a half after the full moon.”

Another thing Hollywood apparently got wrong: werewolves couldn’t change shape whenever they liked.

I’d only properly met one werewolf since I’d learned about the magical world, and that had been Ralph Chander, a gym owner who was friendly and built like a brick shithouse. While he was certainly large enough to do something like this to a person, he hadn’t given me the slightest impression he actually would.

“Sometimes, in cases where a werewolf is turned by being bitten-- instead of being born-- the transformation can damage their minds,” Asami said, and she scribbled something down onto her notepad. She was, I realized, left-handed. “The intensity of the damage could be explained by a rogue werewolf, but only on the nights of the full moon. We’ve found a lot of theories that can explain part of the killings, but nothing explains everything.”

“I guess we’ve just got to keep digging, then,” Kylah said as Kegan crouched between her and Asami. “Just as well we have the Order’s best former-researcher on our team.”

“We absolutely do,” I added with a warm smile, and I noticed that while a slight pink blush had dusted Asami’s cheeks at Kylah’s words, she went almost bright red at mine.

“I was hoping the internet would be more useful in piecing everything together,” the Japanese woman then said with a sigh, and she rubbed at her temples. “But just sifting through the fake sources to actually useful stuff takes up so much time. At the Sanctuary, I already knew everything had been vetted for accuracy.”

“Maybe we need to get you a library,” I said. “Something where the academic quality will automatically be higher.”

Carmen perked up. “We’re close to the University of Oregon.”

“We are,” Kegan agreed. “Their student library must have a history and mythology section.”

“True,” Asami admitted and chewed on her lip. “But I’m not a student. I wouldn’t be able to get in.”

“We can figure out how to get you to a proper research source later,” I said as I got to my feet. “You two don’t look like you’ve moved in hours, and I think I’ve earned a little break after fighting off revenants all morning.”

“Agreed,” Kegan said firmly as he, too, stood up. “Give me five to wash the smoke and zombie guts off me first, though, yeah?”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind a shower, either,” I said. I’d already noticed the smell, but now that the blond man mentioned zombie guts, I felt especially unclean.

“You can use the one in our room,” Kylah said at once.

The five of us had gotten two motel rooms and, for sake of ease, we split our group by gender. Kylah and Asami shared a bed in one room, like they did in my and Carmen’s apartment back in Los Angeles, with Carmen taking the other bed in that room. Meanwhile, Kegan and I shared the adjoining room, which was the one we were all standing in now.

“Awesome, thanks,” I said with a smile, and I headed through to the girls’ room.

Kylah followed me, and once the door closed behind us and we were alone, I shot her a wry grin.

“Care to join me?” I asked.

“Maybe another time,” she replied with a smirk. “Fun as that sounds, you do smell like rotting corpses.”

“Fair.” I winced, but that smell didn’t stop her from stepping forward and kissing me on the lips.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said softly.

“Course I am,” I said, and I brushed my nose against hers. “I was with Monkey and Kegan. We were fine.”

“I know, I know,” she said, but she bit at her bottom lip, and her hands slid up my arms to rest on my shoulders. “I just… you and Carmen are still very new to this. You have combat training, true, but…”

“But it’s for fighting against human opponents,” I finished for her, and I remembered coming to that same conclusion while fighting off the revenants earlier. “I know. I’m working on it, though. And with examples like you and Kegan to learn from, I reckon I’ll be just fine.”

“I know you will,” she agreed with a smile, and she kissed me again before she pulled away. “But you can’t blame me for worrying. I worry about Kegan, too. And Sami.”

“Well, Asami’s a little different,” I pointed out. “She wasn’t a combat Eye, not like you and Kegan.”

“And yet we’ve dragged her into this,” Kylah sighed, and she twisted a lock of blonde hair around her finger, a nervous tick I’d long-since learned to recognize on her, so I reached up, pulled her hand away from her head, and tugged it instead to my lips to kiss her fingers.

“One thing I learned in the army was not to worry over possibilities,” I told her. “You can plan for things to go wrong. You can have contingencies. But if you worry too much about things fucking up, they’re more likely to get fucked up because you were distracted. Asami’s researching for now, she’s nowhere near any combat. And you’ve seen her in a fight before. She can hold her own when it comes to that.”

“I know,” the blonde woman said. “But I still worry. She… she’s like family to me. Like Kegan. And you. And Carmen.”

“And you’re all family to me, too, which is why I can promise you I’ll do everything to keep you all safe. Just like you’ll do the same for me.” I cocked an encouraging smile. “With everyone looking out for one another, I’m sure we’ll be safe.”

Kylah finally seemed to be a little assuaged by this, and she gave me a tentative smile. Then I kissed her fingers one last time before I let go of her hand and headed into the motel bathroom. The water pressure wasn’t great, but it was still a relief to feel the hot spray against my skin and know all the death and panic was being rinsed away. By the time I emerged a few minutes later, toweling my hair dry, I practically felt like a new man.

I walked back into my and Kegan’s room to see the other four all ready to go. Kylah had thrown on her leather jacket, probably because it meant she could carry two of her silver knives, which strapped to her inner forearms, and they would be hidden by her jacket sleeves. Kegan was in the process of shoving another knife into his boot, which would be hidden by his jeans, and Asami, unarmed, was scrolling on her laptop and frowning at what were probably more garbage ‘sources’ on how to hunt monsters.

Carmen had also gone for a shower, I noticed, since her dark hair was damp and messily braided over her shoulder. As I threw my towel onto the rack in my bathroom, I peered into the cubicle and hoped she hadn’t blocked the shower drain. She’d been such a shit for that before I’d left for my tour.

Luckily, it seemed she hadn’t, and the five of us headed into the center of the little town in search of food.

Now that we were out of the thick forest, I could properly appreciate the nice weather. The sky was azure blue and cloudless as we walked, and it was cool without feeling cold. Having lived my entire life in California, I preferred warmer weather, but Carmen had always hated feeling hot and sweaty, so much so she’d taken it upon herself to fix the air conditioning unit in her previous mechanic garage on several occasions, since the owner had been too cheap to fork out for one that wouldn’t break every three months.

But while the weather was nice, Eugene, Oregon was much smaller than LA and over eighty-percent white, which meant our little group got more than a couple second looks as we walked down the street. Or maybe that was just because Kegan and Kylah had this strange, almost inhuman beauty to them.

Faeries, I now knew, were almost grotesque-looking. They were elongated and pointy, human ideals of beauty taken to extremes so they became kind of horrifying. But half-faeries just looked elegant and more than a little entrancing, and I still caught myself staring at Kylah, just awed by how graceful she was.

Either way, it meant people looked at us as we took seats at an outdoor table. I caught one guy-- probably a student at the nearby university if the backpack and laptop were any indication-- staring very unabashedly at us, and I realized after a few seconds that he wasn’t staring at Kylah, but at Carmen, and I glared at him until he returned to minding his own business.

A polite waitress with a smile that said ‘I’m not paid enough’ took our order, and then we got down to business.

“I managed to speak to a couple local magicals while you guys were dealing with the Jonathan Rowe thing,” Kylah told us once she was confident no one was eavesdropping. “Apparently, there have been several local attempts to try and figure out what’s killing those hikers and how to stop it, but none of the people who go into the forest are heard from again.”

“For all the Order like to advertise hefty monetary rewards, freelancing really is dangerous,” Asami said meaningfully. “A lot of people do die when they take up those jobs.”

I remembered the bar in Colorado, with all the flyers corked to the bulletin board. There had been a lot there, and at first I’d wondered why anyone would pass up the opportunity to do what the Order did, only for money and on your own terms.

But having spent the past several days looking over this case, I now understood perfectly.

“Probably whatever’s killing those hikers is doing the same stuff to whichever magicals are trying to stop it,” I said grimly, but Kylah frowned in a thoughtful way and began twisting her hair around her finger.

“I’m not so sure, actually,” she said. “All of the bodies that have been recovered, either partially or wholly, have been human.”

“She’s right,” Asami said with a nod. “Kylah and I have been looking over the records of who’s disappeared, and all the people whose bodies have not been recovered, all the people who are being treated as missing rather than dead, they’re supernaturals.”

“Seers, mainly,” Kylah added. “But not entirely. A few werewolves, vampires, harpies, and so on.”

“Do you think whatever’s killing those people is… using the magicals?” Carmen asked with a disgusted expression.

“What would they be using them for, though?” Kegan asked. “These humans are being found mangled and eaten. It’s not like they were used in some kind of experiment.”

“Maybe it’s a group,” I reiterated. “And the magicals aren’t going missing, they’re being recruited.”

Asami looked very unconvinced, and she pursed her lips slightly.

“Whatever’s going on in Phoenix apparently has magicals of multiple species working together,” she said after a moment of thought. “But that’s… well, it’s unprecedented. There’s never been a large-scale example of something like that before. Even in the LA community, it’s mostly coexistence rather than actual cooperation. Interspecies marriages are still pretty uncommon. I don’t think we can treat a multi-species collaboration as a standard. It’s an exception.”

“Is the magical world just super racist or something?” Carmen asked bluntly.

“Not… exactly…” Kylah said with a grimace. “There’s very little outright hostility, aside from general mistrust of humans. It’s just… people generally gravitate to people who are similar. Similar politics, similar life experiences. So while a werewolf might have friends and acquaintances who are seers or vampires or so on, they’re most likely to have close friends and partners who are also werewolves.”

“But that’s not always the case, is it?” I said. “Ralph, the werewolf from the gym, is married to a phoenix. Uh… Conleth, right?”

“Right.” The blonde woman nodded. “Similar to interracial marriages in the human world.”

“My first boyfriend was from a mixed family,” Carmen remarked with a fond expression on her face, and she propped up her head on one fist as she reminisced for a moment. “His dad was Cuban, and his mom was Jamaican. He had the nicest accent.”

“And your second boyfriend was a white kid from high-school who’s dad was a banker,” I reminded her with a grin, just to keep her humble.

Carmen flushed with embarrassment and shot a glance at Kegan, who was looking at her with raised eyebrows.

“We’re getting off topic,” my sister said hastily. “Sami, you still think this is one individual, and if it’s multiple, it wouldn’t be a mixed group?”

“I’m almost certain,” Asami replied with a nod. “One creature seems to be the most likely, though I can’t figure out what. Sometimes it attacks like a werewolf, other times like a harpy, or a vampire, or something else entirely.”

“Maybe it’s a human,” Kegan suggested. “Someone varying their attack patterns to disguise their true goals.”

“Which would be… what?” Carmen asked pointedly. “To kidnap supernaturals? Why kill humans and kidnap supernaturals?”

“There have been cases of experimentation on various magical species in the past,” Kylah said, and her pale skin looked faintly greenish. “It was theorized for a while that it would be possible for vampires to be ‘born’ by turning a pregnant woman.”

“Oh, god,” I muttered with a grimace. “What happened?”

“Most commonly, the fetus would be turned into a vampire, which is technically the desired result,” Asami said slowly. “But the result would be a creature that aged much, much more slowly than a normal human. If they survived the transformation at all, they usually… ate their way out of their mother.”

“Fuck.” Carmen winced. “What kind of sick fuck wanted to make a vampire baby anyway?”

“I think people just wanted to see if they could.” Asami shrugged. “Experimentation for the sake of sheer curiosity. Science for science’s sake.”

“That’s what Victor Frankenstein did, and he ended up freezing to death in the Arctic after almost his entire family got murdered,” my sister said flatly.

“You know that book was fiction, right?” I teased, but then I paused and turned to Asami. “Frankenstein was a work of fiction, right?”

“Oh, entirely,” the Japanese woman assured me. “By all accounts, Mary Shelley was a perfectly normal human being. Not even a seer.”

“What about Bram Stoker?” Carmen then asked, and her eyes had gone wide with fascination. “He wrote about vampires. Was he a vampire? Did he have the second sight and know some vampires?”

“No, but Doctor Van Helsing was based off a real person,” Kegan answered. “Funnily enough, though, the Van Helsing line is actually one of the oldest vampire families in Europe.”

My sister’s mouth twitched in a smile, and I could tell she was doing her best not to burst out into obnoxiously loud laughter.

“That’s hilarious,” she finally said in a deadpan tone.

“Wait,” I then said. “I thought vampires couldn’t have kids. You just told us that nightmare shit about babies eating their way out of their mothers’ wombs.”

“Vampire propagation focusses less on sex and biological parentage than on siring,” Asami explained. “If you were turned into a vampire, the vampire who turned you would see themselves as your parent, and you as their child. It’s no small thing to turn a human into a vampire, you know. It’s seen as quite a sacred milestone. Many vampires never sire any children, because training a fledgling is a big responsibility.”

“In Europe, it’s fairly common for a vampire to take a protégé under their wing,” Kylah told me. “Usually, a human with no biological family, or none they want to acknowledge. They’ll have a few years of preparation, they’ll wait until they reach their physiological prime, and then they’ll be turned. That’s how the Van Helsings do it, anyway.”

“Werewolves are known for having large family units, but vampires are also very protective of their heirs and sires,” Kegan added.

“Well, it’s nice there’s a strong sense of community, at least,” Carmen snorted. “But that doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what is attacking those people and why.”

The waitress chose this moment to reappear with our food and drinks, and conversation halted as we politely waited for her to get out of earshot so she wouldn’t think we were crazy, or murderers, or crazy murderers.

“I’m still not sure if it’s just one thing, though,” I said. “I told you before, whatever aura I’ve seen in the woods is… weird. It’s… spotty. Inconsistent. Like it can’t decide what species its from. Or if there even is an aura at all.”

“I know,” Asami said with a sigh, and she gloomily dripped a French fry in some ketchup. “But I don’t know of any magic that can hide or change auras, so it’s not some kind of shapeshifter. I’m still sure it’s a powerful illusion spell tricking you into thinking you’re seeing an aura.”

That was a possibility. I was still new to this world and still figuring out the extent of my abilities. I was only just starting to learn how to differentiate between different species’ auras, because the differences were very subtle, and maybe what I thought was an unusual aura was actually totally normal for a species I hadn’t yet encountered, or-- as Asami suggested-- a convincing illusion.

“But I still have no idea what could even create an aura or an illusion like that,” Asami lamented. “I need access to more rigorous sources. Stuff that isn’t clogged up by wikis from fantasy series.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me real vampires don’t sparkle in the sunlight?” Carmen asked with a shit-eating grin.

I groaned and rolled my eyes, but Kegan snickered. Honestly, I was surprised he knew what my sister was referencing.

“I still think we should try and get you into the university library,” I said to Asami. “The Sanctuary library was full of old historical stuff, wasn’t it?”

“It would certainly be more useful than the public library,” Kylah said, and her tone was half sheepish and half amused.

We’d tried that a few days ago, but the only books involving magic, vampires, werewolves and fairies had been in the Fantasy section. What we needed were historical accounts from the time before the veil was put up, when magic had just existed as part of the world.

“Then we need to get you into the university library,” Kegan said, and then he stood up. “I’m going to get a glass of water.”

The table we’d sat at was actually right on the edge of the sidewalk, and there was no divider between the end of the restaurant’s seating area and the bit of the sidewalk left for pedestrians to walk on. As a result, when Kegan turned away from the table, clearly meaning to walk inside and get a drink of water, he collided right into a young man-- the student guy who’d been staring at Carmen earlier-- who’d been walking past our table at that moment.

“Shit!” Kegan gasped as he and the young man bounced off one another. “Sorry about that, I didn’t see you there!”

The young man, though he seemed a little dazed, was unhurt, and he shot Kegan an easy grin.

“Oh, it’s no big, man. I should’ve been looking where I was going.” He waved his cellphone at us to show that he’d been in the middle of composing a text.

Kegan clapped him heartily on the shoulder both to steady the guy and in an apology. “Same goes for me. Sorry again. You have a good day.”

“You, too!” the young man said cheerfully, and he gave us all a wave before he continued down the street.

Kegan then sat back down at the table. We all stared at him for a moment in total silence, but he said nothing.

“Uh, I thought you said you were going to get a drink of water,” my sister finally said to him.

“I did,” the blond man admitted, and he took a nonchalant sip of his soda. “I lied.”

He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic object the same size and shape as a credit card, only it wasn’t a credit card. It had a picture of the guy Kegan just bumped into, along with his name and a barcode.

It was a student ID card.