It started with the car. It wouldn't start. Did that suck? Yes, it surely did. Was I surprised? Hell, no. That was life. You know that saying, right? "When life hands you lemons…" Well, when it does you might as well shove 'em where the sun doesn't shine, because you're sure as hell never going to see any lemonade.
Niko worked on the car for almost four hours before he finally got the cranky engine to turn over. Slamming the hood down, he motioned for me to switch the engine off. Walking back to the window, he wiped his hands on a rag that had once been an old shirt of mine. "I think we'd better spend the night and leave in the morning," he said reluctantly. "It's running, but I would hate to break down halfway there at midnight. A long walk doesn't begin to cover it."
I scowled and thumped the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. "Piece of crap," I muttered, sliding down in the seat a few inches.
"Yes, well, two hundred and fifty dollars doesn't buy what it used to," Niko commented wryly. "I should've driven the Jag instead."
So we were biding our time until the morning. It shouldn't have mattered; after all it was just one more night. But getting out of Niko's beat-up car and walking back into the trailer… it wasn't the best moment I'd ever had. It was like drowning and then being pulled onto the boat only to get booted off the other side. In other words, it sucked.
Still, I tried to keep it in perspective. One night, just one out of my entire life, it didn't amount to much. I tried repeating that to myself a few times while I was brushing my teeth in the tiny, cramped bathroom. I left the lights off. Our electricity had been cut off so many times, I'd gotten used to doing most things in the dark. As I bent down to rinse my mouth with water from my cupped hand, I thought I saw something in the mirror. Something behind me, a shadow against the shadows. "Nik?" I turned, but there was nothing but a wadded towel hanging over the rack. The wrath of the evil terry cloth… boogety, boogety. I snorted at myself and headed to bed. I lay on the field of lumps masquerading as a mattress and tried to doze off without success. Big surprise. Eventually, too wired at the prospect of escape, I rolled over, pounded the pillow a few times, and gave up on sleep for a while. I could hear Niko's slow, even breathing from the next room, where he was asleep on the couch. Laid-back to the point of coma—that was my brother. I was giving serious thought to getting a bowl of warm water and seeing if the legends were true, when another legend reared its ugly head. A darker legend, one that had shadowed me all my life.
It looked like its shadowing days were over.
There was a sound at the window. It wasn't terrifying; it wasn't supernatural. Hell, it wasn't even scary. It was just a polite tap. One-two. Light and restrained. Your friend for the summer, your best pal from school… just passing by, you know? Maybe you wanted to sneak out and smoke a cigarette or watch the stars. It was a rapping rich with familiarity and goodwill. Hey, buddy, whatcha up to?
So I looked up without alarm at the window that hung at the head of my bed. For a split second I forgot that I didn't have any friends since we'd moved. I didn't know anyone out here and no one lived close enough to be merely passing by.
Nobody but family.
The Grendel hung outlined in the window by a scrubbed and shining lunar light. One hand was splayed on the glass with long thin fingers and skin as pale as the moon. A narrow, pointed face grinned at me with a thousand needle teeth and the predatory cheer of a fox in a henhouse. Slanted almond-shaped eyes glowed with sullen reds, scarlet as blood. Tapered ears pressed flat to the skull, and long hair as fine as milkweed shimmered in the air like a corona. The finger tapped again, the nail a metallic ticking against the glass, and a voice spoke. It was a serpent's hiss wrapped around the wet crunch of gargling glass. One word. Just one. It was enough.
"Mine."
The roiling-lava eyes looked down at me with more pride than I'd ever seen in my mother's. Or maybe it wasn't pride so much as rabid avarice. I'd seen Grendels before, more times than I could count, but never like this. Never so close I could see the naked greed in the eyes, the poreless texture of the skin, hear the utterly alien whisper.
Jesus Christ, my mom had fucked that?