Those Who Fight Monsters by Justin Gustainis Read Free Book Online Page A

it without much effort, although I hated to ruin the thing. Not just because I didn’t know what effect it might have on it as a weapon but because it was a beautiful piece. Lee couldn’t make anything simply utilitarian. It wasn’t his nature.
    The bend slid under the handle, and I could apply the right pressure to make the lock click open. Go me. I pushed gently, and the door swung open. Alert to anything from screams to gunshots to a vase coming down on my head, I stepped inside.
    The room was about as far from the bleak exterior hallway as you could get. The walls were gray rock, framed at ceiling and floor with a dark, patina’d metal, and the floor was mostly covered in a thick fleecy rug, white and soft to the touch. There wasn’t any art on the walls, but the bed had a bright blue coverlet, and there were pillows that looked comfortable. A white wood vanity with a mirror above it, and enough geegaws scattered around to make any 14-year-old girl happy, I guessed.
    No photos of her loving parents, I noted. No photos at all. No artwork, nothing representational. The fatae loved beauty, but mostly their own. Not so much about looking at pretties someone else made. That seemed to be a human thing … something Miss Susan was already losing.
    “Who are you?”
    I had been so busy looking around, I hadn’t secured all the entrances. I turned slowly to face the girl who’d come in through a side door, cursing myself upside and down. Thankfully, she was carrying a towel, not something that could be thrown or otherwise used as a weapon, and seemed disinclined to scream.
    “Hello, Susan. I’m Danny. Your folks asked me to stop by and check on you. They’ve been worried, you know.”
    Susan didn’t even blink, although she did shrug. Draping the towel across her neck, she walked into the room and sat down at the vanity, peering into the mirror as though checking for wrinkles. Her posture and pose was that of a mature woman, but her body was still skinny-gawky teenager, and her pose was just that — a pose.
    “You should at least have left them a note, told them that you were all right.”
    “They’ll forget about me, get a new kid,” she said, oh so casually. “That’s how it works, right?”
    Oh we were going to play that game, were we.
    “Sometimes. But mostly, no. Mostly the parents worry and stress and hire people to go looking, and sometimes they even risk their own lives — their souls — to bring back their loved one.”
    I wasn’t getting through, I’d known I wouldn’t the moment I saw her. She was completely dusted. To her, this wasn’t a dreary hole in a dreary tunnel: it was fairyland, and she was the shiny new queen. Why did nobody read Thomas the Rhymer any more?
    “You’re here to try and talk me back into going Above. I’m not interested. Tell my parents I’m fine.”
    “You really think they’re going to believe that. Come tell them yourself.”
    “No. If I leave, I’ll never find my way back. Ageo told me so. I’m not going to risk all this just to reassure them.”
    Well, she had the Snow Queen cold down already. I very much did not like Miss Susan at all.
    “Look. She stopped and looked at me. She had her father’s eyes, and her mother’s mouth. Nowhere near as pretty as she wanted to be, but not bad, overall. Give her another ten years and she might even break a few hearts. But not if she stayed down here.
    “You have no right to tell me what to do.”
    “True. I don’t.” And telling her anything would be useless, even if she hadn’t been dusted — she was a teenager. Short of dragging her out of here by her hair, there wasn’t much I could do.
    The hair thing was tempting. But I had one card I hadn’t played. I hadn’t even thought to, honest, but seeing her sitting there trying so desperately to be what she thought was adult and sophisticated and … fatae-acceptable…
    She had been missing for six days now. One day left, before she was lost to the above world