The One Who Eats Monsters

There is no ‘back’ for me. My home is gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” “Changed. Time makes us all homeless —eventually.

You see?” Ryn asked once they stood in the pool of darkness. “It’s empty.” “I see.” Her voice wasn’t quite as high or thin as before. “But how do you know before you’re in it?” “Because I’m from places where shadows aren’t empty. I know the difference.

She’d never put words to it, but she believed most humans wanted laws—to feel safe from people with the wrong amount of money, the wrong color skin, the wrong religion or thoughts or words, and so they begged for them. They worshipped laws, because laws were how they puffed themselves up and pushed their foes into the mud. In one blink of Ryn’s eye, though, the laws turned around like tigers and mauled the ones who made them. It was idiotic, and she felt bad for Naomi’s father, because he had a principle; but there weren’t many like him. Most of their kind loved flags. Most deserved to choke on them.

I am from the black places and the Long Ago. I can kill anything that can die, and a few things that cannot.

Or do you mean like she might have some sort of chair-related dysfunction?" Her eyes lit up and she leaned in conspiratorially. "Or maybe the chairs offend her, because all chairs are imperfect shadows of the Platonic ideal of a chair. And so she's disinclined to sit. Philosophically.

Tell me more about how you can’t understand faces. When did you realize that was a problem?” “With Naomi. Because I can understand her face.” “Why is that?” “Because…” She struggled for the words. They came haltingly. “She has… a larger soul.” “Pardon?” “Her soul isn’t just heavy as worlds, it’s large too. It spills onto her face. It’s in her scent and eyes and face; it cannot be ignored.

His eyelids peeled open, but only one held the eyeball—the other was ringed in hooked teeth, a tiny mouth. Both his regular mouth and the second one in his eye socket smiled sickeningly together. “Look-it you, you’re just a little girl. I could take you home in my pocket.” He fell out of the crater and coughed out a molar. His neck was two vertebrae too long. “You’re the reason they did this to me. You’re the reason I haven’t got half my working parts, you’re the reason for the pain, for the fact I got Cody’s brain stitched into mine and can’t stop hearin’ him scream about his missing face. I kill you… and maybe they let us die.” She fixed him with a stare. “Death is here now. Come closer. It sleeps in my hands.

Look at his shoulders.” “Wow, he’s tall.” “I hate his stupid necklace.” They all looked at Denise. “What? I do. Kind of want to light it on fire.

Setting her finger to the deva’s jaw, she raised it like she was raising all of Ryn with it.

Walking into an emergency room after midnight was like wandering past a plot twist in other people’s lives. Everyone there was living that moment out of sync, interrupted.

... She said, with not a hint of fear in her voice.