Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

“I didn’t ask you to follow,” I told him. I was, however, not surprised that he had. Luis didn’t like to let me stray too far, claiming that I was a magnet for trouble. That might have had some credence, actually; I did seem to draw attention to myself far too much for safety. Djinn arrogance. I couldn’t seem to shake it, even in human form.

“Too damn bad,” he said. “You don’t get to go off roaming by yourself anymore. Where you go, I go. Just … not so fast. And maybe not so graceful.”

I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing. The truth was, it pleased me in an obscure way that he had followed. There was a kind of solid peace that radiated from him, a sense of controlled and focused power.

In a Djinn, that would have been very attractive. I was not quite yet ready to believe there was anything that could make a mere human — even a Warden — attractive.

And yet.

Luis finished his water and stowed the bottle. He was still breathing hard and shining with sweat. I took out a bottle from my own pack and handed it over. Luis made a moan of indecent longing and reached for it, which made me smile. “I really love you right now,” he said, and then thought about it for a second. “Evil bitch.”

That made me smile more. I rested my chin on my crossed arms and looked out across the world, bathed in clean fresh sunlight. Below us, humans toiled and polluted, loved and created, hated and destroyed. Up here, it was almost like being a Djinn again, a creature above the earth, yet completely a part of it. I could feel the slow, sure heartbeat of the Mother herself.

“Energy bar?” Luis, ever practical, was rooting in his backpack for food. I held out my hand, and he passed one of the wrapped bars over. It tasted like flavored sawdust, but it would serve. I was not overly concerned with the needs of my body just now. “So, why’d we haul our asses all the way up here, anyway?”

I hadn’t asked him to come along, and I wasn’t feeling particularly cooperative. “Perhaps I like the view.”

He gave me a filthy look. “You’d better not go with that one. There’s a tram, chica . You know, you get in it, it hauls ass up the mountain all on its own without all the sweating and muscle cramps.”

I couldn’t explain it to him at first, and then I slowly said, “I needed to feel my feet on the ground. I needed to sense the earth around me. I needed — order, in all of the chaos.”

That made him pause. He squinted, wiped sweat from his forehead, and took another drink of water before nodding. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I got that. Hate it, but I got it. So. Better now?”

“In time,” I said.

“Because it’s going to take us about the same number of hours getting down off this rock, and I don’t want to try it in the dark. Going to get cold, too.” He eyed me at an oblique angle. “Cass. Half an hour, then we got to go, okay?”

“If you’re that worried, maybe we should start back now,” I said, and stood up. He held up his hands in surrender.

“Okay, okay, I confess, I’m done in, Survival Girl. Give me half an hour. I need to rehydrate, or you’ll be watching my body as it bounces down the side of the mountain.”

I snorted, but sank back down into a crouch. It was a very still day, little breeze. He was right; as the sun drifted toward its western horizon, I could feel the heat leaving the air. It would stay in the rocks a while longer, but by full night, it would be cold and clear.

“You ready to tell me why we’re really out here?” he asked me. I gazed at him a long moment, and a random whisper of wind came out of the chasm below us and blew pale hair back from my face. I’d taken the pink highlights out of it, leaving it puffball white. My skin remained pale, as pale as any human I had ever seen. I was — exotic.

Luis called me beautiful, but I did not feel beautiful. I felt … lost. Better, in the wilderness, but still disconnected. Drifting.

“There were reports of something out here,” I said. “Some — thing that comes out at dusk. There have been disappearances, a few deaths.”

“Accidents?”

“Perhaps. Or animals.” Or something else. There was an old, unusual feel to this place, a wildness I had not felt in many places — not since the humans had civilized the world so thoroughly. “I don’t know.”

Luis frowned and looked around, at the scrub brush, and the deeper shadows of the pine forest just below us. “Maybe a mountain lion,” he said. “We’re in their territory.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so.”

I shrugged. I had no evidence; in fact, I had nothing more than instinct, a whisper of something that could not even be defined as suspicion.

Restlessness, likely enough. Our lives had been difficult lately. My first Warden partner, Manny Rocha, had been shot down in a senseless act of violence, along with his wife, and neither I nor Luis had reconciled our emotions. Luis had blamed me, and I had blamed myself; neither of us was right, or wrong. But trust was, at times, a thin shadow between us. I preferred not to shine a bright light on it.

“Okay,” Luis said, sounding equal parts disappointed and annoyed. “Give me another fifteen minutes. I’ve got to work some of these damn cramps out.”

I sat silent as he rubbed his calf muscles — which were indeed cramping, I could see the muscles jumping under his skin — and watched the wind whip through the trees below, bending them first one way, then another. If I listened carefully I could hear the voices of tourists brought up from the tram; they never ventured far from the safe, patrolled paths, so there was no danger of them making this final, perilous ascent and disturbing us. They’d buy their cheap souvenirs, take photographs, and leave as they had come.

“It’s the journey,” I whispered to myself.

“What?”

“Your age seems to value the destination so highly. All this fast travel, transporting from one spot to the next, rushing without experiencing. Recording to see later, at a distance. I don’t understand it. Why do you choose to live so — disconnected?”

It was Luis’s turn to be silent. He shrugged and kept working on his muscles. After a moment, I reached over and placed a hand over his leg, feeling the tense jump of the tissues beneath, and he took in a startled breath.

I took power from him. It felt like hot, golden sunlight moving through my body, and then I directed it out again, through my pale fingertips. Refined by the core of me, the part that was still and would always be Djinn, the power sank in deep, healing, soothing, restoring. “So odd that human Wardens can’t heal themselves,” I said. “That must be annoying.”

“Not really,” he said. Luis was now bracing himself, both hands rigid on the stone behind him, and his voice came out strained and soft. “I’d rather give than receive, anyway.” His face was flushed now, and his breath came shallow and quick.

I took my hand away. He flopped back full length on the stone and put a forearm over his eyes to block out the sun, and to prevent me from seeing his expression. I didn’t need to. There were certain … complications to this arrangement between us. Healing, whether applied from him to me, or from me to him, still touched on human nerves in a way that was either painful or extraordinarily sexual.

I suspected the latter, in this case. Which meant that it was better to be up and moving, quickly, before he could suspect I felt the distant echo from him. Before it could affect me, and build between us like supernatural feedback. I stood, grabbed my pack and gathered up the empty water bottles. As I did, Luis took the arm away from his eyes and looked at me, squinting into the sunlight. I offered him a hand, and he took it to pull himself upright, testing his legs carefully before dropping my hand and stepping well away. I watched him, still hyper-aware of his presence; that was the lingering effect of the healing, I knew, but there was something else in it as well.