The Invisible World

By Lynne Sylvester

Werewolves were bad enough, but supernatural serial killers were out of her pay grade. Clara had seen werewolves, pyromancers, vampires, and enough creepy shadowed figures to keep her nightmares nice and populated for decades to come. Most people didn't know the monsters were real, which was exactly the way the monsters liked it. Werewolves, in particular, were not shy about spilling blood to keep their secrets. But Clara was a special case. She had powers of her own. Three years ago she'd been found by a man nicknamed Reku who hunted monsters, drawn in to a web of people with special abilities just like hers. People who hunted the monsters. Now, some of the monsters were hunting them back. To make matters worse, someone was killing people in Clara's home town. The victims were barely recognizable as human. It would take hours or days for a human being to do that to another human being- unless the killer shared Clara's ability. Now Clara's old lover is hunting her down, trying to prevent another murder. She needs to avoid the monsters that are hunting her and solve the murders before the killer strikes again-- or before someone who knows about her powers decides she's the killer, and stops her with a bullet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynne Sylvester
• Release date: May 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311321411

Lynne Sylvester

I have always loved reading! It's an escape from all the other things that can keep a person up late at night. I hope I can provide that outlet for some other folks, keep the circle of storytelling going! You can read about my kitchenwitchery, goddesses, and meditations at http://www.hecateslantern.com/!

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The Invisible World

By Lynne Sylvester

Copyright 2015 Lynne Sylvester

Smashwords Edition

Visit My Web Site at www.hecateslantern.com

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Reku still got a lot of work, for a dead man. A lot more work than he'd ever gotten killing other criminals for the Khangpae, that was for sure. A lot more work than he'd ever gotten as Che's right hand man. Well, as Che's right hand freak. When he'd first faked his death and left the Khangpae, he'd figured on being one of those wandering broken men that films seemed to love so much, complete with the advanced martial arts training.

If you’re the best at what you do, someone will always pay you to do it. Reku was, indisputably, the best. A good shot, a skilled hunter, an assassin who had been trained from puberty as an instrument of fear by Che, who hadn’t been able to rule his Khangpae by any more subtle method. The one thing Reku couldn’t do was blend in. No matter where you go, an albino half-Korean is a rare sight. But that was okay. Looking like a freak was good for business. None of that was why he was the best.

There weren't so many highly trained assassins who specialized in monsters. In fact, aside from his not-so-near-but-oh-so-dear apprentices, all two of them, he was probably the only real monster hunter in the entire world. He hadn’t talked with either of them in years, but they were probably both well out of the life he’d introduced to them.

The full moon was approaching, and there were lots of places he’d rather be than walking into a house full of werewolves. This job came to him the way most of his jobs came to him these days, word of mouth. He heard things, and he made sure to show up in places where his services might be appreciated.

Most people didn’t believe in the monsters. That was just the way the monsters liked it. They spent a great deal of time and money making sure things stayed that way. But once you were part of the invisible world, once you knew what signs to look for, who to talk to, everything was transparent as glass. No more complicated than any crime syndicate, anyway.

Reku rolled his prize up the walkway to the old farmhouse. It was a chill Missouri night that was coming on, the air thick and wet. Winter in Missouri was not his favorite kind of weather, but at least it wasn’t snowing. His long sleeves served two purposes here, even in the thin winter light he had to cover as much skin as possible. But his forehead itched, under his hat, and the thin cloth gloves were stuck to him with sweat. No matter. Almost done now.

Behind him he towed a wheelbarrow full of unconscious werewolf. The wheelbarrow wasn’t the most dignified way to drag anybody, but Reku certainly wasn’t about to try and carry him. One of the wheels squeaked on the way to the front door. The farmhouse was old, well-built but badly painted, with a sloped front porch and two stories of wood siding and curtained windows. The front door used to be red. He knocked, and waited patiently. He didn’t have to wait long.

A young woman opened the door, her eyes wary. Her torso was thick, but then, she was probably a werewolf. After a few shifts they developed a second ribcage along with a few other physiological oddities, the body tired of trying to reknit everything every month. No other reason for her to be out here. Every urban tribe Reku knew of had a little hidey-hole out in the countryside, someplace to retreat to when the full moon came. It would make their existence very difficult to hide if werewolves ran wild in populated areas. That was how this contract came to him. This tribe had a wandering son, who had threatened to shift forms in a big city, threatened to expose them all. His den mother wanted him home safe, and she’d been willing to pay Reku a pretty penny to bring him back.

Got him, Reku said. The female werewolf turned and practically ran back into the house. He set the front end of the wheelbarrow down. No point in just holding it. The front door was wide open, but he didn’t go in. The pack leader, the den mother, would be out soon enough.

She padded out of the shadows after just a few moments, an older woman with gray in her hair and a spine straighter than a lamp post. She carried two envelopes with her, a small plain one and a larger manila envelope. She smiled grimly when she saw the contents of Reku’s wheelbarrow.

Well, Le Grotesque, you certainly live up to your reputation. Is he all right? We aren’t so easy to knock out, she asked. Reku shrugged. That nasty little nickname had been following him around since his years in the Cote D’Ivoire.

Breathing, he said. The woman’s lips thinned. Well, it wasn’t his job to patch everybody up, was it?

You were pretty Johnny-on-the-spot here. I was just beginning to consider looking for outside help when you showed up. You get around much? she asked. Reku shrugged again, leaning against the door jamb. He just wanted to get paid, and go home, where he could strip out of these sweaty clothes. The cold was beginning to bite through them. No matter what else could be said about the process, wrestling with a werewolf is quite a work-out.

You work all over the U. S., don’t you? she said.

All over the world. Why? he replied.

Someone sent me something. A werewolf in another town, he’s a cop and he knew I have some experience with the occult. But I’d be glad to pass it along to someone else. I’m no good for his situation. You might be, she smiled, wryly, Your reputation precedes you. Even the part that says you’re supposed to be dead.

We have business to finish first, Reku said. She handed over the smaller envelope, without ceremony. He took it without looking inside. He trusted that the money was all there. She couldn’t stiff him without it damaging her reputation among the other tribe leaders in the area. Having to hire an outsider was bad enough without being miserly about it.

I don’t know if anyone would be willing to pay you. But you did some work in Kentucky, a long time ago, right? There are stories. Rumors. The werewolf who sent it to me works in Louisville, she said.

Oh, God.

Of all the towns in all the world. It had to be that one.

I’ll take a look, Reku said, holding out his hand. She gave him the manila envelope, and he turned to leave without another word. He left the wheelbarrow. It would have been a pain to get it back into his car anyway.

Home this week was a crap motel room, not far away from where the wolves had their hidey hole house. It was charged on a credit card that belonged to the same fake identity he’d bought the car with. His hands weren’t steady on the wheel, he almost dropped the key to his room three times, trying to unlock the door. But he still automatically checked the room for uninvited guests and stripped out of his soiled clothes before sitting on the edge of the bed with the envelope in his hands. Even pumping adrenaline isn’t as strong as habit.

Louisville was the last place he’d ever really called home. Because Clara and Ethan lived there. His two not-so-near-but-oh-so-dear apprentices, they were both from Louisville. It was the town where he’d gone drinking with Ethan, listened to hour upon hour of Ethan moaning over the woman he was in love with, his Karen. Like a buddy movie. And Clara had grown up there, lived there her whole life. The dust motes that floated through the air there, some of them were the dead skin cells her flesh had outgrown. Her town. What were the chances that the cops in her town wanted him and it had nothing to do with her?

When he’d met her, Clara Barstow was a freaked-out kid with an uncanny knack for destruction. If he hadn’t met Ethan first, he would have killed her on the spot. But he’d seen what Ethan could do, Ethan’s freakish ability that made him almost like one of the monsters himself. Ethan could control fire. Like some kind of wizard, except it wasn’t a spell, it was just how he was. Clara was scarier. Harder to see as useful. The night he met her, she pulled a building down around them, and she hadn’t even been sure how she’d done it.

He should have killed her anyway. She was too dangerous to live. Her ability wasn’t like Ethan’s. She could move molecules with her mind. She was a walking nuclear bomb. But he was only human. He’d never lost his head like that over a woman before or since, but Clara Barstow had completely wrecked every shred of common sense he’d had.

Even all these years later, the thought of her was a heated flush that left all of his skin feeling too tight, too confining. He took a few deep breaths, trying to calm his heartbeat.

With shaking hands, he opened the envelope. Maybe it was nothing. Another werewolf internal tribe matter. If it was, he could just burn the envelope, and be done with this stupid rush of chemicals through his brain.

No such luck.

It was a murder case file. He’d seen enough paperwork like this to know what he was looking at. It was all over black marks, things blotted out so that the werewolf cop who’d sent this to a civilian could assuage his conscience.

He thought about getting up to get himself a drink, but decided that was just cowardice. He was just putting off the inevitable. There was a summary on top. A sheaf of glossy photo paper that was sure to contain images he simply didn't want to see. Apparently, all the victims were female, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, and none of them had ever had children. The names were blacked out, but not the addresses of the crimes. Maybe when they were laid out on a map, the addresses formed a pattern.

Reku's heart skipped a few beats.

That first address. He knew that house. He'd been inside it. The young woman had been found in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

That was Clara's address.

With shaking-- not trembling, shaking -- hands, he flipped through to the pictures of the first crime scene and Jesus.

That could be anybody.

Reku wasn't even entirely sure that was a woman, and he'd seen his share of mutilated corpses. He recognized the bedroom, though. He'd stared at those same pink walls, making love to Clara. It was her room. And that body, that body could be anyone. Could be her.

As soon as his body worked again he shoved the case file back into the manila folder and started packing. He had to get to Louisville. Over the pounding of blood in his ears, just one thought kept rolling through his mind.

He'd gotten Clara into this world of monsters and hunters. It was painfully obvious no human could have executed those murders. If she'd been killed by some supernatural creature, it was his fault.

*******

Clara sat naked in a room that stank of stale sweat and cigarette butts, staring at the chunks of her hair littering the floor. Usually she could take comfort in the sunlight on the leaves of the trees through her window, but the shades were drawn. She couldn't chance someone seeing in. Not now, not when she was so close, not when one tiny mistake would leave her heart shredded in a very physical sense. Emotionally it had been shredded a long time ago.

And wasn't that just about the last thing she should be thinking about today? Staying out in the woods had been a special kind of psychological torture. Alone with herself. There was a reason solitary confinement was a punishment. If she wasn't crazy yet she was headed that way. Fast.

She could feel her hair floating around her chin for the first time in three years. She'd worn it long for a while, ignoring the way long hair made her look like her twin. Her head was strangely light now, it felt as though a burden were gone from her. She lit a cigarette with hands that she could, with a supreme force of will, force to be steady. Good. Reku would have said that she wasn't ready for what needed to be done tonight, that she needed more self-control.

Amazing, how even now she couldn't get away from the man. Amazing, and depressing as hell. Reku, damn his freakish eyes, had left her with so many messes to clean up she more often felt like a maid than an assassin. She stared at her pale, pale hands and hoped that whatever creature had eaten him had taken its sweet time.

She hadn't seen sunshine in months. Or the mountains. The mountains were all that made this town really bearable. She'd gotten a full ride to several universities on the strength of her skill at chemistry, but she'd chosen Okepe State because of the mountains. It was only two hours away from her zealot mother and just an hour way from the mental institution where her twin lived, but she thought the mountains were worth the multitude of excuses she had to invent to keep from visiting.

The college was situated in a valley among the Appalachians, in a three-street town called Okepe that had never seen any reason to count the passing of decades. In summer the hills were green and patient, in winter they were hairy-backed giants, bristling in the brisk wind. In autumn everything was all over red and gold, from the hills to the sun bouncing off the brick buildings to the clouds at sunset. It was a land of ghosts, and ancient eyeless creatures that lived in the multitude of caves.

Walking in the hills gave her peace when the whispers became too much to bear. A small town is a thinking entity, and the town thought her a freak and a whore. Hardly fair in a college town where the entirety of the biology graduate department had moved on to foreign parts due to a scandal that involved numerous unwanted pregnancies and an actual, honest-to-god duel. To be fair, she'd had her share of men in the years following the realization that Reku was never coming back. She should be glad the town knew only of her liaisons, and not of either the reason for her proficiency at chemistry or the way she used it to make money.

Freak of nature. Reku himself had once said she was too dangerous to live, and he was right. She'd never heard of anyone else who could move molecules with their mind. Given her family history of mental illness, there was little hope that she wouldn't one day go insane and cause devastation on the level of a nuclear bomb. Not that her talent involved splitting atoms, she would have been dead by the time she hit puberty if that were so. She liked to think of herself as a kind of human bunsen burner-- she could add energy to chemical reactions, excite the molecules. Like starting a fire. Rare, secret talent- she didn't even tell her clients she could do it. Didn't want to be studied for being a freak. She still got more contracts as an assassin by trading on Reku's name than trading on her own.

Okay. So assassin wasn't the right word. It was more like glorified dog-catcher. She hadn't been paid to kill in at least a year, but she'd taken three contracts in the past two months. Defaulted contracts, due to the mess she was in. All of them for capturing a supernatural critter and transporting it. Monster-hunter. Like Reku, she refused to work in the human sphere, preferring to take jobs that involved monsters. She'd had to default on a contract for capturing a leprechaun. Air fare to Ireland was included. She was pretty pissed about that.

It was a contract exactly like that which had landed her in the trouble she had now, only instead of a leprechaun it was a werewolf. It was the first contract she'd ever taken that involved capturing a werewolf, and it wasn't his pack leader that wanted him. It was his father. Mr. Van Hopf had been very disturbed that his youngest son, Heinrich, was cavorting around the countryside eating sheep and generally being far furrier than his noble ancestors, and had wanted to put a stop to it. He had money, so he hired Reku to cage the kid. Reku took Clara along for the ride. Three years of captivity had not improved Heinrich's temper.

In fact, three years in captivity had driven Heinrich absolutely nuts.

One fine full moon little Heinrich had gotten free, killed his father, and embarked on a path of revenge against the people who had caged him in the first place. The only hitch in his vengeance was that Reku, the head dog-catcher, was missing. Heinrich had to settle for the plucky girl sidekick. He had followers. He had resources. He knew where Clara lived because, like a fool, she was attending a real university using her real name. It was only luck that had saved her from the initial attack. She'd come back from lunch one day to find her dorm room trashed, and the unmistakable odor of wolf piss on her sheets. She'd run straight to her only friend in town, an older man by the name of Joe Parsons who knew precisely what she was and occasionally found himself in the same business. He'd loaned her food and water, and enough ammo to supplement what she kept in her car. She'd been living in a small shack of his on the edge of the forest ever since.

One more day, and she could return to her dorm room. One more day, and she could return to the land of running water and real hot coffee. At least Joe was keeping her supplied with whiskey and cigarettes. She'd gone from smoking once or twice a month to chain-smoking, to hide her scent. She only had two more weeks until classes started again.

It was luck that had Heinrich's attack come at the beginning of Christmas Break, when the campus was all but empty and she didn't have any classes to fail. She'd expected to have the whole thing wrapped up by New Years, but it was taking longer than she'd anticipated to kill Heinrich's followers. She'd sniped them, at first, from an abandoned radio tower at the top of a mountain. She'd killed three that way. The police were no doubt still puzzling over the bodies. His followers were werewolves, and even in human form werewolves have a different skeletal structure, not to mention the fur on the inside of their skin. There were seven more she'd done up close, when they were foolish enough to be out alone, hunting her. She'd gone from prey to predator and killed them, left their bodies where they lay. What was the point in hiding them? They didn't have a mark on them. She'd killed them with her freakish talents, not with bullets.

Tonight she would kill them all.

She'd found their hiding place, their weak point, their fool's gathering place. Every Tuesday they gathered at the house of a local pot-dealer named Adam. Maybe they played poker. Maybe pot worked for werewolves, she didn't know. She didn't care. From what she'd seen, stalking the lot of them with a finesse that only Reku himself would have been able to duplicate, Adam was an innocent human bystander. She would let him live.

She'd considered running. Just leaving town and the name she was born with. She had enough money. Pride prevented her. Besides, she really loved chemistry. Maybe, just maybe, one day she'd lock her guns up in a cabinet and get a white-collar job. Of course, guns didn't figure prominently in her plans for the evening.

Heinrich had seen her kill with a touch. A simple matter, really, just a few moved molecules and their heart exploded. He would be prepared, and the police would be confounded.

Her plan was simple. And borderline suicidal. As usual.

The police were getting just a bit too eager to find out what happened to those seven dead people. Seven bodies, not a mark on them, except that their hearts had exploded in their chests. Not failed, exploded. They were bound to find her fingerprints on the bodies eventually, if they hadn't already. So she needed to establish that she knew the victims casually, in case that ever came up. Which meant she needed her name on this report as a victim.

All of her guns were registered, and she kept her concealed carry permit on her at all times. She was going to take her gun in there, kind of like a teddy bear. She didn't think she could do this without it on her. But shooting them? Probably a bad idea.

She stood up, her legs stiff from the cold wooden floor of the shack. She was wrapped in four sweaters, three pairs of pants and two blankets, and still she was cold. Her hands had trembled when she cut her hair. But she'd had to. It relieved the pressure building inside her skull from her fears of all the ways this could go wrong tonight, and from her frustrations at being caged up in this pitiful dwelling. She hadn't peed inside in two months. She'd had to bury, like, four-feet-of-dirt bury, all her waste so the ground near her shack wouldn't smell like human waste. Even more than running hot water, she wanted running cold water. In a toilet.

More than a release of pressure, she wanted to look like she had back when she'd first put Heinrich away. Back then, she'd worn her hair short. Maybe it was childish, but she wanted him to know exactly what was going on when she killed him. She wanted him to know that his prey had taken him out.

The sun was setting. The shack was dark. It was show time.

In her hurry to leave her ransacked room, she'd brought only a few things with her. Her cell phone. The scope for her Browning 8000 -- a fine sniper rifle she kept stored in a special compartment in her car. Her silver knives, which she'd stopped carrying with her everywhere when she wasn't on assignment. That was