Other Terrors, page 6
“What did one shepherd say to the other after seeing a wolf in the distance?” Skathi asked.
“I give up, what?”
“Let’s get the flock out of here.”
Mrs. Neuri’s deep, resonating laughter made the hair stand up on the back of Skathi’s neck, but she joined in for a few chuckles anyway. The client shoved a small roll of tens into Skathi’s hand and backed into the shadows.
“That’s really too much for a tip, Mrs. Neuri . . .”
“No, I insist,” she replied, “besides, winter is coming, and I demand you replace those horrible bald tires immediately. You promise, young lady?”
Skathi smiled and shook her head. “Okay, okay, I promise. Take care.”
Mrs. Neuri flashed a wide grin that displayed a mouthful of bright white and rather sharp-looking teeth before slowly closing her door.
Driving down 287 in Lafayette and swaying to the mournful strains of Motorpsycho’s “This Otherness” at eleven p.m., Skathi spotted a familiar-looking SUV barreling north on South Boulder Road.
Probably not those schmucks, she pondered, so no need to start feeling paranoid. And if it is them, they’ll probably get bored and tired of cruising the streets soon enough. As far as she knew, there had not been an official reported attack on a trans or nonbinary person in the surrounding county in a few years, the operative word of course being reported. Rumors occasionally arose about the odd incident, but people’s privacy, desire to stay in the closet, and fear of reprisal left what some suspected to the imagination. Denver, though, was a whole other story, and yeah, she had a good trans female friend who was brutally beaten by some thugs down there just a few months ago. Dana had recovered physically, but she was now more of a shut-in than ever. Skathi knew that she had to keep her own guard up at night.
Ten minutes later, Skathi pulled over and parked on the side of Coal Creek Drive next to Founders Park, an area poorly lit by streetlamps. She exited her rusty car and walked without hesitation directly to the central playground. It was abandoned this late at night of course, and she quickly made her way to the nearest of the two rockpile sculptures that anchored either side of a small rope monkey bridge. Skathi placed her right palm on the darkest of the sculpted stones that made up this façade, and a bright flash of light instantly surrounded the outline of her palm and fingers. A three-foot-high and two-foot-wide opening appeared in the rock face.
“In for a dime,” Skathi said, dropping to her hands and knees and entering the darkness, “in for a dollar.”
After crawling for about fifty feet (yes, the inside, like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, was substantially larger than the exterior could ever explain), Skathi stood up after entering a large domed circular room filled with all manner of stalls and tables on the periphery, thirty or more altogether. Each display had colorful silk and cotton banners and draping, showing off a wide variety of eclectic items. Oil lamps burning powdered oak, pine, and Irish clover incense hung from the ceiling. There didn’t appear to be any other customers inside, which was always the odd case whenever she shopped at the Seelie Court Extension.
“Oh, you saw it all, Ludwig. It is not how things are in the world that is mystical,” she whispered, “but that it exists.”
Skathi walked right up to a table festooned with bright yellow and red flowers.
“Hey, Prankster Pete,” Skathi said to the handsome, sinewy blond man behind the counter whose face was covered with tattoos of leaves and vines. “Here for the usual.”
“Welcome back to this branch of the Summer Court, Skathi,” Pete said with a shy grin, “and I’ve got your stash right here.”
Skathi grabbed the tied-off burlap sack, used her iPhone to scan the code on the small price tag, and handed it back.
“I’ll take it,” she said, and handed over her InstaBag credit card, which was quickly scanned by Pete.
“You know,” Pete said slyly as the paper receipt was ejected, “that offer of a date to the Shining Throne is still good, sweet cheeks.”
Skathi rolled her green eyes. “You never give up, do you, Prankster? I’d think one of the Golden Ones had better things to do than troll for mere mortals to escort.”
“Ohhh, we both know there is nothing merely mortal about you, Skathi,” Pete said with a grin. “You are so much more than you appear, my dear.”
Skathi snapped up the gunnysack and the large tip, winked at Pete, turned around, and walked quickly back to the diminutive tunnel that led the way back to the real world.
“Beannachd leat an tè ghealach agam!” Pete shouted at her back.
Skathi floored it to her next client in Gold Hill, bouncing in her seat to the deep growling vocals of Mr. Cräbs’s “Metamorphosis.” Rumors abounded lately that InstaBag wanted to trim its shoppers, and she always took every effort to meet her speed goals and not give the company any excuse to drop her. This meant the occasional pullover by the cops for speeding, but Skathi had gotten pretty good at finding side streets to bypass most patrolling officers and speed traps. There was a downside to Skathi’s diligence, however, and it was that her recent success at piling up well-paying Night Clients who kept asking for her services exclusively had created a temporary rift between her and all the other Boulder County InstaBagger shoppers, which currently numbered three hundred and eighty-six, but fluctuated over the past few years, once dropping to a mere two hundred, and near the beginning of the first Covid outbreak had reached six hundred.
This exclusive client list had allowed her to climb right to the top of the Boulder Total Speed Leaderboard for six weeks when it came to rank, shopper, and speed. A wildcat strike among jealous local shoppers was on the verge of happening when Skathi came up with the enlightened idea of a handicap system, one which downed her stats to more closely approximate that of her fellow shoppers. Two weeks later and things were mostly back to normal as Skathi found herself regularly sharing top rankings on the Speed Leaderboard with several others.
Standing before the gilded door of a mini-mansion, Skathi handed the heavy gunnysack over to the height-challenged, golden-haired individual with pale green skin.
“Pitcairn honey?” he asked in a mellifluous Welsh accent.
“Only the best for you, Mr. Teg.”
“Priodi fi un hardd!”
“I’m currently off the market, Mr. Teg.” Skathi smiled. “But I’ll keep it in mind.”
Mr. Teg shoved a small wad of bills at Skathi with a wide grin.
“I like your lapis lazuli eye shade, Skathi,” Mr. Teg said. “It reminds me of the enchanted lake of Eire.”
“Diolch yn fawr iawn,” she replied.
Skathi pocketed the large tip, waved goodbye, and walked away.
By 11:10 p.m., Skathi had made two more sets of purchases at odd locations from even odder establishments on mostly untraveled back roads in Boulder County. Afterward, she quickly dropped off a Baku pelt to a Mr. Andy Meonn in the ritzy Mapleton Street neighborhood of Boulder, and two weeks’ worth of an esoteric Nigerian stew containing bat meat, dog meat, cow brain, locusts, winged termites, grasscutter feces, grasshoppers, crickets, and African palm weevils to a Ms. Alexandra Aja, who lived in a huge, elaborate all-weather Yurt bordering Arapahoe Ridge Park.
Back on South Boulder Road and listening to the soothing vibes from Assemblage 23’s “Otherness,” Skathi smiled, remembering Mr. Teg’s comments on her makeup. Unfortunately, this brought to mind the latest set of YouTube and Twitter posts she had read by that jackass transmedia influencer Counterplots, who went on a harangue last night that all true trans people must not only come out of the closet the moment they realize who and what they are, but must also immediately commit to passing. While Skathi felt comfortable at this stage in her existence to dress and wear makeup that complement her true inner womanhood, she knew many others were struggling with the transition and deserved sympathy, not condemnation, for how they presently chose to present themselves to the outside world.
“How did you put it, Ludwig?” Skathi asked herself. “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Skathi chuckled. Her Night Clients, as strange as they were, never seemed to have the trouble that her cisgender customers, acquaintances, family, and friends did in remembering to refer to her by her transgender identity and its accompanying pronouns. Closeted in their own way, her customers seemed to have an innate empathy for the fear, nervousness, and, well, otherness that Skathi had felt every day of her life since she realized several years ago that she was a woman born in a man’s body.
Though she was probably now only a year or two away from sex reassignment surgery, the effect of coming out, as painful, stressful, and tumultuous as it was, became a catharsis that flooded her heart and soul with self-love. Realizing the truth of herself was akin to being blind and given the gift of sight. It gave her a bright, even brilliant, reality, where before she had stumbled across sidewalks of gray twilight and shadow. Sure, she still had the same daily problems that all people did, but now she no longer felt the push and pull, the contradiction, of perceived personality versus true personality. She was truly herself.
Skathi pushed all these thoughts aside as urgent pressure in her bladder had her pulling into the rear parking lot of the Shell Station just as the opening lyrics of “Salome” by Marriages bled from the back speakers.
A few minutes later, after taking care of business and touching up her makeup, Skathi exited the ladies’ room on the poorly lit back side of the gas station and walked right into a solid punch to her right cheek that nearly knocked her off her feet. Her head felt like it was just stung by a hundred bees.
“Nice shot, Samuel,” a male voice shouted out. “Lemme show you how it’s done, Bruce Lee–style.”
Skathi looked up in time to see it was the four teenagers who had hassled her earlier, their SUV parked next to her car. The driver, an Asian boy, ran forward, and after letting out a high-pitched scream, thrust his right leg out sideways where his foot struck her belly, doubling her over, knocking the wind out of her, and making her collapse to her knees.
“Sweet.” Samuel laughed. “That was a bull’s-eye, Danny!”
Skathi gasped, struggling to take air in but barely succeeding. She leaned on her left hand. The foursome circled her like hyenas, skipping and jumping and laughing. She tried to speak but couldn’t push enough air into her vocal cords to work.
“Super Trans Man ain’t coming to the rescue, princess,” Samuel shouted.
“Yeah,” Danny yelled, “no mercy for monster freaks.”
“Just remember, sweetheart,” Samuel said in a chilling voice as all four of them closed in on her, “this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it will us.”
Two of them swung a foot back to kick, and Skathi closed her eyes tightly in sick anticipation.
The kicks never arrived. Two loud thuds, followed by screams, filled the air.
Skathi opened her eyes to pure chaos.
Danny and Samuel were dragged off several feet by two hulking figures barely discernible in the poorly lit area. Leaping down from a nearby tree, Prankster Pete landed next to the white boy who had yelled at Skathi from the SUV earlier.
“Jesus Christ.” The boy screamed and wet his pants. “We were only—”
Without hesitation, Pete thrust a tattooed right hand into and straight through the teenager’s midsection, spraying blood across the face and chest of the remaining teenager, the Black boy who had mistaken Skathi for a Muslim woman because of her headwear. He screamed and turned to run but slammed face-first into a tall, ripped, pale naked man with a bald head, and fell to the ground.
“Mr. Tepes, don’t!” Skathi managed to finally speak, but it was too late.
Tepes opened his mouth wider than any mere mortal could, exposing vicious sharp teeth.
“Oh god, no . . . please . . .” The teen squealed in terror.
Mr. Tepes’s mouth bit into the teenager’s throat, tearing into both carotid arteries. Mere seconds of feeding left the boy drained of blood, pale and dead.
The rank smell of piss, shit, and gore filled the air.
Coughing, Skathi forced herself to stand up. She heard Samuel’s voice nearby.
“No . . . please, for the love of God . . . no more . . .” he said.
Turning back toward the gas station, Skathi saw the outline of what looked like a huge wolf walking on its hind legs. Samuel’s high-pitched screams were suddenly stopped when the wolf completely decapitated him with a single chomp of its large jaws. Samuel’s head fell to the ground, but his body managed to keep upright for a full thirty seconds while scarlet blood jetted up into the air from his neck stump.
Several feet from Samuel’s corpse, Danny was on his knees, groveling before a dark, undulating humanoid shape that looked like a solid shadow come to life.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said, his eyes wide and drool dripping down the side of his mouth. “I’m sorry . . . we didn’t mean anything . . . this can’t be happening . . . this can’t be fucking happening . . .”
“Tariaksuq,” Skathi managed to yell loudly, “please don’t . . .”
The shadow creature suddenly merged with Danny, causing him to shake and convulse wildly and a moment later explode in a large swath of blood, gore, and bone, spraying the area in pieces of matter no larger than a thumbnail.
This last macabre killing proved too much for Skathi’s overwhelmed senses. She dropped back down to her knees and vomited. This was followed by a minute of dry heaves before she could regain some manner of composure.
She wiped her mouth with the palm of her left hand and realized she was now sitting within a circle made by four terrifying entities.
“Why . . . Why?” was all Skathi could manage to say.
“They were going to kill you, Skathi,” the living shadow known as Tariaksuq said.
“You don’t know that,” Skathi said.
“Of course we do,” Prankster Pete replied.
“Some of us see into men’s hearts,” Mr. Tepes said, “others into their minds. We know the truth of their intent.”
The upright wolf slowly transformed into her client, Mrs. Neuri, naked and as beautiful as a runway model.
“I smelled their evil, my child,” Mrs. Neuri said. “We had no choice.”
“But . . . but you killed them,” Skathi said, still in shock.
“Many of us like you, Skathi,” Mr. Tepes said, “and depend on you.”
“And many of our kind . . . love you,” Prankster Pete said in a low voice.
“We will not let them desecrate one . . . of us,” Mrs. Neuri said, “and you must leave here . . . now. We disconnected all surrounding security cameras before you left the bathroom. We will clean up any signs of your . . . our presence. Now go!”
When Skathi was within a half mile of her apartment complex, it struck midnight. Instantly, a New Batch Available alert sang from her iPhone. She pulled over to the side of West Street and put her car in park, ignoring the alert for a full thirty seconds before slowly picking up her phone. Opening the screen, she saw it was one of her best paying and reliable clients, Mr. Arges, an ocular-challenged giant of a man with a penchant for Pule cheese who lived in a secluded corner of Aspen Meadows.
Setting her phone down on the passenger seat, Skathi couldn’t help but see the spots of blood that had sprayed across the back of her right hand. Shivering, she dug through her glove compartment, found some wet wipes, and quickly cleaned up. Glancing into the rearview mirror, she realized her face was paler than any makeup could account for.
The phone beeped again.
They killed those boys, she thought, without any hesitation or remorse . . . slaughtering them like farm animals. They’re monsters.
But the way the tall white boy, Samuel, had punched Skathi in the face, and the way that Asian boy Danny had kicked her, and all their drunken laughter . . . Yes, Skathi thought, they really might have been on the verge of killing me.
The phone beeped a third time.
I can quit the night shifts right now, Skathi thought, no more Night Clients, no more big tips, just go back to the old harried day shifts where I’ll be regularly competing with PostMates and Shipt on top of my own InstaBag co-workers.
Skathi slowly reached for her phone.
But all the medical bills, she thought, the therapists, the estrogen therapy, and the eventual cost of surgery . . . No other job in this failing economy can give me as much off-the-record income as I need.
Trembling, Skathi picked up the phone and looked at the screen. She felt like she was walking on a tightrope across a wide, raging river, and, halfway across, knew not whether to return to one shore or continue to the other. On one side were all the Night Clients she had ever delivered to. On the other, all of the everyday mortal kind. Did she really have to choose between extremes? Or did she have the focus and strength to maintain this precarious balance?
“Heaven and Hell,” Skathi recited in a whisper, “suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.”
Slowly, after the shortest hesitation, Skathi tapped the accept button on the screen, set her phone down, took the car out of park, and proceeded on a long drive to an overgrown valley just east of Apache Peak, where there awaited a family-run cheese factory hidden in a large circular copse of Gambel oak, ponderosa pine, and aspen trees.
Skathi pulled a tube of Bite Beauty Amuse Bouche lipstick out of her purse with a trembling hand to touch up her smile. Pressing both her lips together, she took another quick glance into her rearview mirror and winked at herself.
“Well, girl,” Skathi said nervously, “as the great philosopher Hume might say, she is happy whose circumstances suit her temper; but she is more excellent who can suit her temper to any circumstances.”
Skathi’s rust-coated Plymouth, looking blood red under the bright harvest full moon, was slowly embraced by the night as Jimmy Cliff’s “Give a Little, Take a Little” oozed from her car’s speakers.
Scrape
“I give up, what?”
“Let’s get the flock out of here.”
Mrs. Neuri’s deep, resonating laughter made the hair stand up on the back of Skathi’s neck, but she joined in for a few chuckles anyway. The client shoved a small roll of tens into Skathi’s hand and backed into the shadows.
“That’s really too much for a tip, Mrs. Neuri . . .”
“No, I insist,” she replied, “besides, winter is coming, and I demand you replace those horrible bald tires immediately. You promise, young lady?”
Skathi smiled and shook her head. “Okay, okay, I promise. Take care.”
Mrs. Neuri flashed a wide grin that displayed a mouthful of bright white and rather sharp-looking teeth before slowly closing her door.
Driving down 287 in Lafayette and swaying to the mournful strains of Motorpsycho’s “This Otherness” at eleven p.m., Skathi spotted a familiar-looking SUV barreling north on South Boulder Road.
Probably not those schmucks, she pondered, so no need to start feeling paranoid. And if it is them, they’ll probably get bored and tired of cruising the streets soon enough. As far as she knew, there had not been an official reported attack on a trans or nonbinary person in the surrounding county in a few years, the operative word of course being reported. Rumors occasionally arose about the odd incident, but people’s privacy, desire to stay in the closet, and fear of reprisal left what some suspected to the imagination. Denver, though, was a whole other story, and yeah, she had a good trans female friend who was brutally beaten by some thugs down there just a few months ago. Dana had recovered physically, but she was now more of a shut-in than ever. Skathi knew that she had to keep her own guard up at night.
Ten minutes later, Skathi pulled over and parked on the side of Coal Creek Drive next to Founders Park, an area poorly lit by streetlamps. She exited her rusty car and walked without hesitation directly to the central playground. It was abandoned this late at night of course, and she quickly made her way to the nearest of the two rockpile sculptures that anchored either side of a small rope monkey bridge. Skathi placed her right palm on the darkest of the sculpted stones that made up this façade, and a bright flash of light instantly surrounded the outline of her palm and fingers. A three-foot-high and two-foot-wide opening appeared in the rock face.
“In for a dime,” Skathi said, dropping to her hands and knees and entering the darkness, “in for a dollar.”
After crawling for about fifty feet (yes, the inside, like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, was substantially larger than the exterior could ever explain), Skathi stood up after entering a large domed circular room filled with all manner of stalls and tables on the periphery, thirty or more altogether. Each display had colorful silk and cotton banners and draping, showing off a wide variety of eclectic items. Oil lamps burning powdered oak, pine, and Irish clover incense hung from the ceiling. There didn’t appear to be any other customers inside, which was always the odd case whenever she shopped at the Seelie Court Extension.
“Oh, you saw it all, Ludwig. It is not how things are in the world that is mystical,” she whispered, “but that it exists.”
Skathi walked right up to a table festooned with bright yellow and red flowers.
“Hey, Prankster Pete,” Skathi said to the handsome, sinewy blond man behind the counter whose face was covered with tattoos of leaves and vines. “Here for the usual.”
“Welcome back to this branch of the Summer Court, Skathi,” Pete said with a shy grin, “and I’ve got your stash right here.”
Skathi grabbed the tied-off burlap sack, used her iPhone to scan the code on the small price tag, and handed it back.
“I’ll take it,” she said, and handed over her InstaBag credit card, which was quickly scanned by Pete.
“You know,” Pete said slyly as the paper receipt was ejected, “that offer of a date to the Shining Throne is still good, sweet cheeks.”
Skathi rolled her green eyes. “You never give up, do you, Prankster? I’d think one of the Golden Ones had better things to do than troll for mere mortals to escort.”
“Ohhh, we both know there is nothing merely mortal about you, Skathi,” Pete said with a grin. “You are so much more than you appear, my dear.”
Skathi snapped up the gunnysack and the large tip, winked at Pete, turned around, and walked quickly back to the diminutive tunnel that led the way back to the real world.
“Beannachd leat an tè ghealach agam!” Pete shouted at her back.
Skathi floored it to her next client in Gold Hill, bouncing in her seat to the deep growling vocals of Mr. Cräbs’s “Metamorphosis.” Rumors abounded lately that InstaBag wanted to trim its shoppers, and she always took every effort to meet her speed goals and not give the company any excuse to drop her. This meant the occasional pullover by the cops for speeding, but Skathi had gotten pretty good at finding side streets to bypass most patrolling officers and speed traps. There was a downside to Skathi’s diligence, however, and it was that her recent success at piling up well-paying Night Clients who kept asking for her services exclusively had created a temporary rift between her and all the other Boulder County InstaBagger shoppers, which currently numbered three hundred and eighty-six, but fluctuated over the past few years, once dropping to a mere two hundred, and near the beginning of the first Covid outbreak had reached six hundred.
This exclusive client list had allowed her to climb right to the top of the Boulder Total Speed Leaderboard for six weeks when it came to rank, shopper, and speed. A wildcat strike among jealous local shoppers was on the verge of happening when Skathi came up with the enlightened idea of a handicap system, one which downed her stats to more closely approximate that of her fellow shoppers. Two weeks later and things were mostly back to normal as Skathi found herself regularly sharing top rankings on the Speed Leaderboard with several others.
Standing before the gilded door of a mini-mansion, Skathi handed the heavy gunnysack over to the height-challenged, golden-haired individual with pale green skin.
“Pitcairn honey?” he asked in a mellifluous Welsh accent.
“Only the best for you, Mr. Teg.”
“Priodi fi un hardd!”
“I’m currently off the market, Mr. Teg.” Skathi smiled. “But I’ll keep it in mind.”
Mr. Teg shoved a small wad of bills at Skathi with a wide grin.
“I like your lapis lazuli eye shade, Skathi,” Mr. Teg said. “It reminds me of the enchanted lake of Eire.”
“Diolch yn fawr iawn,” she replied.
Skathi pocketed the large tip, waved goodbye, and walked away.
By 11:10 p.m., Skathi had made two more sets of purchases at odd locations from even odder establishments on mostly untraveled back roads in Boulder County. Afterward, she quickly dropped off a Baku pelt to a Mr. Andy Meonn in the ritzy Mapleton Street neighborhood of Boulder, and two weeks’ worth of an esoteric Nigerian stew containing bat meat, dog meat, cow brain, locusts, winged termites, grasscutter feces, grasshoppers, crickets, and African palm weevils to a Ms. Alexandra Aja, who lived in a huge, elaborate all-weather Yurt bordering Arapahoe Ridge Park.
Back on South Boulder Road and listening to the soothing vibes from Assemblage 23’s “Otherness,” Skathi smiled, remembering Mr. Teg’s comments on her makeup. Unfortunately, this brought to mind the latest set of YouTube and Twitter posts she had read by that jackass transmedia influencer Counterplots, who went on a harangue last night that all true trans people must not only come out of the closet the moment they realize who and what they are, but must also immediately commit to passing. While Skathi felt comfortable at this stage in her existence to dress and wear makeup that complement her true inner womanhood, she knew many others were struggling with the transition and deserved sympathy, not condemnation, for how they presently chose to present themselves to the outside world.
“How did you put it, Ludwig?” Skathi asked herself. “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
Skathi chuckled. Her Night Clients, as strange as they were, never seemed to have the trouble that her cisgender customers, acquaintances, family, and friends did in remembering to refer to her by her transgender identity and its accompanying pronouns. Closeted in their own way, her customers seemed to have an innate empathy for the fear, nervousness, and, well, otherness that Skathi had felt every day of her life since she realized several years ago that she was a woman born in a man’s body.
Though she was probably now only a year or two away from sex reassignment surgery, the effect of coming out, as painful, stressful, and tumultuous as it was, became a catharsis that flooded her heart and soul with self-love. Realizing the truth of herself was akin to being blind and given the gift of sight. It gave her a bright, even brilliant, reality, where before she had stumbled across sidewalks of gray twilight and shadow. Sure, she still had the same daily problems that all people did, but now she no longer felt the push and pull, the contradiction, of perceived personality versus true personality. She was truly herself.
Skathi pushed all these thoughts aside as urgent pressure in her bladder had her pulling into the rear parking lot of the Shell Station just as the opening lyrics of “Salome” by Marriages bled from the back speakers.
A few minutes later, after taking care of business and touching up her makeup, Skathi exited the ladies’ room on the poorly lit back side of the gas station and walked right into a solid punch to her right cheek that nearly knocked her off her feet. Her head felt like it was just stung by a hundred bees.
“Nice shot, Samuel,” a male voice shouted out. “Lemme show you how it’s done, Bruce Lee–style.”
Skathi looked up in time to see it was the four teenagers who had hassled her earlier, their SUV parked next to her car. The driver, an Asian boy, ran forward, and after letting out a high-pitched scream, thrust his right leg out sideways where his foot struck her belly, doubling her over, knocking the wind out of her, and making her collapse to her knees.
“Sweet.” Samuel laughed. “That was a bull’s-eye, Danny!”
Skathi gasped, struggling to take air in but barely succeeding. She leaned on her left hand. The foursome circled her like hyenas, skipping and jumping and laughing. She tried to speak but couldn’t push enough air into her vocal cords to work.
“Super Trans Man ain’t coming to the rescue, princess,” Samuel shouted.
“Yeah,” Danny yelled, “no mercy for monster freaks.”
“Just remember, sweetheart,” Samuel said in a chilling voice as all four of them closed in on her, “this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it will us.”
Two of them swung a foot back to kick, and Skathi closed her eyes tightly in sick anticipation.
The kicks never arrived. Two loud thuds, followed by screams, filled the air.
Skathi opened her eyes to pure chaos.
Danny and Samuel were dragged off several feet by two hulking figures barely discernible in the poorly lit area. Leaping down from a nearby tree, Prankster Pete landed next to the white boy who had yelled at Skathi from the SUV earlier.
“Jesus Christ.” The boy screamed and wet his pants. “We were only—”
Without hesitation, Pete thrust a tattooed right hand into and straight through the teenager’s midsection, spraying blood across the face and chest of the remaining teenager, the Black boy who had mistaken Skathi for a Muslim woman because of her headwear. He screamed and turned to run but slammed face-first into a tall, ripped, pale naked man with a bald head, and fell to the ground.
“Mr. Tepes, don’t!” Skathi managed to finally speak, but it was too late.
Tepes opened his mouth wider than any mere mortal could, exposing vicious sharp teeth.
“Oh god, no . . . please . . .” The teen squealed in terror.
Mr. Tepes’s mouth bit into the teenager’s throat, tearing into both carotid arteries. Mere seconds of feeding left the boy drained of blood, pale and dead.
The rank smell of piss, shit, and gore filled the air.
Coughing, Skathi forced herself to stand up. She heard Samuel’s voice nearby.
“No . . . please, for the love of God . . . no more . . .” he said.
Turning back toward the gas station, Skathi saw the outline of what looked like a huge wolf walking on its hind legs. Samuel’s high-pitched screams were suddenly stopped when the wolf completely decapitated him with a single chomp of its large jaws. Samuel’s head fell to the ground, but his body managed to keep upright for a full thirty seconds while scarlet blood jetted up into the air from his neck stump.
Several feet from Samuel’s corpse, Danny was on his knees, groveling before a dark, undulating humanoid shape that looked like a solid shadow come to life.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said, his eyes wide and drool dripping down the side of his mouth. “I’m sorry . . . we didn’t mean anything . . . this can’t be happening . . . this can’t be fucking happening . . .”
“Tariaksuq,” Skathi managed to yell loudly, “please don’t . . .”
The shadow creature suddenly merged with Danny, causing him to shake and convulse wildly and a moment later explode in a large swath of blood, gore, and bone, spraying the area in pieces of matter no larger than a thumbnail.
This last macabre killing proved too much for Skathi’s overwhelmed senses. She dropped back down to her knees and vomited. This was followed by a minute of dry heaves before she could regain some manner of composure.
She wiped her mouth with the palm of her left hand and realized she was now sitting within a circle made by four terrifying entities.
“Why . . . Why?” was all Skathi could manage to say.
“They were going to kill you, Skathi,” the living shadow known as Tariaksuq said.
“You don’t know that,” Skathi said.
“Of course we do,” Prankster Pete replied.
“Some of us see into men’s hearts,” Mr. Tepes said, “others into their minds. We know the truth of their intent.”
The upright wolf slowly transformed into her client, Mrs. Neuri, naked and as beautiful as a runway model.
“I smelled their evil, my child,” Mrs. Neuri said. “We had no choice.”
“But . . . but you killed them,” Skathi said, still in shock.
“Many of us like you, Skathi,” Mr. Tepes said, “and depend on you.”
“And many of our kind . . . love you,” Prankster Pete said in a low voice.
“We will not let them desecrate one . . . of us,” Mrs. Neuri said, “and you must leave here . . . now. We disconnected all surrounding security cameras before you left the bathroom. We will clean up any signs of your . . . our presence. Now go!”
When Skathi was within a half mile of her apartment complex, it struck midnight. Instantly, a New Batch Available alert sang from her iPhone. She pulled over to the side of West Street and put her car in park, ignoring the alert for a full thirty seconds before slowly picking up her phone. Opening the screen, she saw it was one of her best paying and reliable clients, Mr. Arges, an ocular-challenged giant of a man with a penchant for Pule cheese who lived in a secluded corner of Aspen Meadows.
Setting her phone down on the passenger seat, Skathi couldn’t help but see the spots of blood that had sprayed across the back of her right hand. Shivering, she dug through her glove compartment, found some wet wipes, and quickly cleaned up. Glancing into the rearview mirror, she realized her face was paler than any makeup could account for.
The phone beeped again.
They killed those boys, she thought, without any hesitation or remorse . . . slaughtering them like farm animals. They’re monsters.
But the way the tall white boy, Samuel, had punched Skathi in the face, and the way that Asian boy Danny had kicked her, and all their drunken laughter . . . Yes, Skathi thought, they really might have been on the verge of killing me.
The phone beeped a third time.
I can quit the night shifts right now, Skathi thought, no more Night Clients, no more big tips, just go back to the old harried day shifts where I’ll be regularly competing with PostMates and Shipt on top of my own InstaBag co-workers.
Skathi slowly reached for her phone.
But all the medical bills, she thought, the therapists, the estrogen therapy, and the eventual cost of surgery . . . No other job in this failing economy can give me as much off-the-record income as I need.
Trembling, Skathi picked up the phone and looked at the screen. She felt like she was walking on a tightrope across a wide, raging river, and, halfway across, knew not whether to return to one shore or continue to the other. On one side were all the Night Clients she had ever delivered to. On the other, all of the everyday mortal kind. Did she really have to choose between extremes? Or did she have the focus and strength to maintain this precarious balance?
“Heaven and Hell,” Skathi recited in a whisper, “suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.”
Slowly, after the shortest hesitation, Skathi tapped the accept button on the screen, set her phone down, took the car out of park, and proceeded on a long drive to an overgrown valley just east of Apache Peak, where there awaited a family-run cheese factory hidden in a large circular copse of Gambel oak, ponderosa pine, and aspen trees.
Skathi pulled a tube of Bite Beauty Amuse Bouche lipstick out of her purse with a trembling hand to touch up her smile. Pressing both her lips together, she took another quick glance into her rearview mirror and winked at herself.
“Well, girl,” Skathi said nervously, “as the great philosopher Hume might say, she is happy whose circumstances suit her temper; but she is more excellent who can suit her temper to any circumstances.”
Skathi’s rust-coated Plymouth, looking blood red under the bright harvest full moon, was slowly embraced by the night as Jimmy Cliff’s “Give a Little, Take a Little” oozed from her car’s speakers.
Scrape
