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  Stephen Blackmoore

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  Pat Kelleher

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  Cassandra Khaw

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

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  First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Clint Langley

  Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne

  Marketing and PR: Rob Power

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-056-8

  Gods and Monsters™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  To Mike, who taught me

  fun is good and necessary.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TANIS HUNTED THE Great White Asshole at Floyd’s tavern on the corner of Birch and Promenade. Asshole, also known as Luke Des Moines—like that nice city in Iowa—dressed well: tailored slacks, a button-down shirt. A skinny silver tie and expensive cufflinks with the letters L on his left wrist and DM on his right. His brown hair was slicked back, exposing a pronounced widow’s peak and a pair of overly-waxed brows that cast a feminine quality to his slender features.

  Tanis would call him handsome if she was into male trade, which she wasn’t, and that simplified things because she was going to kill him. Not directly, of course—what would be the point of that?—but she was going to kidnap him, break his legs, and then drag him back to an underground lair so he could be turned into a snake monster and breed with her mother.

  No one ever said Tanis Barlas didn’t live a complicated life.

  TANIS CHEWED ON the end of her cigarette, gazing in at Luke through the front windows of the tavern. The lower panes were dappled with steam in the late Florida spring. She didn’t mind the humidity—her snake blood preferred warm climates—but the humans wilted in their sweaty, acrid-smelling meat. Her nostrils flared, besieged by body odor. And smoke. And too-sweet perfume. And the taco stand a block away serving black bean burritos, and the ass-borne catastrophes birthed in their aftermath.

  Of all of my mother’s gifts. Fuck’s sake.

  She rubbed her nose like that would do any good.

  Luke shifted on his barstool so he could grab a patron’s ass as she walked by, a fattish woman in her forties whose red dye job could use a root touchup. She winked at him. He lifted his glass in salute and beckoned her close. A whisper, a caress on her arm, an inviting smile. He’d pocketed his wedding ring, because that was what he did every night between nine and ten.

  The behaviors were the same even if the bars changed.

  Tanis had watched him for a week, getting to know him and his routines, because that was her routine. During the day, Luke was nice as pie to coworkers and clientele at Maverick Motors, an oily prince among men, but the moment his polished shoe crossed the threshold of his two-story Colonial in the suburbs, Ragnarok was unleashed. On his wife. His kids. Punishing words. Punishing blows. After three glasses of cheap scotch, he’d cruise his way to the local bar in search of a pliant woman. If he scored, he’d deliver five disappointing thrusts and a grunt to a fleshy receptacle in the men’s room before climbing back into his Lexus with the dealer plates to drive home and sleep it off, spooning the very wife he’d bruised hours ago. Sometimes, if Mrs. Des Moines was really unlucky, he’d flip her on her stomach and have at her, and there wasn’t any lube, so she’d wince and bite down on the pillow to stifle her yelps. She knew enough to keep quiet. He’d slap her if she complained.

  Tonight looked like one of Luke’s lucky nights, the redhead a most-willing rabbit before his slathering, minty-fresh maw. They chatted awhile. He bought her drinks and flirted, his hand creeping along her ample thigh to squeeze and caress and delve. It was eleven when he guided her to the back of the bar, past an ancient cigarette machine that hadn’t operated in over a decade so he could kiss her beneath the neon Budweiser sign beside the restrooms.

  Tanis lit herself another cigarette and leaned against the streetlamp, idly prying up the edge of the crumbling sidewalk with her alligator-skin cowboy boot. A Rolling Stones T-shirt clung to her sinewy muscle and barely-there curves. Faded jeans hugged an ass that Naree insisted could turn coal into diamonds if Tanis flexed hard enough. Luke would be out in fifteen minutes—twenty if the redhead was lucky. He was a creature of habit.

  Unfortunately for him, so was Tanis.

  IT STARTED WITH a trip to Walmart of all places, though Tanis could make an argument that a lot of heinous fuckery started and ended in Walmart. The smiling yellow logo invited aggressive bargain-shopping soccer moms and meth heads, and nothing good would ever sprout from that combo.

  “I’m fucking starving,” Naree announced, her hand tugging on the olive green T-shirt with the Army logo across the front. It didn’t quite cover her soft belly fat, but Tanis liked the look of Naree’s navel tucked between her gentle rolls, so she didn’t bother mentioning it. Nor did she mention the way Naree’s shorts bit into her pear-shaped ass as she bent over in front of the refrigerator.

  For reasons.

  “We’ve got half a jar of Miracle Whip and an eggroll from the Paleolithic age. Let’s hit the store.”

  Tanis tossed aside the leather jacket spread across her knees, a fresh red patch of corduroy sewn onto the elbow. “All right.”

  “Have we got money?”

  Tanis smirked around the unlit cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, reaching into the coat’s pocket and producing a man’s brown leather wallet. “We’ve got money.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Naree didn’t ask questions about the wallet or its previous owner—Nicholas Pope, dead for a month—because she knew she didn’t want the answers. That went for a lot of shit in Tanis’s stratosphere. Tanis wasn’t like other women. That wasn’t a coy way of saying she wasn’t feminine or didn’t adhere to some feminist standard of womanhood; Tanis literally wasn’t like other women. Biologically. Naree understood that, had from the first day they met two years ago after a years-long online flirtation. You couldn’t apply a human morality to something not human, and while Tanis walked the walk and talked the talk, she was something more. She was special. A She-Hulk who could smell a car’s exhaust from a mile away. Who could see in the dark, run like a cheetah, and contort her body like she had no bones.

  A demigod, just like her hundreds of sisters. And demigods played by their own rules.

  “Are we doing full shopping or a snack grab?” Tanis flung the coat onto the green checkered couch. The apartment wasn’t much, a four-room affair with a bedroom, a bathroom, an eat-in kitchen, and a living room that doubled as Naree’s office, but it was sufficient for their needs. They wer
e in lovely downtown Percy’s Pass, in a flat above a small printing press about twenty miles east of the Everglades. The Pass had a whopping population of three thousand, but that was big in comparison to their neighbors. They had a Walmart, a McDonald’s, and high-speed internet, and that made them positively urban.

  “A little bit of both. I’m not lying. I could eat a horse.” Naree slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops, her green sparkle polish glinting in the cheap off-track lighting. “Meet you in the car.”

  Tanis fished around for her keys and cigarette lighter. Her fingers raked through her hair, trying to flatten it to her head so she looked less like an electrocuted chinchilla. A glance at her reflection in the glass of a picture frame proved it a hopeless venture. She was a light brown girl with crazy black hair and that was the end of it. Fried rodentia was a go.

  DOWN THE SQUEALING stairs—especially steps four and eleven on the second flight—through the industrial carpeted foyer, and crunching along the gritty driveway. The car was an old Caddy from the ’eighties, with navy blue paint and leather seats. It wasn’t in awful shape, the engine rebuilt from one end to the other, but the dings and scratches on the outside made it look like a shitbox. Tanis didn’t mind. The ugliness meant other, more attractive cars ran the risk of being stolen while her breadbox-on-wheels went gleefully unmolested.

  She climbed into the driver’s side. Naree had already rolled down her window and was using an old copy of People magazine to fan her face. Her temples were dotted with sweat, her glossy, black hair tied back in a tight ponytail to keep the weight off her neck. She didn’t blend in Percy’s Pass. Fat, formerly-Catholic-now-atheist Korean girls with degrees in software engineering from Yale didn’t magically appear in Baptist Country, but Naree had been willing to court her family’s disdain and give up a great prospective job at IBM to be with Tanis. Tanis told her it wasn’t worth it. Naree told her to shut up.

  Tanis had shut up mostly because Naree had been kissing her stupid at the time, doing the wiggle wiggle shake that required excessive ass grabbing.

  Which is how the two of them had built a life together in Nowhere and were somehow managing to be happy doing it. Even going to Walmart was fun, because Naree was fun. She didn’t give much of a damn about what people thought of her queerness, her Korean heritage, her body shape, or her “pinko commie” politics, as she called them. She got looks. She gave looks back. Unfriendlier ones. She was good at putting dissenters in their place. She was better at making Tanis not snap their necks for giving her girlfriend heaps of shit.

  “Man. You know those bratwurst with the cheese in the middle? Like, the chemical cheese that tastes like plastic garbage? I want those,” Naree announced as the car pulled onto the main drive. The wind rippled through the car, and she threw the magazine in the back seat and reclined, her fingernails raking over the Caddy’s felt ceiling. “And lemonade, too.”

  “Hormonal?” Tanis asked, lighting her cigarette. She was fascinated by the perpetual flux of Naree’s body. Her mother’s mystical mumbo jumbo had given her hemipenes—just like male snakes. Two functioning cocks instead of one. Tanis was ‘blessed’ with stacked, double rockets that fired swimless swimmers. And the dicks meant no menstruation. Bleeding from the fun hole looked unfun.

  “Yep. I would have skinned a kitten for ice cream last night,” Naree said.

  “Poor kittens.” Tanis pulled the Caddy into the Walmart parking lot and played ‘spot the open space’ for three rows before Naree pointed out a vacating mini-van, requisite angry mom with four screaming kids scrambling into the cab. Tanis parked and stubbed out her smoke, following Naree toward the double glass doors of the brick building. Naree made straight for the bigger carts, which meant they were going for big game shopping. Good thing Mr. Pope had left them about two-fifty in his wallet. Tanis shoved it at Naree, the crisp bills disappearing into the pocket of her jean cut-offs.

  “You’ve heard that thing: never shop when hungry,” Tanis said.

  “Never starve your fat girlfriend or she’ll eat you,” came the sassy reply.

  “If I’m lucky.”

  Naree smirked.

  They started in produce, Naree lewdly fondling oranges in her quest for perfect fruit, when a lithe blonde woman turned the corner of the aisle with her cart. She wore a hat and sunglasses above a church revival T-shirt, which wasn’t so unusual this close to summer, but when she turned her head, her hair tumbled down her back and away from her face. Tanis caught two things before the woman pulled the heavy curls back over her shoulder and patted them into place. The first was the nasty shiner purpling her left eye, the tender skin swollen, eyeball rimmed red and angry. It was a new hit, not even a day old, with no yellowing along the edges. The second was a cauliflower ear that belonged on a professional boxer, not a woman topping the scales at a hundred and thirty pounds. Not a woman sporting a two carat wedding ring, a Gucci purse, designer sandals and pedicured feet.

  She doesn’t belong in Walmart. She’s hiding here.

  Tanis licked her bottom lip and looked away. She didn’t want to be caught staring and she was definitely staring. She wished it was something new—a rarity to encounter a woman so fine treated so not-fine—but it was as common as dirt. And every time Tanis heard the story, the last chapter played out the same way.

  Monsters for Mother’s monstrous appetite.

  Monsters for the monster hole!

  “Excuse me,” the woman said, reaching past Naree for a plastic produce bag, her voice soft, laced with a sugary drawl.

  “No problemo.” Naree moved aside to let her in next to the bin. Tanis kept glimpsing at the stranger, watching her measured movements, how she flinched away from even the slightest touch with Naree. Her wrist flipped over for a second. Fingerprint bruises on the soft, creamy flesh.

  Oh, fuck no.

  Tanis reached for a cigarette and remembered where she was. Her fingers twitched. Her eyes slid to Naree. Naree peered at her from beneath a fringe of thick lashes, suddenly solemn with the knowledge that something significant had happened in America’s superstore, between the bananas and freshly-misted bunches of kale. Chocolate brown eyes met cold gray ones. Naree nodded once and tied off her bag of oranges before shoving the cart away and into the next aisle, alone.

  Tanis hunted.

  She maintained a respectable distance throughout the store, not relying on her eyesight to keep tabs on Miss Revival 2015, so much as her sense of smell. The woman wore Chanel #5, washed her clothes in lavender detergent, and was ovulating—all things contributing to her scent. When she pushed her way to the checkout, Tanis slipped into line behind her, a roll of paper towels in hand so she had a reason to be there. She watched the woman pull out her wallet and reach for a shiny silver credit card. That was far less interesting than the license tucked into the top flap, behind a plastic see-through window: Melissa Des Moines, 46 Maple Lane, Percy’s Pass. Birthday April 8th.

  Tanis abandoned the paper towels and stepped outside for a much-needed smoke. Melissa passed a minute later, bagged goods in hand, beelining for a black Range Rover in the second row. Remembering her license plate wouldn’t be hard: it was a vanity plate spelling BR4TTY. She exited the parking lot with an explosive blast of dust and gravel.

  Tanis considered the woman and her bruises until she’d smoked her cigarette to the filter. She flicked the butt aside and rejoined Naree in the store, closing in on her just as Naree reached for the economy pack of mac and cheese with the Day-Glo orange sauce packets.

  “Verdict?” Naree asked.

  “Local,” Tanis said.

  “Tonight?”

  “To start.”

  And that was all that was said of it. Tanis had a job and that job had to be performed or there’d be hell to pay. One week each month, Tanis traveled around Southern Florida to find what equated to a sacrifice for her mother. At first she’d chosen indiscriminately—drunk college dudebros stumbling back to the dorm, homeless men, anyone stupid enough to pass Tanis
by around the third week of the month—but being with Naree so long made it hard not to consider the goodness of the person. The humanity of the sacrifice. Naree had quickened the very human-like quality of empathy in Tanis, and while it was a net gain for Tanis as a person, her conscience kicked in after a few hunts. One-night affairs with random snatch-and-grabs were abandoned for due consideration and tactical strikes. Tanis would go to Melissa Des Moines’s house and she would learn all she could about Melissa’s abuser, and if he was as vile as Tanis suspected, he’d be punished for his crimes.

  “Vigilantism,” Naree had said once. “Like Batman. Only with more snake.”

  If that was what got Naree past it, who was Tanis to disagree?

  MELISSA ‘MISSY’ DES Moines was thirty-four years old with a part-time nanny named Georgette and a fenced-in yard. Affluent neighborhood, a cross on the front lawn lit in such a way that, at night, the Lord rose against the cornflower blue shingles of the house to proclaim His dominion. Ivory columns lined the street-facing façade, supporting a tall black roof with not one but two chimneys, for fires that rarely blazed this far south. Missy’s Range Rover occupied the driveway while a navy blue Porsche claimed the left side of the garage. The right was vacant and waiting for Mr. Des Moines’s homecoming.

  A pool. A hot tub. Three kids enrolled in private school. The veneer was polished, but sooner or later, the rot would manifest, and when it did, Tanis would be watching. She stretched out on her tree branch, a lithe, muscular thing nestled among the green of the giant oak in the front yard of 49 Maple Lane, and then she stilled. Naree called it “reptile-still,” when Tanis quieted her body to the point it was hard to tell she was breathing. The only hint of life was the flicker of her eyes, and that came once or twice a minute as the Des Moineses fluttered through their big house with its big furnishings. She was a remarkable predator with a remarkable capacity for patience.