Page 4 of My Monster's Keeper
I peer up at him. The complete disaster of a day goes round and round in my mind. The crunching of animals eating my colleagues barely even registers, though I’ll probably have nightmares forever.
He places a gun in my hand.
I lift it, staring at it blankly. He stands behind me, pressing against me, somehow fitting our bodies perfectly despite his abnormal height. His fingers caress my arms until he reaches my hand. He tightens my grip and moves my arm in the direction of Packwell.
“Just squeeze. We’ll do the rest.”
I fight.
I fight the voice.
I fight my urges.
I’ve done the right thing all these years. Every step was hard because I wouldn’t do the wrong thing. But they shot Grant. They stole the job I worked for all my life. All my work and effort, and they’ve done it before.
I can’t pull the trigger. All the hours of training, all my beliefs, all the pain, it will be for nothing if I do this. No, this isn’t what I do. I don’t take the law into my own hands.
“It’s okay, poppet. I’ll take care of this for you,” the voice croons, and I think I hear amusement.
He squeezes my finger.
It’s easier than I thought it would be. My bullet goes through his forehead and into his brain, and the desperate pleading is cut off. My gasp is loud in the sudden silence. I smell the blood and something musky that isn’t unpleasant. I killed a man. My gun, my finger. It doesn’t matter that this creature is using my fingers like a puppet.
What does suddenly make painful sense is that my mind suddenly accepts that this, these monsters are real. This isn’t a dream or a hallucination. All it took was a hole to bloom in the forehead of Leon Packwell Senior and his miserable life to be snuffed out.
I killed a man. No, I killed my partner.
There are monsters in the world. They are real, and they are touching me.
I killed someone.
Grant’s dead.
That thought rips through me, causing me to double over, pain making my knees weak. I hit the concrete hard, but I ignore the ache in my bones. The creature allows me to drop out of his grip with an eerie laugh.
The rain falls, mixed with my snot and tears. I barely notice the movements around me. I wait for them to kill me. On the shitty ground in the shitty weather, I wait for understanding, for clarity, for a goddamn answer as to why this fucked up world would take someone as fucking beautiful as Grant.
But no answer comes.
The monsters do what they do, and then I realise I’m alone in the pouring rain. There isn’t even a scrap of bone to indicate what happened here. It’s all gone. Even the destroyed squad car.
It’s like it never happened. All that remains is me, the shattered wreck of who I was.
Chapter 2
Becky
Iwalk into the squad room two days later with my ears ringing. Every blue shirt makes me jump. Who is involved? How deep does it go?
I’ve never been this uncomfortable anywhere. I’ve barely slept, my eyes ache from crying, and the choice of leaving the city in the middle of the night and coming back here to make them all face the music was the hardest choice of my life.
Grant and I had a dream. We were going to make it safer for kids like us.
“Where the fuck are Packwell and Rocklea?” Manning, our chief, shouts across the room. His white hair is stark against the red of his weathered skin. The chief’s nose is a little on the large side, and he’s built like he was born to pull slabs of concrete. His sheer size intimidates everyone around him.
I thought he was a good guy. But…maybe, maybe I was wrong.
“Dawson!”
