Monster - A. Lee Martinez [35]
“Miss, come this way,” he said soothingly.
Chipper, eyes wide with terror, kept her death grip on the creature. Monster swallowed his annoyance. He took a step forward, closer to the creature’s giant fish tail. It twitched limply now, but it could start swinging with crushing force at any moment.
He held out his hand to her. “Come on,” he said. “Come on.”
Trembling, she reached toward him.
The beast sprang to life. Chipper was thrown off, striking Monster with enough force to knock him to the floor, which was fortunate, as the creature’s tail would’ve crushed him where he stood otherwise.
Chipper scrambled roughly over him. Her knee mashed his sternum, and she stepped on his arm. He swore as she dashed out of the kitchen.
“You’re welcome,” he groaned.
The creature snapped and growled at Monster as it struggled to turn around. He backed out of the kitchen. Judy was in the empty diner with his crypto guide.
“Took your sweet time.” He ignored the thrashing and roars as he took a seat and flipped through the book.
“Should we maybe get out of here?” asked Judy. “Oh, it’s fine. The thing is so stuck in there that it’ll never get out.”
“And the trolls in my closet weren’t anything to be frightened of either,” she said.
“You wanted me to handle this, so I’m handling it. Anyway, I’m betting this thing is pretty rare, and I’m not willing to pass up the score. You can go if you want. It’d probably be better if you did.”
“I’m staying.”
“Suit yourself.” He skimmed the identification indexes. Since he didn’t know what this thing was, he had to work his way backwards, using distinctive features. It wasn’t hard to identify. Even in the world of cryptobiology, there just weren’t that many dog-headed seal beasts.
“Az-i-wu-gum-ki-mukh-ti.”
“What kind of name is that?” asked Judy. “Inuit. It isn’t usually seen outside of Greenland. In English, it’s often referred to as a walrus dog.”
“That’s original,” said Judy.
The az-i-wu-gum-ki-mukh-ti howled. “Walrus dog sounds almost cute,” said Judy, “and that thing is not cute. So now that you know what it is, can you capture it?”
“No problem.” Monster picked up a napkin holder, a cube of aluminum, and traced a rune on it. He consulted his pocket dictionary.
“You’d think you’d have memorized those by now,” said Judy.
Monster ignored the comment. Rune magic was just writing, but with a thousand-letter alphabet and rules of grammar and punctuation that were nearly beyond human comprehension. It was the shorthand of the universe, and the universe wasn’t particularly bright when it came to interpreting it. A rune spell that could humanely incapacitate one yeti could blow the head off another. And he didn’t want to kill the walrus dog.
He completed the rune, satisfied it would do the trick. “Now what?” she asked. “Now I throw this at it, freeze it in a block of ice. I make the world safe for greasy-diner-goers everywhere, and get a few bucks for my trouble.”
“You said it’s from Greenland, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, isn’t Greenland the one with all the ice? What if it doesn’t freeze?”
“Actually, Iceland is the one with all the ice,” he said. “No, it isn’t.”
Monster spoke through a tightly clenched jaw. “It doesn’t matter. Even if Greenland is the one with the ice—which it isn’t, because that would make no goddamn sense—this isn’t regular ice. This is magic ice.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Muttering obscenities, Monster entered the kitchen. Judy didn’t follow, and that was probably a good thing, since he was very tempted to push her into the walrus dog’s maw before freezing it. The creature had managed to turn itself halfway around and had destroyed the kitchen in the process. The counters were uprooted; half the tile floor was knocked loose. Broken dishes littered the floor, and water was spurting from several broken pipes. The stove was knocked askew, but Monster didn’t smell any leaking gas.
No lightning bolts, he reminded himself.
The walrus dog snapped at him, but it wasn’t much of a threat. When