Monster - A. Lee Martinez [62]
Chester cleared his throat.
“What? The out-of-state charges on this thing are ridiculous.”
“Monster—”
“Fine.” He handed her the doll. “But I don’t see how inflating my phone bill is going to make up for her house. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Thank you,” said Greta.
She stared at the doll a moment.
“I have no idea how to use this.”
They found a coffee shop around the corner, and after Greta reluctantly accepted a clarity rune Post-it on her forehead, Monster gave her a rundown of the past two days.
“Wow,” said Greta. “It’s true, then. All of it.”
“Yes, magic is real,” said Monster.
“Not that,” said Greta. “That’s a little odd, but I can deal with it. No, I meant all the weird things in Judy’s past.”
“What weird things?” asked Chester.
“Just… weirdness in general. She always had strange things happen to her, things that didn’t quite make sense, that she couldn’t explain. No one in the family talks about it much. We just assumed she was hiding the truth. Turns out all this time, the truth was hiding from her.”
“Something like that,” said Monster.
“You’re telling us this has happened a lot in the past?” asked Chester.
“I don’t know,” said Greta. “I’m still trying to adjust to the idea, but yes, I think so. Judy has always been the screwup in the family. When she was younger, she was arrested a handful of times. Mostly vandalism, destruction of private property, some minor arson, things like that. Once, the cops were pretty sure she’d smashed a car that belonged to her ex-boyfriend. They couldn’t really prove it, though.”
“How long have these incidents been happening?” asked Chester.
“They came and went. She’d be fine for a few years, then suddenly there’d be a new round of them for a few months. We were sure she was bipolar or something. Even sent her to a few psychiatrists, but all the doctors agreed that she didn’t exhibit any symptoms. Eventually we gave up and tried to ride out the rough times.”
Greta sipped her coffee. “Damn. I always gave her a hard time about all her screwups. I never believed her when she said it wasn’t her fault.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” said Monster. “It’s just how it is. Even if she had been able to explain, you wouldn’t have been able to understand.”
“But I still feel bad about it. She must have been having a rough time. One time, we thought she’d dug up the backyard. I mean, dug it all up. There was a hole at least twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep. And she’s standing there, covered head to toe in dirt, and Dad starts yelling at her for doing it. But she couldn’t have done it, could she? Not in less than an hour. Not without a backhoe. How could we think she was responsible for that?”
“Because it was easier to believe than the alternative,” said Monster.
“I guess.” She pressed the Post-it to her forehead. “I think this is giving me a headache. Is that normal?”
“Perfectly,” said Monster. “Nothing to worry about.”
Greta rubbed her fingers along her temple to soothe the ache. “Does this happen a lot? If magic is real and most of us can’t see it, wouldn’t this be happening to people all the time?”
“Not really,” said Monster. “There’s not that much magic around. Not anymore. It’s not uncommon for people to run across it once or twice a day, but it usually falls under the category of ignorable incidents. Incogs don’t talk about it, don’t deal with it, and just work around it when they have no other choice. It’s not often a conflict, just a few minutes a day that they conveniently push to the back of their minds and don’t think about, writing incidents off as daydreams or something they read in a book or saw in a movie. That’s the haze. That’s how it works.”
“Why does this keep happening to Judy?” asked Greta. “Is she some kind of monster magnet?”
“We don’t really know,” said Chester. “If there is such a thing, we’ve never heard of it.”
“What do we do?” asked Greta.
Monster shrugged. “We don’t do anything. There’s nothing to do. We let the Reds handle it.”
“That