Chased By Monsters
Jane missed how it started.
She went out to set perimeter alarms and came back to find that they were comparing feet.
The children, of course, had crow feet, complete with scales and talons. Little Joey’s scales were black as his spikey hair. Jane’s baby sister, Boo, had white scales to match her pale blond curls, but her feet were otherwise identical to the boy’s. Since neither child had shoes, most likely they had triggered show and tell.
Taggart was holding his camera on his lap, viewfinder tilted up. He was filming the comparison of feet without being obvious. Jane locked down an automatic kneejerk hate of being in front of the camera. If they were going to get the news out to Earth that Pittsburgh needed help against the oni, it was stories like Boo’s that would win over hearts.
Nigel had taken off his boots to show off his prosthetics that looked like pieces of curved metal. The naturalist was discussing feet in his faint Scottish burr. “The heel is essentially a finger pointing backwards. See, the leg comes down and connects to the ankle, which is a pivot joint like the wrist. From there, the foot shifts out in two directions. Forward are the toes and backwards is the heel. This bone is called a calcaneus. Because it has to bear the weight of the entire body, though it’s evolved over time to a large, strong bone.”
Hal was not to be outdone. Hal had his cross-trainers off, and as he unveiled his feet, everyone but Nigel recoiled slightly. “It’s called Brachymetatarsia. It’s a condition in which there are one or more abnormally short metatarsals. I have the most common form, which affects the fourth toe.”
“Oh, that’s weird looking,” Joey whispered, not old enough to realize it was rude, however true it was.
Luckily Hal had thick skin. “In my case, it’s acquired, not congenital.”
“I thought only women developed that,” Nigel said.
Hal shrugged. “It means that I am truly unique and special.”
Taggart was slowly taking off his hiking boots, apparently bullied into joining. “I have hobbit feet. Big and hairy.” And he did. They were epic.
All eyes turned to Jane.
“The kids need baths,” Jane announced to keep from being roped into this odd display.
Taggart tilted his head slightly to indicate she should look at her sister.
Unshed tears shimmered in Boo’s eyes. The whole foot display, then, was for her sake.
Jane sighed and sat down on the edge of her battered coffee table. She pulled off her boots and socks and reluctantly put out her feet for inspection. Five heads bent over her toes to inspect them.
“Uh,” Taggart breathed in surprise. “I didn’t think you were the type to paint your toenails.”
Boo gave a wordless squeal of delight and launched herself into Jane’s arms. “Purple!”
“Yes, purple just for you.” Jane hugged her baby sister tight. Over her mass of white blond curls, she saw Taggart raise an eyebrow in question. “It’s her favorite color.”
In the weeks leading up to Boo’s kidnapping, the little girl had begged and pleaded with Jane to have a full manicure. Jane never knew what had triggered it, but had resisted because she had tried it once when she was eleven and loathed the results. Her right hand had looked like she dipped her fingers into the polish, and in less than a day, she’d picked most of the polish off.
On the morning Boo had gone missing, Jane had bought a bottle of purple nail polish. They’d sat on the tailgate of their family pickup truck and painted all their toenails as her younger brothers slept off a night of trying to kill one another. It had been a quiet moment of ritual girl bonding.
Two hours later, Boo vanished out of their life. Taken. Presumed killed.
Every week after that, for eight years, Jane had painted her toenails the same exact purple.
If Jane had a quarter for every time she’d washed one of her younger siblings, she could invest in an automatic baby washer. With the exception of his feet and the fact he didn’t act like the shampoo was acid, Joey proved to be no different than any of her younger brothers. It was a little unsettling when he used his feet like a second pair of hands; he could even unscrew bottle tops with them.
Boo surprised her by asking for help with washing her hair. It scared Jane what evidence of abuse she would find under Boo’s dirty clothes. Jane silently called herself a coward as she filled the tub with fresh water and added lavender-scented bath salt. Seeing scars would be nothing compared to the pain of wearing them.
It was a relief, though, that Boo had no noticeable scars. Only her birdlike feet marked what damage her kidnappers had done to her. Boo kept them under the surface of the foamy water. Either she was still ashamed of them or it didn’t occur to her that she could use them like hands.
Boo’s hair proved to be just as wild and curly and white as when she was six. It surprised Jane since most of her family had been towheads as children but by fourteen their hair had changed to honey gold.
“He liked my hair pale.” Boo pulled one of the wet locks of hair forward to gaze at sadly. “He did a spell so it would never change color.”
“Who did?”
“Kajo. He did that first. Just the color. He was going to make me an elf next, but then Danni said I was too dangerous of a toy to keep. That he was only keeping me because of some sick mommy obsession and he should get rid of me before I could hurt him.”
Jane felt like someone had just punched her hard in the stomach. “He took you to be a toy?”
Boo shook her head vehemently. “No. I was stupid. I’d seen Kajo with Danni. Her hair was just like mine. I wanted to meet her, so I followed them all the way to a warehouse where they were meeting with Lord Tomtom. He has cat ears and a tail. Even a six-year-old can tell he isn’t human. He was going to kill me, but Kajo stopped him. Kajo liked my hair.”
“Kajo and Lord Tomtom are both oni?”
Boo wrinkled up her nose. “There’s all sorts of oni. There’s the purebloods but there’s not a lot of those in Pittsburgh. Some of the officers are purebloods; they wear face paint to make themselves scarier. And then there’s the lesser bloods who’d been bred with animals. They don’t need face paint to be scary. And then there’s the greater bloods like Kajo and his Eyes. They look almost human.”
“What do you mean by Eyes?”
“They’re women who can see the future.” Boo said. “I think they’re related to Kajo. Danni calls him ‘big brother’ when she’s mad at him.”
The mention of brothers drove all other thoughts out of Jane’s mind with the sudden realization she was going to have to tell her family that she’d found Boo. Jane shuddered a little at the thought of how their five brothers were going to take the news.
How long could she put it off?
Jane threw away the dirty rags that Boo and Joey had been wearing. Luckily she had a massive closet full of kid’s clothes. Her mother and aunts had kept every stitch of clothing that Jane’s generation had outgrown. The price for taking over the family estate was storing all the clothes until the next generation could grow into them. Jane enforced military order on the closet to keep it from being reduced to pure chaos every few months. She standardized on twenty-seven gallon, airtight, stackable, heavy plastic bins. They were labeled and organized by sex and sizes. She pointed Boo toward the handful of girl containers and then pulled down one labeled “Boy’s size 5” for Joey.
When she opened up the bin, Joey gave a cry of joy and snatched up the topmost piece of clothing.
“Ravenclaw!” He held up a black shirt. “That’s my house!”
“It is?” The long-sleeved shirt had a large bird that looked more like an eagle than a raven.