ME & THE MONSTER

scarred

In a flat on Oxford Street, a young man was trying to slip out of a bedroom undetected.

He picked up his shoes from where he'd left them the previous night and tiptoed through the door. He'd only got as far as the corridor when the floorboards under his feet gave a mighty crack.

Shit.

"Kal?" a sleepy female voice said. "Is that you?"

The man sighed under his breath. He'd forgotten how batlike her ears were. Now he'd have no option but stay for breakfast, have some godawful stale pancakes and play happy couples.

But what she didn't realise was that he didn't do couples, and he only played when it suited him.

"Yeah," he called back, resigning himself. "Needed the toilet."

He pushed the door open and stepped inside the bedroom again. In the half-gloom he could make out the outline of a girl, curled up on her side. She smiled at him.

"Hey," she said, and there was a faint whining edge to her voice. "No good morning cuddle this time?"

He flopped down on the crumpled bed beside her, this man somewhere in his twenties with his black hair and lazy drawl. She twisted herself around him. He could smell traces of himself on her skin.

"Morning, Maddy," he said.

"Maddy? I'm Tess, nutjob. Maddy is my sister." She stared at him, a puzzled frown on her face. "I haven't introduced her to you, have I? D'you know her or something?"

The man paused. Across his mind flitted memories of Maddy's long hair, long smile and long legs wrapped around his waist. She'd clawed his back whole; he still had claw marks.

He said, clear and calm: "Nah. Guess I must have mixed it up with someone else's."

Then he threw an arm around the girl and began to hum under his breath, absent-mindedly, in a voice like distant thunder.

It was a beautiful voice, low, rumbling, velvet-smooth.

It was a beautiful voice in which to lie.

"Has nobody ever told you," she said, snuggling into him again, "that you sing just like an angel?"

* * *

The first time I was attacked by angels, I was almost ten years old.

I was coming home from school one afternoon. It was a bleak February day, but I'd be turning ten the day after, such a perfect, round, neat little number.

Would my parents get me a puppy as a gift, I wondered? I very much hoped I'd get a puppy, a fluffy white tiny thing called Snowy, whose fur I'd plait and tie silky ribbons around its neck. I knew better than to even hint at it, though - I couldn't bear to see the disappointment on my parents' faces.

"Don't worry, Rae," Mum would say. "You be a bad little girl and you'll get all the presents you want. Pet snake? Krazed Kiddie Krime Kit? Maybe even a day trip Below? You name it."

Little could I imagine that the present Id be receiving later would be smaller.

Sharper.

It would save my life.

It would save his life, too, ten years later.

* * *

I'd seen them as I'd neared the Pizza Express.

There had been two of them, a boy and a girl in their late teens. They were perched on top of one of the restaurants tables set on the pavement, sharing a can of Diet Coke.

At the sound of my footsteps, they glanced up, heads cocked to the side. There was a silent intensity about the simple gesture that made me flinch.

"Look at her," the boy's voice, disgustedly enthralled, flitted towards me.

Uneasy, I kept my head down and walked on. They weren't really talking about me, were they?

"My God, look at her."

The girl stared at me.

"Is she...?" She paused. She sniffed the air, like a shark smelling blood, and then she laughed, high and filthy.

"She is," the boy said.

I had no clue what they were talking about, bless - or rather damn - my innocence.

I should have run then. I could have run, or let out a shriek of help.

I did neither of these things.

Instead, I gritted my teeth, tightened my grip on my rucksack and marched on, nearing them with every step. I could now make out the freckles on the boys nose, the undone laces on the girls brown boots.

I was a fool. The biggest, most pig-headed little fool in the world.

My heart was banging in my chest, but I wasn't going to let a couple of odd teenagers mock me. Who did they think they were, staring at me as though I were a circus freak? I'd done nothing wrong. I hadn't nicked so much as a piece of chewing gun in my life.

I was very nearly home. I could spot Dad's garden gnomes standing soggy and morose behind the creaky wooden fence, one of them smoking a ciggie. I'd walk past them in a second - there - another step, head down, avoid eye contact - nearly there -

"She's cute," the boy said. "Bet her kind taste spicy, eh?"

He snapped his jaws. By his side, the girl clambered down the table and tied her laces carefully.

It was almost never o'clock, and I was alone.

Then they both turned towards me.

*

What happened afterwards is a blur in my memory. The mere thought of it, even now, after all this time, has me screaming in my dreams.

I was lucky, though.

Eventually some kind of self-preservation instinct kicked in and I cried out for help.

As chance would have it, my father happened to be cheerily watering his beloved flowerbeds at the moment a few yards ahead, something which made no sense whatsoever because: a) it had been fricking raining all day long b) actually, among our many talents, us demons have zero natural knack for gardening, something he refused to admit.

Anyway, the bottom line is that he heard my shrieks.

Afterwards, when it was all over, he crouched down next to me and gently touched my right cheek. I was too exhausted to even flinch at the white-hot pain.

"It'll scar," he said, in the same low, soothing tones he used to talk to his favourite flower, a magnolia named Adelaide. "It'll scar, but you'll be fine."

He glanced at the dented Diet Coke can and the brown boots with carefully tied laces that lay in a puddle of dirty rainwater next to us. There was silence in the dark streets, icy and swollen.

Then he said: "Here, Rae. For you. Think of this as an early birthday present. You'll have to watch your back from now on."

He pressed something cold into my bleeding hands. Numbly, I looked down at the small dagger. It was still glistening.

I swore there and then that I wouldn't forget what they'd done to me, what they'd turned me into. That I'd get back at them, not just the at the two teenagers I'd had the bad luck of running into, but at the whole of Them.

The angels.

It was never o'clock.

I'd be turning ten that night, such a perfect, neat, broken little number.