Silver and Salt by Rob Thurman Page B

painfully.
    “Seems stupid to me, that something I could swipe from the table of any restaurant could obliterate a monster,” I added. The hand stopped moving and a wary, uncertain, fearful shadow passed over Mr. Not-So-Invisible-Now’s face. Fear is plain to see. If he was alive, I would be able to smell it on him. Fear made him one of the herd he preyed on and easy to see from a mile away.
    “But you never know what will happen until you try,” I said with the darkest of verbal warnings, the vicious cheerfulness of the last attempts to send him on his own way, and a belly full of voracious hope that he wouldn’t listen.
    What fun would that be?
    Hope, today, turned out to be my favorite emotion, and proved steadfast and true when the invisible man ignored the others. That was fine by me. If he didn’t want to move on to nothingness or Hell or whatever punishment waited for him, I had no problem giving him a push. If he didn’t want to pay, then he’d have to play. I loved to play because it wasn’t play at all, not the kind anyone else would know. It was winning. Surviving. I was a lion and that’s what lions did. It was a fact. And fact was fact as truth was truth.
    “So, hey, asshole,” I told him with all the menace and predatory nature I had in me, which was more than he would have possessed in all the years of his whole fucking pathetic life, “let’s see what I can do to you.” He was backing away, but I’d already pulled two handfuls of salt out of my sweatshirt’s pocket and flung it at him.
    He burned.
    Every cell flamed a peculiar almost black-red, but it wasn’t raging. It was slow and, from the flailing of his arms, the horror in his sizzling eyes, and the voice he finally found in ragged scream after scream, nice and agonizing. He careened from wall to wall, but didn’t stop, drop, and roll. Basic fire safety, and he ignored it. Then again, he wasn’t leaving singe marks on the warped paneling of the walls he slammed against. Dropping and rolling wouldn’t have helped. After almost a full minute, he staggered to a halt in front of me, a burning shape of a man, and said the only word I’d heard him say. I’d seen him talking to Mels but had been too far away to hear. I hadn’t given him time to talk to me after he’d “lured” me behind the bushes with beer. This was his first and last chance. With a tongue blackened but still burning, he said it.
    “Monster.”
    I grinned. “Recognize.”
    For once, I didn’t care about the label. For once, I was a little proud.
    He then exploded. I winced and closed my eyes, throwing up an arm, but I felt no heat. Opening my eyes, I blinked and there was nothing. No glare. No afterimage. There was simply empty space where a way-too-motivated killer and molester’s stubbornly evil asshole of a shade wouldn’t give up. Not that it mattered. He lost anyway.
    Ghosts—0, Lions—1.
    There was no Marcus, no ghost grandpa; that was a given. I hated to lie to Nik, but I would hate it much more if he found out that a child molester thought I might be a witness, wrongly assumed I was an easy target, and thought I was better off dead, whichever of those was true. My brother didn’t need to know any of that. I didn’t want him knowing either that I saw a monster that needed to be put down. So I had. There was no difference between Mr. Invisible and a Grendel. If he’d been any other kind of criminal, a thief, a druggie, it would’ve been different, but he was a molester and a murderer. People can pay their dues, people can change…sometimes. Monsters can’t change and their dues are paid in their blood. Hopefully I’d stick with my own monsters, my Grendels with their scarlet eyes and metal smiles, and wouldn’t run into one of the invisible man’s kind again. I wouldn’t want to make a hobby of this.
    Was I lying to myself?
    I didn’t know.
    Niko …he wouldn’t want me to make a hobby of this. That was enough for me. He was a good brother, a