Strange Beasts

by Susan J. Morris

You had to learn the secret language of glances and quirking lips and the whole library of gleams that could be found in a man’s eyes. You had to listen like your life depended on it, because it just might.

The cruelty of humans was far worse than that of literal monsters. At least the grindylow had a reason for acting the way it did. Like crocodiles pulling the weakest wildebeest into the river, they needed flesh to survive. Humans were their natural prey. The humans who had done this to the grindylow⁠—buying it on the shadow market, dragging it from its home, torturing it, forcing it to murder passersby just to slake its terrible thirst⁠—they had no reason at all but evil.

“The thing you have to understand,” Hel said quietly, as if the shadows might overhear, “is that someone like my father doesn’t have ‘men.’ He’s a whisper of information, a nudge on someone’s baser instincts, a finger on a domino whose effects spiral out in unseen designs. He doesn’t order attacks⁠—he manipulates the circumstances so that the attacks happen without ever having to dirty his hands.”

It was ten years before Sam saw those numbers again, in a newspaper photograph of the graffiti at the first of the Beast murders: a wolf under a five-pointed star, standing on a broken crown, over the words Car la solde du péché, c’est la mort. For the wages of sin is death.