The Monsters in Your Neighborhood (7 page)

Igor glanced over at her. “He’s not here, honey.”

Natalie stiffened. “What do you mean, ‘he’s not here’?”

Rehu broke his attention away from the screen. “He got a call and started acting all weird about twenty minutes after we arrived, and then left.”

Natalie stared at the group even harder. Alec didn’t have school tonight. He had been pretty clear with her that he was just going to hang out with Drake and wait out her report on what had happened at Van Helsing’s.

“Where is Alec?” she asked. “Where did he go?”

Rehu grabbed the remote from Igor and clicked mute so that Heidi Klum’s accent no longer filled the room.

“Look, Natalie, I don’t know. He just got up, said he had somewhere to be, and left, okay?”

“No,” she said, sinking into the closest seat as irrational fear mobbed her. “It’s not okay. It’s actually not okay at all. Something has happened to him. I can feel it.”

8

It was thirty-six hours before Natalie saw Alec again. Actually, it was thirty-five hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds. She was counting, her emotions swinging from terror that something had happened to him, to rage that he had just roamed off without telling her, to absolute certainty that he had hooked up with a Brazilian model and gone to live the high life in Europe without so much as a thought for her.

And to cap it all off, the entire time she waited she was forced to endure Igor sitting next to her, watching the clock with her, pressing her with questions about her “relationship.” He even patted her hand and clucked his sympathy at her like she was the Widow Frankenstein.

Which was exactly what he was doing when there was a jangle of keys and her apartment door opened to reveal Alec.

She pushed to her feet and stared at him. His hair was disheveled and he was wearing the same clothes he had been in when she’d last seen him, so they were wrinkled and there were a couple of stains on them.

He glanced up as he dropped his keys and wallet on the little plate she had put on her console table just for that purpose.

“Hey,” he said, wrinkling his brow as if her staring at him wasn’t to be expected.

“Hey?” she repeated, her mouth dropping open with shock she couldn’t mask. The relief,
that
she was able to cover up just fine—because she was going to kill him. “
Hey?
”

He reached back and shut the door behind him, his brow furrowed. “Um, yeah. Hey.”

“Igor, can you leave us alone for a moment?” she asked, without sparing a glance for the staring lab assistant.

She could
feel
him eating this up and was not about to give him the satisfaction of watching them come unglued.

“Oh, sure, I’ll just go to my room,” he said with a quick glance first at Alec, then at her.

She pivoted on him. “No,” she ground out past clenched teeth. “Go somewhere else. Take a walk around the block or something. Now.”

Igor’s eyes widened and he nodded. “Okay, okay. I’ll go somewhere else. Plenty to see here in New York, even at eight o’clock in the morning. No problem.”

Alec stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head. “What is up with you?”

Igor grabbed his jacket and slipped past Alec with one final, rather disappointed glance, and left the apartment. The moment he was gone, Natalie charged Alec.

“
Where the fuck have you been?
” she asked, grabbing his collar and spinning him around to shove him at full force into the living room.

With most people, that push would have put them into the table all the way across the room and through the door in the kitchen, but her monster strength was pretty evenly matched with Alec’s, so he only staggered a little.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, but she saw his eyes glint with his own monster defensive anger. So this was how it would end, with them destroying each other in her living room.

So totally typical.
This
was why monsters didn’t date.

“What am I talking about, suck fucker?” she repeated. “What the fuckity fuck am I talking about?”

“Yes, what the fuckity fuck are you talking about, Natalie?” he asked, hands up in a defense stance. “And why are you saying
fuck
so much?”

“I figured you would lie,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. “I figured you’d be all like, ‘Oh, hey, babe, lost track of time in the library, slept at a friend’s, my cell battery died so I couldn’t call, I had to do a late-night favor for a stripper . . . ’
something
, Alec.” She shook her head and swallowed hard past the sudden lump in her throat. “Something other than pretending that there’s nothing wrong.”

He swallowed. “Natalie, what
is
wrong?”

She wanted to punch him so bad, her fists were actually twitching. “Really? Really, you want me to say it? Okay, asshole. You’ve been gone for a day and a half.”

Alec stared at her with a blank, disbelieving expression.

“Nooooo,” he said slowly, drawing out the word. “I—I wasn’t. Babe, I’ve only been gone for fifteen minutes.”

Natalie hadn’t looked at him or spoken to him in at least five full minutes. All she did was pace around the apartment, slamming her hand against furniture and muttering things about what a lying, scheming, cheating asshole he was.

“Look, Nat,” he finally said with a sigh. “I don’t know why you’ve lost your mind, maybe it’s this whole Creature thing getting to you, but—”

“Lost
my
mind?” she interrupted, pivoting toward him with a twisted, angry look on her face that he hardly recognized. It was monster rage mixed with scorned-woman rage. “You are the king of the assholes.”

He lifted his hands in surrender. There was no use arguing if she was going to insist on her crazy talk.

“Natalie, I left the house fifteen minutes ago, I’m sorry, I guess it’s been twenty minutes ago. I don’t know why you’re so pissed.”

She stared. “Are you saying you
really
think you left the house less than half an hour ago?”

He nodded. “I don’t think it, I
know
it.”

“What day do you think it is?” she asked.

“Friday,” he said. “It’s Friday, January eleventh.”

She swallowed, and some of the anger bled from her stare and was replaced by something fearful and frozen. She removed her phone from her pocket and turned it on. Setting it in front of him, she pointed to the screen.

He looked down and blinked. It read Sunday, January 13, 8:14 a.m.

“What?” He yanked his own phone from his pocket and turned it on, but it said the exact same thing.

“But . . . but it’s Friday,” he said, his voice weak as he staggered to the couch and sat down. His phone slipped from his fingers onto the area rug. “It’s Friday,” he repeated.

She shook her head and took a place on the other side of the couch, not touching him, not near him. She stared.

“I don’t know whether you’re full of shit, or really don’t know what’s going on,” she whispered.

He looked at her. “So you
really
think I’ve been out for a day and a half, fucking around on you?”

That fact hurt him, confused him almost as much as his lost weekend did. Almost.

She sighed. “I don’t know what to believe. But why don’t you tell me what you remember and we’ll figure out where the truth diverges.”

He rubbed his eyes and tried to think. His mind was . . . cloudy, actually. It was hard to remember what had happened and when it had happened. What was the last thing he recalled before standing at their apartment door, keys in hand?

“We got home from Drake’s this morning and you and Kai decided to go see Van Helsing,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “And then we went to pick up Igor.”

Natalie stared. “Is that the last thing you remember?”

He searched his mind, trying to filter through events and memories that seemed very muddy. “You left?”

She nodded, but didn’t elaborate or help him along.

“Then I went to Drake’s and—” He stopped talking because a harsh, heavy pain shot through his head. He covered his temples and growled in agony.

Natalie slid over and touched his hand. “Are you okay?”

He flinched away from the warmth of her fingers and barely contained the urge to snap at her, literally.

“Migraine,” he barked.

She frowned. “That’s a pretty sudden migraine.”

“Oh, you’re the expert now?” he said, turning toward her.

His tongue brushed his teeth and he was shocked to discover that his canines were . . . growing. But that wasn’t possible. It was two weeks until a full moon.

She stood up and backed away. “I’m not an expert on anything. All I know is that I left and you guys went to Drake’s. Once you got there, Rehu says you got a phone call, started acting all weird, and left. That was thirty-six hours ago. You haven’t answered your phone, you haven’t been seen, and no one knows where you went.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he groaned, clutching his aching head.

“I agree. We searched for you the entire first night until finally everyone went home. Me so I could wait around for you to show up, and I guess everyone else so they could wait for the call that you were dead or ran out on me. So excuse me if I’m a little concerned.”

Tears sparkled in her eyes and his teeth retracted with such suddenness that it made him a little nauseous.

“I—I’m sorry,” he finally stammered. “I’m sorry you were worried and looking for me. But I really don’t know what happened. One minute I was heading for Drake’s with Rehu and Igor, the next I was here. I swear to you, that’s all I know, Natalie.”

She worried her bottom lip for a moment and shook her head. “But how can that be possible? How could you just lose some huge chunk of time?”

“I don’t know,” he grunted, and he felt the all-too-familiar agitation building in his chest. “I don’t fucking know.”

She folded her arms. “You’re acting moon-sick. Snappy, fangy, kind of all-around bitchy.”

He shook his head. “It’s not possible. The full moon isn’t for two full weeks. I shouldn’t start getting symptoms for at least a week, maybe ten days.”

“Yeah,” Natalie said with a shake of her head. “But you also shouldn’t be losing chunks of time. So maybe it isn’t your ‘time of the month,’ but
something
is going on. I’m going to call a meeting. We need to figure this out. Until then, just
sit
.”

He glared at her. “Will you bring me a biscuit?”

“Only if you’re a good dog,” she said as she pulled her phone from her pocket and walked into the kitchen. And he realized it was so that he couldn’t hear her talk.

His heart sank even further.

They’d decided to meet at Drake’s apartment, since it was daylight and he couldn’t leave or risk . . . exploding or sparkling or whatever happened to him when sunlight hit his skin.

Natalie had actually been shocked at how quickly everyone had agreed to meet. It was now only noon, not long after she’d started making calls, and Linda, Igor (who had eventually wandered home and insisted on joining them), Pat, Rehu, and Drake were already assembled in the Gothic living room, staring at Alec, staring at her . . .

She expelled her breath in a huff and pretended to look at the bookshelf across the room. Unfortunately, she couldn’t block out everything around her in the way she’d like to.

She could hear Rehu and Alec talking as they waited for Kai to arrive. She wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but she had monster hearing, so what could she do?

“Just tell me, what
were
you doing?” Rehu asked. “Did you hook up with some girl or—”

Alec’s voice rumbled like it sometimes did when he was close to wolfing out. “I don’t know how to fucking say it so that everyone understands. I wasn’t hooking up. I don’t know where the hell I was. Okay?”

Natalie stared at the coffee cup in her hand. He kept saying it and she was starting to believe him. She was probably an idiot. Even pathetic Linda was looking at her like she had been screwed over, so she
had
to be an idiot.

She moved her blank, angry stare from the books to some of the art Drake had on his walls. Weird, old stuff probably worth a fortune since it was so . . . eccentric.

The door to the apartment opened and Kai swept into the room without even bothering to knock.

“Hey,” she called out as she moved into the living room. She looked around at the faces of the monsters assembled. “Wow, what a somber group we are.”

Pat shrugged. “I think under the circumstances it is understandable.”

Kai looked at the Cthulhu with an arched brow. “How did you get here without being seen anyway?”

He sighed. “I went through the sewer system, accessed an alleyway nearby, and then I took the back servants’ elevator.”

“There are still servants’ elevators?” Natalie asked weakly, glad enough for the distraction.

“Of course,” Drake said with a look that indicated she was an idiot. “There are still servants, why wouldn’t there be?”

Pat shrugged. “When I pull my hood up, no one really notices me unless I interact with them. I try not to do such very often, but it is still New York, you know. They look but do not see. It is our greatest asset, really.”