Page 1 of A Mastery of Monsters

Sammie should have realized she was too drunk three drinks ago.

She stumbled behind her friends as they wound around bodies to the exit.

Sweat slicked and slouched, mascara smudged.

They hadn’t chosen Stages because it was the best club downtown—it was probably closer to being the worst—but it’d had the shortest line to get in.

The strobing lights flashed in hot pinks, electric blues, and neon greens, illuminating the galaxy glitter she’d spread on her face earlier.

Only, she kept forgetting she’d put it on and had rubbed off a lot.

She swayed as she walked, the motion gentle and soothing, like being rocked to sleep.

It didn’t fit with the stench of body odor and sour bite of spilled beer.

She pulled her phone out of her purse and opened the top message thread.

Her own blue wall of text stared back at her.

She flushed. The club was too hot, she told herself, unable to look away from her screen.

She and Riley weren’t the same. She knew that.

Sammie didn’t have this grand legacy, and she wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone.

She wasn’t a Historic. She just wanted to have fun.

That was the point of university, wasn’t it? You were supposed to party.

“Come on!” A hand gripped hers, and she jumped, dropping her phone. It clattered on the tile with a crack.

She closed her eyes and groaned. Once she managed to peel them open, she picked up the phone and stared at the shattered screen.

A few swipes confirmed that at least it was still functional.

Her friend kept apologizing to her and promising to replace it.

She wouldn’t. They were both broke. Sammie would just have to put clear tape on it and then beg her parents for a new one when she went home for reading week.

More likely they would say she should replace it herself.

Ask where all that money went. She stayed in Kingston over the summer specifically to work.

Riley was meant to line something up for her.

Instead, Sammie was left on read, unemployed, and burning through her student loan.

She trudged forward and pushed the door of the club open.

Outside, people were leaning against the side of the purple building and spilling into the Metro grocery store parking lot.

The summer air was cool, but she was still too hot.

She walked through a cloud of weed and vapor smoke, batting it away with her hands and fluffing her curls.

They were crunchy as fuck. Too heavy handed with product, Riley always told her.

Across the street, the black sign with the Bubba’s logo gleamed.

If Riley were here, they would have gone inside and split a poutine.

Extra curds, extra gravy. Plus, two Cokes.

Not Zero or Diet because they were supposed to be having fun.

They would have made their way back to campus, arms entwined, on the edge of too full, snickering over some shit they were watching on Sammie’s phone.

Then fall asleep on Riley’s bed when they were supposed to be watching a movie.

She turned away.

“You should call Walkhome,” her friend said. The same one who’d made her drop her phone. “We’re gonna split an Uber.”

Sammie scowled. She wasn’t about to wait twenty minutes for the volunteers at Walkhome to reach her from their on-campus hub.

None of her friends lived her way, but she would be fine.

She waved off the pleas of the girls to find someone to go with her.

When their Uber came, they gave up and got in.

Riley would have added Sammie to the route, making sure she got dropped off first, even if that meant going in a different direction.

The shouts and gleeful screams from people on the street rattled in her skull.

Sweat cooled on her arms and she shivered.

She cut through the Burger King drive-thru and headed down Division Street.

She’d promised to stay close to campus where there were lots of people around.

She searched her purse for her vape pen, tried to click it on, and found that it was dead.

There was a laugh from across the road, and she followed the sound to a group she recognized from the Black student society. She searched among them for Riley, trying to spot her passion twists without any luck. When they looked over, Sammie ducked her head.

She didn’t need them. Didn’t need their obsession with Black excellence and their judging stares and their bullshit.

Didn’t need Riley, either.

Sammie’s foot hit grass, and she stopped, blinking. She’d already made it through campus without noticing and had started to cut across the open field by Biosciences to the park.

She was supposed to meet her secret admirer here hours ago. She’d had to google “City Park” because she didn’t realize that was what it was called. Not that she’d planned to come.

The only sounds were the leaves of trees and shrubs rustling in the wind.

That and the rhythmic flapping of tent plastic from the few that had been set up all summer.

Sometimes into winter, too. This close to the lake, the breeze was cooler.

She let the chill roll over and caress her shoulders.

If you accepted the cold, it wasn’t as bad.

She stumbled forward, attempting to stand tall and walk in a mostly straight line.

The swaying wasn’t like being rocked anymore, more like being shoved from the side over and over, even after you’d begged to be left alone.

There was one other person in the park, bathed in the shadow of a tree.

Not smoking or playing on their phone or anything.

Just leaning against the bark, a hood pulled over their head, hands in their pockets.

The person jerked to the side as if they’d been yanked by some invisible force. Sammie slowed to a stop, leg muscles tensed as though she were bracing for a fall.

The stranger hunched over, and their body began to get larger. Shooting both up and sideways at the same time.

Sammie swallowed, inching her phone out of her purse.

Eyes darting between the person in front of her and the screen as she typed.

She hit send right as she took a step away.

Her heel caught in a crack in the sidewalk, and she went down.

She cried out—from the pain or the shock of what she was seeing, she wasn’t sure.

She scrambled backward on her ass as the person became more wrong.

There was no humanness to their shape anymore.

There was only this grotesque thing , its mouth open to show pointed teeth the same iridescent white as the glowing moon in the sky.

Even in the dark, she knew that it was looking right at her.

Sammie’s head spun as she struggled to get up, kicking off her heels and running through the grass in bare feet, taking no notice of the sharp sticks and rocks that stuck her.

Everything kept tilting on its axis. She thought she was getting close to the edge of the park when the thing appeared there.

She whimpered and fled in the opposite direction.

This park, there was something in this park that could help her.

Her phone! Where was her phone? She must have dropped it, and she didn’t exactly have time to make a call.

Focus. She just needed to remember where the hiding place was.

Fuck! Where was it? Tears leapt to her eyes.

Had Riley seen her text? She couldn’t still be ignoring her, not now.

Riley would have known where to look. Riley would have remembered.

Riley would have just fucking waited for Walkhome.

She kept searching, and the thing continued to circle her. It moved so quietly. She couldn’t track it with her eyes. But it wasn’t attacking. Her head was pounding, and she kept trying to search for the right spot. If she could find it, she would be fine. Everything would be okay.

Sammie fell to her knees in the grass, panting. Her face was soaked with sweat, glitter and makeup sliding down, a galaxy collapsing on her brown skin. She peered at the shadow looming in front of her, choking on her sobs. “What do you want from me?!”

The beast didn’t answer.

She couldn’t keep searching. She had to run.

Sammie made another desperate attempt to escape, this time darting toward the open field, not caring that it wasn’t in the direction of home. She just needed to get away. She managed to make it across the baseball diamond, and when her feet touched the sidewalk, she smiled.

She had only a moment of relief before the pain began.

She had screamed at concerts, as she was reunited with friends, when her dad surprised her with a new phone before her first year. But she had never before screamed like this.

The sound burst from her lips, long and hoarse. Tearing at her throat, mixed with a whimper. It was strained and soft. Too soft for the violence of it. It was her best effort.

And no one heard it.

She fell face-first with claws raking down the back of her body. The monster ripped open her party dress, shredding fabric and flesh, and stained both with blood.

In her mind, she wasn’t there. Wasn’t lying on the dirty concrete, bleeding out.

She was in Bubba’s, gravy on her lips, laughing at something Riley had said.