Dreams and Shadows - By C. Robert Cargill Page 0,79

roll on the floor before passing out and sneaking out before dawn.

When next they spoke, Knocks told her he had met someone else. Someone prettier. Someone better in bed. Someone who didn’t urinate frequently out of fear of wetting herself. Someone he could spend the rest of his life with. That night, Knocks waited outside her window as she drew a hot bath and sawed through her wrists with a steak knife. He giggled as she wailed in the tub. Knocks hadn’t giggled like that since he was a child watching his mothers drown men in Ladybird Lake. Every moment he didn’t call her was a delicacy, but this, this was a feast. Nothing had been this satisfying since Tiffany Thatcher had strung up her rope. And as the life drained out of Lizzie, staining the water a deep, dark red, Knocks knew it would be a long while before he was hungry again, enough time to set up another hearty meal.

Knocks savored the taste of young love gone sour, with its fondness for razor-blade carvings and pill-popping professions of love. Teen hearts shattered the hardest. Allison Jacobs was a brainy girl with a bright future when an equally intelligent poet with a tousle of curly locks came along. She threw herself into the daydream. When it ended, she threw herself under a city bus. Jaclyn Stanton was a pimple-peppered, perpetually silent high school senior dressed head to toe in black, pining for some dark, Gothic mystery. Her Romeo came to her at night, avoiding the sun, enjoying the silence with her. The night he left her, she never saw morning, choosing instead to slit her own throat. Matthew Cash was an engineering student whose love came to him after traded glances at a bookstore. By the end, he’d put a shotgun in his mouth just to hear the sound it would make.

Knocks understood his place in the universe now—his reason for being. He knew why his first two mothers had shunned him; he knew what it was that scared them. They knew what he could become. And while it had taken a long time to get there, all that suffering had only made him better at what he did. It didn’t fill the void, it didn’t dull the pain—but it was comforting to know that everything he’d been through served a purpose, making him what he was now.

A shark.

Nixie Knocks the Changeling was ever moving, always eating, forevermore lurking as a shadow on the edge of darkness. And there seemed, for a time, to be nothing that could distract him from his single-minded feeding.

THE MAN APPEARED from out of nowhere, emerging from the dark one night to walk beside him. Knocks tried not to make eye contact—at first attempting to stay anonymous—but the man knew good and well who he was. Looking up, Knocks recognized him instantly.

“Hello, Ewan,” said Coyote. His skin was as coppery as it ever had been and his hair was as tangled and black as he remembered.

Knocks glared at Coyote, gritting his teeth, spitting out, “I’m Knocks.”

“Of course you are,” Coyote apologized. “It’s dark and I’m used to seeing Ewan out and about at this time of night around here.”

Knocks stopped in place. “What?”

“Oh, I thought you two would have run into each other by now, what with him working downtown. He and Colby are both here. Weren’t you all friends as kids? I seem to remember something like that.” Coyote smiled slyly. “Well, I’m off. Running late and all.”

Knocks stood there, dumbfounded, a fourteen-year-old fist slamming into his gut as Coyote once again slunk away into the shadows. It felt something like what Lizzie had felt. Like what Simon had felt. What they all had felt at some point. Had Ewan been here all along? he wondered. Living out his perfect little life? For a moment, the shark was gone. He was a seven-year-old boy watching his mother trampled to death beneath hellish hooves; watching as the love of his life fell into the arms of another; watching the little boy he was made to look like reap the rewards of the Tithe, only to escape its fate, leaving the crowd howling for Knocks’s blood. One can never go back to fix the wrongs of their pasts, but they sure as hell can relive them. For a moment, the seven-year-old Knocks stood awash in the painful tides of time.

But with those tides came the shark; and with the shark returned, Knocks knew what he