Club Monstrosity (5 page)

“You guys are assholes,” she snapped, but she didn’t threaten to leave again.

Alec grinned and Natalie briefly allowed a smile of her own as they took the final few steps.

“Here it is,” Alec said as he checked the piece of paper in his hand. “Number 419. So close to 420, yet so far away.”

“Really?” Natalie growled under her breath. “Pot jokes, Alec?”

Alec didn’t respond, though he shot her a wink. Then the joviality in the group faded as they got a good look at the door. The four was broken and hung haphazardly from one tiny nail. The doorknob was smeared with something . . . and it didn’t smell good. If the girls asked, Alec was going to say chocolate. The alternative was . . . only going to cause more problems.

“Knock?” Natalie suggested, but Alec shook his head.

“Naw, Drake already tried that. Let’s just skip to the end part.” He dug into his pocket and withdrew a tool and went to work on the lock. “You keeping an eye out, Linda?”

She started and half turned to do just that. “Um, yeah. There’s no one out in the hall.”

“Good . . . and . . .” The door made a click and Alec grinned. He’d learned that little skill a couple of generations ago when being short on money had inspired him to become a cat . . .
dog
burglar.

He turned the knob and Natalie peered around him into the apartment. It took a moment for Alec’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they did, he sucked in his breath.

There were only three words for what they all were seeing, and Natalie said them.

“Oh. My. God.”

5

The apartment was a hoarder’s delight, or at least what they could see of it was. What
was
visible was shocking. Even with ever-increasing werewolf strength, Alec had only been able to open the door about halfway due to the stuff crammed behind it (which Natalie couldn’t help but hope was
not
Blob’s body).

Boxes, clothing, books, toys, all stacked from floor-almost-to-ceiling in piles that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Pizza boxes from different restaurants all over the city made up another pile. Ones on the bottom were so yellowed and brittle that Natalie couldn’t help but imagine they’d been there for years.

“Jesus,” Alec breathed as he squeezed through the opening and looked around. “What a mess.”

Natalie nodded, mostly because she couldn’t come up with words to express her feelings of disgust and pity.

Blob, who had led their meetings with grace and gentle encouragement, Blob, who had kept them all in line . . . he lived like this. Like a sad, lonely man . . . not a monster who was fully capable of absorbing an entire horse into his body through a very gross form of osmosis.

He could have wiped out half the city any time he wanted, but he never had. He’d just piled up pizza boxes and run support groups in the basement of a church.

He’d just tried to help monsters and humans alike.

Natalie cleared her throat past the sudden lump that had formed there. “How did it . . . get like this?”

To her surprise, it was Linda who answered. “It must have been the osmosis.”

Alec arched a brow. “The osmosis? I thought he could control it.”

“He
could
control the big things, but sometimes he didn’t even notice the little ones until he got home and shook himself out. He always felt bad, since technically he was shoplifting pretty much whenever he left the house. He must have just . . . piled whatever he took here.”

Natalie wiped a hand over her face. “That would explain the women’s items. The children’s toys. And maybe that’s why he got so much delivery.”

Linda shrugged. “He said he didn’t really like going out much, he got so tired of taking things with him.”

“How did he even move around in here?” Natalie breathed.

Linda shrugged. “I think he just shook out whenever he was about to leave.”

“That would explain the piles,” Alec murmured just under his breath as he kept looking around from garbage tower to garbage tower.

“Why didn’t he ever talk about it in group?” Natalie whispered. “It was a real problem!”

“Could he have ever gotten a word in edgewise?” Alec asked as he jerked his head toward Linda.

Natalie pondered that. No, probably not.
All
of them were so caught up in themselves, they might not have even heard Blob’s very real plea for understanding.

“So now what?” she croaked. “What do we do with . . .
this
?”

“We can hardly see a damn thing in all this mess. He could very well be here. I say we go farther in and see if we can find him,” Alec said with a shrug. “Come on, Linda, lookout duties are over, time to be a friend. Step inside and shut the door behind you.”

As Natalie squeezed inside, Linda hovered at the open door, her nose wrinkled up enough that the makeup on it cracked and revealed even more thin rivulets of green from her scales beneath.

“I’m not going in there,” Linda whimpered. “I can’t stand that smell.”

Natalie sniffed. She was practically nose-deaf, thanks to her cobbled-together parts and a few years of working at the morgue. But there, vaguely, she did smell . . . rot.

“Is that food or—or something worse?” she whispered.

Alec breathed in a whiff and grunted. “Yeah, that’s rotting food. At least so far. And you
are
coming in, Linda, so suck it up and follow us.”

Linda huffed and puffed her upset, but she wedged through the door, found a tiny square of carpet to stand on, and slammed the door behind her.

“Now I’m in!” she snapped. “Happy?”

Alec didn’t answer. He just put a hand on one of the more sturdy piles and found a new place to put his foot so he could start moving through the apartment.

Natalie followed him as he picked his way through a precarious path in the boxes and piles.

“How do you know?” she asked.

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Know what?”

“Rotting food. How do you know that’s what the smell is?” she repeated as she stepped over a pile of crusty socks that made her shiver with pure disgust. She would need a loooong shower after this one.

“Oh, dog nose,” he explained with a shrug, and tapped the tip of it. “Very sensitive.”

Natalie nodded, but as soon as he had turned his back, she took a quick whiff of her own pits.

She had always been super-sensitive to her scent. Sometimes, if she wasn’t diligent, she could smell a little rotten, too. Stupid stolen body parts.

“You smell fine, Nat,” he said without looking at her. “Come on, this way seems to be the bedroom.”

Natalie blushed as she glared at his back. “What, do you have doggie vision, too?”

“Dogs are mostly color-blind,” he said as he reached a door at the end of the hallway. “I’m not color-blind. By the way, I like that green shirt. Looks really good with your hair.”

Natalie glanced down at herself with a frown and another deep blush (though this one was way more pleasurable than the first). Okay, not color-blind. Good to note.

“God, this apartment is pretty big, isn’t it?” Alec continued, as if he weren’t just making Natalie feel all . . . weird.

“I think it was a converted loft. They were trying to revitalize the neighborhood at some point when Blob rented,” Linda explained.

“That didn’t work,” Natalie said with a wrinkle of her nose as she heard the scuffle of some kind of small animal in the piles. She could only pray it was a rat and not something worse.

“No doubt,” Alec chuckled. “If this is revitalization . . .”

“Hey, I know you two are enjoying this, for some reason,” Linda said from behind them in her whiniest of whiny voices. “But I think we should just get out of here.”

“Why?” Alec asked on a heavy sigh.

Linda arched a brow. “Really? Um, what if someone saw us?”

Alec glanced back at her. “You told me no one was in the hallway. You were the lookout.”

She pursed her lips in annoyance, but it kind of resembled a fish face and Natalie swallowed a laugh.

“Well, no one
was
in the hallway, but that doesn’t meant they weren’t leaning on their door staring at us through the peephole. What if someone saw us break in and is calling the cops right this very moment?”

“Trust me, this isn’t exactly a neighborhood where people look out for each other,” Alec said, climbing over another pile with a grunt.

Linda groaned. “Okay, but obviously Bob isn’t here. So let’s just go and see if any of the others found him.”

“You are as useless as Drake when it comes to searching for people.” Alec rolled his eyes. “Nope, we’re checking the doors and rooms and nooks and crannies until we can rule this place out for certain. If you want to speed things along, then go to the kitchen while Natalie and I work on the bedroom.”

“Alone?” Linda rubbed her arms and shook her head. “No way.”

“For a monster, you are such a scaredy cat,” Natalie said, beginning to feel as frustrated as Alec sounded. Shit, no wonder Kai always looked like she wanted to punch the fish.

“Am not.” Linda pouted. “I’m just not willing to pretend that my monster powers are going to protect me from a mark on my permanent record.”

Natalie refused to respond as she turned to Alec.

He put all his weight into the bedroom door and shoved. It eased back with what seemed like great effort and finally there was enough space for one person to pass through. One skinny person. Skinnier than Alec.

“Ladies, both of you look great. Clearly you’ve been working out. So . . . which one of you wants to do the honors?” he asked as he motioned to the door with the aplomb of a butler motioning to a fancy dining hall.

“Um,” Natalie began. She tossed a glance at Linda, but the other woman had turned her back and was staring intently at a pile of books behind them. “Fuck. Fine.
I’ll
go.”

She moved forward and stared at the space. It was pretty damn tight, but she edged herself into the opening anyway and could only pray she wouldn’t be embarrassed by getting fully caught. For a minute her ass got stuck, but she managed to wedge herself through and in.

It was even worse than the “living space” they’d encountered outside. There wasn’t even enough of an area to walk through into the room, let alone any evidence of a bed or couch or . . . floor. She was standing on piles, touching piles; they were everywhere, made of clothes that still had tags, food containers that reeked of old meals, shoes of all shapes and sizes, a book bag that read M
ICHELLE
, toys . . . If it had a name, it was here.

“I don’t think he’s in here,” she called back out into the hallway. “This has been bad for a long time, Alec. Even if he didn’t talk about it, how could we not know?”

There was a long pause and then Alec said, “I guess we didn’t ask.”

Natalie shut her eyes. No, they hadn’t. Natalie tried not to ask questions about any of the members of their little club. Once more, she regretted that. If she had, maybe they could have helped Blob. Bob.

She sighed. “I doubt he’s even been in this room for months, maybe even years. There’s no way he could fit through the door.”

“Okay, we’re going to check the kitchen. Can you get out on your own?” Alec asked from the hall.

Natalie took a glance at the door. She didn’t really want to squeeze herself free in front of Alec, especially if her butt was going to get stuck again, so she responded, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll join you in a sec.”

She heard Alec’s steps disappear down the hall and Linda’s droning voice trailed off behind him. With a sigh, she looked at the piles again. It wouldn’t hurt to look a little closer. Just in case.

“Bob?” she called out softly. “Bob, are you in here . . . somewhere?”

There was no response and Natalie reached out to toe one of the piles gently. In response it began to rock.

“Shit!” she barked as she made for the door. She squeezed her way through the space and staggered into the hallway just as the pile toppled and slammed the door behind her with its full weight.

She covered her chest, her borrowed heart rattling against her ribs. Getting crushed in the door by a pile of trash was not a very romantic way to die. It was by far more embarrassing than any of her various movie and book deaths.

“Oh my God!”

Her heart, which had begun to calm, leapt back to pounding when she heard Linda’s scream from the kitchen. She pivoted and headed toward the sound, dodging piles as she went. She burst through the open door to the kitchen and came to a sharp stop.

The kitchen was as bad as the rest of the apartment. The counters were all covered with cans, bags, piles of trash. They shivered on the floor almost to the ceiling. They had taken over.

Alec and Linda stood in front of a big walk-in freezer that was squeezed into a space next to the fridge that had probably been meant for a little eat-in kitchen area originally. They had opened the double doors, and inside, propped up between rows of ice cream and frozen dinners, was Bob. Blob.

Dearly departed Blob.

Natalie squeezed her eyes shut. As someone who had studied pathology both for professional and personal reasons, she knew what kind of terrible death his had been. Alone in the cold dark, the oxygen slowly leaving the tight, sealed space, he would have gasped for breath. His fingers and toes would have tingled painfully, then lost all feeling. Eventually he would have fallen asleep and never woken up, but the time while he was awake must have been utterly terrifying and painful.

“Oh, Bob, poor Bob,” she whispered.

“Why did he have a walk-in freezer?” Linda murmured. “In a shitty apartment with hardly any space?”

Alec rubbed his scruffy beard. “He had to eat a lot to maintain his physical form, to keep from turning into a totally gelatinous object. I would guess this made it easier. He could store half a cow in here.”

Natalie sniffed and tried to keep tears from flooding her eyes. “I don’t care
why
he had a freezer. How did this happen? Walk-ins usually have a safety release inside.”

Alec turned toward her. He was pale beneath the shaggy scruff of beard and his wolfish golden eyes glinted with a combination of anger and sadness.

“Because of this,” he said, and lifted a small lock that he held in his hand. “Blob didn’t do this accidentally. It was murder.”

Over the years since Alec had moved to New York, found out about the monster therapy group from Drake of all people (werewolves and vampires had always been well aware of each other), and met Natalie and the others, he’d come to expect certain reactions from the monsters no matter what new circumstance they faced.

Drake would always monologue, usually way off topic. Linda would cry. Kai would get bored with it all or set herself into a complete denial phase that went against all her intelligence and strength. Hyde saw every situation as a new opportunity to go wild, and Jekyll would have to constantly fight to keep him in line.