Page 1 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

Chapter 1

Ava

Three pages of notes and a six-hour drive, and I still don't have my opening line.

The rental crosses the bridge into Nightfall Cove at ten past nine on a Wednesday morning, and I've burned through two coffees and half a legal pad trying to nail the hook for a six-thousand-word integration profile nobody outside the Pacific Northwest will read. My recorder sits in the passenger seat.

My notebook rides shotgun, flipped open to the pre-research: census data, a timeline of the Emergence, a handful of pull quotes from a town council meeting archived on a government website with the design sensibility of 1997. And two days of festival notes from October, when the magazine sent me up to scope the town for the pitch — a scouting trip that earned me polite smiles, good cider, and not one quote worth printing.

The harbor opens up past the bridge rail. Boats lined at the docks, a row of salt-bleached storefronts, Founder's Day banners strung between lampposts in red and gold. Workers on a ladder rig one to the hardware store awning while a woman below yells directions they ignore. I grab the recorder and press record.

"Nightfall Cove, take two. Population eight thousand, give or take. The town that introduced the world to the idea that monsters could be neighbors." I pause. "In October it was hay bales and cider. Now it's bunting. This town never met a holiday it couldn't decorate for."

The B&B sits on a side street off Main, a blue clapboard house with a porch that sags toward the garden. The woman who opens the door introduces herself as June, mid-sixties, reading glasses on a chain. She hands me a key attached to a driftwood keychain heavy enough to anchor a small boat. I booked three nights to get my bearings. Long-form assignments, I find the accommodation after I find the story. The room upstairs has lace curtains and a view of the harbor and a Wi-Fi password written on a notecard in neat handwriting. I drop my bags on the bed, plug in my phone, and stand at the window long enough to watch the street below. Foot traffic. A few tourists with cameras. Two orcs in work coveralls outside the hardware store, loading lumber into a flatbed.

I grab my notebook and walk.

Betty's Diner smells like bacon grease and strong coffee. The pie case does the advertising. The walls handle the rest—awards in frames, a ribbon-cutting photo with a much younger Betty flanked by two orcs in work shirts. I slide onto a counter stool and order coffee and the Tuesday special even though it's Wednesday because Betty tells me it's better.

"That photo," I say, nodding toward the ribbon cutting. "How long ago was that?"

"Twenty-two years next month." Betty doesn't look up from the pie she's slicing. "You a tourist or a reporter?"

"Is it that obvious?"

"Tourists take pictures of the photo. Reporters ask about it." She slides a plate into the case. "Which magazine?"

I set the recorder on the counter. "Pacific Northwest Monthly. I'm doing a piece on the integration—how the town got from that photo to now. I'd love a few minutes if you're willing."

Betty fills my mug without looking at the rim. She hits the line perfect. Fifty-five years of practice. "The Emergence. You want the short version or the long one?"

"Whichever one's true."

She smiles at that.

"Both. The fire came through in late summer, twenty-two years back. Took out three hundred acres of old growth before it turned toward town. We had two engines and a volunteer crew that couldn't fill a softball roster." She sets the pot down. "Then the orcs came out of the forest. And the minotaurs. And a few others we didn't have names for yet. They dug firebreaks with their bare hands. They carried people out of houses the road crews couldn't reach. By the time the state crews arrived, the fire line held and the whole world knew what lived in those woods."

"And after?"

"After is the part that probably takes twenty years to tell." She leans her hip against the counter. "We fought about it. Lord, did we fight. Town halls that went past midnight. Folks who'd lived here their whole lives packed up and left. Folks who'd never been here showed up to protest. Five years of that before the Supernatural Rights Act passed, and even then, the real work started the morning after the signatures dried."

I write: Betty tells the integration story the way a pastor delivers a sermon she's given four hundred times—from memory, with warmth, and with the hard parts she avoids.

The man at the end of the counter watches me write. Gerald Winters, according to Betty's quick introduction. Seventies, thin-shouldered, coffee-colored corduroys and a flannel shirt buttoned to the collar. He runs the general store and post office. He also runs a tab at this counter that suggests he spends more time here than anywhere else.

"The monster folks," Gerald says, turning his mug in a slow circle on the saucer, "they didn't ask permission to save the town. They just did it. That part's easy to admire." He pauses. The mug stops turning. "Living next door to someone who can put his fist through your front wall, that part takes longer."

"How long did it take you?"

His eyes meet mine. Sharp, under the white eyebrows.

"Couple years before I stopped locking the front door at night." He takes a sip. "Couple more before I felt stupid about it."

Betty touches his shoulder as she passes. His hand lifts an inch off the counter toward hers.

I spend an hour at the diner. Betty gives me the highlight reel and Gerald gives me the footnotes. I fill four pages. The coffee strips paint and the Tuesday special turns out to be a meat loaf sandwich I could write a separate article about.

The parking lot gravel pops under my boots as I push through the diner's front door. I'm fishing for my recorder in my bag when the back of my neck prickles.