“Vi does all the writing, and I do the drawings,” he explained, flipping through the book, showing Iris the pages dedicated to vampires, to the rules of monster hunting.
“This is a wendigo. They’re creatures that were human once. Now they eat people.” The emaciated-looking creature had its jaws open, teeth sharp, claws out. It was dressed in rags and had black eyes.
“And this,” he said, turning the page, “is a werewolf. You know about werewolves, right? They’re humans that transform on full moons. The worst thing about being a werewolf is that sometimes you don’t even know you’re one.”
Iris looked down at the drawing: a humanoid form with a wolf’s head, red eyes, teeth dripping with blood. She took a step back.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” Eric said. “Not in the daylight like this. And there are things you can do to protect yourself. Magic and stuff. We’ll teach you. We’ll teach you everything we know.”
Iris smiled.
“Can you draw?” Vi asked Iris. Iris shook her head. “Well, then maybe you can help me with the writing. You know how to write, don’t you?”
Vi handed her a red marker and a piece of paper, like it was a test she wasn’t sure Iris would pass. Iris took the marker but held it all wrong, clutching it in her fist, all her fingers wrapped around it.
“Write down your favorite monster,” Vi said, laying a piece of paper on the table.
Iris looked at the marker in her hand, at the blank sheet of paper.
Then she drew a rectangle. About two-thirds up, in the middle of the rectangle, she drew another smaller rectangle. Inside the smaller rectangle she put two small circles.
“What’s this?” Vi asked.
Iris wrote MNSTR in big, messy block letters, then laid the marker down.
“Monster? What kind of monster?” Vi asked, but Iris had turned away.
Vi picked up the monster book, closed it, and looked at the cover where she’d written THE BOOK OF MONSTERS by Violet Hildreth, Illustrations by Eric Hildreth. She picked up a black pen.
“Do you have a last name, Iris?”
Iris gave a small shrug, then shook her head.
“Okay then,” Vi said, printing carefully on the cover, adding and Iris Whose Last Name We Don’t Know next to her own name. She held the book up to show Iris, but Iris was busy going through the things Eric had shown her in the backpack. She held up the binoculars.
“Binoculars,” Eric said. He turned his hands into two tunnels and brought them up to his face. “Hold them right up against your eyes, and that dial in the middle you use to focus.” He shook his head as he watched her. “Not that way—if you do it that way, everything looks smaller and farther away. You want things to look bigger and closer.”
But Iris held the binoculars with the large lenses pressed against her eyes, looking at Eric, then Vi, making them farther away.
And she smiled.
She kept the binoculars pressed against her face as she walked around the room, looking at everything: the spongy floorboards, the shelves, the window with its cracked glass and spiderwebs. She was looking everywhere except where she was going. She walked into the table hard; so hard that it tipped, dumping the monster book on the floor. She fell back against the wall, hitting her head and making a little shriek that proved she wasn’t mute after all.
The binoculars fell to the ground, and Iris’s orange hat came off.
Eric gasped.
Vi clapped her hand over her mouth to keep the scream she felt from coming out.
Iris scrambled for the hat and pulled it back on.