Nita swallowed down the hurt that bloomed in her chest. “What about him?”
She was silent for a moment. “Did you know I lost my father when I was a year older than you?”
Of course Nita didn’t. How could she? But all she said was a soft “No.”
Quispe nodded, face tight. “A car accident on his way to work.”
“Oh.”
Quispe looked at her, and Nita wondered if she was supposed to have said something more. Was she supposed to express her sympathy? She didn’t really care about the INHUP agent’s dead father. But she forced herself to play along. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Quispe sighed and leaned in close to Nita. “It was an awful time. My mother couldn’t support all of us, even with the rest of the family’s help. I decided to get a job after school to help out. It was my first job with INHUP, at the La Paz office, translating Quechua legends into Spanish.”
Nita was intrigued, despite herself. “What kind of legends?”
Quispe smiled. “Local folktales of monsters and heroes. You know the type. Tales about pishtacos hunting the mountains, searching for human fat to eat. Creation myths about Pachamama—Mother Earth—and her children. The kind of things INHUP likes to comb through for pieces of information on local undocumented unnatural species.”
Nita leaned forward. “Tell me about them.”
Quispe shook her head and gave Nita a gentle smile. “We’ve gotten off topic.” She placed her hand on Nita’s shoulder. “Look, Nita, I just wanted to say, I know how hard the loss of a parent can be. I know how life altering it is. It can make you change all your plans, and it can hurt more than anything. And if you want to talk about it or you need help figuring things out, I wanted you to know you can talk to me.”
Nita quietly took Quispe’s hand from her shoulder. “Thank you for the offer. But what would really help right now is if you just stopped bringing it up.”
Then Nita got up and walked away.
She couldn’t go far, it wasn’t a massive terminal, but it was big enough for her to walk far enough away that she couldn’t see Quispe.
Nita rubbed her shoulder where the INHUP agent had touched her, shuddering. Why did the woman have to go poking into Nita’s business? Nita had lost her father. She didn’t need an INHUP agent trying to butt in and act like a surrogate parent. Nita didn’t need to “talk about it” or “figure it out.” She just needed to be left alone and not have it brought up every five minutes.
Nita wandered the halls, looking for a distraction, something to take her mind off things before she ended up wallowing in her own grief again.
A family sat at the small coffee shop, all of them chattering together, a dozen people with luggage, from old grandparents to small children. Nita’s heart tightened at the sight. A part of her wished she had that, wished she had more people in her life than just her parents, more connection with her father’s culture than just pieces of a language and knowledge of which soccer teams to root for.
Intellectually, she knew she didn’t want a big family. Too many people, too many forced interactions, too much nosiness. But she wanted something, some more connection to her roots. Especially now that her father was gone.
No. She wasn’t going to think of that. She needed a distraction, she refused to start crying in the airport.
She found a combination magazine stand/breakfast shop and browsed the selection. Most of it was pop culture, some politics, local news. One paper blared a headline about men disappearing in one of the logging camps in the Amazon, blaming “las patasolas,” a type of unnatural Nita was unfamiliar with. But there were no details afterward, so she put the paper down and searched for something more interesting.
She paused her flipping on a page of a newspaper condemning INHUP for not adding kelpies to the list of dangerous unnaturals.
The Dangerous Unnaturals List was composed of types of unnaturals it was okay to shoot on sight, since killing them was considered preemptive self-defense. It had creatures like kappa, which ate human organs, and unicorns, men who consumed the souls of virgins.
It also contained zannies. Like Kovit.
If anyone in the world knew what he was, they would be within their rights to murder him on sight. And if anyone ever found out Nita knew what he was and didn’t report him, she could be arrested.
It was easily the least of her crimes.
She rubbed her temples, resisting the urge to check her phone for more messages from Kovit. It wasn’t even six in the morning yet. He wasn’t going to answer.
She succumbed and checked anyway. Of course, there was nothing.
She rolled her eyes at herself and looked back down to the paper. She had some time to kill, so she let her eyes wander through the article. It was an opinion piece, condemning INHUP for not adding kelpies to the list despite never having found a kelpie that hadn’t murdered someone.
Nita tapped her finger on the paper. So far, the Dangerous Unnaturals List consisted of unnaturals that were, fundamentally, human on the outside. They could interbreed with humans and looked mostly human inside and out.
Kelpies were none of those things. Outside and inside, they were as non-human as unnaturals came.
Though they could look human if they chose.
Originally from the Scottish Highlands, they were semiaquatic, like crocodiles. Some researchers speculated that kelpies were related to crocodiles, but Nita thought this was clearly wrong, because reptiles needed warm water to thrive, and kelpies needed cold. That’s why these days they were only found in Scotland and on the east coast of Canada and the States. They’d come over with the waves of immigrants hundreds of years ago as conditions in the Highlands became more perilous, and they’d never left.
In legends, kelpies would appear as beautiful horses by the side of the water. If you got on the horse, it would ride into the nearest lake, drown you, and feast on your rotting body.
But kelpies could also look human and lure their victims to the water that way.
Whether they could physically shape-shift, it was some sort of illusion, or something else entirely, no one knew. A body had never been dissected or studied, so no one even knew what their real form looked like.
They were also very rare these days. Because they couldn’t reproduce with humans, their species was dying. Between laws, hunters, and technology making it more difficult for them to run from their crimes, kelpies were slowly going extinct.
Nita let her eyes wander over the rest of the article. It was talking about species that had been famously exempted from the list, despite eating humans, like ghouls. Ghouls were one of the oldest recorded species, originating in the Middle East and appearing as far back as ancient Sumerian texts as “gallu.” The article talked about several famous cases of ghouls living off people in crematoriums, and how the species as a whole couldn’t be condemned as evil.
Nita sighed and put the paper down. She didn’t know what she thought of the Dangerous Unnaturals List anymore. She’d been a staunch fan for so long—in theory, killing monsters was good. But things got more complicated after she’d befriended one of those monsters.
She shook her head at herself and wandered back over to Quispe. Their plane had started boarding, but Quispe remained seated, her phone pressed against her ear. She was nodding, forehead creased, and listening intently to whoever was on the other end of the line.