Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

  But hearing Luke say he loved me almost changed my mind. Almost. “No matter what?” I asked. Before Max, love had been easy. Now … Now, things had changed. I’d changed.

  “No matter what.”

  I faced him, my eyes traveling from the redness rimming his eyes, to the dark circles beneath them, to the hollows of his cheeks, and to the thick stubble of his beard that he hadn’t had time to trim. His lips parted around a shaky exhale as I leaned in closer, closing the cautious space between us, and pressed my mouth to his.

  This was only the second time I’d kissed Luke since Barrow. The first time had been in the ward, outside Sunny’s room when we thought she was dying from the bane and I was unraveled threads flying in the wind. Luke had taken my shoulders and pulled me against him. His kiss had sewn me back together.

  As our lips touched with featherlight brushes, I braced for the memories to wreck me, but they were only whispers in the back of my mind, and when Luke kissed me deeper, I tuned them out.

  I was a monster and a killer and he loved me. This kind of love wasn’t pain. He breathed the truth of his words into my mouth, loving my lips like he loved me, even if I could only bear the kiss for another brief second before I had to pull away.

  He smiled at me like it didn’t matter, like he understood, but I saw the heartbreak in his eyes.

  S I X

  Sunny

  “Sunny Eugene Lyons, do not make me come up there.”

  I shifted the phone away from my mouth so I could sigh without my mother hearing. “I’m fine, Mom—”

  “We left the school a week ago. A week ago! And you’re already in the ward—again. What are you doing up there? Your grandmother and I are worried sick. You should be in class. Studying. Getting paper cuts. Not bites! What are you thinking?”

  “I—”

  “You’re going to be a doctor, Sunny.” Her mother’s voice hitched around teary thickness. “Not a soldier.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “I …” She sniffed. “I—well, here’s your father. He wants to talk to you. Sunny … be careful, okay?”

  “I will, Mom.”

  The phone shuffled, and then my dad picked up. “Hey there.”

  My father’s voice sounded like it came from a deep part of his belly and had to rumble all the way up to his mouth like a logger truck gathering speed before ascending a tall mountain. I pictured his rough beard and large hands and his long hair tied back in a sloppy ponytail. Like my prim, petite mother, my father was also a doctor. Unlike her, he was out in the field, repairing hunters in the wilderness. He’d been in the field during every Killing Season for the past twenty years. He’d packed torn bellies with snow and leaves and set broken legs with birch saplings, and he knew how to defibrillate a heart while riding on a snowmobile in a blizzard with a pack of ’swangs racing in the snow drifts behind him.

  He’d always been my hero, though I’d never tell Mom.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He was silent, probably running a hand through his beard, his movements calm and slow. Mom said God had set him to a lower frequency, one most humans couldn’t operate on. I believed her. Time moved slower around Dad. He just had that effect.

  “When did you wake up?” he finally asked.

  I glanced at the clock beside my hospital bed. It read nine a.m. If there was class today, I was late again. I had no clue what was happening. I’d woken to a shrill phone call coming from a phone held next to my head by a silent, brooding Hatter.

  I’d blinked up at him, foggy and confused. “What? What happened? Who’s calling?”

  “Your parents,” he’d said, his voice rough with exhaustion. He hadn’t slept in a while.

  “You called my parents?”

  “Someone had to. Answer the phone.”

  He’d left me alone in the room with only a phone and a sick feeling in my gut. But if I looked past the fear of talking to my mother and grandmother and my worry about Hatter’s appearance, I realized I felt amazing. I could run for miles. Climb a building. Walk through a blizzard barefooted. And the voice in my head, the voice I’d lived with during the last few weeks, was quiet. The craving for saliva was gone.

  “Sunny?” my dad asked, jerking me back to the present.

  “Ah, I’m here. Sorry. What was the question?”

  “What time did you wake up?”

  The question was loaded. I didn’t know how much my parents knew about the attack or if they even knew it wasn’t an aswang that had attacked. “I’ve been awake on and off throughout the night,” I hedged. “I was just about to get up and go to class.”

  “Mr. Abbot has been calling parents this morning. Classes are canceled until further notice. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Your mother has spoken to many parents who are bringing their kids home.”

  “I’m not leaving, Dad.”

  “Your mother and grandmother are worried about you,” he murmured. The phone rustled, and I wondered if he’d turned away from my mother and grandmother to shield his words from them. “Your brother and I will come pick you up today if you want us to.”

  Memories of Seth, my other brother, flashed through my mind. He’d died a few years ago, but the wound his death had left would never heal for my family. Hunters died all the time, and families expected it, waited for it. A matter of time. A matter of war. Parents were expected to bear it and keep fighting, to keep sending their children into a bloody fight without an end in sight. Of course, none of that meant losing Seth didn’t hurt like heck every time we thought about him.

  Now, my parents were wondering if they would lose another child. But I couldn’t abandon the school, the students who remained, the hunters who would guard the walls until their last breath, or my friends who would fight until the end.

  Hatter.

  “I’m staying,” I said hoarsely. “I can’t leave. If things get worse, the school will need all the nurses it can get.”

  “I understand,” my father said instantly, as if he’d expected nothing less from me. “And, Sunny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  My dad had stitched claw slashes and packed wounds and held bloody hands and whispered final words during some of the biggest battles in the record books. He’d saved so many lives. He understood the power of staying amid flying bullets and flashing teeth. To hear him say I’d made him proud, not by having the best time in the fear sim or by nailing a test or by getting the highest mark in a class, but by simply staying to help the school made my heart swell and my eyes water.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I whispered. Tears trickled down my cheeks. I covered the phone so he wouldn’t hear the whimpers escaping my mouth.

  “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong to be afraid,” he said, his whisper matching mine. The roughness in his voice made me think he might have tears of his own on his cheeks. “You can’t be brave without fear, and you’re the bravest person I know. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I love you.”

  I clamped a hand over my mouth and took a few shaky breaths. I prayed I would see my father again. My mother and grandmother. Please don’t let this be the last time I tell my father I love him. “I love you too. Tell Mom and Gran.”

  “I will. Be brave, Sunny.”

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, all the doctors had abandoned the school. The nurses had stayed, and we were gathered in the central room of the ward. Counting myself, there were six of us to cover shifts and make rounds. By training alone, and because I’d been working to become a doctor through the apprenticeship-style training at the university, I was the most experienced.

  If anyone needed a doctor, me and the other nurses would answer the call.

  We set up shifts and wrote them out on the dry-erase board next to the door that swung out into the main corridor of the ward. We shared charts on current patients and tried to decipher the doctors’ notes. Bef
ore I woke that morning, Ollie had sent down a request for us to inventory our supplies and make a detailed list of what we would need for the coming weeks. By the time we had everything finished, I was swaying on my feet and my stomach grumbled loud enough to wake the dead.

  Before I headed upstairs to find something to eat, I headed into Dean’s private room to change his bandages.

  The knife had nearly severed his jugular. Thanks to Ollie, it had only nicked it. She’d saved his life, and I hated myself for it, but I wondered if that had been the best course of action.

  My thoughts shocked me, and I scolded myself. What would my father think? He and my mother had taught me that every life was precious, including Dean’s. I cleaned the thin cut extra carefully and bandaged the wound with precision, as if it would make up for my lapse in compassion.

  I quietly peeled off the latex gloves and deposited them in the wastebasket. My eyes slid back to Dean, lying prone on the narrow bed. His face was pale beneath his handlebar mustache. I’d never seen him so still and quiet. So vulnerable.

  I remembered only bits and pieces of his attack.

  I remembered going to training that afternoon and standing in the back of the third-years’ line. I remembered the girl who’d asked if Hatter was single. I remembered glancing out at the courtyard and seeing Ollie with Dean. I remembered the hole in the wall and the guard’s limp body crashing to the ground next to Ollie.

  The sirens. Oh God, the sirens had been so loud. And the fear in my nose. So much fear in such a small place. It had coated my skin like a fine layer of mist. I’d pushed through the mob of students, past Hatter, and straight down to the lab.

  After that, I couldn’t piece much together.

  I touched my throat. The flesh was tender with bruises. It hurt to swallow, but I’d worry about that later.

  I reached for the door handle right as it twisted in my palm and sprung open. Hatter shoved in, eyes wild. He spotted me an instant before he bowled me over, and his shoulders slumped in relief. He breathed out a long pull of air. “There you are. You weren’t in your room.”

  “I was feeling better,” I said.

  His arms hung limply at his sides, his lips were chapped, and his hair stuck straight up. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

  “Have you slept?”

  “Everyone is pulling doubles.”

  Hatter looked like he’d been pulling triples, but I knew better than to mention it. He took his image seriously around school. No one could know that a vulnerable, sensitive young man lay beneath the facade of madness. “I have no clue what happened. The other nurses and I put a plan together to cover for those who are missing, but that’s it. Is Ollie okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Hatter said, the words too automatic for my liking. Everyone always assumed Ollie was fine without asking. They thought she was supernatural or extra powerful, and maybe she was, in some sense, but in the ways that mattered, she was as vulnerable as the rest of us. I reminded myself to check on her later. “Did you talk to your parents?”

  “You should know,” I accused. “You arranged the call.”

  His expression held no remorse. Not even an ounce of sympathy or regret for worrying my mother over something so inconsequential. “When are they coming?”

  “Why would they come here?”

  He frowned. “To pick you up?”

  “No,” I said, drawing out the word, “they’re not coming to get me. I’m not leaving, Hatter.”

  He raked a hand through his hair. I’d gone against his plan somehow, and it peeved me off. He’d called my parents with the intention of freaking them out so they would come and get me. He didn’t think I could handle this. He thought I was weak. Too fragile. Not a fighter. I gritted my teeth and prepared for battle.

  “Do you remember your duck pajamas?”

  I blinked, thrown off guard. My argument died on my tongue. “What?”

  “The blue ones with yellow ducks,” Hatter said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and peeked down at me through the pieces of hair tumbling across his forehead like slashes of blood in the snow. “The ones you wore in Barrow.”

  “I never got to pack them before we went after Ollie. I guess they’re still there.”

  “I miss them.”

  I looked back at Dean, who still hadn’t moved, his breathing shallow and rattling. “Why?” I asked, directing the question at the heart monitor. “They were just pajamas.”

  “They were a lot more than that.” I felt Hatter draw closer, his breathing matching the whirring machinery in the room. “You’ve changed, Sunny. Something’s happened to that girl who wore duck pajamas and emailed her gran every week and got excited over chemical reductions. I don’t see her much anymore.”

  “You want to know what happened to that girl?” I glared at him, my fists trembling. Tears sprung in my eyes.

  “I do,” he said. “I really do.”

  “She fell in love with a man who thinks he deserves to die, and now she’s too damn busy trying to save his life to even remember to change her clothes before she falls asleep at night. That’s what happened to her.” His mouth fell open to spew the same old argument, but I was tired of it. “No, don’t bother with your honorable duty crap. I don’t have time for it. And don’t you dare call my parents—”

  Dean let out a wheeze. His hand spasmed atop the bedsheets, his callused fingers forming claws. Dark eyelashes fluttered against his pale, clammy cheeks. He gurgled. Spit oozed and bubbled from his mouth.

  I whipped off my stethoscope and pressed it against his chest to listen for his lungs filling with fluid. I checked the monitors as I listened, my eyes bouncing from the machines to his bandages to his pupils. “If you die, you piece of poo …”

  At my muttered words, his eyes opened and latched onto me.

  “Get Ollie,” I whispered, dragging my gaze up to Hatter. “Hurry.”

  * * *

  “Can he talk?”

  Ollie stood next to me with her arms crossed and her perpetual scowl in place. Luke stood at the foot of the bed, and Hatter had taken a spot on the other side. Together, we formed a ring around Dean. He watched us, his rheumy eyes blinking weakly.

  “The knife barely nicked his carotid. We stitched the artery together, but the sutures are delicate,” I said, directing the last words to Dean. “You need to be careful. If you pull them, you could bleed out.”

  Dean dipped his chin in acknowledgment. He felt around the edges of the thick bandages at his neck. “I—” he croaked. He paused and licked his lips. “I thought I was dead.”

  Ollie snorted at his breathy words. “So did I. What the hell happened up there? Did you know that girl? Who is the Commander?” She uncrossed her arms and leaned over Dean, her legs pressing against the bedframe. “How did she get inside? What is she? A halfling? Have you ever seen anyone who can move through shadows like that? How—”

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up a hand. “Let’s go a bit slower than that.”

  Ollie shot me a glance, her brows inching up her forehead. “Should you even be out of bed? I thought you were supposed to be resting.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Her look suggested she considered me anything but fine, but I wasn’t as high on her priority list at the moment. To Dean, she said, “Okay. Just nod to save your strength. We need information, and we needed it yesterday. So keep your shit together because you’ve got a lot to tell us. Understand?”

  Dean nodded.

  “Do you know what it was?” Luke asked.

  Dean dipped his chin.

  “It is a girl, right?” Ollie asked, and again Dean nodded. “So how about we stop calling her an ‘it,’ okay? It’s pissing me off. She’s a halfling?”

  His forehead furrowed. With a dry crack of his lips, he said, “It’s more complicated than that. She is and she isn’t.”

  “How can she be anything else? She’s either human or halfling.”

  Ollie was almost frenzied in her questioning.
This hadn’t been a normal attack, and it showed plainly on her face. She was over caffeinated and jittery, and when she spoke, she barely breathed. I wanted to rest a hand on her arm and tell her to settle down, to slow down, but any effort spent comforting her would be wasted. After our time in Anchorage and everything she’d learned about her mother’s past, this school had become so much more to Ollie than any of us could imagine. This was her mother’s legacy, and it was clear to everyone in the room, including Dean, that she took a threat against it personally.

  “Sunny?”

  I started at Dean’s question. “Yes?”

  “Can you raise me up some?”

  “Sure.” I quickly moved to the head of the bed and, using the buttons, directed the top of his bed to lift until he was in a sitting position.

  His face paled, but he took a deep breath. “We called her Zero.”

  Everyone froze. The beat of silence thickened the air in the room, and no one breathed. Finally, Ollie asked, “Why?”

  “She was Patient Zero. The first successful experiment in my fear switch project.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Ollie said, her voice low. This time, I did put a hand on her arm, but not to comfort her. It was in case I needed to hold her back. She didn’t shake me off. “You created her?”

  “In a sense, yes.” Dean’s breathing sounded labored, but his words were strong enough. “Her parents volunteered her for the research project.” If he noticed Ollie’s fists clenching, he didn’t let on. Brave man. “She was the first to accept my attempts to alter her brain’s response to fear. Her ability to move through the shadows like an aswang when it shifts was a by-product of my adjustments.”

  “You fucked with her head,” Ollie growled.

  “Ollie—” Luke started.

  “I was trying to save this school!” Dean almost shouted. He coughed. With my other hand, I held him against the bed, my eyes trained on the machines. When his breathing leveled out and his heart rate slowed, he continued. “My fear switch work, along with the breeding attempts, was our only shot at creating soldiers who could keep up with the aswangs. In the late eighties, we needed all the help we could get. Our numbers never recovered after the Tick Tock Bay Massacre.”