Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

  Was Thad the Commander?

  Had he rescued Zero from that lab? Was he the reason she’d freed none of the other kids there? How had he left them behind?

  If Zero had attacked Dean, killed guards, and murdered families, whose side was Thad on?

  * * *

  Ollie hadn’t taken the news of the folder well.

  She wanted Thad to be something he wasn’t, and there was no talking to her. By the time we’d completely searched the warehouse, it was too late to fly back to the university. We picked rooms and hunkered down for the night.

  I stayed in the shower until my skin turned pruney and the water ran cold. With a towel wrapped around me, I ventured back into the silent bedroom.

  Hatter sat on the edge of my bed.

  I froze in the bathroom doorway, my hand clenching the towel to my chest. My glasses fogged up from the temperature change, and water droplets plopped onto my bare shoulders. Hatter looked up, his eyes following the water drips as they slid over my skin.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, drawing his attention back to my face.

  “We need to talk.” He slowly met my gaze. A blush tingled along the tips of my ears.

  I turned to rummage through the small bag I’d thrown together before leaving campus. With one hand on my towel, I shifted through the contents longer than necessary. “What about?”

  “You know what, Sunny.”

  My blush deepened until it burned. Thoughts of that night—that night—on the mats with the moonlight and Hatter’s sweaty skin and his weight above me and the feel of him inside me flashed through my mind. I cleared my throat. Playing dumb wouldn’t work with Hatter, but I didn’t want to talk about it. If we talked about it, then Hatter would ruin it.

  Ruin it even more than I had by acting like a complete nerd.

  Who in their right mind had a scientific breakthrough during sex?

  “I’m sorry.”

  I gritted my teeth. Yes, he would ruin it. “Don’t apologize.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  I threw the clothing in my hands back into the bag and whirled on him. “Why do you have to say things like that?” I shouted. “Huh? Why? Why, Hatter? Why?”

  Hatter stood from the bed and held up his hands in surrender. “I don’t mean like that. It was amazing. You were amazing.” Great. I was blushing again, especially when his voice got all rough and scratchy like he was thinking about it too, about our bodies, our— “But I shouldn’t have let this thing between us go that far. It’s not fair to you. Not when I’m like this. When I could die—”

  “Shut up,” I growled. The blush was gone. Everything was gone but my instant icy rage.

  “Sunny.” He sighed, and his shoulders slumped as if I’d exhausted him. Well, good. It was his turn to be exhausted. I’d been exhausted since returning to the university. Since I’d known a cure for him was within reach. I’d worked and worked to save him, and he couldn’t care less. His life meant so little to him.

  “I hate you.”

  The words had left my mouth before I even knew what I was saying. When I realized what I’d said, I gasped and slapped a hand over my mouth.

  But Hatter took the words with a tiny flinch. He nodded as though he’d already guessed them. I hated myself for the way he accepted them so easily, for the way he angled his head away from me so I couldn’t see the scarred side of his face or his eyes.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I hurried to add, but the damage was done. It was too late.

  “It’s okay if you do,” Hatter said, and his kindness broke my heart. “I want you to hate me. My mania—”

  “Is not a part of you,” I snapped. “It’s an effect. If your manic states were a part of you, they’d be treatable with medicines, Hatter. You’re not bipolar or schizophrenic. The saliva is causing your manic episodes, and I can fix that. I can fix you.”

  “It’s too late.”

  I strode toward him and grabbed his chin before he could retreat. I jerked his face toward me. He was looking down and I was on my tiptoes, but we were mostly eye to eye. “Do you want to die so badly that you can’t even imagine a life with me? Is it so impossible to just be happy?”

  Hatter’s jaw clenched; the edges of his scars flexed beneath my fingers. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Then why are you always talking about it?”

  “Because I want to prepare you.” His eyes locked on mine. In his gaze, I saw him begging me to understand. But I didn’t. I couldn’t fathom what he meant.

  “Prepare me for your death?” I grappled, fumbling, free-falling through this moment. He’d kissed me and touched me and held me so tightly just a few nights ago, and he was saying this? After all that?

  “Sunny,” Hatter whispered, trying again, “I don’t want you to be sad when I’m gone.”

  My mouth opened and closed. Opened and closed. Ollie and I had spent an hour mopping up congealed blood. Thad had a file on Zero. Fear University was a ghost town. Original families were dying. And I was days away from a breakthrough on my antidote research.

  And he didn’t want me to be sad when he died.

  “Get out,” I hissed through my teeth. My hands clenched into fists.

  “What?”

  “Get out!” I shoved him, but he barely moved. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  “Sunny. Please.”

  Tears blurred my vision and thickened my throat. “I hate you,” I whispered. “I hate you so much.”

  We both knew I meant the words this time.

  S E V E N T E E N

  Sunny

  “Sunny!”

  I skidded to a stop at the dorm entrance. Down the hallway, toward the cafeteria, a small woman with wiry gray hair in a prim bun and crow’s feet around her eyes and laugh lines around her mouth and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen and the strongest arms for the best hugs and the kind of smell that reminded you of biscuits and those orthopedic shoes that squelched with every step ran toward me.

  “Gran!” I tore down the hallway and skidded into her arms. She might have been smaller than me by five inches and twenty pounds, but my grandmother was stronger than a semi-truck. She swept me up in her arms and crushed my ribs into fine bone powder.

  I whimpered into her hair and sucked down gulps of her scent. She rubbed my back in perfect soothing circles the way only grandmothers could do, and I was a puddle of goo in her arms in an instant. I fell apart in tears and snot and snuffling little sobs.

  “Pass her over here before you squeeze the daylights out of her,” my mother grumped from somewhere behind me. I raised my head, sniffling, and looked around. My mom, with her perfectly coordinated outfit and wire-framed glasses, appeared beside me with her arms open. I fell into them next, my grandmother’s hand still rubbing those circles on my back.

  “Sunny,” my mother said, patting my head, “what in the world is going on?”

  “Let her breathe for a second, hon,” my father’s voice rumbled, and his hand squeezed my shoulder. “She’s had a rough few days. Isn’t that right, Sunny?”

  “She should be studying!”

  I sighed. “Classes are canceled, Mom.”

  “I don’t care. You could get ahead.” My mother pushed on my shoulders until I reluctantly stepped back from her. I swiped a hand under my nose and looked at my gathered family. They were all there except for Marcus.

  My mother—as mothers did—sensed my panic before I could voice it. “He’s in the barracks with his friends.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. People always asked if we were sisters; we were almost perfect replicas of each other. “We probably won’t see him for days.”

  My grandmother waggled her eyebrows at me. “He’s got some hot little fifth-year he’s chasing after.”

  My mom grimaced. “Good grief, Mother. Can you not?”

  “I’m just saying.” Gran held up her hands and winked at me. I was almost scared to introduce her to Nyny.

  But after yesterday—the ki
ds, the lab, and Hatter—I needed Gran’s help. After my revelation with the antidote, she would know what to do. Her eyes glittered as she caught the meaningful look I sent her.

  “Well, you know,” Gran said, her voice cherry-pie sweet, “in times like these, it’s nice to have another baby around the house, don’t you think? And Marcus has always been good with the ladies.”

  Mom’s eyes widened in horror. “Do you think … No. Surely not. He would know better.”

  “Of course, dear. You’re probably right.”

  Mom only thought about it for another second before grabbing my dad’s arm and hauling him toward the barracks. He waved over his shoulder at me and Gran.

  “That was scary effective,” I said once my parents were out of earshot.

  “I haven’t lost my touch in my old age. Now, what’s going on?”

  “I need your help with something.”

  “Anything.”

  I took a deep breath and glanced around the hallway. We were close to the dorms, and a few students were leaving the safety of their rooms to hunt for a late lunch, their eyes hooded with exhaustion. They stank of fear too. We all did.

  The last of the saliva had left my bloodstream on the way back from Anchorage this morning. I felt carved out and empty. I was already craving it again, but I pushed the thought away.

  “It’s probably best if I show you,” I said.

  “Oh, no. What have you done now, Sunny?”

  I gathered up her hand, her gnarled fingers clenching mine, and led her toward the stairs. It would be better if I showed her. How did I explain the way I’d discovered the antidote, how the university had changed with Ollie to include halflings and good aswangs, and how we’d most likely be fighting more humans than monsters? This was a woman who’d grown up in the Philippines, in the heart of the war, with aswangs roaming the streets of her small town. She’d mixed up chili waters and spoken prayers and warded off the usog more times than I could count.

  If hunters like Luke, Hatter, and Ollie were the boots on the ground in this war—the flesh and blood of it—then my grandmother, and women like her, were its heart.

  Downstairs, in the lab, Nyny looked up as Gran and I stepped off the stairs.

  “Mrs. Wandag!” Nyny gushed, eyes wide. I should have known Nyny would recognize my grandmother. I often spoke of Gran in the quiet morning hours and during monotonous hours spent bent over a microscope.

  “Nyny,” I said, “this is my grandmother, Rosamie Wandag. Gran, this is Nyura Vasilievna, but we all call her Nyny. She’s an aswang behavioral scientist with a specialization in reproduction.”

  “It’s an honor. Sunny taught me your recipe for palitaw, and it changed my life. Also, she told me how you strain your coffee grounds through bacon grease, which, by the way, is sick. Absolutely mental. But I love it. I can’t stop. It’s amazing. Basically, can I be you? Can you adopt me? Can we be old cat ladies together?”

  “Tell me,” Gran said, putting her hands on her hips and leaning forward from her trim waist, “have you seen a ’swang do the”—she lowered her voice and raised her brows—“horizontal cha-cha before?”

  Nyny choked. My skin burned hotter than three suns. My grandmother had just used the words “horizontal cha-cha” and I couldn’t breathe because I was pretty sure she meant sex and there would never be another moment in my life when I’d experience this resolute combination of horror, anguish, and mortal embarrassment in such a lethally toxic cocktail.

  I needed the world to open up beneath me and swallow me whole.

  “No,” Nyny whispered, her lavender plait flowing over her shoulder from her intensity, “but I’ve been close. I’ve watched a female mark her male. I’ve watched two males fight for a freshly of-age female. And I’ve watched two dominant females battle for matriarchy.”

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about, I see,” Gran said. She nodded like she found the thought—and Nyny—acceptable. “Yes, we do. This is good.” She turned to me and grinned. “And to think I thought I’d be bored up here!”

  I put my head in my hands. Only Gran would plan for boredom while a murdering vigilante was on the loose killing Originals and attempting to assassinate the university’s president. Then again, I knew from some of her stories—the ones she only shared when she’d had an extra glass of bourbon—of her life before moving to Alaska that she’d seen some crazy stuff.

  “Gran,” I attempted when I’d recovered. I had to reel this back in and fast. “Remember the thing I need your help with? What I had to show you?”

  “Oh!” Nyny’s eyes brightened. “Great idea bringing her in. This is perfect because we don’t know where superstition meets fact when it comes to blood. Good idea, Sunny. Good idea.”

  “The blood?”

  I inhaled deeply. This was it. This was my big revelation. “You told me once that the old hunters used to believe that drinking ’swang blood immunized a person to an aswang’s ability to make them feel pain. Do you remember?”

  Deep furrows formed along the paper-thin skin of Gran’s forehead. “Some believed that, but I’ve never known anyone to try. Why are you talking about blood?”

  “What if,” I said with care, “there was an antidote that hunters could take for an aswang bite? Something that would counter the saliva’s effects?”

  Gran knew me too well. She homed in on me, her eyes shining brighter than an aurora. “You’ve made an antidote.”

  “I’m trying, but we can’t find the right counterbalance to the bane. We know the bane is part of the solution, but to find the right solvent …”

  “We’ve tried blood pressure medicine, crank cocktails, every possible combination of blood thinners,” Nyny said, rattling off our failures on each finger.

  Halfway down the seemingly endless list, I interrupted her. “The point is,” I told Gran, “the medicines aren’t working. We saw this antidote in operation. We know there’s a solution that works, and it doesn’t involve sophisticated medicines. These people were getting on-hand supplies of the secondary mixture for the antidote.”

  Gran’s attention piqued. “Who was using it?”

  I could have lied. I could have told her a half-truth. But what was the point? We were too far gone for secrets. Everything had to be out in the open, or someone would get killed.

  “Halflings. Half-humans and half-aswangs.” I braced for the blast of questions. The denial of such monstrous creations. The complete upheaval of my grandmother’s world. But she merely cocked a brow. I hurried to explain, thinking she might be on the verge of a stroke or something. “Ollie is a halfling. Her mother was Irena Volkova, the hunter from the eighties—”

  “I know who Irena is. She was a nice lady.”

  I fumbled. “You knew Irena?”

  “Everyone knew her.” Gran waved her hand for me to continue.

  “Right. Well, ah, Irena had a sanctuary of sorts for halflings in Anchorage. During the second half of winter break, we stayed there while Ollie recovered from a slight hiccup in Barrow.” More like a volcanic eruption, but I was worried about my grandmother’s delicate sensibilities. And Ollie didn’t need the details of her abduction tossed about. “Her father is Hex, the—”

  “I know who Hex is, young lady. Don’t patronize me.”

  I sputtered. “Um. Sorry, Gran. Anyway, his pack was there. He was working with the halflings to protect them from the university and overzealous aswangs. We saw the halflings using the antidote. I think they were getting blood from Hex’s pack.”

  “Huh.”

  I blinked and slid my eyes over to Nyny. She shrugged, also confused by my grandmother’s lack of response. We’d planned for Chernobyl before Gran’s arrival, and all we’d gotten was “huh.”

  “Gran?” I asked, scared.

  Gran swiped her hands across her pants, ready to get to work, and shouldered past Nyny and me to our work stations. Without glancing back at us, she started riffling through our notes. “I thought it might be the halflings. Sneaky li
ttle shits. They were always one step ahead.”

  “What?” I sputtered.

  Could one thing, just one thing, go the way I thought it would?

  “You know about the halflings?” Nyny pressed, rounding the lab table and taking up her normal perch atop a stool.

  “Of course. Halflings were a dime a dozen back in my village. You never knew what side they were on.”

  “Why did no one here know about them, then?” I went to Gran’s side and watched her face—a stranger’s face at this moment—as she briefed herself on weeks of failed experiments with a simple glance. “Dean just found out they existed when Ollie came to the university last semester.”

  Gran scoffed. “You don’t hand nuclear war codes to an overeager, pint-sized idiot. Like so much of the information that came up from the Philippines in the late sixties and into the eighties, halflings were written off as lore and superstition.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “So we let it.”

  “Dude,” Nyny breathed out. “Holy shit.”

  “Don’t make me wash out your mouth with soap, missy.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Gran put down our notes. “I don’t know about this antidote, but we can play around with some old mixtures my mother taught me. Some stuff even the oldest hunters don’t know about.”

  “Okay?” I felt too numb to move. What the heck was happening?

  Nyny rubbed her hands together in glee. “Let’s mix some shi—stuff. Stuff.”

  “We’ll need a lot of blood,” Gran said grimly.

  Across the room, the skull and crossbones door beckoned. The west wing lab. It sang its siren song of fear. I breathed through my mouth as I said, “I know where to get some.”

  * * *

  Ollie