by Meg Collett
My anger had given way sometime between flying over the gulf this morning and standing here, in front of Tick Tock Bay. It could only fuel me for so long before the fuse ran out. It had left me in a rush, and in its place, a swelling numbness settled.
I stood at the edge of the water. Fear University’s fences rose behind me, and the bay stretched out in rolling whitecaps before me. The cliffs along either side of the bay were dotted with trees thickening in the promise of spring’s warmth. From the ocean, the breeze blew in, stiff and biting. The sky was gray above the nearly black water, and the low-hanging clouds threatened another snowfall.
I wrapped my leather jacket tighter around my middle, my eyes stinging from the cold. Or I told myself it was the cold, not the image of the child lying on the table with a dripping IV buried in their arm. They hadn’t even stirred when we walked in and Lieutenant Milhousse spoke. And I heard the silence of their cells like a gong in my ears. How had they been so quiet? How had nothing, or no one, made a sound in that dome?
Humans made noises, but they were creating little monsters within those white walls.
I had to save them. I had to. But this numbness … it was wrecking me.
When had I become such a coward?
Boots crunched on rocks behind me. The ground slushed and sucked at the footfalls, but I caught the scent of caramel candies.
Luke stopped beside me. He offered me a candy, already unwrapped. I plucked it from his palm without touching him and dropped it in my mouth.
“Sunny’s family made it,” he said.
“I saw.”
“You’ll like her grandmother. She’s something else. I just met her.”
“I’m sure.”
“Sunny is hunting for Hatter. I had the distinct impression she was up to no good,” he said and forced a laugh. “You know how she gets when she’s lying about something.”
“I know.”
His silence prodded at my numbness. Without even looking at me, with his gaze on the faraway ocean, he said, “Ollie—”
“Don’t.” I hunched farther into my jacket. “Don’t try to make it right that we had to leave. It wasn’t.”
“It isn’t time for that battle yet. You know that. That’s why you made Sunny pick.”
“I made her pick because she needed to understand that Zero is more important. But every second we’re here and they’re there, they become more like Zero.”
“You’re right.” I stiffened at his words; I hated them. “Someone already failed Zero, and we have to stop her. But we won’t fail those kids. They won’t become Zeros.”
He was right, but it still felt like I was aiming a gun in their faces and firing the killing shot. I recalled that aswang boy in the snow, calling for his mommy, and I wavered.
Luke broke the no-touching rule. He took my arm and turned me to face him. He looked down at me and held me tight until the numbness broke apart around me and all I felt was the creeping darkness of his touch. Right before it consumed me, he released my arm and said, “You told me you were going to stop the war.”
In the breeze, his dark hair rustled. His eyes glinted river-moss green, their golden flecks like stardust in my own personal galaxy. “Yes,” I said, my heart pounding.
“You said you were going to kill everyone who was still fighting to win it.”
“Yes.”
“It’s time to make them pay.”
I’d never seen his eyes so bright and shining. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention until now. “How?” I whispered.
“I told A.J. and Squeak to look for your father. You were right. We need to talk to him.”
Fear slashed through me, instant and consuming. My father terrified me. A shudder threatened at the edge of my marrow, and I had to fight to keep my voice steady as I barely managed to whisper the most terrifying words of all. “I might have to kill him.”
Luke’s mouth twitched in a half smile, crooked and dangerous beneath this gray sky and before this black water. My fear fell away; I knew that look. That smile. That promise. My mouth wavered in response. Luke was my favorite danger.
“Then let’s make sure you’re ready,” he said.
E I G H T E E N
Ollie
Luke prowled around me, his fists raised. A trickle of blood trailed down his chin. He licked his lips, his tongue tracking a slow, sensuous path to taste every trace.
My belly dipped, the desire pulsing thickly through my blood.
His strike came hard and fast from the side. The right hook connected with a sick crunch in my jaw. I reeled back, fumbling for balance, and tasted blood. When I regained my balance, I shook my head and growled.
“Focus,” he growled back. “That was too easy.”
I wanted to tell him not to distract me then, but my father would use any tactic to throw me off balance. I had to keep my mind on the task: fighting and killing him. I couldn’t let him distract me with stories of my mother or anything else he might try.
Rolling out my shoulders, I danced onto the balls of my feet. The gym mats gave me extra spring. Moonlight cut slivers through the wall of windows, casting us in shadows. None of the lights were on. The students who remained, less than twenty, were locked in the Death Dome with all the lights blazing. But everywhere else? Dark as night. Thick as shadows. Heady as smoke.
We’d opened the door wide for Zero. Let her come to us. Let her try again. Better here than some other family while they slept. Better us than some kid.
We wanted her now.
A small number of guards patrolled the fence. Just enough to keep out adventurous ’swangs. The rest were with the families, guarding them as best they could. Some of the older Original families had refused our help, no matter what Dean had told them. I suspected he hadn’t tried hard. I was starting to think he was fostering fear among the families.
What better way to bring them back into his fold than by letting Zero pick them off one by one until they didn’t have a choice?
I’d given him too much credit. I’d allowed myself to forget what he was capable of so I could work beside him.
That needed to change.
Luke leaped and spun in the air. I narrowly dodged his kick. Had it connected, it would have broken a rib.
We’d ditched the pads. The pretenses. We held back no punches. This wasn’t training. This was life or death.
As he gathered himself, I darted in, aiming low. My fist struck him in his side. I slipped by him like a caress. He doubled over with a gasp. I’d hit a kidney. He spun for me, but I was gone.
“You’re gonna pay for that,” he said, smiling darkly.
I returned the smirk.
Behind me, Eve attacked. I whirled in time to parry her switchblade. Its obsidian blade cut deep, the edge so sharp it would barely hurt as it sliced down to bone. I already needed a few stitches from it.
I hit the mats, rolled a few feet away, and snatched up my knuckles from where they lay waiting. They slid over my fingers right as the blade extended. I sliced at the air and tracked her as she circled me.
Her black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail that hung down to her waist. She wore a tight vest, her pale breasts spilling over the top. Her leather pants were tighter still and low on her hips, but she moved faster than a snake. Her red and black tattoos winked at me in the moonlight.
She came at me again. We clashed together louder than a crack of thunder. This was more lethal than the fight with Luke. She and I had a lot of tension between us. Blades flashed through the air. My knuckles hit her pretty mouth with enough force to knock a tooth loose. She hissed at me.
“That’s for eye-fucking my boyfriend all the time.”
Below her devilish sneer, blood stained her teeth. “You sure that’s all I’ve done?”
Behind us, Luke chuckled. My red murder haze draped like a veil around me, and I attacked.
When we finally staggered apart, we were both panting. Blood slashed the mats at our feet. A tear drop of blood s
lid between Eve’s breasts. She laughed at me, the sound tighter and darker than the leather she wore.
Haze fought me next. Then Hatter. Then Mr. Clint. They came from every direction, sometimes in pairs. They alternated between various weapons and their fists. I went into each fight as though it were a battle. My muscles wavered, but I pushed. An aura of warmth threaded through my body with a low-humming warning. I was hurting. I didn’t know how badly until Mr. Clint’s bō cracked across my lower back, and I hit my knees.
The syringe was already in my neck, the contents deployed before I could jerk away.
I stumbled to my feet and spun. Luke backed off and handed Nyny the empty syringe. She faded back into the hall outside the gym and disappeared.
’Swang saliva.
“Dick,” I growled, clutching the side of my neck.
Luke cocked his head at me. “Time to really fight.”
The pain was all I knew for a minute. I blacked out. When I blinked my vision clear, I was on my back with Luke straddling me as he rained punches down on my ribs, his eyes dancing with excitement.
We’d agreed to this. We’d promised each other.
He was the best fighter on campus, and I couldn’t prepare for a fight with my father if Luke held back. So we’d agreed. We’d promised. We met each other in that alternate world of pain and blood, sweat and grunts. This was our world. Our paradise. Together, bound beneath our promise, we let loose. We were finally the monsters we hid from each other in the bedroom. This fight was how we wanted to fuck.
This fight was better than all the sex we’d ever had. And we’d had amazing sex.
The periphery faded around us, but I sensed the others back off to the edges of the gym. They left us, grappling and panting, cursing and clutching in the middle of the gym.
Hours might have passed. Minutes. Seconds. Time was warped in our world or didn’t exist.
I cracked my forehead against his nose. His grip tightened around my throat. He smacked the back of my head into the mats. I jerked my knee up, right between his legs. Our mouths were inches apart. Our oxygen mingled. A fine mist of blood and sweat tainted the air.
It was dark and twisted and I loved every ounce of Luke’s black soul, and I felt his love for mine in every cut and bruise.
He wrecked me to save my life. I tore into him because he could take it.
Here, we were equals. We were soulmates.
I hit the mat. My chin bounced, and my teeth closed over my tongue. Luke’s weight settled on my back. He fisted a hand in the hair at the nape of my neck and wrenched my head back. I choked on a wheeze of air. His chest lowered over my back. His face lowered next to mine.
He’d won.
I relented with a kiss, my neck close to breaking in his hold and my attempt to meet his mouth. He craned around me and wrecked me in an entirely different way.
We made it into the locker room showers. Luke hit the handle and an ice-cold stream jetted over our bodies from a trio of shower heads. The lights were off. The darkness was almost absolute, save for the moonlight coming in through the doors.
He pinned me to the concrete wall, and I wrapped my legs around his hips. Our clothes were plastered to our skin in seconds. At our feet, the water turned black with blood.
We made love our way.
We made war.
N I N E T E E N
Sunny
“Do you think we should be doing this?”
I wrinkled my nose at Hatter and not-too-nicely said, “Oh, what a big, bad hunter you are.”
“We’re stealing from Dean Bogrov.”
“We’re borrowing,” I corrected. “Besides, he said my antidote research takes priority. The blood is going to a good cause.”
“About this theory of yours. Doesn’t it seem odd that you would inject aswang blood to combat aswang saliva? I mean, isn’t that a contradiction or some shit?”
I ignored him as I waited for the west wing’s lab door to unlock. It scanned Hatter’s finger and chimed. Deep within the door, a tumbler fell open, unlocking the room’s secrets.
“You’re sure about this?” Hatter hesitated, his hand against the door. Darkness tumbled out from between the doorframe and wall. I felt the air, ice cold like a freezer. Ollie had said the room acted as a morgue of sorts, though it had taken a different turn when she started bringing Dean live subjects.
“I’m sure we better hurry if we want to get in and out before A.J. and Squeak show up.” Without waiting for him, I slipped past and pushed the door open. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes without feeling the rage boil back up inside me. I wanted to yell at him and shake him and kick his shins and kiss his perfect mouth all at the same time. It was infuriating.
“That’s another thing that’s bothering me. Why can’t you get aswang blood from, you know, our aswang friends?”
“I can’t wait for them to come back from looking for Hex. Besides, they’re Ollie’s friends, not mine. I would never go up to them and ask for their blood.”
“They would have helped, Sunny.”
“You trust them?”
His hesitation was answer enough. I hit the light switch beside the door. The room blazed with a sterile light from the fluorescent lights overhead. In front of us, a row of stainless steel tables stretched in an orderly row down the room. On either side of the room were stacked cubbies fitted with stainless steel doors.
“He keeps them down there,” Hatter whispered. He nodded toward the farthest end of the open lab. That part ran on separate lights and wasn’t illuminated. Part of me was glad. I needed another second to prepare myself.
“Will they still be alive?” I thought of the black body bags A.J. and Squeak had wheeled into this lab numerous times since school had started.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
My sneakers squeaked against the uniform beige tiles. Two steps ahead, Hatter’s boots sounded like gun blasts in the too-quiet silence. I tried not to look at the tables as we passed, but looking straight ahead toward the room’s dark end felt far worse.
I had to respect the orderliness of Dean’s lab. The air smelled of disinfectant, a comfort to me. The floors beneath the tables were clean and shining. The tables sat in perfect, macabre rows, waiting with open arms for their next occupants. The cubbies, which likely contained chilled bodies, were all labeled with names I refused to look at too closely. The hunters who’d protected me and the professors who’d taught me and the students I’d sat with at lunch were in these rolling meat lockers from Hex’s attack against the school over a month ago.
We reached the end of the room far too soon. Hatter paused before hitting the lights; I nodded at him, though the gesture was likely lost in the darkness. A second later, as if he’d been waiting for my quiet exhalation, the lights came on.
They were softer back here, less intense. Probably because Dean didn’t want to strain his eyes while operating on the single stainless steel table. The back wall was solid cabinets with tiny labels by all the handles. His supplies. Everything he needed to poke around in a brain. I cataloged it all before dragging my eyes to the side of the room. In the back of my mind, I was processing each noise I heard. The snuffling. The shifting. The breathing.
Something was in here with us, and it was very much alive.
I lifted my eyes to the side wall. Eyes met mine. She—I sensed her gender by her slight shoulders and stature—sat on her haunches in a metal cage too short for even her. She crouched with her head bowed. Her fur was so black it looked silver; she was Ollie’s most recent attempt at vengeance on those responsible for the attack. If Ollie said this aswang was a killer, then I believed her.
Of everything she did, Ollie took bringing in Dean’s live ’swangs most seriously.
Beside me, Hatter hissed. His knuckles popped from clenching his fist. “Don’t do that,” he warned the ’swang. He leveled a small handgun directly at her face.
We’d expected the ’swang might fight, but I hadn’t been ready for h
er to whimper and cower. She sank to the floor of the cage, her snout pressed between her front legs and her ears flattened against her head. She whimpered, and I’d never heard a more pitiful, desperate sound.
Hatter relaxed without her presence in his mind. He glanced at me. “Ready?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the young ’swang. Surely she was young to be so small. What had happened for her to end up here? Why had she attacked the school? She hardly appeared old enough to leave her parents. She cried, a soft mewing sound. The fine hairs along my arms stood on end.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I whispered, staring at her.
Hatter lowered his gun as he glanced between me and the ’swang. “We’re not here to kill her, Sunshine. Just taking some blood is all.”
“She’s so little.”
He holstered the gun in his shoulder strap. “She only looks small because she’s in a cage and scared. She wouldn’t act like this if she had the jump on us.”
“She shouldn’t be acting like this at all.”
Hatter brushed his fingers against my wrist. I lifted my chin and found his mismatched eyes staring down at me. The sympathy in his gaze was choking. My compassion for the little ’swang was a weakness, one Hatter had conquered and contained in his early hunting days. There wasn’t room for softness in this war.
Hadn’t I considered myself so hard when telling Ollie that Zero should be held accountable for her crimes? Hadn’t I thought myself such a warrior? I’d been proud to condemn a young girl close to my age because softness was a weakness in this place, and I’d always been so soft.
Hatter’s fingers threaded through mine, and I didn’t pull my hand free. At our feet, the ’swang girl’s gaze rolled up to us, though she stayed crouched against the cold floor. She was watching, listening.
“We can take her somewhere in the plane. It’s fueled up.”
“What?”
“If you want to set her free,” Hatter clarified, “we can take her far away where she won’t make it back to the university. I would do it with you.”
