Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

  No thoughts. No thoughts. No thoughts.

  A shadow was nothing.

  Zero. Nothing. Zero. Nothing.

  I hovered in the corner of the room. My father paced in front of a roaring fire. A giant grizzly head hung above the mantle. Thousands of books adorned the wall-to-wall bookshelves. Worn leather graced the various chairs and couches. A little girl’s heaven if ever there was one. All the stories in those books—

  I shook my head. My focus slipped, and the shadow peeled away from me enough that my leg bumped a side table, knocking the bottle of scotch into the crystal tumblers. The chime rattled through the room.

  My father spun toward the sound just as I faded once more.

  I held my breath as he searched the darkness.

  Did he know? Did he see me there? Could a father always see his daughter? Could he never forget her?

  “Zero?” he called in a hushed whisper.

  I would have faltered if not for the crack of fear in his voice. He’d been expecting me. The bad man—Dean Bogrov—had warned him I was coming.

  He didn’t remember me. Fathers didn’t remember. He was just afraid.

  Downstairs, the guards struggled against my hold on their minds. I pressed the shadows harder into their deepest, darkest fears. I might have pressed too hard. Their minds pooled beneath my control like a too-calm lake with no life beneath the lapping waters.

  I regretted that. I hadn’t meant to kill anyone but the one. The father. He stepped away from the corner where I hid. He was ready to run, but I wasn’t in the mood to chase.

  I unfolded from the shadows.

  My father screamed.

  When he tried to run, I held him with the shadows. Hadn’t he known to turn on the lights? There were monsters in the dark.

  I ran a hand over the back of the couch, my eyes on the grizzly’s snarling mouth. “Did you kill it?” I asked.

  My father whimpered. Along his neck, darkness curled up like a vine and crept up his jaw. It slipped between his lips and down his throat. He started choking.

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  I pulled the shadow out of his throat before he turned blue. He gasped for air.

  “Where is she?” I asked again, stalking closer until I was just a few feet away. My mind wasn’t wrapped tight enough. I was seeing too much and feeling everything. I wasn’t a shadow anymore.

  “Dead,” my father choked out. His chest heaved. Was he so weak?

  I wanted to know how, but the words to ask were in a too-bright spot in my mind. I couldn’t—wouldn’t reach them.

  “We’re sorry, Nikki,” he begged. “We’re so sorry. We regretted it the moment we signed the papers, but Dean wouldn’t let us take you back. We tried so hard. We tried everything. Please. Please, Nikki. We loved you, but we thought the cause needed us. And you were so strong. You were the best child. We thought if anyone could help Dean, it would be you. We thought you would save us. We thought you were our savior.”

  He fell to his knees as he spoke the endless stream of words. He crawled toward me, reaching for me. I stepped back, frowning. His words slid through the light and dark parts of my mind, some words lost to the too-bright spot, others sinking into the shadows with me.

  I pulled my knife from the sheath at my hip and dropped the shadows from my mind, making it all bright spaces.

  “Nikki, please. Oh, God. Please.”

  “Who’s Nikki?”

  T W E N T Y - O N E

  Ollie

  “I thought I might find you in here.”

  I jumped and sloshed my coffee over the mug’s rim. It splattered against Dean’s rug, staining it. I turned around to find Luke hesitating at the office door.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.”

  I rubbed the toe of my boot in the coffee spill to grind it deeper into the rug. After the meeting with my father yesterday, I hadn’t slept well and the coffee was making me jittery. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “The Bautista boy came around this morning. The nurses think he’ll be okay, but they’re keeping him sedated.”

  I sighed in relief. “That’s good news.”

  Luke came around Dean’s desk, where I stood propped against the edge. Together, we stood in front of a map that showed the entire stretch of Kodiak Island. Red pins marked attack locations, starting with Dean at the university, the Bautista family’s house, and a few other smaller incidents that may or may not have been Zero.

  “No closer to figuring out her base?”

  I took a sip of lukewarm coffee. “It would help if I knew her family.” My eyes ran over the pins again, over the randomness of it all. “There has to be a pattern.”

  “We can make Dean tell us her last name.”

  Darkness tinged Luke’s voice. I offered him a tight-lipped smile. “You know me. I’m always up for a good torture session.”

  But we both knew why I couldn’t: Dean was still too important. And worse, I needed him. “When will his usefulness run its course?” Luke asked, reading my thoughts too well.

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? I had to take advantage of Dean’s usefulness when it came to running Fear University and navigating the shark-infested waters of the Original families, all while waiting for him to come for me. I had to burn him before he burned me. It wouldn’t end well.

  “Soon,” I said.

  “He won’t let you take this school from him. It’s all he has, Ollie.”

  I didn’t care how much the school meant to him. It meant just as much to me. My mother had worked too hard and sacrificed too much for this place. I would fight to the death for Fear University, but I didn’t say that to Luke. There were things he didn’t need to know.

  “What I want to know is how she got from Anchorage to Kodiak. She’s not flying now, so how did she manage that first trip?” Luke asked, crossing his arms as he stared at the map.

  “The Commander,” I said. “If he sent her to kill Dean, then he could have put her on a plane.”

  “So why not fly all over Alaska killing the Original families? Why stay on Kodiak?”

  “Because Kodiak is personal. She came here to kill Dean, and she came to make Fear University pay.”

  “You think that’s all it is? What if the Commander has his own agenda?”

  “That would be enough for me.”

  Luke studied my profile for a long moment. I felt his scrutiny like ants across my skin. He was reading me too closely, seeing me too well. If my mother had lived all those years ago, I doubted she could have read me as well as Luke did.

  I went on before he could ask the question, the one that would draw too many parallels between me and Zero. “She’s staying close because it’s comfortable, which makes me think she’s from here. If I knew her family name, I would have a place to look.”

  “You think they’re next, don’t you?”

  “I think if my parents had turned me over to a mad scientist for some experiment, they would be high on my kill list. But that’s just me.”

  I tried not to think about Hex and our meeting yesterday. I tried not to, but I failed. I was already picturing the way he had spoken and smiled and watched me like he knew me, which really bothered me. Hex bothered me. For all my mother’s love, and for all she had seen in him, my father was no better than Zero’s parents. He had fallen into this world’s darkness, and he had lost his way. When my mother stole me away from him, maybe she had known, in his hands, a halfling like me would be the wrong weapon for this war. Just like Zero was.

  “Okay.” I nearly jumped at Luke’s voice. He paced toward the map and leaned in close to study the island. “We have a limited amount of space. We know where she’s attacked, and we know where she might have attacked. It’s all over the place. We need a way to make a list to see all the other university-tied places she might go after.”

  I frowned, lost in thought. “A list …”

  “But one from the eighties.” Luke tapped his fi
nger on the map. “I can name most of the safe houses, family locations, weapon caches, and everything else, but that’s modern information. Those places change every few years for security reasons. That’s also why the families move around so much. We need an old list.”

  Lists. Maps. Names. I jumped off Dean’s desk and tore open the drawers I’d rifled through days ago. It took me a minute to find them, but I jerked out the dated maps and pages of information on miscellaneous intel collected over the years. I spread the maps out over the floor behind Dean’s desk.

  Luke crouched beside me. “What’s this?” He held down one corner of a map before it could curl back up.

  “It’s nothing complete,” I said, scanning the map. It had a few marked safe houses. Some of which might have been family homes, if the family had been brave enough to harbor wounded or running hunters. “But we can piece together enough information to get an idea of where she might go.”

  Luke flipped through the scattered pages on the floor. “This isn’t enough. Some of this isn’t even the right decade.”

  I shoved my hair back from my face and eyed the top of Dean’s desk, which probably hadn’t been cleaned off since the eighties. He had filing cabinets and countless log books on his bookshelves.

  “Dean doesn’t throw anything away. I’d bet my left nut he has more maps in here.”

  Luke followed my glances and sighed. “This is going to take forever. Besides, you don’t even have a left nut to bet. I would know. I’ve checked.”

  I grinned at him, my heart pumping. We were closing in on Zero. “Then I’d bet yours.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  * * *

  That evening, as the sun dipped just below the horizon and Luke was asleep, slumped against the wall, a knock sounded at the door. I stood from the floor and turned around as Luke stirred. “Come in,” I called.

  A beat later, Sunny slipped inside Dean’s office. She looked pale.

  Before she could say anything, I asked, “Who’s dead now?”

  “We don’t know if it’s her, but Eve said you wanted to know of every attack on Kodiak.”

  “What happened?”

  Sunny swallowed heavily. “It looks like an animal attack, but the hunter who found the body isn’t sure. The body is Hans Lange, a local retired hunter.”

  “Lange isn’t an Original family,” Luke said, rubbing at his eyes. He popped up from behind the desk, and Sunny shot me a dry look.

  “Hey,” I said, holding up my hands, “we were putting together a list of possible attack locations on Kodiak. That’s all. If she’s attacking a non-Original, that might be important.”

  “He had guards on his estate. They’re all dead too.”

  “What family would have personal guards?” I asked, looking at Luke.

  He shrugged. “The worried kind?”

  “Or,” I said, “the guilty kind. Let’s start back through the family records and look for any properties connected to the Langes. Zero’s base might be on one of them.”

  “But if he isn’t tied to Zero? Then we’ll be wasting our time looking for his properties. We need to be certain he’s the one, because our time will be better spent on finding possible locations she might go to next.”

  I wrinkled my nose at Luke. He had a point. “How did he die?” I asked Sunny.

  Sunny’s fingers worried a loose button on her shirt. “He was pulled apart. Haze and Eve think it was just an animal. It could have been a bear …”

  “And what do you think?” I asked my best friend.

  She had trouble meeting my eyes, but when she finally managed it, she said, “I looked at the pictures the hunter took. The body is a few days old, but he had cuts all over him. The lacerations were clean and deep and nothing like what an animal would do. She wasn’t scared or uncertain this time, Ollie. She was purposeful. Methodical. She was killing him, but it was slow. It had to be her. No animal could do that.”

  “And the guards?” Luke asked.

  “Heart attacks, but we’d need an autopsy to be sure.”

  Luke cursed. “She overloaded them with that pain control thing she can do.”

  “He didn’t have a wife or any other kids with him?” I asked carefully and kept myself from glancing at Luke.

  Sunny shook her head. “He lived alone. His wife died of cancer two years ago. They had no children. The hunter who reported the murder was a local to the area, so he knew the family well. He said they’d tried having kids, but the wife always miscarried.”

  “Why would she kill one guy?” I asked Luke. “One random guy out in the middle of nowhere? And to kill him like that? She’s never done it that way before. He has to be important.”

  “Or maybe her behavior is escalating,” Luke argued. “Maybe she’s just that sick.”

  “It’s her father. It has to be.”

  “If you’re wrong and we waste our time on him, she could kill another family.”

  I didn’t need to hear Luke’s reasoning. He might have a point, but this felt right. It made sense. I would have done the same thing. And while it sucked that this guy was dead, if he was Zero’s father, then he’d gotten what he deserved.

  “Get the others, please,” I told Sunny. “We’ll need help going through all this.”

  With the help of Sunny, Eve, Haze, and Hatter, we made quick work of the information in Dean’s office. If he wasn’t such a dinosaur and had entered everything on the computer, it would have taken seconds. But when the moon was high in the sky, we had an almost bare map of Kodiak. We’d removed a horde of green pins until only two remained, both of which were old docking stations near the whaling hubs of the fifties. Neither felt right. They were too far from the action and too isolated. And Zero would have been too young to remember them when her family owned them.

  “Hey,” Sunny said, perking up from her spot on the floor by the bookshelves. She scrambled to her feet and rushed over to my map. “I think I have something!”

  I rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes. We’d thought we’d “had something” countless times before, and the shine had worn off on my enthusiasm. “Where?”

  Sunny checked the page she carried against the map, her eyes darting back and forth. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh shoot.”

  My spine tingled at the dread in her voice. Everyone else put down their work and closed in around us. “What is it?”

  Sunny picked up a green pin and, fingers shaking, placed it on the map.

  “Shit,” Luke hissed. The others mumbled similar curses.

  The pin was only a handful of miles from the school. I could have run to the location. We’d passed it on our way to rescue the supply truck. We’d been within spitting distance during our meeting with Hex.

  “It’s an old caribou farm. Mr. Lange used to slaughter caribou and supply the school with meat in the mid-eighties,” Sunny whispered. “She would have grown up there.”

  “That’s it,” I said, eyes locked on the pin. “It has to be.”

  “Jesus Christ, we could probably see it on a clear day from the top of the fence.” Eve ran her hands up and down her arms like she was cold. I didn’t miss how she inched closer to Luke, seeking his warmth.

  “Tonight.” I turned to the others. “We go scope it out tonight. See what’s there.”

  Luke was already shaking his head. “We need more time. Hex said aswangs were flocking to her.” He swore again viciously. “We’ve had a fucking herd of them just miles from our walls. They could have overrun us anytime they wanted.”

  “But they didn’t,” I said. “She wouldn’t do that. Not with so many innocent people here.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Sunny asked.

  Her words were a quiet challenge. She’d never believed Zero could be good. Maybe my need for Zero not to be a monster was blinding me. Maybe all I saw was a young girl who needed saving from herself. But shit, Sunny was supposed to be the optimistic one, not me. “Eve, stay here with Haze. Get hunters ready. We’ll att
ack tomorrow when the ’swangs are in day-form.”

  “It’s too—” Luke started again.

  “Then stay here. But I’m taking A.J. and Squeak. We have to stop her.”

  “I’m going.” Sunny crossed her arms, ready for a fight. She was right; there would be one.

  “Hell no,” I growled. “You’re staying here and working on your antidote. We need—”

  “I have a working batch.” Sunny’s words floored us all, except Hatter. “It’s not perfect, and there are a few minor things I need to work out, but I have something that will work in the field. If anything happens tonight, I need to be there to administer the right dose. The bane measurement is precise. You need me.”

  Another challenge. Sunny wasn’t backing down, and time was running out. But letting her go went against everything I felt in my heart.

  “She has a point,” Luke said cautiously, knowing he treaded on dangerous ground.

  Even Hatter added, “It works, Ollie. I’ve seen it.”

  “How do you know?” I fired back, eyes on Sunny.

  She lifted her chin. “I tested it.”

  “On who?”

  “On me.”

  I groaned. “I wish you would stop doing that.”

  “We all do what we need to do.”

  Sunny’s words were a knife twisting in my stomach. Beside me, the weight of Luke’s stare pressed down on me. This was what he’d been talking about: letting Sunny be who she needed to be. Otherwise, I would lose her.

  I glared at Hatter, but even he wasn’t arguing with Sunny’s logic. If she had an antidote that could help hunters fight longer against aswangs, then none of them would push for her to stay behind.

  “Fine,” I growled. “Everyone get ready. Be downstairs in twenty.”

  I followed the others out of the office, but paused at the door. I glanced back into the room and turned off the lights. We were close, I could feel it. I imagined Zero hovering in the room’s shadows, listening to us and watching us mark the path of her destruction with little pins across an old map.