Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

“My mother should have done that when she realized what you are,” I told him, my voice strong. “She was weak. But I’m not.”

  His paws twitched, scrambling at the frozen dirt. His back legs kicked and his body convulsed. The death throes. The final breath. His eyes closed, and as he breathed out his final exhalation of life, he whispered, Irena.

  I heard nothing else from him.

  My father was finally dead.

  Would my mother be proud? In this moment, right here, standing above my father’s dead body, would she look at me and smile?

  Behind me, the battle noises faded. The night went quiet, eerie with only the wind rattling the trees above us.

  I dragged my father’s body into the clearing. With his blood on my face, I dropped him amid his massive pack of aswangs. Fifty pairs of black eyes latched onto me.

  Between their bodies, I found my friends. Hatter rolled onto his side, holding his shoulder, which was a mangled mess of bites and blood. I saw fractured bone and the sliver of muscle that held the rest of his arm to his body. He would lose it.

  Sunny crouched beside him, her eyes flashing to the waiting aswangs. Blood and gore covered her, but I doubted any of it was hers.

  By the door into the slaughterhouse, Luke stumbled to his feet and met my eyes. His jaw and neck had been ravaged, his shirt shredded. He leaned against the building, needing the support. Then I noticed the wrong angle his leg hung at. He lost his balance and fell. He didn’t get back up.

  Master?

  I didn’t know which ’swang had asked the question. The single word seemed to come from all of them all at once, flooding my mind.

  Master-master-master-master-master-master …

  And then, Queen.

  The aswangs lay prone on the ground. Their backs curved into the air, their snouts pressed down, and their eyes watched me, waiting.

  Sunny tied off her tourniquet on Hatter’s arm, using his belt. Once it was as tight as she could get it, she stood and strode toward Luke, weaving between the limp aswangs. She kicked them out of her way when they blocked her path and stepped on tails and paws and noses until she reached Luke. She pressed a hand against his neck, checking for a pulse.

  She went still, searching, feeling.

  And I went cold, cold, cold.

  She looked up and met my eyes across the clearing, fifty ’swangs between us and my father, dead at my feet. “He’s lost a lot of blood,” she said calmly. “He needs a hospital or he won’t make it.”

  I unclipped the radio from my waistband. “Eve?”

  Static crackled. “Go ahead, Ollie.”

  “Bring the truck in. You’re clear.”

  “Over.”

  I returned the radio to my belt. Stay, I told the aswangs. And they obeyed. As I walked toward the building, their eyes drifted between me and Hex’s body. Some doubted me. Others reconsidered. Don’t, I warned them.

  Yes, Queen.

  At the door, I crouched beside Luke. His face was pale and tacky with blood. He didn’t open his eyes as I ran my hand over his undamaged cheek. He felt cold. Too cold. I leaned over and pressed a kiss to his mouth.

  “I love you,” I whispered against his lips. I stood. “Eve is bringing the truck in. Get them on the plane and back to the university.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Sunny said.

  I didn’t bother arguing with her. I had too many holes blasted through my chest to care. I stepped around Luke and headed inside, Sunny right behind me.

  The fight wasn’t over yet.

  There was still Zero.

  T W E N T Y - F O U R

  Sunny

  I’d thought the university stank of fear, but I hadn’t known fear’s true stench until I stepped into the slaughterhouse.

  There wasn’t a sliver of rock stuck inside a crevice in a crack in the wall spared the reek of terror. Of course a slaughterhouse would carry the stench. It flooded my lungs and simmered in my bones until I rattled with it, trembling and shaking and holding back a scream.

  All those animals … I was going vegetarian.

  “Are you okay?” Ollie whispered.

  The question jerked me free from my inward spiral. I shot a glance at her. “Obviously. She knows we’re coming.”

  Ollie couldn’t check the shadows in the animal keep fast enough. We walked farther into the central pen, our boots crunching over petrified, frozen straw and dirt and unsavory animal bits. The concrete half walls around us were stained dark with age and gore. Metal panels, long since rusted through, corralled various pens. We picked our way through the maze to the back of the slaughterhouse where the meat was processed.

  Ollie kept glancing behind us and around each corner. There were no lights. No moonlight. But Ollie carried her knuckles and whip like she might have a chance if Zero attacked. If the shadow girl wanted us dead, we were already corpses.

  I kept that to myself. I couldn’t bear the smell of Ollie’s fear on top of the stench already here.

  A sound echoed through the processing area. Ollie tilted her head, listening closer. “Someone’s talking,” she whispered.

  I nodded. I started toward the noise, but Ollie grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop. “What?”

  “Be careful,” she told me. In the dark, the blood on her face looked like a spiderweb. It was drying to her skin and losing its sheen.

  “Are you relieved?”

  Ollie hushed me. I’d spoken in a normal voice.

  “She knows we’re here. What? Do you think she just ignored the big battle outside?”

  Ollie rolled her eyes. “We don’t have to announce our presence.”

  It was my turn to scoff. “We all but sent up a smoke signal. So,” I said, drawing out the word as Ollie crept farther into the back of the slaughterhouse, “are you?”

  “Relieved? Of what?”

  “Your father.”

  Tension rippled across Ollie’s shoulders. She said, “He’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

  “Okay.”

  She shot me a look. I couldn’t quite tell what it meant.

  “Are you even worried about him?” she asked, frowning hard enough to wrinkle the scars along her jaw. A splatter of blood near her chin cracked. She swiped at it with the back of her hand.

  “Who?”

  She shook her head at me. This time, I recognized the disappointment on her face, though I had no idea what she was disappointed about.

  “He’ll probably lose his arm.”

  She was talking about Hatter, then. But why would I be worried about him? He wasn’t going to die. I’d tied the tourniquet myself. Sure, he would lose his arm, but he had the other one.

  “I guess you got your wish.”

  I sighed through my nose. Guess Ollie wasn’t worried about announcing our presence to Zero anymore since she’d turned all chatty on me. “What wish?”

  “For Hatter to stop hunting. He won’t be able to anymore.”

  A distant part of my brain reminded me I’d cared about him hunting once. The lesser version of me had cared. But this Sunny—the fearless version—couldn’t understand why it was a big deal. Ollie watched for a reaction, but I stared back at her. What was I supposed to feel?

  Right now, I felt nothing but an easy numbness. I was cotton-wrapped and hollow. Air filled me until I was buoyant. I floated around Ollie and swung open a door to a storage closet as empty as I was.

  “What does it feel like?”

  I pulled the door shut. Ollie waited for me. She wasn’t even looking around. Her heavy silver knuckles hung uselessly from the ends of her fingers. We stood in a dark, deserted building with a girl who could move through shadows and who was probably preparing to kill us this very minute, and it was me who Ollie kept dead center in her vision. I was the one she wouldn’t look away from.

  Where was the sense in that?

  I laughed at her. At the situation. At us. I laughed because this emptiness felt great. I never wanted to feel anything ever again.

&nbs
p; The door behind Ollie swung open. The rusted hinges squealed. Ollie spun around, knocking me back as shadows spilled out from the room on a rush of chilled air.

  “Ollie?”

  Ollie started, her eyes stretching wide. “Thad?” she called into the dark room. “Are you—”

  I slipped past Ollie and walked inside the freezer. It was as large as my dorm back at the university. I instinctively swept my hand up the wall beside the door and found a light switch. Four lamps suspended in each corner of the room blazed to life.

  “Oh my god,” Ollie choked out from behind me.

  Suspended in the middle of the room, on metal hooks, was Thaddeus Booker. The skin along his shoulders stretched and pulled around the rusted hooks pierced into his flesh. His bare toes scraped against the blood-stained floor. Beside him, an empty rolling tray wobbled on three wheels as if something or someone had knocked into it right as the lights turned on.

  This room smelled the worst. It was wallpapered in fear.

  Ollie swept past me and wrapped her arms around Thad’s waist. His chest was bare and slick with sweat despite the room’s chilled temperature. His blond hair hung lank and dirty, but I saw no obvious signs of abuse, aside, of course, from the nasty hooks in his shoulders.

  “Sunny, help me!” Ollie’s voice sounded scratchy with urgency. She shouldered Thad’s weight, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift him free from the meat hooks.

  I walked over, taking in the empty tray and pushing it aside. It fell over and clattered against the concrete. “Oopsie.”

  “What’s wrong with her? Is she okay?” Thad said, his voice as raspy as sandpaper.

  “Don’t ask,” Ollie growled. “Sunny, hurry the hell up.”

  I turned my nose away from Thad’s skin and slid my arms around him. “You’ll need a major tetanus shot,” I told him.

  “What the—”

  “On three,” Ollie said. “One. Two. Thr—”

  The lights went out. Thad cursed as we dropped him, and his body slammed against the hooks hard enough to rattle the chains. Ollie’s whip cracked in the air as a warning.

  “Stay back, Zero,” she said.

  “The Commander won’t be happy,” a voice answered from the doorway.

  The heavy freezer door slammed closed. I heard it lock from the outside. “That’s not good,” I said to no one in particular.

  “Zero?” Ollie spun in a slow circle. “We just want to talk.”

  “Is that what you told your father before you slit his throat? I was watching. I saw you. You didn’t even flinch.”

  The voice started from the door, but as Zero spoke, it slid around the room, circling us. From the back corner, a lamp flickered once then came to life, though the light seemed to filter through a dense veil. Zero stepped through the darkness, her gray eyes shining first, then her black skin. The shadows pulled back from her like smoke, and she was here, in the flesh.

  She wore a loose pair of scrubs, the material so faded I couldn’t discern the original color. Her skinny arms wrapped around her middle, but she didn’t shiver in the cold. Dark tendrils of hair spilled over her shoulders in clumps. She pushed a lock back from her face and stared at us, unsurprised and as empty as me.

  “My father wasn’t a good man,” Ollie said. She inched in front of Thad to shield him, but Zero wasn’t about to attack. Even I could tell that.

  There wasn’t any fight left in her.

  From the slump of her shoulders, to her shaky hands, to the wobble of her chin, I knew she was falling apart fast. She wasn’t a killer. Not even close. I was more of a killer than this young woman.

  “He deserved it?” Zero flinched as soon as she spoke. She darted a glance to the side of the room. Both Ollie and I looked, but nothing was there.

  Zero nodded. “Yes,” she said with reverence. Quiet. Meek. Her eyes swept to the floor. “They’re all bad men.”

  Ollie glanced between Zero and the empty spot. “Not all of them are bad, Zero,” Ollie said carefully. “I know you’ve—”

  Zero recoiled against the door, cowering. She nodded furiously toward the empty spot in the room and murmured, “You shouldn’t speak over him like that. You should respect the Commander when he’s talking. He won’t give you another chance.”

  Ollie’s lips parted. She glanced at me. I shrugged. “She’s lost it,” I whispered.

  At the door, Zero whimpered. Confirmation if I’d ever heard it.

  Behind us, Thad groaned. “She talks like that sometimes,” he said in his thick rasp. “About him. The Commander.”

  “Don’t speak over him!” Zero screeched. “He’ll kill you all. Don’t you understand?”

  “Oh,” Ollie said. She sounded sad like she understood. “Oh no.”

  “Wait!” Zero threw up her hands. She swung to stand between us and the empty spot. “Don’t kill them! Please! We can use them! No! No!”

  Ollie reached for Zero’s shoulder, but I grabbed her arm before she could touch the shadow girl. I shook my head. I smelled Zero’s fear and the edge of something sharper. Harder. Darker. The desperation that fear turns into when it festers too long. Once desperation couples with terror, it leaves a person willing to do anything and blinds them to the action. That was the place Zero stood in, and it smelled worse than fear.

  “Zero,” Ollie said instead. “Zero, look at me.”

  “I don’t want them to die,” Zero whispered. She shrank back against the wall, still holding her hands out. She was protecting herself, her eyes glued to the spot. “They’re like me.”

  “Zero!”

  At the harsh crack of her name, Zero’s smoke-gray eyes snapped to Thad’s face. I glanced at him. He’d lifted his head enough to meet Zero’s eyes. The rest of his body might have been uninjured, but his face showed the strain. He looked exhausted, finished, used up.

  “Listen to me,” he said just as forcefully. Zero nodded, whimpering. Ollie and I glanced between the two of them. “The Commander isn’t here.”

  Zero flinched. Her body shuttered into the shadows and back again like a flicker of light. For a second, all four lamps in the room blazed. She’d been keeping them dark with her control of the shadows. “He’s right there,” she whispered. “Don’t talk about him like that.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Thad,” Ollie warned, her eyes locked on Zero’s shivering form. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  I realized then who’d been keeping Thad. Who’d tortured him. It hadn’t been the Commander or anyone else. It was Zero.

  Zero was alone.

  She had been the entire time.

  “The Commander,” Thad growled, “doesn’t exist.”

  * * *

  Zero

  “Doesn’t exist,” someone repeated, but I couldn’t see.

  I couldn’t see.

  A choked scream tore from my throat, and I fell back against the wall, swiping at my eyes with my hands and raking my nails down my cheeks. I shuddered and threw myself into the shadows, but I hit a wall. I screamed again.

  Someone’s arms wrapped tight around me, sealing me off, sealing me in. Trapped. Trapped. Trapped! The word ricocheted bullet-fast through my mind. I saw the white place: white walls, white floors, white coats, white masks, white gloves. I saw my cage. I heard the wheels’ clack-clacking as the gurney rolled me down the hall, my arms and legs strapped down, a hood over my head. A pulse ticked in my ears from the headphones placed over my head. I was there again, and I was trapped. I couldn’t see.

  “Zero!”

  I opened my eyes. The blonde girl—Ollie—had me pressed against the floor, her hands clenching mine to keep my nails from my cheeks. I was choking, but no one had their hands wrapped around my throat.

  “Kill her!” Behind Ollie’s shoulder, the Commander stood. His dark hair fell over his eyes, hiding them from me. But his mouth moved as he screamed, “Kill her! Do it now!”

  “No! Please, he’s right there. He’s right there. Right behind you.” To the
Commander, I moaned, “Please. Please. I don’t want to kill anyone else. No more. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to.” Ollie’s soothing words pulled my attention back to her. When I looked at her, I didn’t see the Commander standing behind her. “You’re safe. Okay? We can help you.”

  They’d gotten the blond man down. He sat against the wall opposite me. When had that happened? How much time had passed? I was losing slivers of time more and more often.

  My eyesight shuttered again, and I heard his voice. “Zero. Do it. Do it.”

  He was there. Right beside me. When had he moved?

  “You hear him. You must,” I whispered to Ollie. “He’s right beside you.”

  Sadness drenched her ice-blue eyes. “He’s not.”

  She swept her hand out beside her, through the spot where the Commander was standing. Her hand passed through empty air. He was gone.

  I whimpered. My head hurt. It pulsed in time with my heart. The Commander had saved me from the white place. Could he move through shadows too? Had he been able to all along? He could have told me. He could have helped me learn. He could have done so many things to save me, and he hadn’t. He hadn’t.

  I couldn’t see him anymore. I couldn’t see the shadows in the room. It was all bright. Too bright. Everything was shining bright. And I couldn’t see.

  But one person knew. One person had spent more time with the Commander than I had lately. I turned to the blond man. “You know. Tell them,” I croaked. “Tell them he’s here. He’s real. You helped him get me from the white place.”

  “No. I didn’t help him. It was me, Zero. I took you from the white place. I broke into Lieutenant Milhousse’s lab, and I got you.”

  I shook my head hard enough to tangle my hair. I told myself I didn’t hear him. He just needed to see. “And he told you where to take me. He told you about this place when you said Anchorage wasn’t safe after the lab’s security raided your warehouse and took all those halflings.”

  “Wait,” Ollie interrupted, glancing back at Thad. “Milhousse has the halflings?”

  Thad’s jaw clenched. “Some were killed, but he took the rest. I tried to get back there, but”—his burning glare found me—“Zero turned the tables on me.”