Paper Tigers
Page 22
No one would die tonight. Tonight was not a fight.
Just as I’d expected, the hunters on Dean’s mission dropped their weapons faster than I could step into the moonlight. They shoved their hands into the air and pleaded for mercy.
That was the problem Dean hadn’t anticipated. He’d gotten the cowards. By splitting Fear University, he’d made the hunters and professors and students and families choose. He’d drawn a line. And it wasn’t a line drawn in sand. It was etched into concrete—absolute and unmoving.
It was the line between those who fought only for the pride of their last names and those of us who fought for whatever was right.
The line never shifted because the difference between the people on either side was immeasurable. And Dean had picked the wrong side. His hunters crumbled in the face of my aswang army. They gave up the truck and the kids inside and ran.
We let them run.
I rolled open the truck’s back door and stared into the darkness. Nearly fifty pairs of eyes stared back. Some were too young to even remember this, but for the older ones like Zero, I smiled at them and said, “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. My name is Ollie Volkova, and I’m taking you home.”
T W E N T Y - S I X
Zero
Zero. Nothing. Zero. Nothing.
The rook’s nest cast dense shadows in the late morning hours. The guards along the wall were few and far between, and those who walked the line moved quickly with darting glances. Too many places to look and not enough eyes.
They never saw me standing here, half in shadow, half in the light as I watched the courtyard’s activity. Beneath red- and white-checkered umbrellas, students gathered around their teachers for a small class. In one of those small groupings, I spotted the boy. The one I thought I’d killed in that home full of pictures and love and the smell of pancakes. But here he sat, at the table with the other students, with a bandage around his throat. What was his name? The name his mother had screamed? Sam? I forced myself to look away from him before I crashed out of my carefully constructed darkness. At another table, music thumped from a speaker. Young kids, far younger than the other students, scampered about, chasing one another and squealing beneath the spring sun. They must have been the children from the lab, the ones I’d left behind. The ones I hadn’t even known existed when Thad broke inside and rescued me. At Fear University, the kids had bounced back in the few weeks since the raid on the lab. Children were resilient. Strong. Brave. When had I lost that? I couldn’t ever remember being that free.
Amid the humming vitality, hammering and sawing echoed as the massive hole in the fence received the last few repairs. It was rowdy and bright and too far into the light for me to reach.
I spent a lot of time in the darkness these days. I kept it curled tight around my mind until I couldn’t think at all, until I felt nothing but the soft caress of emptiness.
“Is it helping?”
I flinched. The Commander stood beside me, his hunched form bright beneath the sunlight. He swept his dark hair from his eyes and smirked at me. A splatter of blood marred one side of his face. He looked exactly like Thad. Exactly.
He was never real. He was never really there. My mind had made him up because it was fractured. And now, to torture me further, I saw Thad when I looked at the Commander.
I whimpered and slunk a little farther into the corner. “I made you up,” I whispered.
“Does that make me any less real?”
“No one can see you.”
“You can. That’s all that matters.”
It wasn’t all that mattered. In the white place, it had mattered. It had meant the world to me. The Commander had been my world. But out here, in the bright, it didn’t mean a thing.
Beneath the rook’s nest, footsteps drummed toward me. My spine tightened, but I leaned forward enough to see the base of the fence. Along a dirt trail, Ollie rounded the corner of the fence at a full sprint. Her blonde hair streamed behind her, and her mouth hung open in a solid gasp for air. A step behind her, Luke Aultstriver followed.
They streaked past, racing toward the front gate. Whatever finish line they’d set, Ollie crossed it first. She skidded to a stop and whooped, bouncing on the balls of her feet while Luke slowed to a stop. He grinned a crooked smile at her and said something I was too far away to catch. Laughing, Ollie punched his shoulder. Still talking, they started the walk back to the courtyard
“And that matters?” the Commander asked.
“It matters the most,” I whispered.
But my words must have carried. Ollie paused and turned, lifting her face toward the rook’s nest where I stood. She shielded her eyes against the spring sun, and for a second, I thought she might have seen me before I shrunk back into the shadows.
Her smile softened at the corners of her mouth. Sad, like she knew I was here just watching. A few steps ahead, Luke paused and called back to her.
She inclined her head toward me before turning to follow him. The gesture had looked like an invitation. A welcome.
“You don’t need this,” the Commander said. He held out his hand to me.
I wavered as I watched Ollie put her hand in Luke’s, their touch so easy and perfect. She bounced along beside him, chattering as the children swept across the courtyard to her. She was the bright. The light. She was everything I wasn’t. She might have invited me inside the walls, but I would never quite fit.
I took the Commander’s hand. “You’re right,” I whispered.
We disappeared because, in the end, he was all I had.
It might not have mattered in the bright, but to me, in the dark, it mattered the most.
About the Author
Meg Collett lives deep in the hills of Tennessee where the cell phone service is a blessing and the Internet is a myth of epic proportions. She is the mother of one giant horse named Elle and three dogs named Wylla, Mandy, and Drax the Destroyer. Her husband is a saint for putting up with her ragtag life.
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Other Books by Meg Collett
The Fear University Series
Fear University
The Killing Season
Monster Mine
Paper Tigers
The End of Days Trilogy
The Hunted One
The Lost One
The Only One
End of Days Trilogy Box Set
The Days of New Serials
(an End of Days spin-off series)
Speaking of the Devil
Full of the Devil
Better the Devil You Know
Devil in the Details
Give the Devil His Due
Days of New Complete Box Set
Canaan Island Novels
(contemporary women’s fiction)
Fakers
Keepers
Hiders
Novellas
Little Girls and Their Ponies