by Meg Collett
I snorted. “Like you could.”
“Ollie—”
“Stop. Don’t give me whatever shit was about to come out of your mouth. Maybe I like it rough. Maybe I want you to come for me when you’ve been bitten. Ever thought of that?” From his shocked silence, I guessed not. “So keep your little chivalrous comments to yourself because they piss me off.”
Luke let the subject drop, but I knew he didn’t like it. We sat on his bed for a while, not saying anything. Eventually, I broke the silence. I bumped my shoulder against his. “You scared me last night, you know. You were very bloody.”
“Yeah, well, you’re scaring me now, so we’re even.”
After a long moment of silence, I whispered, “Am I in trouble with Dean?”
“We have to be really careful.” Luke kissed the side of my forehead. It was the softest, gentlest gesture I’d ever received. Normally people tried to break me to see if I would scream. But Luke was here to hold me together. In that moment, I realized I never wanted to leave this place, leave this man.
T W E L V E
Fall break’s rapid approach meant a sense of excitement and anticipation crackled in the air constantly. It was the last break before finals, the big Halloween party, and Fields, which was less than a month away. After Fields was the three month long winter break.
I knew from my classes and talking with students that winter break was a big deal. Nearly all the hunters went north to different bases across the northernmost parts of the United States, Canada, Greenland, and Russia. Only during this time would so many hunters cluster in concentrated areas, because the ’swangs also collectively migrated north to reproduce.
Reproduction with ’swangs was another hot topic in my theory classes. They flocked north for the winter solstice, where they would experience almost constant darkness, which left them in their night-forms nearly continuously for their mating rituals, which had never been documented, though many scientists traveled north with the hunters to capture the phenomenon on film. The ’swangs were also hyper aggressive and extremely territorial. More hunters died during the winter solstice than any other time of the year. More ’swangs too.
Kill or be killed.
As the killing season quickly approached, I tracked its progress by the shortening days, longer nights, and earlier curfew. Even without the shorter days, I sensed the coming solstice by the increasing anxiety amongst the students, the tension in the professors, and the vigilance in the hunters. We were all entering into a time when the ’swangs had the edge, and we knew it.
For once, our lunch table was quiet enough that Sunny and I managed to carry on a conversation without having to shout. Most students were busy packing for fall break or had already left. Sunny and I had taken a quick reprieve from her packing to eat.
“Is Luke going north for winter break?” I asked. I knew it was just fall break right now, but my mind kept returning to the thought of him going north to Barrow during the elongated winter break, where most of the hunters based in this area went since it was the northernmost point in Alaska and a decent-sized town that would need protection. Seeing all the students leave for fall break left me wondering what I would do for winter break.
Sunny looked up at me in surprise. “I assume so. That’s where his family lives.”
I lowered my spoonful of mashed potatoes and stared at her. After Luke and his father had argued weeks ago, I’d wondered where Killian Aultstriver had disappeared to. “His family lives in Barrow? Isn’t that extremely dangerous?”
“No more than anywhere else. Well, except during winter. Then it’s basically our frontlines of the war.” Sunny wrinkled her nose in thought, making her glasses inch up her face. “So, yeah, I guess it is pretty dangerous.”
I couldn’t imagine living at the front of a war with my family and small child. But then, this was Killian Aultstriver. He’d probably had Luke fighting up there since Luke could hold a knife.
“Who protects the school if all the hunters go north for winter break?”
“The older hunters and professors stay behind, but the university will be pretty safe because most of the ’swangs will be north. Almost all of the students leave for their family’s safe house, so there isn’t much to protect anyway.” Sunny polished off her lunch and pushed the tray away. When she leveled her serious gaze at me, I knew what was coming.
Before she could launch into another sales pitch, I held up my hand. “Seriously, Sunny. I’m fine staying here.”
“But are you sure you don’t want to come home with me? It would be fun, I promise!”
She’d been begging me to come home with her during fall break for weeks now, but, honestly, I wanted to be alone. I needed the privacy to research my ability to chat up ’swangs. “I’m sure it would, but I don’t want to infringe on your time with your family. I know you’ve missed them. Besides, I have to study for finals. I’m really behind in economics.”
“Do you still want me to show you the genetics section in the library?”
“Yes!” I said a little too excitedly. Sunny had told me about a section in the library where extensive records were kept of each hunter’s kills and bite reactions. All the genealogical records were stored there as well. If I had any hope of figuring this out, it would be in those books. “Want to go now?” I asked a little more calmly.
“Why do you need to do this genealogical research again?” Sunny asked for the hundredth time. We gathered up our trays and put them by the dishwashers before heading out the door.
“I want to learn more about all this. You don’t get it because this has been your life since you were born. It’s an outsider thing,” I said, bumping shoulders with Sunny.
“You’re not an outsider.” She rolled her eyes, finally laughing with me. Keeping what had happened that night with Luke and Hatter a secret bothered me. I hated lies. But having her constant smiling, reassuring presence helped me deal more than she knew.
We walked through the quiet halls; classes were canceled the day before break so students could pack and get ready for their trips. The classroom doors were closed, the lights off inside. Above us, the power-saving fluorescents cast a dim luminance that made me feel like we were walking through a deserted building. When we got to the library on the second floor in the east wing, the place was just as empty. Even the librarians were getting ready to leave.
Sunny and I heaved the old wooden door open and turned on the lights. Immediately, the scent of old pages and leather hit me. The prison-vibe the school sported had been turned down a notch due to all the thick rugs and brown leather chairs spaced throughout the room. Rows upon rows of book shelves lined the walls with a separate maze of shelves filling the center of the room. Sunny bobbed and weaved through the library like she knew it better than the back of her hand. She led me to a forgotten corner where huge leather binders sat on the shelves, labeled with years and letters of the alphabet. All the binders took up five floor-to-ceiling shelves, which were positioned to form a little room of its own with thickly cushioned chairs covered in a fine layer of dust and a wobbly table in the middle.
I sighed as I looked along the numerous shelves. There were thousands of binders for me to go through. Figuring out my problem was going to be harder than I thought.
Big surprise.
“That’s a lot of records,” I said.
“And they’re not even complete.” Sunny heaved down one large binder and thumbed through the thick vellum pages. “We didn’t record family history until the first European contact in Alaska during the 1700s. Those are the earliest binders you’ll find. All the stuff from before then, when it was just the Alaskan native tribes and the migrated Filipino families keeping the ’swangs under control, is lost. So the ten families—the Originals—listed in the first binder are the ones we can date back the furthest.” She shrugged, as if talking about centuries of families fighting monsters was no big deal.
“How did the families grow to be this big?” I eased one of t
he older binders off the shelf and carefully opened it, the leather creaking and cracking. The ink was dotted and washed out in spots, but filled pages and pages with names and family descriptions, all painstakingly written by hand.
“Russian settlements. Gold rush. Army bases. Oil. Anything that introduced new people to the Originals. Eventually they mingled, and you get to the number of families and descendants we have now.”
I pointed to a small stack of binders marked with dates in the mid-Nineteenth Century. “Why are there so few binders here?”
“Smallpox outbreak on Kodiak from the Russians. The hunter families practically started over after that.”
“When did you learn all this?”
“Middle and high school. We learn all the history of the families then, or if you have a mother and grandmother like mine, you know them before you can talk.”
I groaned. “I’ll never catch up.”
“But it’s good that you want to learn.” Sunny smiled at me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her my real reason for wanting to learn about her history was a purely selfish one.
“Yeah.” I mumbled the word, unable to look her in the eye.
“Do you want me to help you go through some of them?” she asked, eyeing the huge stack already on the table in the genealogical section’s nook.
“That’s okay. Let’s go finish your packing.”
Sunny sneezed. “Okay good. Cause this place is really messing with my sinuses.”
* * *
The next day was a flurry of activity amid the first snow of fall. The tiny flakes melted instantly on the unfrozen ground, but the nippy air added to the excitement buzzing through the school.
To avoid students scurrying around like rats on a wheel, I headed to the library after saying goodbye to Sunny. Luke’s injuries kept him holed up in his room, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone else anyway. There was something about seeing parents embracing their kids with hugs and excited chatter about all their great plans that made my stomach feel like I’d eaten a boulder. Actually, there wasn’t something about it. It was everything about it.
Everything I would never have.
Back in the library, I hauled out a binder from the oldest year and settled into a chair. The binder’s spine creaked open, sending a wave of musty-smelling pages and dust into my face. The scent comforted me, like I was reaching into the past and really touching history. It wasn’t my history, but if I closed my eyes and sat perfectly still, I almost imagined it was. Like if I wormed my way into this world, one day a binder like this would have my name in it. Maybe if I became a really good hunter, many books would contain my legacy.
I pulled the binder closer to my face and took a deep breath, letting the history fill my lungs. I’d never let myself hope for a legacy before. But everything had changed now. I sat the binder back down in my lap and focused on the first page.
The page depicted a tree with a few thick branches. I counted ten, each with a family name on the branch. The Originals. I didn’t recognize many of the names, but a few stood out to me. Luke’s family—Aultstriver—perched on a branch near the top. The Lyons family sat on one of the other branches, which surprised me. Sunny certainly wouldn’t brag about her family being one of the Originals, but I thought she would have at least told me, especially when she brought me back here. She knew I would find it.
Then it came to me. For all her smiling, laughing, cheeriness, Sunny was horrified by her fear sim testing. Everyone had called her the Cowardly Lyon before my stunt with Jolene. Of course she wouldn’t tell me about her family. She would see herself as a disgrace to their name because she wasn’t going to be a hunter.
Sadness for my friend enveloped me. I wished she was here for me to hug. Who cared about those assholes who called her that stupid name? She was going to be a great doctor, and that was needed more than the hunters. Who would repair the hunters when they came back hurt and broken from a hunt? She would.
People would never call her that again, and I didn’t care who I needed to hurt to make it happen. I almost wished the students were still here; violence pulsed through my veins, making me lightheaded with its potency. I wanted to hurt them all for calling her that. And I wanted it now.
I stood and paced, working the violence out of my system, until I breathed normally again. When I’d recovered, I sat back down and picked up the binder again.
I recognized one other name on the tree—Bogrov. Dean’s family. That surprised me. I hadn’t pictured him as a hunter, but it would explain Luke’s weariness of him. Dean wasn’t trying to avenge his dead wife; he fought for an entire lineage of relatives who had died too young. I didn’t get why he was taking it so personally. It was horrible to say, but everyone had lost family in this war. Like the school’s freaking slogan should be about dying young. It was expected. So if Luke was right about Dean’s fanaticism, why did Dean seek vengeance so strongly?
There was more to the story. There had to be.
I flipped to the next page and the next, finding them carefully marked with each name in the original family, their birth and death dates, who they married, what their skills were. I didn’t stop until I got to Luke’s family. While some families had other occupations besides hunter, each name on the Aultstriver page had “hunter” listed out beside them. It took me a moment to understand the large number next to the word was the person’s ’swang kill count. I turned to the previous pages. Luke’s family had over triple the kills as the other families, which I confirmed by quickly skimming through the rest of the binder. Their kill counts were insane. Each member numbering in the thousands, while other families achieved a hundred or two at most.
What made Luke’s family so special? Did they train that hard? Luke’s cutting was certainly one sign of his family’s violent tendencies. But after hearing about Hatter’s upbringing, I knew other families employed the same strategies. Which meant Luke’s family had some other ability to help them kill so many.
I turned back to the front of the binder and took my time going through it again. By the time I picked up my fifth binder, I’d started a list of all the families as more added to the Originals through marriages, which were carefully picked and planned. Each new family that came into the fold had a documented list of assets and abilities that were added into the binder, as if the marriage match was assigned based on worth, not love.
I found a lot of information about ’swang saliva reactions, but none of them had anything to do with communicating or hearing the ’swangs’ thoughts. None of it boded well for figuring out my situation, or at least attributing it to their saliva. I let Luke believe I heard the ’swangs because of the saliva, but I knew the truth: I’d heard them before I was bitten.
What this said about me, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I desperately needed to find someone in these binders who had heard aswangs because of the saliva. At least it gave me a starting point for figuring out why I could communicate without being bitten. Unless hearing them had something to do with my medical condition. At the moment, without tangible evidence, it was the only thing that made sense.
When my stomach wouldn’t stop growling, I looked up. At my feet and on the small table beside me, stacks of binders towered up to wobbly, dusty heights. I checked my watch. It was dinner time, which explained the hungry gnawing in my stomach. I stood, dusted myself off, and left the library, leaving my pile of books behind. I doubted anyone would bother them, and I really didn’t feel like hauling those heavy things off the shelves every day.
I turned the library’s lights off as I left, tucking the history in for the night.
Beyond the library, the halls stretched out before me, empty and gloomy, like the whole world had disappeared while I was reading all day. My footsteps rang off the floor with each step. I was likely the only student on campus. Though the students were gone, the guards and hunters had remained, but they rarely ate in the cafeteria or wandered through the halls. So I really felt alone, and after being surrou
nded by so many people lately, I was surprisingly lonely.
That feeling disappeared when I arrived at the cafeteria and found that I wasn’t alone at all.
I scowled toward the one table where two people sat eating their dinner: Jolene and Thaddeus. Great.
I loaded up my tray from the single operating buffet. The meal wasn’t as elaborate as when school was in session, but it was enough to make me happy. I sat at the farthest table from Thad and Jolene, who ignored me as much as I ignored them. Fine by me.
Halfway through my meal, Jolene got up and dumped her tray with the dishwashers. She banged out of the cafeteria doors and disappeared down the hall. I watched her go with a scowl on my face as I munched on some asparagus, which was why I didn’t see Thad sit down at my table until it was too late to run him off.
“This seat taken? Guess not. Don’t mind if I do.” He sprawled across a couple chairs, kicking his feet up on the table and spearing a piece of chicken with his fork.
“What are you doing?” I reached over and swatted his feet off the table.
“Eating. What are you doing?”
“I would prefer if you took you’re eating elsewhere.” I didn’t want to be anywhere near Thad after all he’d said about Luke’s father. It was totally my luck that the one hunter who actually ate in the cafeteria was Thad.
He shrugged and kept on chewing his chicken. “I don’t want to eat alone.”
As much as I disliked him, I kind of understood the feeling. “Why didn’t you go home for break since you’re injured?”
“This is my post. Hunters don’t leave their posts. Besides, there’s no home for me to go back to.” He waved his fork at his throat. “Family died when I got hurt.”
The disinterested tone in his voice while talking about his parents surprised me, but this was Thad. “Do hunters like being posted here? I imagine being surrounded by young students all the time would suck.”
