by Meg Collett
“Mr. Abbot’s coward ass is drunk in a rook’s nest. He won’t miss it if we hurry.”
“I passed Dean going to the party.”
“I know,” Luke said, palming the card. “I followed him.”
I hadn’t seen or talked to Luke in days. I wanted to ask what he’d been doing, but I reminded myself that I didn’t care. My stupid eyes wandered down to his lips, remembering how they’d felt and tasted, his breath like the caramel candies he constantly ate. My breath hitched.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
My eyes snapped back up to his, totally busted. “Like what?”
“As if you haven’t ignored me all week like a spoiled brat.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not now. I want to see what’s in that lab, and I figured you did too. Are you in or do you want to go pout in your room some more?”
I waved down the dark stairwell, focusing really hard on not kicking him in the balls. “Lead the way.”
I followed Luke down to the lab, past the night nurse on duty in the ward and into the sterile east lab. I needed to see the big bad they were doing in the west wing. The lab might hold some answers that would help Peg and me figure out my situation when I went to her over winter break. I was also hoping if I saw whatever Dean was doing behind locked doors, hopefully it would make leaving a little easier. Though I hated Dean and his lies, this place and the people had gotten under my skin and close to my heart. I didn’t want to leave.
My skin itched at the thought of more running. I gritted my teeth against the feeling and crossed my arms over my chest, waiting as Luke opened the large steel door into the west wing.
He swiped the card. The silence as we waited for the door to unlock was unbearable.
“Are you sure—”
The unlocking beep interrupted me. Without a glance spared for me, Luke pushed down the handle and shouldered the heavy door open.
A wave of cold air hit us. Luke shivered and the skin tightened over my face. The air inside circulated from a fan overhead and smelled of chemicals and decay. I forced my feet to move away from the door and farther into the dark room. No lights flashed on above us.
From his pocket, Luke pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on. A wall of narrow and shallow doors over to our right. Glass cabinets full of tools and specimen jars to our left. And right in front of us, inches from my hand, a body laid out on a table.
Surprised, Luke jerked, sending the light upward to illuminate an entire row of metal tables, long and narrow, stretching out before us. All occupied.
I’d prepared myself to see anything, but my heart still thudded in my chest as I traced the hulking lines of the body closest to me, the massive claws, the glinting fangs. A ’swang switched to its night-form even in death. From the wounds to its head, I easily recognized it as the one who had attacked Peg. Luke cut me a scathing look like he recognized it too. I shrugged. He had his secrets, so I had mine.
“They’re examining ’swangs. That’s not too weird,” I whispered. Gross. But it made sense, I guessed.
Luke walked around to the front of the body and shined his flashlight into its damaged skull. “No, they’re examining their brains. Look.”
I really could have gone without looking, but I joined him at the front of the table with my breath held and peered inside its cracked skull. The brain was gone. Not that there had been much left after Peg had gone Rambo on its ass.
“Also,” I said, swallowing as I tried not to smell too much of the thick formaldehyde wafting off the body, “not that weird.”
Luke headed deeper into the room, and since he was the one with a flashlight, I followed. A few more bodies were covered, which Luke revealed with a calculated flick of his wrist. All ’swangs. Likely ones he and the guards had taken down during the attack over fall break. Hex’s pack. These were ’swangs who’d come for me, to rescue me. I averted my eyes as Luke studied their heads, noting each was without a brain.
Holy shit. Did I actually feel bad for these monsters? For dying because they’d come for me? I almost raked my hand through my hair until I remembered where I was and what I might have accidentally touched in here.
When Luke had examined at all the bodies on the tables, he crossed to the refrigeration unit on the other wall. “Of all the things I expected,” he murmured, “a morgue was not one of them.”
“Not that unexpected,” I defended. Ugh. What was wrong with me? Seriously?
Luke met my eyes. “Then why are only the highest up in the university allowed in? Why not the other doctors and nurses?”
I didn’t get to answer before he tugged the thick handle on the first door, which was a couple feet tall and wide. I knew what to expect as I opened the door farther for him, and he pulled out the retractable table. But some part in my brain registered the shape of this body was different, and when Luke pulled back the sheet, we stared down at the face of a human.
Black scars stood out on his gray face like thick, freshly inked lines. Down his neck, chest, and shoulders were more, zig-zagging across his skin like a horrible constellation. He wasn’t old. Not even close. I glanced up at Luke in time to see his horror, his shock slash across his face before he ripped the sheet back over the body. “You knew him,” I said.
“No brain like the others.” Luke’s voice was as icy as the body between us. He shoved the table back inside the shelf and grabbed the door from me before he shut it as silently as he could.
“You knew him,” I repeated.
“I went to his damned funeral. I saw them lower the casket.” He raised his eyes to mine, cold and glaring. “He had a hunter’s burial—a sacred sendoff, an honorable one, but his body is here.”
This wasn’t okay, I knew. This wasn’t expected. The ’swangs, sure. They were the monsters, though the guilt still nagged at me for thinking of them like that. Examining their brains was a reasonable jump. But the hunters? They deserved more than experiments and cold slabs. They were human.
“I’m sorry.” I knew it wasn’t enough.
Luke shook his head and turned to the next door. His shoulders were tense, his jaw dancing with every clench of his teeth. He was barely holding it together. “We don’t get many things,” he said under his breath. I walked to the next door, trying to see his face, but he kept it turned away from me. “Peace certainly isn’t one of them. Death is meant to be our resting time.”
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything to say. Never before had I felt like more of an outsider than I did now. There was no comfort I could offer Luke, because I didn’t understand. I felt more guilt for Hex’s pack laying on the tables in the open than I did for Luke’s friend. So I screwed my mouth shut.
One by one, Luke opened each door and pulled back the sheet. Some of the bodies were old hunters, some young, but Luke knew each and every one. Deaths, he said, that went back a month or so. They were all here, thirty dead, a number that didn’t count those who’d perished outside of Alaska. All with missing brains.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” he said after closing the last door. His last homage to a fallen hunter.
“The brains?”
“The rat studies. The ’swangs.” His eyes went to the doors. “Us. He’s looking for a connection. For a way to make us immune to pain. Like you. It’s the only way to explain why he took the hunters’ brains too.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. He might see the truth there. I understood this morgue all too well; I easily saw what Dean was looking for. He wanted to re-create a disease like mine. But maybe, like me, he had already figured out my disease wasn’t really a disease at all.
Hex’s words ran back through my head. These people will hurt you. They’ll cut you apart to figure out what makes you different.
Like he’d read my thoughts, Luke said, “Like you. That’s why Dean is so fixated on you.” His flashlight seared into my eyes. “Ollie, he doesn’t want you for some kind of super solider. He wants to study you, watch you
, see how you react to fear and pain. Then he wants to . . .” His eyes traveled back to the refrigerator doors, to the bodies within. Then, more quietly, he said, “You were right. He’s going to kill you.”
“It’s a disease,” I said, praying Luke wouldn’t hear the lie. “He can’t recreate that. I’m not special.”
“He can sure as hell try.”
I threw my hands up. “Then why hasn’t he killed me already? Why not get it over with and spill out my brains so he can pick through them and get his stupid fucking answers?”
“Because he’s not done experimenting with you. He doesn’t know all your strengths and weaknesses yet. He wants to see how far you’ll bend until you break.” I cringed at his words, but Luke didn’t notice or care. “Then he’ll kill you.”
“Great,” I mumbled, “something to look forward to.”
“We’re getting the hell out of here.”
I didn’t object, worried if we stayed a moment longer in this morgue, Luke would connect more dots about how special I really was. He didn’t know the full truth about being able to communicate with the ’swangs in their night-form or the latest development in my specialness: feeling pain after being bitten. But I didn’t underestimate him enough to think he couldn’t make the leap and realize what I already had. What Dean might have realized too: that if I were laid out in this morgue, cold and naked and brainless, I would be with the ’swangs, not the humans. Perhaps he’d even known from the beginning.
Peg was right when she’d said it was too dangerous for me to stay here, but I couldn’t bear for anyone to learn I was their enemy, a half monster. Let them know I was a murderer. That I was messed up and mean and a bitch. Let them know that. But not this. Never this.
Especially not Luke or Sunny.
Our hurried footsteps echoed across the lab, the hiss of the door sealing behind us, locking with a beep. We didn’t talk as we fled through the east lab, but Luke’s eyes flicked over to where the rats were kept for the fear conditioning tests. Was he thinking I was the ultimate conditioned rat? I was. We took the steps two at a time, only slowing when we snuck past the ward entrance. Then up more steps and slipping into the main entry.
The students were coming back from reenactment. Moving the party from outside to inside. We blended in with them easily, our shocked, freaked-out faces perfectly matching theirs but for completely different reasons.
A hand reached for mine, surprising me because Luke was on my other side. I looked over, half expecting to see Thad, but instead, Sunny looked back at me, her eyes wide and terrified, cheeks slick with tears. She was trembling and unable to form words. I should have been out there with her during the reenactment or made her leave with me. Like a good friend. Instead, she’d watched it alone. She whimpered, needing me to hug her like a normal friend.
Had she pictured her dead brother? Imagined what it had been like for him to be ripped apart and eaten? From her apparent anguish, she had.
But if I looked too closely I saw her stretched out in the morgue, her pretty head cracked open and brainless.
I backed away, pulling my hand from hers. Through the crowd, I saw Hatter threading his way to us, his eyes fixed on Sunny’s wretched face. A sob broke free from her mouth as I shook my head. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
“Ollie,” Luke said, shocked. He and Sunny watched me back away, bumping into people as I made my retreat.
Hatter reached Sunny and pulled her against him, tucking her head beneath his chin so that she was turned away from me. If looks could kill, Hatter would have slayed me right there. I deserved it.
I deserved a slot in the morgue amongst the ’swangs. Where I belonged. If my friends looked too closely at me, they would see the truth.
Luke’s shocked expression burned into my back as I fled into the Death Dome. He didn’t follow.
I crashed up the stairs, once again the only one in the dorms, and raced for my room. I didn’t wait for lockdown. I slammed the door shut behind me, forcing it to lock early. Locking the monster inside. I nearly fell to my knees as I staggered toward my bed, tears completely blinding me. Pain like I’d never felt tore through me, ripping me to ribbons. My ribs were scalding pokers stabbing my insides. My heart a steak on the grill, charred and burnt over and over.
I hit my bed with a heavy thump. Immediately, I reached for the razor under my pillow, the cold metal a new kind of disgust. But I had to know. I dug it into the pad of my thumb, watching mutely as a huge tear of blood welled in the new wound.
I didn’t feel a thing. On the outside.
S E V E N T E E N
Monday came quickly. I hadn’t moved from my bed other than to use my little bathroom or stare at my reflection in the mirror. I’d thrown away the razor sometime on Sunday, not trusting myself to stop testing my lack of pain.
The doors unlocked with a resounding snap across the Death Dome. Numbly, I stood and dressed, pulling on whatever I’d left on the floor from Saturday night. I grabbed my backpack, not certain what books were still inside, and slid open my door. The students were mostly gone, only the late stragglers rushing by me.
A moment slipped by before I realized why everyone was on time today of all days. Finals. A day of testing. Testing that I’d studied for with Sunny. My stomach twisted, but I walked down the metal gangway toward the stairs, putting one foot in front of the other.
My first test—Fear Theory—was to the left, second floor of the west wing, but I went straight. I knew I needed to take the test, but I needed some air to clear my head. With a swipe of my card, I was outside.
Instead of the sun in my eyes, there was Luke. Hulking and bearing down on me with a vicious, ripping growl. He’d been waiting on me. Before the door closed, he had me back inside. I didn’t object as he towed me toward the west wing, a string of curses constant on his lips.
He threw open my Fear Theory class door and deposited me inside. Every student’s head snapped up, their precious quiet disturbed. “She got lost,” Luke snapped at Mr. Abbot, who was ready to object. “Because she’s stupid. A complete idiot. Total asshole.”
“Miss Andrews.” Mr. Abbot turned back to his book, which he was reading at his desk. “Please take a seat. You’ll get no extra time at the end.”
“She won’t need it.”
I started to walk away when Luke grabbed my backpack and pulled me back to whisper in my ear, “You better actually take the test, or I swear I’ll put you in that morgue myself.”
“Great pep talk,” I muttered, trying to pull away from him. Finally, he let my backpack go, and I stumbled forward.
The classroom’s door slammed shut, but I didn’t hear him stomp away, so I figured he was going to wait right outside, ready to haul me to my next exam.
The professor handed me the exam and a pencil. Some students watched me take my spot in the very back, their expressions concerned and friendly, but most ignored me. I dropped my backpack onto the floor and sat down, staring at the paper in front of me. I could leave it blank, but I had to pass if I had any hope of leaving for winter break. It wasn’t a guarantee of Dean’s trust if I passed finals and Fields. But it was a good start.
So I lowered my head and took the test. When the bell rung, I’d been done for twenty minutes. I’d aced the test; Sunny had prepared me well, even if we hadn’t studied in over a week.
As I walked to the front, one of the last ones to turn in my paper, Luke stalked in. Before I handed over my test, he ripped it from my hand and looked over it, making sure I’d answered every question. When he was certain I’d completed the test, he tossed it at Mr. Abbot and towed me to my next class.
* * *
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Luke slammed the door to his bedroom as I set my backpack on the floor. I was exhausted, mentally drained. Six exams in one brutal, tiring day. The Combat and Weapons Theory exams had been the worst and longest. But I’d dug into them, relished them, needing at least someone—even if it was the professor
grading them—to know that I hadn’t given up. That I could have made it as a civvie here at Fear University. I wasn’t leaving over winter break because I was too stupid to handle the school.
I needed someone to know that.
“What do you mean?” I sighed and sank to the edge of his bed, pulling harshly on my cramping fingers to straighten them back out.
He flung a stack of books off his desk and onto the floor with a bat of his hand. I looked up, brows raised at his outburst. All ten fingers thrashed against each other, his chest humming with a low growl. “You know exactly what I mean! Why were you leaving this morning? What happened with Sunny after the party?” He stalked over to me and got into my face. “Why are you being such a bitch?”
Fine. I lost it.
The violence singing in my blood was a siren call impossible to ignore. Didn’t want to anyway. I punched him in the mouth, satisfied when his head snapped back and blood spattered from his busted lip onto my knuckles. “Don’t call me a bitch, asshole.”
Recovering with a ripping growl, he grabbed my chin faster than a blink. “Don’t call me an asshole.”
His pupils were so wide and engulfing that his eyes looked entirely black. He was totally losing control with me. The first lick of fear sliced through me, and I loved it. Wanted it. Deserved it.
He shoved away from me, but I didn’t let him retreat or gather himself. I didn’t know why I did it, why I needed to see him completely lose control with me now, of all times, when I knew I was leaving. Maybe it was because I might never have another chance. Maybe it was because I wanted to tell myself he wouldn’t hate me when he knew the truth about me. Maybe I really was a monster. But I didn’t back down.
When he went to open the bedroom door, to stalk out and likely leave me here, I stepped in front of him and slammed the door closed. We stood so close that our chests touched, his dark eyes glaring down at me, each breath exhaling through flaring nostrils.
“Move,” he commanded. He wanted me to step away, to relent like everyone else did around him, but I didn’t. I knew he was afraid of acting like his father, but I wasn’t. I craved that kind of violence.
