by Meg Collett
“Ollie?” I whispered into the water, drops streaming into my mouth. “Are you there?”
I felt only the very real ache in my chest. Nothing else. Would I know if she was gone? Like Luke, did I have that power?
“I miss you.”
Nothing.
“You should come back.”
Still nothing.
Hatter knocked on the bathroom door. “Sunny?” he called.
I didn’t answer.
“We have to go. There’s been a ’swang sighting.”
T W O
Ollie
Death did not come after I’d spent so long wishing it would. I’d begged and prayed, and yet here I was. The ghost of those weeks with Max hummed in the back of my mind. My chest blazed with low-burning heat where he’d tried to cut out my heart. The skin pulled tight, but the pain had receded into a black smudge in my mind.
I wanted to sleep and forget, but instead, I kept thinking of my mother. Just when I thought I was getting close to knowing the woman she was, she’d slip away. Her life had fundamentally changed after falling for Hex, my father.
I opened my eyes, and there he was, standing above me with his black hair pulled into a bun at the back of his head, as though the thought had conjured the man himself. In the dim lighting, his paleness stood out like a specter hovering at my bedside. He sat down on the edge of the bed where I lay, his body moving with chilling ease. His dark eyes wanted to reassure me, but when he smiled, his teeth were much too sharp.
“Hex,” I said, breathing the word out in a rough rasp. I coughed.
“Olesya.” His voice was low and deep, more a rumble than actual words. He sounded like the night felt.
Faintly, so very faintly, I heard it: Tick tock.
A shudder tumbled down my spine.
He reached out and touched my cheek. It was tender and full of wonder, as though he couldn’t believe I was actually there. I pretended to fall back to sleep. I couldn’t bear his touch, and I wanted to slink away from him, but I couldn’t. I was frozen.
He leaned in close and said, “I’m so happy you’re home.”
* * *
“Ollie. Wake up. You can’t sleep forever.”
The girl’s voice sounded familiar in its cold, sharp beat. Her name floated up through my mind: Lauren. Lauren from the car ride away from Max, when I’d only wanted to die. I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even. I wanted to fall away again, back into the numbness.
“Wake up, you stupid bitch.”
Not even that got to me.
“I knew you were worthless,” she said, poking me in the chest, which felt irregular in its warmth and tightness. “We should have left you there with him. With Max.”
My eyelid twitched at his name.
“Max,” she cooed, but I schooled myself, keeping still. I started to sink away again. She didn’t bother me. Nothing could at this point. “Max. Max. Max.”
Nothing.
“Ollie Volkova breaks for no one.” She snorted. “But you look pretty broken to me.”
A weight around my ankles eased me down through the thick waters of exhaustion. I just wanted to sleep, fade away, and not care about anything. Not care about being a halfling. Not care about what had happened to my mother. Not care about Max.
Lauren’s frustrated sigh smelled like tomato soup and stale crackers. Her unhappiness was a balm. I liked it.
The chair beside my bed squeaked. I fought the urge to roll over as she leaned in close, her breath inches from my face. “I have a secret, you know. Do you want to hear it?”
My chest tightened against some prickling hold as I held my breath.
“I’ll tell you anyway.” She leaned in closer, her lips almost brushing against my ear. “Do you know why it took so long to find you? To rescue you?”
I went hot. Then cold. Then hot again. Memories threatened from the bad places. Words she and Thad had spoken during the drive away from Max. Something I hadn’t wanted to remember.
“Thad knew where you were days after you disappeared. Days, Ollie. We all knew.”
My fingers flexed on the bed. The cuts all over my body, from the places where Max had cut too deep, flared to life. My heart beat so hard I knew Lauren could hear it.
“We waited,” Lauren whispered. “We waited so he could break you. We wanted you in a million tiny pieces. The order to leave you there came straight from the top. From who, you ask?”
I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even taken a breath.
Lauren smiled, a wet cracking of her lips. “We waited because Hex told us to. Your own father left you there to fall apart.”
She leaned in and kissed my cheek. Not sweet. Mocking.
“We waited, Ollie.”
I reared off the bed and slammed my forehead straight into her nose. It broke, cracking wet like her smile. The blood splattered over me, and she flew backward, screaming and clutching her nose. Blood gushed between her fingers.
Her wild, light-colored eyes found mine. Mascara ran down her cheeks from her tears, her pretty dark hair disheveled from the tussle. She screamed again, this one muffled against her hands. She spat blood onto the floor beside my bed.
I swung my legs over the edge, ignoring the dizzy tilt of the room and the warning heat in my chest. A trickle of blood ran down between my eyes.
Lauren staggered back as I stood.
The door crashed open. “Ollie! Ollie, hang on. Stop.”
Thad.
I swiped the blood off my face, smearing it across my forehead like war paint. “I’ll kill you,” I told Thad, who barely flinched at the threat. My gaze swung back to Lauren. “And you too.”
She spat at me. “Fucking bitch.”
“Where am I?” I fired the question at Thad, who was still standing by the door, a wave of people at his back, craning their necks to see around him. I recognized none of them. The bedroom we were in was minimal, with white walls, a gray bed, and a geometrical rug. A little sitting area was positioned beneath the only window, which took up most of the wall. The ceilings stood high, the ductwork exposed. Faded brickwork took the place of paint or wallpaper.
“Reece!” Thad shouted over his shoulder. “Get in here and get Lauren. Now.”
A second later, a young man shoved through the crowd and past Thad, tossing a sharp glare my way. I noticed the familiar black scars running down his neck, his tanned skin, and his surfer-boy blond locks as he took Lauren’s hand and led her from the room. He’d been in the backseat staring down at me while Thad tried to push my heart back inside my body.
My heart. The tightness in my chest. I glanced down at myself and spotted the black stitches holding my skin together, holding my heart inside.
“We’re in Anchorage,” Thad told me once they were gone.
“What the hell for? Why didn’t you take me back to the base? To the university? When we spoke about leaving Barrow to meet up with the other halflings, I agreed because it was on my terms. Things have changed since then.”
“Maybe we should talk when you’re better.”
I turned around, my eyes landing on a purple crystal sitting on the bedside table. Hefting it up, I weighed it in my hand.
“Or we can talk now, if you want,” Thad said. He was already closing the door by the time I turned back around.
I flicked my chin toward the door. “Were those halflings?”
“Yes.”
“Like me.”
“Like us.”
My chest pulled again, straining against the stitches. I didn’t like those words, which might have meant I didn’t like myself, since, technically, I was like the other halflings.
“Where are Sunny and Luke? How long has it been?”
Thad leaned back against the door and crossed his arms, keeping half his attention on the crystal in my grip. “I don’t know where they are. Probably still in Barrow for the rest of the Killing Season. You’ve been asleep for nearly a week. We had to sedate you.”
“Why?”
<
br /> “You kept trying to tear out your stitches.”
It explained the tightness in my skin, the warmth, and the sudden flares of heat. I imagined it was likely sore and bruised, painful too. I felt none of that, of course. “Maybe I wouldn’t have needed stitches if you hadn’t waited.”
He had the good grace to grimace and look vaguely guilty. “If it makes it any better, I argued to get you faster.”
So it was true, then. Lauren hadn’t lied. They’d really waited to save me from Max on my father’s orders. They’d simply left me, supposedly one of their own, there. So much for being safer with people like me. I’d rather take my chances with Killian at this point.
“It doesn’t. Not even a little bit.”
“Ollie,” Thad started, his attention drifting to the crystal in my hand, “do you want to put down the crystal?”
I glanced down at my hand. Blood dripped from my fingertips onto the concrete floor, bright red and shining. I’d clenched the crystal too tight and cut myself against its rough edges. I set it back on the table and wiped my hand across the white cotton scrub pants I wore.
“Why Anchorage? What’s here?”
“Hex’s group of halflings and his pack stay here. This place is secret. It’s a sanctuary for halflings, if you will.”
“A sanctuary.”
He nodded slowly. “We brought you here to protect you. If anyone found out about you—”
“Sunny did, and she didn’t care.”
Thad’s brows rose. “We told Luke the truth when you went missing. He had to know. And you think he doesn’t care? You think it doesn’t bother him?”
If Thad had been aiming to hurt me, he succeeded. The pain in my chest had nothing to do with Max’s torture. The one thing I’d feared most was how Luke would react to the news of what I was. Thad didn’t come straight out and say it, but I sensed the undertone in his words. Luke probably hated me, probably wanted to kill me.
“I brought you here to help you understand what you are,” Thad went on when I couldn’t speak. “Who you are.”
I glanced around at the room again, at the window with the curtains drawn tight, though some sunlight peeked through. How long had it been since I’d seen the sun? “What’s so special about this place?”
“It belonged to your mother. We’re standing in her old bedroom, and that’s her bed you were sleeping on. There are so many things to tell you about your mother and what she was doing here.”
He was choosing his words and structuring his sentences for impact. He wanted to knock me off balance, strike hard blows only to soften them with what he considered gifts, and from his contented expression, I knew he thought I was considering my mother living here.
I wasn’t.
I’d slept in my dead mother’s bed. I stood in her house with people who’d waited to save me from my torturer. If I closed my eyes, I saw the pictures of my mother strapped to a table during one of Dean’s experiments. I was slowly drowning in it all.
“Let me explain why we—”
“No.” I ran a finger down the stitches holding my chest together. They felt jagged and hasty, but warm to the touch. “There’s nothing to explain. Get Sunny on the phone. If you don’t, if you come up with some shitty excuse for why you can’t, you’ll regret it. Deeply.”
* * *
Sunny
I sat alone in the SUV, which Hatter had parked deep in the woods of Mt. Hood, Oregon, off Highway 26. The doors were locked. Silly, I know, but at least a ’swang would have to break a window to eat my fear. I had my throwing knife belt strapped around my waist and a SIG Sauer P226 tapping out an erratic, nervous beat on my knee. As I waited for the guys to return, I chewed on my nails, alternating hands when my fingers got too bloody.
Nearly half an hour had passed since the guys left to hunt the ’swang that was munching on isolated townsfolk. We’d tracked it from the Warm Springs Reservation into the forest. With nothing more than a few weapons, Hatter and Luke had gone into the dark without sparing me a word or backward glance. Watching them disappear, off to kill things, I’d murmured a quick prayer that my grandmother had taught me.
There was one thing Hatter and I could count on to soothe Luke, and that was killing ’swangs. Plus, it had been Dean’s one condition when he allowed us to freelance during the rest of winter break and the Killing Season. He was the one person who wanted Ollie to be alive more than Luke, and he scared me just as much as Luke did. I had no clue what either of them would do if they ever saw Ollie again.
I scrubbed at my eyes, having long since reached the level of exhaustion where I actually experienced a twinge of hope that Ollie might still be out there. Shifting in my seat to relieve the numbness in my backside, I scanned the woods again. No sign of the guys, but no sign of scary, razor-sharp teeth and black fur either. This was my third “hunt” with Luke and Hatter, and it wasn’t getting any easier—or any less scary.
Neither of the guys had offered to let me come with them, and I hadn’t brought it up. As unsafe as the car felt, I couldn’t even imagine what it was like out there, in the woods, waiting for the tick-tock sounds, dreading them in equal measure, and traipsing through the wet and damp with only the spike of fear in my chest to guide me.
No thanks.
I’d almost fallen asleep when Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” roared through the SUV, making me scream. I dropped the gun between my legs, and it fell somewhere on the car floor as I scrambled to silence my cell phone. What had I been thinking when I set the volume that loud? That I wanted to be the tastiest all-you-can-eat human buffet in all of Oregon?
The number on the glowing screen was unknown and protected. I started to swipe across the screen to ignore it, but at the last second, I answered. “Hello?”
My voice cracked like a fourteen-year-old boy’s who’d discovered his first chin hair. I reached down for the gun and found nothing but dirty car mat.
“Sunny?”
My body seized at the sound of her voice, freezing me in place as if even one tiny breath would dispel the moment. “Ollie?” I managed to croak.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I choked, which surprised me given how dry my mouth was from hanging open.
“What the heck?” I practically screamed. “That’s all you have to say to me? Not even a ‘you must be shocked’ or ‘hey, don’t panic’? Do you even know how hard my heart just stopped? Ohmygosh. Ohmygosh. I can’t believe it’s you. It’s, like, you! Where are you? Are you okay? What happened? Why haven’t you called sooner? Everyone was so worried! We were all searching for you but then Luke wanted to go south and he’s pretty sick and Hatter and I didn’t know what to do because we couldn’t stop him so we came down here with him and he’s been leading us on what feels like a wild goose chase and he won’t let me treat his pneumonia but he’s been taking straight saliva even though he’s barely holding it together, at least until I tell him you called, and ohmygosh, I can’t even believe this because I seriously thought you were dead.” I blinked, my mouth hovering around my next words. A sob tore up my throat. I couldn’t remember when I’d started crying, but I was bawling. “I gave up on you. I thought you were dead.”
There was a long pause on the other end. A soft static filled the silence between us. Then, “I’m sorry.”
I heard the wrongness in her voice, like she wasn’t really hearing me. Like she wasn’t really there. I checked the number on my phone again. “Where are you calling from?”
“My mother’s house.”
My knee jolted. “Um—”
“In Anchorage.”
“Anchorage? Wow. Luke wasn’t even close. He’s had us driving all over the west coast like he’s some kind of divining rod.” I cut off my nervous laughter. What was I thinking, laughing as if things were normal and we were people who still laughed? “Are you safe there? What’s going on?”
“I’m with Thad and the halflings.”
I hissed at the sound of his name. “That stinking pile
of poo. He could have at least called to let us know you were alive! I mean—”
“I need you to come here.”
My mouth closed and opened and closed again. “Well, yeah. I mean, as soon as the guys get back, we’re on our way. I would stick my head out the window and holler for them, but ’swangs are probably everywhere out there. We’re in Oregon, and all these hippies probably make pretty tasty—”
“I know I’m asking a lot for you to come,” she said.
Was she even hearing me? I had visions of her tied up and drugged, with someone holding a hastily written script in front of her face.
“I shouldn’t involve you, but there’s no one here I can trust. I don’t have anyone else, and I don’t want to be alone.”
Her tone terrified me. The longer she spoke, the more I glanced around, peeling back the shadows for Luke and Hatter. We had to go—now—even if it meant blowing off Dean and the official “search” for Ollie until winter break ended in three weeks. Whatever it took. I knew bad things had happened to Ollie. I’d imagined them in detail every way to Sunday. But this? She sounded broken. She didn’t even sound like herself.
“Of course,” I said, my throat tightening with more tears. I forced myself to shove them aside. I had to be strong. She needed that. “Of course, we’ll be there, okay? Don’t worry. You won’t be alone. We’ll figure this out. Do you know where in Anchorage you are?”
“Does Luke want to kill me?”
My answer choked off in my throat. Her question wasn’t surprising, given that Luke was an Aultstriver and Aultstrivers were the huntiest of hunters. I stared hard at the emblem in the center of the steering wheel, my thoughts churning. I felt the brush of the SIG at my feet.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
Ollie seemed to process that for a long moment before asking, “Is he still my Luke?”
Just then, I looked toward the woods. Like magic, he and Hatter appeared, trekking through the overgrowth with their weapons slung across their backs. They weren’t talking. They moved like two trees that had grown too closely together, each peeling off in separate directions to get their own bit of sun. “Um, well . . .”
