by Meg Collett
“Never mind. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay?”
“But you’ll come, right? You promise?”
“Yeah, Ollie. I promise. We’ll be there.”
“Okay.” She let out a long breath. “We’re in some renovated warehouse with all these old factories outside.” Something rustled in the background. “It’s close to the mountains. I see an old sign for Chugach State Park.”
“Are you in danger?”
Another long pause. I couldn’t guess her silence’s meaning. “I’ll be fine when you get here.”
The SUV’s back hatch opened and the guys started depositing their weapons.
“Hey, it’s—” I started.
“Is that them?” she asked.
Luke and Hatter didn’t look up from their task, assuming I was on the phone with someone of a lesser dead-and-disappeared status, or worse, reporting to Dean.
I turned back to the emblem on the wheel. “Yeah. They’re back. We’ll be on our way. Do you want to talk to—”
“See you.”
Click.
“Were you talking on the phone?”
I spun around in my seat. Hatter was watching me from the back while Luke zipped up the duffel. “Yeah.”
“Dean?”
“No.”
“Bloody Eve?”
She’d called a few times, mostly to check on Luke. I’d acted like I didn’t mind since she was basically the Barrow base’s leader now and we needed her help in our search for Ollie, but it still felt like she was trying to move in on my best friend’s guy. “No, not her . . .”
My mind was still turning over Ollie’s strange tone as I scrambled into the backseat, forgetting the SIG on the floor. Hatter picked it up when he got in. As Luke climbed into the passenger seat, Hatter turned the engine over. “Who then?”
“I think we should head back up to Washington,” Luke said. “It feels like Washington . . .”
“Washington? Really?” I snapped. It was all too much. “What about Anchorage? Does it feel like Anchorage, you freaking idiot?”
Luke slowly turned around to look at me. Hatter too.
“Uh,” Hatter said, eyes roving between Luke and me. “You okay there, Sunshine?”
“Ollie’s in Anchorage.” I glared at Luke. Divining rod my backside. “With Thad and the halflings.”
The guys stared back at me like I’d grown a snout and two pointy, curved ears.
“How do you know?” Luke asked, sounding more alive than he had since Ollie disappeared. Like a flip had been switched, he hummed back to life. “How do you know?” he repeated, seeming to vibrate in his seat.
“Because she just called and gave me directions.”
T H R E E
Ollie
They left me alone after I’d busted up Lauren’s nose. I guess they thought I was crazy. Not that I really cared.
They waited.
All that stuff with Max could’ve been avoided. Could’ve ended so much sooner if they hadn’t waited.
I laughed, the sound bubbling up from deep in my chest—my battered, screwed-up chest. Lying on my back atop my mother’s bed, I stared up at the ceiling and laughed. Tears trickled down my cheeks.
Yeah, I was pretty crazy.
Hearing Sunny’s voice after weeks had almost sent me teetering back over the edge—the edge Max had carved inside me. I shut down and walled myself in to keep her obvious relief and love for me on the outside. I couldn’t feel those things yet, not around people I didn’t trust, like Thad and Lauren, who could use that love against me.
I hated myself for pulling Sunny back into a dangerous situation, but I had no one else. I needed help. Before Max, I probably never would have admitted that. I knew better now. I needed Sunny to hand me back the pieces of myself. Thad and Lauren and Hex had waited to save me from Max so they would have a broken shell of a monster to rebuild in whatever image they deemed best. I couldn’t allow that to happen. With Sunny’s help—and maybe even Luke’s, although I didn’t allow myself to hope for that much—I had to rebuild myself first.
Coldcrow had been right about this life bending people and warping them.
A while later, a knock on my room’s door woke me, sending me into a temporary mind fall. I’d fallen asleep without realizing, and I couldn’t remember where I was. A panic so tangible I could’ve pulled it up from my throat gripped me tightly. My breathing came in shallow pants as I swiveled my head around, waiting for Max to materialize through the shadows.
But the only shadows were the ones seeping in from behind the curtains. Nighttime had fallen, which meant I’d slept longer than I thought.
“Uh, Ollie?” a voice called from the other side of the door. “I have your dinner if you want it?”
I didn’t recognize the voice, but then, I didn’t really know anyone here.
I sat back on the bed and crossed my arms. “Come in.”
A boy, perhaps thirteen, came into my room. He moved like vapor sliding about, shoulders hunched, feet silent. In one hand, he carried a paper plate with a lumpy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the crust crookedly cut off, and in the other, a glass of lemonade. He was barely more than dark skin and bones, knobby elbows, and tufts of feathery hair so silver it looked white. His eyes landed on my chest, where the top part of the stitches peeked out from under my stiff cotton shirt.
He was checking—probably on Thad’s orders—that I hadn’t chewed them out like a dog.
“Here.” He came close enough to hand me the plate and lemonade. Surprising me, he lingered as I took my first nibbling bite, and his glances started sticking on me longer and longer.
“Why did they send you?” I asked when I couldn’t take his stares anymore.
Did they really think I’d hit a child? Or maybe they’d sent a child in so I wouldn’t hurt anyone else?
“I volunteered,” he said with a sharp-boned shrug. “No one else wanted to do it. They don’t like you much.”
Good. I don’t much care for them either. Except for maybe this kid. I liked how he stared without blinking, refusing to miss a single thing.
“Did you make this sandwich?” I held up the PB&J. The white bread had soft impressions of tiny fingerprints.
He nodded. “My mom used to make them for me when I was little.”
The hollow-toned way he spoke of her told me she was dead.
“Thank you,” I said.
He scuffed one of his mismatched Converse sneakers against the floor. His jeans, thin from too many washes, hung loosely on his slight frame. A leather string served as a belt. He wore a buttoned-up short-sleeved shirt with pink and white vertical stripes.
“Does it really not hurt?” he asked. “You can’t feel anything? Like, at all?”
“Nope.” I can’t feel a thing. Nothing hurts me.
“Wow.” His mouth formed a perfect round O, his chocolaty brown eyes big as saucers.
“What’s your name?”
“Ghost. Not like the movie.” He pulled a face. “That movie was awful. Reece made me watch it. It’s ’cause of my hair. They say I must’ve seen a ghost and it scared me so bad my hair turned gray, but I’m not scared.”
I almost—almost—smiled, but it was only a thought, not a physical thing. Not even a real desire. “So you’re a halfling then?”
“Are you really Irena’s daughter?” he fired back.
The question felt like jumping into an icy lake, where the water was so cold it stole your breath and stopped your heart. “I’m a lot of things.”
Irena’s daughter. Hex’s daughter. A halfling. A killer. A monster. I hadn’t had enough time in Barrow to figure out whether I hated myself. I had the time now, but not the strength.
Ghost nodded at my answer like he understood. “Everyone is out hunting. They leave me to watch the place.” He squared his shoulders a bit at that, his chin lifting. “I can show you around some if you feel like it.”
“Are you supposed to let me le
ave this room?”
“Thad says you’re not a prisoner.” He smirked. “But I bet Lauren would shoot you in the leg if you tried to leave. Probably best if you avoid her for a while.” He tapped his nose, his smile deepening into one of great pleasure. “She’s really pissed about her face.”
My mouth twitched. “I like you, Ghost. I can tell we’re going to get along just fine.”
I scooped up my sandwich and followed him to the door. My body moved like a rusted hinge. I practically heard my bones squeaking in complaint, but I pushed myself forward, following Ghost into the hall outside my room. The scrubs I wore barely offset the chill in the air. The concrete picked at my socked feet with every step. There wasn’t much in the way of decorations. Like my room, this place seemed to adhere to the rule that if it wasn’t purposeful, it wasn’t needed.
A thought weaseled into my mind: Was my mother a practical woman? Did I not know her at all?
“How many halflings are here?” I asked as we passed door after door. Most were closed, but through some cracked openings, I spotted more bedrooms. They were smaller than mine, but littered with clothes and rumpled sheets and the smell of skin and shampoo.
“About forty.” The number floored me, but Ghost went on, unfazed. “The members of Hex’s pack mostly stay in the other buildings. A lot of these factories were too damaged after the earthquake in sixty-four and were just abandoned. Reece says some of them are haunted, but I think he’s just messing with me.”
I’d seen Hex’s pack once before while on a hunt with Luke and Hatter. I’d stood between them, ready to fight, with one small knife in my hand. It was the first time I’d seen my father, though I didn’t know he was my father at the time, in his ’swang form. After Barrow, I knew why his hide had been unscarred, smooth, and shining, while nearly every other ’swang was marked by their female mates.
Hex’s mate had been my mother, a human hunter from the university. She hadn’t followed the female aswang’s ritual of uniquely scarring their mates.
The hall separated in front of us and Ghost steered us left, toward what looked like a common gathering area and kitchen, which appeared barely used. I wondered about the chilly air and the meager sandwich Ghost had brought me. Were they trying to keep this place off the grid?
“Why are the halflings here if this really is Irena’s place?”
Ghost’s attention fell to the forgotten sandwich in my hand. “Are you going to eat that?”
Without a word, I handed it to him.
He took a big, chomping bite and spoke around the peanut butter sticking to the roof of his mouth. “Your mom started gathering the first halflings in secret back in the eighties, before she left the university.” He said the word “university” the way hunters said “aswang.” “Hex took over when she died. Oh . . .” He darted a gaze toward me. “Uh, sorry, for your . . . loss.”
“In the eighties?” I asked, forgetting about the tour and focusing solely on Ghost. “You mean before she disappeared?”
The file with the pictures I’d found in Killian’s office had been labeled “1986,” but Killian had planted it to make me think the aswangs had performed breeding experiments on my mother. I couldn’t trust the date, but my mind stumbled over the thought that she’d done all this before she disappeared and had me.
Ghost scuffed his feet against the floor and took us back toward the front of the warehouse, though I paid little attention to our surroundings, aside from the fact that we were back in the main hallway. “Thad said she was working as a double agent between the university and here when she fell in love with Hex.” He blushed at this. “She brought us together and created a safe place for us. No one tries to kill us here.”
He said it so casually, with half his face lost to the darkness around us, that I knew his short life had been hard—too hard for a kid.
“Who tries to kill halflings?” I asked.
“Everyone.” He let loose a long breath. “Aswangs who think we’re messing up the gene pool. University hunters who believe we could exist even though the university’s experiments never proved we, like, actually exist. They had no clue until . . .”
I cringed. Until me. Until I’d shown up at Fear University with no idea what I was. It hadn’t taken Dean long to figure out his experiments were right. With me, I had validated his research. “Sorry about that.”
“Some of us were mad, but Thad said it would’ve happened sooner or later. He says we can’t hide forever.”
I heard the admiration in his voice that bordered on hero worship. He practically drooled every time he mentioned Thad’s name. The thought clicked into place in my mind.
“Hey, Ghost,” I said. “Why is everyone calling Thad, well, Thad? Didn’t you all know him by another name before he infiltrated the university under a dead hunter’s identity?”
We came to the end of the top floor. A metal railing separated the upstairs from the bottom floor, which was just an empty stretch of concrete.
Ghost started down a rickety set of stairs that bounced and clanged with every step. “He and Lauren fought a lot about that after they came back with you, but he told everyone he was going by Thad now. I didn’t understand until I overheard him telling Reece he liked himself better as Thaddeus Booker. He felt like he’d done more good as Thad, which really set Lauren off. She, like, called him a bunch of really mean names and said he’d gone soft at the university.”
I frowned as we reached the first floor, which was an open, tall-ceilinged space with nothing more than a few cabinets lining part of one wall. Water-damaged boxes filled the back quarter of the space and lent the air a musty quality that made my nose burn.
I couldn’t imagine Thad liking himself better when he was at the university, not with all the halfling propaganda he’d spouted off in Barrow after I discovered his real identity. But whatever he’d felt during his time there must have been powerful for him to take a stand against the halflings over something like a name.
It made me wonder if he really was sorry for waiting to save me. If he regretted what he’d had to do. Maybe he really had been a better person at the university. Maybe he even missed it a little.
I wanted to turn around and go back upstairs. I wanted to not care about Thad’s name or what I was, but I felt a niggling curiosity, and I couldn’t stop myself from returning to our previous conversation about my mother and why she’d created this place. “If everyone is trying to keep this place a secret, why hunt at all?”
“Part of the rules. Thad says we have to pull our weight. Well”—he scrunched up his nose—“he says I’m too young, so they lock me inside.” His eyes swept mournfully to the three bay doors that likely led out onto the loading bay. Everything was sealed up.
“Who do you hunt? Aswangs? It doesn’t seem right to kill your own kind.”
“Only the rogues. Human or aswang,” Ghost said, growing excited again. “Thad says it’s part of the rules we operate under. If a ’swang kills instead of taking only what they need to survive, we hunt them. If a human kills one of us or a good ’swang, we kill them. But mainly we just defend against rogues who want us dead. Thad says it’s all about balance and that we don’t have to be the monsters people think we are. He says it was Irena’s vision for this place. Can I ask you a question?”
I doubted he’d breathed once during that entire explanation, even if the explanation sounded like a justification to hunt whoever they wanted, though I didn’t say that to Ghost. “Sure.”
“Can you really hear a ’swang in its night-form? Lauren says it’s bullshit.”
It had been a long time since I’d thought about communicating with ’swangs, but the feeling of a voice slinking through my head came back in a rush. “I can talk back too.”
Ghost’s mouth popped open. “How?”
I shrugged. “In my head. Must be some halfling thing.”
“None of us can do that.”
“Have you tried?”
“Never seen one,” he said.
“Lauren said if she saw a rogue, she wouldn’t waste time trying to chat with it. She’d kill it.”
“Lauren’s a twat.”
“With an ugly broken nose.” Ghost snickered and elbowed me in the side. I almost felt like smiling again, but the urge went away when he checked the plastic, neon-green watch on his thin wrist. “We should probably go back upstairs. Sometimes the patrols come back early if things are quiet.”
As we walked back upstairs, Ghost chattered on about Thad and this place, but my thoughts kept returning to Irena. She’d created a haven for halflings so they could hunt and protect themselves from humans and aswangs alike. Her vision had been one of balance—not of killing every single aswang, but only the ones who killed. She’d turned her back on the university over this radical idea and paid the ultimate price for it too.
I wondered if that was the path I was on: to come here and pick up where my mother had left off; to fight alongside my father against the university’s hunters and the killer aswangs; and to protect innocent halflings. It felt like a purpose that should have ignited me, but I only felt hollow.
“Is Thad going to let my friends in here since this place is supposed to be a big secret?” I asked to distract myself.
As I followed Ghost down the hall toward my room, I saw the tips of his too-large ears turn red. “They fought about that too. Him and Lauren. After you broke her nose. Hey, how do you hit someone like that? Doesn’t it hurt your head?” He didn’t slow down long enough for an answer. “Anyway, Thad said your friends could be trusted, but Lauren made him agree to take their weapons and phones.”
I was so surprised Thad had said Luke and Hatter could be trusted that I couldn’t speak for a long moment. Yesterday, he’d alluded to the fact that Luke hated me, but then, maybe Thad had been lying. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Reaching my room, Ghost toed open the door. His eyes lingered on the floor. “Lauren says you’re not right in the head, but Thad is telling everyone you’re gonna help us, that you’re like your mom. You’ll keep us safe.”
