by Meg Collett
I swallowed. My stomach churned with the few bites of sandwich I’d eaten. “I don’t know, Ghost. I barely knew my mother.”
He shut down quicker than if I’d hit his power switch. Instantly, I wanted to yank the words back, even if they’d been the truth.
“Well, maybe,” he said, his voice sounding younger and softer, like he wasn’t some kid being raised by a bunch of killers. “Maybe you can talk to the rogues. Tell them we aren’t doing anything and they should leave us alone. Since you can hear them and stuff.”
“Yeah.” My throat felt too thick to talk. “Maybe.”
“I’ll let you sleep. The others will be back soon.”
He walked away, leaving me with my warm lemonade and the image of his slight frame and old clothes.
F O U R
Ollie
The next morning, after a sleepless night, I crossed to the window and stared out, taking in a predawn Anchorage.
I leaned forward until my forehead rested against the chilled glass. Behind the Chugach Mountains, the sun rose, heating up the sky with hues of pink and orange. The illuminated clouds drifted in wisps, loose and fragile. Back in Barrow, with Max, I thought I would never see the sun again, but as I watched it poke its face into the sky, I could only think about Peg and Coldcrow and Sin—the death count. I wondered who would be next.
A knock sounded on the door.
I turned around, expecting Thad or Ghost. The knob turned and the door silently swung inward.
Luke.
He closed the door behind him and stood there like he needed to rest against it for a moment before meeting my eyes.
“I came as fast as I could,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Hatter flew us straight here when Sunny told us.”
My mind flashed through a million things, many of them centering on that awful emotion. Love. I felt the wild tilt of it through my body: the surge of adrenaline, a crazed, fluttering heartbeat, and my blood searing hot then cold. My mind screamed at me even while my body yearned to run across the room and launch myself at him. I wanted to cry and laugh and punch him and hurt. Instead, I stayed rooted, fingertips against the window to ground me, and stared at him.
“Ollie . . .”
“Why are you here?” Love. Hate. Love. Love. Hurt. “To kill me?”
Something anguished passed over his hollowed-out face. He looked like hell—we probably both did—but he’d lost weight and his pants hung loosely on his tapered hips. He was still big, just more angular, sharper, harsher, like the good had been stolen from him. I understood that too.
“No,” he whispered, those sad, brackish eyes sweeping up to mine. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“Thad said you didn’t take the news well.”
Luke grimaced. “Thad wants to use you.”
At the flare of heat in my chest, I turned away and gritted my teeth. My fingers traced the fresh scars along my arm.
“I don’t hold you to what we said before . . .” I forced myself to swallow to ease the dryness in my mouth and the scratchiness in my throat. “At the base. I don’t expect you to feel the same way now.”
I sensed the flash of anger in the jerky step he took forward. From the corner of my eye, I saw his fingers start to twitch. My shoulder brushed against the window frosted with condensation from the icy temperatures outside.
“When I said I love you? Is that what you mean?” He snapped off the question, his voice rising.
“Yes,” I growled, my anger lashing out to meet his. “When we said that. I know things have changed, Luke. I’m not a fucking idiot. If you came here to kill me, just do it. Don’t mess with my head.”
A shadow that had nothing to do with the low lighting in my room—my mother’s room—shuttered Luke’s face. The sunrise behind me gave off only enough light to keep his features in focus, so I saw when the sadness—the pity—replaced his anger.
Luke Aultstriver pitied me.
“Do you remember when you kissed me that day at the university?” he asked.
His question swept me up in a torrent of emotions, none of them entirely safe. He stepped closer, his feet almost on the rug and farther from the door, like he wasn’t as tempted to run out of it. I nodded, my throat too tight to speak.
His cracked lips almost formed a smile, but the gesture quickly died out. “You were so excited when you passed your examination that you practically attacked me.”
My eyes darted toward him again. I realized a second too late that I was touching the scars on my face, tracing them up and down my cheek, a nervous habit.
“I’d wanted to kiss you for days, but you were so damn . . . insufferable. Half the time I couldn’t get you to stop talking long enough to train. And then when you did train, you always insisted you were beating me. You kept me on my toes, and the day you kissed me, you tore the rug right out from under me.” He drew closer to me again, only the corner of the bed separating us, but I didn’t retreat. “You were this wild, untamed thing. Kissing you was like trying to hold on to the tail of a tiger. I’ve known from the very beginning you were different. That this wouldn’t be easy.”
He skirted the corner of the bed and reached for me, his eyes breaking apart with some emotion I no longer cared to place.
I recoiled and hissed, “Don’t touch me.”
His hand fell back to his side.
“None of it—” I started.
“Do you remember at the base, when I said I would never condition my fear of you?” he asked, resilient. “Well, I’m still terrified of you. You’re still my monster in the dark, and I’m still the shadow that will shield you. I just didn’t understand how true those words were at the time. But I do now. I lo—”
“Don’t say it,” I snarled, my lips peeling off my teeth.
His shoulders slumped. “I’m not here to kill you.”
“Why not?” I ground my teeth together so hard the words barely escaped.
“Because what happened between us in Barrow can’t be replaced by hate or fear or disgust. Whatever happened there was real. And you being part”—I didn’t expect him to say the dirty word, but he did—“’swang makes no difference.”
“You’re an idiot.”
He took a deep breath, and when he did, I heard the rattle in his lungs. “When I was looking for you, all I could think about was what . . . Max was doing to you. It killed me to know you were with him. It literally”—he drew a fist to his chest and pounded it against his sternum—“tore something out of me. I didn’t care what you were then, and I don’t now. When you disappeared, none of that mattered.”
“It should.” It mattered. It had changed my entire world.
The silence stretched between us, punctuated only by the loose vibrations in his chest when he breathed.
“What happened to you out there? When he . . . what did he do?”
My eyes snapped to his, and I turned to face him, a cruel smile manipulating my lips. “What do you think?”
I watched Luke battle between rage and horror for me. “He—”
“For three weeks, because Thad waited. Because Hex, my father, told him to wait. They wanted me to be in pieces when they found me so they could use me. Like Dean used me. Like your father used me. Everyone wants a piece.” I was shouting now, but I flung my arms wide and started laughing, a hysterical bubble ready to burst in my chest. “Well, there’s nothing left. There’s nothing to hold my bones together.”
I couldn’t stop the laughter. I was losing it. Tears sprung in my eyes as I doubled over laughing and clutched my middle to keep from dying.
Luke’s fingers brushed across my arm. I hadn’t seen him come any closer. I lurched away, hitting the wall next to the window.
“Do not touch me! No one touches me ever again!” I screamed.
He pulled his hand back and took a step away from me. A small victory. A crushing loss.
I slid down the wall to the floor, tears streaking cold trails down my cheeks. I coughed and choked on
my tears.
“You came back for the wrong girl, Luke,” I said, laughing and dying. “She’s not here. You should have come to kill what’s left of me. You should have done that.”
He backed toward the door, eyes locked on mine, ready to run away from the monster in the corner. I’d never be anything more than that, no matter how good my mother had been. No matter all she’d done. I’d never be her.
“I told him I loved him too,” I called after him, wanting him to run away faster. “I screamed it over and over again while he tore me open. I forgot all about you. Forgot your name. Your face. When I close my eyes, it’s him I see, not you.”
He ripped open the door and shouted down the hallway, “Sunny!”
“You know what’s really fucked up?” My quieter question made his head snap back to me, and I saw his hand was fisted over his heart, like maybe he had a hole there too. “I think I really do love him.”
Luke’s face crumpled at my destruction, at hearing me speak it out loud, but what had he hoped to find when he came here?
“I love him so much I wish he were alive so I could kill him all over again. I dream of killing him, but my nightmares are spent loving him.”
Sunny tore through the door, her attention falling on Luke when she didn’t see me on the floor. He pointed at me as Hatter came in next. Sunny finally spotted me and a mewing sound escaped her mouth. She rushed over, and when she dropped down beside me and pulled me against her, I went. I let her touch me because I was already gone—gone somewhere far, far away in my mind—and I didn’t want to ever come back.
“What’s going on?” Thad asked, trying to push himself into the room. “I agreed to—”
“Get the fuck out.” Luke’s voice ripped through the room, sending a vibration through me. He and Thad exchanged some heated words I didn’t bother to hear as I sank against Sunny, her fingers winding through my hair. Hatter had to pull Luke off Thad and get between them. From behind him, Luke said, “You and I will settle this later.”
I didn’t listen to the rest of their argument as Sunny pulled me in tighter, rocking me, soothing me. She repeated my name over and over like I’d forgotten it, like I needed to be called back down from the sky.
“You can’t—” Thad started again, louder this time.
“You heard him,” Hatter said, and I heard the smiling leer in his voice and knew his scar was probably messing his face up. His mad face. His manic temper. “Get. Out.”
The door slammed shut. I peeked over Sunny’s shoulder. I expected Luke to be gone, but he stood beside Hatter, their bodies guarding the door, their eyes watching over Sunny and me.
“We’re here,” Sunny whispered, her hand stroking my hair. “We’ve got you.”
She went on in Filipino, her words or prayers like an ancient hand reaching through time and easing me. I melted against her, my eyes still on Luke, and I let myself fall apart.
F I V E
Sunny
Ollie fell asleep in my arms. She went so quickly, so heavily and completely, that I wondered if she’d slept here at all. Her body prodded mine in a withered slightness I’d never felt before. Back at Fear University and then at the Barrow base, she’d been solid, like steel made of muscles and grit.
She felt like air now.
Luke lifted her from my arms and cradled her against his chest—two broken things combined to barely make a whole. Hadn’t I looked at them once before and marveled at how such wild, hard things could fit together so well?
Luke laid her out on the bed so gently I thought myself a fool for ever thinking he could hurt her. His face went pale from the effort, and his hands shook when he settled the blanket around her. When he took her hand, I knew he wasn’t leaving anytime soon.
I hesitated at the end of the bed. Underneath the thick blanket, Ollie appeared so small. The hollows in her cheeks sank deep. The ugly mark on her chest, the hatching of stitches, was stark black against her pale skin. Dark scars ran across her cheek, down her jaw, and onto her neck. I had a matching set on my back from fighting the ’swang during Fields. Our shared marks had once made me feel like her sister, but I once again stood on the outside because I would never understand her pain, what she’d gone through, or what had happened to her.
I hadn’t protected her like I promised.
On wobbly legs, I teetered to the door where Hatter stood. He took one look at my face and grabbed my arm.
“We’ll be close,” he called over his shoulder to Luke as he opened the door.
Luke remained silent, his vigil uninterrupted.
Quietly, Hatter shut the door and we turned around. Without thinking, I took Hatter’s hand and faced down Thaddeus Booker, who was standing outside Ollie’s room with his arms crossed over his chest, his blond hair unkempt, his long-lashed eyes bloodshot. When we’d arrived, they’d checked us and the Jeep we’d driven from the airfield for tracking devices. Hatter had to convince them not to move his plane to another city for security reasons they wouldn’t explain to us. But they’d taken our weapons, my knives and SIG, and all our phones, but now I realized he’d taken a lot more from us.
“You,” I whispered so I wouldn’t wake Ollie. “You deplorable piece of utter, freaking shit.”
“I told you I wouldn’t be back,” he said. There were other halflings around him, filling the shadows of the hallway. I’d yet to see a light on and wondered if the place even had electricity. “I warned you.”
“You waited to get her. You waited.” Luke had told us, in quiet words, what Ollie had said. I think the only thing keeping him from killing Thad was being with Ollie and not wanting that to end. “You let us think she was dead.”
“She never should have been with you in the first place. She belongs here, with us.”
“That’s why you waited then? Why you let her stay with that sick man for so long?”
Hatter’s hand had tightened around mine to stop me from inching forward, my fist clenched at my side as Thad and I fired retorts back and forth. The halflings gathered at the other end of the hall crowded closer together, like we might all clash right there. Only when I saw the flash of guilt cross Thad’s face did I step back next to Hatter.
“It wasn’t my call to make.”
“Maybe,” Hatter said, shrugging. “Maybe not. But you’re going to have to face Luke for what you did to Ollie. Hell, you’re going to have to face Ollie. And while Luke may be enraged enough to try to kill you, Ollie is lying in there as we speak, and she’s resting, waiting. And if I know that young woman half as well as I think I do, you better watch out.” His eyes swept over the rest of the group. “You all better watch out, because bad things happen when she goes this quiet.”
“Then it’s good you’re here,” Thad said. “You can help us keep her under control.”
“What?” I sputtered. “Don’t you dare—”
“Hey.” Hatter stepped forward, his arm going around my shoulders, but his eyes were leveled on Thad. “We should talk about this with Ollie. It’s her decision. We’re here to help her, not you. Now if you don’t mind, we’re all exhausted. Is that room empty?” He lifted his chin toward the door directly opposite Ollie’s room.
“It can be,” Thad said carefully.
“Good. We’ll take it. I suggest no one goes into Ollie’s room for a while. Luke is a bit unhinged at the moment.”
“This isn’t the university, Hatter. Your kind doesn’t call the shots here.”
The scarred edge of Hatter’s mouth hooked. The others might have thought he was grinning, but I knew better. “I’m just trying to keep someone’s face from getting ripped off. That’s all.”
He kept the fact that Luke was living off saliva between us. We were the only ones who needed to know just how dangerous Luke actually was.
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Hatter’s face stretched wider, until his gnarled lips revealed the shine of his teeth.
We waited as the halflings slowly cleared out with long, hard looks
cast over their shoulders. They didn’t trust us here. Hatter kept me behind him until every last one of them was gone. Only then did we go into the room across the hall.
He kept the door partway open so he could keep an eye on Ollie’s room and guard Luke’s back.
Our new room had obviously been occupied but kept tidy. The bed was made with crisp, tightly tucked corners. No personal items lined the low-slung gray dresser. Similar to the rest of the house, the floors were made of concrete, the ceiling and brick walls exposed. It felt rough and cold, like a chill even a warm sweater couldn’t shake.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked Hatter.
He glanced up from where he’d been staring down at a rust-colored stain on the floor. Blood. “You should get some sleep.”
“Come on,” I pressed, not buying his non-answer. “What’s wrong?”
His attention wavered between the door and me. “Do you think,” he started slowly, “we were right to bring him here?”
Something cold and wet slunk around in my belly. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. The black scars marring his face battled against the wide-open raw look in his eyes—a hardened warrior mixed together with a worried best friend.
“They’re better together, don’t you think?” I didn’t wait for him to respond, because even I could argue that their relationship might not be the healthiest, and hurried on. “And you heard her. Saw her. She’s a mess. She needs all of us to help her.”
“But what about Luke? Is this what he needs?” He ran a hand over his face. “And you. Is this best for you?”
“Of course it’s best for me. I need to be wherever she is.”
“You think that because you’re a good person, Sunny. You don’t see how this hurts you.”
I frowned. I was fine. I was more than fine. My best friend wasn’t dead. “She needs us.”
