by Meg Collett
“Ollie doesn’t need anyone. And when she comes out of this, can you guarantee what kind of person she’ll be? What if she’s changed and she’s no longer the girl you knew?”
I flung myself to my feet, my face flushing bright red. “Ollie’s been through the worst thing without anyone there to help her. If I stepped away, I could never live with myself.”
“I’m sorry,” Hatter said before I could get anything else out. My ears were burning. “Look, I’m just tired. These past few weeks have been hell on all of us. Why don’t you get some rest and I’ll make sure no one goes inside their room? I just need some space.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. I needed some space too. “Okay.”
He went back out into the hall and closed the door. I heard him sit down out there, alone.
We were four long strings stretched out in separate directions. Somehow, along the way, my grip had faltered. I wasn’t holding us together anymore.
* * *
Sleep was impossible. When I gave up and opened the bedroom door, I found Hatter asleep, his head slumped forward and his back against the wall where he sat on the floor. We’d barely slept during our mad dash to Anchorage from Oregon, least of all Hatter. Not wanting to wake him, I crept by.
On the way into the warehouse this morning, I hadn’t paid much attention to my surroundings. We’d entered through the first floor, which was nothing more than hundreds of square feet of empty space. A set of metal stairs, rickety and swaying, led upstairs to the renovated living space, which, in my memory, was just one long hallway to Ollie’s room.
There had to be more to this place, and I couldn’t wait around and let Thad maneuver us into a corner. He had all the power in this situation—we were on his turf, on his terms—and I had to protect my friends by finding out any bit of information I could.
I’d started to think like Ollie, in terms of moves and countermoves: always protect your weak, exposed sides. I had three weak sides, and I would do everything possible to face threats head-on and save Ollie, Hatter, and Luke.
I was right about the hall leading to Ollie’s room, but I hadn’t remembered the number of doors on either side, which likely led into other bedrooms. Nearly every door stood slightly ajar, and as I passed by each one, I peeked inside, noting the rumpled beds and lived-in spaces. The only sounds were my footsteps thudding off the concrete floor.
Six doors later, I came to a split in the hall. The left opened up into a large common area that served as a dining area. Through a sweeping archway, I spotted a dark kitchen, the counters clean of dishes and the light on the refrigerator off. Heavy curtains were drawn across the large windows, but that was the only sort of decoration I could see. The same dark gray color covered all the walls, barely a hue darker than the floors.
Not really my taste. The place needed some light, fresh flowers, and actual color.
I backtracked and went down the other split in the hall. Instantly, I noticed a change. Threadbare runners muffled my footsteps, and black and white pictures of Anchorage landscapes hung on the walls. A sprawling living room opened up to my left, with numerous mismatched couches and pillows. Shoes dotted the floor and blankets appeared casually tossed over the backs of chairs. This place was lived in, breathed in, and it felt like it had only been vacated moments before. I turned away and kept exploring.
As I went, I started to make out the low hum of voices toward the end of the hall. One doorway stood ajar, light spilling out along with the murmurs.
I kept on the rug, creeping forward on the tips of my toes, my shoulder brushing along the wall. As I came within a few feet of the door, I recognized Thad’s voice but not the girl’s.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears and sticky sweat coated my palms, but there was excitement too, as if Ollie would approve.
“—doing, letting them in here?”
“Lauren,” Thad said, a heavy sigh punctuating the name, “we’ve talked about this already. You’ve experienced what she can do when she snaps. She won’t cooperate otherwise.”
The girl scoffed. “We can make her. Besides, you don’t know what the others are saying. By doing this, you look weak, like you can’t control her.”
“I can’t!” Something crashed to the floor. I flinched but didn’t move away from the door. Shadows flickered through the light coming out into the hall, but I didn’t hear anyone coming my way. Then, in a calmer voice, Thad added, “You don’t know her like I do. She’ll come around with time.”
“You’re willing to tell Hex that when he gets back?”
Her words sounded like a taunt, but Thad didn’t raise his voice again. “Yes, I am. And you should be too if you have any sense.”
Someone shifted inside the room, and I shot a glance back down the hallway. If they suddenly came out, I was stuck. I had nowhere to hide quickly.
“What about her friends? We have a goddamn Aultstriver sleeping a few doors down.”
“Luke isn’t like his father. He’s here for Ollie, nothing else.”
A low, mocking laugh came through the door. “You got weak up there at that university, Thaddeus. I don’t think you remember how we survive. You were gone a long time.”
“Not that long.”
I could tell by the defensive note in Thad’s voice that the girl—Lauren—had hit a sensitive nerve. I pictured his arms crossed and his eyebrows deeply furrowed. He was likely fiddling with the bandage around his neck, but I remembered he had nothing to hide here. He wouldn’t need to cover the white scars that had outed his as a halfling in Barrow.
“Long enough to change the name your aswang father gave you.”
“Christ, Lauren.” A chair squeaked and I imagined Thad leaning back in it and raking his hands over his face. He sounded like he hated Lauren, and I couldn’t help but agree with him if she was this bent out of shape over his name. “Just lay off, okay? It’s just a name.”
“We both know it’s more than that. You liked this Thaddeus Booker character you created up there. You liked being the hero, didn’t you? When you realized the power a name could give you in a place like Fear University, you didn’t want to come home.”
Thad hit the desk, the cracking sound causing me to jump and almost fall against the door. “Leave it,” he growled, biting off the words with a menace I’d never heard from him before. “I’m back, and you should remember your place here. Now give me your report on last night’s patrols.”
She paused for a long moment to show him she didn’t have to listen to him, but in the end, she said, “We found a few bodies. Half-eaten. All their guts gone. Blood drained dry.”
Thad swore enough to make me blush. “Why am I just hearing about this now? How many? Any children?”
“Not humans,” Lauren said, her taunting tone back, like she was judging Thad for thinking of human causalities first. “Aswangs. Three full-grown males at that. They fought back, but the defensive wounds were minimal. They didn’t stand a chance.”
I leaned forward and strained my ear to hear Thad’s response. When he spoke again, I sensed how he was carefully controlling his voice to make it come out even and calm. “They were eaten?”
“Just the juicy bits. Pulled most of their blood out through the wounds in their abdomens.”
“You think some rogue did that?”
“Maybe.” Lauren sniffed. She tapped the toe of her shoe against the floor in an impatient beat. “Pretty fucked up for a ’swang to do that to another ’swang. I’ve got the teams on alert for a powerful, unstable, and lethal male rogue. They know to use lethal force.”
Thad’s chair squeaked again. “That was my order to give, Lauren. You’re not in charge now.”
“Would you have given a different one?”
Another long pause. Thad had walked right into that one, and now he looked even weaker.
“Fine,” he said, relenting. “I want double patrols tonight, though. We need to find this rogue as soon as possible.”
More rustling came from inside
the office, followed by a shadow blocking the light. Boots sounded across the concrete.
I started backing up as Lauren said, “Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”
The finality in her voice had me turning and carefully hurrying down the hall. Passing no one else, I turned at the split, picking up my pace on my way back to my room. If some killer rogue aswang was on the loose outside, I needed to keep my people inside. It wasn’t our fight, but it meant Thad and the others would be distracted. We might have more freedom to assess our options here, especially if the halflings were fighting within their own ranks.
The information wasn’t much, but I was proud I’d uncovered it. It was something, at least.
Hatter wasn’t in the hallway, but Ollie’s door was open. When I paused at the door, Hatter, who was standing just inside with Luke, looked up and frowned. His eyes went to our bedroom across the way and then slowly back to me, narrowing.
I tried for a smile. “What’s up, guys?”
Before Hatter could ask where I’d gone, Luke said, “Ollie’s awake. She wants to talk.”
He stepped aside and I looked into the room to see my best friend sitting on the edge of her bed, her ice blue eyes staring up at me.
She looked like a ghost—like she wasn’t even alive.
S I X
Ollie
Sunny and Hatter filed into my room, closing and locking the door behind them. Hatter stayed beside it to stand guard. Luke crossed the room to the window and propped a shoulder against the wall. He was staring out at the city, looking anything but casual.
“Is everything okay?” Sunny sat beside me on the bed, and I had to fight the urge to scoot away. She must have seen something in my face, because she didn’t put her arm around my shoulders the way she once would have.
“Not really,” I said. My eyes flicked to Luke; he stiffened at the sound of my voice.
“Ollie . . .” Sunny shook her head, and I saw her struggle to choke the words back.
“You can ask.” My heart thudded once, hard, then went back to normal. No more secrets. No more lies. Only the truth from now on.
I couldn’t stop myself. I glanced back at Luke again. He hadn’t left my room once, and he hadn’t tried to kill me, but he looked so deflated and defeated that I didn’t even know if he had the energy to lift his hand against me. I had no clue how he truly felt.
“How are you alive? What happened? Were you in that cabin the entire time?” The questions rolled out of Sunny’s mouth one after the other. She clamped her teeth together and looked so pained it was almost cute. I wanted to smile, but my mouth couldn’t make the motion.
“We stayed in that unmarked safe house near the lakes the entire time,” I said, tackling the easiest question first.
Ever so slightly, Luke shifted toward me, listening intently.
“Killian kept it hidden from everyone. He thought we would be close enough to avoid the major search grids.”
“We searched for weeks,” Hatter said. His words—the fierceness of them—surprised me. He cared for me because of Sunny, because he cared so much for her. And, in our own way, we were friends, which counted for something. “But with the storm, we couldn’t move far enough or fast enough. And when it cleared out, we looked farther because we thought you’d been on the move in the snowcat.”
A beat of silence passed as I struggled to come up with a way to say I understood how hard they’d tried without revealing this horrible sense of resentment I felt in my heart because they’d failed. I hated myself for it, but it was such a small thing buried under such weightier things that I ended up just keeping my mouth shut.
“I’m sorry,” Sunny whispered. Her fingers twitched. I wanted to save her the pain and just take her hand, but I couldn’t. The thought of my skin on someone else, of touching, made my throat close up.
“I know.”
“Whose body was in the cabin?” Hatter asked. “It was burned so badly we thought it was you.”
The halflings must have burned the cabin down after they’d found me, which meant the body could only be one person. “Max,” I said.
I didn’t remember much from that time with him, but I clearly recalled picking up the little blade and stabbing his face. The blood had splattered on me. I remembered the warmth of it and the way his eyes had faded as he died. I’d expected to feel this overwhelming sense of righteousness and relief, but even now, I only felt cold. Killing Max hadn’t helped, and I didn’t know what would.
“He deserved it,” I added.
I sensed my friends purposely not looking at my stitched-up chest or the way the countless, tiny cuts caught the fading light and looked like they were dripping blood. Their avoidance inched under my skin and poked at that resentment hiding away inside me.
“He tried to cut my heart out.” I held out my arms and tilted them this way and that. “He cut me hundreds of times, just deep enough to cause pain but not deep enough to make me bleed out. He gave me saliva every day to keep the pain fresh. Every morning, he hung me up in chains and put this blade under my chin so I couldn’t rest or move or talk or scream.”
I was talking too fast. Sunny was crying, tears splashing onto the duvet between us. Luke looked ready to crawl out the window and kill something. And Hatter just stared at me, his scar sinking into a hollow ridge on his slack face.
“And at night, he put me in bed and cleaned me and tended to my wounds. He would kiss me—”
Luke’s fist cracked against the wall in the corner.
“—and tell me he loved me. And then he would cut me all over again the next morning. It didn’t feel like weeks, really. It felt like this long stretch of . . . nothing. And at the end, I realized something. Max really did care about me. He did,” I emphasized when Sunny looked ready to fight. “And the pain just all blurred into this one big, giant thing inside my head that almost felt like love. It did feel like love.”
Another crack from Luke; he was going to break his hand.
“So I told him I loved him back. I told him countless times, but he didn’t stop. He never stopped, because I think what he felt for me started to feel like hate, and in the end, all that pain and hate equaled to something like love for both of us.”
Sunny swiped under her eyes and took a deep, shaky breath. When she looked up, I turned my face away because I couldn’t bear what I saw in her eyes.
“That’s not love,” she said, but I just shrugged.
That time with Max felt like everything and nothing all at once, and I couldn’t find my footing on the solid ground in between.
“We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to.” Sunny squared herself in front of me like she was dredging up every ounce of willpower she had. “You’re here and alive and that’s all that matters to us.”
“But it matters to me,” I snapped. I couldn’t hold this thing back inside me. “It changed everything for me.”
Sunny shrank back. I saw it on her face: this was her biggest fear. She was right to be afraid.
“I’m not the same person. I don’t know how to feel about what I am. I never got the time to understand it, and now I feel like everyone just wants me to move on, to be this new person and accept it. Well, I don’t fucking accept it.”
I was panting, my stitches pulling with each breath. Sunny was crying again, and Luke had turned away, his fingers dancing against his jeans. Only Hatter truly looked at me. He hadn’t even moved an inch.
“My parents used to give me saliva and lock me in a dark closet,” he murmured. “They knew my mania made me see things. They told me they’d only let me out when I wasn’t afraid of the things I saw in the dark. They promised me, and I believed them. I remember sitting there, knowing what was about to happen to me, but I told myself not to be afraid, to just be still and quiet. My parents would let me out when they saw how brave I was.”
Sunny had curled around herself as Hatter spoke, her hand pressed to her mouth as she stared down at the blankets. Part of me wanted
to hug her, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Hatter.
He continued. “It took me a long time to realize they were never going to keep their promise, no matter how still or quiet I was. And when the saliva had made its way completely through me, I would beg them, claw at the door, and plead, but they would only let me out after I’d passed out from the fear hours later. Sometimes a day or two would pass.”
At his words, Luke crossed his arms, his mouth a grim slash. He’d heard this all before and knew the awful pain of it, though it was new for Sunny and me.
“They loved to hear me beg,” Hatter said. “Their promise meant nothing to them, but to me, it was everything. It was my way out of the dark. When I realized that promise was broken, I felt broken too. Parents shouldn’t enjoy hurting their children that much. I know you experienced something like that when you were in foster care. You know how it can fuck you up. But you got through it. We both did. This matters now because it happened to you and you deserve to feel what you feel about it, but in time, it’ll become just another thing that gives you strength.”
No one spoke. There just wasn’t anything to say. In my head, I heard Hatter’s words, but they were too bright and shiny to hold on to. They didn’t make me feel better, but they calmed me down and soothed me with a hope that things would get better—in time.
A long time passed. Sunny wiped her face and cleared her throat. She was the first to speak, to pull things back around. “What did you want to talk about? You have a plan for all this?”
She gestured around the room, meaning Thad and the halflings—and my father.
I skimmed over that thought and forced myself to focus. “I need to tell you guys everything that happened the night Max took me. Coldcrow and Killian told me a lot of things about my mother and the university. You need to know them.”
And so I told them everything. I held nothing back, and my voice grew hoarse as the story unraveled, from Coldcrow’s manipulation, to the lies Dean set up, to the fear switch research, to Killian’s big reveal that my mother turned her back on the university when she fell in love with Hex, to Dean’s final experiments on her. I took a deep breath when I finished.
