Monster Mine

by Meg Collett

  The others were silent as I looked from one face to another, though I only managed to catch Luke’s profile.

  “Dean was trying to create a fear switch in humans,” I added to emphasize the point. “To sell to the government.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  My mouth fell open at Luke’s question. He should have been equally as horrified as I was. “You used to tell me all the time that humans weren’t meant to live without fear. You said people not experiencing fear would create another kind of monster. You said Dean should never have an army of soldiers like me. You said war should never be easy.”

  I flung his words back at him, but he barely reacted as he shifted from the shadows and looked at me. “I said those things a long time ago. I’m not the same idealist I used to be.”

  “You said them last semester,” I shot back. I looked between them all again. I was losing them. I grasped at the information Ghost had told me yesterday. “Irena started this place because she believed in a balance—a coexistence between humans and ’swangs. What if that can be achieved? What if there are some good ’swangs?”

  “You don’t need to justify being part aswang,” Sunny said. “You’re not a monster, Ollie.”

  “No,” I said slowly, frowning. “I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about Irena Volkova and why she started this place. Why she left the university. Don’t you think it’s important to understand why she turned her back on the school and Dean? What if she was right? Maybe the university is wrong.”

  “Ollie,” Sunny started, her eyes shifting to Hatter. Whatever she’d been about to say, I saw her push it back and pull up something else. She smiled a stilted, propped-up smile that never reached her eyes. “I think discovering your mother’s history is a great idea.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “No, it sounds like you don’t.”

  “I think what Sunny is saying,” Hatter said from across the room, “is that you’ve been through a lot and you need time to heal and figure things out. You have a mother now that you didn’t know you had before. It’s normal to want to understand her.”

  “Exactly.” Sunny’s face went slack with relief and I knew they were handling me, passing me back and forth between them like I was a child. “All that matters is that you’re okay and we’re all here together. We can figure out the other stuff before the end of winter break.”

  A knock sounded on the door, causing Hatter to jump. He unlocked it and poked his head out. A second later, he looked back at me. “Some skinny kid with food.”

  “Hey, Ollie!” Ghost called from the hall as he poked his silver head around Hatter.

  “He’s okay.”

  Hatter stepped back and the kid entered carrying a paper plate with a teetering mound of peanut butter crackers and another glass of lemonade. “I thought you all might be hungry.” He grinned around at us, even at Luke, who just stared blankly at him.

  “For crackers?” Hatter crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Oh.” The kid looked down at the plate. “It’s all I could—”

  “It’s perfect. Thanks, Ghost.” I stood from the bed and took the plate and glass from him, glaring at Hatter. “I appreciate the food. Is anyone else here?”

  “They’re all hunting,” he pouted. “Oh! I’m supposed to tell you that Hex wants to talk to you before the sun sets.”

  “Absolutely not,” Luke said, the forcefulness of his words rocking Ghost back onto his heels.

  Ignoring Luke and the way my heart bucked at the sound of my father’s name, I asked, “Do you know why?”

  “Thad told me before he went out. He’s the only one who talks to Hex.” Ghost snuck a scuttling sideways look at Luke, who I could tell had hurt his feelings. “You have to go soon before Hex starts his hunt.”

  “Are they hunting for the rogue ’swang that killed those other three?” Sunny asked.

  Ghost’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “How did you know?”

  “A rogue?” Luke asked at the same time as Hatter said, “The halflings hunt rogue ’swangs?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  I admired the subtle sarcasm overlaid with a soft hint of disdain in Ghost’s voice. It had been a while since I’d spoken “teenager,” which reminded me: my birthday had passed during my time with Max. No one knew I was nineteen now.

  “Won’t the sun be setting soon?” Sunny asked, shooting me a worried glance. We all knew what that meant: when the sun went down, I’d be talking with an aswang, not a human.

  “She’ll hit the rim quickly.” I almost smiled at Ghost’s choice of words for describing a sunset. He was clearly proud of having the opportunity to use them, even if they reeked of something Thad would say. “I’m supposed to bring you down once you’ve finished eating.”

  “Ghost, is it?” Sunny came forward, drawing the kid’s attention.

  I watched him subtly check her out the way only young boys could. He saw her sweet curves, her easy smile, and her pretty eyes. I remembered when I first saw the beautiful Filipino girl standing in the ward at the university; I’d envied her casual elegance and charm.

  “Yes, miss.” Ghost shot her a crooked smile full of slanted teeth that had a charm of their own.

  “Do you mind if we talk to Ollie for a minute? Not long. And we really appreciate the crackers.”

  Ghost stuck his hands in his pockets, busy thinking, but the battle was lost when Sunny turned her smile up a notch or two. “Okay. I’ll be just out in the hall, but hurry.”

  Hatter’s hard stare lingered on the boy for a stretched-out breath before moving to Sunny and back again. Only when he’d proved his point did he unlock the door and let Ghost out. Hatter closed it behind him and leaned back against the wood, propping his boot up.

  “The kid’s listening in on the other side,” he said. He cracked his elbow against the door, right where a little urchin might crouch with his ear pushed against the wood.

  From the other side came a muffled curse.

  “How do you know about the rogue ’swang?” Hatter asked Sunny, crossing his arms back over his chest.

  Sunny raised her brows, her eyes going to the door. “I might have overheard it somewhere,” she said carefully.

  Hatter nodded, understanding that she’d been sneaking around.

  Impressive, but I didn’t dwell on it. I was about to go talk with my father.

  “You shouldn’t go,” Luke said, lowering his voice. “We can’t trust him.”

  “He’s right. What if something happens out there? I mean, won’t he be in his night-form?” Sunny picked up a cracker and nibbled around the edges.

  “I’m going.”

  Luke raised his hands to his face and grunted into them at my words.

  I lifted a shoulder. “How else am I supposed to get answers? This is the fastest way to know what we’re dealing with. He can tell me about Irena.”

  I want to talk to my father, but I held those words back. It didn’t seem like my friends would understand why. He was an aswang, after all, and according to them, there was no such thing as a good ’swang.

  “The fastest way to turn into a ’swang appetizer too.”

  “Not helping, Hatter.” Sunny leveled him with a no-nonsense stare, like a librarian’s, if only she had those prim little glasses attached to a delicate gold chain around her neck. “What if we go out too? Just in case?”

  “If they let us out of here,” Luke said. “They might think we’ll run straight to a phone and call up the university.” The way he said it, I knew he thought that was actually a good plan.

  “And they took our weapons. We have nothing to fight with.” Hatter’s worry over the lack of weapons clearly had nothing to do with him and Luke and everything to do with Sunny.

  “Don’t forget there’s a rogue aswang out there roaming about. He killed three others and ate their guts out.” Sunny blanched at little as she spoke the last few words.

  “I’m not asking you to go out,” I said. “Wh
en I get—”

  “If you’re going, we’re going. That’s settled.” Luke picked up his jacket from the top of the dresser and pulled it on. Hatter straightened off the door, ready to go.

  “Fine.” I tried not to convey the fact that I didn’t have the energy to fight with them over it. “But Sunny should stay.”

  “She should,” Hatter agreed.

  “No way.” She was already shaking her head, making her brown curls bounce. “Not happening. I go on the hunts, remember? That was our deal.”

  “When it was just the three of us looking for her.” Hatter’s scar twitched. “It’s safer here.”

  “Oh, really?” Sunny fired back, squaring off with him.

  My brows rose at her tone, and I had the urge to slow clap for her.

  “What about Luke? Won’t he be safer here too since he’s practically spewing up a lung every other minute? Or is it because I’m a girl and he’s a guy? That’s why it’s safer for me to stay behind?” She spun toward me and I seriously had to keep myself from taking a step back. “Luke has pneumonia. He won’t let me treat it, and he’s been taking straight saliva to keep going since you’ve been gone.”

  “Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Sunny.” Luke zipped up his jacket.

  “You’re welcome, idiot.”

  Their mutual hostility shocked me, but before I could comment, Ghost’s muffled voice came from the other side of the door. “Miss?”

  “What?” Hatter called back, snapping off the word with a healthy dose of hostility.

  “It’s time.”

  Ignoring everyone, I went to the closet next to the door to the bathroom and riffled through the hanging clothes. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew these were likely my mother’s, but I didn’t let myself think about it. I couldn’t yet. The skin over my heart hadn’t healed enough to hold me together. Even the scent wafting out of the narrow, little space was enough to tug at the stitches.

  Was that what she’d smelled like?

  I shoved the thought away and grabbed the first clothes I found: a pair of jeans, a button-up blue plaid shirt, a red wool coat, and tall leather boots. Hatter opened the door for Ghost.

  “Is she coming?”

  “We’re coming,” he said. “Just getting ready.”

  “Okay.”

  As I went into the bathroom to change out of the stiff, scratchy scrubs someone had dressed me in when I came here, Sunny and Hatter went across the hall to their room to grab their jackets. Luke stayed behind, standing between the door and me. While I changed, I kept my eyes averted from the large mirror above the simple porcelain vanity. No frills, I noticed, just function. The only thing in my mother’s bathroom that resembled comfort came from the antique claw-foot tub with an array of dusty candles and half-empty bottles of bath wash. I imagined her in here, soaking after a long hunt, with her feet propped up on the tub’s edge and her hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head.

  To distract myself, I called out to Luke through the bathroom’s open door, “You’re sick, then?”

  “She exaggerated.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  No response, but I could picture his grumpy, brooding face, his brow creased into tanned wrinkles. If we’d been back at the university, before all this, he would’ve snapped something back at me, likely calling me some name, and I would’ve called him something else. It would’ve gone on until one of us kissed the other and we ended up in bed. Instead, after a long silence, during which I’d buttoned up the jeans, which fit well, and pulled on the red coat, I said, “You should let her treat you.”

  “There’s no time.”

  I leaned over and pulled on the boots, zipping them up over the jeans. When that was done, I yanked my hair into a ponytail and walked out of the bathroom. In front of Luke, I leveled a hard stare on him. “I know what you’re going to do.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to make Thad pay for waiting to get me.”

  The way his face went carefully neutral told me all I needed to know. Luke was never neutral. But this wasn’t his fight. I didn’t even know if it was mine. Things between Thad and I were shaky at best, but if I was right about the reasons he’d changed his name and how he’d regretted having to wait, then it wasn’t him Luke should hate.

  It was my father. The man I was moments away from meeting.

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “He deserves to hurt as much as you did—and more.” His fingertips started tapping against each other in their odd rhythm. I heard his calluses scraping against each other.

  “You’re not going to touch him. I mean it. It wasn’t his call. I’ll deal with this.”

  Luke rounded on me as I tried to step around him, but he didn’t touch me. “You mean you’ll deal with your father. How are you going to do that?” His brows spiked. He was mocking me. “By helping him hunt? You shouldn’t go out there with him. He can’t be trusted. He’s proved that.”

  “Maybe you should have thought about this when Sunny offered to treat you. But you didn’t. So now you’re in no condition to stop me, are you? And you’re in no condition to take on Thad in a fight or whatever you had planned. Next time, you might want to consider not being such an asshole and listening to Sunny, huh? And stop taking the saliva. You’re going to kill yourself.”

  I stepped around him and headed toward the door. Luke followed me, his teeth gritted against the words I knew he wanted to say. Just outside the door, Hatter must have heard our exchange, because he huffed out a laugh. “Do you want your balls back now or later, brother?”

  The fuming vibrations coming off Luke made the hairs on my arms stand on end. I used to crave this feeling from him, of pushing him to the brink. It excited me, and it terrified me now to realize it still did.

  Luke Aultstriver still got to me.

  “I don’t think this is what Hex intended,” Ghost said to us as we converged on him in the hall.

  “We don’t give a fuck,” Luke growled.

  “Language,” Sunny snapped and led the way down the hall.

  S E V E N

  Ollie

  We separated at the stairs leading down into the warehouse. No one was around to stop Sunny, Hatter, and Luke from following me outside, but they hung back to keep from spooking Hex and calling too much attention to themselves.

  The metal stairs rang out as I followed Ghost down. The smells of oil and sawdust filled my nose as we went. The air, cool and damp from the large, single-paned windows that lined the walls, barely circulated down here. Boards had been nailed across the windows in an attempt at defense. I didn’t like the slap-dash execution, especially with no one left behind to guard the house besides a young boy. It was like the halflings were inviting trouble, especially since they hunted rogues.

  The ’swangs retaliated against their own kin—their half kin—the way they’d retaliated against Peg.

  I hadn’t thought much about her or Coldcrow since Barrow, and I didn’t have time to now, no matter how much the thought of my old professor cut at me. She’d been the first to know what I was, and she’d tried to help me anyway.

  Ghost and I reached the bottom of the stairs, and as my boot heels clicked across the oil-stained concrete, I saw a shadow silhouetted against the open bay door. A human-shaped shadow, because the light behind him was still less than an hour before twilight, the sun hanging persistently above Anchorage’s skyline like an angry orange-red ball.

  The shadow shifted and turned around, watching us approach. Ghost stopped halfway across the warehouse, and I felt his eyes between my shoulder blades as I walked on. I stepped onto the bay’s loading dock and looked up at my father.

  “You’re wearing her jacket.”

  I’d begun to think my memory of him sitting beside me right after my arrival in Anchorage was a dream, but he was the same as my pain-clouded and sedative-riddled mind had remembered.

  I shouldn’t have let him talk. Righ
t away, I should have demanded he tell me why he’d waited—how he could do that to his daughter—but my anger and fire toward him dried up with every passing moment around him. He intimidated me.

  “You’re not ticking,” I said instead.

  “We can turn it off and on whenever we want.”

  His mouth hooked into a smile, and I studied him, looking for our similarities. His face was oval-shaped and full of sharp angles, with cheekbones models would slay for. His nose and mouth were almost pretty and feminine in their pert, bow-like shape, but his eyes ruined everything that suggested he was human. The blackness of his irises was too absolute and the silver flecks around his pupils were too otherworldly to be real. Slashing dark brows rose, but his porcelain skin didn’t wrinkle.

  “What do you think? Do I look like your monster?”

  I pretended like I didn’t have to peel my eyes away from his face as I turned to button up my jacket and tighten my ponytail. Fidgeting, I knew, and I hoped he couldn’t see how my hands shook. There was something about his mouth and jaw. Something about the tilt at the corner of his eyes. Something that reminded me of my own reflection.

  “You look like someone’s monster,” I said.

  He let out a huff of air that might have been a laugh. From the corner of my eye, I noted his thick cargo-like pants, which looked military grade, tucked into the tops of his shit-kicker, steel-toe boots. He wore no jacket against the chilly Alaskan air, only a fitted shirt with the sleeves pushed up over forearms etched with lean muscles.

  He stepped off the loading dock and fell nearly five feet, landing on his toes without a sound. He reached a hand up to help me down and asked, “Are you well enough to walk?”

  Ignoring his hand and the dock’s edge, I walked over to the side and down the steps. Without waiting, I started up the slightly sloped driveway toward the street, where lampposts hummed out a soft, warm glow in the pre-dusk light.