by Meg Collett
A whispered laugh trickled down to us.
When I turned back to the others, they were looking up in the same direction I had been. Hex inclined his large head toward the west, angling after her. With a nod, Thad tapped the side of his nose and flashed me two fingers.
“Just say the damn words. She knows we’re here.”
His jaw clenched, but Hex made a chuffing sound in front of us that translated into a laughing sound in my head. With a final glare toward me, Thad went after Hex. I rolled my eyes at the both of them and followed.
I still wasn’t used to a ’swang walking right in front of me. I heard nothing inside my head, no maddening tick tock to disorient me or anything directly spoken from Hex, but my brain still sent alarm bells down my body. My skin stretched tight over my bones, and my scalp prickled with adrenaline. Every other step, I found myself glancing at him just to ease the fear building up in my nerve endings.
It went against every instinct I’d learned since arriving at Fear University and the ones that went further back to my time on the run from Max and the police. I’d honed them throughout years of always glancing over my shoulder and looking in the corner of my vision for an attack.
But maybe my instincts went back even further than that. Maybe I’d been born with them.
Maybe they’d been passed down to me from Irena Volkova.
Her name swirled around in the back of my mind like a deep gulp of salt water—abrasive and bitter, but somehow enticing.
Ollie Volkova, I thought. Ollie. Volkova. The name was just as foreign, just as out of reach as my mother’s. I’d only ever thought of myself in terms of meaningless aliases.
A thick, broken branch snapped beneath my boot, echoing through the woods like a gunshot.
Hex’s and Thad’s heads swiveled back to me at the sound. Thad hushed me, and Hex growled.
Right as I flipped them off, the trees slightly to our right rustled. Bare branches scratched along each other in a breeze none of us felt, only heard. Then came the unmistakable sound of wings retreating back into the sky.
“She’s toying with us,” Thad said.
We need to split up and draw her out. Tell Thad, Hex said in my mind. He peeled off to the left just as Thad stopped and looked back at me.
“Did he talk to you?” The sharpness in his voice told me he was a little hurt by the fact.
“He wants us to split up to draw her out.”
He sighed out a long breath.
“Stay close,” he said, clearly not happy. “Keep within shouting distance. Hex will find you when it’s time to go back.” He reached into his thigh holster and pulled out a handgun, gray metal glinting in the night. “Do you know how to use it?”
When he handed it to me, I checked the safety and racked the slide.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “Shouting distance, okay? And don’t shoot me.”
Part of me wanted to, maybe just in the leg, a tiny punishment. But I figured the others wouldn’t like that, and if I’d learned anything tonight, it was that I needed this—this sense of purpose and the hunt and to feel closer to my mother. Besides, he’d given me the whip from my mother. That counted as something.
“No promises,” I said and lowered the gun.
With that, I set off down the middle, leaving Thad to take the right. I kept the gun in my hand as I pushed branches back and threaded my way between trees and bushes. The red coat I wore took a beating, but the thick wool seemed to hold up against the thorns and limbs.
I kept my head on a swivel and my eyes constantly moving. Every so often, I stopped and listened, even inhaling deeply a few times, though I smelled nothing but leaves and the wet penny scent of frozen dirt.
I walked deep into the woods for at least three hours. I went long enough that I relaxed when I no longer heard wings and didn’t see dark blots slinking above the trees. The adrenaline from earlier wore off and weighed down my legs. I wanted nothing more than a warm bed and a long sleep.
My thoughts drifted. I hoped Sunny had patched up Hatter and Luke. From the amount of bites I’d seen on Hatter, I figured he was probably entering into a manic period about now. I should have been with Sunny to help her handle him, but she had Luke.
My train of thought tripped up like it always did when he entered my mind. He’d said he wasn’t here to kill me, but I had a hard time coming to terms with that. I knew, somewhere deep inside of him, he was burying the urge. His instincts—like mine—had been honed from years of hunting. His blood sang for him to kill the enemy. And I was part enemy.
I had no idea what I wanted from him. Maybe for him to admit he wanted, on some level, to run me through with a knife or splinter my skull with bullets. Maybe hearing the words—to know it wasn’t love that had brought him here, but a repressed sense of duty—would make this new aching hole in my chest feel better. I couldn’t handle the love part.
I was rubbing my fingers along the thick material of my shirt, right above where the stitches were. Max had cut me from the bottom of my throat straight down to the thin skin between my breasts. I would scar—white and thick like a human. His mark would always be set apart, and I hated that. The bones in my chest, where he’d hacked and stabbed to get past my sternum and at my heart, even felt different because of him.
At some point, as I walked, I sensed movement next to me.
I kept up my pace, my eyes dancing around as they had been, as if I hadn’t noticed. Forcing my steps to keep from stuttering, I went along, practically doing everything but humming nonchalantly under my breath. I strained my ears for any sound above the normal forest sounds of frozen limbs creaking like old bones.
If she was on the ground with me, she was close. I should’ve been able to smell her—her rot. Wouldn’t the fleshy, gray strips of skin around her waist get caught in the thorns? Could she even walk on her bone legs?
The space a few feet away from me changed, like the shadows weren’t just hiding more shadows, but a solid thing ready to peel through them like a hot blade.
I raised the gun, my whip in my other hand, as Hex appeared.
He paused and cocked his head at my gun, which I lowered.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears.
Let’s head back.
No sign of her? I asked back. I channeled my thought straight through to him, the way I had in the alleyway when we first met. He didn’t respond, which I took as a negative.
Clicking the safety back on, I followed after him, easily slipping into his wake before the limbs slapped back at me.
We moved quicker this way, but Thad never joined us, though I sometimes caught the occasional sounds of his passage alongside us. He must have known these woods pretty well to walk through them alone. I wondered how often they’d hunted out here.
How often my mother had.
We made our way back to the warehouse district right as the sun began to rise. We had spent the entire night hunting her, and other members of Thad’s team materialized from the gaps between the buildings, their clothes rumpled and grungy from their various treks. Thad had joined us by then, and as the rest of his team came in behind us, we were all quiet. The ’swangs led us back to Irena’s house, until, suddenly, when we had arrived back, I looked around and only people remained. I blinked, confused and disoriented like I’d missed something.
I found Hex easily enough. He was crouched next to a man who wasn’t wearing a shirt. He had scars hatched across his shoulder, blond dreadlocks, and a distant, detached look in his eyes. He held a needle between his large fingers and stabbed it in and out of the torn flesh of his chest. Hex didn’t help and kept a healthy distance from the blond, but they spoke in low tones. With a nod, Hex rose, his eyes landing on me.
When he walked over, I noticed his eyes were red-rimmed. He favored his left arm, though he didn’t outwardly show it much. I lifted my chin in the blond man’s direction. “He was the one who stood in front of us at the garage?”
Hex glanced back at the me
mber of his pack. “Not sure, but it sounds like something Tully would do.”
“Will he be okay?”
“He’s been through worse,” he said, turning back to me. “Lost his entire family during last year’s Killing Season.”
The man stood and walked away, disappearing into another building. He’d heard us.
“How?” I asked.
“How do you think?” Hex spoke dryly, without any emotion. “The Aultstrivers and their band of hunters up in Barrow. They came across Tully’s den and slaughtered his wife and three kids while he was out looking for food. He came back and found them all headless. A Barrow prize-taking tradition.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t pinpoint this feeling in my stomach.
“Do you think it’s right to kill kids because Fear University and Dean decreed all aswangs are monsters? I wonder how many children your boyfriend has murdered.”
He wanted a reaction, so I kept silent, my face slack. Above us, the morning sun was leaking out purples and blues. I needed to check on the others.
When I didn’t take his bait, he said, “You did good out there tonight.”
He paused, as if waiting for me to thank him or something for his praise. I’d never had a father’s approval before, and I felt nothing inside me to suggest I needed it now. I cocked an eyebrow and waited.
“I was impressed and I think the others in my pack were as well. You’re going to make a great hunter.” His eyes flicked to the side, the longer strands of his black hair swishing against the tops of his shoulders as he looked away. “Maybe as good as your mother.”
He got me there; my heart squeezed by a fraction at the thought of her and of being like her.
“You said you’d tell me about her if I hunted with you.” I lifted my hand, indicating the sunrise around us. “I hunted.”
“You did.” He smiled, revealing the sharp points of his teeth. I wondered how many people he’d eaten. Countless, if I were to believe the legends. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I said. “But you can start with when she built this place and why.”
He looked at the warehouse behind me. I sensed movement inside, the lights coming on, and the safety of it. He took it all in with more fondness than he’d expressed when he told me I’d done well tonight.
“When Dean started his experiments, he alienated many at the university. People chose sides, but they didn’t even know the full extent of what he was doing. They thought his ideas were only theories, but he’d started doing live experiments.”
“The fear switch,” I said.
Coldcrow had told me about Dean’s government-sanctioned work to create a sort of mind control in human hunters. It would turn off their fear and allow them to hunt aswangs with impunity.
Hex rocked back on his heels slightly. “You know then.”
“I don’t know why that research turned into his breeding experiments, or why he forced Irena to take part in them."
“Dean grew obsessed with the concept of a fear switch. None of the lobotomies he’d carried out on captured ‘swangs in the seventies worked, but those aswangs had been near death, weak from fighting with the hunters who had captured them. He needed healthy, adult aswangs. Irena volunteered to help.”
My mouth dropped open. When I’d recovered, I asked, “Volunteered?”
Hex ran a long-fingered hand across his chin, and I noticed the blood stains beneath his fingernails. “She didn’t trust him, and she wanted to keep him close, to be involved in his tests. He shut everyone else out, but he needed her. She was the best, and he needed better subjects. She started hunting for him then.”
“That’s when she made this place?”
“She wanted a secret spot no one at the university knew about. Back then, she came here often to store away evidence and information she’d collected against Dean. She was preparing for a day when she would present it against him to end his reign over the university. But then she captured me and things changed. After that, this place morphed into something far more important.”
“How did she get you?” The question spilled from my mouth before I could stop it.
“That’s for another night.” His eyes glimmered with the secret, his mouth hooking upward in another smile, like the memory was a fond one, even though it involved his capture. I saw the love for her still brimming in his eyes, and I understood why his pack wasn’t matriarchal like the other ’swang packs and why none of his male peers were up north to mate.
They’d already found their mates and lost them. I thought of Tully and all he’d lost.
“So she found you. What then?”
“She let me go and convinced Dean I’d merely escaped. Between her hunts, she came up with this idea—radical at the time—that ’swangs and humans could abide in the same world as long as everyone obeyed the laws of nature. She started using words like ‘coexistence’ and ‘balance.’ I loved her enough that she convinced me of it too. It wasn’t easy to find others like us, though we managed to come across a few in the short time we had together. We even found some halflings and recruited them. The house became a sanctuary, a new kind of university for hunters with a real cause—a natural one. Sometime during this period, Dean grew suspicious of her.”
“That’s when he took her,” I whispered.
Hex nodded, his eyes shifting away again. “He’d grown crazier, more radical, and he was demanding more and more subjects. He thought the fear switch could be produced in an offspring between a human and an aswang, like nature’s failsafe or evolution. That’s when he started the breeding experiments and Irena stopped helping him. She wanted to present the evidence she had against him to the Original families to get him removed from the presidency, but I told her the university wasn’t worth saving. We got into a huge fight, and Dean captured her a few days later.”
I thought back to everything Coldcrow had told me, how Hex had helped her escape from Dean and go into hiding. Not long after, she had me. “You helped her escape from him?”
“I did.”
“Did you help her disappear after that?”
The smooth skin subtly creased around his mouth, enough to tell me the question touched a nerve. “I did not. She left on her own. Shortly after, I discovered she was pregnant with you. I tried to find her, but she’d gone into hiding.”
She left on her own. His words rang in my ears. They felt wrong and abrasive somehow. My mother had loved him, yet she’d gone into hiding from Dean, Killian, and Hex when she was pregnant with me.
Something had happened between them. Something that made Hex’s mouth crease with pain whenever he thought about it.
I met his eyes and did not blink. “Why did she leave?”
The crease around his mouth slowly shifted away, like a shadow shrinking at noon. I sensed knowledge in his eyes. Whatever had happened, it was big. Important.
I had to know.
In that moment, my question became the crux of us. I waited to see if he would lie.
Behind us, the warehouse door swung open and Thad called out, “We’re ready for your briefing.”
Hex looked back and nodded. “I’m coming.”
When he shifted his attention back to me, the sharp, tilted smile was back in place, his lips practically snarling at me.
“That,” he murmured as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear, “will take some time to explain.”
“No.” I crossed my arms over my chest, protecting the stitches as if he might rip them out with a few words. “You want to wait until you think I’ll believe what you have to tell me. It seems you enjoy waiting.”
My jab didn’t phase him. “I’ll only ever tell you the truth, but you have to wait until you’ve earned it.”
“You mean when I’ll accept the truth without ripping your face off.”
The smile grew. “Perhaps. Is that a problem?”
“Not at the moment.” But it will be.
“Good.” He patted my shoulder.
“Time to tell the others what monster we’ll be playing with now.”
E L E V E N
Sunny
Hatter’s eyes were closed, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping. His eyelids twitched with my every move around the room as if he were keeping tabs on me. Bandages and hasty stitches had sewn him back together. His breathing ran ragged under his bare chest; he’d been too hot for a blanket. Every so often, he opened his eyes to check on Luke, who was lying a few feet away on a pallet of blankets and pillows on the floor of Ollie’s bedroom, which was bigger than the one across the hall. They’d wanted to be close to each other, Luke saying he needed to keep an eye on Hatter; Hatter saying Luke was banged up worse than him—a lie.
Hatter whispered numbers under his breath. His fingers trembled against the bed sheet.
I turned away, pretending like I hadn’t noticed, and kept cleaning up the room, careful with the hand I’d cut on the glass in the alleyway. Bloody towels and bandages were strewn across the floor from our struggle to stop Hatter’s bleeding. Most of his wounds were superficial, but they’d all bled like geysers. I wasn’t nearly as well equipped as I would’ve been at the university, but I made due with the supplies Ghost brought me from downstairs after he’d helped Lauren inject the bitten halflings with whatever solution was in those cabinets.
I knew better than to ask, but now I knew where to look, even though I would feel bad taking it from the halflings with so many of them wounded from saving us during the alley attack. My guilt wouldn’t last long, because none of them had offered it to Hatter.
What a disaster the attack had been. We’d come so close to dying—again.
We’d gotten lucky, and I knew the guys would be loath to admit the halflings had rescued us. But maybe the common ground would help mend the gap between all of us. At least until I stole from the halflings. I hoped they wouldn’t notice when the time came, but to be fair, they should have offered to share with us.
I wiped a grimy hand across my forehead, pushing back my sweaty, frizzy hair. Behind my glasses, my eyes burned with exhaustion, and my mouth was sore from my busted lip.
