Monster Mine

by Meg Collett

  T H I R T E E N

  Sunny

  I had a problem.

  Hatter wasn’t right. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since he’d been bitten, but I saw no change in him. No relief from the manic episode. This one wasn’t nearly as bad as the one back in Barrow, but I sensed its grip on him. He was lost somewhere deep in his head, a place I couldn’t pull him back from, no matter how much I chattered or banged around or told him my Gran’s stories.

  His eyes had a glazed-over, unseeing quality to them. Every minute or so, he’d flinch away from some ghost sitting beside him that I couldn’t see. That I couldn’t fix.

  I considered sedating him.

  I considered slapping him to wake him up from the nightmare he’d lost himself to.

  I considered screaming until my vocal cords tore.

  Instead, I settled for leaving the room and closing the door quietly behind me. Across the hall, Luke paced in Ollie’s room. He went there right after she’d left to go hunt with Hex, which had been a few hours ago. I needed space and time to think, and I needed a break from him, so I hadn’t argued when he decided to lock himself away.

  He watched Hatter too closely, and I didn’t like it. I hated how his eyes found all the little things I’d already discovered. The tiny jerks. The twitch beneath his right eye. The way he sometimes spoke to himself, nearly silent murmurings. Luke even saw the deeper things, the things I only guessed at. Luke probably knew who Hatter cringed away from, this ghost sitting next to him, and who he whispered to. Luke knew all these things, and I knew none.

  I hated him for it—and a dozen other things. Like how he’d yelled at Ollie earlier, though I hadn’t come to her defense because I had no clue what she was saying. Hunters deserving to be killed . . . innocent ’swangs . . . Tully’s children.

  I went to the kitchen to grab us some food from the barely stocked fridge. The cupboards suggested Ghost had gone to the local Food Pantry and grabbed all the things he wanted to eat. Fruit roll-ups. Peanut butter. Fudge cakes. A wild assortment of Pop-Tarts. I grabbed a few of those and sat down at the metal island with swiveling stools.

  Tearing through the foil, I pulled out a Pop-Tart and held it between my teeth as I unfolded Irena’s picture. I stared at it for a long moment, just sitting there, catching my breath. I needed a moment before I started looking for the spare keys to that medical cabinet. Maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see. Lauren could have been injecting the wounded with anything, and the fact that Thad had kept me from them might just mean he didn’t want me in the way.

  I don’t know how long I sat there with Irena’s photo, licking the sticky berry-flavored Pop-Tart goo from my fingers, but suddenly, Luke was standing right next to me, and I had no clue how he’d gotten there.

  I jumped, nearly fell off my stool, and did a combo of squeaking in terror and choking on my own spit.

  Luke’s hand darted out to steady me from my near fall. I pressed my hand to my heart.

  “What the chicken poop, Luke?” I gasped. “Don’t just sneak up on someone like that!”

  He frowned at me. “I said your name like three times. Plus, I wasn’t sneaking. You should really pay more attention.”

  “Well,” I sniped, “you should really just . . .” My words petered out. I hadn’t thought that comeback through well enough before I started speaking. I mumbled out a finish even I didn’t understand and pushed my glasses back up my nose.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Son of a biscuit. “Nothing.”

  “You’re a horrible liar.”

  “Am not.”

  He sat down on the stool next to me as I slid the picture away. He didn’t try to stop me.

  “Look.” He raked a hand through his scraggly hair. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for being so . . .”

  “Rude?” I offered.

  He grunted. “Yeah. Rude. I—”

  “Mean? Cruel? A total and complete butthead?”

  He leaned his elbow on top of the island and huffed out a laugh. “All that works too. I just wanted to say sorry. I know I was wrong.”

  “Are you taking your antibiotics?”

  He nodded.

  “Then we’re good—as long as you let me give you a pneumonia shot next winter, along with a flu shot.”

  “Is that really necessary?”

  “People who’ve suffered from pneumonia are likelier than the average person to contract it again.”

  He gave another one of those tired laughs, nothing close to the real thing, but this still counted as the most polite conversation we’d had in a while. “Okay. Fine. They better not be in the butt.”

  “They’re not,” I lied.

  If he caught the sneaky undertone in my voice, he didn’t let it show. “Hatter is—”

  “He’s fine.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “No.” I reached over and gripped his forearm. When he met my gaze, his brows rose at whatever he saw in my eyes. “You’re not saying anything about him. He’s fine.”

  “Okay,” he lied.

  I’d pulled the picture closer to me, just under my crossed arms, and I ran my finger along its edge, thinking. Since Ollie’s disappearance, and maybe even before then, I’d pitted myself against Luke, but he wasn’t an opponent, especially not now.

  I let the words slowly unspool from my mouth. “Do you think there’s a way to save him?”

  He straightened from his slumped position over the island. “What do you mean? Cure his manic effects or something?”

  I laid my hand flat on the picture; he had to know I was hiding something by now. “Something like that.”

  “What got you thinking about that?”

  I adjusted my glasses. “It has to make sense, right? I noticed something last night . . .” Telling him seemed like giving away a secret, but I reminded myself that we needed to stick together.

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath. “How many halflings do you think were bitten during the alley fight?”

  “It’s hard to say,” he said, drawing out the words. “Ten or twelve?”

  “Right. So how many do you see recovering in here?”

  “None.”

  “And last night, how many did you notice were experiencing saliva effects from their bites?”

  His frown deepened and he fully turned to face me on his stool. “None.”

  “Not one. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, but they have to have some reaction, unless their aswang blood counteracts it, which I don’t buy. The human part of their blood would be affected, just like Ollie’s.”

  Luke glanced around the dark living space before turning his attention back to me. Lowering his voice even more, he asked, “So what do you think is happening?”

  “I think they know how to fix it. They have something that negates the effects. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “What could do something like that?”

  “I saw Lauren injecting them with a solution. She got it from the locked medical cabinets downstairs. I started to go over there, but Thad freaked out and pulled me back. He practically ran me out of the room. I was starting to think I was going crazy, but . . . it makes sense. They know, Luke.”

  “Holy fucking shit.” Again, he braced an elbow on the table and put his head in his hand, needing the support. “Do you know what this would mean for the university’s hunters?”

  I shook my head. “I know what it would mean for Hatter.”

  “Would it cure him, or just manage the symptoms?”

  “At this point, I would take either. People live out in the real world with manic disorders. When you boil it down, that’s really his main issue. You know, if you take out the monster bites and all that, managing the symptoms would be enough, I think.”

  “To keep him from going permanently manic.”

  I was thankful he didn’t use a word like “crazy” or “insane.” It
was bad enough that everyone called him Hatter after The Mad Hatter. Bad enough that he took that on as his real name. Bad enough that anyone with a similar disorder had to feel like people labeled them that way.

  “And to keep you from having to kill your best friend.”

  Luke’s pain shuddered across his face like a spasm.

  “No one should have to do that. Ever. Not even you,” I said when he couldn’t speak.

  His head sagged fully into his hand, his eyes on the counter.

  “Luke,” I said, “did you really ever consider killing her?”

  Another spasm at my words, like I’d peeled back his skin and exposed all his nerves.

  “A part of me did. A bigger part than I want to admit. She’s part human, part ’swang, but I’m part me and part Killian Aultstriver. I couldn’t ignore his half of me. I couldn’t make the damn thing shut up. All it wanted was to kill a monster, and she was part monster. But then, I must be part monster too, because look at my father.” He lifted his head and stared at me. “He shot you. He murdered Coldcrow and Sin. He simply handed Ollie over to that . . . thing. And all for what? Because he thought he was right? So I told myself if he could convince himself of something so insane, I could convince myself that the woman I love isn’t a monster. That didn’t seem nearly as insane.”

  His words dried up, and I knew he was still doing it—working to convince himself, or at least the part of him his father had raised and conditioned.

  “I hope it gets easier for you,” I whispered.

  “Me too. I’m tired of fighting.”

  I didn’t know if he meant with himself or with Ollie. I took it as probably both.

  “Did you know about those kids Ollie mentioned earlier?” I asked.

  His hand ran back and forth over his hair. I wondered why he was telling me all this, being so open with me, when he barely knew me. Or maybe we knew each other better than I’d thought.

  “I know I’ve killed some,” he said.

  I’d been right about the raw nerve thing. His skin was gone; Ollie had flayed it back.

  He went on, strangling over the words. “I found their dens. Some weren’t even awake when I shot them. They don’t look so big, so wrong when they’re that little. They just look like oversized pups with soft fur and awkward ears. If you blink, if you think on it too long, you forget what they are and what they’ll grow up to be. So I never did. Think, that is. I just shot. I might have . . . I might have killed them like she said, or it might have been my father. But then, really, what’s the difference? Either way, they’re dead. Should I feel bad about it, like she said?” His eyes were pleading with me. “Was I wrong? Are we all wrong?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Ollie wasn’t brought up like we were. Especially not how hunters like you and Hatter were. She has the freedom to think that way. I don’t know if we do. Even if there are innocent aswangs out there, how can we tell? We can’t talk to them like she can. We can’t see if they’re good or bad just from the outside. So do you and Hatter and all the other hunters just not kill any of them because you’re worried you’ll get an innocent one and leave all the bad ones free to hurt people? Wouldn’t the world get overrun then?”

  He looked more lost at my words and more tired. He let out another one of those laughs, and I thought it might have been to hold back a sob. Then again, I didn’t know Luke that well; he didn’t seem like the type who cried. Ollie had hurt him far worse than she thought. With just a few words, she’d unlocked something Luke had buried deep inside him. Those things he’d buried away were tearing him apart.

  “I just keep trying to remember, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve killed so many.”

  My throat constricted with held-back tears. I wondered if Seth had thought these very same thoughts too and if he’d killed children or mothers. I hoped he’d died young enough so these things didn’t have a chance to torment him the way they did Luke.

  “It all seemed so clear-cut before we came here,” I said. “Even when Ollie told me she was a halfling, it didn’t matter to me because I knew she wasn’t a monster, but I could still think of all the other aswangs as monsters. That’s not possible now, because they have faces. I see Hex and his pack. I see Thad and the other halflings. I see the other way of thinking, and I don’t think it can be unseen.”

  “Then how do we go back?”

  I knew he was asking a different question. Not how “we” went back, but how Ollie went back. Could she ever return to Fear University?

  “We haven’t lost her,” I said so only he could hear. “Not yet.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  The emotion in his voice and the hollowness in his eyes had me reaching for the picture. He needed to know, but more importantly, I sensed he needed a purpose. Without hunting and without Hatter, he was losing himself. Quietly, I slid the photo into the space between us on the counter. I had his attention.

  “I have something to show you.”

  He placed Ollie’s likeness to her mother as quickly as I had. I watched him take in the cut, the killing, and the dying look in Irena’s eyes. I even thought, for a second, he saw Ollie there, bleeding out, the way I had.

  He ran a hand across his jaw and looked away from the picture. He didn’t look back. “She can’t see this.”

  “I know.”

  “You think Irena’s killer took that?”

  “I do.”

  “My father . . .”

  “You’re nothing like him, Luke.”

  He swore under his breath. “He deserves to die for the things he did.” He bowed his head, hair falling across his forehead. “Without Ollie, I might have been just as bad.”

  We sat there for a long moment with the picture between us. My guilt at not showing Ollie made my stomach burn. It wasn’t right, not when so many people just saw her as a weapon to be used and wielded and manipulated. But I couldn’t tell myself I was doing the right thing or that keeping an awful picture from her was any different from Dean keeping the truth about her mother’s past secret. It was all the same, and I was just as bad.

  A secret was a secret was a secret.

  “Showing her,” Luke said quietly, like he’d guessed my thoughts, “would only hurt her. Too much has happened. She needs time to pick the pieces back up, and seeing how her mother died”—he nodded at the picture—“will only mess her up more.”

  “I’m sorry I brought you into this. You’ll have to lie to her now too.”

  He looked up at me with a slight smile. “You can only lie to someone you’re speaking with, and Ollie will barely look at me.”

  I cringed because it was true. Luke took a long breath and pushed the picture back toward me. “Let’s focus on those medical cabinets. We won’t have long before the others come back. Where do you think they keep the spare keys?”

  * * *

  It felt like we were back in Barrow. Our days and nights switched around again, with hunters sleeping during the day and tracking the Manananggal at night. I sometimes almost forgot the sun was outside and that I could just crack open a curtain and see the light or walk outside. I wasn’t sealed up inside some great base.

  But it felt like it.

  A few days went by and Hatter hadn’t gotten any better. He slept most of the time or stared at a wall or just blinked back at me when I talked to him. I couldn’t remember the last coherent thing he’d actually spoken aloud. He ate and drank when I offered him food and water, and he shuffled around the bedroom to take care of his needs, but he was a ghost. He didn’t even jerk or flinch or talk to himself now.

  He was just . . . gone.

  Ollie was too. Sometimes, during the day, I stood at the railing, alongside Luke, and watched her train with Hex and his crew. We kept to the shadows, though she never looked up at us. She spent less and less time in our rooms and more time with him, until she was training pretty much all day and then going out at night to hunt. I didn’t know when she slept or ate, but she was looking bet
ter. The haunted dullness in her eyes was gone, replaced with a scary sort of fervor. She didn’t look so bony, and after we’d been at the warehouse for a week and a half, she asked me to snip out her stitches.

  By then, Hatter was slowly getting better, coming back to himself. Luke stopped watching him as much, and I noticed the strength it took for Hatter to pull the unfolded parts of himself back together. He was back to normal after that, like nothing had happened, and ready to get bitten all over again.

  But I refused to watch him slip away and become lost forever.

  So every night, when the warehouse was empty, Luke and I searched through the halflings’ medical supplies for clues as to what they were administering to those who got bit. I knew the keys had to be close; Lauren needed them at a moment’s notice. We went through every drawer and cabinet but found nothing, though more than a few were locked.

  I guessed the stuff had been locked up on our arrival. There was no need to keep it from the other halflings who knew about it already. They’d locked it for our benefit—the human hunters. A secret kept against us.

  During that time, I treated a few halflings, but I was never the first to see to them. That was always Reece or Lauren, who would snap at me to get back if I got too close or tried to help.

  Luke and I discussed confronting Thad, but we had nothing to use against him. Not even the picture, which we’d burned before throwing its ashes out into the snow. Thad must have found my note at some point, but he never said anything and never looked at me differently. But I sensed he knew. We both had our hands tied on that one.

  We never mentioned anything about it to Ollie. Her distance from us made the lie easier.

  F O U R T E E N

  Ollie

  I made no attempt to keep my footsteps quiet as I headed back to the warehouse. If a rogue wanted to jump me, bless their heart, ’cause I was not in the mood.

  It had been almost two weeks since my first hunt with Hex, and we were no closer to finding the Manananggal. It was like she’d vanished into thin air. Sometimes the hunters thought they saw something flying overhead, but the sightings were normally chalked up to exhaustion and fear.