by Meg Collett
“Wait,” he started, voice rising with panic. “No.”
He jerked against the restraints, but they held. Satisfaction warmed my belly as I adjusted my fingers in the knuckles.
“We have to talk, Richard.” I let the knuckles slide down my fingers until they were almost to my nails and the blade became more like a loose knife in my hand.
“Okay.” He nodded like this was some business meeting and he still had some power, even though he was stretched out with his ass up over a broken desk. “Let’s talk.”
“The university is changing,” I said. “Anyone incapable of adapting to those changes will be eliminated.”
“Says who?” He’d bitten his tongue when I punched him, and it flopped around uselessly in his mouth.
I used the end of my knife to spread his fingers wide. “Says me.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Even now, with my knife between his fingers, he was trying to intimidate me with that tone he probably used every day on his son.
I leaned down, eye level, and smiled at him. My smile wasn’t right these days. Something vital was missing from my eyes. I saw it every time I looked at Sunny and she tried to shove down her fear and worry for me. But the way this man’s eyes turned watery with fear told me I was doing okay. As long as my sharp edges still terrified, I could make it.
“Who the hell am I? I’m the person who’s going to check in on you when you’re sleeping next to your pretty wife. When you’re showering and you think you’re alone. When the house goes still and you think you hear something. When you feel a breath-like breeze across your neck. I’ll be the person there, just in the shadows, watching you. And if you ever screw up again, I’ll end you in the worst way. Got it?”
“Fu—”
I sliced, a quick downward flick of the knife. He blinked at me, slowly, thickly. Then the pain hit and he tried to scream, but his tongue was swelling too quickly to make much of a sound. His body thrashed against the belt holding him down. Across the floor, his heels grappled for purchase, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He fought like a feral dog at the end of a leash.
Between his fingers, the webbed skin had peeled apart, separating his fingers down to the bone. I moved my knife to the next set of fingers and waited.
“Try again, Richard.”
“Please.” Bubbles formed and popped from the bloody spit oozing between his lips. He started to cry.
“It’s too late for apologies.”
“I can’t take any more.”
“I’ve only cut you once, Richard. You have a lot of fingers left. How much did you make your son take?” I pressed the knife against his skin. “Did you wait until he was crying or begging or lying on the floor in a shivering ball of fear? How much, Richard? How far did you go?”
“He was too weak—”
His skin parted like warm butter against a hot knife. A high-pitched keening emitted from the back of his throat as he started to rock over his tied hands, blood dripping in a steady flow.
“I don’t think your hands are gonna work too good after this, Richard. You really should try to understand what I’m saying. Will you hurt your son again?”
“No!” He repeated the word over and over until it merged into one long wailing plea. “Nononononono.”
I eased back on my heels as I regarded him. To give the bastard some credit, he lifted his head enough to meet my eyes. Ropes of snot had congealed beneath his nose. “I don’t think I believe you.”
I cut the web between his fourth finger and pinkie. Probably shouldn’t have. Might have been overkill. Might have been a lot of things. But I liked how he cried and trembled and begged. He deserved far more, and I enjoyed reducing him to this state far too much.
Suddenly, his ruddy face flashed into Max’s. His prim, white button-up turned into red plaid. He had broad shoulders, a too-handsome face, and his brown hair flopped over his eyes as he looked up at me.
“Please,” Max said, gasping over the word.
I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. When I looked again, Max was gone, and the man stared back at me like I was crazy.
Good. I felt it.
“Tell your sick-fuck friends too. Tell them if they raise a hand to their children, if they hurt them or torment them or train them, they’re next. Do you understand me now?”
The man was already nodding. “Y-yes. Please don’t hurt me again,” he slurred.
“Should I believe you?”
I moved the knife to his other hand and started teasing apart his fingers. He fought to clench them closed.
“Yes!” He coughed on the thickness of his tears and tongue. “Please. I promise.”
“What do you promise?”
“Not to train my son.”
“The university trains their students. No one else. Training won’t be an excuse to hit someone to feel like a man.”
“Yes, of course.”
I ran my fingertip down his middle finger. “Say the words, Richard.”
“The university trains—”
“No.” I flipped the blade down, a millimeter from the soft, pale skin between his fingers. “The other words.”
He whimpered. “I wo-won’t use training as an excuse to hit him.”
“And . . .” I smiled, toying with his finger again.
“To feel like a man.”
“Because you’re not a man, right?”
“Right.” Fat tears ran down his fat cheeks, and suddenly I wanted to cut into his fleshy jowls and whittle him down to the size of the man I thought he was.
I patted his cheek instead, letting my blade pass close to his eye before I wiped it clean. “Don’t forget to tell your friends. Good talk, Richard.”
My blade whisked back into the knuckles, and I slid them off into my pocket as I stood from the floor. Richard slumped against the wood and started crying in earnest, thanking me for his life. I rolled my eyes. I’d barely cut him, though he was bleeding like a stuck pig.
On my way out, I passed the bathroom, his blood drying on my hands. The door opened, and I waited for his wife to attack me, but she stood on the other side of the doorway, dressed in pajamas with her hair brushed, and handed me a wet towel.
“For the blood,” she murmured, her eyes twitching toward her blubbering husband.
I took the towel and rubbed it over my hands, fingers, and arms. When I was finished, I passed it back to her.
“If he does it again,” I said, “contact the university. Ask for Ollie Volkova.”
I saw how my name registered with her by her small, shaky exhale and the way she nodded quickly, allowing me to catch the flash of a bruise behind her ear. I was closing the room’s front door behind me when I heard her whisper, “Thank you.”
On my way back to the school, I didn’t think much. At the gates, the guards let me drive through without question. Dean had forewarned them of my return, telling them I had the freedom to come and go like all the other hunters. I parked the van in the underground garage and wound my way upstairs. The dorms were to my left, but I went right, back outside through the front door, which remained unlocked since there were so many visitors on campus. My feet carried me forward of their own accord, my mind blank as to where I was going.
The barracks were unlocked, and his door wasn’t locked either, as if he’d been expecting me.
I went in without pausing. The room was dark, his form a solid length beneath the blankets. He shifted, and I caught the gleam of his eyes watching me as I walked farther into the room, toeing off my boots as I went. I dropped my jacket on the back of his desk chair.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes and waited for whatever he would say.
“Where do you go?”
I looked away as I undid my jeans and pulled them off. “This family—”
“No.” He shook his head, rising up onto one arm to look at me through the darkness. “I mean, where do you go,” he said, voice low, “when your eyes look like that?”
The m
issing bits of me. He saw them too. Saw the holes left behind in me.
“Some place new,” I said as I picked at the dried blood forming half-moons beneath my fingernails. “I didn’t have it in me before him.” Max, the unspoken name between us. “Before that time in the cabin.”
I thought Luke might say something else. Might try to promise me I was okay. Instead, he drew back the covers and waited for me to climb in.
I tugged my bloodied shirt over my head, leaving on my white tank top, and eased in beside him. His body radiated warmth and his special scent: cottonwood and caramel. I smelled the candied sweetness on his breath as he lay down behind me. He didn’t try to pull me against him or wrap his arms around me. I didn’t lean back against him or ask for a goodnight kiss. I just settled my head on his extra pillow—my old pillow—and faced the wall.
“Is this okay?” I asked the darkness. He hadn’t moved a muscle behind me.
“Ollie . . .”
I let out a breath. My chest—where the stitches used to be—ached. “I know, but it has to be like this for a while.”
“Then it’s okay.” His words rustled the tiny hairs beside my ear. Then, even quieter, he said, “I’ve missed you.”
I felt Max’s knife against the bones above my heart and heard the hollow clang of its metal. I shivered. “Me too.”
I missed him. I missed me. The words could mean both.
“Did it help? Hurting that man?”
On the other side of the single window in the room, the moon peeked out from behind the clouds and sent a silvery light across the floor. Sunny must have told him where I’d gone. She always knew things like that, even without being told. “Yes.”
He sighed. I imagined I heard the rough pads of his fingers scraping against each other as he tapped them in their dance. “I’m glad you did it.”
I nodded to the wall.
“And the meeting with Dean?”
“Dean,” I said, the moon hiding back behind the clouds, “came to understand it was easier to stand with me than against me.”
Luke went silent, processing my words and their meaning. He knew I’d had to bargain with a madman. He knew, probably better than most, the stakes I was playing against, what I would have to do, and the line I was walking. Eventually, he said, “He thinks he controls you.”
“So does Hex.”
“You can’t trust Dean.”
“No, I can’t,” I said, turning onto my belly and stretching my legs out beneath the soft sheets. “But for what I need from him, I won’t have to, and when the time’s right, I’ll kill him.”
To anyone else, the words might have been unsettling or terrifying, but Luke just nodded. “And Hex is coming.”
He spoke quietly, like we were talking of an approaching storm.
Beneath the pillow, I flexed my fingers against the diamond knuckles. I’d laid my mother’s whip on the table beside me without even registering the action. It was so second nature to keep them close.
My parents and my weapons.
Hex and Dean thought they were my masters, but I was no one’s weapon.
“I’ll be ready.”
T W E N T Y
Sunny
“Well, another one bites the dust.”
Nyny tossed the dead rat into the biohazard waste container. It landed next to nearly a hundred others.
“We’re going to run out of rats,” I said, biting my lip.
Nyny pushed her bangs out of her eyes with the back of her gloved hand and heaved a breath. “Screw the rats. We’re going to need more coffee. What time is it?”
I checked my watch and grimaced. “Almost six in the morning.”
She stripped off her gloves and boosted herself onto the lab table we’d been working on. I wasn’t going to be the one to point out the risk of cross-contamination, not when she’d been without caffeine for a few hours. She kicked her boots back and forth, her sequined leggings flashing, her plaid top tied around her waist. I’d offered her a lab coat, but she’d refused it.
“So let’s recap,” Nyny said. “You call me in the middle of the night, like, freaking out, saying you know how to make an antidote for the ’swang saliva effects. You tell me to bring all the powdered wolf’s bane I have, and, I quote, ‘get my purple ass down here.’ I think it’s time you tell me what’s going on. Where have you been? Who told you to use the bane? And what the ever-loving fuck is going on with Ollie?”
Since this seemed like it might be a long conversation and we were running out of rats anyway, I snapped off my gloves, folded them up, and, picking up Nyny’s discarded pair on the way, disposed of them. I eased my arms out of the stuffy lab coat and hefted myself up onto the table across from her. I had to hop a few times, but I made it.
With a sigh, I adjusted my glasses and said, “I apologize for telling you to get your purple . . . butt down here. I was a little freaked out.”
“You think? You sounded insane.”
“I’d just watched someone die.”
Nyny sucked in a breath. “Oh.”
“I can’t tell you where we were or what we were doing, but this discovery is important. I know they were using bane. They had it in its powdered form and were mixing it into an injectable solution for bitten hunters. It makes sense, right? It kills aswangs when used properly. Wouldn’t it kill off their saliva too when it’s in a human’s bloodstream?”
“Look,” Nyny said carefully, “it makes sense, theoretically, like if you squint when you look at it. But dude. The tiniest dose of bane can bring down a full-grown male ’swang.” She shook her head. “If a human injected it? Like you said? It would kill them, Sunny. There’s no way that’s what you saw.”
“I know what I saw.” I felt exhausted and wrung dry, but I dug my nails into my palms and forced myself to focus. “I can’t tell you what we were doing, but the people getting the bane solution weren’t exactly normal, you know?”
I didn’t know how much I could risk saying. I’d probably already said too much, but I could trust Nyny. After our time at the Barrow base, I knew she would keep Ollie’s secret, but it was too big of a risk. If it got out what Ollie was, her mission to fix Fear University might end before it even started. The hunter families might follow a young warrior into battle, but they’d never follow a halfling.
Nyny was looking at me funny, so I added, “They weren’t completely human. That’s all I can say. You just have to trust me. If these people can take it, then I know we can figure out a way for regular humans to take it effectively.”
“Regular humans?” Nyny’s eyes were wide as the petri dishes we’d been using all night. “Jesus Christ, Sunny! What the hell were you doing?”
“It’s a long story.”
She stared at me for a long moment before saying, “These ‘people’ you saw taking it might have built up some resistance or their genetic makeup might make them more capable of handling the poison. Like it might have worked on them, if you’re right about what you saw—”
“I am.”
“—but it would kill a human.”
“It didn’t kill Abigail Aultstriver.”
“She was lying in it, not having it injected straight into her bloodstream.”
I thought of Hatter hiding behind his mask and how he’d kissed me like he was falling apart. I would do anything to make him better. “I don’t care. I have to try.”
Nyny looked at me as though she knew what I was thinking. Any normal person would have run screaming from the idea, but she barely paused. “Okay. So you’re convinced. You saw these ‘people’ giving bane shots to bitten fighters.”
I nodded even though she wasn’t waiting for my agreement. She had her face scrunched up, her fingers tapping against her chin.
“The x-factor might be the solution they were dissolving it in. That could be the catch to making it safe enough. Okay.” She jumped down from the table. “I have some ideas, but I’ll need a few things.”
My heart started to gallop, an
d I jumped down in front of her. “Anything. I’ll go now.”
Nyny held up three fingers. “Coffee. More rats. And strawberry yogurt, ’cause I’m hungry.”
* * *
Over the next few days, I kept my bane research from Ollie. Not because I was hiding it from her, but because it would distract her. There was no time for distractions.
Killian’s trial loomed over us, warping time until it whizzed by, hours feeling like minutes and minutes feeling like seconds. Under Ollie’s instruction, Dean met with all the guards and hunters on campus. He told them select information, merely saying they were under threat and that they should be ready for anything during the trial. With thousands of people descending on Fear University, we couldn’t risk the all-out panic that would happen if people knew an aswang horde was coming to kill them all. Ollie discussed evacuation with the others, but in the end, we decided everyone was safer here, where there were more hunters to fight off the attack.
But behind the scenes, the preparations became frenzied, almost panicked. Ollie, Luke, and Hatter orchestrated the setup of electric fences beyond our perimeter walls. They readied guard towers and rook’s nests with ammunition and supplies to last a small siege. And that was what we considered this to be: a siege. No matter what, we had to keep the aswangs outside. If we could hold our walls, things would be fine. At least that’s what Ollie kept saying.
The night before Killian’s trial, everyone gathered in the cafeteria, which had emptied out after dinner, with everyone going out to the courtyard or their rooms to gather and talk about how tomorrow night’s proceedings would go. For the rest of us, it would be an all-nighter. Ollie had Dean’s property map spread over a table while she and the others pored over it, making notes of last-minute preparations. She pointed out freshly stocked guard towers with her burnt hand, which she’d removed the bandage from, insisting it was getting in her way. The skin was slightly rippled and pale, but nothing compared to the rest of her scars.
