Monster Mine (14 page)

With a piercing scream, she dove.
Instead of pulling against us, she came straight down. The ’swangs
holding on to her crashed into Bravo Team and bodies scattered.
Losing our footing against the sudden slack in the whip, Thad and I
fell back. He landed half on top of me, and I cracked my elbow
against the concrete. A sudden wet warmness slicked across my skin
and drew a tickling, itchy path down my arm as I tried to scramble
back to my feet.

“
Get her!” someone
shouted.

The ’swangs communicated with clicks
and barks as they tried to rally. Hex bounded onto the dumpster. My
whip’s length fell to the ground, useless.

She was free and gaining air on
us.

Hex leaped from the edge of the
dumpster, straight at her.

Peeling her eyes from mine, she
spiraled around. Her wing collided with Hex and knocked him out of
the air.

As she disappeared into the night’s
clouds, Hex landed in a crumpled heap a few feet away. To his
credit, he didn’t cry out in pain, though I knew something must
have broken from the fall.

“
Follow her!” Thad
shouted, already back on his feet with his gun drawn.

Around him, Bravo Team collected
themselves into separate tracking units without being told. With a
few hand motions, Thad sent them off into the darkness with ’swangs
running alongside them.

Hex, Thad, and I took the direct path
after her.

We sprinted to the edge of the
warehouse district and to the very edge of Anchorage’s far reaches,
heading toward the Chugach State Park. A deep copse of trees, thick
and seemingly impenetrable, stood like a wall before us, but Hex
cut through it, brambles and briars tearing at his coat. Thad and I
kept close behind him. We reduced our speed to a nearly silent
crawl, with Thad holding back every branch and letting them
silently swing back into place as I passed by. I tried to mimic his
impossibly quiet footsteps, but my boots still cracked over frozen
twigs and solidly packed snow.

Every so often, Hex paused. He and
Thad lifted their noses in the air and breathed in deeply. A damp
chill permeated the air, and, in front of our mouths, our breaths
condensed in the air.

But we heard only silence. Hex and
Thad smelled nothing. I saw only the dark sky above us and the
tree-shadowed ground around us.

We’d lost her.

But something told me she wasn’t far
away. An instinct deep in my stomach, like a whispering voice in my
ear, told me to look behind me.

I glanced back right as a cold breeze
blew my hair forward. I swept away the strands in time to see a
shadow pass just above the edges of the tree limbs.

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 member 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?”