Monster Mine (18 page)

In the hall, I slowed long enough to
scan the shadow beneath Sunny’s door. They could be asleep or
somewhere else in the warehouse. Thad had firmly suggested they not
go outside again. Part of me hated to leave them behind, but I knew
where I needed to be.

Downstairs was a ghost town. The bay
doors were locked up tight. Only a single fluorescent light lit the
room. I walked across the space; the only sound came from my boots
clapping across the concrete. I buttoned up my jacket as I went.
Inside my pocket, I felt the reassuring weight of my whip and
diamond knuckles.

“
Missed the boat,
huh?”

I jumped at the voice, my hand
fumbling in my pocket as I swung around to face the
sound.

“
Ghost,” I said, huffing
out a breath. The skinny kid was sitting cross-legged against one
of the side bay doors, waiting. “What the hell are you
doing?”

He shuffled a pack of
cards, flicking them between his hands like he’d done it countless
times before. The cards looked worse for wear too. “They wouldn’t
let me go.
Again
.”

I heard the obvious pout in his
muttered words. “Go out hunting?”

“
Yeah.”

I swear his bottom lip
trembled.

I crossed over to him and toed his
knee with my boot. “But watching the house is a big deal. It’s
important.”

He scooted away from me, his cards
falling in waves to the floor. “Thad says I’ll just get in the way
if I go out with them.”

“
Thad’s kind of an
asshole, isn’t he?”

Ghost snorted. “Yeah, he really can be
sometimes,” he said, eyes glancing around as if someone might
overhear him.

“
Don’t worry about it too
much, okay? You’re not missing much.”

“
Whatever.”

“
Okay. See
you.”

He didn’t say anything else, and I
didn’t press. I eased out through the side door, making sure it
locked behind me. The parking lot in front of the warehouse with
the Jeep my friends had come in along with a few other cars for the
halflings was completely dark, the moon lost behind a thick bank of
snow clouds. Before I started through the buildings, toward the
woods, I coiled my whip around my wrist and pulled the knuckles
over my fingers.

Only when my eyes had adjusted to the
darkness did I move, my boots crunching over loose stones. My
breath condensed in the air in front of my mouth. Above me, I
sensed the heavy snow clouds pressing down, charging the air with
an electric snap that made my molars ache. I kept my head low and
my shoulders hunched, but my eyes were always scanning the shadows
and tracking every movement around me.

Look
vulnerable
, Hex had told me earlier
today.
Look weak, like you aren’t paying
attention.

Apparently, bad ’swangs loved an
unsuspecting person.

Makes their fear taste
fresher
, Squeak had chimed in, clearly
from experience.

Tully had shot him a dark
look.

The other hunters were far ahead of
me, and I came across no one and nothing aside from castaway litter
and old tires. I rubbed circles around the diamond switch on the
silver knuckles, craving to hear the blade’s metal hiss and the way
it sliced through the air, like a breeze of death against your neck
right before the blood came.

Max would’ve had fun with this type of
blade. I imagined all the ways he would have liked to cut me up
with it. Maybe, if he’d had something as sharp as this, he could’ve
made it past my bones and cut down to my heart.

If he had, I would be dead.

Would death be just a deep, hollow
blackness? Or would it feel like sinking through water, cool and
slippery, but with a vague hint of panic?

I’d never thought much about death
before, but I did all the time now. I’d brushed it with my
fingertips, and I missed it like a friend.

The only warning I had was a flash of
black fur glinting beneath the moonlight before the aswang collided
into my side.

I hit the pavement with a crack
against the side of my head. Stars, bright white, sparked across my
vision. The taste of dirty pennies flooded my mouth as my back
teeth clamped down on my tongue.

Claws dug into my waist and slashed my
shirt. As I blinked away the stars, I had a moment to be thankful
it hadn’t shredded my mother’s jacket, only my skin. Good, more
scars.

I was on my side, and then, suddenly,
my body was flipping through the air, feet over head, and I
crumpled against the building’s side. My lungs contracted, shoving
all the air out of my body with a coughing wheeze. For a second, it
felt like my chest was caving in again, but without the pain this
time. I ignored it, ignored breathing, and moved.

Keep in
motion
, Hex had said.
A ’swang isn’t that fast. They have a lot of body to move
through space, and when they jump, if you can gauge it, you can
make them land in the wrong spot, where you just were. They can’t
turn back easily because all that weight is going in one direction.
That’s your kill spot. Tuck in tight and go for the side of their
neck.

What if it’s a good
’swang? One who obeys your rules?
I’d
asked.

If you’re fighting, they
aren’t good, so kill them.

But when the ’swang leaped for me, I
couldn’t get to my feet fast enough, and it collided into me. My
whip and knuckles were useless with my arms pinned down by its
massive forelegs. The ’swang leaned into the light and peered down
at me with its teeth inches from my neck.

I stared into its eyes and again
wondered about death.

Then, I wheezed, “A.J.”

I’d seen those crooked bottom teeth
earlier, when he had me in nearly this exact same position. We’d
been working on side attacks. Clearly, I’d failed the field
test.

He snapped his teeth at my
cheek.
Not good enough, Ollie dear. You
owe me an eyebrow.

“
Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Now
get your fat ass off me.”

I shoved against his furry chest and
he eased back.

Around us, I heard the scuffle of
gravel. Hex’s pack had surrounded me.

I searched for him right away and
found him back a bit from the rest, his body a fold of darkness.
His arched ears swiveled around, but his eyes stayed trained on
me.

You’ll have to be better
than that, Olesya
, he said.
Don’t fall behind. We won’t come back to save you
if a rogue attacks.

He turned around, his pack moving a
fraction of a second later, and bounded off.

It’s just
Ollie
, I said back, flinging my thought
into the night around me. No one answered back, so I ran after
them, my very human legs churning to keep up with them, and I
merged into the pack like they were my own.

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?”