Monster Mine (19 page)

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 better. 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.