Monster Mine (24 page)

“
She’s out here,” Luke
said under his breath. He’d felt it too.

“
Where does she go when
she’s hurt and bleeding? She could barely fly on that wing, so it
can’t be far, and if her nest were somewhere on the ground, her
blood would’ve brought the ’swangs straight to her. But the
treetops don’t seem secure enough with the wind and snow. What does
that leave?”

“
Underground.”

“
Or,” I said, thinking
back to what I knew about the park and the Chugach Mountains, “at
the bottom of a lake.”

“
Son of a—”

Before he could finish, a sharp smack
echoed through the woods. The sound bounced through the trees and
reverberated around us. We spun around, thinking something was
about to attack us. I had my whip in hand and ready to go when the
sound came again, sharper this time.

“
What is that?”

It continued in a sort of offbeat
rhythm that was too repetitive and too off-putting to be anything
normal or natural. Toward the east, slightly off the path we’d been
heading in, it came again and again. Two sharp, hard things
striking together, on purpose and with intention.

“
It’s her,” I whispered.
“She’s calling us to her.”

The sound ended, and the silence in
the woods struck almost as sharply as whatever she’d been hitting
against each other. Neither of us moved east, toward her, even
though we knew she was out there waiting. We strained our eyes to
see through the forest, but the trees felt denser that way, the
shadows deeper. Everything in my body screamed for me to not go in
that direction.

“
Is this what God’s
Forgotten feels like?” I whispered to Luke. My voice didn’t shake
like I thought it would.

“
Honestly, I would take
God’s Forgotten any day over this shit.”

I cringed. “Let’s go then.”

When he tucked in a little closer
behind me, I didn’t know if it was for his benefit or mine, but I
relished the solid feel of him at my shoulder.

We walked for a while, following the
sounds. Every so often they would stop, and just when we believed
she was finished with her game, it would start up again. We tossed
theories back and forth about why she was doing this and what kind
of trap we were walking into. We weren’t stupid; we knew it was a
trap, but we were ready.

We came to a clearing, one I’d walked
by countless times on different hunts. It had never looked remotely
interesting with its small, spring-fed lake, frozen over and
unassuming, until tonight.

The Manananggal sat in the middle of
the lake, her wings draped behind her. She had a tiny fire
suspended over the ice, melting a small section below it. Through
those flickering shadows, I saw her.

She’d destroyed her face by ripping
off her jaw. Nothing but bone and cartilage hung in the gaping
space. With those black pits, she watched us step closer to the
lake’s edge and stop. She clacked a pair of bones together, the
eerie sound echoing through the forest, but she didn’t try to
attack. A second later, I realized the bones were her
legs.

One of her wings was ruined, damaged
beyond what I’d done. It was shredded, the membrane just flapping
ribbons.

She had a rope in her hands that went
down into the melted hole. She dragged at the length, hauling
something up from the depths. I thought I knew what it was, but I
waited, holding my breath, not knowing what she was
doing.

I didn’t dare turn away from her, but
I shifted my stare to Luke. He was just as frozen, eyes wide and
his crossbow strapped across his back.

This wasn’t what we’d been
expecting.

From the hole, she pulled out a
leather-wrapped bundle. Although wet and glistening, it looked
ancient. Bright red designs, like sharp slashes and curving
figures, graced the outside edges. Even from where I stood they
made me shiver. They felt evil.

She set the pack in her lap and laid
the rope down beside her. A few breaths later, she slowly met our
gazes. She simply sat there, staring.

I felt it again, the connection
between us. She stared into me, deep within, and knew the bad parts
of me. I felt her rotted, talon-like finger stroking each part. Two
monsters, the both of us.

“
Should we be doing
something here?” Luke muttered.

“
Just wait,” I breathed,
eyes locked on her.

No one moved.

Then she let out a long, low-pitched
keen.

The forest went quiet—deadly
silent.

She repeated the sound and started
rocking back and forth on the ice, her body almost nothing. She
looked too frail to exist and too meaningless to be such a
monstrous creature.

She’d had countless halflings and
aswangs hunting her for weeks. Grown men had cowered when a branch
would cast a moving shadow over them that looked like a flapping
wing. She’d caused panic and death and fear. Yet here she sat
crying.

I covered my mouth, and I wondered
what it meant that my heart broke for her after she’d killed my
friend. After Ghost had practically bled out in my arms.

But she’d shredded her wing. I
couldn’t think of any other reason why she would do that if she
didn’t hate herself—if she didn’t plan on never flying again. She’d
known I would come, and she’d led us here. She’d waited.

“
Should I . . .”
Luke reached for his crossbow.

“
No. Leave
her.”

I think she would have let us shoot
her. She wouldn’t have done anything to protect herself. It had
come to that for her. She’d hit her shattering point, her broken
finish. This was it. So we waited, and we didn’t have to wait
long.

Her keening cut off, and
she went so still that I almost lost sight of her. Then, moving
with quick, certain resolve, she reached forward and pulled the
fire forward.
It happened in less than a
second, and I gasped as the flames engulfed her and the leather
parcel.
Then she started
screaming.

I’d never heard anything like it, and
I doubted I ever would again. I swear the sound burned me like her
blood had. I couldn’t take it. I started to shiver and pressed my
hands to my ears. The sound nearly forced me to my knees, and as I
bent over, I looked back at the lake.

In the flames, her body, her rotted
flesh and her immortal half, burned. Her hair billowed up in the
topmost flames that licked and danced. In the deepest, hottest
part, her face stretched open, her mangled mouth still making that
horrible noise as the flames pulled her apart.

The smell hit me.

I did the only thing I could think
of.

I turned to Luke and buried my face
against his chest, wrapping myself up in his warmth, his scent, and
his solidness. His arms came around, and he held me together as the
Manananggal burned.

I began to cry.

For her. For me. For all of
us.

* * *

The sun had completely risen by the
time we returned. As we walked across the lot toward my mother’s
warehouse, we saw the others gathered outside. They looked ready
for a hunt—a hunt for us. Thad had assembled his team, and Lauren
was busy barking orders, but as my foot crunched over a rock, it
was Hex and his pack, standing off to the side, who snapped their
heads in our direction, their eyes narrowing at our ashy
scent.

When we drew closer, Thad noticed the
thing in my hand and blanched. “Christ, Ollie.”

I ignored him and went straight to my
father.

“
What do you have for me,
Olesya?” he asked.

I dropped the Manananggal’s burnt husk
of a head at his feet and stepped back. “It’s time you told me the
truth about my mother.”

S E V E N T E E
N

Sunny

I
knew who I had to call. She was the only person who could
help me with my discovery.

When Ollie and Luke went through the
window, and after I’d told Hatter I was going to take a shower, I
went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid, and pressed connect
on my phone.

The call went through. She picked up
after a couple rings.

“
Sunny?”

“
Yeah,” I said, my heart
beating a mile a minute, “it’s me. I need your help.”

Nyura Vasilievna, or Nyny as I’d come
to know her during my time in Barrow, didn’t pause.
“Anything.”

* * *

Ollie

Luke knew what to do while I talked
with Hex. Hopefully, if everything went to plan, we’d be leaving
here tonight and be well on our way to Kodiak by
mid-morning.

But nothing ever went according to
plan.

“
I’m sorry about your
friend,” Hex said when we had some privacy out on the abandoned
playground. It felt like a neat little circle coming here; it also
felt like a neat little suicide, because I wouldn’t be leaving this
place as the same woman who’d entered it.

“
He deserved better than
bleeding out in the back of a car.”

He lifted a shoulder as if to say, “It
happens.” I wondered if he even knew Ghost’s name.

He nodded at my burnt hand. “You
should really have your friend look at that.”

I tucked it into my jacket and said,
“No lies.”

“
I promise.” He sat on a
rusted swing, the chain squealing in complaint.

I kept my place in front
of him. “Promises mean shit and you know it. If you lie to me,
you’ll regret it.
That’s
a promise.”

“
I won’t ever lie to you.”
Loose tendrils of dark hair played against the slight breeze that
promised even more snow.

“
Irena—”

“
Your mother. Why can’t
you call her that?”

“
Irena,” I ground out
between my teeth, “started this place, before she disappeared in
1985, because she fell in love with you after she’d captured you
for one of Dean’s live experiments when he was searching for the
fear switch. After that, she worked behind his back to protect
halflings and find some balance in the coexistence between aswangs
and humans because she loved you.”

He’d told me all of that before, but I
needed to see his face as I spoke his words back to him. I needed
to know he hadn’t lied to me.

“
She did it because it was
the right thing to do, not only because she loved me.”

“
But in 1985, something
happened.”

Hex’s jaw tightened, the only sign
that these thoughts of the past might upset him. “Dean suspected
she was double-crossing him, though he had no idea about this
place. He couldn’t fathom how deep her betrayal went, but he knew
enough, and he turned the tables on her. She became his live
experiment.”

I recalled the pictures from Killian’s
office—the ones that showed her being tortured and kept in a cell
and experimented on. The ones labeled with “1986.”

“
Dean thought his idea of
a fear switch could be created in a halfling, in the merging of a
human and an aswang. That evolution and nature would create a
failsafe in the offspring.”

“
He just wanted her dead.”
Hex spat the words. He hated Dean almost as much as Dean hated
him.

“
But then you rescued her
and ruined Dean’s experiments. And she went into hiding—from
you
.”

If he sensed the trap, if he noticed
the change in my voice—the cool rage—he didn’t react.
“Correct.”

I stared at him long enough that he
sensed the weight of our silence. His dark eyes met mine, his hair
still undulating in the wind, though the rest of him was perfectly,
eerily still.

He didn’t scare me anymore.

I could ask the hard
questions.

“
I remember a sick
mother,” I said, my voice tight. “A frail woman. She was terrified
of her own shadow.” I choked down the tears, because I was damned
if I would cry in front of him. “I thought I was crazy because I
couldn’t equate this woman I knew with the warrior everyone else
told me about, but I wasn’t crazy. Irena was just a husk by then,
when she died, when she left me in a closet. She was terrified. She
was being hunted.”

Hex didn’t blink. Didn’t stir. I
imagined even the breeze around us went quiet. We were frozen in
time.

“
By you,” I
finished.

Slowly, vertebrae by vertebrae, he
stood. His shadow stretched toward me, his face haloed by the
sun.

“
She ran from you,” I went
on, not backing down, not stepping away. “She died alone and
terrified because you did something to her. She didn’t trust Dean
or Killian or anyone from the university who would kill her, but
most importantly, she didn’t trust you. So she ran and kept me a
secret. I know this because you thought I was dead. She made you
think that.” I took a deep, shaky breath. I remembered Coldcrow’s
words back in Barrow. I was bent just like everyone else, but I was
not broken. Hex had not broken me. No one had. “So tell me, Father,
why did my
mother
run from you?”