Monster Mine (29 page)

“
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 missing 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

“
W
ell, 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.”