Monster Mine (3 page)

Her wild, light-colored eyes found
mine. Mascara ran down her cheeks from her tears, her pretty dark
hair disheveled from the tussle. She screamed again, this one
muffled against her hands. She spat blood onto the floor beside my
bed.

I swung my legs over the edge,
ignoring the dizzy tilt of the room and the warning heat in my
chest. A trickle of blood ran down between my eyes.

Lauren staggered back as I
stood.

The door crashed open. “Ollie! Ollie,
hang on. Stop.”

Thad
.

I swiped the blood off my face,
smearing it across my forehead like war paint. “I’ll kill you,” I
told Thad, who barely flinched at the threat. My gaze swung back to
Lauren. “And you too.”

She spat at me. “Fucking
bitch.”

“
Where am I?” I fired the
question at Thad, who was still standing by the door, a wave of
people at his back, craning their necks to see around him. I
recognized none of them. The bedroom we were in was minimal, with
white walls, a gray bed, and a geometrical rug. A little sitting
area was positioned beneath the only window, which took up most of
the wall. The ceilings stood high, the ductwork exposed. Faded
brickwork took the place of paint or wallpaper.

“
Reece!” Thad shouted over
his shoulder. “Get in here and get Lauren.
Now
.”

A second later, a young man shoved
through the crowd and past Thad, tossing a sharp glare my way. I
noticed the familiar black scars running down his neck, his tanned
skin, and his surfer-boy blond locks as he took Lauren’s hand and
led her from the room. He’d been in the backseat staring down at me
while Thad tried to push my heart back inside my body.

My heart. The tightness in my chest. I
glanced down at myself and spotted the black stitches holding my
skin together, holding my heart inside.

“
We’re in Anchorage,” Thad
told me once they were gone.

“
What the hell for? Why
didn’t you take me back to the base? To the university? When we
spoke about leaving Barrow to meet up with the other halflings, I
agreed because it was on my terms. Things have changed since
then.”

“
Maybe we should talk when
you’re better.”

I turned around, my eyes landing on a
purple crystal sitting on the bedside table. Hefting it up, I
weighed it in my hand.

“
Or we can talk now, if
you want,” Thad said. He was already closing the door by the time I
turned back around.

I flicked my chin toward
the door.
“Were those
halflings?”

“
Yes.”

“
Like me.”

“
Like us.”

My chest pulled again, straining
against the stitches. I didn’t like those words, which might have
meant I didn’t like myself, since, technically, I was like the
other halflings.

“
Where are Sunny and Luke?
How long has it been?”

Thad leaned back against the door and
crossed his arms, keeping half his attention on the crystal in my
grip. “I don’t know where they are. Probably still in Barrow for
the rest of the Killing Season. You’ve been asleep for nearly a
week. We had to sedate you.”

“
Why?”

“
You kept trying to tear
out your stitches.”

It explained the tightness in my skin,
the warmth, and the sudden flares of heat. I imagined it was likely
sore and bruised, painful too. I felt none of that, of course.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have needed stitches if you hadn’t
waited.”

He had the good grace to grimace and
look vaguely guilty. “If it makes it any better, I argued to get
you faster.”

So it was true, then. Lauren hadn’t
lied. They’d really waited to save me from Max on my father’s
orders. They’d simply left me, supposedly one of their own, there.
So much for being safer with people like me. I’d rather take my
chances with Killian at this point.

“
It doesn’t. Not even a
little bit.”

“
Ollie,” Thad started, his
attention drifting to the crystal in my hand, “do you want to put
down the crystal?”

I glanced down at my hand. Blood
dripped from my fingertips onto the concrete floor, bright red and
shining. I’d clenched the crystal too tight and cut myself against
its rough edges. I set it back on the table and wiped my hand
across the white cotton scrub pants I wore.

“
Why Anchorage? What’s
here?”

“
Hex’s group of halflings
and his pack stay here. This place is secret. It’s a sanctuary for
halflings, if you will.”

“
A sanctuary.”

He nodded slowly. “We brought you here
to protect you. If anyone found out about you—”

“
Sunny did, and she didn’t
care.”

Thad’s brows rose. “We told Luke the
truth when you went missing. He had to know. And you think he
doesn’t care? You think it doesn’t bother him?”

If Thad had been aiming to hurt me, he
succeeded. The pain in my chest had nothing to do with Max’s
torture. The one thing I’d feared most was how Luke would react to
the news of what I was. Thad didn’t come straight out and say it,
but I sensed the undertone in his words. Luke probably hated me,
probably wanted to kill me.

“
I brought you here to
help you understand what you are,” Thad went on when I couldn’t
speak. “Who you are.”

I glanced around at the room again, at
the window with the curtains drawn tight, though some sunlight
peeked through. How long had it been since I’d seen the sun?
“What’s so special about this place?”

“
It belonged to your
mother. We’re standing in her old bedroom, and that’s her bed you
were sleeping on. There are so many things to tell you about your
mother and what she was doing here.”

He was choosing his words and
structuring his sentences for impact. He wanted to knock me off
balance, strike hard blows only to soften them with what he
considered gifts, and from his contented expression, I knew he
thought I was considering my mother living here.

I wasn’t.

I’d slept in my dead mother’s bed. I
stood in her house with people who’d waited to save me from my
torturer. If I closed my eyes, I saw the pictures of my mother
strapped to a table during one of Dean’s experiments. I was slowly
drowning in it all.

“
Let me explain why
we—”

“
No.” I ran a finger down
the stitches holding my chest together. They felt jagged and hasty,
but warm to the touch. “There’s nothing to explain. Get Sunny on
the phone. If you don’t, if you come up with some shitty excuse for
why you can’t, you’ll regret it. Deeply.”

* * *

Sunny

I sat alone in the SUV, which Hatter
had parked deep in the woods of Mt. Hood, Oregon, off Highway 26.
The doors were locked. Silly, I know, but at least a ’swang would
have to break a window to eat my fear. I had my throwing knife belt
strapped around my waist and a SIG Sauer P226 tapping out an
erratic, nervous beat on my knee. As I waited for the guys to
return, I chewed on my nails, alternating hands when my fingers got
too bloody.

Nearly half an hour had passed since
the guys left to hunt the ’swang that was munching on isolated
townsfolk. We’d tracked it from the Warm Springs Reservation into
the forest. With nothing more than a few weapons, Hatter and Luke
had gone into the dark without sparing me a word or backward
glance. Watching them disappear, off to kill things, I’d murmured a
quick prayer that my grandmother had taught me.

There was one thing Hatter and I could
count on to soothe Luke, and that was killing ’swangs. Plus, it had
been Dean’s one condition when he allowed us to freelance during
the rest of winter break and the Killing Season. He was the one
person who wanted Ollie to be alive more than Luke, and he scared
me just as much as Luke did. I had no clue what either of them
would do if they ever saw Ollie again.

I scrubbed at my eyes, having long
since reached the level of exhaustion where I actually experienced
a twinge of hope that Ollie might still be out there. Shifting in
my seat to relieve the numbness in my backside, I scanned the woods
again. No sign of the guys, but no sign of scary, razor-sharp teeth
and black fur either. This was my third “hunt” with Luke and
Hatter, and it wasn’t getting any easier—or any less
scary.

Neither of the guys had
offered to let me come with them, and I hadn’t brought it up. As
unsafe as the car felt, I couldn’t even imagine what it was like
out there, in the woods, waiting for the
tick-tock
sounds, dreading them in
equal measure, and traipsing through the wet and damp with only the
spike of fear in my chest to guide me.

No thanks.

I’d almost fallen asleep when Taylor
Swift’s “Bad Blood” roared through the SUV, making me scream. I
dropped the gun between my legs, and it fell somewhere on the car
floor as I scrambled to silence my cell phone. What had I been
thinking when I set the volume that loud? That I wanted to be the
tastiest all-you-can-eat human buffet in all of Oregon?

The number on the glowing screen was
unknown and protected. I started to swipe across the screen to
ignore it, but at the last second, I answered. “Hello?”

My voice cracked like a
fourteen-year-old boy’s who’d discovered his first chin hair. I
reached down for the gun and found nothing but dirty car
mat.

“
Sunny?”

My body seized at the sound of her
voice, freezing me in place as if even one tiny breath would dispel
the moment. “Ollie?” I managed to croak.

“
Yeah, it’s
me.”

I choked, which surprised me given how
dry my mouth was from hanging open.

“
What the heck?” I
practically screamed. “That’s all you have to say to me? Not even a
‘you must be shocked’ or ‘hey, don’t panic’? Do you even know how
hard my heart just stopped? Ohmygosh. Ohmygosh. I can’t believe
it’s you. It’s, like, you! Where are you? Are you okay? What
happened? Why haven’t you called sooner? Everyone was so worried!
We were all searching for you but then Luke wanted to go south and
he’s pretty sick and Hatter and I didn’t know what to do because we
couldn’t stop him so we came down here with him and he’s been
leading us on what feels like a wild goose chase and he won’t let
me treat his pneumonia but he’s been taking straight saliva even
though he’s barely holding it together, at least until I tell him
you called, and ohmygosh, I can’t even believe this because I
seriously thought you were dead.” I blinked, my mouth hovering
around my next words. A sob tore up my throat. I couldn’t remember
when I’d started crying, but I was bawling. “I gave up on you. I
thought you were dead.”

There was a long pause on the other
end. A soft static filled the silence between us. Then, “I’m
sorry.”

I heard the wrongness in her voice,
like she wasn’t really hearing me. Like she wasn’t really there. I
checked the number on my phone again. “Where are you calling
from?”

“
My mother’s
house.”

My knee jolted. “Um—”

“
In Anchorage.”

“
Anchorage? Wow. Luke
wasn’t even close. He’s had us driving all over the west coast like
he’s some kind of divining rod.” I cut off my nervous laughter.
What was I thinking, laughing as if things were normal and we were
people who still laughed? “Are you safe there? What’s going
on?”

“
I’m with Thad and the
halflings.”

I hissed at the sound of his name.
“That stinking pile of poo. He could have at least called to let us
know you were alive! I mean—”

“
I need you to come
here.”

My mouth closed and opened and closed
again. “Well, yeah. I mean, as soon as the guys get back, we’re on
our way. I would stick my head out the window and holler for them,
but ’swangs are probably everywhere out there. We’re in Oregon, and
all these hippies probably make pretty tasty—”

“
I know I’m asking a lot
for you to come,” she said.

Was she even hearing me? I had visions
of her tied up and drugged, with someone holding a hastily written
script in front of her face.

“
I shouldn’t involve you,
but there’s no one here I can trust. I don’t have anyone else, and
I don’t want to be alone.”

Her tone terrified me. The
longer she spoke, the more I glanced around, peeling back the
shadows for Luke and Hatter. We had to go—
now
—even if it meant blowing off
Dean and the official “search” for Ollie until winter break ended
in three weeks. Whatever it took. I knew bad things had happened to
Ollie. I’d imagined them in detail every way to Sunday. But
this
? She sounded
broken. She didn’t even sound like herself.

“
Of course,” I said, my
throat tightening with more tears. I forced myself to shove them
aside. I had to be strong. She needed that. “Of course, we’ll be
there, okay? Don’t worry. You won’t be alone. We’ll figure this
out. Do you know where in Anchorage you are?”