Monster Mine (5 page)

He said it so casually, with half his
face lost to the darkness around us, that I knew his short life had
been hard—too hard for a kid.

“
Who tries to kill
halflings?” I asked.

“
Everyone.” He let loose a
long breath. “Aswangs who think we’re messing up the gene pool.
University hunters who believe we could exist even though the
university’s experiments never proved we, like, actually exist.
They had no clue until . . .”

I cringed. Until me. Until I’d shown
up at Fear University with no idea what I was. It hadn’t taken Dean
long to figure out his experiments were right. With me, I had
validated his research. “Sorry about that.”

“
Some of us were mad, but
Thad said it would’ve happened sooner or later. He says we can’t
hide forever.”

I heard the admiration in his voice
that bordered on hero worship. He practically drooled every time he
mentioned Thad’s name. The thought clicked into place in my
mind.

“
Hey, Ghost,” I said. “Why
is everyone calling Thad, well,
Thad
? Didn’t you all know him by
another name before he infiltrated the university under a dead
hunter’s identity?”

We came to the end of the top floor. A
metal railing separated the upstairs from the bottom floor, which
was just an empty stretch of concrete.

Ghost started down a
rickety set of stairs that bounced and clanged with every step. “He
and Lauren fought
a lot
about that after they came back with you, but he
told everyone he was going by Thad now. I didn’t understand until I
overheard him telling Reece he liked himself better as Thaddeus
Booker. He felt like he’d done more good as Thad, which really set
Lauren off. She, like, called him a bunch of really mean names and
said he’d gone soft at the university.”

I frowned as we reached the first
floor, which was an open, tall-ceilinged space with nothing more
than a few cabinets lining part of one wall. Water-damaged boxes
filled the back quarter of the space and lent the air a musty
quality that made my nose burn.

I couldn’t imagine Thad liking himself
better when he was at the university, not with all the halfling
propaganda he’d spouted off in Barrow after I discovered his real
identity. But whatever he’d felt during his time there must have
been powerful for him to take a stand against the halflings over
something like a name.

It made me wonder if he really was
sorry for waiting to save me. If he regretted what he’d had to do.
Maybe he really had been a better person at the university. Maybe
he even missed it a little.

I wanted to turn around and go back
upstairs. I wanted to not care about Thad’s name or what I was, but
I felt a niggling curiosity, and I couldn’t stop myself from
returning to our previous conversation about my mother and why
she’d created this place. “If everyone is trying to keep this place
a secret, why hunt at all?”

“
Part of the rules. Thad
says we have to pull our weight. Well”—he scrunched up his nose—“he
says I’m too young, so they lock me inside.” His eyes swept
mournfully to the three bay doors that likely led out onto the
loading bay. Everything was sealed up.

“
Who do you hunt? Aswangs?
It doesn’t seem right to kill your own kind.”

“
Only the rogues. Human or
aswang,” Ghost said, growing excited again. “Thad says it’s part of
the rules we operate under. If a ’swang kills instead of taking
only what they need to survive, we hunt them. If a human kills one
of us or a good ’swang, we kill them. But mainly we just defend
against rogues who want us dead. Thad says it’s all about balance
and that we don’t have to be the monsters people think we are. He
says it was Irena’s vision for this place. Can I ask you a
question?”

I doubted he’d breathed once during
that entire explanation, even if the explanation sounded like a
justification to hunt whoever they wanted, though I didn’t say that
to Ghost. “Sure.”

“
Can you really hear a
’swang in its night-form? Lauren says it’s bullshit.”

It had been a long time since I’d
thought about communicating with ’swangs, but the feeling of a
voice slinking through my head came back in a rush. “I can talk
back too.”

Ghost’s mouth popped open.
“How?”

I shrugged. “In my head. Must be some
halfling thing.”

“
None of us can do
that.”

“
Have you
tried?”

“
Never seen one,” he said.
“Lauren said if she saw a rogue, she wouldn’t waste time trying to
chat with it. She’d kill it.”

“
Lauren’s a
twat.”

“
With an ugly broken
nose.” Ghost snickered and elbowed me in the side. I almost felt
like smiling again, but the urge went away when he checked the
plastic, neon-green watch on his thin wrist. “We should probably go
back upstairs. Sometimes the patrols come back early if things are
quiet.”

As we walked back upstairs, Ghost
chattered on about Thad and this place, but my thoughts kept
returning to Irena. She’d created a haven for halflings so they
could hunt and protect themselves from humans and aswangs alike.
Her vision had been one of balance—not of killing every single
aswang, but only the ones who killed. She’d turned her back on the
university over this radical idea and paid the ultimate price for
it too.

I wondered if that was the path I was
on: to come here and pick up where my mother had left off; to fight
alongside my father against the university’s hunters and the killer
aswangs; and to protect innocent halflings. It felt like a purpose
that should have ignited me, but I only felt hollow.

“
Is Thad going to let my
friends in here since this place is supposed to be a big secret?” I
asked to distract myself.

As I followed Ghost down the hall
toward my room, I saw the tips of his too-large ears turn red.
“They fought about that too. Him and Lauren. After you broke her
nose. Hey, how do you hit someone like that? Doesn’t it hurt your
head?” He didn’t slow down long enough for an answer. “Anyway, Thad
said your friends could be trusted, but Lauren made him agree to
take their weapons and phones.”

I was so surprised Thad had said Luke
and Hatter could be trusted that I couldn’t speak for a long
moment. Yesterday, he’d alluded to the fact that Luke hated me, but
then, maybe Thad had been lying. It wouldn’t be the first
time.

Reaching my room, Ghost toed open the
door. His eyes lingered on the floor. “Lauren says you’re not right
in the head, but Thad is telling everyone you’re gonna help us,
that you’re like your mom. You’ll keep us safe.”

I swallowed. My stomach churned with
the few bites of sandwich I’d eaten. “I don’t know, Ghost. I barely
knew my mother.”

He shut down quicker than if I’d hit
his power switch. Instantly, I wanted to yank the words back, even
if they’d been the truth.

“
Well, maybe,” he said,
his voice sounding younger and softer, like he wasn’t some kid
being raised by a bunch of killers. “Maybe you can talk to the
rogues. Tell them we aren’t doing anything and they should leave us
alone. Since you can hear them and stuff.”

“
Yeah.” My throat felt too
thick to talk. “Maybe.”

“
I’ll let you sleep. The
others will be back soon.”

He walked away, leaving me with my
warm lemonade and the image of his slight frame and old
clothes.

F O U R

Ollie

T
he next morning, after a sleepless night, I crossed to the
window and stared out, taking in a predawn Anchorage.

I leaned forward until my forehead
rested against the chilled glass. Behind the Chugach Mountains, the
sun rose, heating up the sky with hues of pink and orange. The
illuminated clouds drifted in wisps, loose and fragile. Back in
Barrow, with Max, I thought I would never see the sun again, but as
I watched it poke its face into the sky, I could only think about
Peg and Coldcrow and Sin—the death count. I wondered who would be
next.

A knock sounded on the
door.

I turned around, expecting Thad or
Ghost. The knob turned and the door silently swung
inward.

Luke.

He closed the door behind him and
stood there like he needed to rest against it for a moment before
meeting my eyes.

“
I came as fast as I
could,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Hatter flew us straight
here when Sunny told us.”

My mind flashed through a
million things, many of them centering on that awful
emotion.
Love
. I
felt the wild tilt of it through my body: the surge of adrenaline,
a crazed, fluttering heartbeat, and my blood searing hot then cold.
My mind screamed at me even while my body yearned to run across the
room and launch myself at him. I wanted to cry and laugh and punch
him and
hurt
.
Instead, I stayed rooted, fingertips against the window to ground
me, and stared at him.

“
Ollie
. . .”

“
Why are you here?”
Love. Hate. Love. Love. Hurt.
“To kill me?”

Something anguished passed over his
hollowed-out face. He looked like hell—we probably both did—but
he’d lost weight and his pants hung loosely on his tapered hips. He
was still big, just more angular, sharper, harsher, like the good
had been stolen from him. I understood that too.

“
No,” he whispered, those
sad, brackish eyes sweeping up to mine. “You know I wouldn’t do
that.”

“
Thad said you didn’t take
the news well.”

Luke grimaced. “Thad wants to use
you.”

At the flare of heat in my chest, I
turned away and gritted my teeth. My fingers traced the fresh scars
along my arm.

“
I don’t hold you to what
we said before . . .” I forced myself to swallow to ease
the dryness in my mouth and the scratchiness in my throat. “At the
base. I don’t expect you to feel the same way now.”

I sensed the flash of anger in the
jerky step he took forward. From the corner of my eye, I saw his
fingers start to twitch. My shoulder brushed against the window
frosted with condensation from the icy temperatures
outside.

“
When I said I love you?
Is that what you mean?” He snapped off the question, his voice
rising.

“
Yes,” I growled, my anger
lashing out to meet his. “When we said
that
. I know things have changed,
Luke. I’m not a fucking idiot. If you came here to kill me, just do
it. Don’t mess with my head.”

A shadow that had nothing to do with
the low lighting in my room—my mother’s room—shuttered Luke’s face.
The sunrise behind me gave off only enough light to keep his
features in focus, so I saw when the sadness—the pity—replaced his
anger.

Luke Aultstriver pitied me.

“
Do you remember when you
kissed me that day at the university?” he asked.

His question swept me up in a torrent
of emotions, none of them entirely safe. He stepped closer, his
feet almost on the rug and farther from the door, like he wasn’t as
tempted to run out of it. I nodded, my throat too tight to
speak.

His cracked lips almost formed a
smile, but the gesture quickly died out. “You were so excited when
you passed your examination that you practically attacked
me.”

My eyes darted toward him again. I
realized a second too late that I was touching the scars on my
face, tracing them up and down my cheek, a nervous
habit.

“
I’d wanted to kiss you
for days, but you were so damn . . .
insufferable
. Half the time I
couldn’t get you to stop talking long enough to train. And then
when you did train, you always insisted you were beating me. You
kept me on my toes, and the day you kissed me, you tore the rug
right out from under me.” He drew closer to me again, only the
corner of the bed separating us, but I didn’t retreat. “You were
this wild, untamed thing. Kissing you was like trying to hold on to
the tail of a tiger. I’ve known from the very beginning you were
different. That this wouldn’t be easy.”

He skirted the corner of the bed and
reached for me, his eyes breaking apart with some emotion I no
longer cared to place.

I recoiled and hissed, “Don’t touch
me.”

His hand fell back to his
side.

“
None of it—” I
started.

“
Do you remember at the
base, when I said I would never condition my fear of you?” he
asked, resilient. “Well, I’m still terrified of you. You’re still
my monster in the dark, and I’m still the shadow that will shield
you. I just didn’t understand how true those words were at the
time. But I do now. I lo—”

“
Don’t say it,” I snarled,
my lips peeling off my teeth.

His shoulders slumped. “I’m not here
to kill you.”

“
Why not?” I ground my
teeth together so hard the words barely escaped.