The Killing Season (32 page)

Luke froze.

Killian threw back his head and howled with laughter. The hunters escorting him herded him into the security room as Hatter wrapped a hand around Luke’s arm to keep him back, but there was no need. Luke didn’t move.

Right before the entry door closed on Killian, he called out to Luke, “You know the right thing to do, son. That’s one lesson I know I taught you well.”

The door slammed shut on Luke’s silence. When he turned and walked up the stairs, leaving us all shivering in the entry, a horrible feeling twisted up in my stomach. Ollie might already be dead, but if she wasn’t and we managed to find her before Thad, I prayed she wouldn’t be in as much danger here as she’d been with Max.

I almost wished Thad would find her and take her to the other end of the world.

By the third week, I learned prayers were meaningless fairy tales.

I barely saw Luke and Hatter anymore. Abigail came back from the hospital. We made food for hunters who never came home and Nyny who stayed locked in her lab, scouring endless hours of camera feeds for any sign of Ollie.

Abigail stayed quiet so often I started to wonder if the slight coma she’d been in had done some brain damage.

Maybe everyone had a little brain damage.

Ollie had once told me about rats who had damaged amygdalae would go right up to a cat without fear. She’d been obsessed with the rat studies in her classes.

We’re all fucked-up rats who think we can fight cats
, she’d said once.

Cats and monsters and pasts full of basements and bad men.

I missed her so badly I heard her laugh ringing down the empty halls inside the base as I walked them. Saw her smile in the dusty reflections of the paintings I passed. A flash of her golden hair around a corner. Her fingers trailing along the edges of the scars on her face.

Sometimes I imagined she walked beside me. I visualized her hand in mine. Today was the first day I opened my mouth and actually talked to her like she was really there.

When she didn’t answer, I sank down in the middle of the hall and cried.

* * *

Ollie

I marked the mornings by Max tying me back up to the ceiling.

I marked the nights by him bringing me back down, taking me to bed, cleaning my new wounds, feeding me.

Saying he loved me over and over.

Kissing me.

Begging me to say I loved him. To kiss him back. To remember all that we’d shared together.

I stared over his shoulder and thought of Luke. Sunny. Fear University. My purpose. I never thought of what I was, who my father was, or what that meant about my place at the university or among its hunters. Those were bad thoughts and threatened to shatter me. And I couldn’t break yet. So I only thought of how I was needed. Special. Wanted.

Loved.

“I love you, Ollie. Please. Please, say it back.”

“I hate you,” I said, flicking my eyes to Max for the briefest of seconds, “sir.”

When Max screamed his frustration in my face, I smiled and reached out to touch Luke’s face.

Things went dark for a while after that. When I woke again, I’d lost track of how many days had passed while I lay unconscious in bed. A few possibly, because Max’s beard had grown back in.

After that, I stopped bothering to mark the days.

Sometimes, Max kept me in bed. Too much blood loss, he’d say, then kiss me. Begged me. Told me he loved me.

Then strung me up to cut me some more. Sometimes he messed up and went too deep. Those would leave scars. Max cried over them, about marring my body. He begged me for forgiveness then hit me when I didn’t offer it. Screamed at me. Apologized for marking up my face as bad as my body. Kissed me again.

Brought me back down.

Told me he loved me.

Asked me to say it back, to just say it back, and it would all be over. I thought about it, about saying I loved him. I just wanted it to stop. But even thinking of giving in felt like a betrayal to Luke and Sunny. To me. Like if I said them, I would never get a piece of myself back. So I didn’t.

He begged me to please be a good girl. His good girl again.

Why couldn’t I just be a good girl?

Strung me up.

Electrocuted me when the blood loss became too much.

I think I died once.

Once upon a time . . . a monster told me I was his daughter. That I was a monster too. But we’re all just monsters. Fucked-up monsters who kill each other. Slowly. Strung up and strung down. Up and down. Until there’s no place left to cut anymore. So we shock each other. Until a heart stops. And you wake to a monster pounding on your chest and blubbering about how sorry he was and how much he loves you.

Don’t say it back. Keep your mouth shut. Never say the words.

I wanted to go back to that dark place. To the place where my heart stopped. Because he was there. The man who smiled at me. And said he loved me like he really knew what love was. Luke Aultstriver.

Back up on the ropes. Don’t say the words. Never say the words. Back down to the bed. I thought of Luke then. But I was losing him in all the apologies, the fists, the blood, the pain, the saliva, the kisses, the up and down, the shocks and volts, the fire. Always, the fire. The fire took everything from me until I didn’t really know what I was holding onto in the first place.

But I did remember one thing. One thing, I learned really well.

Max Taber loved me. He loved me so much.

So I promised . . .

. . . to never love again.

* * *

Sunny

“I found her!”

Everyone at the table jerked, our bodies hardwired to those words, so when we finally heard them, it was like the earth bucked beneath our feet. Luke surged up from his chair and nearly crawled across the table toward Nyny. Hatter and I were up next. Abigail just drank calmly from her wine glass.

“Where? What?” Luke said the words over and over until they were one breath, and he had to stop and gasp for air, bent over at the waist with one hand on the chair to hold himself up.

His ribs pressed against his baggy thermal. His sharp shoulder blades heaved with every focused breath. When he coughed, he hacked, thick and deep, like his lungs were dropping away somewhere. The coughing made him turn blue. Everyone waited for the fit to pass, the silence in the dining room a touchable thing as we watched him. No one offered help.

He was sick. Pneumonia, I suspected, but he wouldn’t stop going out to hunt for her long enough to let me examine him.

“On the camera feeds. I found her,” Nyny said, breathless too.

“Where?” Hatter asked. During the weeks Ollie had been missing, he’d become the most sane individual in our group. The leader of our mad pack of skinny, exhausted hunters. Because the Barrow base really did make you crazy. We saw a ghost everywhere we went. Heard her too. Now we’d found her.

“The southern tip of Isatkoak Lagoon. I saw tracks on my feeds. She has to be out there somewhere. And she’s on the move.”

“Christ,” Hatter hissed. “That’s only miles away.”

“We’re going now,” Luke said, clutching his side.

“Luke, maybe—” Hatter began.

“
Now
.”

I was the first to the door. “I’m coming too.”

T W E N T Y

Ollie

“O
h, shit,” someone said. Not Max. Not me.

I’d stopped holding my chin up. Stopped saying much of anything lately. Stopped . . . everything.

I’d broken.

The prongs were lodged completely in my chin and sternum. Like a skewer holding my head up. Thank God for it too because I couldn’t.

“Shit, Ollie. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I blinked at the voice. An odd voice. But I couldn’t look up. Too weak to pull the prong out of my skin. Someone did it for me. Gently. Cursing as they did. But they did it. My chin lolled forward.

“Look at me, Ollie. Just look at me.”

Someone lifted my head, cradling my cheeks to avoid my chin. Blond hair. Light eyes. A name surfaced.

The wrong man.

“Thad?” I said in a thick, choking rasp. I looked behind him. Max laid out on the ground, watching us. He’d been shot in the stomach. Blood seeped across the wooden floor like a velvet rug.

Funny, I hadn’t heard anyone get shot.

“I’m here.” I flinched at the sound of the voice right beside me. My eyes flashed to take in the blue-eyed man next to me. I’d forgotten about him. He was still talking. “I’m taking you away. You’re safe. Oh, God. What the fuck? Shit. Shit.”

He’d seen my latest wound then. The three-inch-deep incision straight above my heart. Max had been trying to reach it, to fix it when I broke.

He broke me. No, I broke myself. And I handed him the pieces.

With each word, I gave away a piece of myself.

I screamed the words over and over until my voice was hoarse. But once Max started cutting, he couldn’t stop, much like his daddy couldn’t stop. And I couldn’t stop saying I loved him.

We’d both passed out during the cutting, while Max tried to find a way around the bones of my sternum. When we woke, lying on the floor of the cabin together, my blood cooling our skin, I laughed. Because it was funny how badly bones hurt when you cut them. Then Max had hastily stitched the wound back up to hide it from himself.

He’d kissed me a lot afterward to make up for it.

I love you.

I love you too.

The ropes suspending me gave way and I collapsed into Thad’s arms.

“Put your arms through my jacket.”

Thad ended up having to move my arms for me, but his jacket, still warm from his body heat, covered my naked skin. He cradled me while he freed my feet. “Oh, Ollie. We’re leaving. You’re safe.”

He swept me up in his arms and carried me to the door.

My eyes fell on Max. He was clutching my nightgown, bloodied and ruined, to his chest. The lace edges and pearl buttons poked out beneath his fingers.

He coughed. “I love you, Ollie.”

“Stop,” I said. “Wait.”

“I love you,” Max whispered.

“Set me down.”

Thad slowly eased me onto the floor, like he didn’t think I could stand. Maybe I couldn’t. Holding his hand just in case I fell, I took an aching step toward Max. Eased myself onto the floor beside him. He started crying as I held his cheek.

“Ollie . . .” Thad said from behind me.

“I love you,” Max repeated, trying to reach for me, but his hand fell back to his side. His other holding my gown twitched, like he was offering it back to me.

My hand slipped into his pocket, smooth as a lover’s touch.

I looked him in the eyes. “I love you too.”

I stabbed him in the face with that little knife that had cut me so many times. I stabbed him until his face was like the raw hole above my heart. I stabbed until I saw nothing but red. Pretty and shining. Over and over. Until blood dripped once again from my eye lashes. Only when the knife slipped from my wet grip and I noticed I was coated in blood, did I realize Thad was trying to pull me away. I released Max’s head and Thad swooped me up and away.

“Ollie?” He shook me, eyes searching my face.

I blinked slowly at him, a bloody tear dripping down my cheek. “It’s okay. We love each other.”

* * *

Sunny

We arrived too late.

The cabin marked on no one’s maps burned in front of us. A handful of hunters, including Hatter, kicked through the door and disappeared into a billow of smoke. Luke tried to follow, stumbling in the deep snow, until he fell to his knees. I fought through the drifts leftover from the storm and waded to him. The heat from the cabin scorched me, but I eventually slid down beside him.

I didn’t try to help him. I just wrapped my arms around his chest in case he flung himself into the fire. I could hold him back now. My strength likely matched his at this point.

“We’ll find her,” Luke said to me, his hand grasping mine. “We’ll find her.”

From the smoldering cabin, Hatter staggered out, coughing. I knew better—after all these weeks—to feel relief. He looked at me, and my heart broke. Then he looked at Luke, but Luke didn’t understand. I doubted he even knew where we were, what we were looking at. He’d been hallucinating Ollie for days already. I wished he would hallucinate her now so at least one of us could be happy somewhere with her.

“We’ll find her,” he said again.

Hatter knelt in front of us, his face smudged with black soot. His hair smelled singed. “Luke, she’s gone. She’s dead.”

“We’ll find her.” Luke stared steadily into the fire over Hatter’s shoulder.

Hatter scooted into his line of vision and offered Luke something. I looked down. In Hatter’s hand was an edge of lace and a few pearl buttons. “I found this on a body in there. The fire had done too much damage to tell, but it looked like she was wearing this when he burned her.”