Monster Mine (15 page)

“
Everything,” I said. “But
you can start with when she built this place and why.”

He looked at the warehouse behind me.
I sensed movement inside, the lights coming on, and the safety of
it. He took it all in with more fondness than he’d expressed when
he told me I’d done well tonight.

“
When Dean started his
experiments, he alienated many at the university. People chose
sides, but they didn’t even know the full extent of what he was
doing. They thought his ideas were only theories, but he’d started
doing live experiments.”

“
The fear switch,” I
said.

Coldcrow had told me about Dean’s
government-sanctioned work to create a sort of mind control in
human hunters. It would turn off their fear and allow them to hunt
aswangs with impunity.

Hex rocked back on his heels slightly.
“You know then.”

“
I don’t know why that
research turned into his breeding experiments, or why he forced
Irena to take part in them."

“
Dean grew obsessed with
the concept of a fear switch. None of the lobotomies he’d carried
out on captured ‘swangs in the seventies worked, but those aswangs
had been near death, weak from fighting with the hunters who had
captured them. He needed healthy, adult aswangs. Irena volunteered
to help.”

My mouth dropped open. When I’d
recovered, I asked, “Volunteered?”

Hex ran a long-fingered hand across
his chin, and I noticed the blood stains beneath his fingernails.
“She didn’t trust him, and she wanted to keep him close, to be
involved in his tests. He shut everyone else out, but he needed
her. She was the best, and he needed better subjects. She started
hunting for him then.”

“
That’s when she made this
place?”

“
She wanted a secret spot
no one at the university knew about. Back then, she came here often
to store away evidence and information she’d collected against
Dean. She was preparing for a day when she would present it against
him to end his reign over the university. But then she captured me
and things changed. After that, this place morphed into something
far more important.”

“
How did she get you?” The
question spilled from my mouth before I could stop it.

“
That’s for another
night.” His eyes glimmered with the secret, his mouth hooking
upward in another smile, like the memory was a fond one, even
though it involved his capture. I saw the love for her still
brimming in his eyes, and I understood why his pack wasn’t
matriarchal like the other ’swang packs and why none of his male
peers were up north to mate.

They’d already found their mates and
lost them. I thought of Tully and all he’d lost.

“
So she found you. What
then?”

“
She let me go and
convinced Dean I’d merely escaped. Between her hunts, she came up
with this idea—radical at the time—that ’swangs and humans could
abide in the same world as long as everyone obeyed the laws of
nature. She started using words like ‘coexistence’ and ‘balance.’ I
loved her enough that she convinced me of it too. It wasn’t easy to
find others like us, though we managed to come across a few in the
short time we had together. We even found some halflings and
recruited them. The house became a sanctuary, a new kind of
university for hunters with a real cause—a natural one. Sometime
during this period, Dean grew suspicious of her.”

“
That’s when he took her,”
I whispered.

Hex nodded, his eyes shifting away
again. “He’d grown crazier, more radical, and he was demanding more
and more subjects. He thought the fear switch could be produced in
an offspring between a human and an aswang, like nature’s failsafe
or evolution. That’s when he started the breeding experiments and
Irena stopped helping him. She wanted to present the evidence she
had against him to the Original families to get him removed from
the presidency, but I told her the university wasn’t worth saving.
We got into a huge fight, and Dean captured her a few days
later.”

I thought back to everything Coldcrow
had told me, how Hex had helped her escape from Dean and go into
hiding. Not long after, she had me. “You helped her escape from
him?”

“
I did.”

“
Did you help her
disappear after that?”

The smooth skin subtly creased around
his mouth, enough to tell me the question touched a nerve. “I did
not. She left on her own. Shortly after, I discovered she was
pregnant with you. I tried to find her, but she’d gone into
hiding.”

She left on her
own.
His words rang in my ears. They felt
wrong and abrasive somehow. My mother had loved him, yet she’d gone
into hiding from Dean, Killian,
and
Hex when she was pregnant with me.

Something had happened between them.
Something that made Hex’s mouth crease with pain whenever he
thought about it.

I met his eyes and did not blink. “Why
did she leave?”

The crease around his mouth slowly
shifted away, like a shadow shrinking at noon. I sensed knowledge
in his eyes. Whatever had happened, it was big.
Important.

I had to know.

In that moment, my question became the
crux of us. I waited to see if he would lie.

Behind us, the warehouse door swung
open and Thad called out, “We’re ready for your
briefing.”

Hex looked back and nodded. “I’m
coming.”

When he shifted his attention back to
me, the sharp, tilted smile was back in place, his lips practically
snarling at me.

“
That,” he murmured as if
he didn’t want anyone to overhear, “will take some time to
explain.”

“
No.” I crossed my arms
over my chest, protecting the stitches as if he might rip them out
with a few words. “You want to wait until you think I’ll believe
what you have to tell me. It seems you enjoy waiting.”

My jab didn’t phase him. “I’ll only
ever tell you the truth, but you have to wait until you’ve earned
it.”

“
You mean when I’ll accept
the truth without ripping your face off.”

The smile grew. “Perhaps. Is that a
problem?”

“
Not at the
moment.”
But it will be.

“
Good.” He patted my
shoulder. “Time to tell the others what monster we’ll be playing
with now.”

E L E V E N

Sunny

H
atter’s eyes were closed, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping. His
eyelids twitched with my every move around the room as if he were
keeping tabs on me. Bandages and hasty stitches had sewn him back
together. His breathing ran ragged under his bare chest; he’d been
too hot for a blanket. Every so often, he opened his eyes to check
on Luke, who was lying a few feet away on a pallet of blankets and
pillows on the floor of Ollie’s bedroom, which was bigger than the
one across the hall. They’d wanted to be close to each other, Luke
saying he needed to keep an eye on Hatter; Hatter saying Luke was
banged up worse than him—a lie.

Hatter whispered numbers under his
breath. His fingers trembled against the bed sheet.

I turned away, pretending like I
hadn’t noticed, and kept cleaning up the room, careful with the
hand I’d cut on the glass in the alleyway. Bloody towels and
bandages were strewn across the floor from our struggle to stop
Hatter’s bleeding. Most of his wounds were superficial, but they’d
all bled like geysers. I wasn’t nearly as well equipped as I
would’ve been at the university, but I made due with the supplies
Ghost brought me from downstairs after he’d helped Lauren inject
the bitten halflings with whatever solution was in those
cabinets.

I knew better than to ask, but now I
knew where to look, even though I would feel bad taking it from the
halflings with so many of them wounded from saving us during the
alley attack. My guilt wouldn’t last long, because none of them had
offered it to Hatter.

What a disaster the attack had been.
We’d come so close to dying—again.

We’d gotten lucky, and I knew the guys
would be loath to admit the halflings had rescued us. But maybe the
common ground would help mend the gap between all of us. At least
until I stole from the halflings. I hoped they wouldn’t notice when
the time came, but to be fair, they should have offered to share
with us.

I wiped a grimy hand across my
forehead, pushing back my sweaty, frizzy hair. Behind my glasses,
my eyes burned with exhaustion, and my mouth was sore from my
busted lip.

Downstairs, the bay doors must have
closed, because the chains rattled the floor. I quickly checked on
Luke and Hatter. The room wasn’t completely tidy, but it would have
to do for now, even if my mother had taught me to never leave a
room in worse condition than I’d found it.

My chest ached with homesickness.
Normally, I’d be with my family during winter break. We’d exchanged
emails and phone calls back when I was on the road with Luke and
Hatter, but not nearly enough. I missed Gran and her stories. I
missed Mom and how she was always bustling around, cleaning. And
Dad, though he’d never been the same since my brother Seth
died.

I slipped out of the room and down the
hallway. Already, I heard the voices of those gathered below,
which, judging by all the empty rooms I passed, included everyone.
My eyes flickered to the hall leading to Thad’s office. They might
keep a spare key to the medical cabinet in there. My palms itched,
but I kept walking to the front, where the bottom level opened up
and metal stairs descended. I stayed on the gangway and peered
down.

The injured were still laid out on the
ground, though Ghost had brought in heaps of blankets and pillows
to cocoon them. Even now, he hurried around, handing out dinner
plates full of meat sandwiches—cut diagonally down the middle with
the crusts pulled off—and glasses of water. At the front of the
room, against the central bay door, stood Thad and a handful of men
and women who all looked ragged and worn out. Thad was talking,
addressing the injured and issuing orders to those who
weren’t.

A side door opened, and I spotted a
blot of red—Ollie. Next to her strode a tall man. He was slender,
but not in a delicate way. He moved like a predator, like he doled
out every breath with measured efficiency, and his eyes constantly
took everything in. I didn’t like how close he was walking to Ollie
or how he kept her slightly behind his shoulder. The protectiveness
clued me in.

Hex.

As if he’d heard me think his name,
his eyes swept upward and locked on me. I stared back into their
shuttered darkness and waited. My fingertips started to shake, but
he was the first to look away with a quirk to his lips that
could’ve been a smile. He walked up to Thad, while Ollie hung back
off to the side like she always did. Never part of the group.
Always standing in the shadows.

Thad nodded at Hex to
begin.

“
Halflings!” His voice
slinked through the warehouse, loud enough for everyone to hear,
but still dark and soft. “You fought well last night. I speak for
my entire pack when I say your coordinated movements and efficiency
in battle was impressive.”

He offered the group a real smile, and
I practically smelled the wave of pride blossoming out. They fawned
under his approval like thirsty dogs lapping up puddles of muddy
water.

I did not like Hex, not one little
bit.

“
Many of you are wondering
what that thing was.” Hex paused to let the drawn-out silence rile
up the halflings with renewed fear and apprehension. “Thad and I
led a group of trackers out last night to search for it. We found
it and got a good look at it. Squeak here”—Hex turned to a scrawny
man standing off to the side—“even took a good chunk out of
it.”

The young man spat on the ground, his
hair falling into his eyes—dark eyes like Hex’s.

“
Didn’t taste good, huh?”
Hex laughed. “We tracked it last night into the park, where it
likely keeps its nest. If we find the nest, we find it, and then we
can kill it.”

“
Does it have a name?”
someone from the back called out.

“
It does.” Hex let the
moment stretch out again until the halflings were all leaning
forward, even the injured ones, and soaking up his every
exhale.

“
We call it
Manananggal.”

I couldn’t take any more of Hex’s
narcissistic, warlord-type behavior. It made me sick. I crept away
from the gangway, keeping my steps silent on the metal, and doubled
back into the living quarters while he droned on about the
specifics of the creature.

I didn’t need him to tell me about
her. My grandmother had long ago told me the legend.

“
A woman, once beautiful,
but now rotting with stinking pits for her eyes and mouth, has
haunted the Philippines since the dawn of man and aswang,”
my grandmother would whisper to me in the middle
of the night while I was huddled beneath my blankets.
“She nested during the day in her wasted, barely
human form,
always alone because she
couldn’t stand how her beauty had rotted away, and she was jealous
of the ’swangs’ human forms
.
She’d lived forever, and time had not been kind.
At night, she would come out, unfolding her wings and taking to the
sky. But”
—and here my grandmother would
lean in close, my bedside dinosaur lamp illuminating her weathered,
beautiful face—
“the wasted woman had to
leave part of herself behind in a safe place, a hidden place, for
if she always had a part of herself tucked away, she could never
die, no matter what happened to her flying night-form.