Monster Mine (21 page)

In the open air behind me, the
Manananggal batted her wings and screamed. She was strong, but her
slight weight put her at a distinct disadvantage as I sat back on
my heels and pulled. I inched back toward a metal beam behind me,
the only solid structures still holding the place up. If I could
just wrap my whip around it, I could hold her down and get help for
Ghost.

The warning flares in my neck and
shoulder were getting worse, like a fire blazing beneath my skin,
but I hauled myself backward, one step at a time, with both hands
on the whip and a gritted stream of swear words pouring from my
mouth.

I was almost to the beam when the coil
went slack.

I fell onto my back.

A second later, the wall splintered
apart and she barreled at me, her face a broken, stretched-apart
scream, her broken jaw swinging. Her eye sockets were wider than my
fists.

She hit me hard enough to knock the
air out of me and make my body flash cold.

Her hands, like talons, tore into my
shoulders, and she hefted me off the ground. We flew out of the
building through the door I’d originally entered from, into the
cool night air. With a screech, she flung me across the ragged
lot.

I sailed through the air, legs kicking
and arms pinwheeling.

My back connected with an old
telephone pole, and I crunched to the ground in a heap.

Above me, she dipped and bobbed in the
air, her wings flapping in a disjointed, frantic manner. I’d done
some damage to her, and it showed in her rage. But my whip was
still in my hand, my knuckles were locked over my fist, and she
hadn’t killed me.

I spat out the blood in my mouth and
sneered up at her.

“
Fuck you, bitch,” I
growled, half breathless.

She could finish me off. She could fly
back inside the building and rip open Ghost’s throat. But her wings
were unsteady, her jaw was a loose hinge, and her neck was torn
wide enough that her head wobbled atop her spine. With one last
scream, she turned and half flew, half fell over the buildings and
away into the darkness, toward the state park on the outskirts of
Anchorage.

I watched her go for only a second,
and then I shoved myself to my feet and pushed into a hobbling run,
my grip slick on the whip’s handle.

“
Ghost!” I shouted, but my
voice was just a raw rasp.

I retracted the blade and shoved the
knuckles into my jeans pocket as I went. I didn’t bother neatly
coiling my whip before I stuffed it into the back of my pants. It
felt wrong to put my weapons away, but if she came back, we were
all dead, including her. I needed both hands for Ghost.

I tumbled into the building and went
straight for him. My fingers slid around his neck, searching
frantically for a pulse. Just beneath the hollow of his jaw, I felt
a tiny tremor.

“
It’s okay,” I said, words
fumbling over each other. “You’re okay. I’m going to get you
help.”

His body was a mess, his stomach and
chest a raw crater. The blood flow had slowed, which wasn’t a good
sign; he hardly had any blood left. Not knowing what else to do, I
tore off my mother’s red jacket and shoved it into his stomach. His
eyes reared open and his back arched off the ground as he made an
awful, fish-out-of-water gulping sound.

“
Stay with me, Ghost,” I
said. “I’m here. I’m here.”

I lifted him into my arms, his tiny,
mutilated body folding against me, and ran like hell.

F I F T E E N

Sunny

A
knock sounded on the door.

Running a hand over my hair, I called
out, “Come in.”

Hatter eased the door open and slipped
inside. He looked like walking death with exhausted, dark bags
under his eyes and his hair at wild, disheveled angles. “You get
any sleep?”

“
Hatter,” I sighed. “You
don’t have to knock. This is your room too.”

He lifted a shoulder. “Did
you?”

I thought about the picture and
everything Luke and I had done while Hatter slowly came back to
himself, and while Ollie built up this image of Irena in her head—a
warrior, a soldier, a mother—and while so much else went
on.

I blinked up at Hatter, who’d shrugged
out of his coat and toed off his boots. He was still waiting for an
answer.

“
Sure. Yeah. I
slept.”

“
And I believe that.” He
shot me a look that said he very much did
not
believe it.

“
Have you slept
any?”

He screwed up his face,
mangling his scar beyond mention. “Not with that
thing
still out
there.”

I picked at a piece of dirt beneath my
fingernail. “You don’t have to hunt with them now, you
know.”

“
I
know
?” He crossed his arms. “I know
my brother is out there hunting that bitch every night and I should
be too.”

Since Hatter had come out of his manic
state, he and Luke had joined the halflings in hunting the
Manananggal. They’d been at it for nearly half a week, and it
showed on their faces.

“
Okay,” I said slowly,
“but what if you get bit again?”

“
Then I get bit
again.”

“
It’s not that
easy.”

“
It actually
is.”

“
Hatter . . .” I
paused, not sure how to approach this. “You weren’t okay last time.
You . . .”

“
I know.”

“
It was ten days before
you snapped out of it. Has it ever lasted that long?”

“
I
know
how long it was.”

I turned away from him and tried to
rein back my anger and fear. But before I could launch into my
preplanned, well-rehearsed argument to change his mind, Hatter sat
down beside me on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight
and pulling me toward him.

I let myself slide, using the momentum
to ease closer until our legs touched.

He reached across me, and I swore my
heart stopped, but he just put his hand on my knee. He smiled and
any desire pooling in my stomach dropped away like sinking cement.
I knew that look.

“
Sunshine.”

I tried to pull away, but his hands
went to my wrists and pushed them down onto the bed so that he was
practically leaning across me, into my lap.

“
You know what’ll happen
to me.”

My eyes flashed to his.

I simply snapped.

“
Screw you,” I hissed, my
mouth inches from his. He nearly fell on top of me from his
surprise. “Screw you for giving up. You don’t even
care
. I think part of
you believes you deserve it. Maybe you’re sick enough to even want
it. But I don’t. I still care. Doesn’t that matter at
all?”

“
I—”

“
No.” I leaned in closer,
my body pressing against his. He tensed, like he wanted to lean
back. Well, he’d put himself in this situation, in my lap, so he
could deal with it. “You don’t get to talk. You don’t get to say
what I feel is wrong. You don’t get to tell me anything. And you
most certainly don’t get to die on me.”

Over the past few weeks,
an elastic band had worn down inside me, the rubber stretched too
thin. It finally snapped. My mother would be so ashamed. But I
knew—I
knew
—this
was what I was meant to do. I might never be a good hunter. I
accepted that. But I was a damn good healer. I could heal Hatter. I
could fix him. I knew it in every part of me that wasn’t tired.
That was whole and unsnapped. The best parts of me, the strongest
parts, the Ollie-est parts.

I was Sunny Lyons. Sometimes I was the
Cowardly Lyon, but not often. Not anymore. I was strong and smart
and I knew my purpose. It wasn’t just for Hatter, but for every
hunter. For all the ones like Hatter, and for all the ones like me,
who loved a Hatter—a Mad Hatter who wouldn’t take a moment to care
for himself. So maybe I wasn’t some badass with muscles and a scary
smile and scarier scars with a look that could turn a man to stone
and who could pull off leather jackets and motorcycle boots and who
listened to weird screamo music with the windows down and drove too
fast and laughed at the thought of fighting monsters. But I was
me.

And that felt like enough.

“
It’s—” Hatter started
again.

I cut him off—with my
mouth.

With. My. Mouth.

The kiss caught him off guard. His
grip on my wrists loosened, and he started to pull away, but I
wrapped my freed arms around his neck and held on. My lips pressed
against the coarse thickness of his scars that mangled the corner
of his mouth. In a whoosh, his breath came out against my mouth,
shaky and terrified. I smiled and moved in closer.

I threaded my fingers through his hair
and flicked out my tongue to trace the seam of his mouth, both
sides, showing him his scars didn’t scare me. They never had. He
felt too familiar, too much like home, for me to be nervous like I
thought I would be.

Somehow, I’d been dreading this
moment. This moment when he opened himself to me with a growl-like
groan. The moment when he eased me back against the bed and it was
just him above me and my frizzy hair and my fogged-up glasses and
my duck pajamas and my curvy hips and my not-so-much-a-six-pack
stomach. All of it. All the “ands” that ran through my mind to
spell out all my insecurities.

I’d feared it so much, but now that it
was happening, with his weight against me and his hand on my waist,
on my bare skin, I wasn’t afraid at all.

“
Sunny,” he said against
my mouth.

The rasping need in his
voice curled my toes just like in all the romance novels I’d binge
read like a cocaine-addicted lab monkey. I pushed my hips up
against him and nearly died right there. His hardness pushed back
against me,
and, and, and, and, and
he swiveled it against me, and I think my mind
short-circuited and this was it. This was the end, and, oh my God,
I was so happy that I would have cried right there had it not made
me look like the biggest, craziest person in the world.

He pulled back and I seriously almost
cried.

“
Sunny,” he said
again.

“
Hatter.”

I tried to make my voice raspy and
ended up nearly coughing.

He winced. “I can’t . . . we
shouldn’t . . .”

I sighed and readjusted my glasses.
Really, I just wanted to throw them against the wall and flick my
hair like some sexy secretary, but I really couldn’t see without
them. Like, not at all. Like I could be making out with a raccoon
and wouldn’t know.

“
Hatter—”

“
Don’t call me
that.”

My mouth snapped shut. The hurt came
quick.

“
I mean,” he said, raking
a hand over his mouth as if he could still taste me, “I can’t stand
you calling me that name right
now
, during
this
. Hatter is just a character I
created to deal with what I am. He is for everyone else. But
between us, I just . . . I just can’t, you
know?”

His arm by my head bunched with
tightly corded muscles as he held himself up. I tried not to stare.
“What do you want me to call you?”

“
I want you to call me
Hatter, but I need you to know I wasn’t always this person. I’m not
ashamed of who I became to survive my parents and this war, but
‘Hatter’ is just a crazy hunter with a manic reaction. When I
created him, I never thought I’d be capable of finding someone like
you—or loving anyone.”

My
heart
.

My heart broke.

“
My real name is Drew.” He
squeezed his eyes shut like the words had almost killed him. He
opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again. “I want you to
know that part of me. Who I used to be before I was . . .
this.” He opened his eyes and stared down at me. “I want you to
know about Drew, about that piece of me I had to hide
away.”

His words sounded like he was pleading
with me—begging me to see him.

But I already did.

I always had.

I relaxed back against the pillows and
smiled up at him. Yes, my glasses were crooked again. Yes, I was
wearing duck pajamas. And yes, I would never be as sexy as Ollie,
but I saw him.

“
I’ve always known,” I
said, my finger tracing his mouth, up his scars, and back down
again. “You were always mine.”

“
Sunny.” He leaned down to
kiss me again, his lips grazing mine. “Sunny,” he
whispered.

Downstairs, a door slammed and someone
screamed, “Hey!”

I pushed against his chest. “Was that
Ollie?”

Hatter sat back as I scrambled out
from under him. I raced over to the door and threw it
open.